People keep talking about how they are disappointed by the Fallout 4 graphics. My question is how do they compete with other open world games? Shouldn't that be the standard?

Content, content, content.

I am not dissapointed by the graphics, because i enjoy the visual style the game has. Lighting, colour, audio-visual etc. If we are talking pure texture size and the like, well yes then there are better looking games out there. I think it should be about choosing a style that fits the game you are doing, and then taking it from there. How much can the engine handle? What kind of systems out there can actually run our game? I would say that The Witcher 3, and Metal Gear Solid looks better from a technical standpoint, but i enjoy the visual style of Fallout 4 alot more.

Most other open world games are filled with 100% static objects, and NPCs who barely have anything resembling a schedule.

Bethesda games allow players to pick up basically every cabbage, and basically all named NPCs have complex daily tasks. Those things draw significantly more resources to manage and keep track of, thus preventing them from having the same level of graphics as say GTA.

I think people have garbage set ups.... I am playing on a top end 4k sony xbr...and this identical rig https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/T7wMQ7

Currently running at Medium settings due to my system being half way between Minimum and Recommended and never felt the need to upgrade it to see how it looks at High settings.

The graphics is obviously worse than any recently released open-world game, but why on Earth does that matter so much?

Graphics are fine, just different from other franchises.

Ya want pretty, play Dragon Age. Ya want gritty horror, play Dark Souls. Ya want weird... well, there are lots of games for that.

I want post apocalyptic so I chose F4.

It's fine.

As others have said. I can put up with a lot if the content is good.

Graphics? Well the graphics for GTA 4 on my old Xbox360 blows away the graphics on Fallout 4 on my new Xbox One. I do NOT care. I play Fallout type games for hundards of hours, after just a few I stop noticing glitz and glitter, what keeps me playing is the content. If I want to look at something pertty I go outside and look at a nice sunset, nature blows away any graphics in any game on any platform.

I like the way you think. When I play Fallout 4 I enjoy the world and it's content. When I'm down in a valley, standing in a stream fishing for trout and the sun begins to rise up over the valley.....then's when I admire "graphics", lol.

This is close to my opinion too. Fo4 has an amazing open world - like attention to detail and weather effects don't even come close to touching Fo4 (and yes I've played TW3). It's such a diverse world with settings and there's just so much in it with tons of things to do between points of interest. That said, textures are a bit low res - which is fine. However, the character models and some animations are unacceptable.

There are rough spots and textures but overall I think it looks great. It's not The Order: 1886, but then it would be two hours long....

Point is, the bigger the game, the more shorthand required to pull off visuals. Go ahead and pop in FO3 on a large display and then pop in this game and you'll see the difference is massive. I just did that for funsies yesterday. It was drastic.

I think the game, as a whole, looks stellar. Sure, there are some muddy textures here and there in certain circumstances. But never, since Skyrim, has a game simply wowed me with its visuals and sense of "place" in a virtual world. And never before has a game so thoroughly convinced me (immersion, suspension of disbelief) that I was actually present in a world fallen down (which is a happy place for misanthropes like me).

So many times already, I've just paused to absorb the feel of the place I was in. Sometimes that feeling is wonder at the odd, if threatening, beauty of certain areas and events (hello radstorms). Sometimes it's dread and unease. Sometimes its pure curiosity.

And sometimes it's screaming terror (don't trust the waters).

But Bethesda, in a way even more convincing than Skyrim, has nailed ambiance.

That said, yeah, the character art could have used the same love and attention the world got.

As a DA and Witcher fan I must say those games look visually better, but Fallout 4 its a way more interactive world than those 2 combined, also the big extra its that fallout doesn't have glitchy horses............... yet... wait dogmeat the [censored] are you doing!!!!

On par with skyrim but sometimes better like in the institute and at the beggining, I think it has trouble when you go outside in the giant world.

I seriously dont get why people think the game looks bad... sure I have found some areas that look flat or muddy but in general it looks amazing.. there are times when I think wow this game looks beautiful! Never did i get that with Witcher 3....

Every other recent open world game also cheats a bit by having randomly spawned npc's that walk around and are just for show. They are simply there to make the game look populated. Except for spawning enemies, Bethesda's npc's are set. You go to a populated area and you'll see the same npc's and those npc's have a schedule and perform certain random tasks.

Graphics wise I think everything looks great. I think people are looking at the animation and confusing that with graphics quality. . . Lots of games these days use motion capture and people are just getting so used to seeing that that when it isn't used they balk. They also like to complain about lip syncing not realizing that each face is totally malleable.. With the mouth being able to be in so many different positions this is obviously going to create a bit of difficulty when it comes to lip animations because of the mouth's placement on the 'skull'. If you notice, in most create a character games.. you can only change the type of mouth and maybe put it a bit up or down. This games feature is much more like the sims. .. you can really screw the mouth up if you want.

What it really comes down to is expectations. All in all, graphics improvements have been slowing down with each generation. People are expecting those great leaps from the past and they just aren't getting those anymore. They also seem to want ultra-realism in every AAA game. I don't believe that's a necessity. The closer something looks to "real" the more people react to it. Imagine if Fallout had ultra-realistic body explosions. Well, that'd be gross. I much prefer it over the top cartoony.

The environment/lighting looks fine. I will eventually mod it to make the night darker. The main eyesore for me is the skin textures and hair for PC and NPCs. I check the Nexus site everyday hoping that decent skin textures would show up.

This game isn't a graphical power house, but it doesn't need to. Not for me at least. I set the bar for "great" with Star Wars Battlefront 3, especially the maps, but they cheated and laser-mapped actual geographical locations. That makes EVERY other game's landscape look like trash by comparison.

Several reasons I see this is a talking point issue:

• Devs sacrificed some graphics polish and eye candy to generate a very interactive world (individual object wise). Nobody at Bethesda has ever stated their # 1 goal was putting out a graphically stunning game.
• There are better looking open world games available, but they lack the interactivity level of FO4 (and certainly many of them lack tenth of FO4s content).
• Players are mistakenly convinced (often by the "games media") that if game X is "open world" then all other open world games should have a similar visual look.
• Games have different visual styles that are intentional and potentially a result of resource compromises to enhance other aspects of gameplay in the world as well as supporting older hardware platforms.
• "Good Graphics" in a game is highly subjective and varies widely for each user.
• Each user places graphics quality at different levels of importance.

For me, the real litmus test for any game is if I am enjoying my time playing it and the answer is certainly, "yes" for FO4. Comparisons of it's graphics to other games is a non-issue to me, but if others want to critique it to death, that's their prerogative.

Exactly! Until a game can put a chill in the air, make you feel the touch of morning dew on your face, smell the freshness of the water and grass, then comparing one game or platforms graphics is WAY over rated for me. Heck the music and ambient background noise in a game is FAR more important than the graphics.

fallout 4 can't compete with other new fps/rpg in terms of graphics, at all, maybe only in terms of story and/or content

I don't usually agree with @derrame, but, when I do, it's because @derrame is right!

As an old school gamer and a fan of the recent Fallouts I can personally say that overall I'm very pleased with the graphics, especially the environments. I think someone who is much younger, let's say 15-20, won't be able to appreciate them as much and see how far these games have come. Now as far as how Beth games compare to other open world games, that's all up to personal preference. I care more about the style and the systems that are in place as opposed to simply how impressive the graphics are.

I have no problem at all with graphics I am running on ultra with a 4k monitor, but I didn't really get this game for the graphics anyway.