This is a long post about the various aspects of Fallout, don't read it all unless you care to. Instead, find a section and comment on that so we can have a focused discussion if you prefer.
Summary
I modded the ever loving crap out of Fallout 4 with minimal effort using the A Story Wealth mod pack . My reasoning was that on my first play through I found the world empty but I mainly enjoy stories and quests, which this modpack seemed to do. Also I didn't have time to spend modding and didn't want to get lost in that hellhole of doing it myself. This play through was long, about 150 hours (yikes) which is probably all the fallout I'll need for many years to come. I also used an addon to the modpack to make the game extremely difficult with healing items. More on that later.
Mods
The mods here are really quite varied and I was surprised at how coherent they are. With Skyrim modding, I always felt that the mods are somewhat disjointed and it takes skilled modders to stitch together. Here in FO4 its impressive how stable the pack was and how well the quests worked together. The most standout mod by far is The Fens Sheriff Department which adds hours of story, actually interesting quests, and in my opinion content miles better than Bethesda's own content. It was worth coming back just for that alone.
Story
spoiler
After seeing what mods have done, I have no good words to say about FO4 in terms of story. The entire plot revolves around you getting your son back and its all in service of setting up the surprise that he isn't a child anymore. Its predictable, boring, etc. All of the factions are uninteresting. Minutemen are nobodies and their story is minimalist. So is the Railroad. The Brotherhood of Steel are cool in concept but can't back up their grit at all and end up being too friendly with zero depth to them as well. The Institute makes an attempt at depth but geez, its barely deeper than a puddle. I chose to end the game with the Fens Sheriff Department and it ended up being way more interesting despite the muted ending to their plot. If you're playing this game for story, don't.
Graphics
I'll spend little time here, I didn't spend any time beautifying the game at all but it looks surprisingly good at times. But at other times, the engine is terrible. The way it handles LOD stuff is awful and graphical glitches and clipping are extremely common. And yet, I do enjoy the aesthetic. The art is charming as ever and my main and only complaint is that the wasteland itself is very one-note and could've used some changes.
Engine
Take it out back and kill it. I won't blame the vanilla game entirely but mods didn't contribute to the instability of the game much. It has always been rough. In the city, due to a lack of proper culling you will get half your FPS or worse. My rig is very well equipped and still struggled to maintain 30-40fps in the cities. Then add in the few quest bugs that I had (mostly vanilla quests too) and the large amount of physics and items bugs and this really feels barely glued together in ways mods can't fix. This engine needs to be worked on. A lot.
Characters/Followers
I'll be honest, I'm not a huge fan of Fallout 4's followers. Dogmeat is great but the interaction is minimal and Nick Valentine is easily the best in my opinion. He's one of the few with a great set of dialog that actually makes use of the setting and feels grounded. Everyone else could almost belong in a different game. As with the story, a lot of the characters are poorly written and have lackluster dialog. The DLCs fix this but the main game struggles big time to ground everyone properly. I played the entire game with Heather Casdin and that was a real treat. She is what every follower could have been and provides really unique story commentary and relationship moments. It actually feels like you get to know her well instead of her just spouting backstory at you constantly. Bethesda take notes.
Locations
One of the better noted parts of Fallout 4 and Skyrim are the random locations and storytelling within them. Only problem is, FO4 doesn't reward you often enough with location exploration beyond loot and thats not what people play fallout for in the first place. Its a mixed back here, some of the locations are very well done and are 10/10 settings where others are bland as mayo and waste your time.
Settlements
As intrigued as I initially was a long time ago at launch with them, the settlement system really brings the game down. Its impressive, don't get me wrong but it eats up way too much of your time to configure and there isn't any real point in setting them up. Sim Settlements helps with this but it still misses the mark in my opinion. I hope this system returns but very diminished in terms of tedium.
