I guess it is the volume of content, depth, the ability to believe in the characters, and so on. In some ways, it doesn’t feel like the Bethesda team has really been advancing in this regard. I feel like they are just “playing it safe”, but the problem is that the game doesn’t have the sort of immersive experience that the Witcher 3 has.

Skyrim I would argue was a bit too shallow on the exploration as well. So for this game to be worse in that regard makes it really a game that I would regard as a disappointment.

There are also a few bugs with Fallout 4 worth mentioning that may or may not hamper your experience.

First is giving us a protagonist who feels like a distinct voice-overed person in an open world environment. Reminds me of Gothic games: you do not yet played as a specific character like in BioWare games but you are not whoever you imagine like in previous Fallout/TES games. All Follaut games (except Tactics) gave you specific background but here I can’t imagine having a second playthrough with a different character. It would be the same guy but he’ll joke or ask for money more. I guess you express yourself through companions who form your morals and disposition but it doesn’t work well as good as in party games like Dragon Age. You just say whatever your single companion likes and that’s it. You are a pleaser.

Second is more important. It’s crafting. In previous games it was fun to search the world to find interesting games. Even in TES 4 & 5 where loot was leveled. F4 is on one hand similar to Borderlands but even more so to something like Far Cry 3. You don’t find better loot, you find bear asses you transform into a better scope. Your first 10mm pistol is better than any other weapon you may find if you upgrade it to the max. Only Far Cry transformed the search for crafting materials in specific challenges like killing sharks. In F4 you find components by searching dumpsters. Ducktape and aluminium cans are the most important things in the game. Don’t go looking for cool places, just search some garbage. You can kill legendaries for legendary equipment – they spawn randomly so again there’s not much need to go into some special places looking for them. And legendary item bonuses are usually weak. And it’s all feels like some sort of MMO farming. Bethesda takes pride in a big world but doesn’t give you a reason to explore it properly. Except maybe boring predictable quests – each time you think there’s something interesting happening (like boosting radio DJ confidence, National Treasure quest) it all ends up with clearing a dungeon. It’s like deep inside Bethesda yearns for good old days of Daggerfall where all quests were created by soulless machine.

Gunfight is fun, the game looks good but it’s probably a first Fallout game I wouldn’t play again.

They would be about your character(s) development both in

1.) mechanical
and
2.) role-play sense

in interaction with respectively

1.) the rules of the game
and
2.)the story those characters go trough.

So a game like Diablo 2 (and Fallout 4?) would tend towards the “mechanical” side of role-playing (that’s why I would have called them beforehand “Action-RPG’s”); while others might tend more towards the story side (Planescape Torment? I don’t have really good examples right now…)

Then there’s games like Second Life, which are obviously RPG’s but which not only don’t have very restricted mechanics, nor a restricted story, and are also in interaction with the real world…

In the mechanical sense, an RPG is a game where you play a character or a party of characters that fights monsters, gets experience, levels up, improves their stats and acquires loot in some sort of persistent world. Some of these elements have been bleeding through into just about every genre under the sun because developers have figured out they’re a great way to give a player the impression of long-term progression, but I think the mechanical identity of “an RPG” is quite distinct. Fallout 4 easily qualifies, even if it doesn’t make the best use of all of these elements.

In the thematic sense, an RPG is a game where you play to a role that you, the player, have chosen beforehand. This is where things get a bit muddier as it’s usually quite difficult for computer RPGs to cater to this demand – the player character can’t be given unrestricted freedom to choose their own path and they have to be railroaded somehow, so they usually plump for giving them a choice between a few different character archetypes or plot paths through the game. This is definitely one of Fallout 4′s weaknesses as you’re very much straitjacketed in how you can respond to specific situations, and the Karma stat is gone so there’s not even the illusion that your everyday choices might be having consequences of some sort. That being said you do get to make several decisions that alter how the plot unfolds so the story you experience is somewhat personalised.

On the second criteria I would say Fallout 4 is borderline. I am probably not the best person to be arguing in favour of it as I didn’t think all that much of Fallout 4′s world; however I dare say you could find a lot of people who have wholly immersed themselves in it and would be fully prepared to do so.

The thing is, though, I made pretty clear in the review that I was tackling the mechanical side of the game and why, as a collection of systems, I found it pretty compelling. I’m not going to get into an argument of whether having a set of RPG-like mechanical systems makes something an RPG or not; as I said above, the line is becoming increasingly blurred these days. For my money, though, it more than met *that* criteria.

I keep meaning to go back to Fallout 1 and 2 to see how much I view them through rose-tinted glasses. My last playthrough was eight or nine years ago, and my overriding impression was that while the interface was clunky as hell you could cut the atmosphere with a knife. It’s not really a fair comparison to F3 and F4 because they’re very different styles of game despite being set in the same world.

The thing with New Vegas is that it isn’t strictly a Fallout game – at least, not as the Fallout universe exists in most people’s heads. It’s got a very different feel to it and struck me as being somewhat less accessible as a consequence; it requires a bit of a mental run-up to parse what’s going on and why. However once you’re in the difference between it and Fallout 3 is like night and day. New Vegas is the reason my opinion of F3 has suffered so much over time, because it showed me what F3 *could* have been.

I don’t think I got the most out of the companions, mostly because of their penchant for jumping in front of my sniper rifle just as I pulled the trigger. I only really spent time with Valentine, and I will concede that he wasn’t half bad, as characters go. The latter half of the game I spent companionless, though.