Fallout 4 had an incredible amount of hype for it. It sold a bazillion copies, and tons of people were playing it on day one.
But it seems like it has quickly dropped off the radar. A lot of people on my friends list put more hours into Xcom 2 than Fallout 4, and that’s only been out two weeks. I see almost no discussion or even funny gifs on reddit about it.
It’s basically tied with Skyrim with player counts on steam. Skyrim has a larger install base, having been on sale many more times, but it’s a 5 year old game, which is a much bigger factor. Very few games have tens of thousands of concurrent players on average after 5 years. It seems extremely unlikely to me that Fallout 4 will have the number of players skyrim has now in a year, let alone 5.
It seems to me like outside the hype of the few days after the initial release, it has no cultural impact whatsoever. Not even compared to previous Fallout games, of which it is probably the worst. Certainly worse than NV. Against Fallout 3 I could see it going either way. It certainly doesn’t have even a fraction of the lasting cultural impact that skyrim has.
It’s telling that I played it for about 15 hours on a friend’s account and have almost no interest in picking it back up again. I could play it at will, but just haven’t bothered. I don’t even know if I’ll bother to pick it up when it’s $20 or even $10. Maybe if they finally allow people to make extensive mods for it and someone manages to make more compelling gameplay there.
Have they even released the mod kit for the game yet? People have been making mods with limited functionality using the skyrim kit, but they don’t have access to the full array of features. Considering that Bethesda vanilla games are only a shell of what they can become, there’s hope that Fallout 4 can be rescued by modding, but they’re really dropping the ball about getting the tools out there. I’m concerned they’re going to try to force some sort of ridiculous parity with consoles where mods have to work on both, dramatically limiting the potential there. Or they might charge for them, which would devastate the mod scene, ruin their reputation, and definitely make me boycott their games.
I think the reason it has no cultural impact is that it is by far the most shallow fallout game. The roleplaying options are extremely shallow. The characters aren’t very interesting. The dialogue options are a horrible abomination compared to previous games. Characters get very few real choices to make.
It’s basically Borderlands gameplay in a Fallout universe. The character design aspect is actually probably shallower than Borderlands, with its multiple classes with multiple trees. In Fallout, you basically pick whether you’re a guns guy or a melee guy or maybe some sort of novelty charisma/intelligence build. It hardly makes a difference.
But they both have basically the same gameplay loop. Find a quest giver, go through their dialogue, have no real choices in how the conversation goes nor do your character stats or previous actions in the game matter, get some sort of fetch or exterminate quest, go kill something, look around for loot, and return to sender. Only rather than the rather faced paced looting of Borderlands, you have to search every nook and crannie in buildings for hidden spoons.
And at that sort of shallow loop of gameplay, Borderlands probably does it better, with more variety in the way you can gear and skill out your player for combat, faster paced combat, less tedious inventory management, etc.
I wanted to like Fallout 4, having been a huge fan of all previous Fallout games except 3, which was kinda meh. But it seemed so incredibly shallow compared to previous games, so dumbed down, that I thought that there was no way it would make a real impact. I think I was right.
(My not so humble opinion only, but for me it’s a textbook example of a game I sunk like 15 hours into, put down one day, and simply never cared enough to pick up again.)