Ask Lemmy

Fallout 5, please and thank you.

But, if it's my vision, with no compromise:

• the map is the whole of the contiguous US, with parts of Canada and Mexico thrown in for good measure
• there is a main campaign with a more coherent story than those we've seen so far, but it's almost irrelevant
• given the vast scale of the map there are hundreds of huge, complex, side quests involving different regions each of which is as full and complete and compelling as the main campaign
• the world is alive: it slowly changes even without your input if you've visited a place. Settlers slowly clean up rubbish, remove corpses, plant crops, rebuild walls and roofs, redecorate, begin trading, establishing lines of commerce and communication between settlements. You can speed the process up through your actions, but once you've visited a place, things will happen. The flip side is that sometimes bad things will happen: diseases that wipe out a village, fires, natural disasters, raiders, supermutants, whatever.
• NPcs age, change, die, have offspring, move locations
• over the course of many in-game years, you can actually make the world a better place, bring safety to the wastelands, wipe out nests of deathclaws, etc such that they don't respawn
• reputation matters but travels organically, if you save a village (or commit brutal murder) your reputation changes but only at the pace of communication, if you go somewhere completely new, quickly enough, or far enough away, they won't have heard of you
• NPCs will react to you appropriately, e.g. raiders with pool cues won't attack a PC wearing power armor and carrying a minigun, townsfolk will be wary of a stranger who's walked into town covered in blood
• dialogues choices will be complex, meaningful, and consequential
• game actions will also be meaningful, and consequential

I'm sure there's more but that's off the top of my head.