So far, Fallout 4 has left me awestruck for a bethesda game. Unlike 3, which had an especially bad and even very cliche story set in a wasteland that is a little to old for the story to begin with, fallout 4's main quest focuses far more on emotional loss and development from it.
After the sequence, your in vault 111 and the typical 'bethesda starting dungeon' begins. It's not as uneventful as fallout 3's tutorial, nore as dull. After getting out of the vault, your released into a swampier world than in F3 or new vegas, and at that point, your introduced to the main game.
Combat and Character Customization:
The combat is far more decisive in fallout 4 than it is in F3 or new vegas. No longer are you simply stopping the time whenever you have the action points and getting free hits. Vats now simply gives you a slow mo in which you now have to quickly make your decisions as to what parts you shoot. Unlike fallout 3 or new vegas, there are no dump stats in the game, and in vats, your perception directly effects your chances to hit a target. Your agility has a far larger effect on how many action points you have. Another change to vats is critical strikes, instead of exclusively having critical strikes, you have a "critical meter" which fills in vats with every hit you land. Higher luck ratings cause it to fill faster, as well as unlocking perks to enable you to even "bank" extra critical strikes.
Luck also directly determines how often you find bottlecaps and ammo in containers. An unlucky character WILL have an ammo shortage, trust me, my first play through was with luck 1.
The stats which have no effect on vats are also not dump stats. Endurance scales retroactively with health. Strength can let you upgrade armor at a minimum and greatly effects melee damage(far more than the pidly 1-5 points in F3 or NV), and Intelligence is a craftsmanship skill for ranged users and even effects your raw leveling speed.
And charisma is as useless as ever- wait, no thats new vegas. Charisma instead, becomes one of the most important stats. In fallout 4 charisma at the very least directly effects prices and lets you successfully pass speech checks regularly. But fallout 4 also enables you to establish, and rebuild and take control of towns in the game through a series of side quests or even simple discovery. And the game lets you build just about anything you wish from a small shack to a building on top of another building, the only limiting factor is resources. And charisma not only makes the prices for some materials better, but from what I've seen a minimum of SIX is required to establish trade to make those materials available to all of your settlements. No amount of wealth will come if you cannot move your materials to that rich central positioned drive in that you plan to turn into a shopping center!
And of course items are prohibitively expensive in the game. Even something as simple as a fusion cell can cost as much as eight or more caps a shot. While it's possible to make it without establishing a territorial power base total war style, it certainly helps in affording ammo and chems when you can simply produce excesses of crops, purified water and also have scavengers collecting resources for you in 4-5 towns.
And likewise, there is no cap to how much you wish to increase your special scores. Every time you level you either choose a perk or increase a special score, and often you may not have any useful perks to invest in so you naturally pick a SPECIAL. With no level cap I could easily see someone making a 'perfect' character, but likewise it'd take prohibitively long even if your pumping mentats and maxed intelligence or made a person with idiot savant.
Lastly, Special scores can be boosted above 10 and benefit you, but you cannot train them above 10. Although I read you can get a stat to 11 permanently with a bobblehead after having hit 10 in it.
Armor also functions as a more combination of damage threshold from new vegas and resistance; the bigger the bullet or more destructive the shot, the more damage it will retain against armor. Armor cannot completely negate damage, but using a .32 pipe weapon against a super mutant is generally a poor idea, even on normal mode, because they simply have enough armor to remove most of such weapons damage.
How roleplay friendly is it?
As with most modern roleplaying games, combat is something thats unavoidable, for the most part from what I've seen. I think it could be possible to only kill those the game asks, but it'd take a dedicated sneaker to do so. And even then, some quests just flat out require you to go to violence. But there are quests that very much ask you to use peaceful solutions, and a high charisma or good agility can be important to do so.
As for choices, fallout 4 actually lets you choose who you side with this time and has a branching story line with it. No longer do you have to side with the brotherhood of steel, in fact you may even find good reasons to not side with them. When I first played I chose to side with who i'd thought were cliche badguys only to find they had their reasons behind their decisions. All the same, it's very easy to anger a group that'd otherwise be thought of nice simply due to their sheer paranoia and even half hostility towards you for no reason. The overall story doesn't seem to have the same black and white problem that fallout 3 had of "your either super good and with the brotherhood, or you enclave and have to die!".
