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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8238763" data-attributes="member: 18">This is all right but doesn't even address the biggest and most fundamental problems with FO4.First off, unlike FO1 and FO2, the world doesn't make any sense, in ways it inherited from FO3, but didn't correct. It's supposed to 200+ years after a nuclear war, but there's trash everywhere (which makes zero sense - in RL apocalyptic situations and the like people absolutely do tidy up because it's important to survival), everything looks like it's 20-30 years after a war not 200, people haven't really started rebuilding in any real way, new societies are barely a thing and so on. There are no/few trees despite it being a temperate area. There's also essentially only one visual style, this faux-1950s one. And the whole game leans hard into a 1950s vibe, right down to the way people are still acting, the robot PI, and so on.This is a really stark contrast to FO1/2, where they were a shorter time after the bomb, but people had started rebuilding, had tidied up, had formed new societies (some quite complex and advanced, like the NGR or whatever they were called), and where it was set in a desert, so it made sense that it was largely treeless etc. They also had multiple different aesthetics, as you might expect, with the faux-1950s one being a distinct pre-war one, not something still perpetuated. Fallout New Vegas goes the same basic way as FO1/2 - if people live somewhere, they've tidied it up, and there are entire new civilizations and so on. It also has a more varied aesthetic. Some of what I thought was in FO3 and was a varied aesthetic turned out to actually be in FONV. It does have a 1950s vibe, but only as associated with New Vegas itself, and it's an intentional vibe created and maintained by the being in charge of that.This is a huge underlying problem with FO3/4. It's unreflected. Thoughtless. A copy from someone who profoundly didn't understand the originals at more than a superficial level.Before anyone has a freakout, as they may, that doesn't make it automatically "a bad game", but it means that it doesn't really fit with the legacy of FO1/2/NV. It's quite a distinct thing, but it tends not to be obvious to people who started with FO3 or later, regardless of whether they eventually played the others. FO4 is a pretty good game in a straightforward sense, but it's a very very very shallow take on Fallout, which focuses entirely on the 1950s stuff and the Americana stuff, which were only a part of FO1/2/NV.There's also the fact that FO4 has one of the most obnoxiously and ineptly forced stories in modern CRPGs (FO3 also had big problems here, particularly with the ending, which even after changes, was hilariously dumb and literally insulting to the player). I don't want to go on at length as we'd be here all day, but they force you to be these specific characters, force very weepy and overacted dialogue into your mouth, and force you to pursue a pretty dull quest... and then basically forget about it until it's time for the very end - it's not woven-through like any Bioware game - and it's not fun to engage with like, say, Cyberpunk 2077's main questline. It's just obnoxious and showed a lack of imagination on the part of the writers.FO76 acknowledged/fixed the tree thing (despite being far closer to the bomb than even FO1 in time!) and I hear stuff is a bit tidier in lived-in places too (haven't played it), so maybe FO5 will make a bit more sense.There are other criticisms too - the tacked-on settlement-building, the Diablo-esque "legendary" enemies and the literally magic equipment they dropped, and the ones you outlined. It all adds up with FO4 being really not an ideal game to base your Fallout game on if you want a "broad church" of  Fallout fans. The ideal game for a "broad church" would probably have been FONV, or better yet, probably getting a licence to use all the FO games.This is true but one thing that messes with it for me is if you play in a couple of games or more, if you're used to roll-over/roll-high, and you start playing a roll-under one you don't ever actually get used to it, because you're still playing roll-over/roll-high and I think given the vast majority of games are that way, you stick with that on some level.</blockquote>

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