• An issue is that Bethesda might be getting deluded into thinking that Fallout 4 on its own was fantastic.

    It is, on its own, very boring. The story is bland, characters left unexplored. But the mods make it amazing.
    Sim settlements alone revitalizes the game, changing settlement building into an optional and story driven thing, particularly in its version 2.
    The vertibirds mods which not only fix the abysmal default abilities, but even let you call one in as air support.
    Various mods that add travellers on the roads and paths, so you encounter other people.
    The mods that let you turn the feral ghouls into zombie hordes.
    The list goes on.

    • Yeah, at the beginning Fallout 4 was just Fallout Shelter with a quest tacked onto it. And especially since the game really pushes you into the Minutemen faction, for a new player, the annoyance of constant settlement building and rescuing settlers and setting up new settlements completely overwhelms you and makes the game extremely frustrating. After my first playthrough I put it down and didn’t come back to it for over a year because it pissed me off so much. Realizing you could just ignore the Minutemen made the game so much better. And then when mods came to the consoles, it completely changed the game. Made it so much more enjoyable.

      Like, yeah, there’s loads of YT channels now devoted to FO4 content, but only because mods allowed people to transcend how lackluster the game was at the beginning. The love of it now is despite Bethesda. And they definitely spend way too much time smelling their own farts thinking they hit the ball out of the park because of all that.