I think after ~300-350 hours spent on diff characters I can say I've fairly enjoyed the game *steamreview.jpeg* but can't deny that they've actually taken steps back in some aspects from 3.
Story is whatever,I don't think the story twists were inherently bad,it was all about the execution,personally I think it's better than 3 was but obviously still a far cry from New Vegas and the clusterfuck you could cause by the end with the various factions.
The new leveling system I don't have much of a problem with because in 3/NV you could just go for cookie-cutter INT build and max out your skills by the time you reached 60-75% of the max level,you become op either way and even if there isnt a max lvl here in theory,youll have to resort to farming to actually max out everything.Now with DLC,that might actually become a problem,I wonder how are they gonna handle difficulty in those.
I have no idea why the hell did they want to ape Bioware with the dialogue system,but even then they just basically copied the 1.0 version of their system which even Bioware realized was bad and improved upon years ago because the options presented were so ambiguous it was like taking a gamble every time you answered.This is exactly why they've implemented those faces to convey the tone of the choices and stopped using 3 words to describe them and yet Bethesda completely ignored these simple but useful additions.
They should've just stick to the old dialogue list no matter how "clunky" and un-cinematic it looked because I think most people would sooner overlook the fact they're staring at a huge UI than reloading a save because the "sarcastic" answer was actually a sarcastic no and not a sarcastic yes or whatever.Not that it actually mattered much because...
the lack of choice in handling the quests was actually surprising (even more so on my 2nd playthrough),it was a huge step back even from Fallout 3.Most of the choices are basically about whether you actually take the quests or not,9 out of 10 times you have no options in how you wanna tackle the tasks other than killing everything in sight or you have a small choice at the very end where you can screw over someone,you end up killing someone else for a diff reward but thats it.Then again I wonder just exactly how many people out of the general audience are gonna replay a 40+ hour rpg just to see different outcomes.Think it was actually one of the Obsidian devs that said writing doesnt actually matter all that much to the average consumer which is a shame but there it is.
The lack of skill system for quests a la New Vegas could've been easily replaced if they tied some dialogue/quest options to the perks/special system instead and its obvious that they DID actually start doing just that (USS Constitution questline) but soon scrapped the whole idea for some reason.
I am okay with the decision to add VO to player characters in principle,I really like Courtenay Taylor as well but the thing is if companies decide to put VO into rpgs,they actually have to be ready for the consequences and all the extra work it entails in order to keep the amount of dialogue choices on at the very least an even level with previous entries otherwise its not worth the effort imo.
The settlements are entirely optional with the exception of that Sanctuary tutorial and a lot of people probably dont know that theres an entire manual in-game under HELP? I think.Personally when I first saw this addition I thought it was gonna be a tower defense-like game essentially but out of 300 hours I think I was attacked like ~25 times,I dont know if its bugged or what but it was hardly worth the effort to pimp out all those towns.Guess this is something mods will make way better though so I'm looking forward to that.
Overall I was happy we finally got more Fallout and its probably the game I had most fun with this year,mostly because I don't really like Geralt's personality and prefer created characters but it's definately disappointing as an rpg with roots in such a good franchise.