Why do Bethesda Games always generate such hype?

You just summed up my thoughts/feelings about The Sims.   Yet EA make a truck load of money out of it...

I don't think Bethesda games are that great right out of the box. What makes me interested in them is what modders can do with them.

I got bored with Skyrim very quickly when I first played it. But looking around at what's available on Nexus and such transformed the game and allowed me to sink hundreds of hours into it.

I feel that Bethesda is very good at providing players the tools to find their own fun in their games.

Some of their strengths lie in emergent gameplay, emergent storytelling, and modding, which are not really BioWare's strengths (at least in their more current crop of games).

And Skyrim for example has one of the best soundtracks in any game I've played. That adds a lot to the enjoyment of just being in the game. Add to that the interesting sandbox playground, day/night cycles, people having routines, and just the sheer amount of content that can you pick & choose, and take on at your own pace. There's a really good foundation there, if you play the game to its strengths.

I've found that all this comes together in a way that can create some really standout moments. I also find that because I can largely ignore the main questine, just taking the game at my own pace, I can... lose myself in the setting moreso (or just easier) than in other games.

I haven't played Saint's Row, but I can give you some examples of how Skyrim handles it.

There's a Dark Brotherhood (Assassins) mission where you're sent to kill the Emperor's cousin on her wedding day. There's a bonus if you kill her during her balcony speech with her groom-to-be.

They help by providing you with several means of doing this (dropping a statue on her, sniping her, straight-up attacking her, etc.), each with their own risk of being caught and a bounty put on your head. But you can ignore all that and do things your way. And the game giving you the tools to do things your way is one of the ways to find the fun in Skyrim. 

A good one (if you're into Alchemy) is to brew a Frenzy potion, and if you have good enough sneak skills and perks, you can plant the potion into the groom's pocket during their speech. He'll drink it, and immediately attack and kill his wife, then in turn get killed by the guards. All the while you loot the bride, then stroll down to the pub free and clear in the bride's wedding dress for a celebratory pint.

Or another fun one is a mage spell that allows you to summon the ghost of a famous assassin who just... follows you around really. And he loves to monologue about whatever nefarious scheme you're currently up to. Even in front of random strangers, hilariously implicating you in murderous schemes wherever you go.

Then there's the emergent storytelling that comes from just random encounters meeting other random encounters. Like strolling along then suddenly seeing a guard being chased by a troll, being chased by a ice wraith. And they are running clear across the countryside. Time to break out the popcorn. Or the bandits who's sole purpose in life seems to be berserker-murdering your chickens. Or Maven Black-Briar losing it, for whatever reason, and starts murdering the entire town of Riften. Or me discovering the joy of telekinesis + cheese wheels. Or stealing the clothes off every Thane in Skyrim.

As far as Jeremy's work goes, everyone has their musical preferences. I personally found his work in Skyrim to not only be great, but the pairing works so well it elevates the game as whole.

You don't typically have the same kind of in depth freedom in other RPGs that you have in Beth games. Specializing as a vampire and practically taking out whole villages is indelibly etched into my brain from Oblivion.

I think it’s mainly because Bethesda got there first with open world RPG all the way back with Arena and defined the genre. Every new game updated their formula in some way, even if there’s a lot of debate about whether all the updates were a good thing or not.

It’s largely since Skyrim that everyone else has jumped on the open world bandwagon (obviously with some exceptions), and they were able to see what works and improve on it.

Personally I think Besthesda’s “go anywhere, do anything” mantra is holding them back now. It was cool when gamers had lower expectations, but now they want meaningful narrative with consequences for their actions. Things like warrior builds being able to complete the Mage’s guild story arc are classic examples, but I think that’s a little unfair. Completionists can do everything with one character, while people more serious about role playing can just not do quests that don’t fit their character. There are still few RPGs with entire story arcs devoted to specific builds, so I tthink they deserve credit for having it at all.

With Fallout 4 they seemed to try to address some of the issues. There were factions you had to (eventually) choose between, and companions with actual opinions. Unfortunately, those improvements seemed overwhelmed by how meaningless the vast majority of quests felt, how little difference dialogue options made, etc.

TLDR

The short version:

Bethesda games have lots of freedom in their worlds, but the missions/quests are very linear. The choice you get is mainly in what quests you do or ignore. Flooding the world with hundreds of dungeons/locations doesn’t really cut it anymore.

IMO, they need to expand their approach to the open world to missions and quests, with different ways to approach them and linking them in interesting ways, but they perhaps seem too focused on creating tonnes of “content” and not locking anyone out of any of it.

I hope Bethesda can learn from other games rather than being too stuck on what they’ve done before. As they are the biggest name in the genre, there’s always going to be high expectations, but they need to live up to it.

I always thought they wasted that a bit,

Other than rearranging your house, rolling cheese down mountains or putting buckets on NPC’s heads, what is it used for?

There could be physics based puzzles and other ways to use the environment and objects to your advantage, but it doesn’t seem to add much that’s not just messing around.

Moving things around

Puzzles- game is full of them. See thieves guild, dungeons etc. these include moving an object

Moving things around rarely if ever seems to be to useful.

And I wouldn’t class any of the puzzles as physics based. Activating switches or rotating columns doesn’t really make use of the engine. I mean things like putting a barrel on a beam to act as counter balance so you can walk on it to reach a ledge, or using water and buoyancy.

Why do you have to understand them?  There are lots of types of games out there that I'd never play.  Do they all suck because I don't like them?

A lot of people have said what Bethesda games do that they personally like, and I agree with many of them, but here's what they don't do that I very much appreciate:

Bethesda games (at least until Fallout 4, which is a separate issue) don't generally put words in my character's mouth. By which I mean, I am not forced to choose from three different variants of "how horrible!", or if I am, it's easy enough to play at least one of them off as being sarcastic, seeing how I'm not usually forced to perform a particular type of action afterwards. I can still just shoot the person I've just technically agreed with in the face, turning the whole exchange into a farce (and a good roleplaying experience). I am also not forced to witness a cringeworthy animation of my character's face expressing the horror that my character shouldn't be feeling in the first place. I do not have to be the world's holy savior at all, I can just be the guy who keeps all his stuff here, so he's protecting that. Or someone who's just doing stuff for shits and giggles, or money, or whatever.

And mind you, the game might not be actively accounting for that, but it is not contradicting it either, and that's why I'm still hyped for Beth games. Video games will probably never be able to let me roleplay exactly the way I want, but if they're at least not fighting me every step of the way, that lets me have the fun I'm looking for.

In other words, Beth games are far, far from perfect, but I have not yet found a franchise that allows me to fill in the gaps in a narrative as freely with my own context as Beth games do, while still remaining immersed in the gameworld. I hope there will be more games aiming for that in the future, but it doesn't look like that's the general direction gaming is taking right now, so idk. That's the best I've got right now.