What a garbage, lazy game
Literally nowhere in my post do I ever say this.
It's almost like they focused on having varied gameplay and content over visuals.
As the other games show, these two things are not mutually exclusive. The reason that Fallout 4 has subpar graphics is because its using a last generation engine, not because of it "having varied gameplay". That doesn't even make sense.
while looking at a lot of pretty, empty scenery?
That's damn untrue and you know it.
Here is a video of literally crossing the Fallout 4 map. in 11 minutes, you only get attacked 3 times.
The Witcher 3 has a vastly more varied and larger, with vastly more indepth quests. Its not even a debate.
What, you actually want to go inside the buildings and interact with the world? Haha, no, graphics! Who wants NPCs with cycles, names, homes and inventories when you can have a thousand nameless, non-interactive, generic NPCs? /s
Your rant is getting straight delusional right now. You can't interact with the overwhelming majority of NPCs in Fallout 4 in any more depth than in Witcher 3.
I realized the gameplay consisted of 90% running through empty fields and fighting endless Drowners with amazingly simple and repetitive combat.
This tells me you haven't even played the game. Witcher 3's combat was widely praised as being MILES ahead of anything Bethesda has ever done. Super BunnyHop said it best.
Here are some quick examples, and let me reiterate, these are on high, not Ultra.
Wait is this supposed to impress anyone? Even when you try to cherry pick screenshots that look good, they still ALL still look desperately dated. The first one you can literally see the pixelation on the god rays, ALL of them have terrible textures. The textures in your Example 4 are almost cringe worthy, it looks like an indie project and not a AAA release in 2015.
It's almost like people are cherry-picking the fuck out of everything as some sort of weird anti-hype circlejerk.
That's ironic given you just attempted to cherrypick images that make Fallout 4 look graphically impressive and still failed. All your images look exactly like they're in an last generation engine, all of them REAFFIRM what everyone is saying about Fallout 4's graphics that fanboys like you refuse to accept.