Now I know that there are a bunch of topics on people's opinions on Fallout 4, but I wanted to make this topic about the people that overall thought Fallout 4 was a great entry in the series. I personally am on the side that loved this game. I thought it was a great entry in the series. It may be Bethesda's second best game when it comes to exploration(Skyrim taking the helm). You could choose one direction and find somewhere interesting. I also really enjoyed the story and it's characters. It may not be as in depth as FNV, but I still think it was great. The combat system is extremely well done. The gunplay feels much more satisfying than FNV and Fallout 3. I also loved the new aesthetic. They ditched the terrible green tint and went with a much more natural look. The use of Godrays, the much, much better models, and the overall variety in locations was a breath of fresh air. The new facial models are much more lifelike compared to FNV and FO3. The crafting system is also an improvement compared to FO3(and FNV in some areas). The brand new armor system is really cool too. You can mix and match different armor pieces. Now what I don't like about the game is the stripped down leveling system. Bethesda made it completely dependent on S.P.E.C.I.A.L. They literally kicked skills out the window. This made it more difficult to really create your own character. Another thing that really ticked me off was the dialogue system. Not being able to know what I was gonna say really ticked me off. I also liked the voiced protagonist. I thought it brought a lot of emotion to the game, but with that said, I don't think they should continue with it. It really limits roleplaying and in a way forces you to be a certain character. Overall, I thought Fallout 4 was a great entry to the series.

I agree to an extent. I think the brighter, more colorful pallet was a welcome change in the series. I also love the customization and settlement building aspects to a degree.

However, I feel like the game lacked significant RPG elements that made previous entries so great. The voiced protagonist was not needed, and quite honestly made me hate my own (male) character. I also felt kind of let down about the DLC's as well.

I'd say it was a good game, just not a good Fallout game. I really hope the next entry corrects some of the errors made.

I loved Fallout 4 and although it is my favourite Fallout game it isn't because of the graphics because I can make FNV look way better anyway. What I love about Fallout 4 is just how fun it is to kill things, how fun the quests are and how the game molds your character into an unstoppable badass. Fallout 3 and NV felt like I'd gone through all this trouble for this faction but the people didn't really respect that. I'd walk through the Mojave and the CW having everybody have generic lines and I didn't feel like I'd accomplished anything. In Fallout 4, the people recognise you for aiding or destroying certain factions, completing certain side quests and your dialogue options during quests. In Diamond City the guard thought I was in a vault with molerats I think and my companions hated or loved me for siding with certain factions. Hell my girl Piper even published good news about the Institute despite hating them just because I was her lover and my dude Danse doesn't even respond to me anymore for joining them. The characters feel so alive.

The voiced protagonist I didn't like that much but it's a love/hate relationship between that and me as I like it because I take my character a little more serious but I hate it because I feel a little limited to what I can say. I can understand why'd people like it and dislike it though.

The radiant quests were not all that bad imo and cleansing the commonwealth and the synth retention ones were the best. They make it so fun to kill things, and thats how video games should be. I miss the weapon jamming and the conditions but that was so small a part of Fallout I nearly forgot it. The animations and killmoves like in Skyrim make the game so cinematically fun and badass that I actually feel like I'm in an intense combat situation and not some shoot shoot run hide pop stimpak simulator.

The changes in chems I really liked. I hardly used them in FNV and 3 but now they're so much better I'm always addicted. Tell me it isn't cool to slow time and highlight enemies. It makes the game so much more fun and immersive. My companions would even hate me taking them and I felt like I needed them in every combat situation. I would ask myself why people would get addicted to chems in 3 and NV when they didn't do nearly anything special but now I'm addicted to them in 4.

The power armour no longer feels like stormtrooper armour which is great. It now feels like a walking tank, which is exactly how it should feel. The fusion cores I really like as they stop me from using power armour as much as I did in 3 and NV, which is exactly what I want. I don't want to be a walking tank forever, make me cherish my armour!

