Anyone else disappointed with Fallout 4?

[Iwantstuff]

No. Because the only expectation I had was that I was going to have fun.

And I'm having a hell of a lot of fun.

 

[Zhukov]

I have avoided disappointment with the miraculous power of low expectations.

 

[OpticalJunction]

yeah it's not as special as fallout 3 or even new vegas. i haven't been compelled to finish it, the main story is just boring. it seems like just another shooter

 

[Drakmorg]

Nope, absolutely loving it.

People who complain about how role-playing is impossible I've come to assume aren't trying hard enough. I'm having an amazing time thinking about the characters I've made and the motivations for what they do.

I really like the new perk system. I was going to complain about how the level caps on perk ranks are annoying, but then I realized that they've made me have to actually try new things, so it's pretty great actually.

My biggest complaint is that persuasion uses the shite Fallout 3 method rather than the great New Vegas method.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I have certainly reached the saturation point much quicker than with previous Bethesda games. The only thing that really kept me coming back was the weapon/gun modding. And as soon as I had decked out my pistols to the point where I could three-shot super mutants with my silenced 10mm, I lost much of the motivation to keep playing.

I tried another playthrough where I went for a full melee build, but that lasted even less time since there's so few melee weapons. Also, I tried to go for a crazy, cannibalistic feral lady character, but the game is so adamant to make you care about your stupid son and do the damn settlement missions that I kind of felt blocked from getting weird.

Yeah, I found it rather disappointing. Now I hardly ever actually finish a Bethesda RPG, but atleast in New Vegas, and heck, even in Skyrim, I'll have gotten my exploration fill by the time I quit. In Fallout 4 the exploration was so dull, because the missions were so dull, because like half of them consist of a settlement needing help with ghouls or raiders, with NPCs reciting the same damn lines every time. This one farmer had his wife kidnapped like three times. I mean, Jesus Christ!

And after The Witcher 3's brilliantly living open-world and it's compeling NPCs, Fallout 4's flacid gameworld and characters just made the game feel dreadfully baren. And I know you can't really compare a lush Fantasy world to a nuclear wasteland, but it's Bethesda's job to make you want to wander through and explore it and interact with its inhabitants, and for me they failed terribly at that.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

I have avoided disappointment with the miraculous power of low expectations.

Same here. I expected it to be like Fallout 3, my least favourite Fallout. As it happens it's better than Fallout 3 so I guess you could say it exceeded expectations. I still just think it's an okay game though. It hasn't hooked me the way New Vegas and Fallout 2 did.

People who complain about how role-playing is impossible I've come to assume aren't trying hard enough. I'm having an amazing time thinking about the characters I've made and the motivations for what they do.

The one glaring issue that I find with roleplaying in Fallout 3 and 4 is that they force the emotional, family backstory on you. I didn't give a shit about Liam Neeson in Fallout 3 and I don't give a shit about my hideous child in Fallout 4, but that's my character's primary motivation. So my options are either take the roleplaying to its extreme and ignore my son, which (as far as I know, I'd like to be wrong) means ignoring the main questline altogether, or I have to go through the motions of pretending I care to have access to all that content.

That's why I loved the Courier in New Vegas. A dude shoots you. You go find him, have a choice of getting revenge, seducing him, or just having a live and let live attitude, and after that he's pretty much out of your life and you can get on with the interesting stuff.

 

[fenrizz]

Nope, 20-35 hours in and I'm still loving it.
Hell, I like it better the more I play.

I got to the first town and encountered a glitch which prevented me from equipping any weapons.

Since then I really can't be bothered going back and restarting. So the game is disappointing in that I paid £40 for it and had my interest killed in a handful of hours.

Did you try to reaload the game/save?
That usually works.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Does "my laptop can't play it" count as disappointment? Because I learned the hard way that at lowest possible settings I can only play it smoothly when using a quarter of the screen. I got a refund and bought 5 other games with that money.

The game runs like utter crap on PC from what I've heard. Even people with beastly rigs are having trouble getting it to run smoothly. Then again it's Bethesda so what did people expect?

