The mechanics were better, the graphics looked great, and the character customization was very responsive and creative! So why did it leave me with a bad taste in my mouth?
I pre-ordered the game and bought the season pass for the DLC, spending way too much money on a game I’d end up hardly enjoying. The romance was a nice addition but it felt meaningless in terms of the story and game play. Aside from a couple lines of dialogue from you, the partner in question, and maybe the other companion characters, it really didn’t do anything. Sure they had their personal quests, but that was it. You could get a perk to your stats if you slept with them (meaning, you clicked on a bed and slept a couple hours with them being your party member) and a little line of dialogue, but you didn’t get any scenes of the two of you crawling out of bed together.
The lack of cut scenes is to be expected from Bethesda, but the better graphics (especially modeling and rigging of the character) felt wasted with a floating camera. Your relationship with a character just didn’t do anything for the story or add to it.
While it may seem like a small problem, getting hung up on Besthesda’s first attempt at actually including romance in an RPG (in Skyrim, you just wore a necklace and asked someone to marry you) but the root problem of it is shared in the rest of Fallout 4’s problems.
A lot of the quests have no meaning to them. Go here, fight this, come back and collect a reward. Not to mention, the game was serious, something a lot of us were not expecting for the game series that previously let us shoot ghouls to the moon, have our brain, spine, and heart removed by robots, and had a cowboy robot following you from city to city.
With every DLC released, I held my breath for that goofy extra content but it never really came. The robot one was the closest, but it was also the shortest in terms of story and was pretty much just there to provide an in game reason as to why you could now build robots with your heaps of scrap.
Last but not least, they removed the feature where you could have benefits in combat to fighting the opposite and same sex, making your character a tactical bisexual, and it’s the lesser for it.
Video Games Deconstructed 