And I actually like it.

As someone that never touched a fallout game before, I thought I would give my opinion on the game without influence from the previous ones as well as my take on what could be improved.

(And I will ask you to be understanding should I make english mistakes, or if I'm not always clear, as english is not my first language)

I will first start with what I liked in the game.

I. The combat system

While I do agree that the system is more FPS-like than RPG, it never once felt off with me and the combats always went smoothly (though with me dying quite often at the beginning)

However in VATS vision, it is impossible to use grenades or change weapons which is a bit disappointing. But that doesn't take away the feeling of smooth violence that is given when you utterly destroy an enemy. In my opinion the combat system is one of the most well done feature in the game.

II. The world

The graphics are awesome. I felt as if I was really travelling in an area devastated by an atomic bomb, adding to that a wildlife that saw me as food more often than not. The attention given to each area/dungeons is impressive and the backstories don't leave you indifferent. Exploring the world is a real pleasure and you can't help but to wonder what will appear next. Especially with Travis. God I love Travis. Makes me feel so much better about myself.

III. The characters

Most characters you encounter have nice backstories, interesting personalities (as of now my personal favorite is the captain of USS Constitution). You can clearly feel the love poured on them by the developers.

IV. The settlements

I must confess having spent hours in building stuff in my colonies, trying to rebuild the commonwealth. The settlement system is still a bit buggy, but there is much hope that it will be resolved in the coming patches.

Now to get on with what could be improved, I will first explain how I played. (/spoilers maybe)

So I am a father whose son has been kidnapped, wife murdered and who spent the last 200 years as an ice cube.

I actually loved the setup at first cause after such an experience you could basically decide what kind of man you had become.

I like to play a nice guy so I went with "considering I don't know when the kidnapping happened, I'm not in a hurry to find my son"

"let's explore the world a bit"

So I helped the minutemen and found them to be quite in agreement with the values of my character. They would become my power base to understand this world and find my son.

I soon became general and the first things that made me cringe started to appear.

I was not the leader of the men as preston had wanted me to believe but their special ops. I had no control over the group whatsoever. What's more, in my own colonies people were talking to me defiantly, calling me dangerous. What a great leader was I...

I took back the Castle, gave the minutemen their former power and yet there was no change whatsoever in my interactions with other people. When I came to diamond city, I still had to pretend I was from a caravan in order to enter. And there I discovered that I was doomed to be a caring father that still though his son had just been kidnapped when it obviously had not happened at the same time I woke up. That somehow killed the main quest for me...

Then came Cait and the pit. I was to enter a neutral area and see what was happening. Getting ready for some talks, I was greeted with fire. That's when I realized that not once had I been able to escape from fighting.

(spoilers end/)

I then decided to play the game focusing on exploration, settlement building and fighting. And I had a blast.

But here is my opinion on how things could be improved:

Well basically you have the perfect base for a game. It's like you have wonderful pieces where you poured your soul but forgot to link them together.

An example of that is

(Spoiler)

The USS Constitution. There is a [censored] ship full of robots that recognize you as part of the army. And yet the interaction it has with the big picture is... none.

Why not being able to take control (either by charisma or hacking) of the ship, put it back in the sea and have it move from base to base on the coast, bombing the enemies.

How nice could it be when you take back the castle to have the queen blown up to little bits by a ship ?

(/Spoiler)

You should be able at each encounter to have a possible talk with any group. (even gouls if you have that goul friendly trait) and the stronger your group become the easier it should be to avoid fighting. (you don't want to piss of someone that is very backed up)

let's take a few steps back and have a look at the general situation.

You have several entities in the commonwealth.

-The sole survivor

-The minutemen

-The Institute

-The BoS

-The railroad

-The raiders

-The gunners

-The vaults

-Goodneighbor

-Diamond city

-the farmers

-many small others

Here is my conception of things. The sole survivor should be able to join any group and rise to become their leader (or stay as a underling cause why not) or even create its own group.

With the settlements, the game takes a bit of a sandbox approach but does not go far enough.

