another GOD HOWARD masterpiece :)

thanks to my dear friend mira for this amazing gift :)

I didn't know if I should rate this game positively or negatively, but with recent news of the new pointless update messing up your mods, and postponing the release of the biggest fan project this game have ever seen I can confidently rate this game negatively. There's good, bad and ugly in this game.

I'll be honest from the start, the story sucks ass. Bethesda just took the main point of Fallout 3's story (which wasn't that strong to begin with) and flipped the roles around. So instead of son/daughter looking for dad it's mother/father looking for son. The main quests are extremely 2 dimensional and boring a lot of times. The endings are also not great. You have 4 optoins but from the 4 options 2 are carbon copies of eachother. So you end up with 2 ending that are different in outcome. And there's an M. Night Shyamalan
esque twist in every main questline for whatever reason. There's also the illusion of free choice present throughout the game and it's DLCs. Like for an example a railroad mission, you and Deacon find a special weapon at the end of the quest and he asks you if you want it, your choice doesn't matter, as he gives you the gun no matter what.

So all in all the story is extremely mediocre at bast and just straight up bad in several cases.

One of the strong suits of the game. The gunplay is the best from the 3D games. New Vegas introduced modifications to weapons and 4 improved upon it by a mile. Movement in this game also feels better than in previous 3D titles of this franchise. The biggest selling point for me was the new power armor mechanics. Power armor finally feels like in the first 2 games, and not like glorified metal/combat armor like in 3 and NV. I was a bit sad that you don't require any skill to be able to use power armor (although 1 and 2 didn't have a skill requirement either) especialy with 2 instances.

Firstly your first real quest ends with you entering a power armor and defeating one of the strongest creatures in the Fallout universe, a deathclaw. Which is questionable choice in story writing to get one of the most powerful military equipment in the universe and use it to defeat one of the strongest creatures in the wasteland while being a low level character.

Secondly companoins and NPCs can also wear power armor without a problem. Which is good in the way that you can dress up your favourite traveling buddy in advanced pre-war technology. But also bad, because how did a murderous crackhead (raiders) figured out how to use advanced pre-war equipment which in the previous games required training, The other problem is that a frequent visitor in Sanctuary, a piece of ♥♥♥♥ named Trashcan Carla has the tendency to just enter one of your stored power armors, if you have a fusion core in them, the bad part is that this hag has a fusion core in her inventory sometimes, so she can enter your armor if it's in her vicinity.

One of the bast part of the game is the settlement menu. I have spent a couple of dozen hours decorating and building things in my settlement, it is an amazing feature, which cannot be exploited in anyway to gain almost infinite caps and level up 30 levels in a matter of minutes.

As I already said weapon costumization is an extremely neat feature. But there are some weird choices, like not having a 10 SMG, laser/plasma rifles don't exist in the traditional sense, as they are just modified pistols. The sniper rifle is also dissapointing, the sniper rifle from 3 and NV had such an iconic look. The assault rifle became an abomination that is painful to look at, and made me really miss the Chinese Assault Rifle, which was amazing.

The DLCs are also just utter garbage. While 3 had 5 DLC's with their own storyline/map (1 amazing, 3 great and 1 total crap {Mothership Zeta}), New Vegas had 4, from which all are amazing in a way (and some of those being the best DLCs in gaming history in my opinoin) and then there's this game... 2 DLCs that add anything of value and you can basically ignore every other, more precisely the 1 that has any story.

While Nuka World's story is weaker than Far Harbor's (which is not that amazing to begin with) I enjoyed it much more. Nuka World is an amazing worldspace full of everything that you would expect from an amusement park. The story exists, the problem is that wipping out the raiders (which I always do as they are insufferable) makes the DLCs playtime much shorter. But atleast you still have the cool area to explore.

The second coming of Christ that was supposed to improve the overall story of the game, and it failed in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, it definetelly if better than the story of the main game, but that didn't put the standards that high. Bethesda wanted to make you question what it is to be a human, but failed as one of the factions leaders just straight up asks you this question 20 minutes after you started the DLC, and makes awful point why you might be a synth and not a human. The worst quest in the entire game is also in this DLC, DiMA's memories, which is the most boring 30 minutes I have spent from my life. This DLC also has the illusion of free choice, even more noticable than at other points of the game.

A synth asks me to help him, I say that I really don't care about his problem. He begs me for around a minute and I end our conversation with me not caring. He acknowledges this and still tells me to do the quest and marks it on my map. Like why? It's not like it would have been so hard for him to just end it with "Come back if you changed your mind." nope, just go out and do it even if you don't care.

An other example of Bethesda's peak writing:

I walk in Acadia, a random snyth initiates dialogue, because I looked at her for a millisecond. Than she asks me the most basic philosophical question, "What it means to be a human?". I tell her that I really don't care. She tells me that I'm narrow minded. I basically tell her to ♥♥♥♥ off and she gets angry for understandable reasons. Then she sais that if I need any help just let her know. Like what is this writing? Are all of the syths have brain damage from the memory wipe and lost the function of their short term memories?

Fallout 4 is a good shooter/adventure game with improved mechanics from previous titles. But it is a really mediocre RPG at best, which is a shame, as previous titles were amazing in this regard, even 3 in my opinion. The best thing about the game is that you can mod the crap out of it. Making things just straight up better and re-adding weapons from previous Fallout games. The modding community is extremely talented and some of their works are just miles better than anything Bethesda put into the base game.

In a few days will come the thing that tipped me over to rating this game negatively. The "next-gen" update. Which will ♥♥♥♥ up all these mods while probably not giving any benefits to PC users, other than 5 lazily made Creation Club items. Performance was never an issue for me, my 4th gen i3 and RX480 ran the game 60FPS ultra @1080p no problem for years. And having more than 60 FPS was bad in this game, as the physics are tied to framrate. The biggest problem is that Bethesda made sure this "huge" update will come out 2 whole days after the biggest mod for this game, Fallout London would have released. So Bethesda was so kind that they ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over an entire modding team (and the entire modding community in general) so this game's engine could use like 5 percent more resources.