I don't know how many hours I have at this point but it is a lot of them. I play this game 3-5 hours a day and I think about it when I am not playing it. That is a sign of a good game I guess even though a lot of that time is spent running out of strange things like copper and plastic for my setllements.
This is one of the things that kind of starts to irk you a bit as you progress because sometimes the search for these items can be a bit tedious rather than fun. Searching through room after room for a toy car in a drawer or something else that gets you plastic can be something that stops being fun pretty fast.
That's just part of it though. The other side of what makes this game a bit, dare I say, boring around level 25 is the fact that there are two sorts of encounters you are going to have. You are going to completely clean the floor with anyone you meet in combat, or they are going to be so impossibly difficult to cause damage to that the battle just carries on for ages even though there is very little chance of death on your part.
while it does look good and the music is good and most of the npc dialogue is even good, it doesn't change the fact that most of the missions you are given kind of have to consist of "go over here, clear out that building, get such and such item, and bring it back here." There isn't much else that they can do.
Combat is interesting in FO4 specifically because it is "cut and dry". There isn't a lot of strategy, there is virtually zero dodging, and mostly it just consists of having big enough guns with you, enough stimpacks, and having ammo and grenades. Thankfully, if you are anything like me, you probably have far more of all of these things than you really need.
Part of the reason why gameplay started to feel a bit dull for me was because I was off the main mission path and didn't really even know it. It can be hard to tell because it's not like there is a gold star next to the quests that actually progress the story.
So if you find yourself in a similar situation just know that you need to be focusing on quests that involve finding your son. I had been away from that storyline for so long that I kind of forgot it was part of the story to be honest.
Right around the time that you get a major quest step that is called "Dangerous Minds" and "Finding Doctor Amari" these quests are easy to forget that they have importance because finding someone doesn't sound like a big ordeal. Because I forgot that this is a major quest line and it doesn't have any markings, I found myself liberating settlements and going to do random stuff for a few days in real time.
It wasn't until I started to tear through all the side-quests that I accidentally ended up on a story that progresses the story.
So in order to help other people not end up in this "dead zone" of sorts be sure to make a note of stories like this one that might not be so evident in the "data" section of your PipBoy
Once you talk to her you get back on track, so to speak, and the enemies do phase in and out as far as how difficult they are which is mostly pretty easy. Every now and then someone who is uber-powerful gets thrown in there and you die unexpectedly after blazing through a dozen or so underlings right before you get to him or her.
But the story in Fallout 4 is actually really good, and if I am saying that you know it is true because I am such a non-story guy in gaming that most of the time I just skip all of it. I have not been skipping it in FO4 though. I think they have a good team of writers as even the side quests have a pretty good story behind them.
If I was to offer one other point of advice it would be to focus your perks on things that allow you to alter your weapons. This can make an absolutely huge difference on your ability to do just about anything and for me it has been the ability to snipe from very far away that has been the most fun. Now if I could just convince my power-armor wearing companion to not run out into the open and immediately give away our position :)