How does increasing the difficulty scale for subsequent playthroughs?
Unlike Skyrim, or even fallout 3, fallout 4 doesn't quite play the same game of "increase their toughness to absurd levels" that previous bethesda games are imfamous for. Instead enemies only see, at best, a marginal increase in toughness on very hard. I have not played on survival, but read it's no different other than decreased health recovery speeds from healing items. Enemy damage still see's a significant increase, even enough so to make some otherwise less threatening enemies deceptively dangerous(in fact I was instantly killed by a 'legendary' rabid radstag, bastard instantly initiated a fatality move on me when I had full health).
The biggest change though, is the game has "Legendary" enemies, who are random mini bosses that can show up at any time, anywhere. And they show up somewhat frequently on normal, but become a regular thing on hard/very hard. Legendary enemies can instantly heal their health back to full by 'mutating' if you do not instantly kill them yourself, and they have a significant increase of damage. However they are still largely counterable. The real kick is when your dealing with enemies typically used as bosses in the first place. Such enemies take massive amounts of damage to begin with, and the durability increase, small as it is, can become a major problem on hard/very hard. In a way, fallout 4 on very hard suffers the same problem that skyrim suffered; they become overpowered and you often resort to some kind of 'cheese' tactic to deal with them early on. In fallout 4, it's simply using jet or psycho, or even "psycho jet". There is no shame in using chems to deal with a boss fight in fallout 4.
Using correct weaponry is also important in fallout 4, because as stated earlier, armor acts both as resistance and a threshold. A plasma weapon or upgraded combat shotgun for example will punch through that deathclaw alpha male along the train tracks pretty quickly. But the minigun or even normal automatic can easily destroy a pack of poorly armored raiders no trouble. This generally ensures no one weapon is truly dominant in fallout 4, and tends towards new vegas in style; use big hitting weapons on tough hided enemies such as deathclaws and supermutants, ligher weapons on raiders ect.
Even going from using a weapon inflicting 30 damage/shot to a weapon inflicting 60/shot can cut the number of shots needed down from 10-15 shots to only 2-3 against a super mutant!Overall, fallout 4 on higher difficulties, with a few exceptions, is a game i'd happily play on very hard most of the time, easily. With a few exceptions(such exceptions being a pain even on normal anyways, you'll know them when you see them), the game tends towards challenging on higher difficulties rather than punishing.
How do companions perform?
Very well, surprisingly. Unlike fallout 3 or new vegas, where companions mostly got in the way and were either useless(fallout 3 pre broken steel) or brutally op(F3 post steel) or just someone you never used(new vegas in hardcore or any DLC), companions so far are a bit more usable in the game. You can now choose exactly what weapon you wish a companion to use, for the most part, and while they still sometimes jump on an enemy your sneaking near, they aren't as recklessly stupid as they were in fallout 3 or new vegas. Companions cannot die
, but instead collapse to the ground skyrim style. This time however you CAN heal a fallen companion, which is useful, because of how frequently it can happen earlier on. You can also give them better armor far more easily in fallout 4 than in new vegas, and charisma has perks to make them not only tougher and more destructive, but also carry more stuff for you. Romance just as well have been as it was in saints row 4 however, as in many rpgs; all you need is to say the right stuff and have the charisma for it.
Companions can be equipped with weaponry to, and with the way weapons can be upgraded, it's very possible to keep a companion well equipped throughout the game. This is especially true if you go for a power economy from settlements(yeah, charisma really does feel like the one stat to rule the rest at times).
Overall:
Fallout 4 is a big improvement over the fake difficulty and bad story that 3 suffered from, and inspite being a bethesda game, it isn't like skyrim where any higher than adept is simply code for"kill me instantly everywhere I go". It's story isn't perfect, but it's a massive improvement over 3 or even skyrim in some ways. It battles moral grays and your actions can have consequences, which is a huge thing. The settlement system is fun to play with, and building your own styled buildings is a neat thing, and something I'll write on another time as I learn more about it; it simply takes time to master it. But fallout 4 is a game that I'd be happy to play multiple times through. It's better balanced than fallout 3 or new vegas gameplay wise(anyone who used a laser rifle in new vegas knows what I mean when I say crit monkey).
(I do plan to write more as I explore more and get a better idea of the random things in the game, but so far exploration is awesome to, although some maps prove an exception to that).
