Is this game bad? Simply outdated? Or is it just me? (Beginning spoilers)

Seems like people are holding this game to an unreasonably high standard. If you're playing the console version and are upset about bad framerate, I get that, but quite a few console games have poor framerate in spots, especially at launch. People want this to be the mind blowing next generation game that makes them proud to own a next generation console. Well, sorry, it's a video game and games have flaws and imperfections just like any work of art. Expecting perfection and lashing out at the developer when they don't deliver that is childish.

@frostyryan: Totally agree. If they built a new engine, they would have to invest time and money into ironing out whatever bugs showed up in that new engine, and they might not even find the worst bugs until the game was released. Entitled gamers think making a new engine is as easy as replacing the engine in a car when it's more like taking the old engine out, then hiring engineers to design and build a new engine, then hiring drivers to the engine, then making fixes to the engine as needed.

@jertje: "Many" developers have gotten facial animation right? More like a handful. The only games I can think of that came close to having realistic facial animation that synced up well with the dialog was L.A. Noire, GTA V, Until Dawn, and maybe Telltale's The Walking Dead. (It's been a while since I played that.) The budget for L.A. Noire was $50 million and and for GTA V was $265 million. That does stuff doesn't come cheap, and if Bethesda had prioritized facial animation, it would have had to cut back on something else.

@substance_d Expecting the framerate to not drop into the low teens is not unreasonable, or childish, or expecting perfection.

Regarding the engine: if the complaint is the bugs, and the excuse is the engine, and the reply is to fix the engine, and the excuse is that doing so is hard, what response do you expect? "Oh, gosh, sorry, I didn't realize it was going to be hard. Nvm, give me bugs please." I don't care about the reasons for the bugs. They are not occasional corner-case things, they are littered throughout, and pointing them out as negatives is reasonable.

I'm actually enjoying playing this game more than I expected (went in with very low expectations), but suggesting that I have to pretend that this is the best possible implementation of this is ridiculous.

Played more today and it suffers from the same problem as fallout 3, side quests are just boring and everything has a lack of urgency or meaning. I feel like i'm struggling to enjoy the game. It's systems are still so bloated, convoluted and never fully explained plus the performance issues drag you out of any kind of immersion. If the game dips 5fps from 60 you instantly feel it unlike most games, which i guess is because speed is tied to fps(dumbest decision ever). I don't understand anything about crafting, armor/weapon mods, and i've played for over 10 hours now. The inventory system is so garbage and full of weapons and equipment that i don't even know the function of as i just pick up everything. The base building is a mess of unexplained difficult to manage systems. I feel like they built a game with the intent of letting modders fix it for them. I hope once i get to the big city things will get interesting again, so far side stuff is go here, click this, shoot that and return to base.

It's the shadow distance for me as soon as i turn those down i get about 10-15 fps boost in problem areas, still not perfect though. And i'm pretty sure it's a cpu thing, i'm running a 980 and cant' max this game at 1080p, god rays actually have less impact than the shadow distance for me which everyone claims is the biggest performance hog.

Bethesda releases some of the most commercially successful games of any given generation. Let's stop pretending that they're just some poor developer that can't afford to put time into their engine

I cant speak to the technical issues on the PC since I've been playing on PS4, but aside from the janky framerate, I've only had 2 bugs in roughly 10-ish hours of play: I got stuck in the geometry and a line cut off mid-sentence but the subtitle stuck around. Past that, its been smooth for me, and certainly not as bad as New Vegas' launch on console (Especially the memory leak issue, because holy shit, loading into a building could take 10 minutes late game)

okay so I can totally say that I wish that the pre-war section went on a bit longer, but thats my own personal taste. I also loved the opening sewer section of Oblivion, but it seems like everyone hated that. However (all spoilers for very very early in the game)

And a quick aside for the people who keep saying "New Vegas was better"... I love that game, but seriously, most of that game was "Go here, kill that, talk to some people" too, yet its Bethesda that gets hate for that, and Obsidian gets hailed as the best RPG dev ever. Fuck man, give me a break. Besides, New Vegas came out far worse than Fallout 4 and is still broken in some areas. Let me put it this way: Fallout 4 doesn't have broken fucking perks.