PC player here; I can confirm that the game is horribly optimised for PC, or at least, horribly optimised for certain setups. While I'm aware that my graphics card is getting a bit long in the tooth, it's fully capable of running pretty much anything else I throw at it on at least decent settings. Hell, a decent comparison would be other open world games like the Witcher 3 and GTA 5, both of which I can play at a much higher graphical fidelity and frame rate than Fallout 4. In fact, with GTA 5 I can put most settings as high as they'll go and still get a better frame rate than Fallout 4. With Fallout I had to put all the settings on their lowest, and even with the blurry textures, terrible shadow resolution/distance and horrible lighting, it still ran badly. The vaults in particular were badly optimised and would run at around 20 FPS, and the city ... well, that's another story. It seemed to run at around 20-30 most of the time, but would periodically dip to single digit frame rates for a few seconds at a time before returning to their mediocre baseline.

...
- I see the removal of skills to be a good thing and not a bad thing. It was so stupid how you had to pour points into Lockpicking, and then you'd run out of points at 49 Lockpicking and (still) be unable to pick 'average' locks until you leveled up again.
...

While a agree that the way lockpicking and science worked with the skill system was rather dumb, that's a minor blemish on an otherwise decent system, not the death knell for the entire system. They could easily have simply reworked those two elements and kept the rest of the system, or even just reworked the entire system, rather than removing it entirely.

I honestly don't care all that much about the way skills effected game play as much as how skills effected dialogue checks. Without the ability to use your perception or medical skills on dialogue choices, all that's left are those abominable charisma dice-rolls. If they really had to do away with skills could they not have at least had perk checks, such as certain dialogue options that require certain perks to pass?

I know that by this point criticising the horrible dialogue system in Fallout 4 is pretty much beating a dead horse, but why the hell did they have to do that? Why replace a perfectly functional, indeterminately sized list of choices with this direction system where every single dialogue choice bar none has precisely four options, no more, no less? If they really had to make it more convenient for console selection, couldn't they have when with the choice wheel of Mass Effect?

...every vault is a disappointment...

That's a surprisingly specific grievance, but one I actually share. For me, visiting the vaults in the previous Fallout games has always been exciting, and I consider them the absolute pinnacle of their dungeons. Despite fundamentally using the same level kits, they all felt different and had their own story that you unravelled as you ventured further and further. Despite having the same number of vaults as Fallout 3 and NV, it somehow felt like there were fewer, and each one didn't seem as interesting. It's a shame since I think the new design of the art assets look really nice.
And what happened to the vault jumpsuits? Did I miss something, because it seems like they aren't in the game any more. I'm sure I could probably kill one of the members of vault 81 for their suit, but all the other vaults just feature skeletons that can't be looted, nor can you find them in drawers (looking on the internet, apparently you can find a 114 jumpsuit, but that's about it). I liked collecting these jumpsuits as a souvenir from each of the vaults.



With the number of Fallout 4 threads that seem to infest this site I feel like I'm being given ample opportunity to stagger out my bitching and whining about this game, but despite this I did still genuinely enjoy it. I'm thinking of doing another run on a higher difficulty setting where I'll side with the BoS this time round, but honestly, as far as my main character is concerned, I feel like I've already grown bored of that save file. I kind of lost interest in it rather rapidly after finishing the main story. While it was still enjoyable I'm not sure how many more times I can play the same old Bethesda Open-World RPGtm. They really need to retire that old engine, not just because of the ever mounting technical reasons, but because it may encourage them to rework some of their core game design. This is the fourth Bethesda game that uses the exact same lockpicking mini game, that at this point is little more than minor busy work. And that god damn hacking mini-game, Jesus Christ, just kill it already. There was a time when I actually really liked this mini-game, but after the third Fallout game to use it without any form of variation it's completely lost any shred of entertainment value it once had and has now turned into a chore. The lockpicking has never been fun, but it is at least quick enough to never become an annoyance. I find myself groaning every time I find a locked terminal. But it's not just these mini-games; every other aspect of this game just feels like the same thing we've found in every previous Bethesda Open-World RPGtm.
As much as people like to give Ubisoft shit for their over use of open world design, and rightly so, I think we've been over looking another company that has firmly wedged itself into an unchanging template.

