Fallout 1 is doing fetch and kill quest.
1. Fetch a working water chip!
2. Kill the mutants and their boss!

I'm not expecting much from this and I never get into these betas anyway, but I signed up. Might as well.
If I wanted to depress myself this early in the morning, I'd browse their forums and read about ideas for planting trees in the wasteland that grow in real time and gradually affect the oxygenation of the game world, or how the game should track every stone and bit of gravel in the wasteland as individual objects so that they can be picked up and used as throwing weapons, with varying statistics based on size, weight and aerodynamic properties.

There is already an fan made fallout mmo, and it depicts brutality of wasteland perfectly, sadly i forgot how it was called.