It's a great game, but...
Any game that has technical flaws and game engine bugs that first surfaced when the engine was introduced a decade ago, does not deserve high awards.
Unless gamers look at the industry like that, we will not see continuous improvement, and will be saddled with an "It'll be right" attitude by developers.
You're telling other people who play DOTA2 and CS:GO actually enjoy it?
They're highly addictive and competitive, yes.
Also http://steamcharts.com/ only goes back 30 days for it's peak players. And it's peak players under "top records" are top records per individual game. It's not useful as a comparative since there's a huge amount of in between "top records" per game it won't show at any given time.
Maybe the pink-glassing of the game here will stop now and the blaming of the supposedly "hating" classic fallout fans too. A lot of people here tried to show the problems but mostly they got muzzled.
Fallout 4 fell too much apart from it′s predecessors and it′s definatly not "well meshed", instead it feels like knitted with a hot knitting needle - tons of stuff put it not really fitting or working together. Not enough changes (improved combat and graphics is not everything to hook players) and more reduction on everything else.
I actually like dialogue wheel, but it was badly implemented. I replay Skyrim, and you don't actually have more options, a lot of the dialogues may only have 1 or 2 options. Clicking on one may reveal additional options, and a lot of the time, you only have 1 option to choose from. In Fallout 4, sometimes, the dialogue wheel reveals new information, but at other times, the dialogue wheel allows you to also have one dialogue, but at the same time, letting you show your emotion while saying that line. What the dialogue wheel is weak at is paraphrasing. It's too broad sometimes like I like to be sarcastic as in funny, but sometimes, when I click on sarcastic remark, it ends up insulting the person. What they need to do is to have paraphrase, but has a subtitle down below telling you what you're supposed to say or at least a short version of it if you so choose. Some of the comments are very witty, and it would have been ruined if I have known it in advanced.
I love the game but I don't think it should be GotY. It has improvements over Skyrim and FO3 sure, but some of the things they added really needed work. Settlement management is can be a nightmare, not know what your PC is going to say is a problem with many (as indicated by some of the more popular mods already on Nexus). It does have bugs, but nothing that's really ruined the game for me. The biggest one bothering my now is the fact you can't remove the Misc. mod from Synth armor, and I like to break down all my armor pieces as I collect them. It's not a major thing by any stretch, but it's one I notice every time I'm at the workbench, so it bothers me to that extent.
Looking at the improvements from The Witcher 2 to The Witcher 3 and all the 'free' stuff and additions they've added to the game, plus all the DLC's during 2015, I think it more than deserves the praise it gets. I'm not playing it (waiting on a deep deep STEAM sale) but I can appreciate what they've done.
Looking back I'm trying to think of what would have made FO4 better and perhaps would have garnered it more GotY awards. Overall I think the dialog wheel was a mistake. It's an obvious rip-off from ME and it just makes FO looks like it's trying to be like ME, which it never should. Something we're more used to in FO (like the mod that's had more than a half million downloads) would have been an overall improvement. A polished settlement menu and settler organizer would have been a huge help. Would like to hear what others think would have helped their case for GotY.
Fallout 4 is a decent game but it's not a classic or "game of the year". It's hyped too much and deliver none. At end of the day it's a sandbox with little substance, integrity and innovation. You go places and kill things for no apparent reason.
Character leveling system is worse than some FPS and action games(i'm being serious), it does have a nice world but exploration is pointless because you only find places filled with things waiting to be butchered. Skyrim had 8 cities and 5 of them were totaly unique. Dozens of farms, villages, inns, strongholds. Fallout 4 has 3 decent locations(DC, Airport and Institute) and that's it.
The settlement system can't help this problem because it is an empty mechanic without any substance; only purpose is to waste time. It doesn't effect the world.
Number of real side quests are fewer than Fallout 3 and almost every Fallout 3 side quest is better. I shouldn't even mention F:NV because difference between F:NV and F4(when it comes to side quests) is so enormous in both quality and quantity that it's depressing.
Fallout 4 is a horrible RPG with pathetic dialogues, sad leveling system, unbalanced difficulty curve and zero role playing. It's a funnish shooter with a nice but nonsensical world. That's it. Some may like it and it's okay but there is no need to refuse the reality.
lol, he is possibly the most annoying npc of any fallout game i ever played
Falling back to the roots what fallout really has been, an rpg with a lot of adventure elements. That means building your character with a lot of shapes available and tons of dialogues with multiple choices and results as well as quests that are multi layered what means that it′s not only "go there and kill this".
Turning it into the same sauce every other game offers with reduced dialogues, mainstreamed skills/perks and tiny quests - this won′t last long.
Having actually played it, I can't confirm that Fallout 4 is a fantastic game that would be worthy of GOTY most years. It just happened to be released in the same year as Witcher 3, though, which is apparently a great game. I haven't played W3, but I'm sure it deserves all the accolades it's received.