 

[stroopwafel]

I'm finding the game incredibly enjoyable as well. It's like FO3 but better. I loved that game but a few things held it back like poor FPS controls, which have significantly improved in FO4. As have enemy AI. The graphics look a lot better with more use of colours and some genuinely gorgeous lighting effects. Weapon modding is awesome with insane amounts of variety. I love exploration in this game espescially since you never know what you're going to find. Like a vault where yet another creepy experiment have taken place or a den of super mutants or a weirdo raider hide-out going about their strange ways. I love the lore in Fallout and the way its scattered across the wasteland and the way this game often throws curveballs your way makes every place you discover intriguing and exciting. And I haven't even really touched the whole settlement mode yet.

I was expecting a better looking FO3 but FO4 went well above and beyond that. Absolutely superb.

 

[major_chaos]

Nope, I'm enjoying it immensely. Its basically just better Fallout 3 with functional combat and fewer goddamn subway tunnels. Also remarkably stable for a Bethesda release. I have had exactly one crash and that was the result of a preposterously improbable combination of events that I severely doubt I could reproduce if I tried, and on top of that I have had no quest completion bugs at all which is more than I can say for TW3 at launch.

It has been funny to watch the backlash, because apparently gameplay that isn't barely functional garbage and a PC that is anything other than a fence post with a camera on top and guns glued to the side disqualify a game from being a "Real RPG". I honestly wish I could have shared the joy some people had with NV, but as it stands I'll take being ever so slightly railroaded by a backstory and actually giving a damn, over Fo3 and NV where total freedom leads to total disinterest and I can never bring myself to do anything but play in the most detached efficient fashion.

 

[Silence]

It's a huge step up from FO3, but it's objetively worse than NV.

Bethesda never changes.

As for disappointment? I had no expectations coming in, especially because of FO3, so I'm enjoying the game.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

It's a huge step up from FO3, but it's objetively worse than NV.

Bethesda never changes.

As for disappointment? I had no expectations coming in, especially because of FO3, so I'm enjoying the game.

I assume you're joking about that. Surely you can't be serious, right?

 

[DanielBrown]

Yup.
Story didn't do much to hold my intrest and everything just felt exactly like Fallout 3/New Vegas and damn did I get sick of it fast. Still, after struggling to complete it I had gotten 40 hours game time out of it, so I reckon I got my moneys worth.

Spoiler: All I could think about when the father said the sons name

 

[ShakerSilver]

Played about 20 hours at a friend's house. I came in expecting nothing and still was disappointed. My disappointment was based both on the game's own merit as an individual title and as a game that call itself both "Fallout" and an "RPG".

Spoiler: Setting problems

First, some minor grievances about the setting, some that carry-over from Fallout 3. Somehow 200 years after the nukes dropped the wasteland still appears as if it were just a couple of decades afterwards. Nearly all the towns and cities are just empty and people are scattered among small settlements comprised of metal shacks. Pre-war food is still just lying around in the open despite that people would have obviously needed to scavenge for supplies. Very few places actually giving an effort to create crops. The most prominent population of people are generic raiders that somehow are still a problem. The only large settlement (or town) is Diamond City, and it's still got the metal shack problem. It actually reminded me a lot of Nuketown (not a good thing). Compared to Fallout 1, where there were plenty of farmers and large settlements just 80 years after the bombs dropped, or Fallout 2 where 80 years later there are booming cities. I know the point of Fallout 4 was to put the rebuilding of society in the player's hands, but the timeframe it claims to have and the setting it places itself in just really takes me out of things and makes it hard for me to get immersed or connect with the events going on.

Spoiler: Gameplay woes

Second, I wanted to see if the game had good role-playing from a gameplay standpoint, so I made sure my character was as horribly built as possible - put 10 points in CHA (useless as speech checks are chance based and can be easily savescummed), 3 in all other stats, and picked perks that have little to do with combat ability and don't mesh well together. Level 26 and still blasting my way through everything. Compared to my friend's character who was much more sensibly built but wasn't all that different in terms of abilities. I never felt like the choices made in my character's progression actually mattered or had any impact on my them, which I can't say I didn't expect. Somehow though it managed to be even worse than Fallout 3 in delivering role-playing through gameplay. It felt like I was playing an aciton-game with some lite-RPG mechanics.

