SheriffAvastcompanions don't die so theres no reason to not always have one considering they can just act as walking storage and can occasionally clear traps
I've been traveling without a companion that generally just alerts everyone and does no damage and it's been fine, there is actually a perk that makes you recieve less damage and hold quite a bit more weight when you aren't traveling with a companion, so it feels more beneficial even to take this and not have one around with you. They seriously do feel like dead weight.
For the record companions don't alert enemies if you're successfully sneaking. They can walk circled around the enemy but if you're hidden behind a crate and they don't know you're there, they'll ignore your companion. Companions also don't set off any traps.
I've seen Piper do some shit man. She's crouch-walked into a room full of enemies, scouting them out while I'm ducking in the room next door wondering what she's doing. She's walked through huge laser array traps and didn't set off the remote bombs I was defusing at the time. She's strutted through grenade windchimes without giving a damn but without setting them off. Seriously, badass.
boulderSkyrim was released in 2011 --followed by some expansions which obviously don't require all of Bethesda to make-- so they've been working on Fallout 4 for 4-5 years at least.
According to interviews they had dedicated team members working on Fallout 4 around halfway through Skyrim's development, and shifted full focus to it once Skyrim was released, with DLC for Skyrim being made in some of the team members' spare time.
boulder"unfinished product" - Most of the problems in Fallout 4 stem from either the problems inherent to the Creation Engine, or the tick-rate being locked to the frame-rate. Creating a bug-fix for either could affect a mind-boggling amount of things. Changing the engine for sure would, but the FPS issue could be as easy as setting ratio relative to the current FPS but that really just relies on what dependencies the various parts of the game have. In any case, the fact that a work-around exists means that it's negligible. The only thing unfinished about this game is that they didn't release it with the FPS set to 60 by default. The average case user probably can't even run it higher than that, I have an above average PC and I can't even keep a steady 60fps.
I keep around 60 at most points, it's all about knowing how to tweak your setup to maximize performance without majorly sacrificing quality. That said, yes, fixing such a core issue will be difficult, but the posts going around discovering that it's tied to vsync and not framerate in general are very promising, and are making me hope that there will be a patch to fix it.
boulderWhat bothers me the most about this is that you're saying all this as a player who's new to the Fallout Series (I'm assuming here based on the fact that you didn't know you could dismiss companions). If you'd played any of the past games --not that it's required for you to have a full appreciation for Fallout 4-- you'd recognize what a massive undertaking the overhaul of the crafting system was, and the introduction of the supply-line system must have been. In the past I never crafted shit, I thought it was a waste of time because you really didn't have to. But this game has made it so that crafting shit beyond little things is useful, and fun. More-so than it has been in other games.
On top of that, think about how many games have as many interactive objects fucking everywhere. I've been thinking about it for a while, and I don't think there are any that aren't made by Bethesda. Can you imagine how much work that is?
Amen. Crafting, towns, building, and supply lines are honestly HUGE improvements. They threw the word "dynamic" around at E3 like it was the first buzzword they had ever heard, but fuck if this game isn't dynamic. I never expected a game built using the Creation Engine would be capable of something like this without major quality and performance issues, but they've managed to achieve it. The dynamic lighting is also a huge step up from Skyrim where most lighting was pre-baked, and the lighting that wasn't was of incredibly poor quality. I haven't yet seen an aliased shadow in Fallout 4, so they've really gone the extra mile there.
boulderThe things people are complaining about as buggy and unplayable in this game (which all have workarounds by the way), all that shit is minuscule compared to what Bethesda actually accomplished. This game wasn't rushed, it's just a little buggy. And you have to be an idiot to not be thrilled with what the game has. Plus once modding is released it's gonna be 10x better.
There are some parts of this game that I'm a bit worried about regarding mods. Since we now have voiced protagonists, it's going to be difficult adding quest and story mods without either not making the protagonist voiced, or somehow impersonating their voice well. That being said, there are also really, really promising areas that mods will be amazing with, for example construction, adding new buildable locations, new settlers, a huge assortment of new mods and crafting accessories, new companions, etc. Expanding on the latter, most of the voice lines the protagonist uses for companion communication are fairly agnostic and don't mention names, so it'd be really easy to set up a new companion that responds to them that feels incredibly integrated into the world, with full quest commentary like the current ones (little remarks by Piper and Nick during the main quest in Diamond City anyone?). Seriously excited.