I totally agree with your stance on sandboxy games. I like big decisions if it affects the world, but none of the sidequests in Fallout do. Most are "go there and there, kill or loot this" and with fast travel, those quests are just time wasters. It's pretty similar in Mass Effect too, though.
Guessing you weren't around for Skyrim and how it was marketed, if you were then you'd know the vast majority of it was exaggerated bullshit, and it seems little has changed.
I expect the pattern to stay the same, I expect fallout 4 to be bland rubbish.
<- like Courier 6 as a character a lot more than the Oblivion counterparts, especially Hero of Kvatch. Elder Scroll protags sadly tend to be the same damn formula: get in jail, get out due to contrivance, do something badass so suddenly you are a somebody. Not quite in Fallout.
Gonna play devil's advocate here and say I feel that New Vegas had the best balance thus far of exploration and questline, and even then the questline was mostly 'go this way cus people JUST left, honest!' With that said, I use the World of Pain mod to increase my exploration potential and I do ->
@Elonex21: Actually, it should have been done with the Questing Adventurer. I once won a game because I managed to make my Adventurer survive one turn. Then gave him 8 bananas (3 of them were +2 bananas) and BAM. He went face and won me the game. :D
It's worth note, the Dev's have not said there is less world exploring. They only said that they are making the quests/narrative more branching and open, meaning failing a quest does not mean reloading the game. If anything, Fallout 4 seems to be leaning towards being more open for explorers.
@Francis Tan: (cont.) (New Vegas had more depth than 3, IMO). I think a good mixture of the two, with a more focused storyline that doesn't take away from the exploration would make Fallout 4 a much better game.
@Francis Tan: I tend to agree with both you and Jo. The whole exploration across the wasteland was amazing and just finding new locations and all the side quests within each location really sold Fallout to me. But at the same time, the main quests have always lacked something to me.
Megaton not Nuketown, Nuketown is a CoD map. I feel sorry that you like stream-lined narratives because the Side-Quests in the Fallout series were one of the most amazing things in Fallout 3 and NV if you haven't had the chance to explore the game fully, I recommend that you do, you're missing out.
To each their own. I just miss Fallout 3 and Morrowind. Open-world games where exploring was the whole fun of it, not just an annoying waste of time between quests. It just takes a ton of work to make a world varied and thought-out enough to be really immersive. This way's easier for them...
