Thanks for all the replies! I think part of my problem with FO4 is all those settlement attacks that make me feel like I have to drop everything I'm doing and go save'em. Previous FO and TES games didn't have time sensitive missions so I could just take my time and explore. Just add those missions to the list of things to do and continue what I'm working on. Now every time I try to explore I get interrupted. I know I could ignore those attacks, but no, I can't! And I tend to fast travel a lot more because the attack is on the other side of the map.

I'm looking forward to the CK and hope someone will publish a mod to eliminate those settlement attacks or eliminate the timer.

Fallout 4 Quests and Skyrim Quests to compare:

http://imgur.com/gallery/Mvc3i

...and yes it is.

No Settlement Attacks Mod

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/4180/?tab=4&&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Ffallout4%2Fajax%2Fcomments%2F%3Fmod_id%3D4180%26page%3D1%26sort%3DDESC%26pid%3D0%26thread_id%3D3491085&pUp=1

Ok that's Skyrim though. Ofcourse an Elder Scrolls game is going to have more to do than Fallout. 3 kills 4 in quest length though.

Is it really that Difficult to accept that Fallout 4 has only the half of Quest to Skyrim? Both Games have good Quests but they have also many go to x and kill y Quests. I know ur Holy Grail is under attack but this?

One of the things that is most noticeably different to me is how the act of actually trekking across the wasteland to a location differs in FO3 and FO4. If I'm trekking from Megaton to some far reaching location on the edge of the map in FO3, it's a long walk. A really long walk. But it's also often an incredibly uneventful walk. I might run into a few mole rats or a couple of super mutants. I might find a new location or two if I'm lucky. Taking the equivalent journey in FO4 is more likely to involve running into a raider camp, some wandering Gunners or super mutants, finding three new locations and a couple of dungeons to explore seeing some building way off in the distance that you just have to go investigate. With my first character, I set out from Sanctuary with the intention to head to Diamond City at about level 12. I didn't make it there until I was around level 50. I'd set out, find a new location, investigate it, clear it out, loot it, go drop my loot off, head back out to Diamond City, get a little farther, find another location...and so on. I ended up picking up so many side quests before getting to Diamond City that it just took me forever to finally get there...which isn't a bad thing. Meanwhile in the Capital Wasteland, I just walked halfway across the map and only had three small enemy encounters and got to see a really big desolate wasteland with very little to draw my interest.

Hardly, most of the quests (besides Freedom Trail that I encountered) are not long. Most are just "head straight to point A, kill dem baddies, u da real MVP"

I think a major thing that we all keep forgetting is, that we didn't have sprinting in the previous Fallout games.

We were really forced to walk across the map until mods came... That made the maps in both games feel far bigger than they actually were ^^

Skyrim has more quests, but that doesn't make it have more content, does it?

You can still visit and fight through as many locations in F4 as you could in Skyrim, if not even more... we don't necessarily need an NPC telling us to get a sword from that location, to be able to go there by ourselves.

The radiant quests from Fallout 4 and more than the half of Skyrim's quests don't add anything to the game.

They're just tools to stretch the length of the game for those people that wouldn't explore everything without them.

Skyrim had the advantage of those quests actually being written instead of being copy-pasted and radiant, like they are in F4... but it still hardly makes them more enjoyable and hardly adds anything to the game.

What matters to me is:

Doing the complete main quest once, doing all the unique quests and exploring the whole map... takes roughly as much time in F4 as it did in Skyrim

Which means that both games have the same amount of content. All the other repetitive and radiant quests don't really matter.

You don't see the difference between written quests and radiant "go to x location and kill"?

That's like saying Adam Sandler is your favorite comedian.


The bit about f3 and NV not having sprint was interesting I forgot about that gripe. Glad they fixed it.

I just don't think that those things:

Bring a Dwarven item to Calcelmo

Bring the Stallion's Potion to Roerek

Kill the leader of Druadach Redoubt

...are any better than what we see from Preston, only because they have more dialogue that makes sense.

They still hardly add anything to the game and don't make a location more fun to explore.

