Fallout 4

The base building is not too grindy actualy. But it's not really explained how everything works. You can scrap a ton of stuff in the settlements to get lots of wood and steel: Trees, cars, even whole buildings. Rare materials you can either produce yourself or buy in bulk from traders. For example adhesive can be cooked from tomatoes, corn and mutfruit. So just let your settlers produce some more then what they need for food. Easiest way to have something to trade with for rare materials is to produce extra water.

Also you don't have to find materials for each new settlements from scratch. With the local leader perk you can create supply lines between your setllements so you have access to all your crafting materials from each workbench.

Another thing that helps is to unload your junk to your companion if it gets too heavy while you're questing. You don't have to scrap it afterwards. Just throw it into a workbench to get new materials.

Yeah, I haven't really gave base building a honest shot yet, I'm way too busy leveling my character up and doing quests, but the little that I've seen of it, it's not as grindy as I initially thought it was going to be, there's just a bunch of little things that you need to learn and the game never really teaches them unfortunately.
Just like Stepp said, make sure you get the local leader perk before diving into base building, or just completely ignore it, you don't it need to finish the game. It feels like the mother base from MGSV, you don't need to build one to experience the core of the game.

This whole bugs situations is really weird for me, I'm 50 hours in and I've yet to find a show stopper bug, other than the sporadic NPC walking against a wall or or ragdolls going apeshit with seizures. I am tho, getting a really weird bug where every couple hours both my pip-boy and weapon disappears and I have to restart my savegame to see them again.

I'm having a blast with this game man, so fucking immersive and going out there and just exploring randomly can be more fun than doing the main quest alone. I just LOVE the freedom that I can experience with this game, I can do whatever the fuck I want and the game doesn't care.

Great idea to stream in your weapons!! love waiting 10secs in a firefight before my weapons shows up and I can start to shoot!

Plus the full set of T-60d I'm wearing... I don't know what they expect you to do with all of these:

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Quote from Sprony

Power Armor used to be an endgame item. Something legendary, epic and seemingly unobtainable. When you first encountered the Brotherhood of Steel in the original Fallout you were in awe. The quest line just to get a foot in the door was a huge undertaking and even then, you weren't there yet. When I finally acquired Power Armor, I felt Godlike, walking the Wasteland without a care in the world. Now you drown in them.

You make a good point, but I do like the new take on the mechanics of it, even if the fusion cores are a little tedious. While the training was a good idea, I like that the brotherhood haven't taken every piece of armour going and there's this whole chop shop thing at play. Although just handing it to you so early on with a minigun (which you then find no ammo for) was a little cheap. It was once definitely something to aspire to, and now as you can see, I have more than I know what to do with, and selling the plates isn't really practical. When I get a human companion I'll gear them up too.

They should have allowed you to upgrade the "output power" of the armour instead. to be able to jump, sprint, jetpack, stealth, or reflect damage you would need modules that would draw on that output power. Like building a computer, you can't have a billion GPUs drawing on a pissy little 200W PSU.

Ofc you could always upgrade the power supply to allow for more mods to be fitted at once, or improve the modules/servos to be more efficient.

And you can drown? I'd not found that problem, but then I quickly took up 1 point of the aquaboy perk which negates that anyway

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It's a good game but they've simplified it far too much. I can look past some of their simplifications, but other's just go against what Fallout is.

The lack of big non-main story quest chains (for example, helping the boomers in FNV or Moira's wasteland guide in F3) in FO4 is putting me off just now. Do all the quests outside the main faction ones boil down to kill X or retrieve Y? Maybe I was just expecting more post-endgame.

ahah, YES! I just picked that same gun yesterday, it's a beast!

I've really not had any problems at all with FO4... I've got stuck in a terminal twice now in 30+ hours, and lost vision of my weapon a couple of times but that just requires toggling 3rd/1st person and it's back again.

