I felt like playing Skyrim, but also wanted to shoot stuff. So I fired up FO4.
I've always kinda felt like it was a step back. It's more obvious when you've been playing Skyrim a lot. Movement is pretty bad. Motion is fine. I'm looking at an even 60 and things moving on-screen are smooth. Directing the camera just is not. It's not stutter. It just feels jerky and... uniformly not smooth. The lighting and general front-end are significantly more advanced... and yet worse implemented. Skyrim's rendering techniques are significantly dated compared to FO4's, but they look better.
The TAA is better on Skyrim, too. It is a little more blurry, but with some careful FXAA/Lumasharpen from ReShade, edges can be clean and textures appropriately sharp. That's how all of my screenshots are done. They tried to make it sharper with FO4 and it is a little sharper, but still fuzzy and kinda gross. I have tried cleaning it up with FXAA on top, but you get chunky edges with fuzzy details. Either way, it doesn't sharpen well. Alphas are generally terrible... with meshes that are completely flat, like grass, you can forget about them ever looking good, no matter what textures you use or what you do in post. A lot of the game just has that cutout/watercolor look to it. It's way less plausible-looking generally.
You can actually tweak all of the TAA parameters in FO4's INIs... you'd be surprised at what you find, digging in the wikis for INI settings. You can tweak a lot of stuff like that, including AO and behavior of the water. I welcome being able to change so much and I wish other games wouldn't dumb it down. But IME, it never yeilds great results just cuz... well that's the engine for you
ENB is also wayyy further along with Skyrim. You don't even get ENB water with FO4. You've got the weather module to have weather dependent settings for Skyrim, too, which in itself is huge. With FO4 you generally get 4 sets of parameters, day/night inside and day/night outside. The rest has to be left to adaptive lighting, which sucks because it has to go a lot further out to see everywhere and you really notice it. You can't set it for the dozens of variances in image characteristics. All of the shaders are generally more primitive and don't yield the same quality as Skyrim's. With ENB on both, Skyrim literally becomes more modern than FO4. Just from a factual, technical standpoint.
ENB authors also make baffling choices. They like to cook the images and toss all sorts of nonsense effects on. The only one I like is PRC, mostly because of how it can actually simulate different cameras/lenses with advanced grading using great-looking LUTs. But it tries to surpass what can consistently be done with the current state of FO4 ENB, so it gives way to a lot of visual bugs. I might steal bits of that shader to work into my custom profile. But for me it's always been semi-unusable.
The thing that gets me about seemingly every fleshed-out ENB for FO4 is the goddamned DOF. They always use A LOT of foreground DOF, and then tweak the shader so you can't get rid of it. It looks awful when you're looking out into the distance and somewhere in your face is a horrible-looking blocky-ass, oddly tree or building-like blob taking up 1/4 of the frame. It's very straining to look at when a lot of action and things in front of where you're looking are constantly going in and out of focus.
To me, McFly's OG DOF looks better, and lets you get rid of near field blur. It's a bit hard to find unaltered, because everybody seems to feel a need to contort it. I don't know why they never use it. I practice a little photography and I've got to tell you, foreground DOF is NOT what you want for most pictures. I almost never see it used. I myself only use it for close-ups. And even then, it ruins a lot of photos. You use it for a creative effect, very carefully. Not CONSTANTLY. With both landscape and portraits, a lot of skill is in getting the area at least from the closest point in the frame, out to the subject, in focus. Even in movies, this is largely how it is done. Camera operators get paid pretty good money to know how to keep that sort of focus. They may use a blurry foreground for effect sometimes... usually to convey something about the setting or give a more voyeuristic perspective, but the rest of the time, the foreground will be as sharp as the subject. You only get away with having blurry things in front of the subject in just the right setting, with the right framing. Otherwise it looks like you fucked up the shot, like you don't know what the hell you're doing and should probably just put the camera down.
Why is this? Because having big blurry blobs between you and what you're trying to look at is distracting AF! That is the LAST thing anybody wants when dealing with action. Bugs the hell out of me how they all ignore basic visual principles that every other game follow for a reason, just so people can have screenshots they think look cool. I don't even think they look that cool. When you blur the foreground, you get that "miniaturized" perspective that makes everything look fake... and it throws off the whole composition. I only even like background blur for hiding the LODs. Otherwise I would use as little as possible. I don't understand how the FO4 modding community has been going so haplessly crazy with DOF for years and still not gotten tired of it.
The one thing it has that is pretty good, are the ultra godrays. Since the LODs are still PS1-quality and you don't have the ability to easily generate dynamic, super-high-res LODs like in Skyrim, it's handy to have that hiding them most of the time. It gives a nice effect for a post-apocalyptic game, too.
Character models are better, too. You can get a lot more polygons. But then customization is way simpler.
Still enjoying the game, but it is a love/hate relationship. Skyrim, I can say I love for all of it's flaws... and the modding scene makes up for it. Can't say the same for anything to do with FO4. I legitimately don't like a lot of things about the whole deal.
90 books published 
by various authors since the Metro series, however, there is not a lot of information about most of them. Below are the books that have officially been recognized by Dmitry Glukhovsky as well.