And there are really a ton of them in Skyrim. And every single one of them is on that quest chart:

http://i.imgur.com/t3kczeB.jpg

I'm surely underestimating the amount of real quests in Skyrim... the amount of factions that we had was impressive.

But the difference to Fallout 4 isn't as big as many people make it out to be.

You discover an interesting Bards College, hope for some interesting dialogue and all you get is that you have to go to a cave to bring a lute back?

That's not that much better than the disappointing Combat Zone in F4, is it?

The Bards College is actually a great example of how stretched that chart is ^^

It's not even under the Miscellaneous section in there... and you still see every single bit of the repetitive quests you get there

• Investigate the Bards College


• Tending the Flames


• Finn's Lute


• Pantea's Flute


• Rjorn's Drum

Yeah, it's not about questing, it's about killing stuff, looting, simcrafting and exploring.

i agree the NV quests were good, obsidian is good at writing and storytelling, they have the edge in that area,the NV map itself was pretty barren and fallout 4 is dense, intricate and battlezones and locations are fairly well done all over the map, so there's way more to do overall its just not realy great when it comes to quests, its like they need some injection of better writing to really complete the game worlds they create, they do combat, enemies and overall world design excellent i think, i have a few gripes but not too many as far as world design but the quests are kinda weak.

Thats a own Goal, isnt it?

More Quests = more Questgiver/more NPC's = more Villages = more Dialog = more Content?

Skyrim had 3 Times more Villages and not only 3 Times more unique NPC's. Maybe 4 or 5 Times more? Maybe less? But Skyrim was huge while Fallout4 isnt. It dont have that huge feeling here. You look at the West its kinda empty, the South too, the North either, the Party is only in the middle. This Game has so far 1 big City, 1 small City and one unique Settlement. For a Size of Skyrim Map its very very weak.

What about Quality? Are the Quests, Villages, NPC's in any Way better compared to Skyrim? Story, Graphic and Ragdoll. That is for me the difference between Skyrim and Fallout 4. I dont care much about Fantasy or post-apocalyptic, i just like huge Games.

no... cutting 90% of my post is an own goal ^^

Quests aren't the only type of content.

It's pretty obvious that a post-apocalyptic destroyed world will be way more hostile, than a game in a fantasy-setting.

All of Skyrim's villages combined are still way smaller than the Boston city is. It's just that Boston isn't friendly and a war-zone

And I definitely had the 'huge' feeling way more often than in Skyrim. You feel completely lost when looking from the Prydwen on the skyline of the city.

The small villages of Skyrim can't keep up with that... as much as I love Riften and as much as I dislike Diamond City.

But Diamond city is luckily just a tiny part of the whole Boston city in the game.

Skyrim has definitely a big advantage in those friendly areas... every single city was way better than Diamond City and Goodneighbor are.

Even the somewhat disappointing winter college was more interesting than Diamond City :/

I do feel like the NPCs are better written in F4 though... there may be not as many, but I doubt I'll forget Piper, Danse, Maxson, Valentine soon.

They simply have more character and aren't as generic as the NPCs in Skyrim... I can hardly remember anyone from there.

Oh i did that with a Reason because Quests are the Main Content in every RPG or? And this Sentence, sorry i had to react like that. And what is the other Part of Content in Fallout 4? I only see the Settlement System. Crafting and other Stuff have both Games. But the Settlement System is even just a little Part (Settlement x 30 Places to built?, so just 30x copy/paste) They are not replacements of real Villages in any Case.

Quests will always be the first Content to compare to other Games, but ofcourse not the only one.

exploring... getting distracted ^^

when you're doing a quest and see an interesting building and end up spending 2 hours in there... just to be forced to head back home overloaded, instead of being able to actually doing the quest you wanted to do.

It's basically the same as it was in Skyrim, just that you had to revisit several places twice, because there were tons of NPCs that forgot their stuff in those caves and made you hike back to get it.

I see 'content' as a term of how much I can spend in a game. Having played 200+ hours in Fallout on a single playthrough is not a short time.

