Fallout 4's main drawback is that Boston just isn't that interesting. I mean, how many people around the world dream of visiting Boston? New Vegas was a much better idea for a location.
Assassin's Creed had Jerusalem, Florence, the Caribbean, Paris, London, Alexandria, Athens etc. They also did Boston, but it was in a American Independence game I hardly played. Americans always like to have a Revolution episode, even if doing so is totally predictable.
Nothing wrong with Boston, problem is with Bethesda and their design choices. If you place story of Fallout 4 in any other city it would still be a equally bad game only with maybe few more interesting vistas.
Biggest problem is that Bethesda just cant comprehend a post apocalyptic society that flourishes and rebuilds.
Boston is just another place that after hundreds of years is still just a ruin overrun with mutants and bandits. Only civilization being a struggling small part of it on a baseball field which entire identity is about baseball themed weapons and armor. Its stupid and not interesting.
How about making Boston a capitol of a new strong faction that chooses the city for its symbolism as they try to usurp the old powerful staple factions of Fallout universe.
Hmm I'm gonna go against the grain here, I honestly think FO4's setting both conceptually and in execution...is pretty good. I find it quite fun to explore Boston. There's tons to see and do.
The issue is that there are core problems with gameplay, that mods can fix or improve to some extent, and then there's things that can't be fixed like shitty quest design and boring NPCs.
I tend to find FO4 pretty fun, at least with a certain amount of mods to make the gameplay better, up until the moment the Prydwen arrives. And then I gradually start to lose interest. The story and quest design and writing are just terrible.
In my last playthrough (heavily modded is an understatement) I managed just about to keep interested until the end of Far Harbour (barely) and then when it came home to go back to the mainland and continue the main quest...hell no, I'm done here.
Creating fun locations to visit was never really Bethesda's problem IMO, rather its their inability to create competent stories, plots, quests, characters, etc.
Look at somewhere like Nuka World, even, which is one of Beth's worst DLCs, the issue isn't at all with the design of the place, it's fine. It's the stories and quests and characters that are boring as fuck.
To address your example, it's not that people are armed with baseball bats and protective gear that reeks of incompetence, it's the storytelling approach and character designs that are the issue.
This also explains why FO4 is so popular with normies, because they don't analyse stories in any kind of detail, it's just 'oh a baseball community, neat' then they carry on killing stuff mindlessly and enjoying every second of it. The design of the actual setting aside from the stories and the characters and so on, the actual landscape itself and even to a certain extent the enemy design, which isn't that bad, if a little lacking in variety sometimes (endless gunner enemies does get a little repetitive), does a lot of the heavy lifting in this game.
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