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 Simply outdated?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

@mirado: Just like to point out that bethesda may not be the smallest game studio,but they are FAR from big.They only had around 100 people for skyrim and they have stayed around that same size for fallout 4.In comparison CD Project RED has around 200 people and assassins creed 4 was made with around 1000 people.So compared to all the other open world game developers,bethesda has way less people and have ALOT more going on then witcher 3 or assassins creed etc.

I think as long as I play in first person visually it looks fine, the lightning seems pleasant. But every time I see NPC on the screen and they start animating/talking maaan it so bad, immersion breaking even.

And loading screens. At first I thought I would not be bothered so much, but when you go outside of diamond city(loading screen) , fast travel to quest marker if you found the place earlier(loading screen), then enter the cave/house/lab/ (loading screen), then going deeper in to the whatever structure another (loading screen) is hiding behind the door. Complete quest and report back to quest giver? 2 loading screens + fast travel+ if giver is inside some shack another loading screen.

I for one would give up every spoon and fork in the game world for better visuals . I know it's unpopular opinion. Feels weird to play this game at 30 fps with those kind of visuals.

I always find this viewpoint very perplexing. Every time I play the game I just get lost and the hours fly away. I guess I get it from a purely intellectual standpoint, but there's so much more to immersion than just how "realistic" or good the game looks and animates. All videogames has a TON of things that requires a suspension of belief, so I don't really get how people get stuck on something as simple as the visuals.

It also gets even more perplexing considering how we have all these 8-bit or pixel art or otherwise graphically simplistic games that people enjoy immensely. I mean, how can a game like Undertale be able to accomplish what it does if visuals is such a big barrier to immersion ?

@ares42: I never said I want realistic visuals or life-like characters. Just better more fluid animation would help a lot. Poor dialogue, weak characters, average animation breaks my immersion very easily.

Undertale differs from fallout 4 because it is not a 3D polygonal video game. The approach to visuals is entirely different . Undertale suceeds at what does, Fallout 4 not so much.

Games are visuals medium and with each year there are expectations for what is a standard visual fidelity from AAA studios. I am too harsh on fallout 4 maybe because I expected better from a studio that sold 20+ million copies of Skyrim. I mean AC syndicate got flak because it looks worse than AC unity so why Bethesda should get a pass for it? Maybe I have unrealistic expectations because one company from Poland improved immensely with each game and set the bar for open world rpgs.

Sorry for the rant.

@ares42 said:

Good writing. Something Fallout 4 sorely lacks.

(Just kidding on that last part, you guys! Well, I think so? It's been totally "fine" so far, though hardly deep. The best stuff seems to be random side-stories on terminals. But I'm hardly far in the story at all. And for the record, I haven't actually played Undertale yet.)

I don't know what many of you were expecting. My character was freaked by what happened to his wife and son. There seems to be continuity to me. The engine is dated, but oh does it look better than what broke me in New Vegas! The glitches are there (I want to post my shot of Trashcan Carla's 2 headed Ox on top of the workbench/main house). I've seen much worse and way less funny. I love going out, getting into the shit, collecting,discovering new missions and areas, and stumbling into the main story line. As for mouse complaints (I play with a controller-pc) I wonder how many of you gave Dark Souls a pass. Yes, this is a shooting game, but I find myself getting the job done and not just with VATS. But I understand this complaint the most.

I haven't been pleased by a game like this for a while. If I have any complaint at all, it's that I do not find creating settlements...I'll get used to it, need to find some wire. But I love to go out into the world alone, except with maybe the dog, and get into it. The negatives are not so adversely affecting me like some of you here. In this case I appreciate a glass three quarters full, and I won't come back to this thread unless there is a reason.

Fallout 4 is actually a pleasant surprise to me. Fallout has always been a distant second fiddle to the Elder Scrolls in my heart - Fallout 3 was addictive but not phenomenal and New Vegas never got the hold on me it did on so many others (Caravan was a cool game, though) so I was a little surprised with myself when I decided I had an itch it would scratch and bought it on release day.

