That all sounds reasonable. I mean, Skyrim has the classic feature where you stealth shoot an arrow into somebody and they say “Who’s there?” followed by “I guess it was just the wind.” or whatever - with an arrow sticking out of their chest. At some point it just becomes a classic Bethesda aspect of the game. The base building was my least favorite part - but that was more about having to run back to defend stuff rather than just pushing through on side quests.