Fallout 4 kind of in a weird place where it's simultaneously a bad Fallout game and arguably the best Bethesda game.

Thank you

That's how I've described fallout 4 since it first came out. Nice to see someone else had the same thought. It's a great game and I've put a ton of time into it and I play through it every 2 years at most.

But it's really not a great fallout game. The game overall is excellent but it feels the least fallout-y, to me at least.

Play Morrowind and your opinion might change on them having to be shallow. It's hard to get into, but it is the 3D one that takes its world very seriously.

For example, there's a faction that uses magic and levitation is a thing in Morrowind. Their buildings are built vertically with shafts connecting floors you almost have to levitate through. Skyrim did these in the DLC that includes some of Morrowind, but they just made them floaty elivators, not a skill your character can use.

It is hard to get into though. The key thing to know is its actually an RPG. Your character stats matter more than your player skills. If you aren't trained in using a sword, you aren't going to be able to use one effectively. The game won't stop you from trying, but you'll miss a lot. Also things like using up your stamina sprinting (what feels like normal speed) and being tired makes your character tired and they can't hit things. They'll also be worse with bartering/talking with people because basically they're standing there drenched in sweat and panting, which doesn't look nice and people don't really like dealing with it.

Bethesda has strayed far from this path though and I doubt we'll ever see it come back.

Also, the only temporarily impactful decision you make is which flavor if the final mission you'll do. You don't actually have to choose one until the very end. You can somehow be not just friendly, but high rank with all four at the same time, despite the conflict of interest.

They make you think your making choices sometimes (though honestly rarely in F04 because of the dialog system you mentioned), but you never do really. It's an alright survival shooter thing, but a bad RPG. You choose abilities, but you rarely choose a role. You're given your role at the start, and your only choice is to follow it.

Heh, I'm probably the opposite. I like the settlement building capability in the engine, but don't feel that Bethesda's done a lot with it in any of their games.

In Fallout 4 you can make pretty settlements, but there's a very minimal degree to which layout interacts with the game. Putting some walls up around expensive stuff and making enemies need to go past turrets or guard posts helps a bit, but it's basically just SimArchitect. Lay out stuff how you want for fun. That's not bad as such, but I'd like to have more interaction with the game world. Also, using settlements without the Local Leader ability to let settlements trade goods was a pain, which was one of the few useful things in the Charisma tree. There is one quest where one does lay out defenses for a significant fight, bur that's about it.

The Sim Settlements mod introduces settlements that build themselves, which gives you elaborate, evolving things without having to manually do all the work of building them (and can take advantage of newer hardware with larger settlements). That's nice, but it really just provides an opportunity to rebuild nice-looking stuff in without the scrap-hauling and placement drudge work. The mod adds a (fairly extensive) questline, but the actual layout of the cities again doesn't matter much. Avoids the need for Local Leader as a quality-of-life perk, so provides more character build flexibility.

Fallout 76 has some game-important roles to a player's CAMP, but it's basically providing convenient access to workshops and a player vendor. Defensive layout does matter somewhat-more, as attacks when a player isn't present are actually simulated in the game world. You can take and hold certain map locations, sorta a tower defense mode, but there's minimal reward in the game for it. The point is still mostly being Sim Architect for player CAMPs, except now you can show your creations to other players. CAMPs are much smaller than Fallout 4 settlements. You can also have Shelters, which are little areas to free-build off the main world. Like CAMPs, but with a few restrictions, like the inability to have resource-producing items (and automated resource production is very limited, rarely worthwhile). Some players have done neat things that add to the game, but again, just doesn't feel like there's much "game" to it. Fallout 76 has some hard limits on ability to store things in a CAMP -- inventory limitations are a core part of the game.

Starfield has multi-base spanning automated production, and automated production matters, more like a very limited Factorio. However, you can pretty much play the game and ignore that aspect, as the main purpose of getting resources is...building more bases. IIRC, bases don't get attacked when you're away, and defenses aren't an issue. I guess that's nice for people who don't like base-building, but it felt like kind of a pointless loop to me. Not like, oh, Egosoft's X series, where you build out a space empire to get more stuff that unlocks more things. You can buy player homes, but they never felt as useful to me as Home Plate in Fallout 4, as I just usually wasn't passing by the player homes, and the ships are generally more available. I think that those are more aimed at people who want to do interior decoration. Starfield does let you modify ship interiors, but there just isn't a lot of gameplay point to it, though it's probably where I spent the most time. There just isn't that much that happens in your ship.

None of those are bad things, but the base-building aspects just feel kind of decoupled from the game, like a kind of bolted on architectural program. If you want to create your dream space home, I guess that that's fine, but I was kind of hoping for something that heads more in the Sim City or Caesar direction, where there's real gameplay associated with the settlement you build. If one wanted to do just aesthetics, maybe in Fallout 76, let players build new stuff in contests and then whoever builds the neatest gets some award and the structure gets incorporated into the base game, something like that.

Yes!! I felt the same way!

Particularly the ham fisted way it's written, you're really led to choose the railroad path, but I felt I never got a proper explanation on how the institute was bad (the why is clear).

I ended up going with the institute and I got a really underwhelming ending

I put in 1300 hrs into fo4 just for the settlement building. With mods though.

