I had fun with the building mechanic, but it couldn't make up for the fact that this game is almost completely devoid of main cities to explore. There's Diamond City, which I felt was well made, and Goodneighbor, which was pitifully small. The old games had settlements that were not just larger, but more numerous.

The following cities had many questlines, unique NPC's, and shops, as well as being relatively large.

Fallout 3- Megaton, Rivet City, Tenpenny Tower, Underworld

New Vegas- Goodsprings, Novac, Westside, Freeside, New Vegas

Fallout 4 has twice as many overall locations but only half of the cities, with one of them being particularly small. I blame the settlement system because so much land was allocated to them. In the entire low level section of the map, there's nothing present except ramshackle settlements with generic "Settler" NPCs. This was incredibly bad design and made the early game very boring. The settlement system was fun, but it shouldn't be implemented at the expense of cities and unique NPC's to talk to.

I agree to some extent. I feel the wasteland is too empty of settled life, especially larger communities/cities. There's a BILLION people shooting each other, but almost no one living here. It seems, odd...

I end up messing around with the Workshop editor, but I'd like to see more NPC settlements/city or towns around.

I feel where you are coming from, I find myself wandering around too, thinking "Oh mh I could hang at Diamond City, get fixed up and have some noodz"...but it just gets less fun if there is no real alternatives.

As you say, Goodneighbor is a cool place but so so small.....

I guess the intention here really is to create those places yourself.....make your 30000 potential settlement spots come alive, but I know its not the same as entering a City that has that "secure spot" feeling incl. exploration..

You can have up to something like 30 settlements, all which can have shops and up to 20 settlers each. So as far as cities, I think that gives plenty. What would be nice to make the world feel more lively is to have unique npcs that are able to join settlements. That would give them more of a true town feel.

There are unique npcs that are able to join settlements. i know of two, one is in diamond city and the other...

The game also has named NPCs that populate specific settlement spots as well. I have not even come close to exploring all the locations or quests so my two examples isn't to be taked as the only examples as I haven't explored the game all that fully yet.

Ah, that is cool then. I didn't read your spoilers one, I'll come across it at some point I'm sure. So the only left for the settlements is some way to stop those radiant quests, they drive me nuts. I sometimes will get like 4 of them with kidnaps going on at the same time. Gets boring and takes away from me doing what I want.

Especially if it's always the same person being kidnapped from Sanctuary.....plus I could swear a guy told me it was his daughter and she was clearly older than him

Atm my playthrough is focused on the minutemen so its not quite a problem. But it takes up alot of time if you want to build a nice lore-friendly settlement. So I'm a bit worried for my second playthrough since I then want skip the settlement building.

There's more places then diamond city and goodneighbour though. There's Bunker Hill, The Slog, Covenant - all with around 10 named npcs but not so big and they also feel quite "dead" most likely because they are also able to join the minuteman and the dialogues/quests there are few to none.

I didn't name those places because I don't consider them real points of interest. I applied something of stringent standards to the olds games too, because I didn't bother mentioning smaller places such as Andale, Sloan, or The Republic of Dave. These places are cool, but they cant match the standards of a main city.

If I'm honest for sure I miss a few of the old cities from F3/NV, but when I think about it I only ever really visited them in detail once or twice for the various little character quests (The marriage one at Rivet City for example). The rest of the time I only ever used them (and this is 99% of the time I visit) as dumping grounds for my loot and thats about it.

I suppose yes it would have been nice to see some more larger pre-built settlements, but I'd rather build my own this time around

Personally I like to have as few settlements as possible, so I move all my settlers to have max pop before starting another. I have only 6 settlements at the moments, but all are at max population (16 for me) rather than have multiple settlements with 2-3 people only, so I have about 10 empty settlements.

Unfortunately some settlers can't be moved to other settlements >: /

You say goodneighbour is pitiful, but I'd wager it has a higher object count than even Megaton, and that's because most of the space is interiors. TP tower, Rivet city and the ghoul spot were all interiors too, and all smaller with less object density. There are side quests in goodneighbour, and it's one of my favourite places in F4.

Though I do agree in general that the overall size of the game is somewhat disappointing, but only after 70h of play through to me, and I think I've discovered like 200 locations which is more than any Beth title previously. And there are more unnamed locations than any previous game, so it's hard to criticise when the fault comes down to me for having unrealistic expectations.

