Utterly Mad

The thing is...this is what's happened with virtually every single Bethesda game.  The core game is lackluster in so many ways, banking on it's breadth of content rather than the actual quality of it, and I essentially have to fix it myself or wait for someone else to do it.  And even all that isn't going to fix uninteresting characters and questing.  New Vegas actually had writing that made me want to look past the inherent 'meh' of several parts of the core experience, but it also benefitted from being able to significantly improve upon what Fallout 3 established mechanically. 

And after playing Witcher 3, my bar for these kinds of games are even higher. 

Means I just get to wait for GotY/Ultimate edition again before buying it.  I'm still interested just based on what the modding community could potentially do with it.  It's just not going to be a first week purchase for me. 

I really need to finish that game...

You know, something I don't think anyone has really considered yet.

What if they're not just trying to make Fallout 4 a better Fallout 3?
What if the reason they're changing things in the way they are is because they're trying out a new approach to Fallout? Because thinking about it that's sort of what this is looking like, they're keeping it as Fallout as possible while trying to do it in a different way to see how it works out.

Shouldn't we expect better from a developer who's been in the business of these types of games for over 20 years?  Ever since Oblivion, Bethesda has hit this kind of stagnation where they manage to make everything shinier and more streamlined for better or worse, but fail to significantly improve in two of the most commonly criticized areas of their games time and again; writing and characters.  They have a small handful of standouts and the rest are cardboard city; eating dog biscuits is probably juicier than interacting with anything that isn't Paarthurnax or Sheogorath. 

Obviously we won't know for sure until we actually get to interact with the characters beyond the token trailer bait, but after their last three games being paper-thin in terms of characters and knowing that better is possible with the existence of Witcher 3 and even within their own game engine with New Vegas, it's hard to keep ignoring this glaring deficiency in something that should be one of the keystones in making a believable fictional world. 

You can mod the mechanical bits out.  Yeah, that's whatever (though still subject to criticism because it's what they're selling us).  But you can't mod out how terrible and one-dimensional their characters are, and this goes a long way towards me wanting to give two ****s about what's actually going on in the game world.