Should I take it that this is still a WIP and that I should wait before firing it up?
The story is the best part of the game...and as Columbo says, don't expect a great story. I think it's a better story than the story for FO4, although you will miss bits because notes aren't instanced per player so you will miss ones that have been picked up by another player. Another reason why the mess of MP and SP doesn't work.
It's definitely a WIP. It's not stable, you can't reliably play the game, you can be kicked from the game without warning at any time and it
will happen. Quote possibly in the middle of something important. For example, I was kicked during the final part of the final BoS quest and now the quest has disappeared from my list and might be completely broken. If you explore rather than just following quests on a fixed path (and isn't exploring the main point of games like this?), you might get some problems with quests. For example, I have lost out on a quite useful repeatable quest (selling technical data to the BoS) because my exploring resulted in me triggering a later quest in the BoS questline before completing earlier ones. You will probably also have the game just crash, usually freezing for a while until you either kill the process yourself or Windows detects that it's not responding. You will get huge lag spikes, sometimes several seconds. Not milliseconds. Seconds. You will get periods during which every few seconds the controls are disabled because the server isn't responding and as a nice little extra that will also sheath your weapon every time. Numerous things will be changed because someone at Bethesda decided to change them so expect your build to become wrong, whatever your build is. Many of the challenges that you can do are bugged and can't be completed. Since those challenges are the only endgame content, it's even more of an annoyance than it would be anyway.
I wouldn't bother waiting - there's no reason to believe it will be fixed and some aspects of it can't be fixed because they're inherent in the game design and implementation. Also, the changes introduce new problems.
So you may as well fire it up now, if you can get it very cheaply. There is a decent Fallout game buried in the muck. The gameworld is very well made, arguably the best in any Fallout game and certainly an interesting change from the urban environments of 3 and 4. It's more varied than the environment of NV and has more depth in the literal sense - hills and valleys and cliffs and plateaus. It has the "what's that over there?" factor that makes such games interesting. I've used the sight on my rifle as a telescope to get a better look at something in the distance many times. A glimpse of blue or a glimpse of a flat surface...is that an unmarked location, a shack or something? Is there lore there? A side quest, maybe? A rare item? Time to go there and take a look around!
It also has something from FO4 that entertains me - the priorities you'll be placing on loot. An assault rifle with a night vision scope? A missile launcher? Technomagic armour? Meh, not worth the encumbrance of carrying them to a merchant to sell. A battered clipboard! Sweet! Grab that right away! The spring in it is more valuable to you than the majority of legendary (i.e. magic) items.
I paid £27 for it and I think I got my money's worth. It's selling for under £10 on PC now and at that price I think it's worth giving it a go. You will be frustrated. You will be annoyed. You will not have any endgame content. But you will probably have fun in between those things. Probably more than £10 worth of fun.
Yep indeed, was just a minute ago in the middle of my first solo Scorchbeast attempt (I'm only LVL 39), got the thing down to about 25% health left and had used about 1000 rounds when I just got kicked out of the server......grrrrr!!!
I have a photo of my first solo SB kill. Also of my first solo kill of 3 SB simulataneously. I like the photo mode. It's a small thing, but it adds some entertainment value. Although my favourite photos are my "Pantsman" series, playing various musical instruments in various locations in my underpants because reasons.
Oh yeah, I had something to say about fighting SB. The staggering effect works on them, which is a bigger thing than it might seem to be. I've specialised in shotguns and rifles and with the right perks shotguns can have a pretty hefty staggering effect. If the SB is flying low enough, I can blast them with a shotgun and stagger them, causing them to hover in a daze for a while, then pull out my rifle (more DPS, far more DPS at anything other than point blank range) to shoot them many times while they're hovering in a daze. I can reliably kill L50 and L65 SB without them landing and without needing an entire arsenal of bullets.
not many I know!
Be back in a few more weeks......
Apparently Harper's Ferry is a good nuke target for gathering raw violet flux and the masses and fluids to stabilise it.