Novac was not large and did not have that many questlines. Goodsprings had several houses, a clinic, bar, and general store. Decent size. But not that many questlines. I'll admit, those other locatons were big, but not every place in a post-apocalyptic world is going to have real large cities. It would be unrealistic. I think given the setting Diamond City does alright for itself.

The issue is that Goodsprings is only slightly smaller than Goodneighbor, yet Goodneighbor is supposed to be a main city. Diamond City is fine, but then again it doesn't match the way that we had both Megaton and Rivet City, or Freeside and New Vegas. Cities are sorely lacking in this game.

goodneighbor isn't that small actually, there's a lot going on there, state house, third rail, two vendors, memory den, hotel rexford or whatever it is, warehouses, other houses people live in, one where the lady gives you a quest, and most of those locations are fairly good size inside, nothing in goodsprings is like that, one vendor, a small saloon, doctors house a few random houses, there's way more going on in goodneighbor with a lot of quests associated with it.

i'm kinda satisfied with it, i'm glad most of the city is left for battling enemies, but there is covenant, vault 81, diamond city, the slog is kinda like underworld, there's goodneighbor, bunker hill, atom cats, prydwen, airport, institute

Don't everyone forget Vault 81, now, either. I'd say that place is at least as fleshed out as Underworld, Goodsprings, or Novac. I'd also put Covenant in that group, too, but to each their own.

I'm pretty sure it's deliberate on Bethesda's part to go easy on major settlements, though. The Elder Scrolls games are all very cosmopolitan, with way more cities compared even to New Vegas. Only having a few truly advanced settlements in their Fallout games is probably to drive home the post-apocalyptic setting - and it's not like the Fallout games suffer for content, at any rate.

For the most part, I agree. I do really enjoy the whole settlement system, but as I'm progressing through the game I keep getting more and more settlements. It's become something of a chore to keep building them all up. It's using up an obscene amount of scrap too.

I think for the time being I'm just going to keep sending new settlers to my already established settlements.

The more urban settings are some of the coolest in this game. I love Diamond City. The view when you first walk in is one of the more pivotal moments of the game. More cities on the scale would be cool, although I do like having a large portion of the map as mostly empty area too. Scouring the wasteland looking for scattered raider camps can be a lot of fun.

I tend to agree, there needs to be more random interaction in the world...a lot more quests from random non faction-affiliated NPCs would help for a start.

I don't blame settlements for this however, that can be a thing extra, not a thing that takes from other things.

The fact of the matter is that Fallout 4 has less cities and civilized areas because there is a greater presence of raiders and more numerous monsters. Deathclaws seem to be running rampid in the Commonwealth. Several times when fighting raiders the noise has brought Deathclaws to investigate. Which is frustrating because I have no time to loot my kills before I have to deal with those SOBs. And by deal with I mean running for my fricken life. Yes, this run is in survivor mode.

The settlements work well as cities. I would just like to see them not be so required in the sense of those radiant quests. If the township has several geared settlers and the defense is high then kidnappings, attacks and such should be non existent or the town should be able to take care of it themselves without us. For those who have a lot of settlements, it makes them extremely time consuming and, at least for me I start to regret having them at all. Overall I love them, I would just like to see a few changes to make them become a "part" of the game and not all of the game.

I agree. Fallout 4 really does lack civilization all things considered. It doesn't take away from the game a whole lot.. I mean there's a lot of little gems in there like Vault 81 and the Atom Cats and little places like that. Settlements are awesome, but yea I don't see why there needs to be so many? Hopefully the expansions add to the map.

You all miss the point, he is just trying to say there are not a lot of big places, filled with interesting characters, that are made by developers for us to explore.

Of course you can still play sim city, build everything by yourself and fill it with generic, one dialogue option NPCs, but come on, you know that is completely different.

One big city, models from Skyrim, animations back from Oblivion, all assets reused, dialogue options reduced, engine from older games. Then what were they doing all those years in development. Just makes you wonder what were they working on, it is a great game but it feels indie.

I didn't miss the point @guy above...anyway it looks like they're leaving this to the modders.