I can't argue that the game doesn't have some jank. I haven't encountered quite the scale of it that some have, but it does have bugs. I can't argue it's anywhere near the best looking game of 2015 (or 2013, for that matter). And I can't argue that the mobility is on par with a game like the Witcher. And I think they should be a lot more ambitious with the aesthetic. And they need to tweak item weights, because you hit your encumbrance ceiling way too quickly. To be clear, I don't think this game is a 5/5, but here is what I think people are not giving it enough credit for, in terms of iterating on the Bethesda formula. Excuse the wall of text, but there are a lot of pages of hate to counter.

1) Improvements in facial design. There are some very good ones in this game. Lighting settings make a big difference in how good they look, but in Fallout 3, everyone looked like Paul McCartney. In this, take a character like Piper and find me anyone who looked nearly as good in Fallout or even Skyrim. Even minor characters can sometimes look quite good.

2) Improvements in combat. The shooting in Fallout 4 is downright good, sounds good, good feedback, and playing it as an FPS is often more effective than VATS. Then add on the critical strike system, the ability to call in reinforcements and artillery strikes, the need to target powerful enemies' limbs (which was always just a novelty in 3) and I think that Fallout 4 is a far more varied combat experience, as well.

3) The story. By and large this is the thing that's surprised me most. I don't think it's because of the VA, because at least in the case of the male character, I think that his generally mild and reasonable tone doesn't fit the story very well. But here are some things that have happened in the story that were legitimately cool and not just "for a Bethesda game". (Heavy Spoilers for maybe the halfway point in the game? Maybe less?)

I rescued a Brotherhood of Steel patrol, and they signaled their home base about the threat of the Institute, who sent a fucking armored dirigible to impose order on the Commonwealth by force. I led an aerial assault on a Super Mutant fortress with them with vertibirds circling overhead providing fire support. Though I am currently working with them, their single-minded determination to kill all Synths along with the people who create them has me legitimately concerned that I may have to betray them later.

I discovered my son had been partially raised by the man who had killed my wife, and after killing him, went on a trek through his memories that revealed his life's choices, how he grew so embittered and how his choices led him to that outcome. It was nicely handled, sort of like the ME3 thing where you see the Geth's memories, except more interactable and with an engaging personality in narration.

I helped a science robot frustrated with the limitations of her hardware transfer into a synth, and got to watch as she found the new sensations she experienced in her living body distracted her from her intended purpose of finding scientific inspiration.

4) Weapon and armor modification. Looking for your 10mm pistol to be a light, short-range submachine gun? No problem. Want it to be a heavy armor piercing precision weapon? You can do that too. And if you have your eye on something in particular you want to make but you don't have the supplies, tag it in one of your settlements and when you find scrap that can provide the needed materials, they will be marked, making it far more worthwhile to scavenge than it ever had been before.

So yeah, the wasteland is still the wasteland, and deathclaws are still deathclaws, but to say that Fallout 3 is something like the incremental equivalent to Uncharted 3 over Uncharted 2 is totally misguided, and to say that it is yet another example of Bethesda's inability to tell stories is not quite so irrefutable an argument as it has been in the past.

It's pretty bad. The writing here is pretty poor. The main enemy here is the most interesting because of it's concept, but it's severely under utilized. Not one moment has happened that made me realize the threat they pose. No dramatic twist, or big shocking moment where you the player got tricked by a Synth. In NV the first time I walked into Nipton, I immediately realized the threat the legion posed, and that these guys were NUTS. Not to mention the NCR did some really messed up stuff too. Made that games factions, and overall story really fantastic.

@edgaras1103: I think you're more onto the real problem here though, expectations. I think much of the reason I get "more immersed" by Fallout than say Witcher 3 is because I don't view them as similar games. They might share a lot of classifications and concepts, but the core experience is vastly different. To me Witcher 3 is an elaborate fantasy "epic". I kinda view it as a book come to life (which it sorta really is). Fallout on the other hand is much more of a simulation. Witcher is all about experiencing the big set pieces and interesting characters, Fallout is about exploring the wastelands and discovering funny and interesting tidbits.

With that in mind I feel like they both play to their strengths. Witcher needs to look great because it's about the spectacle, but Fallout doesn't because it's about the "small moments". And in the same way most of the "icons" on the Witcher map are just boring repetitive cookie cutter events, while almost every single location in Fallout is unique and has something strange or interesting going on.

