Posted 11 November 2015 - 02:33 PM
All I can say is that two evenings in (about ten hours), I'm having a blast.
I've been living the suburban dream, survived a nuclear attack, been frozen, had my wife murdered and my son kidnapped, shot rad-roaches, huge mosquitos, and mole-rats, found a dog I can play with, created leather armour (with pockets so I can carry more stuff), modified a pistol into a sniper rifle, found a suit of power armour and a Gatling gun, battled a Deathclaw, started a settlement, built a house with beds, tables, and chairs, installed water pumps and tilled a field of potatoes. It has rained radioactive rain, it's been sunny, foggy so I hardly could see ten feet in front of me, day, night, dusk and dawn, I've been down a molerat hole and found a second power core for my power armour. And I've yet to move out of the first three locations on the huge map.
In Fallout 3 you were in the wasteland; unless I misremember there's about three live plants in the whole of the game. In Fallout 4 I spent half an hour just picking flowers; there's things growing everywhere - and you can use all of it. Chemistry crafting is a thing, as is weapon crafting, armour crafting, power armour crafting, and of course settlement crafting. Oh, and cooking.
As for the skill system, yeah, it takes a bit of getting used to. but just think of perks as skills and you're set. Every time you level you get to pick a perk; it can be one that raises a SPECIAL stat, it can be one that you already have so it'll increase in effectiveness, or it can be a new one. Most perks have between two and five levels, and I find that this means you get even more freedom in how you build your character, since the only limit on which perks you can get is how high a score you have in the corresponding SPECIAL stat - and you can always raise that. There is also a level requirement for the higher perk levels, but as of right now that is not an issue for me; I'm still working on getting the perks I want the first rank in.
Skill books like Grognak the Barbarian no longer gives skill increases, but instead give perk increases; the first one you find will give you the first level of the Barbarian perk, if you find any more they will raise your rank in that perk. Bobbleheads increase a SPECIAL stat or a perk.
The shooting bits are much improved since Fallout 3; there's iron sights for most weapons, and scopes for sniper rifles. You can hold left Alt to hold your breath while aiming to remove the sway - but it saps your AP, so you can't do it forever.
Enemy AI is also vastly improved; enemies try to take cover from your shots, they dodge, and they seem to work together to take you out. Running into a ghoul pack is a pants-changing experience.
All this at a comfortable 60 fps with very little in the way of bugs. Yes, there's been some aesthetic ones, where subtitles got stuck or someone talked without their lips moving, but no showstoppers, no game-breaking ones. The UI is made for the consoles, but you get used to it after a while; a couple of hours in and it ceased being an issue.
I'm sure there's more to say when I've done a few more hours, but if the early game is any indication I'll probably spend just as much time or more on this as I have done on Fallout 3, Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind - which is to say several hundred hours (I've logged 300+ hours on each of FO3, Skyrim, and Morrowind, Oblivion only 100 or so. FO:NV? 65 hours, didn't enjoy the cowboy vibe).
So TL;DR: I really don't know what the people giving the game bad reviews were expecting, but I'm hard-pressed to believe it was a Fallout game from Bethesda.
9
It is hard to, though, since the first one was so magical.