The characters felt so believable. In Fallout 3 and sometimes in NV, the characters sound so robotic and like an actor bored with their role. Although that is present in 4 (Preston Garvey I'm looking at you) it is now to a much smaller extent. Maxson is quite convincing but so are the rest of the faction leaders, and bear in mind that it isn't black and white like in 3 with the BoS being great and Enclave being evil and NV with the Legion being obvious bad guys and the NCR being heroes. The factions have their own justifications for everything and in a way, they ALL are good, which makes it so hard to choose a faction.

All in all, I think people just hate Fallout 4 for the sake of hating it. It's ok to not like it but it is not a bad game at all, just like NV and 3 were not bad games. Fallout 4 was a completely amazing experience and I feel like I'm actually walking, talking, shooting, killing and surviving. Fallout 4, like all the Fallouts before it, is a masterpiece.

I feel like Fallout 4 was a great game, but a great Fallout game? No.

It didn't feel like a fallout game. It felt like it lost a lot of it's predecessor's autonomy in player choice and made no allusions to hiding the fact that the player was being forced towards a clear conclusion or story event. Choices seemed very redundant as the player is predisposed toward certain groups without a real option. It's similar to Fallout 3 in too many ways and really feels like Bethesda drawing from the well. There's very little wider world building similar to the wider world of Vegas as a very controlled narrative plays out to a familiar battle sequence. Characters are fairly boring and even moments that seem important feel fairly tripe when considering the massive buildup we've gone through to reach them.
That said, story aside, it introduces a lot of cool new features to fallout. The new leveling system was fun, base building seems like something fallout has truly been missing for years, first person gameplay is massively improved (while third remains somewhat boring in comparison) making combat more interesting than fallout 3 and NV's blocky system and, saving the the best til last, Power Armour is now finally what it should have been all along, a mobile tank. It definitely took a great step toward making Fallout fun, but it really lags story wise. The fact Bethesda seem to have sidestepped the lessons learnt from Obsidian's New Vegas and fell back onto the lackluster narrative conventions of 3 is clear indication of a lack of any improvement in their ability to tell stories, which are essential in RPG's. A lack of creativity or variety in both main and sidequests leads to a game which quickly becomes pure action as opposed to an RPG.
There's only so long gameplay entertains before the games lack of world or depth becomes apparent, and there are only so many virtual people you can kill before you have the desire to do something else. Fallout 4 doesn't fill the urge Fallout New Vegas left a lot of players with, and that is a major issue going forward, in all Bethesda games, be they Skyrim, Fallout 3 or Oblivion. There needs to be a focus on multi linear narratives with a number of characters each representing different possibilities. Not Good and Bad. People aren't satisfied with that anymore, and if Bethesda continue to ignore that, Fallout will not improve, at least storywise.

@IRORIEH I understand and agree with some of your points. Fallout 4 in the RPG department was really lacking in my opinion. I really felt that you were playing as a premade character that had their own past and quirks written out for them instead of a character that I built myself. It honestly felt like Bethesda took a page out of Bioware's book and used the Shepard complex, where you can shape out your character's choices and the outcome of them, but at the end of day, that character already has a past written about them.

dantaefetticus wrote:

@IRORIEH I understand and agree with some of your points. Fallout 4 in the RPG department was really lacking in my opinion. I really felt that you were playing as a premade character that had their own past and quirks written out for them instead of a character that I built myself. It honestly felt like Bethesda took a page out of Bioware's book and used the Shepard complex, where you can shape out your character's choices and the outcome of them, but at the end of day, that character already has a past written about them.