@substance_d: that's a good point about overencumbrance. I had tried a console command to set carrying capacity at functionally infinite (not a fan of encumbrance in games), but it kept snapping back to 250.

Also I left the game at auto settings, which recommended Ultra with everything maxed. Pretty sure I was hitting 60fps besides the stuttering, and I can't go higher due to the physics speed changes.

I spent quite a bit of time in NVIDIA Control Panel/Inspector messing with various settings, but honestly it's usually a better use of time to just wait for the community to sort it out. Considering I spent about a third of my total time wrestling with tech issues to get the game playable, I just ended up feeling like it wasn't worth 60 bucks right now, as the refund window was closing.

To be clear, I'll buy it and play it. Just not at the launch price. I want the value that the game brings to me to be proportional to the cost I outlay.

Edit: words

Same here, I feel like people are just engaging with the surface level of it for a couple of hours and just assuming "Eh its trash, everyone else says so!" and not actually playing the game.

I don't think anyone is expecting perfection. Bethesda quite simply cannot get away with re-releasing the same janky open world games when the bar has already been raised by the likes of TW3. Single digit frame rates and game-breaking bugs should be considered unacceptable, period. Especially when the core RPG elements and plot are still undercooked, nevermind the terrible UI and plethora of pointless and convoluted systems like the base-building stuff.

But hey, with the exception of FO1 and 2, I've always seen these games (including the Elder Scrolls series) as pretty much a sandbox for mods and nothing more.

This game is basically a Fallout 3 DLC pack. The new mechanics add nothing to the core gameplay and in fact take away from it. The whole base building/crafting mechanic is poorly done. I am constantly getting encumbered because now I HAVE to pick up all the bullshit just to level my gear. The shooting has improved but it is still rubbish by today's standards. The IU is also bad. Comparing gear should not be a chore. Also glitch's and framerate stuff, but I can look past that stuff if the core gameplay is good and sadly it is not. If this game wasn't on such a grand scale and from Bethesda it would surely be panned. I have loved Bethesda's game's in the past. Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim have all been terrific, but I feel they have not done enough to their game design.

@xdeser2 said:

That's not what's happening though. Go read Jeff's review for a perfect example. People are articulating very specific things about the game that in some cases are objectively bad (as in: not the intended operation of the software), and things that they find subjectively disappointing. You may have a different subjective stance, you may find the objective shortcomings unimportant, but that doesn't make differing viewpoints shallow.

My stance is: it seems like a fun game. It has some problems. I'ma try to enjoy the parts that are good and not let the bad parts irritate me. I don't expect everyone else to be successful at doing the same.

I think you all are making excellent points and I pretty much agree with all the negatives.

Yet I'm still having a really fun time with it. Having a hard time trying to explain why in words but there you go.

@mrroach: I 100% understand the complaints about the technical and performance aspects of the game, like what Jeff was talking about, it has some problems there for sure. I'm talking about people who are saying "Eh its just a mediocre unfinished POS lol Bethesda amirite?" instead of actually engaging with the content.

The reason why they have clung to the old engine for so long I feel is readily apparent. They want to keep the games as modding friendly has possible. Mods have easily been one of the top selling points of their games and a large reason for their success. Skyrim mod videos were probably the most popular video game thing on youtube outside of Minecraft and Five Nights at Freddie's videos. They have been a super great promotional tool. On top of a potential revenue source they seem very interested in exploiting. Also they have been a great source of inspiration to them as the settlements and gun modding systems in FO4 were FO3 mods so was the food and sleep system in NV.

