Fallout 4: 16 Hours In

I've now spent over 16 hours with Fallout 4 (Sorry, I've been on mandatory overtime at work...) and I can say that while it has a LOT more to offer than Fallout 3 did, I'm seeing a sad pattern in Bethesda games.

I have now made several settlements, completed a few story missions, and a good handful of sidequests. My favorite new feature of Fallout 4 is the crafting system. It allows for a very nice amount of customization between all of my weapons, though there are some drawbacks. I'm still using two weapons I got within the first couple hours of my playing, one of them being my original 10mm pistol. Bethesda's choice to forego weapon degradation is an interesting one, as I've now modded my original gun to be my go to weapon in many situations.

I've spent a large amount of my 16 hours building settlements. I'm not great, but the tools offered are both nice and sorta limited. Having to place buildings from a first person perspective is fine, but only being able to do it from standing/walking around is kinda difficult at times. Moving the piece can be a bit of a crap-shoot as well as they don't move forward or backwards well. That said, you can rotate and stack pieces for days.

The movement and shooting in Fallout 4 are so much better than in the previous two Fallout games. Shooting feels precise and accurate, while fast and frantic at times. I've only encountered a couple glitches in shooting where the hit detection wasn't quite working right. Movement has been made much nicer too with everything working relatively alright. I haven't had any issues getting stuck yet anyway. My biggest issue with combat comes from running into a very high number of legendary and extra difficult enemies while having a relatively low amount of ammo. This may just be me, but it seems that the ammo in the Commonwealth is hard to come by sometimes.

The quests aren't too bad, though I've found some of them to be a bit tedious. Following NPCs around is just a chore most of the time as they move slow, albeit faster than in Fallout 3. Overall I've enjoyed the quests I've done to this point. My personal follower hasn't really gotten in my way or caused me any issues on any missions or wandering I've done so far.

A bit of a complaint now. Fallout 4 suffers from many of the same ridiculous glitches that Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Oblivion, and Skyrim all had. Followers disappear sometimes, the game occasionally breaks, framerate stutters often, and a host of others. Many of these are things we've come to know and love about Bethesda games, others, are annoyances that I'm beginning to find unacceptable. But, that said, this is a pretty straightforward Bethesda open world RPG for better or worse.

So, that's where I stand after 16 hours with Fallout 4. Would I recommend it? Yeah, I'd say pick it up, especially if you enjoyed Fallout 3 and New Vegas, as Fallout 4 provides many improvements over those games while keeping the developer's signature problems in tact. Here's hoping the next few patches will fix the issues a bit and make the game even more fun than it already is.