I guess one thing I'm overly worried about is how much of this game has a set in stone storyline. Todd howard did say that player freedom remained Beth's #1 goal, but he made it pretty clear in his post-show interview that the 'freedom' aspect was more along the lines of where the player could go around the world and not so much character building. If you look at previous Bioware games and even the Elder Scrolls series, there's a huge difference between freedom of building your character and freedom of exploring the world around you.
An example in Fallout New Vegas. You are literally a blank sheet of a character who can choose to side with one of four factions for control over New Vegas. All sides have their own reasons for wanting New Vegas and all sides have their reasons why they shouldn't run New Vegas. There's even a choice for you to run New Vegas yourself and the kind of ruler you become depends on your behavior throughout the game. Even different choices have alternative choices within themselves! Fallout 3? You're just some guy's kid who has to turn on a machine or make someone else do it. The End. I'm hoping that Bethesda took a lot of notes from New Vegas in terms of developing your character and how that affects the story, rather than the point a to poing b
Probably the biggest indication of how little choice the player will have in developing their character is, well, the game's opening. You start out as a happily married person who just had their first child. That's set in stone. Compare that to the blank slate of New Vegas. Heck, Fallout 3's player character has more of a blank slate than this since you could still do things that wouldn't contradict your character's behavior. I mean, let's face it. Being made to play a straight couple is not my forte. After playing Skyrim, Dragon Age, Mass Effect and even Star Wars: The Old Republic, I love character romances.
Skyrim had a pretty cute, if completely unrealistic romance system where a large number of NPCs can be romanced by any race and any gender. All you have to do is do a specific quest for them, show them an amulet, get married in a chapple, and boom! You now have a home companion who you can return home to after a hard day's work. Now while there are some moments in the Fallout franchise where you could flirt and to an extent romance a character (Fallout 2 having a shotgun wedding even), Fallout 4 seems less likely to have any of this since you start the game as a married straight person. For someone who always picks the female character and romances the girl whenever possible, I feel very saddened that my character's orientation will also be set in stone. Again, not a problem if you're trying to tell a fixed story with a character who does things the way the writer wants them to, but games like Fallout, Skyrim and pretty much anything BioWare has done has really set the standard in what it means to create the kind of character you want.