So its not as simple as just tossing the engine and making a new one. It would also mean tossing out the modding tools they have spent a decade improving and tossing the decade of experience the modding scene has with those tools. If they tried to make the engine in such away that would keep the modding tool relatively the same you would probably still have all the same issues as before.

Bethesda has also made the promise before they you can make anything they could with their mod tools. This stops them from being able to do to many fancy one off solutions to problems. Case and point would the animations. The reason animations have been so much better in recent years especially facial animations has been because of better capture tech. As we learned from a recent bombcast to make really good facial animation you need to capture the voice actor performance as well as model the character with something like an 80% likeness. The way the other open world games that keep getting have solved this problem was doing that for all the important npcs. They can't do that for Fallout for two reasons.

1. Modders would get real mad when when all of their characters have terrible animations while the key npcs look great and be told the only solution to build a capture studio.

2. You spend so much more time talking to random npc B in Bethesda games then pretty much any other game on the market. It's just not worth it to hire hundreds of voice actors to capture for the hundreds of npcs you are interacting with in a Bethseda. You could cut back on the number of actors and have all the npcs look really samey but not exactly a great solution. The only other games I could think of that even have a remotely similar time talking to random npcs is Mass Effect. They didn't do much a great job their either and the numbers are greatly scaled back and a large chunk of the npcs were non human. So if the next Mass Effect has great facial animations all around you can forget that point.

Well, the game was definitely a slow start for me. Within like one or two hours they throw the base building, power armor and crafting mechanisms at you without providing any motivations to mess around with them, and the engaging story is nowhere to be found.

BUT.

Having played a dozen or so hours more I feel like the game has now grabbed me. There are definitely some cool characters in the story and I don't think all the hate on the writing is necessarily justified at this point. The decision to have you make beds for 5 people while they all stand around doing nothing is almost unforgivably stupid. Who thought that was a good idea? But if you endure those very weak opening hours, in my experience the game definitely picks up after that.

Yesterday I thought I would give the game one more sitting to see if it was actually all that uninteresting, right now I actually can't wait to play some more. If you are like me in the sense that a game like this should appeal to you but are feeling underwhelmed early on, maybe stick with it a little while longer.

What weirds me out is the lack of polish compared to Skyrim. That would disappoint me when you're expecting a game to surpass 3 and New Vegas with 4-7 years of development time. Makes you wonder how much firefighting was going on during the game's development.

@substance_d: Man no offense but give me a break. Unreasonably high standards? People expected a brand new experience for the next generation. What they got was a gussied up version of Fallout 3, and thats O-K for many because Fallout 3 was a good game back then, but at the same time it's disappointing that in 2015 we're still playing a very much identical game that we first experienced 7 years ago. If expecting more than the bare minimum is considered "unreasonably high" then the game industry might as well pack it up and call it quits now because making really great games takes a lot more effort than that.

You said you played Witcher 3 right? Well that game is obviously a lot different than Fallout, but think about how crazy it is that we're even considering it in the same breath. CD Project Red compared to Bethesda is a small developer. Their last game, Witcher 2, was successful but nothing in the scale of Skyrims financial success and Witcher 1 before that was a cult classic but a commercial flop. Witcher 2 came out in 2011, and since then CD Project Red made a brand new engine to handle the open world they envisioned for Witcher 3. They knew that they needed to make new tools in order to accomplish something bigger and better than last time and they went for it. In comparison Bethesda released Fallout 3 in 2008 followed by Skyrim in 2011. Both games experienced the same exact engine shortcomings and now in 2015 they've released Fallout 4 which once again features those very same shortcomings as well as the exact same lock picking and hacking minigame that were present in F3 over 7 years ago.

