Fallout 4 - Post-Game View

Today, I finally made it through the rest of the main story-line of Fallout 4, after playing for 41 hours.
You can read my early game view write-up [here][1],
Since then, my feelings for the game remain largely the same.
I've been writing up a sort of journal of my chronicles through the game. Mostly in the voice as if I was the actual character. You can find all of those Daily Recaps [here][2].
While my "Daily Recaps" are essentially just me regurgitating the story as I experience it, and thus are very "spoilery", I'm going to try to keep this "Game View" as spoiler-free as possible.

The game is really dark and intense.
And lots of "go here, shoot this". By the end of the game, it really got to the point where I was like "Ok, I'll put that off until later, I guess" whenever I knew I would have to go to some remote location and clear it from raiders or some other big ugly monster-thing.
I still really like the game, but at the same time, I'm kinda relieved that I'm done with the main story. Now I feel like I can go back at my own pace and complete some of the side missions.

I must admit, the story left me kind of underwhelmed.
Don't get me wrong, the story was intense, but I just didn't feel satisfied at the end.
Essentially, the story splits near the end, where you have to choose one of four Factions to side with for the remainder of the game. Once I was forced to choose a side, basically everything started going downhill. And I felt like a horrible person for each action I was forced to perform.

I've seen games before do stuff that intentionally messes with your emotions. I suppose you could argue that since the game is all about freedom of choice, that it is just one of those things about making choices. But near the end, I started to feel like I was no longer actually being given a choice. When faced with specific situations, I kept selecting dialog options with the hope and intention of doing one thing, while the other character basically says "No, we're doing it this way" and then the quest continues as set forth.
The illusion of having a choice while not actually having a choice.
I'm not wanting to do these things, and you make me do it anyway.
So again, I suppose you could have a discussion there about human mentality and moral decisions and whatnot. But personally, I would rather enjoy my time with a game, rather than basically feeling hatred at the situation I'm being forced into.
On the other hand, I have not played the other three Faction endings yet. So maybe one of those would feel more personally satisfying. If/when I do that, I'll be sure to add a quick note here about my feelings.

So, ending aside, I really liked this game. Part of that may likely be my personal-bias, coming in from being a fan of the Fallout franchise for over a decade.
The game looks great, despite many glitches. (Incorrect subtitles at times, interface not loading properly after re-load, odd camera angles during dialogue,)

The Quick-Save feature is invaluable. The game is very shooty-shooty, so I died a lot. Being able to reload quickly to re-try a section was very convenient.
I'm not really a huge fan of FPS games, so that aspect really started to wear me down a bit.
But other than that, the writing of the characters was really good. For most of the game, I had a 50's-era detective robot as my side-kick, which was like the greatest thing ever.

I still have a lot of side-quests to complete, and probably the other alternate endings to try for, as well as the settlement management. So there's still plenty left of the game that could last me many more hours.
It's a big game.

But I need a break from it for awhile. It's just really intense.

Was it worth playing? Yeah. I think so. It's a solid game, which will likely only get better with patches to fix the bugs. And there's all the Season Pass content yet to come. So I'll be revisiting the Commonwealth wasteland soon, surely.

I probably wouldn't vote for it as Game of the Year, though. Despite my love of the series.
It's a solid game. Lots of love for it. But at the end of the day, there's just that little something that leaves me with a little hole. Probably just me trying to cope with the ending. I don't want to judge the game on that, as I realize that is just one of the endings, but so far that's the only ending I know, so that's the ending that I have to judge it on so far.

If you wanna check it out for yourself, which I do recommend, you can pick it up on Steam [here][3]

[1]: http://sstaver.typed.com/blog/fallout-4 "Fallout 4 - Early Game View"
[2]: http://sstaver.typed.com/tags/fallout "Fallout 4 - Daily Recaps"
[3]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/377160/ "Fallout 4 on Steam"