now i know this thread might spark some arguments but i urge you all to be level headed and be understanding. OK now that that's out ov the way i have seen over the past year or so a versed amount ov opinions and thoughts on Fallout 4 as a game my stance is that it was lacking having the looks ov a ocean but the depth ov a mud puddle although im not saying fallout 4 was bad mind you just wasn't the best fallout and or didn't feel like a fallout i believe i can say my opinion on the matter having played the game over 300 hours i love my RPG's but sadly fallout 4 was more a FPS with bare bone RPG elements but my simple in a nutshell view is i just believe they made steps forward but a lot back to just put it simply anyway i look forward to seeing your own thoughts and views on this subject regardless on if you disliked it or loved it i still enjoy reading how we can make the next game even better {that being if Bethesda listens to us haha} before we get our hands on it and mod it to peces to make it epic

I enjoyed it, it was fun game. I have put hundreds of hours into it, but it does lack in the player dialogue and RPG departments. Altogether it feels like a more polished game than New Vegas, in regards to the mechanics, character design, voice acting, models and textures. It is also a more stable engine than New Vegas. New Vegas strives in the story, lore and RPG elements but to me totally it lacks the things that made Fallout 4 polished.

As Fallout 4 isn't as RPG oriented as the earlier games what I'm most excited about is what modders can do with the engine. Right now the mods are simple things like new weapons, armor, settlement pieces, and stuff like that. I'm looking forward to what huge mods will be put into the newer engine.

I think fallout 4 is a great game, but there are many things that are so lacking such as dialogue and side quests. fallout nv corrected some of the issues with fallout 3 like expanding on your skill levels being used in dialogue but fallout 4 totally abandoned this giving much to the imagination of what it should have been.

Fallout 4 was intended to be played by a much wider audience as opposed to fallout fans. From a marketing point of view this is totally fair enough and is understandable but in doing this it kind of neglected the fans of the series by ignoring what people wanted and that's were issues with the game become much more apparent.

@MotionlessGhost first off thanks for posting! well that is were you and i differ {witch is fine} i am more a RPG oriented guy and as for the more it feels like a more polished game than New Vegas in regards to the mechanics, character design, voice acting, models and textures all that is a given thing and also a standard although im one ov those whom preferred they not went with the voiced player witch ill give them credit they came out and said it wasn't the best ideal ov course thats a small thing but Fallout 4 didn't have that fallout feel for me it was COD wasteland edition shoot all the things more ov a spin off then a core fallout but like i said it was a good game not a good fallout game and im talking no mods just base.
@ketketket1 thank you for posting i agree with your statements totally they have been doing it to the Elder scrolls as well sense Oblivion and making things more streamlined and less about thought i mean yes i understand they are a business and making money is the goal but to just totally rip the clothes off a long running series and slap new paint on it and hype it up is never a great plan in the long run ill be honest i started with fallout 3 then NV and i picked up 1 and 2 even got tactics and i just see fallout 4 as sort ov a let down for the hype train it had behind it i mean choices are almost totally gone from the game but like i said fallout 4 is a great game just not a great Fallout game to me personally.

@"shocktrooper666" I actually enjoy RPGs they're the majority of my collection of games, and I too have a bone to pick with the voiced protag(though the sarcastic dialogue choices were great). But I meant both games on their own are great games, and I believe that they both excelled in different areas. And yes Fallout 4 felt more like a shooter, as a standalone game 4 is pretty good. But since it's held to Fallout standards it flounders as such.

@MotionlessGhost i agree as a standalone it is a great game but sense it's got that Fallout label on the cover it's going to either rival or go beyond it's predecessors or lastly like you said flounder i just keep finding myself returning to NV, 3 and the rest ov the past installments 4 just seems to much like a attempt at porting minecraft and modern FPS's into fallout and tossing the rest to the wind but i believe beth has seen the errors they have made and will move forward with the fallout community in mind and have the next game at its core be a fallout game not a game with the skin ov a fallout game i am sorry if i sound rude that is the issue with text or typing

@"shocktrooper666" It's ok i understand what you mean   text makes me sound like jerk alot too because of my high levels of sarcasm (not even people in real life get my sarcasm). But yea I see where you're coming from my friend has the same issue with 4, heck he goes on rants about it. And then i have another friend who is the opposite and wouldn't touch New Vegas with a 4 meter long pole and he absolutely enjoys Fallout 4. he says New Vegas doesn't feel like Fallout. I laughed so hard when he told me that.

