I played all of the Fallout games to ready myself for Fallout 4. ALL OF THEM! The first 2 are horribly outdated and i wouldn't recommend anyone playing them, Tactics is garbage, 3 hasn't aged well and i left most of the map markers unexplored, as most of them are copy/pasted from 4-5templates. New Vegas is defiantly the one that has aged the best and in my opinion has the best story and roleplaying in the franchise -above 4 too. All that leaves us with Fallout 4, a game i've been immensely excited to play and that sadly disappointed me a whole lot. Where to start? The gameplay is the best the franchise has ever had but the story, the story takes some turns and becomes really poorly designed. The beginning was captivating as you start in pre-war America and the middle portion is interesting but the endings -yes i got all of them- are shit. Not only is this the Fallout game with least roleplaying aspects to it but the lack of simply saying "No" to things is disheartening. The worst part of the endings are that they leave me dissatisfied, sure, Fallout 3 didn't really have any plot divergence but the ending atleast made me feel like the journey was worth it but not in Fallout 4. This is the one Fallout game i have zero desire to play the story ever again and that says alot.
Furthermore the game is rippled with bugs. I've never been in the camp of "It's a Bethesda game so bugs are alright" but i tend to play their games awhile after release, this time i got it on release and oh boy it's something. Countless times has my weapon just disappeared out of my hands and left me defenseless against enemies. At one point my power armor just vanquished and when i loaded an earlier save, i couldn't get into it again, loading an even earlier save and got my armor and lost a half hour. I've had plenty of other bugs aswell.
The game doesn't look great and i was prepared to forgive it for that if the story was any good but considering the above, i have to say the game doesn't look great and it runs even worse. I can't fathom the complexities between game engines but i can say that i have seen alot better looking games than Fallout 4 and all of them run tremendously better than Fallout 4, further more, the game was capped at 50fps for me, which is an odd number to cap it at, i would have uncapped it in the gamefiles but considering all the glitches and flying cows i had in Skyrim, i thought it was better not to.
The settlement system only comes into play in an optional mission near the end and can be as the dev said "entirely ignored", i would have hoped there to be an ending where you could take control of the commonwealth with your army of minutemen but that never came to fruit.
Even if Bethesda proclaimed there to be more dialogue in this game than any of the other games they have done like it, it doesn't feel like it, there is a lack of worldbuilding dialogue, like explanations and talking about the world in general, it feels shallow. The game is said to be bigger than Skyrim and this is another thing that doesn't feel so, it feels smaller than Skyrim but that's just a feels thing.
I'm hugely disappointed by this game, the gameplay is fine, just not the story, RPG elements or player influence.