Well, I wrapped up my first proper session of the game now that it's out of beta. Just hit level 12 and mostly finished exploring Morgantown.
I will say I've warmed up a little to the game compared to the beta. Not that I think the first hour or so of the game is any better, but I was having a bit more fun once I got out beyond Flatwood. That said, there are still a lot of things that feel like they drag down the experience even early, and I get the feeling they are the kind of things that are only going to get more annoying as I get further along.
There are still a lot of bugs to wade through, even compared to Fallout 3 & 4 at launch. Just tonight I had 3 separate quests bug out for similar reasons (picking up or interacting with an object prior to a quest wanting me to do so). You can kind of shove these quests back to progressing if you can remember what container you plucked that quest item from before it wanted you to, but this should not be happening. I also lost my entire stash of 10mm ammo to a bug in the food processing plant event in Morgantown; if you're doing that event (where it tells you put 5 of each food ingredient into the hopper so it can begin food processing) DO NOT use the space bar in the hopper's inventory menu. It will drop the first food item on your side of the inventory, replace that slot with the ammunition type of your currently equipped weapon (which shouldn't even be able to appear in this menu) and if you keep pressing the button (thinking you will drop the rest of the food containers in the list) it will dump your ammo into the hopper and immediately disappear forever. I also had over 100 Pre-War Money just... disappear after transferring it to my stash. Not really sure what to do there because the weight issues are so serious in this Fallout that you can't afford not to constantly put stuff in your stash. There are also countless animation bugs going on pretty much all the time, whether it is enemies spawning in getting stuck in T-pose, crazy stretched out corpse models, or really jank AI pathing issues (watching the cargobot try to fly in with your event reward at the airport is a reward in itself).
Bugs aside, the weight limit in the game seems incredibly limiting even compared to games like New Vegas in survival mode. The combination of weight from food, water, chems and junk / scraps just seems to keep you perpetually near weight limit. On top of that you actually want to carry looted weapons or armor you might not actually use so you can scrap them for mod schematics, and the base weight of these (especially weapons) is enough that it feels like you are eternally battling your weight limit. You can tell they try to offset this by putting crafting benches of various types all over the world, but it just winds up meaning you are constantly running back and forth between the damn things when trying to explore larger town areas since you can't seem to deploy a camp near those existing locations. Also, why the hell do plans and recipes have weight? I have found maybe 10 duplicates so far (because there is no way to see if you have a recipe before picking it up) and no vendor I've come across buys them (despite them all having a relatively high value). It's definitely put a big damper on my enjoyment of exploration already; when my stash also starts running into limit issues I feel like it's going to become the game's biggest problem.
I'm not crazy about the changes to the perk system so far, and I can already tell that min-maxing in this game is going to be incredibly tedious. Perk cards like Picklock or Hacker are cards where you don't want them equipped until you actually come across a locked object, so "optimal" perk usage is going to involve tons of card swapping so you aren't wasting valuable combat perk boosts in the gaps. Same for crafting perks; you really want to have them, but only to swap them in before crafting and then back out when you're done. It will ultimately add up to a lot more time wasted in menus compared to previous Fallout games. I'm also not sure what to make of the perk balance from what cards I've seen so far; a lot of the damage-based perks have diminishing returns per card upgrade, while other incredibly powerful ones don't. There seems to be some real opportunity cost problems in the system which I think are going to need addressed. For now all I'll say is try to avoid the early game trap of upgrading the +10% damage to weapon type cards, and abuse the critical-related Luck perks before those get battered in future patches.
Also regarding the menus, at least as far as the PC version goes, navigating any of them is basically a total mess. This is only amplifying my annoyance with the weight limit since basically every menu feels trying to type with mittens on. The camp build-out menu is particularly bad. They need to put someone on the task of cleaning these menus up for keyboard and mouse sooner than later.
Despite all the above, I did enjoy exploring the new environment, and I hope they start hammering away at some of this stuff so that I get a chance to hit some of these areas while they are completely new without having to grapple with these issues getting in the way of it.
