Ohoh, we are comparing those games, let me chime in
Because I have 2k hrs in Fallout 4 and (I dont know how) many in Skyrim aswell. I enjoy Cyberpunk a lot.
In terms of character creation, Skyrim was absolutely the better. The only thing known about your character is that they crossed the border and got caught(unless you use alternative start). Everything from looks, preferences(includes sexual), stances are all decided by the player. As such I have played character that were good and noble while I also played characters that were absolutely evil. I think the most fun character I had was a psychotic sorceress for which every decision(Do kill this npc or not? Do I join the Brotherhood or not?) was decided by a coin toss.
Skyrim gives you a blank slate that you can do with as you please while the dialogue is overall very neutral. There is no voiced protagonist to ruin that. It actually surprised me how fun it was to play an arrogant xenophobic egotistic Telvanni bitch.
In Fallout 4 and Cyberpunk you are always Nora/Nate or V and you will have to settle with that. Prdefined characters are always interesting the first time as you try to discover what they are about, but when you replay you usually start to notice details that you wish you didnt. Like how V is rather naieve about the world around her/him even when V has spend their entire life in Night City. Half the time Johnny goes 'I thaught you'd never figure it out' or other 'you know nothing V' style replies. I didnt really like that if I'm honest. The fact that V often has dialogue choices that sound rather naive and gullible doesnt help.
Fo4's Nora comes out of a vault and doesnt know what happened to the world so you can accept the sometimes uninformed replies of that character. Though Fo4's dialogue was rather bad; four words that describe a reaction, but might be completely different to what you expected. Glad they abandoned that kind of dialogue. The other problem with Fallout 4 is that you play a good character and then go to Nukaworld where you are expected to be a bad person. That only works if your character is a blank slate
Story wise F4 has the issue that it tries to make you do things as quickly as possible but doesnt really succeed at it. Go find Shaun but you could just wander off into the wild and explore. Kellog is a pushover when you meet him at level 30 because he doesnt scale up and is designed to be your antagonist at level 15. Cyberpunk did kind of nudge me into doing the main quest initially until I started wandering off.
To be fair, I dont mind it. I dislike timed quests like the police neighbour quest in Cyberpunk 2077. You go out into the city and get caught up in some other gigs, forget about andrew and the quest fails. Meh!
What Fallout 4 does well is give you the option to side with one of the different faction and thus give you a high degree of replayability; minutemen today, Brotherhood tomorrow and at the end the Lone Wanderer lives happily ever after. Whereas Cyberpunk 2077 only gives you one storyline, only the endings differ somewhat and none actually ends well for V(one ending might be a good one if we take what the NPCs say literally).
I was told that Cyberpunk was supposed to have 3 different story arcs; one where V has Johnny, one where Jackie has the Johnny and one where the chip remains unused and you try tro sell it off. So unfortunate that that didnt materialize.
The whole debate about NPCs is an old one that will never go anywhere. You cant have a city with thousands of NPCs and expect dialogue for all or even most of them. Bethesda makes smaller cities but 9/10 NPCs in them have dialogue. In Skyrim 9/10 had a quest for you. Its one or the other, you cant have both. I'm okay with the way CDPR did it in Night city. Do you, in real life, go to the city and randomly talk to everyone? And if you did would they talk to you or walk away while staring at you?
Fallout 4 has good AI(and I was told they got help from Halo devs), you can make a settlement and the settlers will behave fairly realistically(for as much as that is possible in a game like that). They go to sleep, do their different daily jobs and if you built a living room or a bar they'll go there in the evening. The combat of the AI in Fallout 4 is also pretty good, one wonders how they managed to lose that AI scripting when they started to work on Fallout 76.
What Cyberpunk does absolutely best out of all these is the locations you fight at. Skyrim has tunnel dungeons, long corridors that conveniently end at the entrance. It has quite a few of those. You still see that in Fallout 4 while in Cyberpunk you arent going into artificial locations, the compounds and buildings you enter to do gigs are always realistically built. backdoors and frontdoors, windows and fences with restrooms, offices and other rooms logically placed. With NPCs going about a daily routine instead of being planted in such way that the player always to deal with them.
In Cyberpunk I never feel like I'm entering a tunnel dungeon, but rather a 'real' location. Noone ever mentions this and it really should be. Cyberpunk is absolutely superior in this regard.
I like random activities like fishing, awesome addition to make the game feel more lifelike. I wish Cyberpunk has such activties. Somewhere I'm hoping they'll make it possible for V to take over a place like Jotero's and turn it into their own club. Well, there are plenty of other features that I'd like that would require an additional dev team to be hired
Overall both have their strengths and weaknesses. I personally find it hard to choose.
cyberpunk.fandom.com