@MotionlessGhost that one friend needs a keanu reeves "whoa" NV not Fallout wonder how they see 1 and 2 everyone has their stances but anyway i started out with 3 then played the older games loved NV and 4 was just was a ocean ov potential with the depth ov a mud puddle for me although i have my hopes up for a "what should have been" fallout game sorta how NV was made i dont know if that will happen {most likely not" but just a little pipe dream i suppose.

@"shocktrooper666" He didn't even know they were isometric, so I don't think he would enjoy them. I really enjoyed Fallout 2, I liked 1, but 2 I thought was better. I also enjoyed New Vegas and it's like a sequel to 2 in a way. I hope Obsidian is given the chance to create a Fallout spinoff on Fallout 4's creation engine.

I love fallout 4 it has some of what I want in game like fallout 3 I felt like I was doing shit that impacted the game and I never will understand the hate that it gets they got rid of the awkward fucking weapon handling system from the earlier titles increase the weapon firing speed and the fucking weapon turns into a single use one shot rifle and improved on combat AI go to cover unlike the older ones where it appears the AI think they're gods or something the only problem I have with 4 is it's missing some quest and stuff that would have made it different than the others still better Then the old Fallouts 1&2 holy fuck those where so bad they made me hate turn based game's to this day I still have turn based ptsd from them that one fucker with the rocket launcher and you couldn't jump crouch or get away from him you just had to take the fucking 1000 dmg hit yea fuck that Lol.

See, when people give their opinion about falluot games, what i always see is "4 is not a good Falllout", "NV is the best one" "2 is the best one".
OK so first of all, we should stop thinking of the games as sequels of each other and that they should be alike. They do not need to. They have different aproaches of gameplay, and what @ketketket1 said must be remembered: Beth (and all big game devs) wants money, and they get more money making games that most people will like. And people have different tastes, so what one think that is the better game because of X, maybe is the worst for other person for the same X.

It IS sad that Beth is making their games more and more simple, i just HATE the new S.P.E.C.I.A.L. and perks system, but yes, the game is 1000% more enjoyable to play than Skyrim. I will not even mention the older fallouts in this question, as it is not wise to make gameplay comparations between games with so many years of difference.

Fallout 4 could have had better quests and dialogues and skills and perks and karma and well, etc? Yes, it SHOULD. But nothing new here, we already knew skyrim. When i saw that a new fallout was comming, i thought i was going to hate the game and that it would not be a good game. I was not hyped, but even so, being a fan of Fallout 3, i bought 4 in the pre sale with the season pass, because i had hope that time, that in the end i would be wrong. And i was!

Talking more of MY tastes for gameplay, i was never a fan of NV. I was introduced to Fallout with 3 (never really played the others), and i had that intro and 'tutorial' (first gameplay until you walk a little in Springvale) as the best intro ever. THAT was fallout for me. I do not need to explain, i think, but seeing your character growing in the vault, everything that happened and then the first sunlight and all the destruction, totally lost, made a good and strong impression im my head.

Because of this, starting as a courier that get shot in the head, and 'oh go find the guys who tried to kill you' in a big desert... this was definitely NOT 'fallout' for me. Of course i liked a lot the improved gameplay, and i liked NV, really, but i never felt 'at home' in the Mojave desert.

It is very important to note that i NEVER finished any fallout. Never get to the core of any main quest. "Oh so you are talking shit here, you must finish the game to have an opinion", if you say this, you may be right, but then my opinion is not of a game that i played 300h versus one that i played 20h.
And by speaking of hours, FO4 is the one i have most, because i love this game to roleplay.