So like I said before - Fallout 4 isn't a terrible game, it's not even a bad game, not by a long stretch. It is a game that seems to lack any real innovation and is depressingly decrepit in the technology thats not so much driving it forward as it is laboriously dragging it along. For those that just wanted "more Fallout" that is great, because that is exactly what they got. For the rest of us, we simply wanted something more. A world that has some real weight and physicality to it beyond rubbery, jittering items littered throughout. NPC's that are more than robotic dolls awkwardly getting on and off mattresses to begin a conversation with you. Dungeons that offer more than walking through a maze of corridors looking for the right door to teleport you to the next detached part of the level. Those aren't "unreasonably high" expectations, they're just expectations from people that live and play games in 2015.

Stop with the Witcher stuff, That game had its own jank out the ass. Witcher on PS 4 ran atrociously and went to single digit FPS on the regular, crashed on numerous occasions and fucking Roach would sometimes appear stuck in the fucking ground. I would avoid certain parts of Novigrad specifically because they chugged so bad.

I've played this game for 20 hours now and I haven't crashed, nothing has spawned in the ground and the frame rate while dipping has never been a slideshow, I haven't been to diamond city I expect it to chug there.

If your gonna crucify Fallout then crucify Witcher as well.

At this point I'm not getting the attack on Fallout. I don't think its an amazing game its not as well written as it should be and its a bit flat, but by the outcry you'd think it was Arkham Knight on the PC.

Fun fact. CD Projekt red had 220 people working on Witcher 3 while Fallout 4 had about 100

so it is funny that you are considering them in the same breath.

@superscatman: Well then I fully stand corrected - my mistake. I was sure Bethesda was much larger than that, but it also explains a lot about the state those games ship in if they're making such huge worlds with such a relatively small team.

Everything else about wanting to innovate and pushing yourself as a developer to evolve your product still stands though.

This. I am barely a few hours in FO4 and anyone suggesting this is just FO3 with a new coat of paint is being highly disingenuous.

FA4 is huge and tickles that exploring itch like no other game. The world is broad but also has a myriad of little details to discover.

And damn it I'm very very happy it's more of the same in terms of experience and gameplay ! But it's more of the same with a ton of improvements that make playing the game much more involving.

These new consoles selling for $300-$400 ? What on earth can you expect from something priced $300 ? They may be latest gen but they are still low end platforms for running games on.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Like, at all. They are still new hardware compared to the old consoles. You can't just make the same damn game again on new consoles. People expect more than that. The Witcher 3, MGSV and several other games somehow managed to be truly new and impressive experiences compared to anything from last generation. If I'm expecting too much, those games should have been impossible to make.

Never seen anything but occasional terrain bugs in TW3. That's just anecdotal evidence, but still, I've probably had to reload well over 100 times in FO4 to fix quest and/or game-breaking bugs already. In the first major quest alone, the Deathclaw kept spawning inside the ground and then, when I cleared everything out, the quest wouldn't end. My experience with both games has been vastly different.

MGSV is not a real open world game. It's at best 2 sandbox environments that look amazing but are extremely limited and repetitive. The experience in each of these sandboxes is limited to travelling the same repetitive beautiful landscape, shooting the same half a dozen repeated enemies and picking up a few collectables. Yes MGSV is beautiful but it's not an open world experience that is broad and engrossing. Story wise it's an utter disjointed disgrace which feels and actually is, a half finished product. There is actually barely any story worth remembering... just a bunch of cutscenes that are tied together by missions which have absolutely nothing to do with the cutscenes they lead to (especially so in act 2).

The Witcher 3 remains one of my favourite games of the year and I applaud it's quality and the experience it delivered as an open world game but it had it's numerous glitches especially on these cheap 'new gen' $300 consoles.

There is a video out there which was linked on these forums showing the difference in performance between Xbox PS and PC running FO4. The PC is a middle of the range gaming PC. Not a high end super expensive machine. The difference is simply astonishing. That's not to do with the game. That's to do with the limitations of the gaming platforms. You simply can't have the best @ $300. Consoles are cheap mass market gaming platforms that do a pretty good job at delivering average to good gaming experience. But a lot of top end games struggle with them. Unless of course you go the MGS5 road and deliver something beautiful that is in essence one hour's worth of gameplay repeated 40 times.

