Fallout 4 came out in the tail end of 2015 after what was actually a fairly short hype period, the game only being announced in June that same year. That being said, there was a heck of a lot of hype built up in those few months.
If you've watched my Let's Plays on Dragon's Dogma, which you probably haven't, I do my fair share of ripping on Bethesda, regarding mostly their more recent releases. I really enjoyed Fallout 3, but objectively Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas brings the franchise to a new level. Skyrim was fun on the surface level for a while, and the modding community helped me keep interest in the game, but I think it fell flat in almost every aspect.
Being a pretty big fan of Fallout, (call me a casual if you want though, I never played the first game and didn't play much of Fallout 2) I was actually pretty excited for this new game to come out. Bethesda should know by now what works and what doesn't work in the Fallout universe, especially after seeing Obsidian beat them at their own game, right?
Sigh.
Fallout 4 almost seems unfinished. I've never been so excited to be playing a game, and then hit the 10 hour mark and totally lose interest. The graphics are nice, the gameplay is tightened up, but the game suffers from a pitfall that almost every major release falls into. There's so much time spent on the graphics, the fluidity of character movement and combat, the environments (which admittedly look great) that "unimportant things" like story, dialogue, and world-building all fall by the wayside.
Characters are completely bland, and there are no real dialogue options that let you change anything about the world you're in. Your character becomes a yes-man of sorts, and you're shoehorned into playing one arch-typical parent protagonist.
In New Vegas, you could kill literally everyone. Sure you might not be a psychopath and want to do this, but even if you accidentally kill a quest giver, you fail that quest. This was magical, because you actually affected the world around you. In Fallout 4, practically every single "named" character is invincible due to some connection to the main plot.
Nothing your character does or says matters, you just run and gun through the wasteland. Even charisma checks are few and far between, not really getting you much out of conversations other than a few extra caps.
If I were you, and you happen to be one of the six people on earth who haven't bought this game yet, I would give it a second thought before you do. To me personally, it would honestly be better if they just slapped the updated graphics and combat mechanics onto the exact story of Fallout 3, which at least had Liam Neeson.
-SK
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