Bioshock Infinite is basically the Fallout 4 of Bioshock games. If you played Fallout 4 first, you’d probably think it’s a great Fallout game. The gameplay is decent, you have roleplay choices for the story, there is lots of world building, etc… But if New Vegas is already your favorite game, you probably hated FO4 for not being enough Fallout.

I think that every Fallout game other than New Vegas and maybe 2 is like this. There are things that people like, but there are also changes that fans of prior games are really upset about.

Fallout 3 came out, and it was shifting a much-loved isometric game with fully turn-based combat into a pausable 3D shooter. Part of Fallout and Fallout 2 was that it had good world-building. I believe that “Fallout” was originally a play on words, referring not just to the radioactive fallout, but to the societal fallout. It showed a post-apocalyptic society. In Fallout 3 and on, a lot of that world-building made a lot less sense in favor of building little mini-stories.

Fallout 4 shifted from a tradition of being able to drastically affect the world to having dialog paths that almost entirely had no effect other than reputation with one’s companion. Fans complained because the game felt like it was on rails. The skill system went away, which a lot of people didn’t like.

Fallout 76, aside from being buggy at release even by Bethesda’s standards, took a series with lots of characters to interact with and basically eliminated them until later updates brought them back in. It had a weaker plot (especially at launch). Fallout 76 had a bunch of design decisions around being a multi-player game that made it a rather weaker single-player game — in a series with an immersive world, constant reminders about multi-player events and such kind of don’t fit in well.