All of the Fallout characters had a past. The vault dweller came from the vault to save their people, the chosen one was a tribal descendant of the vault dweller, the Lone Wanderer was the son of James and Catherine and the courier was a courier with a trail behind them...
But the thing is, all those characters have a level of mystery. Were they good, bad or morally grey? What else did they do? Why? There were multiple options through dialogue or story to develop backstory. Fallout 4 doesn't have this. You're either an ex military troop or a law graduate, you live a happy and peaceful life and are then thrown into turmoil. I think that really hurt the game more than anything else. We're thrown into someone else's life, rather than our own character.
It's not really that it was a bad story, it's actually good. Just not as an RPG.
I agree with the BioWare comparison. They've been doing voiced protagonists for a while and it works for them, but it felt like something Fallout didn't need. I still enjoyed Fallout 4 nonetheless.

IRORIEH wrote:

I feel like Fallout 4 was a great game, but a great Fallout game? No.

This is exactly how I feel. It's a very solidly made game with pretty nice gunplay and atmosphere but it misses the 'Fallout' aspect of things by a mile. It's still a fun game to pick up and play (I'm super excited that I now have a machine that can run it on Ultra) but it's just lacking in the things that make a good Fallout title.

I do think fallout 4 is a good game like what people above are saying, but i really must agree with the fact that it is NOT a good fallout game.

I do enjoy the story, lore and the fact that it provides more background to the once was nothing but a background lore: Pre-war fallout 4 put alot of effort into showing us the pre-war making us actually care about the old world, how it was meant to be. i fully sympathized with my character because of it, i really applaud them in that part. and the colorfull commonwealth is also as said above a great change. fallout 4 has improved several things that previous games i think were lacking, like the Companion effection system, Shooter system (very fun) and customization system. but i believe that's as far as it can go, I cannot stress the many times ive suffered trough this games result of lacked effort of an RPG implemenation, at first i did not care so much about it whilst i did realize how it lacked RPG elements, but then i started playing the campaign after years of sidequest gameplays and having to redo my character. currently im on a Fallout 4 completion spree where i finish all sidequests and campaign therefore i have no reasons to really get back to it, but trough out these gameplays ive been experiencing, and bear in mind ive been playing nonstop. for more than 2 weeks without a single break, when i started getting into the campaign i actually CARED for the background's future i foccused my character on actions that i tought would certainly make changes to the commonwealth, far harbor, nuka world. i really forced my self to role-play this game, but so many times has it stressed me to the lack of work put into some quest, like the options of not being able to tell anyone that you did something right really baffles me, (SPOILER) for example with the institute and nucleus, i couldn't tell them what i did was right and explained to them WHY i did it, i just tell them "it was the right thing" but then the NPC just usually says "no its wrong" and you are not given a dialogue option to prove yourself and it makes me feel that my character is very selfless or doesn't have any personality at all, and she just agrees with almost everything they say or does not have the nerve to fight back, this really makes me bitter, getting lectures that i do not even deserve. i felt depressed at times when my actions cannot be justified. it's a horrible feeling therefore i have to say that i really agree with it being a good game but not a good fallout game or at least to me it doesnt feel like an RPG. it reminds me of metal gear solid 5 where you roam around and do stuff. but no real feels of accomplishment to it

and i also felt that unlike Skyrim, Fallout 4 is not worth to be given a replay value,
For example, in skyrim if i finished the stormcloack campaign i definately want to recreate a new character with a newer factions campaign, perhaps the imperials.

It felt huge, contentwise.(Skyrim)
Whilst for fallout i just don't think it's worth any of that in the end you are forced to kill kellog to progress onto the storyline. you can't choose a way to avoid the "looking for your son" part.

And this game also seemed or felt desperate, it felt as if the devs or the game itself realized it's own flaws, what it lacked and tried to compensate it by using Radiant quest's or respawning already destroyed raider bases. i do not mind these, however i really wish more would'v been put to these radiant quest's

The other issue is that this game, to me, unlike Skyrim provides a lot of great historical informations based on the lore, it has gotten me heavily interested in the lore, to the point that i watched every single Oxhorn video's on fallout 4 lore videos. their ways of recreating the past is highly applaud, but some of these stories are cut, or unfinished which is a shame in my opinion. now i know that the main focus was not the background or the pre-war settings but i really do think it had a huge potential.

