FO4 has such a sudden start when you think about it. The game starts and the bombs almost immediately start falling and your spouse dies and son taken within like the first 10 minutes of the game.

Would have been cool if you started in the war wearing power armor, then came home to your family after facing the horrors of war, made your face, adapt back to normal life and get to know family and neighbors over a couple of time skips, then the bombs happen in the middle of one of those events. Grow some attachment like FO3 did.

Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. I would go further and say that 3 did a better job with the overall story. 4’s gameplay is what kept me playing but I found the whole story just lacking in any nuance. It was more bland than 3’s even though it’s basically a rehash of it. Once the wonders of exploration have settled, I just felt like there was no point in doing another playthrough since it all boiled down to picking from two real factions that lead to the same ending. They really stripped the role playing aspect from their supposed action RPG

There’s been a whole slew of games (old and new) pushing a child sidekick or helper character, like Yakuza 6, God of War, Last of Us etc. All well loved and successful games by any measure, but the whole “here’s this kid you have to care about” thing doesn’t work for me either.

To me Fallout 4 felt like an uncharted game. In that the set pieces where thought of first and then a story made to connect them.

There used to be the genre of collect-'em-ups, where the thinly-veiled end goal was to just collect various items.
For example, to complete a level in Banjo-Kazooie, you had to collect 10 puzzle pieces and 100 musical notes, and you likely gathered lots more bonus collectibles along the way.

These were essentially just numbers going up. But we do all have that gatherer instinct in us, so if you can get past the meaninglessness, it’s just one of the easiest sources of endorphins.

And I feel like modern crafting systems evolved out of that. While you still can’t think too hard about it, they are providing meaning, in that you’re now collecting 100 wood planks, because you want to craft a house.

The unfortunate side effect is that they are now part of the soup which is pretty much mandatory to include in big budget games.
Indies are perfectly capable of fleshing out individual endorphin sources these days, so AAA games need to outdo them by having multiple. And the whole collect+craft loop is an endorphin source that can be added relatively easily to many game concepts, especially if you’re also buying into the mandatory open world.

So, I guess, the moral of the story is: AAA bad, indies good.

But like, for real. AAA won’t stop using the collect+craft loop, unless we have another massive technology jump where their big budget becomes useful again (like with 2D -> 3D, back in the days).
So, if you’re tired of it, you do want to look into smaller budget games or, I guess, some of the few remaining niche AAA titles…