Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is a massive game. One could technically beat it way quicker than the 275 hours it took for me, but if you explore every single location and dabble in some settlement building, the hours start stacking up. This is the longest single playthrough of a game I've ever done by a good measure and will probably remain so for a good while. Maybe till Elder Scrolls VI?

Content for weeks

Given how huge the game is, pushing procedurally generated quests at your face feels highly unnecessary. There is already plenty of content without these repetitive tasks. Since Fallout 4 has a skill system that allows you to (eventually) get every upgrade there is (like in Skyrim), I suppose the radiant quests do have a purpose once you're done with everything else.

But doing even just two of these same missions is dull. They're always short and it feels like you're mostly watching loading screens. The experience reward isn't that great either. Maybe the Minutemen and settlers could solve their emergencies on their own for a change without always fetching you. And if you want to help, you could just ask them. I ended up installing a mod to disable attacks on settlements as they got annoyingly frequent while traveling between the main game map of Commonwealth and the Far Harbor DLC.

One thing Bethesda continues doing very right in their open world games is the lack of radio towers. You don't need to reveal laundry lists of icons that mark repetitive open world activities in arbitrary regions. Instead you learn about locations from terminals and such or simply discover them on your own. Exploring the wasteland doesn't feel like going over a checklist. The compass Bethesda uses instead of a minimap is also a nice, less screen space taking alternative that is good at suggesting where to wander off next.

Immersive open world

Finding unique items adds excitement to exploration. Mostly I looked forward to issues of the special perk granting magazines and bobbleheads. There are some unique weapons and such too, as well as a randomized legendary affix system. I had a mod that adds a legendary equipment piece in every "boss chest" (and maybe adds chests in locations where there are none?). In hindsight, that mod was an overkill. Legendary enemy variants already drop legendary items. With the additional chest stuff, I had containers stored full of looted legendaries by the end of the game.

Then again, with more legendaries there's a higher chance you'll find your favorite type of weapon with one of the really good affixes such as Exploding (+15 AoE damage; amazing on guns with high rate of fire). Furious (more damage with each consecutive hit) is also fantastic for taking down the most durable enemies. I never found a random gun with it but the Nuka World DLC has whole two guaranteed unique rifles that do the same thing.

Armor legendary affixes aren't as exciting as the weapon ones. Percentage increases to various things didn't seem great and I instead equipped ones that had simple bonuses to the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes.

When I played Skyrim for the first time, I wished it had a mod that highlighted loot. Fallout 4 has one. At default settings Loot Detector (which I think is customizable) can be overwhelming as it highlights corpses, containers, locked stuff, doors, etc. all in different colors. But that didn't bother me personally. And the highlight does (usually) go away after you've interacted with the object in question or looked at it close up.

Loot Detector also places quest markers on close-by legendary and unique items. I think that function is the more important one. I would've missed so many magazines without it. Although, even with the mod I had to return to few places for a magazine and a couple of bobbleheads. Maybe it bugged out or something.

Opportunity for creativity

Unlike in Witcher 3, crafting materials, and the junk they come as part of, aren't weightless. You will quickly find yourself overburdened if you pick up every object you come across. And you kind of want to do that if you intent to do settlement building and/or craft mods for your weapons and armor. I think having scrap weigh nothing would make the game a better experience. I mean, ammunition already is weightless even though in real life that's not the case.

I found settlement building to ultimately be not all that rewarding after satisfying the basic needs of settlers. Most of the building blocks are half-broken, irradiated, rusty pieces of garbage that just don't look aesthetic. After completing the Vault 88 DLC you do get the pre-war vault stuff that is in perfect condition but by the time I made it there, I had already decided not to play Bob the builder anymore.

One extensive building project I did do was an arena to have a spectated fight in for the Instigator achievement. Even though it wasn't a particularly complex construction, NPC pathfinding couldn't quite figure it out and settlers only found the seats on one side. I would imagine that only you will visit more complex buildings you make even if there is something for the NPC AI to go to.

