ahhhh I wish I could play this game. No karma, building, im still on the fence with the skills but it looks good.

Wow, Fallout 4 is the first game since the Witcher 3 that 's held my attention for 2 hours.

I am getting a PS4 tomorrow and contemplating getting the Witcher 3 later this month for it, I guess you would recommend it?

Crew, please continue your series I'll play vicariously through you...

Yes, I would recommend that as well. :)

Of course, some people have different tastes in open world single player games, I like about anything, some people prefer the "dungeons and dragons", others the "sword and sorcerer", still others the "zombie apocalypse"... then others the malignant and benign tumors that come form nuclear holocaust.

If I spend more than an hour with it, I call it a solid.

Love SP games, Skyrim is awesome and if it's similar to that in open exploration and all kinds of stuff to do then it will be all good ;)

F3, NV and F4 ditching the early games' RPG mechanics isn't necessarily a good thing. Just because the newer games have focused more on exploration and gun play, doesn't mean the older games should just be tossed aside. One man's stream lined game is another man's console-ized game for retards.

I'm not trying to play the PC master race card, but surely the complaints that F4 have had leveled at it have some merits in terms of gamer reaction. Fallout is essentially now a shooter franchise with a small mix of hiking sim and world shaping thrown in to give it some longevity. If that's the direction they're going, then they should just drop any mentions of RPG whatsoever and just focus on the COD nature of the games. - Don't try to sell me a 4 cylinder family sedan and tell me it's a Porsche 911 Turbo.

Fallout 4 looks like an FPS game - because that's what it is.

Have you actually played it, or are you getting your information second hand?

I absolutely agree with you. The first MP game I ever played was "Ultima Online", you were supposed to get one month free when you signed up, so I did, then played and the moment I entered the game, I was killed, my stuff taken, then re-incarnated to have the same person kill me and take my stuff again.

After about 5 minutes of that nonsense, I never continued my 30 days, I cancelled my account forever.

I have played MP games online which were free to play, mainly the FPS ones. Half-Life was my favorite. :) However, when it came to any type of RPG, if it was "Pay for Play", it was a "no-no" for me. I have, however, played Neverwinter Nights (not the AOL version) online, because it was not pay for play, and had community run servers that had their own rules. I did enjoy playing that many years ago.

I tried Elder Scrolls Online, but it took forever for the game to update and by the time it downloaded all the updates, the expiration time from first sign in, download updates and my time to play exceeded the 30-day limit and I spent $90 for nothing.

I'm pretty well comfortable in knowing that I really enjoy the SP games now since I know it's only the game I have to deal with and not the in-game griefers or the out-of-game greedy corporate types trying to ruin it for me. :) (well, that has yet to be seen.)

Read reviews and watched 3 or 4 different people stream their LP videos. I usually always do that before purchasing games these days... especially if they're AAA releases.

As a huge FPS fan, I honestly wouldn't classify Fallout 4 as an FPS. Not even in the Far Cry 3 sense. Yeah, there's a greater focus on combat than in the originals, but... I mean, if it's an FPS to you, does that make the newer Elder Scrolls beat-em-ups? It seems more to me like a souped-up Deus Ex. You shoot stuff, sure. You shoot a lot of stuff, with a lot of different weapons. But you also do a lot that doesn't involve shooting. MAYBE I'd call it an FPS with heavy RPG elements, but that would be stretching it. It's really more accurately an RPG with heavy FPS elements. And I suspect the only reason people are trying to classify it as an FPS is out of some ill-conceived attempt to shame anyone who enjoys it.

Heck, I'd be perfectly fine if they dropped the rest of the character building elements and just tied everything to your equipment a la STALKER. It would make for a much more enjoyable experience.

Also, I literally have yet to see a single person dare to "toss aside" the originals. They'd probably end up murdered in their beds if they tried.
I prefer anything that reminds me of STALKER in any way :P

Fallout 4's wasteland is kind of like The Zone as imagined by Thomas Kinkade.

OK, here's my take so far.... story, character creation, exploration and induction, sad revelations, subtle training, more exploration, lots to look for, finding the past, seeking the future, save after you leave sanctuary, seek out man's best friend.
BTW, what I find interesting is that shortly into the game, you're introduced into crafting different things. It's almost like you're supposed to pick up a bunch of random crap (and trust me, there is a lot of that) and turn it into something.

I kind of wonder if I should have crafted stuff before leaving sanctuary...

