I agree completely with all of this, which is why I don’t much care that the game is being transplanted into a FPS enviroment. None of that requires turn based, isometric gameplay to be implemented. And a lot of it has been implemented in FPSes before, to good effect. I liked the combat system of Fallout, but it was the setting and the writing that set it apart from other RPGs, not the combat system. Can Bethesda deliver on that? I don’t honestly know. They never have before, but they’ve gotten closer with each new RPG they’ve released. This could be the one that puts them over the top, which would be awesome. It could be merely as good as Oblivion, which would satisfy me. Or they could completely cock it up and make a giant pile of shit. If that happens, well, so what? We’ll have two great, classic Fallout games, and one POS no one wants to ever play again. Is that fundamentally different from just having two great, classic Fallout games and nothing else?
It’s also worth noting that the franchise has never had particularly impressive AI. Remember how often you’d get drilled in the back by your own team members, because they couldn’t figure out that it’s a bad idea to go full auto on a bad guy when your character is in hand-to-hand range with him? The AI they used in Oblivion would be a huge improvement over the one they had in the original Fallout games.
The only real problem I’d have with doing it in full-on Oblivion style is that I fear it would lose flexibility. One issue with Oblivion was that everything came down to combat. You could stealth your way through most things, but it got really boring, since Stealth increased so fast that you soon became a ninja master. Also, suffice it to say that quests did not have quite the flexibility promised.