bcaton

+ Good opening + Some companions (Piper, Valentine) are wonderful + Some quests (Silver Shroud) are moving AND tricky + Settlement system shows promise - Settlements are just for show - you cannot recreate the commonwealth - Settlement bugs are common - the spreadsheet will show no water, for example - Settlements can't defend themselves unless you are there - despite everyone wearing power armor and carrying miniguns. They automatically fail, because Bethseda wants to force you to drop everything all the time and babysit them - the characters choices don't really matter. You are a pawn, never a General, despite what they tell you. - it's not an rpg - it's a shooter. It's not a PC game - it's a console game that PC players can sort of play.

The bugs kill the fun. Playing for three hours, only to be slaughtered by a puny sky screecher (the equivalent of being savaged to death by an earth worm) is pretty awful. It's an old bug, it's a known bug. You can't save the game and avoid it somehow either. If it's going to be in the game, it will always win, regardless of that it's stats say - which means the AI will try and battle it anyway. Also the new shapeshifter character will crash the game if it's in play. I recommend choosing characters as a work around. There's no proper way to debug this game either - there's no debug report that I can generate, I can't upload a buggy saved game to illustrate a problem. I think that's often a problem with coding now - quality control is generally shoddy, because the pressure is on to rush it out and fix it later- maybe - maybe not.