After seeing some GOTY threads pop up here recently I've been thinking a lot about these things. Trying to piece together something of a list myself I've had a really hard time trying to rate all these open-world games I've played this year, and I pretty much came to the conclusion that I can't. They've all been great at what they tried to do, but they all also did very different things.

As someone who's never played a Fallout game before, I'll say that I'm enjoying it so far (about 15 hours in). It's got a good atmosphere, the shooting is acceptable, and the overall options the game gives you seem vast.

My biggest negatives about the game revolve around movement and menu stuff. The movement overall seems stiff, and I share Jeff's sentiment in the Quick Look about the lack of movement options aside from that little jump. And coming from playing hundreds of hours on MGSV as well, I think the inventory management in this game is actually worse. It may be that I'm not familiar with all the options yet (as a lot of people weren't in MGSV i.e. loadouts) but the menus don't seem clear on certain things, and could use some more distinct categorization. Like when I'm pressing in the left stick to sort stuff, it doesn't say in what way things are being sorted as far as I can tell; I just have to guess ("maybe this is being sorted by damage now?"). But even if it is telling me, and I'm just not seeing it, the menus overall seem clunky.

I also wish the game had better default controls for mouse and keyboard. Generally I think most people playing FPS's on PC will go for mouse and keyboard. But again, the menu stuff doesn't seem optimized for it on default. For example, when scrapping stuff in a settlement, it's mouse to look at an object, R to open the scrap menu, and then enter to confirm the scrap. Which means you have to move one of your have to the enter button, or use you thumb on your mouse hand to his the num-pad enter button. And unlike while using the gamepad, you cannot sprint while using the workshop editor when using M+K. (Also, the keyboard doesn't work when a gamepad is plugged in, whereas all other PC games I've played this year have allowed me to switch between the two on the fly).

On the topic of bad tutorials. The stuff you need to know is there, but the game doesn't shove it in your face (hence "bad tutorials I guess). Instead, you have to dig into the "help" option in the pause menu, which I never do in games because they tell me in the game what I need to do. But it's in the "help" menu that the game tells you how to link generators to things and so on; instead of just a short tutorial message that flashes across the screen for a few seconds.

It may be wrong to compare this game to other big open-world titles of the year. It's a game with many moving parts made by a smaller team. Yet that doesn't change my experience with it. But I'll keep playing it since it's my first Fallout game.

@nasp: Well it seemed like his point was that the npc's have needs, like in the sims. And then use their advanced ai to fulfil those. That they need food and sleep just like they need to be able to breathe.

You cant starve npc's in fallout, just when it is the right time of day they go look for food. And regardless of whether they find any, when the next beat hits they forget about food and go look for a bed.

@ares42: I don't know man. Witcher 3 and the whole trilogy resonated with me because of these small moments/ emotional character interactions. Shit, the first cutscene after the dream when Geralt talks with Vesemir about his dream encapsulates why I like Witcher 3 so damn much. And come on , I can say about fallout the same thing, you get in to a cave shoot stuff , loot stuff, get unique weapon, rince and repeat. Every witcher contract, every treasure hunt had unique context/flavor to it and for the most part unique location. Sure bandit camps and monster nests are same shit but it was never boring for me because the world looks so freaking gorgeous and the atmosphere is soo good.

I do agree fallout has its wacky unique stuff and that is awesome. And the shooting feels quite nice. The best part in fallout 4 for me is when it's just me, the wasteland and my dog. Exploring ran shacked houses before the dawn, breathing in the atmosphere and ambient music. The worst when some dude who lost his wife and son talks with npc in a cutscnene about boatfly glands and is not fazed by anything.

And I did not had that problem with Oblivion and Skyrim, I was enamoured with these worlds and I was fully immersed because my character was a blank non voiced slate. Lack of 3rd person cinematic cutscenes helped so much to believe in the world.

All in all I would like to care about something in Fallout 4 besides loot and leveling up.

So now I'm about 40 hours in and still enjoying it a hell of a lot. The negativity around this game kind of baffles me because this game is 150% exactly what I was expecting when I bought it. Yes of course it has flaws but I basically knew what they were when I was giving Bethesda my money. Especially after their E3 footage. I just don't really know where people got the idea that this game would be anything other than Fallout 3:2, especially after Skyrim. Wishful thinking and nostalgia I guess.

