It would be nice but I don't see them doing it unless they make a Tactics 2 just for the sake of not restricting what items a player can use as a Super Mutant.
I mean in my fantasy dreamland I think that'd be an interesting way to balance playing as a SM. You are locked out of certain items and weapons, but you get higher base stats like endurance and strength. I can see why they wouldn't want to bother, though, given it'd be a nightmare to design and most people would just play humans anyway. Ghouls, though, I feel like it's time those make a playable appearance. Bethesda already allows you to play as Vampires and werewolves in their fantasy games, with hefty changes to the systems for both. A charisma penalty and some "wow you look like shit" from the NPCs in exchange for radiation immunity and a stat penalty sounds more reasonable.
Going back to FO3 via TTW, I've come to appreciate the world design more. The story and writing may be worse than NV overall, but it's still way better than 4, and the level design is top notch, arguably better than NV. Even the memed-up endless metro tunnels look and play so much better with mods, and the amount of detail they put into everything is crazy. I also like that compared to vanilla NV NPCs generally look pretty good. There's very few weird/deformed faces around. And in the end, writing aside, it's just plain fun going through an urban wasteland blasting super mutants with NV's engine enhancements.
Love it or hate it, there's no denying that Fallout 3 provides a really solid post apocalypse experience. Bethesda was firing on all cylinders for that one, I think, and it really shows. With some added mods and New Vegas' updated gameplay it's really damn fun.
They need to go back to the tone and style of FO3 and NV, 4 got real, real dumb with things, and 76's "story" is an incoherent mess.
Funnily enough, 4 really reminds me of Bethesda's 4th Elder Scrolls as well in that it's got a weirdly light tone and things are just kind of 'off' the whole way through. 4 sits in this really awkward middle ground tonally where they gloss over the horrors of a post-nuclear world but still have bleak elements. The complete and total absence of human slavery is really strange to me, since it's a common element of The Wasteland to some extent in almost every game.
Fallout 4 feels like a Disneyfied version of the Fallout universe. All the goofy retrofuturism is cranked up, the world is nostalgic and colorful, life before the bombs is painted like some kind of idyllic wonderworld. Fallout 3's world design, the remnants of the old world you can see, are also super bleak and seem to fit into more of the established Orwellian aesthetic of the first few games. All that creepy architecture, the strange statues, the newspaper clippings talking about the annexation of Canada and the War Propaganda clinging to ancient billboards like grim reminders that the world before the nuke dropped was no picnic.
I miss that element of the setting.
I'm just not sure what needs to happen with Fallout in the future. Bethesda's release schedule guarantees around 15 years for new games from their IPs, all assuming Starfield doesn't become a juggernaut that makes Microsoft demand a sequel ASAP. Even if their development schedule wasn't packed, I don't trust Obsidian to make a new Fallout from scratch after how painfully mediocre The Outer Worlds was
This is the real Monkey's Paw timeline. Microsoft owning both Obsidian and Bethesda means that more spinoffs helmed by them is likely, but it's nu-Obsidian, where all the real talent was chased off and replaced with millennial quirksters who, when given the reins on an all-new sci-fi setting, made Borderlands with flavors of Rick and Morty.
I think Fallout's setting demands some level of introspection and seriousness, so they might not quite lean into retardation, but really, it's just time to kind of admit that we likely won't be seeing anything great from the series ever again. The thing I'm looking forward to most from the franchise right now is the Sonora translation. Just hope that fans can pick up Bethesda's slack, I guess, like that hasn't always been the case.
You know, would it make sense for a Fallout 5 to be set in a thriving (but still dangerous) Capital Wasteland ? (Except we get a bigger map with wild, mysterious and uncharted places thanks to better tech).
I wouldn't mind a return to the Capital Wasteland after years of having its infrastructure slowly built back up by The Brotherhood, but I'd want another big area to explore that's all new too.