I played well over 60 hours of Fallout 4 on Xbox One. Then I picked it up on PC. According to Steam, I've put about 85 hours into the PC version of the game. That's something like 140 or 150 hours with Bethesda's huge RPG. And no, I'm not the guy suing Bethesda. I'm nowhere near done, and I plan to continue playing it for the foreseeable future.

But it's also kind of a disappointment.

Let's draw a clear, thick line between "disappointing" and "bad" before we go any further. Fallout 4 is not a bad game. It's a very good game. I didn't spend nearly a week of my life on a bad game or a game I don't like. Fallout 4 is a disappointing game. A game that doesn't meet certain expectations. Some of the disappointment lies with me, some with Bethesda. Let's get into it.

We know what to expect from a Fallout game. Power Armor. The Brotherhood of Steel. Raiders. Super Mutants. Deathclaws. The Pip-Boy. When Bethesda moved the timeline of the game a full 200 years after the bomb dropped and the location 2000 miles away from its point of origin, they had a chance to make a clean break. They could pull in some of the known elements, but drop others and bring in some substantial new stuff. Instead, things stuck pretty close to what we expect. It made sense with Fallout 3. They'd just acquired the license and moving from a turn-based game to an action/shooter was already a huge change. That was enough on its own to be novel.

Now, though, that novelty has worn off. We know that Fallout can work as an action game.

The core formula these games are built on hasn't changed much, either. The formula had grown from previous Bethesda games and matured in Oblivion and Fallout 3. Skyrim was different enough in terms of setting that I was willing to overlook the underlying sameness. Fallout 3 and Skyrim are really where the formula became set in stone. With Fallout 4, it feels like just an execution of the formula. There's not much in the way of inspiration to be found in the Commonwealth. It feels, as I look back on the last few Bethesda games, less like a new game and more like a re-skin of the last one.

The only truly new element of Fallout 4 is crafting of items and settlements. The application of item crafting is pretty clear, and sort of expected at this point. The settlement building is fun – I'd wager I've spent at least a full workday just building settlements. I'm googling how to find more steel because all I want to do is make dope houses for all my sad future people to live in. But it doesn't change the world at all. Connecting all these settlers together doesn't turn into anything bigger like it should. It's an extension of the house building added to Skyrim, but little more.

Beyond that, it's the same as it ever was: digging through drawers in old buildings looking for bits and pieces, jamming stimpacks into your arm when you get overwhelmed with Super Mutants.

Then there's the fiction of the world. It's held together by chewing gum and old string. I'm not one to sit and nitpick generally speaking, but the little things add up as you spend tens and then hundreds of hours wandering through the game world. The base problem Bethesda's Fallout is similar to that of Knights of the Old Republic. That game is set 4,000 years before the original trilogy because they didn't want people to try to connect the story to the movies – they wanted freedom. Then they used that freedom to build an almost identical world. Technology didn't change at all in four millenia? Similarly, Fallout asks us to believe that in the two hundred years since the bomb dropped, the world hasn't started to heal. Mutated stuff? Sure, that makes sense. Plant life is all dead, and yet you can grow unlimited amounts of it with no effort.