Well it depends on how you look at it.Sure its not like if they dont eat they die and go away,but they still are programmed to find food as if they really needed it and thats the point.Whether they need to eat the food to live is irrelevant to the fact that the ai and systems have alot more to them then other games and that they still are programmed to have ai that is more alive and less static.When you have almost all characters in the game programmed to live their own life to a degree like this,you are going to have times where it breaks.The more going on,the higher chance of a problem.No other developer has a open world this big,with this many characters that run a farm,run a store,find food and go to sleep at the same time,while plotlines and random encounters happen as well.Obviously we should expect the best as consumers,but i think its important to have the right expectations for a game this big,with this much going on,and with a dev team that is smaller than most AAA devs or open world devs,including the wither 3 which is considered a small dev team by many.

Maybe other developers have better learned how to strike a balance between having an open world with "dynamic" AI versus actually filling their games with something meaningful. Maybe Bethesda should learn from them. I would be all for them bringing down the size of the world if it meant they improved the quality of it because let's be real, a lot of the world is just empty anyway.

I would absolutely not want to see them reduce the scope of their games. The 'empty' parts of the game are what makes the other parts meaningful. The presence of many buildings and rooms that have basically nothing but garbage in them makes it way more rewarding when you find something exploring some random part of the map. Exploration is basically the main point of the game, not main-lining a story.

@nasp: Yup, it was all very impressive, back when oblivion came out. At this point the system has hardly changed since then, and it's still just as janky.

These basic routines are there for a lot of npc's in the witcher as well, just a little less fluid. Which hardly matters for the player ecperience except that it's morr reliable.

Anyway, it's important to remember the post i was replying to for context. The bethesda ai isnt the greatest thing in the world, both in terms of what it actually does and how often it doesn't work that great.

This.The scope is what makes me love their games.Take it away and i wont want to play them.

True it hasnt changed,but i like it and nobody else does it exactly like them.Also,for the most part i think the AI has worked pretty good in all their games,but like i said before,everyones experience with bugs is different.Most of the little problems ive ever had with AI were never gamebreaking and always funny.I just think there are people who like how bethesda does things and people who dont.I like how they do things and so do lots of others.If others dont thats completely ok,and they have the right to complain about the games they make,just like i can disagree with them.

About 30 hours in and I couldn't agree more. The game's by and large more Fallout and I'm ok with that. The new stuff's kind of a hodgepodge, but there's more good stuff than bad.

@cthomer5000: You can pare down the size of a map without reducing the scope of the game because (hopefully) there is more to it than how much landmass the map encompasses. As you get older you more readily recognize tedium for what it is. Wandering a huge empty map is perhaps novel for the first half hour, but after that those of us with limited time just become annoyed that that kind of stuff stands in the way of us accomplishing anything meaningful during the smaller blocks of time to play. I want to get something done if I have thirty minutes or an hour other than just walking.

But why does Fallout have to be that game ? There's plenty of other games out there that serves that playstyle, why is it bad for a game to be different ? If you look at what people enjoying the game is saying the "tedium" is part of what makes it enjoyable. For a game to have a good sense of exploration you have to have areas to explore.

As others have said, I never said the AI were real people. I said that they go find things to do. Just this very concept adds a level of dynamic programming that most games don't even attempt. The bottom line is that judging it next to games that don't even attempt what it does is an unfair comparison. No matter which game you think would win that debate.

I read a review of the game by a guy who was complaining about how "janky" it was when a character (preston) got hung up walking from city to city. All I could think was, "You're not blown away by the fact that the game even ATTEMPTS that?!?!" Most games would merely blink him from one spot to the next. That's the "safe" way to do it. The fact that Bethesda attempts to make the world "live" at all costs is why you get the occasional glitch. It's the cost of doing business.

I stand by The Witcher 3 not attempting to do half of what Fallout does. I'm not saying Witcher is a bad game. I'm not even saying it's a worse game. i AM saying it doesn't attempt to do a user-created character. It doesn't attempt to do a party system. The Witcher doesn't attempt to have you build settlements. The Witcher 3 doesn't have you able to pick up and interact with almost every item in the game world. The Witcher 3 doesn't have object physics. Etc.

These are all gameplay choices, and you can say they are smart or not by virtue of your own estimation, but the fact that they are different objectives is a non arguable.

