Fallout 4, finally!

Fired this up moments after midnight 2 weeks ago...(i.e., right when it was released; had already done the download)

Should explain part of that...last year at the company xmas party, which has door prizes, I won the grand prize, an Xbox One. I'm not a console guy so this was an interesting opportunity...

Can't say I'm overfond of the handheld with these things, it's WAY too hard to aim effectively...

But after a few months I thought -- I should get F4 on the Xbox. Then, in the fall, when I decide to advance order it, I discover that Microsoft has reversed their prior statement about it being too hard to produce a Xbox 360 emulator that will run on the One, and now there is such a thing, and a number of 360 games (but not all) will run on it, including Fallout 3, and that what you can buy is actually the F3/F4 bundle.

OK, that sounds good...I don't think I even finished playing F3. Parts were confusing and I was unable to find certain locations you had to go to, so I stopped trying to do that and just wandered around.

So, F4. Have played ~60 hours in the last two weeks. The controller is just as sucky as you will get told in PC Gamer--mouse is better for aim. Otoh, those little joystick things are better for very slow motion--you can walk at a very slow pace, turn very slowly. It's the fast turn that is very poor.

I crashed it once, yesterday. Loading a map for a building interior, bam, down it went. I could tell it had crashed, in the middle, and then the audio went bad, too, and it dropped back "to desktop". It was fine restarting again, so no loss. [Later: this has happened a couple more times, no indication why]

Overall, this is exactly the increment forward you are expecting from Bethesda. It is not pointy-end-of-the-spear state of the art, that seems to go to a PS4 game I forget the name of, but this is Bethesda's best. (Elder Scrolls 6 will be fabulous.)

The amount and precision of detail is amazing. This is a wander-around-and-look-at-things game, so I do a lot of that, and there's a lot to look at. I haven't yet felt I was looking at clones of anything yet, other than things like burned books n stuff. Watch out for Deathclaws until you have power armor.

You'd think that after 200 years, the local population would have done some actual cleanup, but there seems to be very little of that--and you can't tell them to do it either.

The color scheme overall is much the same light-brown-various-gray-earthtones that F3 and FNV had, which I think is kinda wrong. Plant life would recover at some point, esp after 200 years, as often as it rains, weeds especially would recover--just think about how many buried seeds there in your back yard. There would be plenty of green around. (OK, it turns out that if you are running Steam, there are user-mods that green things up. No good for me.) And there would be things like bicycles and brahmin-carts as transportation--and thus there would be more-or-less cleared roadways--if a brahmin can be a pack animal, it can haul a four-wheeled wooden cart.

I've meandered over about a fourth of the total map so far. Quite a ways to go...no hurry to do it all, I'm not one of those crazy folks who has to do a speed-run on it. Ultimately this game will have cost me 10 cents/hour to have played it, AND I get to go back and retry F3.
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Later (post xmas): have about 150 hours on this now. Other than two things (lack of color, and the endless amount of trash around that no one cleans up, even in a settlement that has people just standing around), this has been good fun. I still have a fair amount of territory to cover.

Definitely worth the price.
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Update: ok, the first DLC was just released. Apparently I had already paid for this with the Expensive Bundle back in the beginning. Time to build a robot!

Update 2: next DLC comes out in 2 weeks.