Second try - can't force myself to finish the game

O

omphaloskepsis

First time out of the vault
I actually enjoy Bethesda games, at least the TES series. It took me a while to get over the fact that they weren't even trying to make RPGs, but I enjoy the open world/walking simulator aspects, especially with heavy modding. I agree with nearly all of the criticism of their games, but I still enjoy them.

When FO3 came out, I couldn't finish it, but eventually retried and made it through just year or so ago. If not for mods I couldn't have done it. But in the end I had fun, even though it took a few years on the shelf and 300+ mods.

When FO4 came out, I got a fair number of hours out of it, mostly because of aimless wandering. But I got into the Institute quest line and hit my stupid threshold. I uninstalled and replayed FONV. Recently, I've been bored and wanting an open world game, so I decided to give FO4 another try.

And I can't do it. Even with mods, and low expectations, I can't make it. I'm not sure why, in the sense that I made it all the way through FO3 and liked Skyrim for what it was. With FO4 I kept finding myself quitting the game to look for mods to take the pain away, but it didn't work.

So my question is, how is FO4 different than FO3 and Skyrim, and what makes it impossible to play through? I know that Beth doesn't make Fallout games or RPGs, but I can usually still have fun with their titles. I think it's something about repetition and shallow, pointless (and endless) radiant quests. I know this is a personal, subjective issue but there must be others who previously enjoyed Beth's games, but hit the wall with FO4.
 
FO4 is not just shallow, it's a black hole sucking away all the effort you put into either playing it the way you wanna approach or mod it, or even make own mods... That's a WIP theory though...
 
I'd call Bethesda's previous games RPGs - not particularly deep or complex ones, certainly, but there are basic roleplaying elements there. You work on your skills/attributes to get good at certain tasks, you make choices throughout the game, you decide your character's personality, etc. With every new game, Bethesda has been bit by bit dumbing down/removing these aspects of the games, but it wasn't until F4 that they went too far. There's also way too much stuff from F3 that was rehashed this time around. A ruined metropolis as the main setting. Super mutants, raiders, and ghouls as 90% of the enemies you fight. A sentimental main story about searching for a missing family member. And so on...
 
As much as I dislike fo3, it had some good qualities. If you ever got bored of the story, and you will because it's awful, you could generally walk in any direction and find some interesting location with interesting characters. The suburban cannibals, Dave's Republic, some of the vaults, as dumb as they are in the setting they are fun distractions, but fo4 for whatever reason left that out.

When you get bored of the story in fo4, and you will because there aren't a thousand great writers willing to kill to work on a Fallout game apparently, most of the locations you hope to distract you are filled with re-spawning whack-a-mole raiders or mutants. 90% of the time when you find a new marked location it's just more ghouls, terrible loot, and some boring terminal entry and then your done. There's a giant department store, multi-level and everything, just filled with mutants and nothing else. There's a broadcasting station, a huge facility so big it has several loading zones inside, nothing but gunners. Three of the game's five vaults are just filled with raiders, and one of them is totally empty. Covenant is the best you can find and even that's criminally boring.

And I'm not even going to get into the horrible scaling and balance that makes mid to late level combat awful.

I have no idea how anyone can find this game fun without serious modding, let alone multiple playthroughs.
 
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