@subjugation: I think the game just isnt for you.I love walking around the world and so do others,so i think you are just going to need to find another game that fits your criteria.

Yes. that's exactly what I'm saying. You're upset that characters will walk into frame while you're having a conversation? Well most games would jump to a cutscene for that conversation and have a canned cinematic with canned animations. Most games would freeze time while the conversation is happening. Most games would have the NPCs clip through one another and not react when they make contact with one another. So, yes, most games would solve those problems by not attempting to do what Bethesda does. It's a trade off.

Apparnetly, a good number of people would RATHER the game have canned cinematic for conversations since that would make the game look "like a movie", which is what a lot of people seem to want, but the reality is that it's unfeasible for the size of Fallout.

@bananasfoster: How would freezing time when you're in a conversation or putting you into a more cinematic mode take away from the experience? They don't need all those complex AI subroutines working in the background when you're talking to someone and 90% of the screen is their, quite poorly modeled, face. So, yes thats exactly what I want, canned cinematic conversations that possibly have a few more graphical touchups going on to pretty up the models. Hell, do it like Rage did it, whatever as long as it doesn't break a ton of shit why wouldn't you do it that way? I can't remember the last time I talked to an NPC and saw someone walk by in the background and thought "wow, the immersion, only in a Bethesda game." More often than not something would break, or the camera wouldn't find a good spot and I'd be looking at an NPC from the ground up, no clipping into their chin, and likewise I'd think "only in a Bethesda game."

I would love for them to just make Boston at 1:1 scale and make everything huge, have tons of space in between "real stuff" so that you have to travel way more than now. Empty lands are awesome when done right, they make you feel lonely and give you the idea that you're a in real place and not some theme park with the next attraction around the corner. Never understood people complaining about "empty lands," that's exactly what immerses you in the world and we need more of it. people wanting smaller maps because they want to travel less are missing the point imo.

I would wager I'm older than at least 90% of posters here, and I still disagree with you. I think you'd be sucking a lot of the core essence out of these games if you couldn't walk 10 feet without running into something.

If you can only play in 30 minute blocks, than it's probably better to just pass on Bethesda games rather than wish they'd be altered to fit your play-style. It obviously resonates with a lot of people, jank and all.

@tackystuff: I realized when the only "Bethesda" game I liked enough to beat isn't even a Bethesda game (New Vegas), that I straight up don't like Bethesda games past Oblivion. It's a crying shame they didn't use any of the ideas Obsidian came up with for New Vegas, because it is better than Fallout 3 in nearly every way (except for there's less enemies for those who like that part most). Narratively it's much stronger, the locales are more interesting (for example, most of the Vaults actually had a real character to them, the towns all had a different theme and story to them), and I like a lot of the characters (Rose, Raul, Yes Man, Boon holy shit Boon, Veronica) and even the characters I didn't like I felt like they had interesting conflicts within their respective groups groups (This goes for most of the Brotherhood of Steel officers as well as most named NCR officers, specifically when you get to the big camp near New Vegas). There was plenty of dark, sinister shit going on and it was just a cool as world to be in. It's still one of my favorite games of last generation. So much so that I had to buy it 3 damn times (Red ring'd on Xbox, got stuck in the explosion in one of the vaults due to save state on ps3, eventually got a PC that could run it well) to beat it. Obsidian is a hell of a development house, I'm still kinda pissed Bethesda burned them so badly, because seeing what they could do with the tech in FO4 would be really good. But yeah fuck Bethesda, I really dislike them as a company atm. I only like the games they publish (New Vegas, Dishonored, Wolfenstein).

I don't care enough to go metabomb it, but Fallout 4 disappoints me.

Then we've settled it. What you want isn't Fallout. That's fine. But taking piss on a game that is doing something, albeit something that you don't want, EXCEPTIONALLY well is just childish.

@bananasfoster said:

I'm upset that a NPC will walk into frame, push the character I'm talking to out of the frame, and then I'm talking to empty air with no reaction from my character. It looks hilarious and stupid and totally pulls you out of the world, and I don't understand how some people find that excusable in 2015. The Witcher didn't do that; it felt far more natural and lifelike and exactly like what Bethesda wanted to do, but didn't pull off. They had the same kind of non-cinematic conversations, with far better lip syncing and a hell of a lot less jank, all while dealing with a similar amount of recorded dialog. Why does their in-engine convos work out, and Fallout's fall flat?

