Stereotypes and clichés aren't a bad thing in and of themselves. Half of NV's companions are clichés or tropes: Boone is the Cold Sniper, Arcade is the Sarcastic Nerd, Cass is the Hard-Drinking Girl, ED-E is R2-D2, for instance.
The difference is, they are well written. Boone has a very good reason for having a stick up his ass, he's still the most boring companion in the game however. Cass goes beyond her hard-drinking facade and is actually a fairly intelligent, kind and thoughtful woman who just has a particular way of expressing herself. Arcade hides his hefty backstory behind his sarcasm and proves to be an almost zealously principled chap in spite of it. ED-E... well, remains an R2-D2 clone, that's true. He still has more personality than Preston, so that's that I guess.
Companions in FO4 have almost no growth. At best Cait starts disliking drugs once you make her go cold turkey (she still always talks about getting in fights however). Preston stays a boring and bland nobody. Strong stays a dumb mutant. Piper stays the intrepid reporter. Nick stays the 100% stereotypical private eye, but he's a synth so that's, like, completely groundbreaking or something.
Even if you dig you see almost no additional layers, very few interactions beyond ''your thoughts?'', no real reasons to care about them beyond their status as pack mules.
Obsidian does better. Say what you will about Bioware, but even their most boring characters have more layers than Bethesda's best ''efforts''. There's really no excuse for such blandly written characters beyond Bethesda's lack of interest and/or failures as writers.
Exactly. That's what I meant by well-written characters even when built out of stereotypes and clichés - all of the New Vegas companions.
Fallout 4 is potential that's never built on, pure and simple. When I see discussions on the companions outside NMA, they're all full of good, very in-depth and interesting ideas, but... they're all ideas. Speculation. Assumptions.
Cait, albeit in a very subtle manner, shows interest in the Brotherhood of Steel (and I'm not just talking about the "Cait likes that" when you speak to Maxson). A lot of the time, many of the choices she would prefer you pick in a quest matches the ideology of the East Coast Brotherhood of Steel. Considering the BoS there isn't exactly xenophobic and is content with recruiting outsiders, there could've been a questline involving that. Not sure how creative it would be, but just curing her addiction and leaving it at that felt empty, to say the least.
Preston? Well, let's see. Ignoring the fact that he's stuck into a pseudo-tutorial quest where he cannot be killed, and gives repetitive quests in a very obnoxious and unavoidable manner, Preston Garvey appeared quite bland and uninteresting. And that's great - as a start. But you're supposed to build on that. He gave off a kind of
"I want to be a hero" feeling, along with his slightly naive and self-righteous behaviour and the stern near-suicidal depression he revealed to you later on. That could've been used for a lot.
See what I mean? All good ideas right? And this is the problem -
good potential is being mistaken for good writing. Fallout 4 is loved for what it
could've been and not for
what it is. This doesn't include just the writing, it includes the features - see how people are all waiting dearly for the mod tools to arrive? So that it can be used to fulfill the potential the base game never did? It's all about building the house frame and letting the players build the rest of the house. For story, the players have to fill in the imagination with their own gaps. For gameplay and graphics, the modders will fix it. See how this goes?
And while using imagination isn't a bad thing, imagination used to support the personality of the character you roleplay is fine, but not to fill gaps left by laziness.
So there's that. I thought Fallout 4 had pretty decent storytelling when I first played it, then I realised half the stuff I thought was the good bits actually came out of my own head or reading other people's theories. Then people recall it incorrectly, and that's where people get the defense of "Fallout 4 had good writing" from.
Basically, the game has potential, gamers fill in that potential in their own head, then when arguing on the internet, remembers their own fillings incorrectly as already being in the game. Potential potential potential. That's all there is to it.