Next are the companions. I think that any character inside a group you're part of could be taken as a companion (minus the backstory for newcomers / or a few standard backstory like drug abuse, family killed by raiders...). Well for that they would need a name first.

Then maybe you want to change the personality of your companion. I like Preston, but someone with a darker mind might want to transform him into a raider boss.

How to do that ?

You might want to rationalize the likes and dislikes.

Let's take an example of the main moral topic of the game: the synths.

You have four positions on the subject:

-(hate) Let's destroy them (BoS)

-(slavery) They are tool (Institute)

-(equality) But they have feelings too (railroad)

-(indifference) I don't give a [censored] (the minutemen)

Now you put that grid on each faction an race and you have the political opinion of each citizen of the Commonwealth described by a base 4 vector.

Do the same with (like, neutral, dislike) on the actions like pirating, stealing and such and you gave them a personality.

And how can you modify the personality of your companions ? Well talk to them. You did something they don't like, they should ask you why and you should be able to tell them that you did it for a greater good.

Now for the settlements. So you have immortals citizens that transports goods from one side of the map to the other even if the entire path is not controlled. Yeah that feels wrong...

You have everything needed to create some sort of economy and yet the world fails at it. You create shops and they suddenly get furnished, there is no goods production.

You want us to rebuild the Commonwealth, please let us do it.

My take on it is:

-food and water: rather than absolute values, have a consumption rate and stocks. This would allow the existence of raiders settlements that would live of pillaging enough stocks to survive as well as trading the surplus to other colonies that can't produce enough, or even sell it.

-security: how come there is no difference between a guard with power armor and without. Please make the security brought to be dependent on the equipment

-population: well I think that 30 or 40 as a limit could be better considering my next points

-caravans: existence of danger on the road, based on the areas it cross, leading to the need of escorts

Now if you take my previous points together, we can talk politics. You have several factions, meaning you can get several classes. You can have a settlement where some raiders rule over the farmers (maybe even as slave) Once you have seen which group are in the colony, you can determine a hierarchy between them. Maybe even create a new one (like in the case up here, you decide that some farmers could be traders and considered a bit better).

I get that it could be a bit tedious to manage, but well done it could be fun. Imagine a colony full of supermutants that follow you cause you made them believe that you were their prophet or something like that.

Now for the different buildings and area that you clear.

Once you have cleared an area, you take everything that is there and usually you lose time going back and forth to stock the trash. That's tedious and not really fun.

Why not send a signal to the nearest colony so that a group of scavenger comes and takes everything ?

it would also be nice to send some troops to take control of the area afterwards. Being a real leader. Securing trade roads. (or pillaging trade roads - I don't judge)

you could have a nice map with the different spots and who control them.

You could send an armed troop take control of an area for you (expect losses), having the area being attacked and lost. This would make the player need to think of how he expends rather than just taking any settlement he founds.

And my last point for today: diplomacy.

God! diplomacy. Not aggressive negotiations (SW) and not the 5th element negotiation (damn that movie was good).

Like going to a group of raiders and using your charisma, making them follow you in making the minutemen the most badass group ever by making them join the minutemen. This also mean allowing you to send them where you want like any companion.

Or simply have them enslaved the moment they arrived.

Well to sum up my feedback:

If it was a painting, the game would be one of the best canvas ever seen, but you could only use pink to paint on it.

Thank you for reading my long post.

Well I must say I expected at least some kind of discussion...

Many of the things you wish for are just not possible on today's generation of consoles/PCs.

Yes, a "realistic" game is what everybody (well, many people at least) really want to see.
But, the technology just isn't there yet to allow for such detailed coding.

But, that is just my opinion.

I must disagree though.

for example giving a personality as I described could be done by adding a vector to the data of a NPC (not a lot of memory weight)

as for adding diplomacy solution before shootings, I don't think it's that heavy either.

From a memory point of view, I think that what I propose is doable.

"Adding a vector"...for each NPC.
Multiplied by the thousand, or so, NPCs in the gameworld?

Everything seems simple...until it doesn't. (lol)

I thought that was the reason why we have loading screens ?

compared to the weight of the texture of the characters that seems a bit negligible to me.

I might be wrong though