I would have been alright with this if the gameplay was interesting enough. It is decent, but rather lacking in several areas. The gunplay, while better than Fallout 3, is still somewhat lacking compared to other FPSs. This is a really big shame considering that it's the thing I was doing most of the time. There's little else to do in the game other than shoot things. Sneaking around is rather boring and the AI is pretty brain-dead when it comes to stealth. The perk choices themselves aren't too bad, but pretty sparse. Most of them have to do with combat, of course. I think the only thing to do with persuasion or speech was Lady Killer/Black Widow. Overall, the gameplay, while better focused than Fallout 3, is still rather lacking.

Spoiler: Narrative failings

Lastly, the story, which had me even more disappointed. I was already expecting the worst when I saw the dialogue system, but somehow it still managed to disappoint me. I tried to go for a complete monster run, but when I got to Concord and chucked a grenade in the room with the settlers, they just all fell over and got up 10 seconds later. The amount of invisible NPCs in this game is horrible. Then I tried to go for the complete dick run and picked the least favorable responses as much as I could. Couldn't do that for too long as the game wouldn't let me progress until I agreed to help the settlers. There were no other methods of completion, no other means to save (or ruin) the day, I had to help Preston, grab the power core, get the Power Armor, and minigun a Deathclaw until it was kill. The lack of options in this and many, many other quests was just disgusting, especially for a game that claims to be an RPG, let alone a Fallout game. I found little use for Speech checks outside of getting more caps or squeezing some info out of people, I never felt like I had much choice at all, and what choice I did have in the story was incredibly shallow or didn't matter much. Not all RPGs have role-playing from a narrative standpoint, but if you're not going to have it in the gameplay, then at least have some of it in the story.

As for the story itself, I can't say I enjoy it. The protagonist is rather bland and uninteresting, which is an awful thing considering how the game makes a half-hearted attempt to tell a more focused narrative. Unlike other role-playing games like The Witcher with defined characters and dialogue that reflects on their personality and possible reactions to situations, Fallout 4's main character is rather flimsily defined with only one real defined trait - wants to find his son. Beyond that the game gives you some meager and generic dialogue choices that do little to really make them unique. The plot so far is also rather dull and the characters in it aren't anything special. Some of the companions are interesting but most have nothing to do with the overall plot (at least for as far as I've gotten). Seems to me like Bethesda tried to go half-and-half with a more focused narrative around a defined protagonist and making a more open-ended narrative with options for progression. So far I'm feeling like both aspects were rather half-assed and it's falling rather flat.

In summation, I can say that Fallout 4 performs better as an action game than Fallout 3, it still gives an awfully shallow roleplaying experience. I can't even justify calling it a role-playing game - it plays more like Far Cry or Borderlands, open-world action-adventure games (plus some lite-RPG mechanics). Maybe it gets better towards the end, but I'm halfway through and I'm really finding it hard to even continue. I don't want to have to force myself to play this until it gets better.

 

[laggyteabag]

I have trouble playing the game for more than 1 or 2 hours straight. I just don't have any motivation to play the damn thing.

Of the quests that I have available, they all revolve around that shitty/clunky outpost building BS, and I just don't have time for that (Hey, minutemen, how about you go camp in Vault 111 instead of the broken and busted village next to it? Oh yeah, minigame). Otherwise, finding my son is pretty much at the bottom of my list, because Bethesda have never been able to tell a compelling story, and this is further emphasized by the fact that I managed to guess the glaringly obvious twist the second that your son was kidnapped (I was correct, by the way).

Then Fallout 4 just has some kind of allergic reaction to telling you anything useful. There is a cover system? Would've been great to tell me that. An item in my camp is damaged? Fancy telling me which one? I need to construct a radio beacon? Where is that, and why is it not anywhere logical?

I mean, sure, the game looks pretty nice. I mean, it isn't Endor from Battlefront 'nice', but it is still passable. Though, for a game supposedly set 200 years post-bombing, I would quite enjoy one or two areas that know what the colour green is. Also, why are people still running around in pre-war clothes? There is no way in hell that anything like that has survived for that long. The '200 years' number just seems like one that they slapped on because of the story, but they never really communicated that to the art team.

Fallout, like Skyrim before it, is just a colouring book. Bethesda puts in the bare minimum, creates a massive world that is populated by nothing interesting, then releases a creation kit a few months down the line, and then the community can step in to make a decent game out of theirs. I cannot wait.

 

[WSTommy]

Played about 20 hours at a friend's house. I came in expecting nothing and still was disappointed.

