I'm wondering if someon will provide some deeper insight. Recently I was pondering if it could be a nice survival shooter like F3 was with FWE (that was before I played better games); browsed nexus and read about it for a bit, and then I realized I really can't be bothered with it anymore.
You can make it a decent open world survival type deal. It was pretty fun, in spite of everything. Now, you may say, "But Birdzo, you were shitfaced when you did that!" And you'd be right. So it was fun with an asterisk for copious alcohol.
I forget the names of the mods, but this is basically what I did:
>play on survival
>mod: lets you modularly change everything about survival mode, including damage rates, starvation rate, etc.
>set damage to 1.5:1.5 ratio, because bullet sponges and asymmetry are sinful and gay
>set starvation, sleep, etc. to realistic rates. play around with it
>mod: add damage threshold to all armors and vertibirds,
a la NV
>this may have been a few different mods working together. i can't remember.
>total gamechanger
>mod: lets you set up fast travel nodes at settlements
>can only travel by activating a node, and wind up at the target node
>would use these whenever I connected settlements via caravan -- rationalized it as hitching myself to the caravan
>your settlement empire becomes incredibly important due to this
>mod: radiation storms are significantly more dangerous
>mod: make radiation accumulate faster in general
>mod: search and destroy (i remember the name of this one)
>increases distance enemies engage you from, the amount of time they search for you, and lets them follow you through doors
>mod: removes ambient lighting without real light sources, and darkens nights
>mod: brighter power armor lamps
>without this mod, the lamps are useless in real darkness
>mod: gives you lots of thunderstorms. purely for vibes.
>mod: find holotapes that let you record a journal entry so you can save without sleeping
>limited to one save per holotape
>mod: portable junk scrapper so I could actually carry shit
>breaks down items into its constituent parts
>no reason why you shouldn't be able to disassemble stuff in the field with a leatherman, so this didn't seem like a cheat button
>mod: no more essential NPCs
>take care of your companions
This was honestly a good experience (*while drunk). Bethesda can't do Fallout right, but they maybe could have done STALKER right.