I've been pretty unremittingly negative about Fallout 4 so far. So I thought I'd set down some thoughts about what it does right,

Level Design: I know I'm not the first to point it out, but some of these locations are fantastic. The Corvega factory reminds me of The Pitt's Steelyard with all it's interesting heights and unexpected corners. Raider strongholds are well defended and the defenders make good use of the defenses.

Diamond City is impressive as well: actually large enough to look like it could house a decent population, and we can see how these inhabitants are fed and watered as well. Not that the lack of farms particularly bothered me in F3, but it does make the setting more convincing. In Rivet City I had to assume (as I do in most Beth games) that the part we could visit was a small part of the overall settlement and that a number of infrastructure issues were take care of off-map. Diamond City I could almost imagine being as self-supporting as it is portrayed.

Perks: The Perk Chart is interesting. Rather more so now I've discovered that you can scroll it my holding the mouse pointer on the bottom edge. (Guys: page down? Arrow key? Click and drag? Any one of those would have saved me ton of time here). I wasn't at all happy about losing the skills to SPECIAL based perks, but at least my fears of dumbing down would seem groundless. There are some interesting depths in there, and I can see some fun to be had exploring the different combinations.

Companions: I like Piper, Valentine and Dogmeat. Not sold on Coddsworth and haven't tried the others, but, there's fun to be had there. Piper manages to keep out of my line of fire more often than not and is rather more useful than I'm used to. Also, she doesn't talk my ear off and the affinity system makes for a nice little minigame. Clover could have done with something similar in Three.

Crafting: This looked like fun from the start, but it's not until now that I'm starting to work out which perks support the process, it's finally starting to live up to that potential.

Enemies: The balance and AI seems rather better than I remember. You can't take Super Mutants lightly or wander blithely into a raider stronghold, but at the same time the challenging ones aren't so overpoweringly tough as they were in New Vegas. And even radroaches can spoil your day if you don't see them coming. The Synths seem worthy additions to the roster as well, although lord knows how the Institute can keep manufacturing them in "Phantom Menace" scale numbers.

I'm not so sold on the mutant dogs. Decent monster, but having the mutes on the East Coast strains credulity in the first place. Having dogs that are susceptible to FEV or a variant FEV virus that can affect dogs? Doesn't work for me, sorry.

I still haven't really played with settlement building yet. I got very frustrated with that one trying to get the food supply past 50% (I found some gourds in Concorde and planted them, not realizing they only produced half a food point each - spent way too much time running around re-assigning settlers to different plants trying to fix it). It does seem like there's some potential there, though.

In General: It's clear a lot of thought has gone into this. That hasn't always been apparent: between Mama Murphy's Magical Hallucinations and the Magician's Force used and overused by the dialogue wheel, it was starting to look like this one had been specced by the marketing dept. and then pushed out the door as cheaply as possible. Now, at least, I'm starting to see where the effort went into it

One thing I'm not reconciled with is the background of the player character. I do have some thoughts about that as well, hopefully constructive ones (I haven't been terribly constructive on that subject so far, either). But I'm trying not to moan in this post, so I better leave that for a follow up.

TL:DR:

It's been hard work getting to this point, but the game is finally starting to be fun