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