this feels like its on the weaker side compared to a lot of other bethesda games. its built on oblivion's engine and doesn't even feel like its better than oblivion.

the spaces are terrible to navigate if you want to do quests. sometimes you're asked to find a certain person, and they're just somewhere around a town or whatever. there's a lot of filler locations and npcs to create a sense of scale, but everything still feels a bit hollow and oblivion/morrowind do a million times of a better job at a sense of scale.
the story and writing is such a headache to go thru omg. incredibly boring scenarios told by incredibly bored voice actors.
i dont know why bethesda always does their main quests in such a linear fashion. i know what you're "supposed to do" is to ignore ita nd just do whatever, maybe its just my autism but i actually want to go through a main quest when i play one of these games
the voice acting!!! why does bethesda not know how to direct voice actors!?!?!? how did obsidian get way better voice actors than fucking bethesda!?!?!?!

good parts tho:

the vats system is pretty cool for an action rpg. i prefer it a lot more to slow mo.
it is kind of cool to find random places that have people to talk to that are super missable. i wish these places were like, interesting though lol.
fallout 1 and 2 had a lot of dummy skills that didnt really do anything. a lot of skills only came up in very specific scenarios like repair, a lot of weird overlap skills like first aid and doctor, and Gambling. fallout 3 did a lot of things to make pretty much every skill actually impactful to put points into.
i wish energy weapons was better to use in the early game, but hey this was the case in the earlier games too.
three dog is great and is the only person in this game with good voice acting lol.
the world visually looks pretty cool. i like a lot of the big weird statues. visual landmarks are visually really easy to spot. i wish these games didnt have quest markers in them, if you turn them off the games becomes a lot more fun when you actually look forward.

at the end of the day, whenever i play this game i feel this weird sense of morose. like oh boy i can go anywhere! but its like, oh i can go to all of these loot dungeons that don't really matter because the game scales with me. or i can do these really annoying quests that aren't written well and are kind of tedious to go through.

a part of me still likes just going around and finding places though, just a little bit. probably the skyrim brain worms from playing that game as a kid. like with a lot of bethesda games, i like the idea of playing it more than actually playing it. idk something about me made me like this a bit and im not able to put it into words lol.

new vegas does pretty much everything better than this game, albeit they're kind of games with different goals. but new vegas couldnt exist without this game. so thanks todd-sama...