Don’t want to spend too much time covering old ground, and obvs if you loved it then that’s great. I think it was clearly the most technically proficient game they’ve released. Possibly the first RPG they’ve done where the basic combat mechanics were actually good. I also loved the crafting system and the first 20 or so hours were utterly splendid. But for me it lacked the thing which made, in particular, New Vegas one of my favourites of all time, which was the sense of agency and choice, and the drop-off after 20 hours is nigh-on unprecedented (for me).
Almost every mission boiled down to ‘shoot the guys’. Sure, you could agree to shoot the guys cheerfully, with sadness, or sarcastically, but you still had to shoot the guys. Contrast that with ‘Beyond the Beef’ in NV or ‘Tenpenny Tower’ in Fallout 3. Multi-directional quests full of dark humour and pathos, with a zillion different brilliantly written speech options to navigate it however you want. Or the zombies with their rocket or the super mutant village in the hills or the town full of Elvis impersonators! There are so many little moments that have stuck with me from NV, and most of Fallout 4 has already faded from memory (maybe that major irradiated area is the one standout). As for Preston Gravy…
The previous generation were amazing story- and character-driven games with an endearingly terrible combat system tacked on (which reminds me of duelling an NV mini-boss who killed everyone with a superpowered golf club 
). 4 was a passable combat system, and amazingly realised world, with characters (Nick Valentine aside) tacked on seemingly as an afterthought.
That said, I sunk like 50 hours into it so [ascii shrug]