Here's the better question: Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 are all of similar size and scope, accounting for the advances in tech over the years (obviously 3 is the smallest, but it's also the oldest). With that in mind, why are some of the exact same problems present in 4 as they were in those older games, and why in the world didn't Bethesda do anything to correct them? Even if they decided against a new engine, they should obviously be more experienced in creating this scale of game, and had both their experience from Fallout 3/Skyrim and the intervening development time to hammer out the issues that have cropped up over time. But yet they persist.

I've enjoyed my time with Fallout 4 so far, but just as From Software's inability to lock down a consistent frame rate or jank-free camera has gone from cute to unacceptable, so has my tolerance of Fallout's issues. The sooner people stop giving them a pass because they had to "make trade offs" or whatever, the better Fallout will be, because it won't sell otherwise. I know this probably won't convince you, but I'd like to hope that other people will read threads like these and really scrutinize why they're giving them a free ride when they may bust other games for similar problems. It's fine to like the game despite it's faults, but you're poorer for excusing them outright.

It's actually not childish, it's called criticism. If your amazing AI subroutines cause your game to break on a regular basis then maybe it's not worth it for some people and it's totally valid to point that out. I'm still enjoying the game so far but I just had a quest completely break on me. The character I was supposed to talk to bugged out and remained in his combat stance looking for an enemy that wasn't there. I couldn't talk to him to continue my quest. Quitting and reloading the game didn't help either. The character was just wandering around aimlessly. I left the game running hoping that it would eventually work itself out and it did but it took over 15 minutes. That's just one example. My weapons have disappeared multiple times now, which I could only fix with a reload, the camera bugged out to the point that I couldn't see anything, characters glitched to positions where I couldn't reach them, dogmeat got stuck on terrain during a quest for which I needed him. If that's the cost for your ambition, maybe scale it back a little.

It's really, really outdated and really, really good! Fixing the game along the way becomes your job as well as navigating and trying to immerse yourself in this weird Fallout 4 world. And what a fantastic feeling it is if you can. So far I've fixed the clastrophobic field of view, nudged NPCs back into their "tracks" should they stray, watched my dog bite someone so hard they became inside-out-people and floated slowly into the great yonder... gooodbye!

Like MGSV, this is another great game I can recommend fully but only if you're willing to put up with its baggage since I understand it could be very, very deal-breakingy.

I've enjoyed this game so far. I'm about 27 hours in and playing on PC.

The first bug I came into contact with was about 20 minutes into the game (the part where you're getting inducted into the Vault). I looked down and spotted that one of the female NPCs was only wearing underwear. Upon closer inspection, her skirt had clipped through her body and it was all bundled up at the front. At first I thought it was an amusing, intentional wardrobe malfunction, but then it hit me that I was playing a Bethesda game. After that, the first 10 hours or so were surprisingly bug-free.

However, it seems that the frequency of bugs has been increasing the longer I play. I've encountered a glitch where my Pipboy and weapon disappear and I need to restart the game to fix it. When I enter a new area, every so often the framerate will drop for a few seconds and return to normal. Sometimes the framerate completely drops seemingly out of nowhere and it's completely unplayable and I need to restart the game to fix it. I've had a few instances of the camera getting stuck in a wall during dialogue and one instance where an NPC appeared out of nowhere and stood directly between me and the NPC I was talking to. Once in a while, I can hear the echo of an item freaking out somewhere in the vicinity because it has gotten stuck in geometry. The most recent bug I've been struck with is a quest NPC being stuck underground. I hope that the bugs don't become gamebreaking, because they seem to be increasing in severity over time.

The bugs aside, it still has everything I want in a Fallout game. Nothing has drastically changed and everything's familiar. There are small, hilarious/sad/confusing stories scattered around each location. For example: Griswold's poetry journal,the entire USS Constitution questline,that one raider conversation about the lunatic making grenade and motorcycle sound effects to scare people away from him and the Museum of Witchcraft. There's just enough to keep me legitimately fascinated in what I could run into with every location I come across. Bad writing and characters is not something this game truly suffers from, and I don't think the people accusing the game of "bad writing" have truly sunk their teeth into it, because there are a lot of fucking cool details in this game and a lot of great characters. They clearly haven't met Takahashi.

