Two thumbs up. I'm an older gamer myself and I am glad needing to have a spreadsheet or calculator and a notebook full of scribbled down stats is not needed to play RPGs anymore. Hell, I haven't unboxed my abacus in years.

Imo they could have made the map 2 or 3 times bigger with the current places and settlements etc.

Sure there are empty spaces but if you walk through the city areas with its huge buildings to explore everywhere its often too much for me. I follow a quest and i see a freaking shopping center to my left. So there is ibviously no other choise than enter it, kill everything and loot the hell out of it. Ok left the building and really 10 seconds later there is a bank... And so on and on.

Im lvl 38 and im really really at the beginning of the main story. Everytime i try to follow it i encounter some stuff which might be worth exploring. Or a bounty is offered. Or a settlement is under attack.

There is really way more to explore than in previous fallout games.

And there are also a lot of settlements that you can get. I think after my 13-15th settlement i stopped helping new requests since it just too much

But on the other hand having bad guys close to your settlements can be a advantage later once you unlocked certain stuff from the Minutemen questline.

I don't like the way groups of enemies swarm at you, it makes things feel claustrophobic at times. I was going to make a sneak build but it feels like it would be worthless with the way enemy behaviour has been designed so I'm probably going to reroll into a melee & close range weapon build.

Also I noticed most of the buildings aren't explorable, possibly even more than FO3. The first town I went to had like a bar and the quest location, and the rest were all boarded up.

You think its cramped now? Wait until the mods start rolling in. There are a lot of unused buildings that will be taken advantage of. Also I can see people building more rooftop and elevated gameplay in which you will be shot at from a ton of angles.

This is a massive over exaggeration. You'll only ever come up against multiple enemies in a city, certainly not the wilderness.

It's BEEN overcramped since Skyrim.

Just up jogging speed to something like an actual person can manage, bring the engine up to date for viewing anything beyond 50ft (seriously, last gen games still have better detail in the distance than Fallou 4) and triple the size of the map.

I really don't see a reason that the map size continues to be the same as Oblivion's even though it's coming up on a decade later. Really, few if any complain other open world games are "too big" even though they range in size from triple to thirty+ times the size of Oblivion (Just Cause 2).

I know Bethesda has "cheated" by making the fog too thick and the Level of Detail distressingly low end, making the world "seem" bigger than it is. But it looks uglier and uglier with each passing game. And that doesn't change the fact that Concord is down the block from Sanctuary hills, and utterly feels like it. I don't feel like I'm going on an epic journey, I feel like I'm walking fifty feet from town to town, which I am.

i said truth , I didnt invent anything and I have no reason for . Believe what u want though .
Plus I am playing at normal and I find odd to meet every now and then su per utants fully geared with massive guns and nukes ... Not sure whats the lore here yet but in FO3 they had a meaning and a region , here they are scattered everywhwre and I see no proper reason for this .

And yet most people used to complain about fo3 and fonv not having enough content and had alot of empty space...

I kinda understand why developers cannot win that one.

This game only gets better and better

But I too was taken aback by the small map size

I just saw a thread last night saying the landscape was empty of stuff, that was his complaint.

Because that person only plays Call of Duty and has ADHD...

Bethesda is obsessed with tiny maps for no reason.

This is a good point. Beth should have aimed for a larger map to allow for the crazy mods that will start rolling in.

But as you have said, well, now we can build up.

**

The complaints amounting to empty maps refer to people like myself that have stayed to the north of the map and just explored. The north has buildings and settlements but it is devoid of enemies at low level and feels very empty. Sounds like the south is a hell hole.

LOL i love this post, first the map isnt small there is just to much on it and it feel small. Second there is no way u just step over enemies every 5 steep i walk all the way from Sanctuary to Diamond city to pick up my PA and then i come back and i only come across 1 group of super mutants.

IS RANDOM. is suppose to be like it.

i dont understand the size of a map ppl want, Big map like JC or Witcher map end with alot of nothing (yeah alot of tree to fill it but nothing else), i think each map i have play on Bethesda game is perfect. Yeah skyrim have that huge mountain in the middle but wasnt that bad when i think on the lore behind it.

Is it related to difficulty at all? Supposedly it increases "legendary encounters", but I wouldn't be surprised if it increased normal ones, too. I've been playing on the higher modes and I'm experiencing a crap ton of ghouls and such.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Negative reviews are being discredited left and right.

Cannot WAIT for this. I hope there's a project to unboard all the boarded up buildings.

This is just another example like whatever BSG does, it devides the community. Map size? To big vs. too small, a draw. map dense? Too much vs. too little, a draw... I say BSG cannot possibly win this match.

For me, I am OK with it - I can play 1-2 hrs per day at maximum, and not every day, so I just have reached Concord. Going throug wasteland for 10 minutes without anything happening is not an option for me. But I completely understand the opposite view...

I think its great. Fallout 3 really suffered from beeing a Wasteland without stuff to do at, and it didn't make sense from a worldbuilding perspective either. Downtown Boston is my favourite place, with so many different buildings to enter, warzones between raiders and mutants and gunners. Just intense down there, love it so far. The map is exactly the size i prefer. I can skip fast travel with this size and with the well placed work-benches and workshops around you can always keep your gear updated even in the middle of a warzone.

When you say "most", that's rather disappointing. I was hoping for more explorable buildings since many users are saying the map is a bit smaller, and since Beth said that FO4 would have more vertical action than ever before, that lead me to believe that perhaps buildings would have a lot of exploration - more buildings to compensate for the "smaller" map.

But I think this issue, if it's true(since people are getting different experiences) won't be an issue in the future when people start creating mods that adds more areas/buildings to explore.

You have a great point as well. I think Bethesda has handled low levels like they did in Skyrim or even dating back to Oblivion where all you would see in the beginning is wolves or dogs or basic enemies. As you level up the game gets much more lively.

It gets to the point of Utter Chaos when you get a little further in, its even more intense than Fallout 3 because so much is going on.

"A lot of nothing" builds atmosphere and believable landscapes. Everywhere is not a major city, and with that you have the wilderness which is vast...

Those who wanted death to be waiting around each and every corner, will have a field day with FO4 -because that's exactly what awaits them

I kind of like it.

No... Why post untrue statements?

The encounters I been rolling over are all small locations , unnamed perhaps but locations ... a broken caravan with a "Robot" Escorting ( dunno why ) a group of shaks with Supermutants with heavy machine guns ( Illogic placement to my eyes ) , several packs of dogs, giant scorpons , abandoned buildings that are warded by all shooting turrets , group of bandits and swarms of all sort of insects ... I litterally cannot even flee from an encounter without stepping into another and start a chainroute of people chaising me .

sorry but this gamedesign makes absolutely no sense .

Its like this time Bethesda wanted to give people just stuff to shoot at ... now I cannot approach anything or walk by trying to get immersed into the environment without beeing shot first 90% of the times .

This is totally immersion breaking for me , the space is too much cluttered with people, monsters , enemies of all sort that leaves you no breath .

This is not good .

No I am playng on normal , and another disapointing thing is that I am just level 4-5 , I wanted to walk around a little befoure starting quests and I can't make two steps after the other without getting into supermutants, giant monster and impossible overthough dogs !

it may be "cramped", but its the exact opposite to New Vegas, where half the game was spent walking around desert and seeing nothing but the odd tumbleweed. sorry, but fast-travel got used A LOT in that game. This one, there is something to explore around every corner, it's cramped and crowded and I love it.