Depends on what you use as a basis for comparison. Compared to say Far Cry 3 or COD Black Ops, then yeah, Fallout 4 is definitely an RPG. However, compared to the first few titles in the series, Fallout 4 struggles to stay under that RPG umbrella. The base building stuff for example, is that an RPG element? Sure, base/town building can be in RPG games, but it's usually most always a filler side feature used to give the player something else to do between missions, and to have a place to store loot. It's rarely ever offered as a main game mechanic, but yet that's exactly what it became with Fallout 4. Hell, as soon as you leave the vault to seek revenge, you're almost immediately distracted/pulled into the base building stuff at the Red Rocket station (and that's like in the first 10 minutes of the game). It just looks to me like there's few RPG elements that we recognize from older titles in Fallout 4, and the longer we go being detached from them in AAA gaming, the less we're even able to recognize what they are. I'm sorry, I just don't see un-killable companions and some town building as RPG fundamentals.

And who's to say that Fallout couldn't become a great FPS series? I'm sure that if they streamlined the action, stripped out all the RPG pretense, and tweaked the gun play and gun modding, then Fallout 5 could really give the other shooters on the market a run for their money. Certainly would appease the twitchy console crowd. I just think they're sticking with the 'open world RPG where you can do anything' label as just pure marketing, and it needs to stop because their current design model for Fallout isn't RPG, it's a shooter with item collecting and VERY basic RPG elements. But so is the Far Cry series, and no one has a problem calling Far Cry an FPS.

Well, I don't want to get into a nitpicky semantics argument... but two things.

First, you don't define a game's genre by comparing it to another game. Sure, compared to the original Fallouts, Fallout 4 is practically an FPS. But if you want to go down that road, the original Fallouts are practically turn-based strategy games compared to Zork.

Second, did you know that "comedy" used to refer simply to a story that ended happily, not to a story that was humorous? That's why The Divine Comedy isn't very funny. Definitions aren't written in stone. They change all the time. What RPG meant howevermany years ago isn't necessarily what it means now. Look at what people call RPGs nowadays. You've got your Witchers, but you also have your Mass Effects.

Fallout 4 has quests (lots of them), it has leveling and character building with a large variety of skills and abilities (a lot of which aren't combat-related), it has dialogue options, it has a complex inventory system, it has party members that you can build relationships with, it has moral choices, it has combat that's driven by stats and numbers as much as twitch aiming, it has a variety of mechanics and ways to interact with the world, it allows the player to do what they want when they want and how they want.

It's an RPG. It's not a particularly deep RPG, it has significant FPS elements, and like Fallout 3 it's a mockery of the original games' vision... but it's still an RPG.

Well... every single piece of junk that you find in the world can be used in modding/crafting.

Also, protip: ignore the main story. Just walk off in a random direction and see what you can find. If you try playing a Bethesda game like a normal RPG (follow the main quest primarily, do sidequest when you're bored), you will HATE the game. Bethesda is good at some things, but main quests are not one of those things :P. Writing in general, actually, is not one of those things.

Best way to play is to stay as far away from the "right" path as possible. I honestly have no intention of completing the main quest of Fallout 4, possibly ever. Just gonna explore and do side quests until I'm bored.

But then why have a Fallout 'franchise' at all if the very different new titles can't or don't even try to honor the originals? I'm all for Fallout going in new and different directions, but then Bethesda should stop forcing their programmers to keep paying lip service to the originals. Just make it a generic post-apocalyptic shooter series and be done with it. From what I've seen, Fallout 4 is a good example of what happens when young game devs try to interpret their vision of classic game mechanics. They shouldn't bother. Modern game devs are good at texture mapping and placing mobile hit boxes within a game engine. Trying to stay loyal to the original games' atmosphere, lore, and gameplay is just pulling the whole series in too many wild, unfocused directions - somewhere in the middle that band is bound to snap. And from the looks of user reviews, it has.

Fallout 1 and 2 could never be seen as shooters, because they were isometric games. The player blasted the hell out of tons of enemies in those games, yet the games weren't seen as shooters because of the perspective. The new Fallout games are seen as shooters because of the first person perspective, and it has come to dominate the design and gameplay. That's fine to me. But just call shooting random raider gangs and upgrading weapons as an RPG? That's a shooter with refined shoot 'em up game mechanics. We're arguing over apples and oranges, really. I just want to be clear which one can be ground to pulp and called orange juice. Don't hand me a glass of apple juice and say, 'well, apples and oranges are basically the same thing, so enjoy this glass of orange juice.' Most gamers are smart enough to detect the difference. Their eyes and ears may have not noticed it, but their brain did.