Man, fuck the UI and controls in this game.
I figured Bethesda would have done the smart thing by now and just hired the guy/team who made SkyUI. But...no, still the same song and dance. It's not as bad as stock Skyrim, but it's still pretty bad. The fact that they seem to think that "ENTER TO CONFIRM, TAB TO CANCEL" is acceptable is just beyond comprehension (protip: having to shift your hand to the opposite side of the keyboard is the opposite of good design). And what the fuck is up with having to use the arrow keys to control dialogue prompts? It's even worse in the workshop menu, where you have to move around with WASD, control the menu with the arrows, and aim with your mouse. How many hands do they think we have?
As far as gameplay controls go, moving and shooting work fine, as expected (I'm very pleasantly surprised by how good the shooting feels), but what the hell is up with all of the press-and-hold controls? I'm not using a goddamned controller, I'm using a keyboard and mouse. The game is only using a tiny fraction of my keyboard as it is, so what is the point of that shit? If I wanted crippled FPS controls, I'd use a damn controller. I'm not using a damn controller, though, I'm using a fucking keyboard and mouse. Argh!
My system isn't the best system to judge performance on, but the game does perform very well. No stuttering with everything maxed out (including god rays). The bokeh DOF option looks awesome! Just like looking through a camera. It gives it a bit more character than the typical blur. It's really nice to see that they finally abandoned the puke green color filter that served them so "well" in FO3.
The texture work is far spottier than I was expecting. I understand that texture quality has to take a backseat in open world games, but FO4 doesn't even utilize the amount of VRAM in my old GTX 680 (2GB), let alone what would be available in modern cards. They could have pushed the quality up and still managed to make it work on modern consoles, too. I have no doubt that the community will take that into their own hands, but this is one case where I fail to see why they should have to. 4GB of VRAM should have been the target for Ultra, not 2GB.
As far as the actual game goes, I'm not too far in right now (just got back to Sanctuary and built myself a little house. Woo!), but I do wish that the intro sequence would have lasted a bit longer. While the opening does have some pretty powerful stuff in it, the family interactions felt a bit...rushed. I dunno, I just feel like what ended up happening should have hit me a bit harder than it did. Plus, what happened just felt way too obvious to me. I dunno, maybe it's just me.
But hey, ridiculously bad menu controls aside, I'm enjoying it so far! Let's see if it grips me as hard as Skyrim did this past year.