Yes, and no. Yes, in that it has the makings of a perfectly fine Fallout 4.5-type solo game. No, in that it’s pretty clear that the design intent includes working with ideas that are rooted in multiplayer experiences. That is, it seems to me that the designers fully intended for the presence of other players and the shared experience of adventuring in the wastelands with others to be central to the overall game experience. It’s pretty clear that they wanted players to develop communities, set up trading, even band together to fight off other players, etc. Hence the lack of human NPCs–I really think they hoped players would fill those gaps.
The problem is that, for whatever reason (engine limitations, team limitations, etc.) they simply could not pull it off. The team may well have, individually, had great experience with online games, but the combo of trying to adapt a creaking old single-player engine to a modern MMO environment, a new team that as far as I know didn’t have a lot of experience working together, and Zenimax’s no doubt intense pressures to monetize everything seems to have seriously undercut execution.
Now, I’ve put maybe a hundred or more hours into this thing, on two characters, and I still really enjoy the experience…most of the time. But it’s objectively a dumpster fire/train wreck/whatever of a disaster in oh so many ways. The stuff they want to do I think can’t be done the way they are trying to do them. Their reach is far exceeding their grasp.