Gameplay
Guns feel good, fights are great. The mods all enhance that by giving the high stakes gunfights I really enjoy. Yet the game still became too easy despite me playing on survival. Needs just became annoying distractions. And being overencombered is just... awful. Especially with scrap being a thing and I hate scrap honestly. The scrap is a cool idea but has you doing the even more annoying part of Bethesda games, looking in every nook and cranny for a desk fan or box car. Its stupid and it takes you out of the game completely. I think this could have been fine if they toned it down, not every item needs to be able to be used like this.
DLC
This was the highlight of my time because I had never played the DLC, I couldn't afford it back when this launched. Far Harbor blew me away with how cool it was and just really showed what parts of the base game were missing. The moral grays presented here were fun to work through and the quests unique. I wish Far Harbor was its own game almost. Nuka world feels more like a lightweight DLC but still shows that Bethesda can write decent stuff and have decent art when they try. I have no idea why the quality of these DLCs is so high when the rest of the game is kind of bland compared to FO3 or New Vegas.
The Takeaways
I hope Bethesda gets their act together because FO4 was a pretty decent game. Not perfect but also very dated. Quests are mostly bland and are often fetch quests or don't reward you with much dialog or story. And the mods just show how easy it would be to get this stuff right the first time. The lack of grit to the story is something that really sucks in my opinion. Its not a game for kids clearly, there is blood and guts and mutants abound. So why don't any of the major characters die? Why don't they meet horrible ends? Why not have your son meet a horrible demise if you make the wrong choices? The only time any of that happens is the end of the game. Far too little far too late. The game just has absolutely no stakes to it, no impact. At least in Skyrim the Civil War shakes things up. Thats what I really wanted from this game is to feel like my actions were doing something and the mods really helped with that.
If you made it through this wall of text, I appreciate it. I spent way too long on this but I felt like telling someone about my experiences. Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with this game but by the end I was exhausted of Fallout 4's short comings. Let me know what you think!
It's been a while since I last played fallout 4 - outside of Fallout: London, while it's "technically" the same game, it's not. Haven't played the "next gen" patch version.
Anyhoo:
Right there with you about the settlements.
Building my own fortress just for the sake of it? Sure, but functionally literally a single container box, few crafting tables, bed and maybe walls if you really want to is needed. I don't mind some settlers to make the place a bit more lively, but they have absolutely zero agency of their own. I just can't be bothered to micromanage a bunch of idiots who seem to be starving until you literally hold their hand and make them farm the plants that were right next to them all the time. Haven't tried sim settlements mod.
The thing that starts to really annoy me is how some settlers seem to get captured by bandits all the time. My "favorite" was this one lady who got captured on weekly basis, and was held every week in the same bunker, tied down on the same spot. After several rescues the bandits just stopped respawning, so she was just sitting in the bunker tied down and all the doors were open. I like to imagine it was her kink and not just badly implemented repeating quest. Eventually I just stopped caring, it was getting stupid - even in Fallout's standards. In general the generated "quests" are fine, but they start to repeat pretty quickly.
My preferred method was just to mod carry weights to zero and vacuum everything scrap looking on my adventures and craft away - I know I could just consolecommand in the parts, but I'd rather do some collection on my own.
The adventuring in F4 was pretty great, I did enjoy snooping around the city and doing odd jobs here and there. I've played the game few times to like lvl 60-whatever but never finished the main quest - furthest I've gotten was apparently to start pushing the final attack to the institute but I just couldn't be bothered. I did finish the dlc's, tho.
All in all, kinda feels like it's the middle of the road Bethesda-game, decent-ish on it's own, better with mods.
That’s pretty much how I feel, they should have made the scrap very light weight or zero weight to begin with.
The Sim Settlements stuff kind of redeemed the systems, it appears to add a lot of that autonomy and you just place plots and people start working. That and it actually had an amazing set of quests to go with it, like hours of content. I was quite surprised.
That mod also adds in the ability to go to war with people and have your settlement do battle which is neat. I didn’t get that far into it but it’s an option. I just didn’t see what the ultimate goal of it was and since it doesn’t factor into the story, I didn’t really care much.
I agree with the overall sentiment but also in case you’re wondering, I finished this at over double that level. I think I was close to level 130 when I stopped, which is insane for that game. Did let me make use of the perks though which was nice.