Fallout 4 - Why Details Matter

[Crni Vuk]

Interesting!

 

[Oppen]

Well, I wouldn't mind being able to kill people in very impractical ways, like with a fork or a spoon.

With a spoon, you say? Wait no longer:

I knew someone would catch the reference.
Now, on a more serious note, I think the matter here is the priorities, not the isolated features being positive or not.
I don't care if there is a lot 'mmursive junk. I care about the game having substance.
If you chose your factions, setting and plot in a way that make sense already, and have extra time, you can then add some quests and backstory that let the player know a bit more of the world it's in. After you have done an immersive enough world in that aspect, you can start paying attention to the silly details. They do add, but they add far less than meaningful story.
Then, if you still have time, you can give that junk uses. You can enable the player to be an idiot that stabs people with forks (for negligible amounts of damage, because it is a goddamned fork!), or hit them with spoons and what not. Only, you do those silly things after you have a game that makes you want to play it, not as the main focus of it. I think that's what Beth doesn't get. They created Megaton, not because it would make sense in their story and the world they were trying to portray, but because they wanted an excuse to add a silly detail: the possibility to detonate an atomic bomb. They put the Enclave and the BoS, because they needed an excuse to put a shiny power armor. They chose DC, because monuments, so immersive! They focus on the silly little details, and fail to create any big picture. The silly little details DO add something positive, IF used correctly. If you just toss a handful of details into the player's face, you can as well throw a turd to its face, it'll stick the same and it'll add the same.

EDIT:
I'd like to add that so much attention to graphic details brings less into the table than attention to details in other areas of the game for a pretty simple reason: graphics will be outdated and obsolete the next year, while several other aspects age much better. Story, for example, is pretty much forever young, if combined with good story-telling.
However, this "wrong priority" might be intentional, since when the strong point of games is in the looks, and the looks get outdated every year, your public won't think twice when having the option of buying a new game or replaying an older game.

 

[Askorti]

I have a strong beef with Megaton. The fact that the atomic explosion is there ONLY because there has to be one in a fallout game. All the previous Fallouts had one, so Bethesda thought that it's just so iconic so they must have one of their own. Too bad in all the previous games those nukes were used either to destroy the main antagonist or to get to him. Here? Here you detonate an atomic bomb for shits and giggles. And I guess it sets the tone for the entirety of the game after it.

 

[Walpknut]

Filling the world with useless and detailed Junk actively affects the experience in a negative way, from the simple annoyances like trying to pick up some herbs off a bown and ending up picking up the bowl and spread what you were trying to pick up through the ground (and even UNDER the ground) to just making save files more and more bloated, resulting in longer loading times, more frequent frame rate drops and such because the game is keeping track of how much every piece of garbage was moved or not....