Objects don't snap and fit together as well as one would hope either. I couldn't even get the cupola pieces to snap on the top of a barn I built. That sure hampers the potential enjoyment you could get from building. There likely are mods to improve the building aspect but in my opinion Fallout 4 wouldn't lose much if it didn't have the feature at all.

Gameplay refined from previous titles

Gunplay is the best it has been in the Fallout games this far. Bethesda added a hit indicator to the reticle which, while being a small thing, is such a good tool for giving you feedback. Typically to the series, distinguishing enemies from the terrain can be challenging and the hit indicator helps with that. You'll know when you hit something.

Third person view seems to exist solely for the purpose of admiring your character. Combat while in it is awkward. Aiming is clumsier and your reload animation gets interrupted if something hits you in melee. Your own melee attacks also get interrupted by enemy melee, although that seems to apply to first person too. I guess if you want to properly melee, you use a fast weapon or the time-slowing V.A.T.S. mode. I used the latter for shooting more than in New Vegas -- mostly for getting multiple enemies killed from stealth with the Deliverer pistol.

In the (relatively) early game, I sometimes wished the game had more realistic damage. No human or even creature should be able to take a shot to the face from a .50 cal sniper rifle -- not to mention 5 or more -- and live. The tougher enemy variants can be serious-ass bullet sponges and I played on mere Normal difficulty.

One can probably avoid the sponginess by starting to specialize in some weapon type early on unlike I did. I had weapon mods but they can only do so much. It's the +100% bonus you get from a 5/5 weapon type perk that really brings in the damage. Eventually I specialized in automatic guns and even legendary enemies started dying quickly. Non-automatic guns I found to have too low rate of fire to use outside sneak attacks.

My initial plan was to play like I did Fallout 3 and New Vegas -- a stealthy sniper rifle user without a companion. Instead I ended up with a companion for most of the game and didn't sneak around all that much due to that. Some of the companion perks you get at maxed affinity are quite useful. I'd even say that Piper's, Preston's, and Danse's are must-haves.

I spread my initial S.P.E.C.I.A.L. points evenly: 3 to 5 points in each attribute. After finding the +1 bobbleheads, I had access to almost all of the nice mid tier perks. A select few miscellaneous perks are useful to have regardless of your build: maxed Scrapper (INT 5) for more crafting materials, Sneak 2 & 3 (AGI 3) to not trigger mines and floor-based traps, and Aquaboy/girl 1 (END 5) to not take radiation damage from swimming and to be able to breathe under water. The last one is hardly crucial but prevents you from worrying about having to go in water.

Perks that increase caps and ammunition found, and experience gained you probably want to pick as early as possible. Every point in INT increases the speed you gain levels at but if you keep it at 1, Idiot Savant (LCK 5) is most effective. Evidently higher INT becomes beneficial with the perk again if you have 15+ of it, however.

More focus on action

Some players have criticized Bethesda for moving even further away from the original Fallouts' roleplaying aspects in this game. They're probably right; Fallout 4 is mainly an action RPG. It's like Skyrim, really, but I don't mind that myself. I also wouldn't necessarily call it simplification how they merged skills into the perk system. Mastering everything is practically not going to happen; you will have to play with some kind of build even with the lack of separate skills. I finished my lengthy playthrough at level 120-something which is far from 286 that is required to have absolutely every perk.

The game's writing could've been cleverer though. It touches some science fiction concepts such as artificial intelligence, its rights as lifeforms, and transhumanism but never truly involves the player by having characters argue their viewpoints or giving choices beyond agreeing with a faction or not. I felt it never got below surface level.

For some reason there always has to be 4 dialogue options even if there's no need. Why not sometimes fewer or more instead? Without mods you also don't know what exactly your (voiced) character is going to say when choosing from the truncated options. I didn't have to suffer from that until Nuka World -- I guess that particular mod is still a work in progress.

(The following 3 paragraphs have story spoilers.)

