I ended up dropping the game again.
It's clear the Codex review of Fallout 4 was on point, and I quote:
It's a 100+ hour shooter, with all that entails
I was very surprised when yesterday, almost past the 80 hour mark (!!!), I got a Steam achievement telling me I had completed 10 sidequests.
10 sidequests.
...in almost 80 hours.
What. the. FUCK? That's an average of one sidequest every 8 hours. I don't need statistics to tell me most of the time I spent playing Fallout 4 was killing Raiders and Super Mutants, as well as looting "abandoned" buildings (populated by Raiders). But you do need statistics to know that, in 80 hours, I killed 420 human enemies. And the only reason the numbers aren't any higher was because early in the game I avoided combat as Survival makes it very easy for the player to die by bullshit means.
Yesterday I struck me, after I looted my 40th generic store, that the thing I disliked so much about Fallout: New Vegas -the generic assets and locations- was amplified in Fallout 4. Bethesda thought they could get away with reusing assets to create different locations and hoping the amount of enemies could distract you from this. But if you don't fill these locations with compelling stories and NPCs, they are virtually indistinguishable from one another. Yes, I can tell this is a hospital, as much as I can tell this is hardware store and that is a bakery. But it doesn't really matter. Having played Fallout 3 years ago, I couldn't help but notice the similarities between both games. It's as if FO3 was a prototype for Fallout 4. It's not fair to say Fallout 3 was better than Fallout 4, because the truth is anything better about Fallout 3 was an
accident: Fallout 4 was the game Bethesda wanted to make
all along.
Fallout was a franchise about finding new locations, meeting new people, and doing quests that involved interacting with them and your environment. Fallout 4 is a game about finding new places to loot, meeting new enemies to kill, and no quests to speak of because every quest you are given is an excuse to go somewhere, kill twenty raiders and acquire 1,000 caps just from looting garbage bins, and getting a 200 cap reward for being such a good boy.
Fallout 4 is a game you truly have to play because reading about how bad the game is isn't the same as experiencing it first hand.
No amount of reading could prepare me to bear the awful dialogue, the annoying accents everywhere, the lack of meaningful choices, the repetitive gameplay, the lack of a clear goal whenever you did anything for anyone. I used to frown upon the "kill these Ants" quest in New Vegas, which is one of the lamest in the game. But at least you got a decent REWARD from it. Fallout 4 has never given me something worth calling a reward. Only sound and visual cues that signify something cool or good has happened, but Bethesda forgot to implement it as part of the gameplay.
It's quite telling that of everything Fallout 4 changed in regarding to New Vegas, the only things I genuinely liked were:
- The improved gunplay. Which is still lacking.
- The improved graphics. Which still look off.
Everything, and I mean
everything else.