How do people on here feel about Fallout 4? I very much enjoy the game, but I dislike that it seems to be a departure from the RPG genre for the game. I feel like in Fallout 4, player choice is very inconsistent. I'm not going to spoil anything, but in this game, you are really only able to choose a SINGLE faction. In Skyrim, you were able to pretty much join every one. It was a little immersion-breaking, but I think it was still fun. Knowing this, you would think that Fallout 4 gives a lot of player choice, right? You would be wrong, I think. A lot of the dialogue is pretty much meaningless. If you encounter someone with a mission to give you, you can either say yes and accept the mission, say no (which leads to you accepting the mission anyway), ask for money for completing the mission, or sarcastically accept the mission. It all feels like you're being very railroaded. Not to mention the fact that your player's SPECIAL doesn't impact dialogue like it has in previous games. A stupid character talks in the exact same way as a smart, charming one. It's very disappointing. With that being said, the world itself in FO4 is amazing. There is a lot of very meticulous detail put into the design of it, and your companions are some of the most likable characters that I think Bethesda has ever put out. That only makes it all the more frustrating, that the roleplaying aspect of the game has been so watered down, presumably to appeal to a broader audience.
I more or less agree with your gripes. Though at least as far as the factions are concerned you can fiddle with all four up until more or less the very end without alienating the others. It's only the final handful of missions that really force you to choose one over the others. (And even then, you still typically wind up with two of them on your side in the aftermath. The Minutemen are pretty passive.) Regardless, I like it. The world is enormous, and there's tons to do. Plenty of variety, as well - even if you're just raiding enemy base after enemy base, each offers a wide range of options for approach, so no two encampments ever feel quite the same. I also love settlement building, even though it's ultimately not very useful. And... it makes Preston really annoying, the more you do, but I don't hang out with him much anyway.
I was honestly surprised by how far you can get if you choose to be a quadruple-agent. I saw so many threads all across the Internet saying I'd get a "warning" when I'd reached a point of no return and I was skeptical, but by the time I had made my firm choices it was obvious when that'd happen. A lot of folks are talking about how much they miss the Karma system we saw in Fallout 3, and I totally get that. So much is set in motion for the player character from the first minute of the game. There's a lot of variables here -- what if we didn't really want a family life? What if we wanted to do our own thing in the Commonwealth as we did the Capital Wasteland? In FO3 the player character was like, 19. Nineteen years old is the right age to make one's own conclusions and make our own mistakes, team up with whomever seems like the right idea at the time. And we would pay for our mistakes and decisions in a nearly realistic way. As either an Army veteran or a law school graduate with a wedding ring and a son, it often feels like the game is pushing us to take the moral high road... which is where it gets interesting. I have a deep appreciation (and shared frustration) for the moral gray area that Fallout 4 gives us. For no one faction is truly 100% in the right. (Well, except maybe the Minutemen, but even then I hear Preston Garvey has his own deep-seated dislike/prejudice for synths.) No matter which path you choose, you still encounter a little bit of a pinch: you have sided with (at least) one group of companions to trust to bring you to an endpoint, and at that endpoint, inevitably you must question everything that you have been told. While at first I was severely irritated that I could not create an outcome that was exactly the way I wished, I'll have to admit that there's a great deal of "replayability" in this game. Because of the profound moral ambiguity, I'm genuinely interested in playing again to see the outcome of my actions with each path. So, even though I don't feel like I'm 1oo% free to roam and do as I please, I feel the questlines are compelling enough to make me want to see what all I can affect. This is without even touching the endless options I have for personal playstyle, in the sense of weaponry/defense. Every once in awhile I go to YouTube to very briefly relive the nostalgia of FO3; ultimately, I think it's sequel is absolutely beautiful regardless of the limited plot line. We have not only better visuals, but we have a wider variety of music, and the hidden "easter eggs" of humor and emotional mini-stories we find exploring are just too good to dismiss. Definitely worth at least one play-through.
While Bethesda could have tidied up the story a bit before the final release, I enjoyed the game very much. One of the biggest things they fixed from the two previous installments was the combat/gunplay. It felt more like a "proper" FPSRPG this time around. Bethesda still needs to fix a bunch of the problems that are still going on, but I will not stray away from the game anytime soon.