One thing I'm absolutely certain of is that they cannot make another game with this engine.

60 hours in now and I am enjoying what I am playing so far quite a bit. I will say Fallout 4 is alot like a newer version of Fallout 3 which I also enjoyed. The only thing that has bothered me about FO4 is the repeatable quests that never seem to end. Its incredibly lazy game design and also boring.

I do understand the fatigue people getting from playing Bethesda games. I did not enjoy Fallout NV, I also got bored after playing Skyrim for 10-15 hours. I guess the Elder Scrolls world didn't appeal to me. I'd rather be in the wasteland. I would not put FO4 in the same league with Witcher 3 and MGSV, as they're far more superior for story writing and game play.

As for bugs, glitches and performance. I haven't really had any issues except for the dumb companion AI which I was expecting. I played with a solid 60fps on pc with an i7 oc to 4ghz, gtx780 sc and 8gb ram. i only had to change the FOV to 90, turn off mouse accel in the .ini. Playing with window borderless and vsync off seemed to get rid of input lag. I feel bad for people playing this on a console though. Sub 30fps and epic-ally long loading times sound like an absolute nightmare. yuck

I'm playing on the PS4 and I haven't had anything even REMOTELY close to what you have had happen, happen. I'm probably 50 or so hours into it and maybe 1/4 (1/5 maybe? Who knows) of the way through the game? (I've been doing a lot of dungeons).

The worst I have had in terms of glitches is a few audio hiccups and a few weird teleportation issues involving comrades. One time the dog showed up in an elevator, randomly, when I hadn't talked to him since the very beginning of the game. But, that was likely to do with the fact that I never formerly dismissed him. I told him to wait in a cave, forgot about him, and just never went back.

I load up the game today, and what's the first thing I see?

I don't know how the hell it got there. It's remained there through fast travels and reloads. I guess I just have a new, unconventional lookout?

Good for you. But a lot of people are having more serious issues, so just because you haven't experienced them doesn't mean they aren't present or infuriating.

Maybe I worded it poorly but I think you misunderstood what I meant. I was simply asking, why can't the world freeze in conversation mode in order to avoid unwanted bad camera angles or occasional NPC collisions? I'm not talking about turning off AI subroutines completely for the entire world. I'm specifically talking about conversations locking you into an isolated mode, ONLY when speaking to another character. Is that really not Fallout anymore? What if the game world froze VATS style when you're conversing with someone, sort of like when you enter barter mode? They're already halfway there with the camera panning cinematically at times to show your character speaking - why not go all the way and make it fully isolated, turn off AI, freeze everything and fill up the screen with the NPC you're talking to? I don't think that would fundamentally change anything about the way the game looked or played, it would just reduce the possibility of screwups.

Do you still think that would make it not Fallout anymore? Is it that radical? It seems like it's a fairly easy fix for a common problem, but then again I'm no game dev and I'm sure the guys at Bethesda would look at this suggestion and and be like "buddy we wish it were that easy!"

Actually i think my biggest problem with the game atm is the annoying habit of the companion to block critical pathways during combat. Dogmeat has a tendency to stand in doorways blocking my attempts of trying to get out of the line of fire into other room.

Actually the companions tend to block doorways also during exploring. There has been plenty of occasions where I am just trying to get out of a room and Dogmeat is just standing there blocking the access.

So now that I've messed around with the game for about 20-25 hours or so and not having the game grab me, I think I've put my finger on what I find lacking - the game has so far failed to provide me with a single, memorable moment (or at least positive ones. I've had plenty of truly awful, progress stopping bugs crop up).

If I think back to other Bethesda games, there was always at least one or two moments, and usually several, that at the time I found so incredible that I'll remember them for the rest of my gaming life. For example, I'll always remember the moment in Oblivion when you stepped out of the sewers for the first time. That game is obviously nothing special by today's standards, but at the time, walking out into this vast world with a ruin in the distance was pretty cool.

And other games that have come out this year have provided plenty of great moments. I won't soon forget the bat-shit opening level of MGSV, or the Bloody Baron story-line from the Witcher 3. Those are things that are going to stick with me. Things that I'll remember and tell my friends about and look back on in a few years and think about how cool it was.