I don't really know whether I spent 80 or 120 hours of those 200 for quests or how I filled the time... all that matters to me, is how much time I had fun with the game.

And 200+ is a very very long time for a single player game. There are hardly any other games except Skyrim that can surpass that.

Without talking about quests and story-line, are the people saying it's "small" also claiming they discovered and fully explored all the locations? I can't even tell.

I agree with this. I think exploring is in and of itself a huge part of the content in this game. Like I said above, trekking from Megaton to a quest location in Fallout 3 was generally a long and fairly dull task. It was fun. I love just exploring and taking in the scenery. But it wasn't as interesting or attention drawing. I'd leave Megaton and generally make it to the quest location without incident. I'm currently replaying Fallout 3, and just a little bit ago I went to Paradise Falls for the first time. Not that long of a walk from Megaton, but it takes a little while to get there. I encountered a small Enclave outpost just north of Arefu on my way there, and a couple of mole rats, but those were the only events of interest. I didn't see any locations that I haven't yet been to with this character. I didn't get sidetracked by anything. I basically just went straight there.

Taking a similar length journey in Fallout 4...would have probably taken me all night. I would have stopped to fight a raider camp, then seen a couple of new locations that I haven't been to yet and cleared them and looted them, which would mean I'd have to travel back home to unload my junk. Then I'd travel back out toward my destination, but I'd make it a little farther and find another new location, and so on.

I think I may have said it earlier in this thread, but a big part of what makes FO4 feel small is that everything is dense. Short of the far north and far south regions, most of the map is really densely packed. So far I've discovered 331 locations in the game. I see people post on Facebook saying that they think they've found all the locations, and they'll end up only having discovered like 250 of them. Granted, some of those locations don't have much of interest, such as the crashed Vertibird in the Glowing Sea that doesn't have any loot or anything near it, but counts as a discoverable location. Fallout 3 has 163 discoverable locations, excluding the DLC. Fallout 4 already has -double- the amount of locations. And we've already been told that Far Harbor is going to have the largest landmass of any Bethesda DLC to date. After the DLC, Fallout 3 had 221 locations. The pre-DLC Fallout 4 already has over 100 more discoverable locations than Fallout 3 had after ALL of the DLC. That says quite a bit by my reckoning.

There is too. It's called "The Institute". And the Fighters' Guild is called the "Brotherhood of Steel" and the Thieves Guild is called "The Railroad".


And (to push the Skyrim anology to breaking point), the three Guild questlines have been rolled into a three sided Civil War. And the Skyrim MQ has also been rolled into the Civil War with Alduin being placed in charge of the Mages' Guild and given plausible deniability. ("I'm only going to eat the world a little bit, and it'll make things better for everyone in the long run. The very long run. Now pass the salt and pepper!")

Depends. There's a lot of wonderful detail in the world design, a lot of interesting nooks and corners on the map. There are some really big interiors and some wonderfully complex verticality. But the quest based content seems extremely sparse.


Put it this way: it was years before I got fed up with playing F3 or Skyrim. Fallout 4 didn't last three months.

Every single TES game have always more quest that Fallout.

But if i compare TES game in exploration vs Fallout game Fallout games have a better exploration that the TES.

And why is that? Fallout doesnt have more Locations. How it can be better as Skyrim then? Is that your Opinion as a Fallout Fan? I mean i try to be objective, i dont want to be outed as Skyrim fanatic Fan or a Fallout fanatic Fan. I dont compare the exploring because both having the same Amount of Locations. Thats why ill took the Amount of Quests in Total because at the End its the only representative Content i can use to compare the Content in Total of FO4.

It's definitely missing something that's for sure. It would be nice if bethesda had worked with Obsidian on this.

We need to start comparing FO4 to FO3 and NV.


Bethesda has a different design for elder scrolls games.

Or we could legitimately compare F3 against Oblivion and F4 against Skyrim and see which Fallout holds up against the corresponding TES game.

I don't think F3 suffers particularly in comparison with Oblivion. Certainly not on the scale that F4 does when compared with Skyrim.

Yes, just like how most quests from 3 and NV are that.