Ide like to say that i literally just played witcher 3 before fallout 4 came out and played hours upon hours of both.In my experience witcher 3 has had WAY more bugs and issues than fallout 4 in the same 20 hour span.Witcher 3 had frame rate issues pretty bad at times,it had crashes,i even had a horse race where nothing on the screen loaded,so i lost the race and had to restart.I had multiple bugs where two of the same person appeared and broke immersion.I could go on and on and on.Fallout 4 on the other hand only has had infrequent and minor fps drops and a brahmin that got on top of a house.Not saying people arent having issues with fallout 4 with more frequency or severity,what im saying is bugs are very different for everyone alot of the time and to crap all over fallout 4 when lots of people have had worse issues in other games(including the AMAZING game that is witcher 3)is ridiculous.I love witcher 3 as well,but lets not act like its the second coming of christ when it has had plenty of bugs aswell and other issues not bug related.Fallout 4 is a slightly better game than witcher 3 for me at this point ide like to say as well.

I don't care if people agree with me or not - to me it's Fallout 3.5 - and that's FINE! But...I'm waiting for mods and patches.

I'm having fun with the game. Playing it on the PS4 were there are some frame rate issues, but nothing that impedes the game play. (Side note, I did notice when the app is open to the "local map", there is a definite dip in frame rate.)

It's not a bad game, in fact, I would say its good. It just has some flaws.

That's bugs for you, some people just get shafted, I for example haven't had to do a reload in Fallout 4 at all, and it also probably goes somewhat to explaining why there are such varied responses to things. The occasional bit of clipping and slowdown are things I can deal with. I don't like broken quests but I haven't had any break in 20 hours.

I had two broken side quests in the witcher.

I loved the Witcher, but it really was a shit show for me. And from other peoples impressions I've read this was not uncommon on ps4.

I wonder how well this game was optimised for the different consoles and how much work the PC version had. I'm playing on Xbone ATM.

I don't think it's weird to praise the people responsible for the "but good" part of "Fallout 3 but good."

Wow, 120 hours i never had anything real bad happen in the witcher besides the xp glitch (which really didn't break the game since xp was gated by level anyway) and i fixed that with batch file the next day lol.

I'm coming around on fallout 4 i think but my problem with it isn't really the technical stuff, just the design of the game itself feels like it was made in 2008. The witcher had a cumbersome inventory system as well, but was still better than this. (and it eventually got patched). Since witcher 3 is CPR's first open world game, it think it would be fairer to compare it to skyrim when bethesda first used this engine. I would hope that the witcher 4 wouldn't suffer the same issues as 3 if it came out with so much time to iron it out.

I'm surprised Zenimax is keeping bethesda's team so small, i guess they wanted to spend more money on their MMO team and figured people would buy fallout even if it was basically the same game.

"I really want to like this game, but I can't seem to square my personal experience with most of the reviews that were compiled yesterday."

Now, take a moment to think hard about this, and try to be brutally honest with your thoughts on this occasion. What does this tell you?

They've always been bad. Hopefully more people realize it now. Sadly it sounds like this game sold super well (not shocked), so Bethesda can continue to get away with shipping janky garbage. Hurray.

Lets be honest, the amount of polish this game lacks in comparison to Skyrim is quite a margin. As for team size, I'm sure Todd Phillips could've had more bodies at his disposal if he wanted to. If it shipped in this state last year it probably would've been seen as a decent stab in the early-ish goings of a new generation. As it stands, others have shown what can be done and Fallout's left behind a touch. Does Elder Scrolls Online use different tech?

This makes intuitive sense, but if that is what they're going for it seems like a bizarre strategy if these numbers are correct. While I'm not sure how much I trust those numbers, it seems reasonable to think that the console market is bigger than the PC one.

Then again, maybe I'm being shortsighted, in that obviously if they had been taking this approach, it wouldn't have done them any harm and presumably would have generated some goodwill amongst enthusiasts.