The game really feels like it's choking my neck and forcing it to play. sort of like that, whenever i play fallout4 i do not felt like have the freedom to travel midway trough the game. i am always rushing to finish sidequests, helping settlers and doing campaigns. it reduces my time for exploration, which leaves me to not discovering newer locations, i always felt rushed when i play this game. even when i try to "take it slow" and enjoy it. i just felt i had to rush it, when i play the game i sometimes felt like i am being held at gunpoint or being choked in the neck, as in forced to do things that i really don't want to do. the game forces you to do all sorts of things, the only reason i am still playing fallout 4 is because of the mods, if fallout 4 was not mod-able i wouldn't of had bought it in the first place.

again, this is just my opinion thank you for taking your time reading this.

Ok, Fallout 4 is a GREAT game.

The story is pretty decent, the gameplay is fluid, and the settlement building really let's the imagination run wild. The fact that you can legit scour the wasteland for items to build weapons, armor, and housing is amazing.

Companions are another strong point within the game. You become attached to them as you get to know them and find out their personalities....how can you not LOVE Dogmeat!?

There's also the decision making aspects that determine the outcome of various situations within the world....and how in the end there really isn't a right or wrong choice.

Again, GREAT game....but when compared to it's predecessors....it fails miserably.

In NV/3 there was really room to let the imagination run wild with your character. You could set up whatever backstory you wanted and run with it. In Fallout 4...you're either a Veteran or a Stay At Home Mom and your only motivation is to get your son back. (I won't even bring up the voiced character thing b/c that's just too easy to criticize.)

While Fallout 4 is a phenomenal game...it's not really Fallout imo.

Fallout 4 is an awesome exploration shooter. Load up on the supplies and go shoot some mofos!!! But its a terrible rpg LOL. There is no consquences of choice whatsoever. But its still fun as hell for me tho. FNV is still the king as far as story goes.

Fallout 4 is a good game, but missing a lot of elements that make it an RPG. Most quests were "go here, shoot this, talk to this, bring back this". That being said I thought the story itself was pretty good. Not gonna win any awards but I still felt connected. It's also a great sandbox game to have a bunch of mods and build things and whatnot. I think bethesda was too focused on fixing certain little things and trying to make as many details as possible (the "guts" inside robots, etc.) that they forgot to add RPG elements. Also sadly for whatever reasons a lot of quests that included roleplaying were cut for some reason. Plus the dialogue/voiced character really limited it. Although I do think Brian T. Delaney and Courtenay Taylor did a fantastic job with the PCs. I also think the companions this time around were some of the best. I do miss the NV style where you could lead them down different paths but I feel like I connected more with FO4's. Plus the AI at least I think so has improved. So overall it's a pretty good game, it just wasn't the RPG I was expecting.

Fallout 4 Is a good game, but very far from being a good fallout game.. Maybe it's just me, but i love when role is kept and followed, but hate it to the core when lore is forgotten/abandoned/replaced/ignored. Fallout 4 did this to me. Ghouls, for example, are supposed to not even bering able to run, they are rotting corpses melting down by the minute, yet here they are faster and stronger than an athlete. Or the ghoul kid surviving in a fridge for 200 hundred and more years without food , water, or air. ANd the power armor fusion cores? They are supposed to last centuries of continued use, not minutes. (these are just examples). They shat on lore for gameplay reasons, and in a RPG like fallout, lore and RPG should be ABOVE combat and gameplay.§


The story was meh. I believe kellog was the only interesting antagonist, i actually wanted to spare him in the end.

Well, lets think for a minute, what makes a fallout game a good fallout game? Well, really, its the environment which comes down to a couple things.

