I shall point you to this fine fellow as he does an excellent job at explaining it.BloatedGuppy said:le snip.
ShakerSilver said: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".
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.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.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.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.