Fallout 4 is immediately in love with its main quest, to the point of forcing your character to care about it in the dialogue.

Which is of course not why I play Bethesda games, nor I suspect why almost anyone plays Bethesda games. But that's beside the point. No, the point is, it's not very well done even in its intention.

Right in vault 111 you, in first person, have dialogue put in your mouth trying to portray your character as confused, scared, lost, and in a desperate need to "find your son!" And then 2 seconds later you're lovingly crooning over a gun sealed in a case because you're also a gun obsessed nutcase that doesn't give one sh*t about their son or anything else.

And all of the dialogue is like this. In the same conversation you switch between "Have you seen my son!" and "Son? What son? I only care about murdering everything in my path HAHAHAHA!" and etc. etc. etc. You are almost inevitably portrayed as some crazed schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder. Not that it matters because all your dialogue ever ends up with is "Ok, I'll go and kill everything over here."

Skyrim was badly written, no question. But at least the quests gave you different things to do. Fallout 4 is badly written and only ever has you kill things, with no recourse to do anything else. Oh I enjoy exploring the world, and obsess over crafting everything I can, including overly ridiculous settlements. But I avoid actually speaking to any NPC or getting any quest whatsoever like the plague.

Yeah, I think it's pretty much accepted at this point that the dialogue is pretty janky in this game, especially with the voiced character. It's even more jarring hearing him completely change his tone and manner of speaking as opposed to us imagining our own voice.

I think the lack of consistency is due to Bethesda's hesitance to really commit to the idea of a pre-set character. They can't give the character a real personality or else we wouldn't be able to imagine him as ourselves, but they also don't let us really express ourselves through our character like we could in previous games with all the different dialogue options, many of which would lead to the exact same result but at least let our character say the same thing in different ways.

Fallout 4 doesn't seem to wan to commit either way, leaving the dialogue in this weird limbo where the player has a strangely wooden yet also schizophrenic personality, while also not letting us fully create a personality for him through dialogue.

had not had this problem, I choose options that make sense for my character, and hurrah, have a consistent character portrayal throughout.

Yep is a much more linear game when looking at the character.

Even the removal of the skill system makes the character less "S.P.E.C.I.A.L.".

All the RPG elements are dumbed down.

Mods will help in some ways.

The voice acting is great.

The dialogue lines and system are really bad.

But is ok.

Fallout 5 will be out in 6 years or so .

Maybe them we will get no loading screens.

Lol.

These issues sound like that of you're own making, OP. "And only ever has you kill things, with no recourse to do anything else" is just a blatant lie. I resolved a potential shooutout between two parties at a certain diner just hours ago, with no violence, using a successful dialogue check.

I agree. After having only played a couple hours I can already tell the people screaming about the game being dumbed down, linear, and what not are just trolls. Yea, its different, a lot. But I'd say it's deeper and less linear than the previous games. The way you can pick perks based on your s.p.e.c.I.a.l creates an rpg element that never exist in 3 or nv.

Every time I open a locked safe and my guy goes, "Oh, sweet!" like a 13 year old boy I respond with a sharp