"I heard people complaining about the bed situation...." NPC carrieing a bedroll on her back.

That part about weapons and armour rang true for me as well. I spent a lot of time just wandering the commonwealth looking for junk to upgrade with and levelling my gunsmith up as a result. I think this is the most I've really explored in a game. Personally I didn't really go in looking for anything so I was pleasantly surprised. But I definitely can see how say, someone going in for full role playing immersion from a game wouldn't feel quite the same.

Which modern Fallout game would you suggest for someone who loved the first 2 and generally prefers classic (and modern classic style) RPGs and deep stories?

It revived the game for me. Changed settings so it would grow without my tedious input, so thankful for that. Show up to settlements over time to find evolving cities that are actually worth visiting and make the game feel alive, like you didn’t build every shack in the wasteland personally with the toaster you hauled from a national guard building.

Kind of funny when you know Fallout is a satiric version of USA society

Snow mods in the summer. Desert mods in the winter.

This is my running complaint with most Bethesda RPGs. Just about everything scales by player level, which can put you in situations where enemies are downright impossible to kill if you're too spec'd into non-combats.

not many games go for the scavenger fantasy like fo4. Throw some mods on top of the shaky base and you’ve got the only real good post apocalyptic survival game i can think of.

Not the same genre at all -- it's a turn-based open-world roguelike -- but have you played the open-source Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? I mean, it's directly got some Fallout-inspired content, like power armor, but above-and-beyond that, it's a post-apocalyptic survival scavenger fantasy, and it's a hell of a lot more complex.

Like, you've got regional weather (fog, precipitation, wind) simulated, several nutritional meters (including stuff like going too far over and getting something like iron poisoning), fat reserves and hydration, several types of diseases, parasites, and fungal infections. Maybe the most-sophisticated gun collection out there in video-game-land, plus modeling firearms stuff like multiple sight and optic systems, multiple barrels, gun weight, recoil, different magazine types, different loading mechanisms (including doing things like having a shotgun or magazine-fed weapon with specific types of ammunition, like buckshot or slugs or Dragon's Breath loaded into individual cartridge slots), carrying straps, bipods, brass catchers, Picatinny rails, grenade launchers (including attachable), rocket launchers, energy weapons, flame-projecting weapons, thrown explosives, placed traps. Food spoilage. Various types of carrying cases and aspects of them -- things like straps to attach items via carabiners on some backpacks, multiple "pockets" per container that may have different volumes and maximum dimension constraints on items and may be able to contain different things, like mesh or rigid/nonrigid. Waterproof cases and water damage to some items, like dissolvable drugs or personal electronics. Vehicle construction and damage -- you can build bicycles, cars, tanks, boats, helicopters. Remote cameras and displays. Electrical wiring and power generation and storage systems. Bionic implants. Mutations and associated powers. Various types of melee combat, including a wide variety of martial arts. With mods, multiple magic systems and magic items and psionic powers. Base-building. NPCs. The ability to build and manage NPC camps with NPCs producing things. Agriculture. Ranching. Thermal imaging and electromagnetic vision. Toxins, including airborne and injectable, and protection against same, as well as various environmental hazards, like acid. A cooking system. Food temperature that matters, including freezing damage to some foods. Drugs. Brewing, freezers and refrigerators (both fixed and in vehicles). Biodisel and ethanol fuel production, as well as other various fuel types, including gasoline and JP8. Morale. Sewing, including modification like Kevlar- or fur-lining items, and a material type system including things like removing buttons or zippers or fabric of certain material types (leather, wool, synthetic, cotton, etc) clothing to create something else. Crafting armor. Remote-control vehicles. Quests. Addictions. Radiation. A skill system, with separate "theoretical" and "practical" knowledge in each area. A proficiency system. A perk system. Stats. Personal electronics, like time, temperature-measuring, camera-enabled, display screens (e.g. one can scan books into tablets or smartphones or augmented reality glasses and then read them later). Lighting and shadows. Ocular adjustment time to dark or light conditions. Dwarf Fortress-like underground digging. Procedural map generation including subterranean maps. Enemy tracking via visual, auditory, and olfactory methods (not all of which can use all of these), and methods to mitigate one's signature in these fields. Corpse dissection and resource extraction. Optional "innawoods" play, where one does a no-civilization survival play, just using primitive technology and food preservation. Achievements. Progressive content unlocking. Scenarios, like playing as a prisoner in a prison. Modeling of fires and smoke; one can have wildfires or buildings burning down. Various enemy factions; these can fight or otherwise interact; for example, a fungal faction can "take over" zombies. Water-gathering via raincatchers. Breaking into computer systems. Automated movement (to reduce drudgery of hiking from one map location to another). A configurable notification system. Rules-based searching through recipes and visible items. Ability to have the character perform automated sorting of items. Multiple competing audio and graphical packs.

I got so hooked into the settlement building. Downloaded a handful of settlement mods and spent 3 whole days repairing and outfitting the Castle. Then something happened to my mods folder and I had to redownload them all and didn’t make note of the order I had them in before. Loaded in the game and everything was broken/invisible. Huge letdown and I took a 7 month break. Now I’m getting back to it and finishing the main story before doing the DLCs

At first I dabbled quite a bit with it, decorating up the castle. But as time went on I honestly stopped paying attention to it.