Yeah, I know, understand and agree. I do use the 4GB patch, and limited graphical improvements, but it’s a compromise between appearance and performance that each person has to juggle for themselves. With the build I used last (a very slightly modified version of Gopher’s collection) it was mostly stable, but I make a point of saving frequently and fully closing the game after no more than an hour or two (which isn’t hard with adulting, granted!).
Fallout 1 was an isometric RPG.
Fallout 2 was an isometric RPG.
Fallout 3 was a 3D RPG with a lot of shooter elements.
Fallout New Vegas was a 3D RPG with a lot of shooter elements.
Fallout 4 was a shooter with some vaguely RPG-like elements.
To really understand the difference, look at the conversation systems. Fallout 3 and NV have rich conversation options where you can learn a lot and make game-changing decisions in those conversations. Fallout 4 has a stripped down conversation system that always has 4 (and only 4) options, which basically boil down to Yes, No, Snark, and Something Else. But even though you’d think that this would give you different in-game results, they almost never do. Almost every conversation option ends with exactly the same result.
For role players, immersing yourself in the conversations is where the fun is. This is where you get to do your role playing and shape your character. In a shooter, the conversation options just forward the story so that you can get on to the next bit of shooting.
If you are a role player, FNV is by far the best game. But if you are a casual gamer, FNV’s conversation options are tedious and you probably don’t care about detailed information about whatever faction you are dealing with. You just want to get on with it and get back to shooting stuff.
The Fallout fan base comes from an RPG background, so we mostly think that FNV is by far the best game. But if you are a new player and started with FO4, you might not actually like FNV, especially since the FO3/FNV game engine is kinda wonky and the combat is nowhere near as good.
That’s great write up.
An interesting thing with FO3/NW versus FO4, is that the former sets you up for a heavy engaged play session so I find myself more primed to read terminals and hunt for the back matter…. where FO4 being an action shooter with light RPG elements puts me in a mindset of “I’m not reading all this!”
Which unfortunately also transfers over to 76.
I do think that gets to the heart of the issue, but for those with no experience in the pre-F4 universe - the protagonist was never voiced, so what you selected was literally what your character was saying. What makes the F4 conversation even worse from a roleplaying standpoint is that even if you select from the vague text corresponding to the “yes, no snark and something else” it often went in quite weird “NO, that’s not what I meant!” directions from a RPG POV.
@engineer_comp_geek did an amazing job in analysis, not in any way debating it, but wanted to make the additional point.
Another POV issue is where you came into the series, again, if your intro is F4, you’re going to be harder pressed on the others. Especially since F4 is the all perk/stat skyrim style play, while all the others were a combination of skills, stats and perks. And since they all had level caps, you couldn’t just grind till you were good at everything.
I came into the series with Fallout 3 GOTY, but I loved the lore so much, that I read most of the nukapedia. I then played FNV complete, and loved it even more. I heard so much stress about F4 that I got into it late, and found it… compromised though, some elements I loved, some (the RPG elements and the lack of seeing how you actually changed things other than the end) I hated.
I fixed a lot of my issues with F4 with the mods, and some of the DLC (Far Harbor mostly) had a lot better RPG and consequence which was somewhat soothing.
But I did finally go back and play F1&2 with the most modern updates. And they’re great stories - but absolutely the mechanics are rougher, the need to min-max more desparate, and the RNG in combat can absolutely frustrate a modern casual gamer. Save scumming may be the only way to survive sub-optimal builds or bad RNG.
I’m of many minds about F76 - I own it, played for about 3 seasons, and reasonably enjoyed it. There are a lot of cool stories hidden in some of the quests and terminals. But unless you’re on a private paid iteration, you are just never going to be important compared to people who’ve been playing a lot. And paying for it. It’s got so much pay to win it’s crippling. And for me, Fallout is all about the actions of an individual quite literally changing the future, with a few close companions. A massive blast fest of a dozen people popping around in high end power armor in a world 20 years after the nukes that looks BETTER than after 200 years of “recovery” feels off.
