As a huge fan of the Fallout series, I was extremely excited to get this game. I have them all, even Fallout Tactics. As much as I want to love this game, as much as I want it to be an awesome step forward for the series, the truth is: this game is a massive letdown.
The game immediately dips you headfirst into one of the basic flaws of the game: your character is already decided for you. Want to be the empitome of evil that clears out entire towns for caps? Nope, you're a concerned father. Want freedom in dialogue choices? Nope, you're just allowed to straddle shades of being a concerned father. There is literally no room for roleplaying with the choice of a voiced protagonist. Within the opening minutes, the heart of a Role Playing Game is taken from you and never given back. You cannot be a character of your own creation, you just get to change what your concerned daddy looks like. That's it.
The second glaring abortion of this game: skills are gone entirely. Just let that sink in a bit, we're talking what's supposed to be an rpg here and an established system from 5 previous games. Bethesda decided to trash it quite literally. No more intelligence beefing up your skill point gain each level, no more needing to tag skills or focus on what you want to be. Instead it's just completely gone, with tiny slices of it shoe horned into the perks system. You get a perk every level instead, and spend it on the new perks sheet. Perks even feel that much more watered down because of it. It's the only slice left of character specialization in the game, and it doesn't do nearly enough. It's cute looking, but also hides the ridiculous nature of leveling in this game.
Leveling up makes character building pointless anyways. In all past Fallout games, your starting attributes were absolutely vital. It was who you were going to be. Melee oriented? Here comes the strength + endurance. Sneaky sniper? Grab that perception & agility. Then Fallout 4 comes in, and lets you learn that attributes are now nearly pointless from a build standpoint. You can add a stat literally each level, until you're perfect. Gaining stats in previous games was like a holy grail, extremely rare to find, expensive to do, but dear goodness you raised that 1 point in agility. Now you can just eat up extra attributes like popcorn, until you're a jack of all trades and builds.
Another glaring thing that bothered me 8 and a half hours in: I'd already explored half the map quite literally. And I play this game slow, with a terrible side of being a pack rat. I take my time and pick up everything. Heck, I spent an hour and 10 minutes in the tiny Vault 111, just making sure I didn't miss anything. And that's my biggest issue with this game so far: it's absolutely tiny. I later looked back at the map and realized most of the rest I haven't explored was the ocean. You will discover all the locations in the game absurdly quickly, and getting to them is fast. I personally liked the massive empty spaces of Fallout 3. If that's not your cup of tea, New Vegas did a more compact map extremely well. It felt more like an unpopulated wasteland, not to mention journeying there was half the fun. Now you can get anywhere with no planning, and do so in seconds. The worst part? This tiny space is pretty empty. Random encounters are very rare in the time I've played. There's not much of a sense of danger or worry, you'll get there in one piece and most likely never run into anything on the way.
One last tidbit, companions are all in god-mode. They cannot die, ever :/ They also join you with zero effort or next to no dialogue. The game washes your face with this too, 3 minutes into it you're probably already the new general of the Minutemen. You almost never took charge of a faction at all in the previous games, much less this easily.
The 3 things that have changed the most in terms of additions: are gunplay, settlement building, and weapon modification. Let's take a look at them.
Gunplay is most definitely the best improvement 4 has to offer. And when it really comes down to it, that's what this series has now become. It's barely an rpg anymore, it's much more of an action fps now. The controls are tight, the action in shootouts is intense, and vats is no longer a pause button. Bethesda made some right moves here, but even so missed a few basic things. The ai also isn't terribly suited to the new gunplay either, you'll either be up against someone firing out in the open, or have to chase enemies behind a slice of cover. Once in a while they will crouch behind sandbags, or lean from a corner. On the plus side, enemies on the whole are much tougher, especially the legendary ones. There are some great fights to be had, some can last minutes and require you to pull out the last bits of melon or stab a stimpak in while you run away. It's sad, there was some serious potential here.
The weapons look much more like what you'd expect in a post apocalyptic wasteland. The vast majority are put together from pieces of pipe, springs, anything you could grab. I like this compared to the mysterious numbers of pristine pre-war weapons in previous games. The modification system is pretty fun, and it's nice you can tailor guns to whatever you need from them. The same pipe rifle you use to snipe from a distance can totally be remade to churn out armor piercing rounds automatically. Unfortunately, there's 2 big downsides to this new system. First, you can usually find better modified weapons off of enemies than the ones you can make. Secondly, you will have the most powerful weapons early in the game. There's no sense of scaling here, everything you can ever operate is there from the get-go.
Finally, let's talk about settlement building. You can finally manage and run settlements in the wasteland, not to mention build them to the smallest minutia. I've spent hours into this alone, just building up the right amount of crops, beds, etc. It adds some serious meat to an otherwise bare game, and in my mind is the 2nd best change this game did. But even so, it was rather poorly explained to the player. Trying to figure out supply lines, looking around on foot for your workers so you can re-assign them jobs... there's just far too much frustration and wasted time figuring this out. Not to mention the entire mechanic would have benefitted immensely from a freaking menu. How is everything else in the game viewable from your pip-boy, and yet you can't look up what your workers are doing & where? It's really rough around the edges the way it's implemented, I'm hoping modders fix this up, because it has extreme potential for fun.
So when it comes down to it, Fallout 4 is not the masterpiece the hype would have us believe. It's pretty stripped down, well past the point of being an rpg. The game can still be good fun, but I can't honestly recommend it at full price as it is right now. Down the road when it's on sale, and modders have saved Bethesda's butt it could turn into the experience it should have been initially.
*Edit - snap, you can lean! Thanks guys*