Honestly, I kind of expected Fallout 4 to be a little less than what I'd want from a Fallout game. Fallout 3 had so many setting issues, it was amazing. Why set it on the East Coast if you're just going to have everything from the West Coast there even though a lot of that stuff is exclusive to the West Coast? The FEV is also on the East Coast even though they specifically said in the first two games that the only source of it was Mariposa? But somehow there was a whole bunch of it on the East Coast and someone just managed to make the exact same or nearly the same batch Richard Grey made when he developed Supermutants? The Brotherhood of Steel, which was dying out in Fallout 2, is all over the East Coast. I suppose you could say they were dying out on the West Coast because there's a bunch on the East Coast and possibly middle America... But they have Power Armor, huge advanced computers, all kinds of energy weapons, but apparently can't communicate by even something as primitive as a telegraph? All those are problems with both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 still.
What makes it worse would be that Bethesda's one addition to the universe in Fallout 3 really doesn't line up with the large, clunky, vacuum tube setting of Fallout, which would be the androids. So, before the nuclear apocalypse, the best company for robotics could only make things like Eye Bots, Sentry Bots, etc. but after the world ends, they can make robotic copies of human beings which look and act like human beings? What? So, Fallout 4 comes along and that's a big part of the focus of it. It's on par with George Lucas making Star Wars: Episode 2 all about midiclorins and Jar Jar Bunks being the fountain of them.
Basically, I bought Fallout 4 as a third person city builder, which is really the only reason I got it. I knew about the stripped down character system going in to it. However, I wasn't expecting to be as disappointed as I was with it. It just feels so limited and stale. You can't be a low agility thief and make up for it with mad skills? You can't be a high Agility character without having lockpicking, since it's granted by having your Agility level. In all the previous Fallout games, while there was a connection between skills and attributes, you could compensate for one with the other or add Perks as a third way of building your character. This new system is inflexible and honestly takes away from tailoring characters to how you want to make them. In fact, it takes a lot of the reward away from a level up.
I really don't like the character customization system. I'd much rather have the sliders like Skyrim and Fallout 3/FalloutNV. It seemed a whole lot less clunky and was much faster. It's much less intuitive, which isn't the direction I think they were going for. You have all kinds of options, but you have to back out of one menu just to tweak something else. Fine tuning is a pain in the ass and makes it difficult to get the look you want efficiently.
I agree about the dialogue. I had the limitations. You have a little phrase which hints at what you'll say, but there's always those times when you're expecting one thing by picking that phrase and it gives you another result you didn't expect. I didn't like that in Mass Effect either. That method of dialogue is not an improvement over dialogue trees like the CRPGs of the 90s and early 2000s had. Again, I see what they were going for in that it's supposed to be more immersive, but it doesn't work well.
I'm really early in the game, but I also have very little interest in pushing myself further in to it.
