Again, what 'right moves' you felt it didn't do considering the situation it was in?
Why "again"? Have you asked this before and have I left it unanswered?
Anyway, the 'right' moves....
Projectile skills should have affected gameplay much more, heavier effect on accuracy more specifically. This would've been perfectly doable, but did not happen due to Sawyer's apparent hatred of letting the character fail at what they are prompted to do. He criticised Morrowind for going 50/50, he criticised XCOM for having to-hit chances, he criticised Alpha Protocol for the accuracy impairments, he intentionally favored damage progression over accuracy progression in NV (and said so himself), he originally wouldn't have allowed characters to miss in PoE but changed his mind due to backer pressure (and it was then like "Ok, there's now a small chance of missing, but the rest is crit hits, good hits and less good hits").
The guns and ew skills did so very little in the game that they could've
almost be absent.
Sawyers knack for balancing also made the choices between guns and ew almost an irrelevant one as they were balanced to work so similiarly (Sawyer himself has spitballed how that could've been improved...). There's very little practical distinction inspite what it might say on paper with ew -DT stuff and all. That could've well been differently handled, and again the skills did so very little to the gameplay....
Merging Big Guns with guns and ew had a logic behind it, but for the same reason as above, it kind of trivialized them.
The ammotypes and DT actually play into my original criticism of the game working too much like an FPS since it does cut down even the HP grind, even that is now mitigated from the characters aptitude.
They could've well chopped the map in pieces and reintroduced the world map travel between hubs (that this time around would've offered explorable landscapes as well). '
VATS wasn't altered enough. It was still the sort of panic button safeguard. They should've boldly gone deeper into making it a genuine and somewhat comprehensive combat feature.
Bethesda has earned most of all criticism they've gotten, but two things they did better. They understood that pleas and begs deserve a %-check while expressing knowledge comes with flat threshold. And generally (as Sawyer too has admitted), the dialog checks were kind of "I win" conditions, which they shouldn't have been.
And the other would be how repair skill worked in Fallout 3... Buying your gun into mintness in NV with 20 duplicates was awful. It would've made the skill much much more worthwhile if it had determined how much the character actually knows how to repair. That, if it was out of the question to make repairing a skillcheck (or at least how much repairing is done via an attempt).
They could've also well stripped the minigames and allowed the PC to do his dues accordingly with lockpicking and hacking.
They could've added character based interactivity to the world and objects to underline the mechanical intrigue and meaning of the characerbuild.
There's more, but you get the gist. The game is not going to change anymore, but I would hope people recognized that while there's a lot of good things to say about New Vegas, it's not beyond criticism; and the full on "Obsidian defence force" mode that excuses all the faults and shortcomings and makes up odd diversions ("
Not FPS with RPG elements but RPG with FPS elements", that's... I don't even know what it means here, the game plays the way it plays, the combat there plays the way it does....) often sounds frighteningly lot of Bethesda goons from 9 years ago dismissing all criticisms of Fallout 3.
I'm trying to look at things objectively, without the certain coloured glasses that are often fit in my head. I don't always succeed with that, but while I admit the good things, I also don't excuse that the game does suffer from a lot of the same things as Fallout 3 does and that those things were fixable. It's all in hindsight now, but it is what it is nonetheless. The minute to minute gameplay flow is just boring, not much more exciting or different than Fallout 3 or 4.
I'm also not trying to turn anyones head around on whether they should or shouldn't like New Vegas, in case someone thinks that. I'm just trying stir some discussion on an apparently taboo subject here.
EDIT - to get a bit more back on topic.... Fallout 4 is an unfixable bucket of trash, as everbody knows.
Which is of course a bit of a shame since there's potential in what Bethesda does, it could well be leashed to do something actually interesting, they just intentionally butcher it all themselves.
