I already own the base game on steam and although it's tempting, I'm refusing to give Bethesda any more money. By now pretty much everyone should know that the RPG elements have been stripped back to the bare minimum and choice is mostly restricted to "Yes I will do yet another meningless side quest" or "I want more money for doing another meaningless side quest" and the game is padded out with endless radient quests that will have you either finding a pointless MacGuffin, planting a pointless MacGuffin and clearing respawning enemies from THE SAME LOCATIONS for EVERY faction. What is not mentioned as often is just how poor the writing is. I mean in FO3 you are trying to find your dad and fight a shadowy technologically advanced genocidal organization. Well guess what? In FO4 you are trying to find your son and fight a technologically advanced shadowy genocidal organization. Wow Bethesda, you really have some really creative writers(!) Talking to NPCs can be a real chore as the dialogue wheel all too often gives an inaccurate summary of what your character will say and the "Sarcasm" option is just an unfunny joke. And I mean really unfunny joke.... Where's the Fallout: New Vegas team when you need them? It won't matter most of tthe time as NPC interactions are only programmed to give you a quest so you can't provoke a fight or get frozen out of further interaction World building is something Bethesda excelled at with Fallout 3 and even more so with Skyrim, yet FO4 doesn't really have anything impressive: wasteland, ruined towns and swampland, yet theres nothing impressive such as the ruins of the capital in FO3 or the bizarre and vast underworld of Blackreach in Skyrim. It's all too empty and this is not helped by the lack of content and repetitive quests. I did indulge my OCD with settlement building, which should've been a golden oopportunity to explore, yet everything falls backm on "build yet another settlement". It;s not awful, it's just empty.
It's not quite Bethesda simplified and dumbed down, but the charachter build is a bit stripped back and there's some odd choices in the way stats affect gameplay. The map is disappointingly small and even with the extra $$ DLC I don't think the game is as big as Wasteland 2, to the point I was thinking a new map would be unlocked before the finale. Speakling of WL2, it's painfully clear assets have been reused, with poor detail on NPC models and terrible character customization. It's not well optimised, with increasing ammounts of frame drop as the game progresses and poor CPU utilization and a few crashes and in game mission bugs occurring too. It's not a bad game, it just suffers from meh writing and an overall lack of effort to improve in any standout way over the previous game.
Sorry but after many hours I'm about to give up because I'm bored to tears by the writing and game design. The Character writing is just so bland, and I really become immersed or connect with any of my party. The pathfinding AI is absolutely terrible and depite tinkering I can't stop melee characters engaging the nearest enemy, no matter which enemy I target at the onset of combat. I don't get the levelling system either because you're mostlly bound by class and effectively locked out dialouge options because you didn't build a very high perception character and dialogue skill checks are 85% perception, but then if you don't have will/fortitude you'll be forver charmed /petrified /stunned in combat by evey bloody creature with the ability. Levelling... Oh great! I'm stuck with my original build and can only pick perks. Are all RPG's now being reduced to perks instead of stat points or do I have to restart and grind through for the stats my character need? I get that there's classes and it's not Skyrim where you can have it all but not being able to tailor my character base stats as I go is really taking away some of the fun in an RPG. As of 2021 there aren;t too many Obsidian bugs (so far) but the game still has a habit of long load times for small maps and abymal low frame rate stuttering that requires you to tab out and in a few times to fix. I's not the smoothest under 'normal' function, even with custom water loop cooled 3800x, 2080Ti and 16Gb 3600MHz cl15 RAM on a Samsung 1tb Evo ssd. All things considered it's not a truly bad game, just a few design choices and a feeling of "That'll do, push it out the door" hold it back from being a solid, if uninspiring game. As it is I'd give it a solid "Meh" out of 10. Tyranny did it all so much better...