Another thing that i must note here is that i only care for modded bethesda games. Play them without mods is just not for me
So FO4 now have the best difficult, best graphics and gameplay and is giving me a great roleplay with my last character. It is all balanced for my tastes.

And to finish, one thing that is personal, of course, but i already saw some people saying that the game is not good, easy, but playing with the most powerful weapons, using glitches and with a ton of health and armor. When I play, i use what i have in my hands, i do not rush to complete quests or to have good equips, i play to have a good time and that's it. If i can play as it was real, the better (no fast travel, for example).
This one guy that told me the game was not good, was complaining that he got the best sniper in the game by crossing the map in lvl 1. Really? Complain that you have the best weapon because you rushed to get it instead of exploring the world ?
I just don't get it.

In this instance, i must congrats bethesda, because they make the best open world. You enter in a house in the woods, and find a holotape or a note. Skeletons of the people that died, trying to survive the post war. Sometimes i read notes and they tell a bit of the horror of the survival, sometimes people were alone, desperated, and in the end they died. A family hides with the kids, and you find the kids buried because they died without air. A radio signal of a woman trying to save her child and in the end all you find are two skeletons.

See, playing the game is not all about stats, damage and storyline. For me, the world must look alive, you must not need someone talking to you so it can get interesting. Instead, the game must be interesting because you found what happened to some people many years ago, and almost got killed by one of the last survivors, now a ghoul. The game creates its own history, while you play it.

That is why i say that fallout 4 - with mods - is a great game. Not to be compared with other games, because we all have our different tastes, even me, who prefers more the landscape and places of 3 than 4.

But i am talking too much now. As you guys said already, it is easy to understand the words as being rude, and i am very sorry if this is the case, english is not my native language and it makes everything a bit more difficult to sound fair

I do not claim to posses the truth, all i wanted to say is that we all have different opinions, and the games are all different from each other too, so saying that one is better than the other is useless.
As for bethesda (the imaginary bethesda that is reading our coments hehe), they should try to add more depth to the story and put back some classic RPG to the games. Making skills and leveling simple end making the game simple, and we want a good game. Even if the skills does not affect much, having points to spend and using them in quest makes all the difference! (in fallout 4 there are few quests that use your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. points, like Covenant and the USS Constitution).

Sorry again for this much, i hope you all can understand what i said hahaha

I have to say, I'm not fond of where Bethesda has been heading in the past few years. They've become increasingly shady and lazy. With Doom's release and preventing reviewers from getting a hold of the game to state their opinions and with Skyrim's Special edition, only sending copies to Bethesda fanboy channels months before the game was released but none to other fairly well known critics.

Releasing Fallout 4 with those incredibly low res textures and counting on modders to fix it. Basically saying, hey here's a game. We can't be bothered to polish it and provide decent content.
And hey, you can't play a lot of quest contents because we gave the protagonist a voice.
And don't get me started on the season pass. Give us money, we'll take it and THEN we'll think about what we're going to make.
I don't know guys, lemme know what you think.

Fallout 4 just doesn't have the kick I need to satisfy my fallout craving. New Vegas had it. Fallout 3 had it. And FNV with TTW is a God send. But fallout far is not that fun to me. I had over 800 hrs on fo3 and NV on 360 back in the day and I loved those games without mods. When I received fo4 I played it and realized that I needed mods for that game off the bat. I can't see myself playing that game without mods. The base game just isn't that fun. Don't get me with wrong. It has its fun moments but those moments don't compare to NV or fo3. Nv and fo3 are amazing games without mods and with mods it just makes them fucking over the top amazing. FO4 is meh and mods make it tolerable. The only thing fallout 4 has over the others are game mechanics and graphics. But story, lore, immersion, excitement factor, fun factor is just lacking.

I don't think that I've touched New Vegas or Fallout 3 since Fallout 4 was released, it really does feel like the better game in terms of mechanics, combat and character design. That being said, I don't think it could ever match up to New Vegas or Fallout 3 in the sense that, in my opinion, it lacks the role-playing and replay-ability that they both had. I will eventually go back to New Vegas to play TTW but it will take me time to get used to the game again coming from Fallout 4.

