No. I had a great time in the early hours of The Outer Worlds, but the further I got into it the more the sheen wore off. It feels like playing Fallout 3 or New Vegas but modded to give you the maximum in every stat. Playing as a character with no points in every combat skill and everything in speech/persuasion type stuff, I found combat an absolute breeze and I have like three or four different guaranteed-pass speech checks in any conversation. I can pick any lock, hack any terminal effortlessly, stealth is totally unnecessary, loot and equipment is meaningless, there's no joy in finding some cool new weapon because combat is braindead easy.
And, unfortunately, most of the quests are just straightforward waypoint -> waypoint -> waypoint -> waypoint -> done, with the only real choice being which flavour of speech check you choose at the very end. Make the quest end snarkily with Persuasion, smartly with Intelligence, intimidatingly with Intimidate, or by shooting with <ATTACK>. The decision at the end of the Edgewater/Deserters quest was a really great moral quandary, but I haven't come across anything like that in the rest of the game. I haven't finished it, though, so I'm holding out hope.
The games beginning is it's strongest point and it goes downhill from there. And everything you wrote is exactly on point. Your character is a typical Mary Sue and skill allocation, character building is basically meaningless and it only gets worse the longer you play. The game is getting a serious "fuck Bethesda" pass because of Fallout 76.
1, 2 ,3, and New Vegas are better Fallout games. Fallout 4 is better in many ways, worse in others. So ti answer the Ops question, is it better than any Fallout games? Absolutely yes, it's better than 76, other than that you'd have a hard time convincing me.
Fallout is not about random open world barf that you wander around 'exploring' - that's WHY there was resistance to Bethesda getting the IP to begin wtih. TOW is the Fallout 3 we've been waiting for for 20 years.
First off Fallout is about open world exploration now, even New Vegas was about that. It's time to let the RPG Codex like complaining go. Ironically, the Codex doesn't really seem to like this game at all, which makes no sense if it's "the Fallout 3 we've been waiting 20 years for" because they'd be the first group of people to slurp old school Fallout gameplay.
Second, TOW isn't even remotely similar to even the first two Fallouts. Those games had actual challenging encounters. They had meaningful character build choices that didn't allow you to become an all-powerful, do anything god like TOW. TOW shares more in common with Fallout 4 than either of the first two Fallouts, btw. Nothing about TOW says 'spiritual successor' to those games and, frankly, it's some of Obsidians weakest work in terms of characters, dialog and story. Most of the companions are shit and I couldn't name one character that I'll be talking about this time next year. It's a completely forgettable experience but at least it's not buggy.
Anyway, no, TOW isn't the Fallout 3 we've been waiting for for 20 years. TOW is the knock off, safe, hybrid version of Mass Effect and Fallout with less memorable characters and gameplay than either series. It's a nice baby step into a, hopefully, massively more fleshed out sequel, but not much else.
In order of quality to me
Fallout 2 > Fallout 1 > New Vegas > Outer Worlds > Fallout: Tactics > Fallout 3 > Fallout 4, does 76 even count?
That's about right, but I'd move TOW either between 3 and 4 or between 4 and 76.