@oursin_360: I honestly like fallout 4s inventory system more than witcher 3s.Witcher 3s menu lagged when i used it some times and i like the look of the menu more in fallout 4.I dont think it feels like it was made in 2008,but then again i never had an issue with how fallout or elder scrolls played or felt anyway.

So after reading through all of these responses and listening to this week's podcasts, I'm going to try the game again with different expectations.

The major breakthrough was this thread, which contains fixes for all of my current technical issues. The iNumHWThreads=X tweak has seemed to eliminate remaining stuttering after applying the borderless fullscreen workaround and getting the framerate lock figured out, and using Bilago's Configuration Tool is super easy.

We'll see how it goes...

Well yeah, there are only a few developers at the top... but why compare Fallout 4 to top-of-the-line facial animation technology? I'm comparing it to other 2015 titles, and I can't honestly think of any triple-A title released in the last 3 years with worse facial animations than Fallout 4.

Anyway, that's a sidestep in the discussion, because it's not my point at all. I can agree that facial animations are not the most important thing, but I pointed it out as an element of the unpolished nature of Bethesda games, not as a single argument why I don't like the game. Nearly everything in the game seems to have that level of polish, from the UI to the gunplay to the glitches.

I guess I just like polished games.

I don't, it's basically a giant text list where you have to click on stuff just to see the stats and it lacks a full comparison to what you have. Fallout has way more types of weapons so it needs way more categorization and inventory options than the witcher. Hopefully a mod fixes it soon or they patch it like Cdprojekt red did.

Even though i like fallout 4s menus i agree it could be better.There could be alot more tutorials for new players to the series as well.I didnt have a problem understanding all the systems and mechanics of the game,but i could see a new player being completely lost on how all this stuff works.

I'm just used to it with the Fallout games. I love these games more than just about any other, but frankly they have been busted pieces of shit since the first one. In Fallout 1 you had to fucking pickpocket equipment onto your companions to get them to equip things because there wasn't a real companion interface. The cornerstone of the gameplay in F1 and F2 for me was save scumming midcombat to get out of tough fights with e.g. my companions alive.

I'm slogging my way through it now on a laptop with integrated video that can barely run it on minimum settings, and I'm used to that because I've never had a good PC in my life, but the technical problems are still really irritating. Like when I (usually) have a transparent pip boy while I'm using stealth armor. That might even be intentional, but it's impossible to tell.

I think that's the main thing that lets me enjoy this game. I have no idea if any given thing I'm experiencing is intentional or not. I have no expectations that anything will work properly so I'm like, whatever, I'll just learn how to noclip and give up on my usual obsession with playing games "the right way." The games themselves feel as cobbled together as the world they depict, maybe I like the meta-roleplaying of trying to keep the game running while my character tries to keep himself alive. But a last night a Mister Gutsy attacked me while grunting "MADE IN THE YOU. ESS. AY!" and that was great, so whatever.

There seems to be a ton of ignorance in this thread as to how games are actually made and how, specifically, Bethesda makes games.

"This game looks like Skyrim 2.0!" Well it's made using the same engine. "Well then they should have made a NEW engine!" That costs money. And also time. This game has been in development since Skyrim released. Before, even. If you wanted a new engine, which is in the works for the new TES I'm sure, you would NOT be playing Fallout right now or any time soon.

"This game looks like garbage!" Actually, no, it's pretty gorgeous. The number of unique art assets continues to stagger me. The whining over how bad the game looks, how the players "deserve" better, and how lazy and stupid the developers are reminds me lot of when I heard that argument before 20 years ago. A little game called Earthbound. Maybe you've played it. People back then didn't. They were too pretentious for it.