To me Fallout 4 is a huge improvement in term of gunplay and general game mechanic. But the questing and world design is a step back from New Vegas. There aren't enough town/settlement that have well developed NPC and quest in them. It makes the world feel very empty and lifeless.

I think Fallout 4 is in many ways incredible indicative of how Bethesda has managed to get the IP wrong after acquiring it. Not out of ill-will, but rather due to looking at the previous games and only taking a very superficial sampling before deciding what direction they wanted to take the series in.

Compare if you would, Fallout 1 and Fallout 4.
FO1 is very slow-paced, with a lot of talking. Skills like Speech were incredibly important and although you could go into every encounter guns blazing, the reward for using your head was often better. The gunplay was also terrible, to be totally honest. Taking turns meant that when up against two or three mutants, they could easily kill you or your followers in the first round because of bad luck. Unless your sequence was high enough to always act first, then godspeed. Saving and reloading was absolutely vital to completing the game. But it didn't matter, because the story was the main drive behind the action, and as you progressed more and more sidequests naturally branched out and got you absorbed into the world and the character.

Now FO4 is as far as you could possibly get from FO1. Incredibly fast-paced right off the bat, not wasting a moment on reflecting on the actions of the player or the world around you. Forget speech, because you'll only be given one way to say yes and three different ways to say no from now on. Interacting with NPC's will be the absolutely low-point of the game because of the abysmal dialogue mechanics that result in a shallow, uninteresting approach to storytelling and writing. However, the gunplay is phenomenal and makes for an very good FPS experience. Shooting and bashing is 99% of the gameplay, owing mainly to the fact that there is nothing else (unless you count Sims-style base building), but it is done very, very well.

It feels to me like Bethesda looked at the Fallout franchise and said to themselves, "You know, there's a perfectly good first-person shooter hidden under all that needless roleplaying garbage, we can definitely bring that into the spotlight". And it puzzles me to no end, because looking at the original games, the LAST thing anyone would/should see is a fast-paced shooter. Fighting in FO1 was mainly a means to progress in the story, whereas in FO4 fighting IS the story. It's really bizarre, but they've managed to almost entirely invert the game between 1 and 4, focusing entirely on the things which were only tertiary in the originals and bringing them to the front.

Their decision to basically scrap everything RPG related and keep only the very minimum of meaningful interaction hurt the story (and the franchise) more than one would have thought possible, and it's hard to count FO4 as a real Fallout game considering how it plays and feels. It's more of a spin-off in the vein of Fallout Tactics. Still enjoyable, but it's not the real Fallout experience, but rather an awkward pantomime of things we recognize and love lazily draped onto a very solid shooting game. Gone is the oppressive loneliness of the wasteland and the feeling of being isolated and vulnerable, and with it goes the atmosphere which made Fallout special, at least to me. I hope more than anything else that the next game in the series will be a return to form when it comes to character interaction and actually roleplaying in a living world where your actions have consequences, because if they continue to head in the direction they seem set on right now, the next game will be Callout of Duty 5: Modern Warfare Never Changes.

I love it. Made me change my mind about my fav Fallout game.

I love the gritty feeling of Fallout 3 combined with the colour palette that makes the game look amazing. The visuals look well, not that great for a 2015 game, but it doesn't really matter anyway considering how great the gameplay is.

The story to me, felt like a combination between NV and 3, as you're avenging your wife, but searching for your son too and the emotion of the story was far greater than both those games combined. The characters like Nick, Piper, Deacon and Danse made me feel horrible to betray them after they'd helped me get so far. Some characters are badly written and lack character too like Preston, but not all games are perfect right?

The moral dilemma between the four factions in the game is quite typical and boring. "Will Robots kill us all? Is this AI a person? Has science gone too far?" Bla,bla,bla. Quite boring and and cliched. The storyline towards the end is not that great.

