@gavin gold I would say it makes the game "bad" by the standards that are already imposed on it from the player's perspective. FO4 is a "bad" RPG, but a great shooter.

Who decides which one it is? Well, it's going to be in the eye of the beholder.

Personally, I think classic Fallout fans are the loudest. They love to shit on FO4 because what they EXPECT is a good RPG. However, the $$$ comes from the silent majority per se, the ones who could care less how deep an RPG is but love the shooting mechanics in 4. I just call them the silent majority because they don't scream as loud as the other side.

You have to love it for what it is. It was not designed to be a game comparable to Fallout 2. Is that wrong? No, of course not. As I said, I invested hours and hours into it.

But was I incredibly disappointed in it when I compared it to other Fallout titles? Titles that laid the foundation that this one was built upon? Hell yes.

I love your points though, especially on the main quest. I think you missed what I was trying to argue however...

What I meant is, I think the question of whether or not to pursue the main quest was not as heavy on the player as it is for other Beth titles. Oblivion and Skyrim as well.

In Skyrim, your DESTINY as the Dragonborn is to stop Alduin. I think if you don't touch the main quest (don't go to Whiterun to see the Jarl), I think that your fate as a character isn't exactly compromised and I think you are capable of doing whatever you want. Same with Oblivion, if you don't travel to Jauffree than you are simply an escaped prisoner, free to make whatever life you want.

FO4 however, added the weight of YOUR SON WAS KIDNAPPED to the main quest. There is no opportunity for another motive. The other games at least provided that small window where you had the choice of starting the main quest or write your own tale as someone else. I don't think the Sole Survivor was given that opportunity.

Even the Courier more or less had a choice of whether or not to pursue Benny. Logically, it would have made more sense for them to get the hell out of the Mojave after they woke up in Goodsprings but it just doesn't work that way. I guess I just see it being more necessary that the SS chase after Shaun than the Courier chase Benny.

Maybe it's just me being a father and having my own child, I would scorch the earth to find him if he was missing. But if I got shot in the head and robbed, I don't know if I would be feeling all Liam Neeson and track them down. Hopefully I communicated that to how it sounded in my head.

@Sirdanest Yeah, I don't mind voiced characters either. I actually prefer them. I'm simply hypothesizing that having a voiced character may be behind that immersion breaking for some people.

Also, just a small observation. I'm actually fresh out of law school and I can absolutely tell you I've found people with 1 charisma and 1 intelligence. XD

@Tribal Raven Oh, I get what you're saying. Finding your child feels like a much more important issue so you feel pressured to go for the main quest.

I don't think the matter is that finding your child is a more urgent or important goal though, is that is a more personal goal, it resonates more with people because it's much more relatable. But I would actually argue that in that case, FO4 does it better than NV, not worse.

The most important thing about a story is that it is engaging. I had a really tough time relating to the main quest in NV. I kept thinking "Why are we pursuing this guy again? Are you sure it's a good idea?" I guess I can understand the revenge angle, but I just don't have that iron work ethic that would make me risk my life to complete what (at the beginning seems to be, at least) a menial job. To me, if you're going to go for such a lousy story you might as well have no story at all. Of course, it gets better as you progress through it, but at first I was just sort waiting for it to get interesting. With FO4 however, I was instantly hooked. It adds some level of purpose to everything you do from that point on.

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Personally, I think classic Fallout fans are the loudest. They love to shit on FO4 because what they EXPECT is a good RPG. However, the $$$ comes from the silent majority per se, the ones who could care less how deep an RPG is but love the shooting mechanics in 4. I just call them the silent majority because they don't scream as loud as the other side.

Yep, that's me. An by the way, you're right. Because to this day, FO4 is the most successful title in the franchise.

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I would say it makes the game "bad" by the standards that are already imposed on it from the player's perspective. FO4 is a "bad" RPG, but a great shooter.

That's exactly what I'm saying. If you release it with a different name, everyone would love it. But because it's called Fallout people just have the preconceived notion of what a fallout game is, and when it doesn't fit their expectation they equate that with being a bad game. Even though they'll later go and play COD or some other fps that has none of the RPG elements they claim they absolutely need, but somehow they still love it.

I'm coming from fallout 1 and 2 -- if you've played that with a 1 intelligence, it's like a whole new game. To most people you sound like "ME FIND ... GECK! GIVE GECK!" But when you talk to other low intelligence characters, your dialogue is more like, "Well hello my dear friend. Goodness, I'm looking for a piece of technology, the garden of eden creation kit. Might you have one?" The 1 stat in intelligence probably meant something very, very different in fallout 4, like, "Slow learner" rather than "caveman with a head injury and a speech impediment."

Paraphrasing as it's been too long to remember the exact details, but a 1 in any stat back then could practically up-end your game into a whole new world. Not going to happen in a modern voiced fallout game, I suspect, even if you could re-unite the original developers.

And yeah, if fallout had never existed, and Bethesda didn't already have a reputation and a long list of past games, f4 would have been absolutely beloved with a fanatic fanbase. People claim it changed the tone from the previous games, but they've all done that, they all change the tone a little each time. It was one of the reasons people cited for not liking fallout 3, and then again the reason some people didn't like new vegas... the tone, the color scheme, the setting, the look and feel and seriousness and side quests and such had changed.

But it sounds like '76 was actually a genuinely bad game rather than just being something other than what some people wanted.

What perplexes me is that no pc user still that I'm aware of expresses rage at skyrim or new vegas for its unpatched, unmodded state. (They used to, in the first few months, I remember) But people will scream and scream at fallout 4, sometimes for things that were modded out ages ago, like not being able to kill Preston. Go ahead, kill Preston. It's fantastic. No more map marking, because now YOU'RE going the reason settlements need help. "Mark THIS, Preston." Heh heh heh.

Mod your game, just like you did with Skyrim and New Vegas, right?

Love Fallout 4 to death with mods, but I thought the main story was very cliché. I thought it could have been much better.

The other thing I dislike about the game is Preston Garvey. He was very annoying to me, since he does nothing but send you on fetch quests.

Those are my biggest gripes with Fallout 4, aside from the ancient dinosaur that is the Creation Engine.

Making the game, and then selling it for money...

Okay, that's a bit harsh. I think the thing that really killed it for me, to the point that I STILL haven't bought or played the game, was the obvious removal of player agency. We're not playing ourselves, we're playing their characters, with their limited range of interactions and decisions. They also utterly gutted the skill and perk system and I frankly got fed up with Skyrim's constellation system really fast, and this was looking to be even worse.