Well, I don't know if this has been discussed in the Forums at length before, but I just finished Fallout 4, as well as its two DLCs Automatron and Far Harbour, and I'm filling kind of conflicted. On one hand, I thought the crafting and modifying elements of the game were a massive step up. There were Weapon mods in New Vegas, but I don't think I ever used them. In this it added an exciting element to the game and made scavenging and junk actually useful rather than shit I sold immediately in all the other games. It also was a fairly good boost in graphics and wasn't particularly buggy. I even liked how they played the Power Armor thing, which although it went against lore a bit it turned Power Armor from a pretty good set of armor to a new, badass mechanic. The new Companion Mechanic with gaining their approval was interesting.
On the other hand, it seems it went back a bit in gameplay. It's new Leveling System forced you to be a more generalized, broad character and it killed roleplay quite a bit. The game took a turn from previous games where you could usually play a completely pacifist run. There were times where peaceful negotiations were thrown aside in exchange for "KILL THE BAD GUY!" You could rarely convince people to back down or surrender, and the entire game took a sharp, painful turn towards first person shooter. Hell, the only thing Speech was good for was convincing people to pay more Caps for murdering raiders. The Faction Approval System was done away with for some reason.
Then, there's the storyline and world. The story was bland at best. The looking for your son thing is quickly shifted many times and you have little investment in the kid or your partner. Even the Synth moral question is clearly bullshit as show by any looking into the game.
The Commonwealth is kick-ass compared to a lot of previous places and is a lot more interesting. There were some cool factions, like the robots of the USS Constitution and the Atom Cats, but others that were just stupid. One of the largest factions in the game were the Gunners, a massive army that controlled a lot of the commonwealth, yet had no quests associated with dealing them. They were supposed to be mercenaries, even though they killed everyone they encountered, controlled a small empire and clearly had very few people to hire them. The fact that they were permanently hostile pissed me off. I thought the Mafia Triggermen were heavily underused, because they were pretty cool. Diamond City was super racist, but that never seemed to change and they were supposed to be a cool, friendly place. The Super-Mutants were abysmal, no motive, no quests, going back to the "They're just evil, OK? Stop mentioning it" or Fallout 3 with an even shittier excuse for being there in "The Institute made them. And kept making them in the hundreds. And then released them. Because I said so."
Then, there were the big four factions. The Brotherhood of Steel going back to their roots was a welcome change, but they just seemed so much better than the "good" factions. I mean, they get badass power armor, heavy weaponry, vertibirds with kickass miniguns, Liberty motherfucking Prime and base it a huge Zeppelin. The Institute has a robot army, a huge underground base that looks like something out of Star Trek, Terminators and take the only thing the Railroad has, spies and stealth, and does it infinitely better with a huge amount of informants and undercover agents. They are both evil and badass, but the two other factions who are actually good are just boring and shitty. The Railroad has a shitty base in the underground of a ghoul infested church and their spying abilities are outclassed by the Institute. They don't even have a faction grenade. The only cool thing about them is the codenames and Deacon's ever-changing appearance. The Minuteman's base is a kickass castle, but it's half destroyed. They constantly badger you with dumb quests, and they don't even have any unique or cool units, or many unique sidequests. All they have is artillery and the castle. Hell, they don't even listen to you have the time.
Well, that was my Fallout 4 Rant. It felt good to get out. What did you guys think of the game?
