So I just watched the Giant Bomb coverage of the Bethesda E3 press conference, and I guess I'll share some thoughts on the Fallout 4 footage.
1. The voiced protagonist sounds like ass and I really hope there's an option to turn off his voice separately from the others, even though they will probably be annoying too. Also, why do the vault thing again? Both Fallout 2 and New Vegas gave some neat alternatives to being a vault dweller, Bethesda seems reluctant to switch up the formula too much.
2. Super Mutants and Brotherhood of Steel are back... why? This seems like Bethesda repeating their Fallout 3 mistake of clinging to easily recognisable things from the series' past because they don't want to exert too much effort in coming up with new factions.
3. Your dog companion can be ordered to go and get things for you via a "go here" point and click thing, but its response to commands is so slow that you might as well just walk there.
4. You can build your own houses and communities in preset locations around the map. So there's basically an expanded version of Hearthfire in the game, and that could be a neat feature if it has enough granularity.
5. VATS looks a lot more fluid, and doesn't just straight up stop time any more. Even so, I hope the free shooting combat is good enough that VATS isn't something the player has to rely on to fight. It was necessary to use the VATS aiming system in the original games, but in its 3D incarnations it has often felt to me more like a crutch for the developers to excuse their shoddy FPS combat.
6. You can play minigames on your Pip-Boy. Uh... yay?
7. You can call a vertibird to come and pick you up. What?
If you liked Fallout 3 this looks like more of the same, and I'm sure it will deliver everything you want in a new Fallout title. For me, that's a cause for concern more than anything, F3 was a mess made by people who didn't seem to understand what Fallout is, its world or its atmosphere, and felt totally uninspired and half-assed at the same time because it was mainly elements of the original games cobble together with no rhyme or reason stuffed into a new location, with a bullshit story set on the 200th anniversary of the Great War, where you are Wasteland Jesus and Three Dog is your prophet. I really want Fallout 4 to be great, I really want to enjoy playing it and be able to say that it's a worthwhile addition to one of my favourite series of games, but what I've seen at the press conference doesn't give me a lot of confidence that this is going to be more than a retread of the mistakes they made last time around.