I found Fallout 4's writing to fail particularly when meeting Father, and I guess the plot's premise as a whole in regards to that. The game tries to make you, the player, care about the protagonist's spouse and son right off the bat simply because they're family. Fallout 4 is not the first game to attempt that and it's not the first to fail at engaging me with it either. I don't care if the protagonist's husband gets killed and son kidnapped in the prologue -- I just met them! They don't mean anything to me at that point.

It is amusing, though, how in Fallout 3 your character is looking for their father and in this game their son but who then ends up being 'Father' again. It's a peculiar thought experiment to imagine reuniting with one's kid who just a few days ago was less than 1 year old, but is now a 60 years old man. Like, could anyone recognize the person as their child? Would there be any bond, a reason for the protagonist to go:"Okay, I guess I'll join the Institute because my assumed son wants me to." I'm not sure either if the son really feels anything towards his parent who he has never known and how they're less than half his age.

My first reaction was to just shoot the guy -- it was probably yet another synth. Why the hell did he think his parent would like seeing the synth kid version of him first anyway? It was so weird. Was it supposed to somehow ease the shock of having a strange white haired man walk into the room next and claim to be your son? The dialogue options offered there didn't satisfy me. I did in the end join the Institute, however, but only for achievements and to see what's actually inside.

Brotherhood of Steel is who I picked as my final ending path. Their modus operandi seem to have some logical fallacies too. They claim they don't want humanity to experiment and use advanced technology. But instead to me it appears that they just don't want anybody else but them to do it. At least they have the required military strength to eradicate the dangers of Commonwealth.

I actually almost had the Brotherhood's main force never appear in the game. When you do the story mission in Fort Hagen, you have to exit through the roof entrance that is accessible from the elevator in the basement. If you instead backtrack and use either of the other two entrances, you don't trigger the scene of the Brotherhood of Steel arriving. That's sloppy on Bethesda's part. Fort Hagen's design could be less messy as well -- I had trouble finding the first elevator to the basement too.

Great audio and visuals

The female player character is voiced by Courtenay Taylor who I expected to sound like she does in Mass Effect 2 and 3 as Jack. Maybe in the sarcastic lines you can hear the most similarities but overall I was impressed how different her performance was. It wasn't at all like in Dragon Age: Inquisition with the female Inquisitor British voice being so much like Specialist Traynor in ME3.

There is, however, an accidental Mass Effect throwback when you meet the Atom Cats crew. Some of them, for whatever reason, call your character Jack at times and Brandon Keener also happens to be the voice for one of the NPCs. It's like Jack and Garrus had met again -- without the Turian voice filter, of course.

It's cool how Bethesda recorded a bunch of voice clips so that your pre-war robot butler, Codsworth, can call your character by name if you happen to (or purposefully) pick one of the applicable ones. I had read about it back at Fallout 4's release so I can only imagine the surprise of hearing him go:"Miss/Mister <CHARNAME>!" after naming your character.

Inon Zur composed the game's soundtrack. The main theme is of course iconic by now and one epic combat tune gets your heart pumping. Then there's the Railroad HQ theme, which I found to be an interesting one, like from a secret agent film.

Environmental audio can be atmospheric in the city areas. Enemy spawn location density is high in them and you can almost always hear someone fighting somewhere, the sounds of gunfire and explosions echoing between the tall buildings. It's like walking the current day streets of Sweden's big cities.

The dense city areas are also terrible for framerate. Loading into them takes considerably longer than normal as well. There is just so much stuff in them. Otherwise the game ran effortlessly at Ultra settings for me, which is hardly surprising -- it's the same old engine Bethesda has used for years. It was considerably more stable this time around, though. I think Fallout 4 only crashed thrice for me (with the community patch installed).

Bethesda has naturally beefed up the engine since the previous Fallout too. Explosions are impressive with their air warping shockwaves and lanterns in the misty Far Harbor have to be one of my favorite lighting effects in video games. If it weren't for the post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland and the retro futuristic '50s fashion I dislike, Fallout 4 could be visually one of my favorite games. That might be my opinion about the game in general, to think of it.