I think my first Bethesda game was Skyrim and I love Skyrim. I’ve played through Skyrim when it first came out I played through it again in the DLC came out. I played through it again on the switch I have since played through it again on PC. I love Skyrim. I played it so many times and I know it’s a meme to keep re-releasing the game but it is just genuinely very good game.
I’ve played fallout three I tried to get into new Vegas. I played fallout four up to like level 40 just today actually and I’ve tried fallout 76. I know the gameplay is almost the same as the Skyrim game but I just can’t get into fallout and I don’t know what it is about that series . Maybe you can help me figure it out because I just don’t think this game is captivating.
It seems like there’s just less to do in the world enemies are Raiders or mutants and maybe some creatures and I guess sky rooms really the same it’s just different factions of humans but it just seems less copy and pasted than fallout does and of course Skyrim has the same dungeons, but so does fallout.
Is it just the genre of playing in a wasteland instead of a fantasy world the only real difference between the elder scrolls games in the fallout games? 
You’re not alone. I’m in the same spot. I love the humor of Fallout and I really liked the TV series; I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, more Skyrim playthroughs than I can remember but I bounced off FO3 pretty hard. For me it was the dreary environment and overall decay of the world.
People in FO3 just didn’t seem to care much about their living conditions and this doesn’t seem like what would happen in actual post-collapse society. People in general love surrounding themselves with art and beauty, rusty scrap metal shacks wouldn’t be around two centuries after the bombs drop. Earthship, stucco and clay bricks are low tech but can be made very pretty and livable. Murals and paintings made using various pigments, colorful textiles, basreliefs, carvings and sculptures of ceramic, wood and stone would be everywhere, sprinkled with surviving pre-war artifacts that’s been restored, maintained and cherished with pride.
Plant life would also recover quite fast and be lush in a post-atomic war world—Chornobyl is a prime example how nature claims back human-abandoned land just decades after a nuclear event. Deserts in FO should not be all dreary brown misery; there would be a thriving ecosystem of both flora and fauna. Two centuries is enough time for the most dangerous radioisotopes to decay away and you wouldn’t really find places where radiation would stop wildlife reclaiming the land. More mutations and birth defects, yes, but life will find a way.
And this overall miserable representation of post-apocalyptic world is the reason FO games never really clicked for me even though the satire and tone hit the spot.
That’s the thing that breaks my immersion. I know that 200 years would make the area completely taken over by nature. It would look more like Horizon rather than Fallout. Not sure I’d dig trenches or anything, but radiation would be much more minimal. Nukes would also have a limited area, so the cities would die, but farmers, small towns, and everyone else out in the boonies would survive and rebuild. Hiroshima is a thriving city nowadays, with the building that survived still there