I don't know many people who bought Morrowind, or Oblivion, or Fallout 3 and promptly uninstalled them
I got one playthrough each out of Oblivion and Fallout 3 (with their final official patches, mind you), prior to uninstalling. They each individually held the record for shortest-time-installed on one of my computers, with Fallout 3 still retaining that dubious honor. The only reason I got a full playthrough of Oblivion was to try to figure out where all of the Morrowind magic had gone. Fallout 3 gave a strong first-impression, which started to fall apart after leaving the Vault. I got to the end of FO3, constantly hoping that the feel of playing a first-person Fallout game could be recaptured at some point, but the game just kept travelling further and further down the path to bat****-crazytown, until finally, it arrived at an ending so terrible that Bethesda eventually gave up defending it and just retconned it (if you were willing to pump another ten dollars into the steaming pile of crap, anyway).
who actually manages a completely free-roaming massive RPG better than Bethesda?
Maybe the better question is, "Does a large, free-roaming world actually benefit the RPG genre?"
The free-roaming concept worked for
Red Faction - Guerilla,
Dead Rising, and
Just Cause, because it provided more opportunity for the player to smash stuff, kill zombies, and murder South Americans - the main draws of each of these games. In RFG, rolling a tank into an EDF fortress is
more fun, when you get to flatten all of the EDF checkpoints on the way, instead of having a loading screen before cutting directly to the fortress. Something was gained by modelling a large, traversable world. When the EDF get pissed with the Red Faction and begin shelling Dust, it's not seen in a cutscene of a pre-rendered city being blasted, but from the ground level, as the player evacuates key people and material from the town. Something was gained by modelling the large, traversable world. The list goes on.
What did Oblivion gain by having a large, free-roaming world? You met more people, each with one of three voices. Having a large, traversable world highlighted a shortcoming of the game. You got to explore hundreds of dungeons, which were actually all carbon copies of about three unique dungeons. Again, the open world highlighted a shortcoming of the game. Intrepid explorers could accidentally stumble on elements of the main quest, not meant to be encountered until much, much later. This issue likely wouldn't have existed at all, if not for the open world.
More broadly, what is there to be gained by having an RPG world more open than, say,
Baldur's Gate II's, one that allowed some freedom to travel, without the need to model every cubic inch of dirt in Amn? I'll grant, it is easier to feel a part of the world, if it is all physically modelled, but it can't just be dead space and random encounters between destinations. An open world is something nice to have in an RPG, but it requires a great deal of time and effort to be invested. If that investment isn't made, then the openness of the world becomes a liability, as it did in Oblivion. Even if that investment is made, it cannot come at the expense of the quality of the narrative, or you still wind up with a bad RPG, like Fallout 3.
Buggy, poorly-tested, and slowly patched, absolutely... but that doesn't make a game bad.
Really? That seemed sufficient to damn
Ultima IX as a critical failure and bury the franchise. I don't recall
Vampire - Bloodlines being an enormous success.
Shadow of Chernobyl was given amazing post-release support by the developers, and it still wasn't a blockbuster game, on account of its buggy release.
I'd say that shoddy development, especially when coupled with lackluster post-release support amount to several nails in a game's coffin, without a marketting behemoth like Zenimax stapling flyers to every forehead in America, in the hopes that they can sell loads of copies before word gets out about the game being a steaming pile of crap.
A non-Bethesda example:
Outpost (1). This game sold on the merit of a glowing review in PC Gamer, accompanied by one of their highest scores to-date. The problem was that PC Gamer reviewed the game, while it was still in beta, and assumed that all of the promised features and bugfixes would be in place by the time the final game was released. Unfortunately, the publisher moved up the release date, and the beta version that was shown to PC Gamer was released in that very state, with
none of the promised bugfixes or features implemented. The result was a strategy game, in which there was no real objective, colonies could spontaneously die off, and two-thirds of the tech tree did absolutely nothing. The game got patched
once (though being patched at all was a rarity at the time) to fix a few crash bugs, but the show-stopping colony-die-off was not addressed, and the unimplemented features were never added. It sold like hotcakes, though, because it got good early press.
Of course, the gaming press isn't
quite that naive anymore, so direct marketting has to substitute for a review based on promises. Still, professional critics seem to get swept away by the hype as well, as they too are in a pattern of lavishing praise upon Bethesda's games, only to pan them, two years after the criticism can do any good.
For a bad game, I refer you to Zero Punctuation, because Ben says it so much better than I do =)
I will point out that the video to which you linked highlights three open-world games widely considered better than Oblivion or Fallout 3, since you keep asking for examples. Also, as -Joshua- pointed out, Yahtzee has expressed little fondness for Bethesda's post-Morrowind offerings.