I just finished a replay of Fallout 3 and I think that’s a very generous interpretation of the conversations you have in that game. At best, you have a situation where you can pick between supporting side A and side B in some dispute, sometimes with the possibility of using a Speech check to avoid violence. That doesn’t seem light-years away from what you do in Fallout 4, in my experience.
Just the fact that you can’t tell exactly what you were going to say when you pick the option is, I think, that the root of the lot of the frustration. I have played through Fallout 4 a couple of times although I’ve never finished it (if I’m still in a Fallout mood after I finish New Vegas I may come back to 4) and I do agree that it’s really not that bad in terms of being an RPG, but those dialogue options really take you out of the game every time.
The other big difference is the structure of conversations. In the older Fallout games, each person would have a list of topics they know about. Sometimes you click on one topic and it gives you a few other options. As you learn about new events or locations, you get the option to talk about those new things. All that is kind of gone with The Fallout 4 style of four options every time. Just from a UI perspective, it’s extremely limiting.
I agree that F3 is far, far rougher than FNV in terms of storytelling, but again, since you don’t have the voiced dialog to work around, it’s at least more representative than the much more vague options of F4.
But you’re right that like pretty much all games, the actual scope of final decisions is limited, because, well, that’s what games are. The others, especially with the closing slideshows, give you a much better feeling of what you did and did not do. F4 just… goes on. Which is a perk in it’s own right, depending on your pov.
One of the biggest problems people had was Fallout 3 when it came out was the way that the ending locked you out of the game. They did fix this with the Broken Steel DLC but I can see why they took that criticism to heart, perhaps a little too much, in Fallout 4
Agreed. I’m not dumping on F4 or even 76, I’ve played and enjoyed different elements of all of them. I totally enjoy the base building aspects of 4/76 and think they added some massive fun, and customization though I’d love to see them redone where the limits were not capped by the system/software or by the artificial pay-cap.
[granted though, I’d rather the pay to win F76 elements be on this sort of cosmetic than more core gameplay, though, you know, it’s not like we didn’t PAY to buy the game in the first place, sigh]
Back to FNV though, as I said upthread, the vagueness of your history with partial presumed amnesia from getting shot in the head means that it’s the most open for internal role-playing. In most of the others, you have a quest that you’ve been burdened with (find the chip, the geck, your father, your son) which detracts from the whole open world elements (which at least in F4 you can indeed, continue on with once you’ve resolved your issues).
In FNV, sure you want to get the guy that shot you, but there’s no consequences (from your POV) with whether you do or not. You can play most of the game, and pretty much all the DLC, and then decide if you want to do that, or if you want to intervene at all to end the game. Otherwise you can explore until you get bored.
But, and back to your point, the open-endedness of F4 is padded with a bunch of repetitive radiant quests, so while it’s more open-ended (and thank the FSM for mods!) you have to work at it to make your own fun much of the time past the main story and dlc, so not all that different in terms of the other capped games. 
Yeah, this has been nice, I am taking my time going after Benny because revenge isn’t necessarily my top priority, and that makes more sense than ignoring world ending dragons.
Although you always can fall back on the first part of the hero’s journey where you reject the call to adventure… By going on another adventure instead… That’s what I’d do in Oblivion. “Yes, yes, the Amulet of Kings, I’ll bring it to that guy eventually, after I join the Mage’s Guild”.
That’s actually a HUGE difference from Fallout 4.
FO4 gives you the illusion of choice, but your conversation options like Agree or Disagree give you the exact same response from the NPC, just worded slightly differently. And you generally don’t get a choice between helping side A or B in FO4. Most quests have only one path. FNV is better than FO3, but quests do at least branch in FO3. FO4 it feels like the only real choice you get to make is which faction wins. That’s it.