Yeah, not perfect, but I had more issues with the horse on witcher 3, and how you can only really progress in the world by doing main story missions, going and exploring in withcer 3 led me to lots of things I couldn't kill and killing things / exploring gave you no xp to allow you to roam which is what i like to do.

I've got 65 hours on fallout 4 and I have only had to revert my save once. I'm not sure if I'm lucky (or they were QA'ing my exact CPU/GPU combo :P) but any issues I've had with the game have been design choices and not glitches or bugs.

The series is slowly getting 'Mass-effect'd' in my opinion which means the RPG elements are slowly stripped out or simplified and replaced with action game elements. I'm sure you'll agree that VATS is less useful now- you can have 92% chance to hit but somehow shoot the cover 3-4 times the enemy has slow-motioned behind.

Quote from Vaya

I'm sure you'll agree that VATS is less useful now- you can have 92% chance to hit but somehow shoot the cover 3-4 times the enemy has slow-motioned behind.

You can press Tab to cancel the VATS sequence if the enemy has moved behind cover etc.

Personally I've not experienced many bugs at all. My experience is very similar to Jackophants. I've played almost 50 hours and not progressed into the main quest too far. I'm just having a blast exploring the wasteland and finding all the little stories. I did really enjoy the Witcher 3 (Never got passed the second zone though) but I just prefer the world of Fallout I think.

I think it has to do with accessibility, I can easily boot up fallout4 for the last 20mins of my lunchbreak and do whatever, but for the witcher 3, I feel like i need to set aside an hour or two just get into it again

Quote from Sprony

The simple truth is that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt raised the bar for open world RPG's in every conceivable kind of way. While not a bad game, Fallout 4 doesn't even come close to The Witcher's achievements. It also illustrates the widespread corruption in regards to game journalism. Just look at Metacritic (although not the best site, but that's a different discussion). A 8,4 score from the critics and a 5,4 from users. What made me wonder most is the hypocrisy of reviews detailing the overall buginess of the game but not detracting points for it. I read some article that Bethesda RPG's would be ruined if they polished it more because it would limit the freedom and randomness of it all. But that's just bullshit. Fallout 4 deserves the same amount of criticism as Arkham Knight for the state they released it in. Anyway, this review sums it up rather well.

The game is on hold for me. I want some proper patches from Bethesda first and I'm waiting for mods to come that address the more serious issues. The dialog mod is already a big step forward.

I don't mean to defend FO4 or Bethesda, but falling into the trap of comparing it to Witcher3 is not very fair imo, they're both open world games but that's really where any similarities end, imo. You need to play games for what they are, and judge them for what they are, not compare them to other games that you enjoy, people that do that tend to end up disappointed because of unrealistic expectations. This applies to any kind of media, music, movies, games, books, etc.

And on my very brief hours with Witcher 3 I actually had a side quest bugging on me, and don't get me started on the buggy horse. I guess so is the nature of open world games man, not every game can have the level of polish GTA has.

Also, the article you're mentioning is probably this one, and i think it's a great read, he does have some really compelling arguments and an interesting perspective on this topic, feel free to disagree but I think the guy's onto something when he said:

Quote

(...) This also is exactly opposite of what makes Bethesda’s games magical. They’re sloppy, sprawling, surprising messes that show the sticky fingerprints of the people who made them. Polish says “no” a lot more than it says “yes,” and you can hear a lot of yes in Bethesda’s games.

Polish says you probably shouldn’t do a quest with a talking dog, because it’s going to look terrible with the lip sync system. Polish says you shouldn’t do a one-off Rube Goldberg trap using hundreds of physics objects in the game’s “creaky engine.” Polish says you probably shouldn’t put a “flying” spell that will kill the player 20 minutes into the game because it will playtest badly.

Again, last thing I want to be is apologetic for the fact that the game can feel extremly unpolished at times, but an argument can be made that both the games masterful aspects and it's problems can be two sides of the same coin.