As I understand PVP starts if you retaliate on provocation, you get hit and that hit basically does little to no damage regardless of level / stats / armor.
Yes,
if pacifist mode isn't on. If you have pacifist mode on, players can't harm you and you can't harm them. You can stand a metre apart and empty miniguns at each other with no effect. Pacifist mode is on for everyone until they reach L5. It has been suggested that it might be an available option for a player to choose to have it on after reaching L5. Maybe. The facility is definitely in the game because it's on for every player below level 5. It's just a matter of whether Bethesda allow players to use it.
Bethesda see it as a system to stop 'griefing' to try and sell it to the long standing fans who mostly love Fallout because they aren't fans of most multiplayer games, I'm one of latter and am not convinced.
Given Bethesda's history of bugs, players will undoubtedly find ways around this and just run around being total tools in a bid to ruin the experience for most people just wanting to play a Fallout game, because that's just what happens in a multiplayer environment, in every single online game I've played.
Absolutely. It will happen. Everyone apart from people making press releases for Bethesda knows that. Well, they probably know it too but are pretending not to.
But what stops the person just jumping infront of you non stop so you can't see or do anything
Or ruining your stealth approach by standing next you firing wildly at the enemy to draw them to kill you
Or leading some aggro mobs into you, as has been done in numerous online games even when PvP doesn't exist. Or finding some way of getting the environment to kill you. Lots of things explode in Fallout games. That's just off the top of my head and not including creative use of bugs which will undoubtably exist because they always do in Bethesda's games.
Yeah but if there's no npcs or story It's a bit meh.
There are sort of NPCs. They're dead or gone, but terminal entries and notes from sort of partly function as NPCs to a limited extent. A bit meh, but maybe not too much. There are stories. A main story, numerous side-quest stories and the background stories (from notes and placement of corpses and items) that you usually get in a Fallout game. The story part doesn't look bad, maybe better than the mian story in FO4.
I'm thinking that it might possibly at some undetermined point in the future perhaps be something I might play if it was cheap. Maybe. Probably not, but that's partly because I don't want to in any way encourage Bethesda to turn Fallout into an online only multiplayer only unmoddable hyper-expensive (AAA price + DLC + over-priced not-so-microtransactions) waste of money.
90% of the game doesn't need group interaction. And is very big game to spend 2000 hours before you decide to do so. And yet is still much to do at Cyrodil, imperial sewers or imperial City (pvp areas) or do the group dungeons.