Fallout 4 – Better Than Expected

I must confess that I did not like Fallout 3 and New Vegas as much as everyone else did. To me, Fallout 3 was exactly the same game as Oblivion, which I had already played enough to be tired of it. So after I finished the main Fallout 3 story, I was done with it. (Steam reports that I played some crazy number of hours, but that was only because I left it running 24/7 on a secondary PC.)

So I haven’t been that excited for the release of Fallout 4, because I was expecting it to play exactly like Skyrim, a game that also played more-or-less exactly like Oblivion and Fallout 3 before it. But then on the night of the 10th I was watching the Steam trailers and noticing that it looked different from Skyrim. It looked like, you know, a new game. And by pure coincidence I had the next day off of work. So I took a chance and bought it.

And lo, it’s actually a great game. A great, new game. It plays well. The shooter parts feel like you’re actually playing a decent shooter. (That was my biggest complaint about Fallout 3.) The RPG parts feel like an evolution on the standardized boilerplate Bethesda dialog trees. The Oblivion-style zooming-in-on-NPC-faces that jarred me completely out of the game is finally gone.

I don’t have any comments on the story yet, except to say that it started out a lot darker than I would have expected. (I think of the Fallout franchise as fairly whimsical.) But I haven’t completed much of the main story… just enough to leave the shelter.

I’m taking my time and exploring the world piece by piece. Well, side quest by side quest actually. I find the world pretty dangerous so I feel like I need to spend time building up my character before going too far from the starting point. I like the crafting and base-building aspect of the game-it’s a lot like State of Decay, which I loved-it’s a great addition to the franchise. I’m so glad to finally have a reason to pick up all that junk out in the world. (Although I wish I had an AoE loot key like Guild Wars 2 or a loot vacuum-cleaner like WildStar. :)

And you get a dog! With possibly the best dog AI I’ve seen in a game to date. Just be careful he doesn’t disappear on you. (If he does, you might have to load a previous saved game to get him back.)

P.S. If you find the game suddenly running on the wrong monitor for no apparent reason, this Reddit solution worked for me.