1. Retro-futuristic aesthetic, I've said it before and I'll say it again, fallout 4 nailed this. Right down to the 10 mil pistol, everything in FO4 looks like a relic from the fifties adapted to a sleeker, more futuristic design.

2. Character, basically, is there any depth to the stories that are told in the world, this is often mistaken for the stories in side-quests or the main quest, which isn't the case. Dark souls gets a lot of praise for environmental story telling because people don't tend to be the one's telling the story, its the world that does it. Usually in fallout games you want to mix environmental and character driven story telling to achieve depth and intrigue which, in turn, achieves what we call character. It makes the environment "pop", so to speak. The environment definitely "popped" so to speak, but the character story telling lacked depth and so this entire category comes off as lukewarm or half-assed.

3. Main Character Interactions, this is more complicated than people think. What role does the main character play in the stories of the world and do they feel important. This is FO4's main downfall because, even though the character makes massive changes to the world by the end of the game, they lack depth. I'm of the unpopular opinion that FO3 is not a good fallout game because it fails massively in this category, in fact, it fails slightly more than FO4. Big, HUGE, events can happen because the player made them happen, but if there's no emotion, if there's no real work or events that play off your characters personality, then those huge events don't really mean much, do they?

So, at the end of the day, FO4 nails one of these things, half-asses one, and fails utterly in the last, but that doesn't make it horrible, it just makes it... meh, in terms of a fallout game at least.

@Screw4ff I am very, very sorry. I accidentally pressed the minus rep button on your post. I actually meant to plus your rep. Again, I am very, very sorry.

I Upped his comment to negate your mistake

Thank you, I'm on my iPad right now and my big thumbs and the iPad's wonky hit detection messed it up.

No harm done either way @Dantaefetticus, one little mistake ain't gonna tear me down or anything. I'm just happy to come in here and share my two cents.

@dantaefetticus end ov the day many including myself see fallout 4 {base game no mods} as being a great game but not a great "fallout" game to put it nicely. it is just a run ov the mill FPS with a rusty fallout label on it that says go here and shoot all the things and go there and shoot all the things and no real RPG elements to it whats so ever it was a ocean ov potential but sadly only had the depth ov a mud puddle even with mods i couldn't just pick it up from start to finish and it feel totally new like i did with past games now i will agree that the side quests make the game more so then the main and i understand some loved fallout 4 and still do and that's great but my stance is fallout 4 made a lot ov steps forward but to many back and the sooner this can be put to rest with a hopefully "done right" fallout the better both for the modding community and fallout fans alike but just my 2 cents thanks for making the thread man!

I defiantly agree. At first at hated the new aesthetic though but i learned to really enjoy it, at first i thought the new colors took away the post apocalyptic feel from fallout(easily fixed with and enb if needed) but now i believe that is due to the world at self. Now i do agree with you with the variety of locations in the game but i think its missing some of the encounters previous games had, for examples the slavers in fallout 3 brought a brutal aspect into the game which you would except in the game. But all-in-all i defiantly agree and thanks for giving some light on the opinions of this game!

Personally, I thought Fallout 4 was a great game in the basic sense, just not a good Fallout game. Going into it I was expecting more elements of what made New Vegas so good and more, just like other people who played and loved New Vegas to death like me. However, I was let down by the limited interactions you had with the world and with each of the main factions. Most quests can play out and end the exact same way regardless of what choices you made (they did correct this with Far Harbor, but it should have been there from the start). Plus having a voiced protagonist limited the dialogue options severely and limited what modders can do for new quests. Having dialogue options limited to only 4 choices and not knowing what you would say before you say it really hurt the game for me. Now don't get me wrong, there are some things I enjoy about Fallout 4 like being able to use random junk from the wasteland to craft new weapons and build up your various settlements was an awesome feeling and made every random piece of junk serve a purpose. Overall, I still wish Fallout 4 was a better RPG in the sense of New Vegas.