GG50Hive_MindAzieI was dissapointed Fallout 4 as well, but there's a few issues with this.
You did have evil choices in Fallout 3, but there was nothing to encourage you to be evil. The big evil choice in the end is actually harmful to you, so why would you do it?
Arguably there are evil choices in Fallout 4, in the Institute and Brotherhood. There is no truly good and evil this time around, more of a big gray area like New Vegas did, which I enjoy.
You're forgetting the Minutemen and Railroad. They aren't as big as the other two, but they still make up the major players in the Commonwealth.
Everything else you nailed. The ripped quite a bit out of Fallout while replacing it with nothing substantial.
Warning: No spoiler tags at this point, so don't read this post if you want to avoid spoilers
If the "Big Evil" choice you're talking about in Fallout 3 is nuking the Citadel, that does benefit you. You get to raid the armory, which has tons of good stuff, and hostile Brotherhood Knights will spawn in the crater of the Citadel, with Power Armor and other good equipment to sell.
Nuking Megaton lets you live in the one Tower place, which I can't remember now, without needing to kill everyone inside and replace them with Ghouls.
Sure, FNV had grey areas, but it was pretty easy to be "Conventionally Good" (side with NCR or House, or even Yesman, establish diplomatic relations with other groups, forgive Benny, etc) or "Conventionally Evil" (side with Caesar or Yesman, kill everyone who stands in your way, crucify Benny, etc) if you chose to be.
Fallout 4 is all grey area. And it's not all even well-explained grey area: for example, the Institute never explains
why they're replacing random civilians with synths. Some have tactical purposes, but it seems counterproductive with their goal of not having the surface dwellers fear and hate them (and, therefore, interfere with them).
I didn't forget the Minutemen, but they are a semi-compulsory part of the game. No matter what you do or who you join, you can't get the Minutemen to reject you. I did forget about the Railroad though...personally I went with the Institute so I wiped them out pretty early on. Can you complete the whole story with the Railroad as your primary faction? No "Railroad sends you to work with the Brotherhood of Steel" cop-out?
And another thing - the "Ending Sequence" to the game. In Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, it would mention totally peripheral characters who you encountered, like Rose of Sharon Cassidy. In Fallout 4, it only mentions what you did on the main storyline. It felt like a much less complete review of your time in the waste. Prepackaged and hollow.
