What were your feelings on FO3 and FO4?

Not the parent, but I love FO1 and 2 dearly.

FO3 felt too linear and too hand held. FO:NV on the other hand was actually decent.

FO4 is not fun at all if you want the open world RPG element. It's a shooter more than anything else, and you have to avoid settlements completely. The survival difficulty mode was decent in difficulty, but it lacked "oh shit" mechanics so random encounters don't just kill you at will for the first many hours of gameplay until you get some gear.

This makes a lot of sense. 3 and New Vegas are remakes of 1 and 2, which were respectively linear and open. 4 is the first one where Bethesda hasn't had earlier work to use as a reference, and it sounds like that really shows.

Have you played them FO1 was not linear at all? 3 and NV are not in any way remakes of the originals. But NV was not made by Bethesda, but a different studio with some of the orignal developers and that really shows.

I have played them both several times, starting not long after they came out. NV is much more like 2 than 3 is like 1, fair enough - but I don't think it is unreasonable to characterize 1 as being much more linear than 2. "Remake" is probably overdoing it a bit, though; the similarities aren't quite that strong.