Overview
By the by, I also posted about Fallout 4 a couple weeks ago (but it was mostly an excuse to shout out Too Much Future and Ranged Touch (@rangedtouch)). Onto the post ...
There were six DLCs released for Fallout 4, but this post is just about the big three: Automatron, Far Harbor, and Nuka World.
In terms of general impressions, I enjoyed my time with all three. Far Harbor was definitely my favorite, and Nuka-World was big swing-and-a-miss for me. I'll talk more about that under that cut.
My main take away from playing all three back-to-back is that the settlement building is a lot more important to the game than I remembered from my first playthrough. That's not to say I didn't do any settlement stuff in my first playthrough--if anything, building weird structures and getting people to live in them probably occupied the majority of my playtime--but at the time, I just treated it like a fun minigame. I was thinking, "oh, nice, they put a little city building in my Fallout-themed Borderlands." But now, it's very clear to me that settlement-building is the game.
The main addition of Automatron is a new crafting station for your settlements. One of the first main quests in Far Harbor ends in you getting a new settlement location, and half the side-quests do the same. Nuka-World, gameplay-wise, is just clearing locations for settlements. If you're not doing settlements, you're missing out on a big chunk of the game!
So, long story short, by playing a low charisma character (which was a Real Problem for Far Harbor) and not doing any settlement stuff, I feel like I didn't get nearly as much enjoyment from these expansions as I could have, and I can't really blame the game for that! At the end of the day, Fallout 4 is a game I like but don't love, and the DLC didn't change that.