Yeah... the two romance sub-plots, the vampires, Super Mutants even being there at all, the Brotherhood of Steel even being there at all (not to mention with a serious shift in personality), a lot of the stuff with the Enclave, not being able to send my Super Mutant buddy into the radioactive death room (until a DLC, in which case doing that is still treated somewhat negatively)... it's a tad wonky.Dr. McD said:snip
The thing that always killed it for me though was the same thing that seems to kill all Bethesda games to me: the pacing. There's literally no sense of urgency to the game. Sure, you're told that your dad's work is of incredible importance, and you're told that you need to find and help him ASAP... but then you can just sorta wander around for seventeen years without ever pursuing your dad. Then during the eighteenth year of your wandering, you might accidentally stumble upon something plot-related, and the game treats it as if no time has passed at all and everything is still super-urgent.
I had this same problem with Oblivion and Skyrim too. Big epic quests that are presented as being somewhat time-sensitive, but no one really cares whether or not you actually bother with it. In both games I ended up getting bored and bailing long before finishing the stories.
At least with Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas there wasn't really an implied urgency to the main story. Your character wanted to track down Benny, but the game doesn't treat it like a time crunch. And they don't add a time crunch factor to the Hoover Dam battle either, as the whole game is treated as a "calm before the storm" so to speak. Is it still wonky from time to time? Sure. But not nearly as bad as a lot of Bethesda titles seem to get.