Fallout 4 has tons of options that are flavorful and make you feel like you live in a dynamic world, right up until you realize there's not much actual dynamic content.
New Vegas was a special beast, with its myraid choices and great writing. I will have to replay that. But FO4 on survival mode is a great experience, with plenty of danger and tradeoffs, and so much that I literally cannot do everything (I fail quests just due to lack of fast travel sometimes). And for that, I can thank Bethesda for a new kind of "more real" fallout experience.
This is true, but the reason why Fallout 2 is considered great (and why so is New Vegas), was in number possible paths that player can take during gameplay. Writing in those games was all about presenting gray and grayer dilemmas to the player and leaving it up to them to follow quest lines for either of those.
It was rarely things like "take the lost kitten from a tree or set the tree on fire" types of "good and evil" pseudo-dilemmas that end with player being a paragon of justice or chaotic evil, something that keeps plaguing role-playing games to this day.
In Fallout 1, the entire Necropolis arc is time dependent, and what you can do in there depends of the time you arrive: the Vault Dweller can save Necropolis from the slaughter by killing the Master before the Lieutenant and before 25 March 2162 but after 110 days have passed.
I think Oblivion's success despite its shortcomings on the RPG side gave them the message that this works and Skyrim's success reinforced it even further.
Though personally i find Morrowind the best of their games by far, especially on the writing side (not a surprise considering the writers they had - and lost right after Morrowind). Not as chaotic and repetitive as Daggerfall and Arena's random generator-based worlds, yet still with solid RPG mechanics, writing and exploration.
I remember getting to the 2nd map (Los Angles?) and the first mission was this huge map which was hardly used. Massive waste of my time baby sitting and watching people walk.
And that was when I had enough of the game designers wasting my time so much and stopped.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Hong Kong are also really good. I hear "Returns" was OK but not nearly as good as those, haven't bothered with it.
Divinity: Original Sin seemed really promising but I got sick of it crashing like 1/hr and dropped it.
Perspective: aging former gamer whose access to long gaming sessions for deep single-player stuff is now tightly restricted by adult responsibilities—i.e., kids.
Favorite older games of that sort, for reference, are Baldur's Gate, FO1 and (especially) 2, Arcanum, and (stretching "that sort" a bit) Darklands. Still haven't beaten Planescape: Torment after my game started repeatably crashing ~2/3 of the way through years ago, but that was really good.
The story lines are linear, but the stories are rather good. There's a lot of user generated content, and some are OK, but none of them are as good as the original. (I _think_ someone remade the original game's campaign in the Hong Kong engine, but don't recall for sure.)
DoS 1/2: Never had any crash in either game and played both from release on.
No need to play the first.
I hurried through and went back to Witcher 3.
I decided that until Bethesda starts writing games properly (story- and code-wise), I'm going to pass. Fallout 76 didn't interest me, and stayed away from that soon to be dumpster fire. I found it hilarious that most Fallout 4 criticisms applied to Fallout 76.