If you played and enjoyed Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, then you more or less already know what to expect and will almost certainly enjoy Fallout 4. But just for funsies, let’s talk about all the things the game did right and what it could have done better.
Combat
The first thing I noticed is VATS got nerfed. The not pausing time thing wasn’t that big a deal, but you have fewer VATS points, which means you can’t use VATS as often. On the flip side, a lot of people are saying the shooting feels better, but not even my shooter friends can put their finger on it. I like RPGs, and I don’t like shooters, and I don’t want to be forced to play a shooter, so overall, this is a massive downgrade for me. (Although understandably, not everyone will agree.)
And then there’s power armor. In the early game, power armor feels powerful, and by all the math, power armor really is powerful. But there’s one little weirdness where wearing power armor completely negates the bonuses on your regular armor. And my regular armor has so many boosts to PER, AGI, movement boosts, and VATS cost reductions, and I lose it all when put on my power armor. So even though I might be numerically more powerful, I don’t always feel more powerful. Given the amount of effort you have to put in to maintaining power armor, the game would have been a lot better off if power armor stacked with regular armor.
Character Advancement
And now for the elephant in the room: the removal of skills. A lot of people raged about this, but once you actually try it, you’ll actually like it. The truth is, they didn’t get rid of skills. They combined them with perks. Now you have a ton more perks, some of which are basic boosts to shop prices or damage, and some which give unique effects. And if push comes to shove, you can boost stats in exchange for a perk as many times as you want. So now you have actual interesting choices when you level up. Do you take a numbers perk, a unique ability, or a stat boost?
Not only that, but since the damage and crafting perks are level-locked, you won’t get weirdness where you max out your damage at low-levels, and the high-levels are just for things like hacking. So now every level matters, unlike Fallout 3 and New Vegas where levels stopped mattering after level 15 or so.
Settlements and Crafting
Settlements were a great concept. Now you can build a home base with a bed, storage, and all the crafting stations and shops you need. No more having to lug your crafting materials between your safe room and your crafting station. No more having to find a vendor before dropping off your loot in your footlocker.
On the other hand, settlements can be tedious sometimes, especially when the settlers give you auto-generated quests to go clear out a nearby raider threat. (And as far as I can tell, if you don’t take these threats seriously, they can wipe out your settlement.) I only had 2 settlements going, and the requests were already getting annoying. I’d hate to imagine doing this for all the settlements. I think Bethesda made a huge mistake here. Instead of punishing players for ignoring settlements, they should reward players for helping them.
Crafting is a huge improvement though. There’s a lot of flexibility here. You can craft almost every base weapon into almost any gun you want. No need to search for that perfect sniper rifle when you can build it. And you can add different mods to your gun for different effects. If you really wanted to, you can do weird things like a full-auto sniper rifle. (Not sure why, but you can.)
Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that unlike Elder Scrolls, crafting isn’t game breaking.
Setting and Story
I know Fallout is set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but the Commonwealth is even emptier compared to previous games. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, despite being mostly deserted, still had plenty of towns in it. Fewer towns means fewer people, and fewer people means fewer interactions and interesting quests. It’s the people that make the game, and Fallout 4 is too deserted, even by Fallout standards. Fallout 4’s main story only takes you to 3 real towns, and throughout my random questing, I managed to find 2 more “towns”, if you can call it that.
Maybe the point was to build your own settlements, but some players aren’t interested in building their own settlements. And even the ones that do will find the settlements bland and uninteresting compared to the real thing.
The companion characters you meet have a lot of depth and personality (well, some of them anyway). They’re much better than Skyrim companions, comparable to the New Vegas companions. (None of them are anywhere as good as Serana though, but no one will ever be that good.)
The factions are also really well done. I like how Bethesda doesn’t rely on the lore and develops entirely new factions. Maybe this is why they wanted an east coast Fallout game. (Plus one returning iconic faction, that if you’ve seen the trailers, you already know who they are.) Compared to Fallout: New Vegas, the factions are even more morally ambiguous. The internet is still arguing over which factions are good and evil or whether they’re all just morally gray. Plus, unlike Fallout: New Vegas, each faction actually has unique quests with only a few overlaps.
The story is very well done. It starts a bit slow, but picks up once you reach a certain major city and start meeting interesting characters that move the plot forward. And then there’s the big reveal partway through the game, the oh-my-god moment that changes everything. Sadly, it goes downhill from there, devolving mostly into fetch quests and dungeon crawls. I suppose that’s one of the weaknesses of a non-linear game. (For a different opinion, check out this review of the ending, although obviously, it contains massive spoilers for the ending.)
Quests and Dialogue
Fallout 4 has a few really well-done set-piece quests and one particularly good boss fight about halfway through the game. Other than that though, the vast majority of quests are fetch quests and dungeon crawls. There are very few quests where you have to make interesting choices, mainly because there are so few people to interact with. Really, there’s nthing left to do but dungeon crawl. Plus, Radiant quests are back. I dunno why. I’m pretty sure everyone hated Radiant quests.
The dialogue was exactly as bad as everyone expected. The dialogue wheel almost always follows the yes/no/maybe/question pattern or the 3 choices that mean the same thing or question pattern. Occasionally, you get a Charisma check to ask for more money, or the always ambiguous “Sarcasm” response. The Dead Money DLC in Fallout: New Vegas was known for having amazing dialogue, and there’s just no way you can replicate that with the dialogue wheel.
Even worse, all dialogue checks are based on Charisma. No more perk-based checks or checks based on other skills. Which is too bad, since they opened up so many interesting options in previous Fallout games. When they showed off the dialogue wheel, players called it out for being a terrible idea, and they were right.
That said, there’s one encounter that would have never worked without a voiced protagonist…
Conclusion
So basically, the removal of skills is fine, the crafting is a huge improvement, the factions and companions are great, and the story is amazing. On the flip side, the setting is boring even for a wasteland, the quests are unimaginative, and the dialogue is as terrible as we expected. The combat is a mixed bag, depending on whether you prefer an FPS or an RPG.
It’s not the best Fallout game ever, but I think the positives far outweigh the negatives. In the end, if you loved Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, you’ll probably still enjoy Fallout 4.