First, some minor grievances about the setting, some that carry-over from Fallout 3. Somehow 200 years after the nukes dropped the wasteland still appears as if it were just a couple of decades afterwards. Nearly all the towns and cities are just empty and people are scattered among small settlements comprised of metal shacks. Pre-war food is still just lying around in the open despite that people would have obviously needed to scavenge for supplies. Very few places actually giving an effort to create crops. The most prominent population of people are generic raiders that somehow are still a problem. The only large settlement (or town) is Diamond City, and it's still got the metal shack problem. It actually reminded me a lot of Nuketown (not a good thing). Compared to Fallout 1, where there were plenty of farmers and large settlements just 80 years after the bombs dropped, or Fallout 2 where 80 years later there are booming cities. I know the point of Fallout 4 was to put the rebuilding of society in the player's hands, but the timeframe it claims to have and the setting it places itself in just really takes me out of this.

Second, I wanted to see if the game had good role-playing from a gameplay standpoint, so I made sure my character was as horribly built as possible - put 10 points in CHA (useless as speech checks are chance based and can be easily savescummed), 3 in all other stats, and picked perks that have little to do with combat ability and don't mesh well together. Level 26 and still blasting my way through everything. Compared to my friend's character who was much more sensibly built but wasn't all that different in terms of abilities. I never felt like the choices made in my character's progression actually mattered or had any impact on my them, which I can't say I didn't expect. Somehow though it managed to be even worse than Fallout 3 in delivering role-playing through gameplay. It felt like I was playing an aciton-game with some lite-RPG mechanics. At least the gunplay was better than Fallout 3.

Lastly, the story, which had me even more disappointed. I was already expecting the worst when I saw the dialogue system, but somehow it still managed to disappoint me. I tried to go for a complete monster run, but when I got to Concord and chucked a grenade in the room with the settlers, they just all fell over and got up 10 seconds later. The amount of invisible NPCs in this game is horrible. Then I tried to go for the complete dick run and picked the least favorable responses as much as I could. Couldn't do that for too long as the game wouldn't let me progress until I agreed to help the settlers. There were no other methods of completion, no other means to save (or ruin) the day, I had to help Preston, grab the power core, get the Power Armor, and minigun a Deathclaw until it was kill. The lack of options in this and many, many other quests was just disgusting, especially for a game that claims to be an RPG, let alone a Fallout game. I found little use for Speech checks outside of getting more caps or squeezing some info out of people, I never felt like I had much choice at all, and what choice I did have in the story was incredibly shallow or didn't matter much. Not all RPGs have role-playing from a narrative standpoint, but if you're not going to have it in the gameplay, then at least have some of it in the story.

In summation, I can say that Fallout 4 performs better as an action game than Fallout 3, it still gives an awfully shallow roleplaying experience. I can't even justify calling it a role-playing game - it plays more like Far Cry or Borderlands, open-world action-adventure games (plus some lite-RPG mechanics). Maybe it gets better towards the end, but I'm halfway through and I'm really finding it hard to even continue. I don't want to have to force myself to play this until it gets better.

Excellent post. You summed up my feelings on the game perfectly. I'd give this post a thumbs up if this forum allowed it.

 

[sageoftruth]

Bethesda cannot disappoint me at this point. I lost my faith in them after Oblivion. Nowadays, when a new game gets mentioned, I consider the Bethesda label to be a warning to temper my expectations.

 

[TheMigrantSoldier]

It exceeded my expectations in some areas while disappointing me in others. I knew things like the story wouldn't impress me.

What surprised me? Enticing combat, decent companions, beautiful environments, diverse enemy types + AI, weapon/armor customization, and the flawed but fun skill system.
What disappointed me? The dialogue system, uninspired voiced protagonist, bare-bones settlement system, and the disturbing shortage of skill checks.

Also, why is it that Beth has no understanding of what makes something hard and challenging? "Survival" mode is little more than just jacking up health and damage of enemies. It isn't fun to spend 10 extra minutes depleting minigun rounds on a single deathclaw. There are mods for Fallout 3 that have been getting it right for five years.

Overall, it's a awesome game by itself. Not one I'd recommend paying the full price with DLC and mods around the corner.

Now, Obsidian, if you could, uh, start making a follow-up that'd be sweet.