So I made this account because I'd been searching for a good place to sort my feelings on this game, and this thread was full of interesting insights about how bad Fallout 4 was, where it succeeded, and where it failed hardest. I've watched long-form videos about it like JA's critiques as well as doing all the non-radiant quests in the game myself. I hope it's alright to share.
I waited in line for this game at midnight. It was very cold, but there were a bunch of other people waiting as well, so it wasn't too bad. I had it preordered even though in Canada you basically got fuckall for doing so. Americans got socks, or season passes, in Canada I think a couple stores gave out PS4 themes. I didn't even get one of those, but I didn't care. Games here cost about $80+tax now, so closer to $95+. But I paid it, happily expecting that at worst, it'd just be Fallout 3 again with better graphics. Which I could've lived with.
Meeting my expectations would've been more than enough, even if it didn't try to
exceed them.
It shocked me, to say the least, how many ways this game felt like a downgrade from
New Vegas. Ammo types were boiled down. You could level up forever, meaning every build had one universal stamp sheet that everyone eventually fills out, meaning builds don't matter-- and most of the Perks are completely worthless (why does waterbreathing even have a second tier? THERE IS NOTHING IN THE WATER!), while others are hilariously broken (such as Idiot Savant, which triggered constantly for me despite having 10 INT). Sorry if I am treading ground others have said better elsewhere, but it really did surprise me. It felt as if Bethesda did not even
play New Vegas. As if they went
out of their way to avoid using
any of Obsidian's design improvements, or gameplay tweaks. Having different ammo types was literally just applying different modifiers to your weapon. It would be very simple to include even if lots of players didn't use it, and it would give them a greater variety of things to find when exploring, besides randomly generated cases of generic ammo. But I guess that would clash with the "it doesn't have to make sense if it's fun and wacky" weapon modding, which allowed me to craft a laser shotgun with exploding shells that basically melted whatever I aimed it at. So ammo variety was shifted over into "do whatever who cares" crafting freedom. As someone who had always been fond of finding powerful Unique variant weapons with their own history in the game world, I found the emphasis on crafting nonsensical super-guns to be dull because it was so "game-y". It removed a lot of immersion for me. (I'll get to Legendary enemies/gear in a moment.) Over the course of FO4, hitting up every place on the map, I think I found maybe three named, unique weapons. The rest were RNG trash like SENTINEL'S KNEEPADS or whatever, that I never equipped.
It didn't really sink in how bad things were, until I reached the Museum of Witchcraft. See, I'd gotten a note of it on my map, and I'd been slowly moving in that direction, getting rather excited to see it. I thought there was sure to be some unique stuff there-- a witch's costume for my sassy mom character to wear, or a broom melee weapon, or some kind of novel twist to what happened there. As I read the pre-war notes inside, I thought perhaps the teacher dressed as a witch might have been trapped in the basement and became a ghoul, which would be neat. Instead, I found nothing unique in the entire building, then as I went to leave, a deathclaw spawned.
When I saw this, I began to realize that in a short number of hours, I had already largely seen what the game had to offer in enemy variety. I was very underwhelmed by the new enemies in this game. Synths didn't really show any behaviors that set them apart from human foes, and super mutants are just inexplicably everywhere. Unlike New Vegas, or even FO3, 4
really felt like nobody had ventured five feet from their door in the last 200 years. The game seems to flip between wanting the world to feel 'untouched' since the bomb drop, and also a 'lived-in' world where dynamic things are always happening. So you have a lot of factions, all running about inside this world, founding communities, but not touching ANYTHING.
Really though I should put quotes on "factions", since that's kind of insulting NV's faction depth by sharing the word. I don't know know what magic Obsidian worked to make faction allegiances work, even including faction disguises and whatnot, but it's obvious Bethesda didn't read their notes. In FO4 I was able to join every faction at once, maintain a strong relationship with
all of them, and only in two instances was I
forced to make one hostile to me-- Mass Fusion, and the Brotherhood's invasion of the Railroad (which is part of their endgame). On top of that, you are forcefully drafted into the Minutemen by the plot-- and made their
General-- within minutes of even finding out what it is. And if the Brotherhood or Institute can at least be called 'factions' in a sense, The Minutemen are
not a faction; their authority is recognized by nobody, they have no crossover with other factions, or any real motivation of any kind. After going through each faction's ending and getting a boring and mostly identical slideshow for each faction ending (which I did all in a row when I was done with the game), I remembered to check in with the Minutemen and found they, too, had an "Institute Invasion" option, for no reason I can really understand. You and Garvey barge into the Institute, blow the reactor, and the entire time, Garvey seems genuinely confused as to where they are or what they're even really doing this for. They forgot to give The Minutemen a motive or stance to motivate destroying the Institute, but bothered to make sure they could do it anyway because who knows why. And then, unlike every other faction, Minutemen don't have a 'faction ending' slideshow. You also can't bring them up in many, if any, casual conversations.
I don't want to go on too long so I'll just quickly talk about Legendary Gear, what a fucking terrible idea that was. Whoever thought of it probably thought it was really clever too. First of all, Legendary monsters are stupid because if there are legendary monsters everywhere, then none of them are special. There is no room to ponder what history this monster has to have earned that title-- you know it's just a respawning upper-tier enemy with some Epic Hockey Pads of Sturdiness on it or something. They should be placed manually, not spawn with complete RNG modifiers jumbled together. It makes every enemy's name look like some MMO crap. The stars aren't really necessary to denote the specialness of an item either-- the Named gear was that much more special because it stood out from gear that is RNG or generic. Everyone remembers The Terrible Shotgun from Fallout 3, or Maria from New Vegas. Nobody remembers "Epic Flaming Laser Tough Shotgun
". It's just another pile of random adjectives onto a weapon, or maybe a shoulder pad you picked off a big mosquito that somehow became 'legendary' from inside the Glowing Sea.
The only genuinely good quest in the game is Silver Shroud, and the amount of effort put into the Shroud stuff vs everything else in the game makes me wish that person had written ALL the quests in the game. Not only is the Shroud outfit the most stylish fashion in the game, it's the only time your character shows actual personality, while roleplaying as The Silver Shroud. It also has a bit of challenge in trying to get the shroud fanboy out of the situation alive. Most of the other quests either take a shit on the Fallout lore (Eddie Winters, Kid in a Fridge, Chinese Sub, etc), or they're frustrating Radiant quests that you aren't ALLOWED to permanently strike off the list for some reason.
I don't know how to end my post so, I will just say it is fucking ludicrous that you can't make walls or ceilings with no holes in them. And that Garvey will still take orders from you even if you let Nuka fiends into the Commonwealth. Just... what the hell, Bethesda. What the hell. 
