I feel bad for the people who tried on this game. The world designer Nate Purkeypile (who has a cool new game out right now), all the level designers, most of the lore builders, and the researchers at Bethesda who really did want to represent West Virginia in a major studio video game, give a little respect to an often overlooked, yet very fascinating state full of rich history involving cryptids and monsters that would be really cool to expand the Fallout mythos with. Implementing the miners and their families, the wendigo, the mothman, and other creatures that have backing in the state retrofitted to be radioactive and mutated to become these game counterparts, I was really fascinated by the direction the team wanted to take and I think there was some solid footing for the map.
But, as with any opening, there's the punchline, and that's just Zenimax wanted another Fallout game out immediately and pushed both the Austin and Dallas team to use the Creation engine when they shouldn't have been even touching that code anymore. It should've been retired with Skyrim and Fallout 4 comes out with a new foundation like Starfield did, as shit as that game is. No, we got the broken, egregious mess that is STILL fucked today, even with all the patches and attempts at bandaiding the code. You still get the power armor glitch, the inventory disappearing, accounts being swapped, falling underneath the map, visual glitches when multiple nukes go off, and server lag is just embedded into the experience. All that world-building, with backstories told through holotapes, a tale of a state infighting over it's legalization of deep drilling, the little glimpses of family life that existed before the bombs went off, and the remnants of current events that characterize the setting, for nothing. There was some great stuff in there that rivals some of the early Fallout games, I love the atmosphere that was captured, and if anything, I just liked walking around town listening to recordings of residents talking. All that effort for something that would be buried under a prissy and infantile community overrun by the pride brigade and manchildren, desperately hanging on to updates that don't do much to address the state of the game.
I'm not sure why John Carpenter is a fan of it, maybe for the same reasons I initially bought into it, but there's so little replay value, Bethesda can't keep clinging on to this corpse of a game and dumping money into it.