"The Witcher 3 looks better!" The Witcher 3 doesn't do HALF of what Fallout does. Comparing The Witcher 3 to Fallout is like comparing your body to the body of a professional baseball player. They spend all their time doing one thing, working out. Of COURSE they're body looks better than yours. You, hopefully, do a lot of OTHER things, though, and that's why your body doesn't compare in the same way. GTAV looks great, but the NPCs in GTA appear out of nowhere, walk a few steps down the block and then disappear when you look away. The NPCs in Fallout are basically Sims. They are AI Agents who have entire, persistent lives. They have homes. They wake up in the morning. They go home at night. They eat when they are hungry. They socialize. And they use their AI to solve their problems when they arise. If they are hungry, they will go FIND food. If they sleepy, they will go FIND someplace to sleep. What does this mean for gameplay? One time in Oblivion, I had no weapons to fight a fully armored guy, so I led him to water and DROWNED him (because the AI Agents need to breathe). One time in Fallout 3, I needed to prevent a guy from committing suicide and had no idea when he was going to try it, so I simply followed him around all day.

These kinds of solutions can be improvised because the game is LOOSLY programmed. It is a series of complex systems all playing in the same sandbox. What does this mean? It means some stuff is going to "glitch" or be "janky". No, that's not a problem. It's the ONLY way to create a game world where you can improvise solutions to complex problems that may have been created by the game and not even the intention of the developers.

If you want a "cinematic" experience that is tight and plays out the exact same way for absolutely everyone, go play one of the 1000 AAA games that do just that. It's extremely en vogue right now. But for gamers who REALLY want Role Playing Games, as opposed to "cinematic role playing games" or "action role playing games", Bethesda is one of the only places doing it.

I think i've decided that yes the game is a bit outdated, but I found myself getting into it more than i got into fallout 3 after i got to diamond city

The Fallout formula is old and the engine is old, and they didn't use much of the new power the current console's offer imo. The new building and crafting seems very tedious.....and a bit mysterious, lol. Gameplay has so much jank and clunk. Camera and friendly AI being retarded. The standard shooting is an improvement, I'll give them that, but aside from improved visuals everything else seems surprisingly dated. I expected more....maybe that's on me then. There's fun to be had for sure, but I don't know if I want to continue after all the Beth open world games I've played, it feels pretty laborious.

EDIT: Just wanted to add to these impressions for fairness. Since I switched to first person mode, gameplay has smoothed out a lot. 3rd person added so much clunk and bad camera. Also, I have since really pursued story heavy quests and they are pretty great. Several of the potential companions are awesome. Nick and Piper specifically. But I just can't dump Dogmeat...he's just too useful, and so adorable in his welding goggles :-). Love that dog. <3

From all the flack this game was getting around launch, I thought I was going to experience something awful. I think overall, the game is pretty great. As someone who has a ton of time invested into other Bethesda games, this one doesn't seem to be any different. Which for some, yeah that can be a bad thing, but I don't mind that this is just Skyrim: Fallout Edition. Messing around and exploring has much more reward now since you basically need as much junk as possible for crafting and settlement building so that's pretty cool and addicting. The sound and art design is pretty awesome in this. I love how after the BoS arrives on their airship there are like small little firefights all over the map between them and other baddies and you can hear the vertibirds flying over providing air support for them. Plus I love how all the pre-war vehicles look in this game. Gunplay feels right where it's familiar, but hasn't gone completely snappy like call of duty which I think is a good thing.

I do feel like the beginning is a real slow agonizing burn. The first 2 hours of this game you're hit with so much information and they're trying to throw all the new features at you. It was really overwhelming and I think most of the time I invested after that, was just trying to figure out what I can and can't actually do in this game. Not to mention that making your way down south was completely brutal with how much higher in level the enemies get. Plus the early stories for factions and quests don't really get interesting until you go to Diamond City/BoS arrives.