By contrast, Fallout 4 just kind of is. It's competent enough I suppose, if you can soldier through the jank, but it isn't really offering anything incredibly unique. It's doing the same things that Bethesda has done for awhile now but isn't really adding anything meaningful. They've done the "leave the opening dungeon into the bright sunlight trick" four games in a row now and, frankly, it's gotten old. About the closest thing the game's got that I haven't seen before is the "we'll say your first name!" thing, which in addition to being completely one off isn't that cool, all things considered (plus, it's always "Mr. Firstname," which is something that personally bothers the living fuck out of me when customer reps do it in real life. We don't need that shit in video games too). Beyond that, the environments are all kind of samey, the graphics are nothing special, the game doesn't run that well on consoles, and the story, dialogue, and voice acting feel childish in a post-Witcher world.

The game just doesn't compare favorably with other recent games and it doesn't do enough of its own thing to be memorable. I think the game is good enough for me to finish, but it's so bland that in a few years I'll be confusing it with Fallout 3.

@lawgamer: The one specific moment that has stuck with me is the appearance of the (spoiler for the end of the "Reunion" quest which took place about 20 hours into my playthrough) Brotherhood of Steel. The way that airship glides in, vertibirds in tow, blaring "We come in peace!" as it more or less blocks out the sun had me pretty impressed. Other then that, I agree it's lacking in the kind of moments that felt pretty effortless to a game like MGSV, where I wanted to tell my friends about every mission I completed and how crazy some of my solutions were.

I'm just going to hop back into this thread to say that, for whatever reason, every single one of my 50-odd save files has been corrupted which has caused the loss of 50+ hours of gameplay. There is clearly some major issue with the way Fallout syncs to the cloud. So, I suppose I won't be playing this game again for a while - at least until mods come out.

@crysack: What platform are you playing on?

PC.

On topic but from a different angle:

You know that conversation people had and still pops up that it just looks like slightly prettier Fallout 3? So yeah, while in some aspects and places the game does look much better graphically, there are just as many I found that look like they are straight up from fallout 3 seven years ago, like holy shit some areas just look sooo simplistic, bare bones and flat (from a technical perspective, not a "this is a wasteland" perspective). I was doing the start of the BoS quest line searching for scouts and in the satellite array with suprmutants decided to look at another place nearby while climbing them, oh boy... not a pretty sight.

@tennmuerti: I've been playing for about 20 hours now and my biggest complaint about the world - that carries over from Fallout 3, New Vegas and Skyrim - is that it's sprawling but lacks real character. You go into these towns and you see people living in a hut that is 4 walls, a dirty mattress and maybe a night stand with typical trash strewn about. Everywhere you go interiors are this simplistic setup that reuses the same 3 bed types. I can never really feel like I'm in a living breathing world when all the towns are so.. I don't know, fake? I get that it's a huge world and it takes time to craft these locations but the re-used assets make nearly every settlement look the same. Sure Diamond City is a lot different from Good Neighborhood on the outside (although not by much) but you go anywhere indoors and it's the same dilapidated interiors that offer little in terms of variety. I know it's the post apocalypse but is no one trying at all? Why does everyone live in complete filth even when it's an ostensibly civilized location? Not everyone is a master engineer or carpenter but you'd think maybe some would at least paint the walls - it's completely immersion breaking after you've seen the same exact assets in a dozen locations.

I just recently had to go kill an assassin and she was holed up on the second floor of a rundown building in a single room that just had a pile of rubble in the corner. I guess she was just passing by on the way to the next contract? I don't know.. It certainly doesn't help that, as you mentioned, a lot of the graphics look like they're straight up pulled from Fallout 3 which wasn't the prettiest game 7 years ago.

@tennmuerti: Yep, graphics all over the place in this game. Sometimes it looks so pretty, like when it's sunny and you got that atmospheric lighting through trees and shit. Or when indoors and there's some heavy light shining on a face (sometimes the skin shaders look pretty good).

But other times... holy shit. All lighting is so obviously baked indoors, it doesn't even match the outdoor situation. A building most of the time consists of a cube with window textures slapped on it. There were rumors that this game has been developed as a cross-gen joint and I can totally see that.