I was less annoyed by the size of the map and more annoyed by the lack of actual stuff to do. Like, the USS Constitution side quest was kind of cool. Sure, it basically boiled down to "fetch this, kill that" just like the rest of the game. But it actually paid off in the sense that something interesting or amusing actually happened at the end. To make an analogy, it's like a joke that actually had a punchline. Meanwhile, in my opinion, most of the rest of the game is all setup. Most quests are "kill this, find that, fix something". Which I'm not knocking, because that's basically how the whole game works. My problem is specifically that that's ALL that most quests amount to. It's all setup with no punchline. You do the work but it doesn't MEAN anything because ALL that one gets as a reward are experience points and maybe some cool weapons/armor.
For a shorter game, that's fine. For a game of this length, that's potentially a problem. The game is a chore simulator. That's basically what I do: I run errands and do chores. That's not necessarily a problem, because if the game is short enough then it's easy to finish it before getting so sick of doing chores. But by 40 freaking hours, it becomes VERY apparent that that's all the game is doing and there is rarely gonna be any payoff. I don't expect the game to be meaningful, but they could at least do a better job of trying to give the ILLUSION that dozens of hours worth of chores actually means something. At least TRY to use the game's long ass time to show me something that I haven't seen before. That's not to say that there aren't some really clever and entertaining moments, but the number of times this game actually ENTERTAINED ME is depressingly low for how much time I put into it. I've been playing these games ever since Fallout 2. I didn't become a fan just because of the grinding and the killing, I became a fan because the developers did a good job of giving the ILLUSION that all of that work would pay off with something entertaining and memorable. Maybe that's just nostalgia speaking, and the previous Fallout games were just as boring. But I can say that after spending a buttload of time with it, Fallout 4 is boring.
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