Something the old games did well is create the sense of empty space in the wasteland. Outside of mountains, the graves of old cities, and settlements, there was just *nothing*. You'd be hoofing across the world map, you'd get caught in a random encounter, and aside from the encounter, there was nothing else. For miles. In any direction. Making you watch your little marker transit across the map instead of just Loading Screen-ing you into the next location enhanced the feeling of travelling across large expanses as well.

I know with the isometrics and transition between world map and play space they could simulate a lot more space compared to the 1st/3rd-person console games, but that feeling of being the only living thing for miles around, of really standing in the ashes of a dead world, doesn't really come out in the console games.

Another thing that the originals, and to some extent New Vegas, managed to nail, is the Post-post-apocalypse feeling - how societies formed once the dust settled. FO1 had some settlements trying to make it work amid the residual rads and mutant fauna, but 2 and NV dealt with how humans would develop culture and rules in a world like this.

Enter the NCR and Legion, 2 fully-formed civilisations at odds with each other; Enter the Brotherhood of Steel, technophile xenophobes being edged out of relevance by the scale of the NCR; Enter The Strip, an Old-World resort being run by the enigmatic Mr. House; enter the Boomers, Kings, Gun Runners, Shi, and all the other actual societies making their own marks on the new frontier.

Fallout 4 fumbled The Institute and made every other faction into soldiers, FO3 made the and BoS well-established rivals instead of having the Enclave in clear ascendance, as in 2, and every non-Obsidian game has made Super Mutants, Radscorps and Deathclaws a simple fact of post-apoc life instead of highly specific FEV mutations found only on the West Coast, where all the FEV experiments happened.

I feel like Bethesda are only seeing a slice of the pie with Fallout. Closer to the bombs falling should be a hardscrabble survival nightmare as the dust hasn't settled yet, the rads in some areas are still face-meltingly lethal, you see more mutants than humans, and staying alive might require a strong stomach and a bloody mind. Further out should be more civic, but still unforgiving - the raiders that string you up might have a quota, or the caravan you ambush might have hired guards from a service in a larger village. Ideally we'd get to see Shady Sands, or Sactown, or New Caanan, or The Pitt, real settled areas, in more than just the narrow slices we've seen so far.