FO3 has 5 ending videos, with a total of 26 different options spread out between all 5.
FNV has 29 different ending slides, with a total of 189 (!) different options spread out over those 29.
FO4 has 5 ending videos, with a grand total of only 8 options.
To be fair, Fallout 1 didn’t branch much either. Fallout 2 did a lot better. Fallout 3 was a step backwards. Fallout New Vegas went absolutely nuts and set the bar very very high. Fallout 4 went back almost to the Fallout 1 days.
Fallout 4 also doesn’t generally have a speech option. It’s a shooter. Someone tried to do a pacifist run through FO4, and Bethesda’s response to this was basically that this wasn’t the type of game that they made. People have successfully completed pacifist runs in Fallout 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas. You can technically end up with 0 kills in FO4 but it relies on someone else doing your killing for you. You can’t do a true pacifist run in FO4.
You can also be totally evil in FO3 and FNV (not sure about the earlier games). You generally don’t have that option in FO4. Players complained about that, and Bethesda’s response was to make a DLC where you almost had to be evil (technically you can complete it as a good character but that severely limits what you can do in the DLC). So Bethesda completely missed the point. It’s not that players wanted to be evil, they wanted to have options.
I haven’t played Starfield yet, but from what I have seen in reviews and such, it suffers from the same issue. The game tries to give you the illusion of choice, but it doesn’t actually give you choices.
Bethesda used to know how to make a good RPG. It was what they were known for. Now they want to make brain-dead shooters like everyone else, and they aren’t very good at that (IMHO).
I have to push back on this.. There is no “WINNING” in Fallout 76 so there’s no pay to win. You can pay for quality of life upgrades that make issues from regular play less obtrusive (storage is basically it) and access to cosmetics and a private server. You don’t need Fallout 1st (the monthly subscription) to beat the scorchqueen and complete the original main quest…..or any quest because of enemy scaling. PvP is only a thing if YOU allow it….and it’s pretty rare these days.
So I don’t understand that idea that Fallout 76 is “pay to win:–and I hear it bandied around in Fallout 76 critiques a lot.
When I last played (a year, year and a half ago) the storage cap goes past a QoL improvement into a near insurmountable edge, though, based on the “old-timers” discussing it, it was much MUCH higher than in the original iterations. And there is a lot of… different… griefing in 76 than just out-and-out PVP. Like putting their settlement in a position where if you fast travel to it, it drops you out of the sky to your death, pit traps if you want to visit their vendor, etc. Sure, pure PVP griefing is more rare, but it’s by no means gone.
And the semi-private server thing is IMHO needed if you want to play Fallout like Fallout and not a reskinned generic MMO.
But like everything else, YMMV, and different people go looking for different things.
Back to FNV mods though, I mentioned Weapon Mods Extended, but it apparently doesn’t play well with most modern item retextures and fixes, so I found UWU - Unique Weapons Upgradeable that lets you add GRA style mods to many/most Uniques. It also works with TTW, so a plus one for a modernized play through.
I mean, why can’t I add a scope to Palencia if I can to a “normal” hunting rifle? 
It definitely helps keep “earlier” weapons relevant to later in the game, like a personal (but weak) favorite like Maria.
Yeaaaaa… that’s not really a thing. I am daily FO player and I can count on one hand the number of times that has happend since release date. Trap camps do exist but it’s fantasy to try make it a regular concern and a reason to not play at all.
That’s the strength of 76…. you can solo it absolutely fine and play it like a regular game and decide your end point or play with the community…..and also decide your end point or if you want to just keep going with radiant quests and new content.
For FO:NW mods… I’m only really interested in big mods that will fundamentally change the game but those seem to more often fizzle out before completion… Like FO: Lonestar, was it?
Then we have different experiences - I got hit by those 4 times in one particular month during my play, and maybe 12-16 times total in roughly 12 months of play.
Granted, that’s not a TON, but it was enough that I got very frustrated.