Fallout 4 was easily my GOTY. In fact, there hasn't been anything released since Skyrim, four years previously, that has come close to it for me.
...can someone explain to me why people care so much about these things?
Is it some kind of subtle ego boost? "This game/movie/tv show that I played/watched, won the GotY/Oscar/Emmy! I am therefore a more awesome person"? Or what?
Seriously, if I enjoyed a game that I played, why does it matter if it won X award or not? In either direction, for that matter - if I played and enjoyed a game, and it didn't win GotY, should I then feel ashamed? (That seems silly, too.)
It's always interesting to see how each individual person judges "exploration". I've seen threads on the Skyrim forums talking about how exploration was pointless because you could craft better gear (i.e, "if I can't find god gear, why explore at all"). You seem to care more about finding friendly outposts. Me, I enjoy exploration just for the basic discovering - I'm ok with the locations being dungeons full of baddies, as long as there's something to find/see there.... terminals & journals, architecture, a nice view, etc. And another person will have yet a different set of criteria for "good exploration".
Like I said, it's interesting.
really Fallout 4 come out to be the 2 best game on 2015, competing with Witcher 3 and MGS. Second best game is still a really good position and isnt as if it lose against a bad game.
im with u on that exploration for me is discovering the story of the place trow jurnal pages or terminals, something that i only get from games from Bethesda and Bioware. For me Bethesda still is number 1 on world crafting, no game this year have a map so interesting as Fallout 4.
A lot of really good posts here.
For me I must first confess, that no matter how many awards Witcher 3 wins, I will never buy it.
You see I am hopelessly addicted to Bethesda's 'Moddable, Open World' games. Back when Morrowind (TES3) came out, I had never heard of Bethesda. I mostly played RTS games at the time. I saw Morrowind on the shelf, picked it up, said, "Meh", and was about to put it back.
Then I noticed it was releasing with a game editor. The pusher, got their hooks in me and that was it.
That said, I really enjoy Fallout 4. Even more so than Fallout 3. Fallout 4 is my personal GOTY.
However, there are some design decisions that Bethesda made that I don't like.
While every Fallout has provided some backstory to the Player Character(PC), the one for Fallout 4 is too constricting, and at times annoying. It will also be a challenge for the mod community to overcome, but I have confidence that it can be done. I am personally willing to sacrifice every bit of non-generic voiced dialogue in the game if it will free me from this backstory.
I started out as on the fence about the voiced protagonist, but have grown to hate it. The development resources wasted on this feature, could have been better spent on anything else.
While I am OK with shifting from skills to perks for character development, the perks should have been much more numerous and forced the PC to make decisions about the direction they build their character. This is a weak objection, since all Bethesda games generally allow the PC to become master of almost everything.
Others have already spoken about the weakness in dialogue and radiant quests.
And poor Preston Garvey, what did he ever do to you, Bethesda, that you would afflict him in this manner?
So again, for me. Fallout 4 is my GOTY, but I understand why it might not be other peoples.
replay, replay, replay....FO4 lacks in that..It is still my favorite of 2015, since there wasn't much else out to play (never played any witcher game)..
Still a great game no doubt..funnest I've played in a while, but doing another serious playthrough got a little boring for me...
IMO, they should have spent a couple more months developing, and more importantly testing the game...it seemed like a rushed project, and unfinished in a few areas..
I would give the game a solid 8.5/10 tho..
Yeah. Voiced protag, settlement building, legendary enemies and weapons, etc etc. Bethesda basically went through a bunch of popular games and genres and just took their ideas and plopped them into Fallout 4, in order to appeal to as many people as possible. Blizzard does that, but Blizzard knows how to steal ideas from other games and get them to fit in their own. Thats one of Blizzards strengths, they're the magpies of the industry, but they do it so well.
Thats not one of Bethesdas strengths. So when they tried to do it with Fallout 4, the result was that a lot of these features feel disjoined and inelegant, or they push out other features just to fit.
Don't try to be Blizzard. Or Bioware. Or Gearbox. Just be Bethesda. Ideas and new features should come organically from the designers, not from focus groups or 'whats-hot-right-now?' lists.
That's probably the worse part. I've retired three characters already whom I just ran through the MQ mainly just to see the different ending and try out different role-plays. Now I'm playing 'For Real' and finding that it's going to be difficult to actually do some things differently in game. Ignoring the MQ (who cares if someone murdered my spouse and kidnapped my child, right?) the wasteland is basically the same place with little the player can do to affect it.
Just at the start I would have liked to have picked a pre-war career and then get some Perks at the start based on that, kind of like a starting class. Soldier gets some gun perks, lawyer some persuasion perks, politician some leadership perks, thief some stealth perks, mechanic some crafting perks, etc. Just something to give the role-play a jump start.
At this point it is simply personal preference, opinion, and sniping back and forth. There are threads about the game for both Yes and No for deserving awards. There really doesn't have to be another.