Weird, i didn't get a notification for some reason...

Honestly, i think even with NPCs it would've sucked, just not as bad. At the end of the day, the joy come from the lore and NPCs. Without them, there is nothing. Try going through new vegas or 3 without talking to anyone, just wandering around and doing stuff. Really boring, right? You need an NPC to really talk up the location a haunted or something, just to give it meaning. An empty town is just that: a wasteland. It's really boring really fast, and a bunch of douchebags acting like idiots doesn't really solve that, especially if there aren't many of them around you. They don't provide lore to the locations like NPCs do, nor do they have the needs that NPCs do, to go out and find someone's glasses or something. At the end of the day, i hear people describing it as a "PUBG wannabe." Not necessarily. People are more into the writing itself as a whole. When people talk about skyrim, for example, A Night to Remember comes up alot. Then there's that quest to rescue a child so she can go around giving adults advice on what to do when alone in bed, 'cause that's a thing. There's that slut-shaming quest in Riften. And if you fully explore the final dungeon of A Night to Remember, there's quite some interesting lore hiding in there. And let's not forget, everyone has had Serana as a companion at one point, even people who don't normally carry companions. J'zargo, Kharjo, and Ri'saad are semi-frequent topics as well. I've occasionally heard people talk about epic fights, but i usually hear people talking about how a particular quest has meaning that's deeper than what's on the surface. Some of those quests and how you handle them can really make you question what kind of person you are (which is a really fun way to play these games, honestly, to ask yourself what you're morally OK with). I've noticed that co-op games tend to fair better with multiplayer, 'cause skillgap issues are a thing in every game. I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing with, here. I don't follow Ubisoft so much, but i do agree Bethesda is getting worse and worse with every game. As far as i can tell, bugs have always been a thing with them, so i don't really see that getting worse. The level of content and gameplay, though, does certainly seem to be getting worse. I also noticed that they focus more on balancing and fixing exploits, while, overall, they seem to be relying on unofficial patches to fix the bugs, which is really sad. It's cool that they give us the modding tools and all, but I really wish i didn't have to get 3rd party mods just to get the game to work as intended. I'd rather mods be mods, not bugfixes. I noticed people generally don't take non-PC versions of these games seriously because of the bugs. What concerns me is that how everyone knows this and sees this coming, we still get people buying the console versions. That alduin semi-final battle bug, though. You're likely to die, and there's a good chance that if you do, your autosave will end up corrupted to the point that alduin becomes invinceable. Yeah, i got the thing for PS3 'cause my computer is crap, but that's when i regretted it. Welcome to the industry: Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was like that, too. So many complaints about the unfinishedness of the game, but always focused on cosmetic armors and such. I did hear alot of complaints about 4, but i just couldn't comment without some kind of knowledge. But, from what you're telling me, they were experimenting to see if they could get away with what they tried with 76: less content. My boxing instructor was talking to me about that tonight. Something about multiplayer saving, as well, requiring a microsoft account or something. He wasn't speaking very clearly on the subject (he's very much a layman when it comes to tech), but what I could gather was that character management is a royal pain, at least for him. He wanted to know if i had an xbox 1 or xbox 360 to see if i could help him solve teh problem. Unfortunately for him, I don't. Sounds like bethesda is going to end up feeling tis one later, since they probably aren't right now. Yeah, i have no problem with achievements per se, but this rewards system has created some unnatural incentives. I even see cheat pages dedicated to generating save files to help cheat your way into achievements, so that you don't have to play the game, but download a save, talk to someone in particular, and you end up running through a ton of achievements in no time flat. Sometimes I just want past some silly part of a game that is ridiculously difficult or I beat the game normally on another system and just want to jump back to the post game on the current system, so i do some googling, only to see people who have cheats and saves dedicated to achievements as opposed to problem sections of a game. I'm just over here sitting saying "eh, i really don't care. I just want to get back to having fun with the game, and here you guys are trying to milk the achievement system."

But, no, people can use a good "gamer score" to make money promoting a game or something. it's really sad.
Yeah, debate and discussion are highly discouraged, anymore, and this is very obvious with politics. You can't talk about anything without being called a name. Ultimately, i think it comes down to child abuse or something, 'cause people have trouble dealing with worldviews that conflict with theirs, and citing evidence of some sort of objective standard ends up with people putting their fingers in their ears and shouting ethical absolutes while being unable to defend the ethics or avoid hypocrisy. As you say, your friend calls you "evil." Frankly, i don't know how people can stand the world to be so boring. But, i can understand that people have trouble dealing with conflict, anymore, especially when everyone else they know is playing the same games. With politics, the more people insult my intelligence, strawman, etc, the more difficult it becomes for me to resist the same tactics, especially since they work, even though they're dishonest and unethical. Not really sure what the solution is, but it is nice to meet people who don't play the silly games, but it's rare.