The story sucked, you were basically given the option of two major factions to join, either the scientists that wanted to hide from the majority of humanity while replacing them with synthetic clones or the Brotherhood of Steel chud brigade that is led by one of the guys from Dude Perfect, there is a 3rd faction of freedom fighters but they only offer a handful of quests and I don’t think you can even complete the story only siding with them. NPC interactions were homogenized to the point you had 4 dialogue options (Yes) (Yes but sarcastic) (Fuck you but ultimately yes) (No). The weapons and armor were stripped of unique varieties you’d have to go into vaults or other dangerous areas to find and implemented a Borderlands/Mmo style loot table with stat/effect modifiers. Base building was janky as fuck, some people liked it but it was painful getting tiles to snap together correctly. The whole game likely needed another year in the oven imo, seemed like a lot of it was rushed or incomplete. I will say the gun handling is the best of any of the 3rd person FO games and getting into power suits is basically like stepping into a mecha which was cool.

FO4 was trash. They retconned tons of lore. the story telling was weak bordering on non existent. It was stupid easy even on the hardest setting. All the quests were overlapping and respawning so you had to do the same thing over and over for different people. The base building was tedious and boring. There were a few things that I did like, namely the modular armors and customizable equipment but they couldn’t make up for the flaws.

• Story and writing was generally not received well, people didn’t like the obvious recycling reversal of FO3’s “look for your dad” and that the central conflict was 100% around androids that were so ill-defined that the game can’t even agree if they need food and water or not. The game also breaks its back bending over trying to preserve the painfully fucking obvious twist of “your baby son is like 63 years old now!!! woahhhh!!! wowowowow”

• Exploration, what’s usually Bethesda’s main strength, is now extremely boring and repetitive because Bethesda’s radiant randomly generated shit finally overtook hand-placed content. Most of the game world is completely interchangeable raider/ghoul/mutant dungeons and completely interchangeable tiny scrap metal villages that have Literally no characters or stories because all but like 2 towns are part of the settlement system. The “pipe gun in a pre-war safe” complaint is symptomatic of this because FO4 lacks anything that could be interesting loot

• Game’s new systems are really half-baked: The settlement system is too limited and ugly to be a fun creative Minecraft-style builder, and the underlying settlement mechanics are too rudimentary to be an engaging base management minigame. The weapon/armor upgrading system is an uninteresting minor statistical upgrade progression system disguised as customization system, which was also an excuse to cull most of the arsenal because half the guns serve triple duty as pistol, machine gun, and sniper rifle. The game’s core gameplay loop is about hoovering up garbage and scrap to break down to parts but Bethesda games have always had terrible inventory management so a majority of the game is spent picking up a desk fan, being overencumbered, then navigating the worst inventory UI invented to see if you can eat or drop enough things to get back down

• Roleplaying and progression have for at least some people hit the point of where streamlining becomes dumbing down. This is kind of a mix of things. Part of that’s the dialogue system and the neither fish nor fowl sort-of-predefined sort-of-blank-slate protagonist. Part of that is that all progression is through perks, which are mostly “do x% more damage with y weapon type” or “unlock Tier X crafting in Y category”. Part of that is progression is restricted in some ways (you need to be level x to get the next tier of this perk) but unrestricted in others (your attributes can be all be maxed out at any time) that together encourage very generalized similar feeling character builds. The game doesn’t really ask players to make very many engaging choices, narratively or even mechanically, beyond which faction you side with at the end