The RPG elements of the game have been scrapped just like Fallout 3 did too but to a much greater extent in FO4. which is what I think FNV did right with making your backstory vague and player-determined (well most of it anyway, the courier still was a citizen of the NCR, etc). They did a lot of good with the opening sequence and a lot of effort was put into the intro to make it feel more movie-like, but it still lacks what it's series is based on, RP.

The game is indeed very fun, immersive and interesting though. It's definitely my favourite out of the series because of that. FNV is boring compared to FO4 and FO4 just combines the best out of both games, makes it smell fresh, throws bright colours inside, cooks it and gives it that nice sweet taste. Beth then just knocks it out of the park with the gameplay and combat system that just feels amazing. Good job, Beth!

@"wealthywyatt" what you said

@"bobmtran" yea, I feel the same way

Where are the No-bark Noonans in F4? The world of F4 seems very dull compared to other fallout wastelands. There really isn't any intriguing or complex people to meet in the Commonwealth and the ones with any potential usually only have mundane dialogue options. The one thing it does have is a strong drive for the player character as the game starts but overall the main conflict isn't very elaborate or interesting. The Brotherhood and Minutemen at least have the Prydwen and Fort going for them but are almost completely lacking in compelling characters or story. The other factions are much worse. Though I prefer the radiant minutemen radio busywork to nothing there is practically no meaningful progression to their story before you've destroyed the Institute and this is the problem with every faction in the game.

To quote myself and compare it to Vegas "so many awesome elements were used for NV's Mojave like the old west theme of Goodsprings, the Howard Hughes character of Mr. House and his preservation of old world Vegas, NCR bringing back a semblance of old world America, and the rugged Mescalero feel of the Mojave itself. In comparison not much of Boston or it's characters stood out or were all that memorable though there were a few exceptions. I hate the melee in 4. Oh and Mr. New Vegas, absolutely irreplaceable, saw him on an episode of Bonanza once....."

@Waffenbaum You absolutely nailed it for me man. That's the way I feel about Fallout 4. Especially when you said "in FO4 fighting IS the story".

Even though I think Fo4 is a great open-world FPS game. It definitely lacks a good story. While the intro of the game is well done I think (I personally was quite immerse in the very beginnings of the game, and thought: "damn, I'm gonna get my son back and kill everyone who stands in my way". It had that revenge driven story feel, and made me think a bit about the beginning of FNV, at least at first. But once I "entered" the world so to speak, and started meeting NPC, and starting discovering the factions, locations, doing a few sidequests here and there, while following the main-quest; I just didn't felt involved in the game anymore. I think that the bad thing about the writing of Fo4, is the fact that the character's main story (meaning the sole survivor main story) IS the game's main story; whereas FNV, which had a really good writing in my opinion, the character's story (the courier 6 story) IS not the game's story, it just serves to involve the player into the game's main story which is about the whole NCR legion war, and Mr.House plan, and the fight for the control of the Mojave. The courier story is just there to launch you into that big and complex geopolitical world. Basically, FnV story is build around the world and universe of the game. And to me, Fo4 is the complete opposite, the world and universe of the game are build around the story of the game, and around the story of the sole survivor. Not sure if what I'm saying makes any sense but that is how I see things about Fo4 story being bad, compared to FNV. Fo3, I think is more similar to Fo4 than New Vegas in terms of writing.

Also, about the building of the world and universe of the game, I think that Fo4 doesn't know where to go. Let me explain; in New Vegas there is this whole post apocalyptic/Mad Max/western like feel and atmosphere, and I think it's important component of the game. The game world stands on its own and feels coherent. While, I feel like, in Fo4, it is all over the place. There's this indenpendence war/Frontier/1770's era vibe, but you also have that sort of Film-noire vibe, and also that all Sci-Fi vibe with the Institutes and the synth and the questions of AI and the all sentient AI thing. And it does not feel to me like they blend that well together. I think the game story and world building may have been better if the had developpers had went all the way in one of these style.

Damn, I'm really tired and feels like I'm writing non-sense hehe.