While I enjoyed Fallout 4 well enough, I find it far harder to get into the world than the previous Fallout Title New Vegas. To explain why I’ll start off with the backstory given to your main character. We open Fallout 4 with the option to pick between one of two people, a married couple featuring a War Veteran about to give a public speech or his Lawyer wife. This immediately gives you a backstory to your character. Specifically, you would presumably have a few specific skills that come with their history, even though you don’t actually need to stat your character out in that way. You also are happily married and have a kid. Once you start the game, all of this baggage comes with you and does a lot to define who you are as a character. Yes, you can choose to just up and ignore this, but as has been established you are in a happy relationship and love your family.
This is an issue because of how much the Fallout games (3, 4 and new vegas at least. No experience with the previous entries) are driven by creating the kind of character you want to make. You lose so much control of the aspects of your character’s personality as a result of this and choosing to ignore it is hard as it serves as your entire reason to be exploring and learning about the Commonwealth.
To expand on why that’s a problem, the entire purpose of the story in any of the Fallout games is to act as more of a framing device to involve you in the world, to motivate you to explore the world and learn what has happened, and to help you to shape your character. Having so much of your character’s backstory pre-determined like this works against this premise.
Compare this to Fallout New Vegas. Your back Story? You were delivering a package and shit went wrong. That is it. It comes with no baggage, and nothing to define your character other than at some point he took on a job to deliver a package. It may give you nothing to work with, but it completely opens up the slate on what kind of person you are.
Now for the actual story. In what way are these games trying to invest you into the worlds? In the case of Fallout 4, you lived before the Nuclear War and were frozen. Over two hundred years later, you are de-thawed and find your child has been stolen and your spouse killed, and the premise is you are off to find your kid. This plot is entirely built around the premise that works against the fully create-able character from earlier. There may be a bit of an incentive due to the idea a small child is in danger, but it’s always going to be chained to that aspect. The plot demands you accept the character’s backstory as part of who you are, and it makes it makes it far harder to get into the game world when a large part of your character is entirely undefinable by you.
And again we compare this to New Vegas. While delivering this package, someone intercepts you and shoots you right in the face. Due to a stroke of luck, you survive. Now, this may be a bit bias on my part, but I don’t know anyone at all who does not have an immediate desire to understand why they just got shot in the fucking face. Without the need to define anything about your character, you are given a reason to go after this Benny guy who shot you, and on the way, you start to learn about the world that created him. So, given full and reasonable control over what kind of character you are, you can still be given a reason to immerse yourself into the world.
What these two points really boil down to is that in a game like Fallout (Or even Elder Scrolls), the key to immersion is keeping your character as much of a blank slate as possible, while still managing to give you a strong motivation to go out into the world. The minimalist approach in New Vegas works far more than the more heavily detailed approach of Fallout 4.
This, of course, is not the only reason. Next up is the Dialogue options. Fallout New Vegas features list options to pick between, some options only being pickable based on needing certain skills or stats high enough to make use of. Fallout 4 makes use of a Dialogue Wheel similar to many Bioware Titles, which leaves you with at most four responses to any given situation. The Wheel finds itself far more limiting in what options you can actually go with, which just serves to limit your options of role play much like the detailed backstory. It simply doesn’t offer the same level of freedom that makes these games work.
The wheel works in games like Dragon Age due to the stronger focus on an overall narrative where the freedom of choice isn’t really as important as the freedom to choose a path towards a specific end goal. No such thing exists in Fall Out, so the limiting of options does nothing to improve the experience, it does nothing but limits one of the games driving forces.
This last bit isn’t as big as the last part, but I feel it still has an impact, and that is having a voice actor for your character. As I said, it’s not big, but the inflections of a voice actor inevitably become part of your character, and it’s another thing that feels like is just out of your control. Again something that works in your more narrative driven story like Dragon Age, it serves to do nothing more than drain away a small bit of your ability to create your own character when used in Fallout.
Now both games I like, but for me, it’s clear that Fallout New Vegas was able to do far more to immerse you into the world right from the get-go, and offers far more freedoms in how you want to play your character. Fallout 4, on the other hand, attempts to push you into a much more defined role which acts against the entire structure of the game, which is there to motivate you to explore and create a character all your own.