Before you'd even gotten to the many issues with Mass Effect 3's ending, it inherently had a problem in balancing the open-world of side missions and tasks to complete with an Earth back home that was very quickly being decimated by the Reaper invasion. Now, whilst Fallout 4's narrative isn't as weighty as this, there's not really a whole lot of wiggle room to see what secrets you can find amongst the wasteland when you're fully aware your infant child is out there fending for themselves. The conceit Bethesda wrote into the script is that "Well, they could be any age", but it hardly makes you forget about the task at and. As such, when things like becoming General of the Minutemen or indulging in levelling up your Power Armor start to emerge, it always comes with the reminder that you really should be trying to track your son down first. The voice actors behind your character reinforce the immense weight of having your partner killed and having to track down this innocent child, but then within seconds you're off doing something entirely different again. It creates the same same sort of ludonarrative dissonance we had with GTA IV, where Niko would profess to just wanting to retire or give up his life of crime - then be blowing a few hundred gangster's heads off the next second. You can argue that complainers should simply mainline the story to get it out of the way, but when the appeal is clearly intended to be in the character (otherwise why voice them?) and the exploration of the world itself, both elements seem completely at odds with one another.
