I can't really get excited about a Bethesda game either, though I must admit I seem to be less salty about it than most of the like-minded people in this thread. I kind of appreciate Bethesda dusting off their formula once in a while and piquing my interest with a bit of stylish advertising to get me to mill about in another of their worlds.
As a side note, I do hope they have a set protagonist, given that the RP value in a Bethesda game is pretty much nil anyway aside from really broad strokes. Might as well give the players something other than a murderous person-shaped void that rolled out of a forgotten corner of the world to play around with. Especially if it's a pre-war guy with a semblance of personality - I'm not exactly picky about what that personality might be, though I'd hope for hilariously out-of-touch propaganda victim in the optimal case, or maybe the archetypal Fifties Dad (which is even better). Now that's something I can get hyped about.
EDIT: Damn, I am getting hyped about it. I can see it now, a manly paragon of pre-war virtue and WASPitude traveling amidst the savages of the modern world, dispensing Ward Cleaver-style frontier justice to all he deems inappropriate and wrong, and exactly how deluded that justice is depends on the players themselves. Through cleverly-written dialogue choices you could make sure that, no matter what he's doing at any given moment, the Fifties Dad always has some pithy lesson to provide to the unenlightened wastelanders. Imagine that! Dialogue choices with character! I love those!
And, once the character becomes that much less of a self-insert, you have much more incentive to explore other options - maybe you want bad things to happen to Fifties Dad. Maybe his continued survival is not in your interest. Maybe it's that much more amusing to sell innocent people into slavery if he's got a fun line to say about it and you can look at it from a detached perspective. An evil path with purpose and meaning, mayhap? Something never before seen in a Fallout game, yet possibly keeping with most if not all of its themes!