How the game runs is pretty bad... In fact one of my pet peeves when it comes to games is when it's a broken mess that doesn't run well. Which is why I got this on PC so I didnt suffer completely with frame loss and stuttering, although it seems it's pretty unavoidable since I'm getting anywhere from 25-50 fps while I play. That kind of range seems pretty ridiculous and I really hope that in future patches I see my frame rate get better and better. Glitch and bug wise, the most terrible thing I've seen so far is a Deathclaw I killed clipped through the ground. The most annoying thing to happen is having my pipboy and gun disappear while in first person. Luckily all I need to do is make a quick switch to third person and it's fixed when I switch back.

If I had gotten this for PS4 I would have been really pissed that I bought this at full price. I do think it's pretty sad to think that in the present day gaming industry, this game does not have the optimization to run well on a console currently. Many people are comparing Witcher 3, but I think that's pretty unfair. It ran sluggish for sure, but not to this extent to where there is stuttering, input lag, and massive frame loss on consoles.

I was kinda with you, but now you're just talking nonsense. Also, the AI that's impressed you so much isn't really what you're painting it as. NPC's don't get hungry, they don't get sleepy, they just have certain routines built in. You're being extremely reductive about the witcher and pretty naive about fallout. To the point where I'm wondering if you've actually played either.

Not saying the witcher is a 'better' game (I mean, I would say that but that's my subjective opinion) but I think it's fair to say that it is better made. I can see plenty of valid reasons why someone would prefer fallout over the witcher, though, which is perfectly fine. There's no need to be disingenuous.

@bananasfoster said:

Spawning raiders underneath my settlements and forcing me to noclip into the void to kill them is a problem. Falling through a bridge and getting stuck in the support beams is a problem. Having my Pip-Boy bug out so that half of it is off-screen is a problem. None of those are justified by what you are saying. Are you really trying to tell me that the ability to "improvise solutions to complex problems" makes it inevitable that my companions will get lodged on objects or stick to walls like Spider-man? That other NPCs will shove the one I'm talking to out of the frame? That my HUD will disappear randomly?

I've played about 40 hours now, and I'm enjoying my time despite these faults, but to somehow pretend that all this broken shit is justifiable by the deep complexity of the AI routines (it isn't, and they are actually quite simple) is kinda crazy. Bethesda is not a small studio. They have the money, the manpower, and certainly had the time to iron this shit out and deliver a better product. But, for whatever reason, they didn't. Maybe they figured their target audience would enjoy themselves despite these faults, and it seems that they were right. Regardless of their reasoning, this is the product we received at the end of the day, and while it's absolutely fine to take those problems in stride, it's counterproductive to either pretend they aren't there, or to excuse them entirely.

I guess this means my preferences are outdated?

I am enjoying this immensely. I've not been able to stop playing it since it came out. Here's the thing: I didn't play Witcher 3. That seems to be one of the points of comparison. I've not even watched any of it. So maybe my expectations are out of date?

Maybe if I had seen what I hear the very good writing and smooth world in that game my opinions of this would change. As it stands, I'm enjoying the writing in Fallout a bunch. It's a shame that technical problems are taking up most of the discussion but that's on Bethesda.

For me though, I am loving it. Maybe I'm wrong for not expecting more (technical issues aside). I just love having another Bethesda world to walk around in. I don't see that getting any less cool for me.

I'm enjoying the game but the fact that you can run an ENB with FO3 and have it look the same as FO4 is a problem. How anyone can be satisfied with this level of graphical fidelity in 2015 is beyond me not to mention the other problems that have existed since Oblivion. I guess it's the same people who stuck with one console for ten years.

Obviously they dont get hungry or sleepy and have routines built in,because they arent real people,so i dont get your point.However,they are programmed to act as if they need food and sleep,which means that since the AI are programmed to do alot more things,they have a WAY higher chance of bugs happening than most games.Most games have AI that are alot more static in how they act.They dont have to find objects in the world or go to bed at a specific time like fallout does.So i think his point stands.Bethesda games have ALOT more going on then other games,including witcher 3 which have alot of npcs that stay in the same place for the whole game.