Fallout 4: General Discussion

unfortunately you must have started typing before my final edit which had this line:

"(and its not like i'm angry about having spent money on this game. i pirated it and still felt ripped off so, i guess, no remorse)"

i'm glad you got something out of it but i can't see what the hell it could have been. and on the issue of hours, i had 50 hours into F4 before i just decided that i should just accept its a shit game and learn from skyrim, where i put 100 hours into it on 360 and 236 hours on PC and can't remember a single moment of actually being thoroughly entertained as opposed to just playing it as a time sink

bethesda is literally fucking cancer. they make shit games with extremely basic gameplay mechanics (skyrim's sword and magic is as boring as F4's gunplay), good looking but painfully boring worlds (fallout 3, skyrim, f4), subpar writing that is literally fucking absolutely mediocre, boring quests that essentially "go here, fetch this, come back" or, my personal favourite, "go here" with the visuals of the locations and enemies to kill barely hiding the tedious repeat after repeat of the same mission over and over and, above all else, the absolute worst thing, they do this knowing that modders with literally no budget working in their spare time can fill in the blanks by making mods that make magic gameplay fun, add missing survival features etc etc that would be a piece of cake for the actual fucking company to create and implement. but they don't, because they know that modders are happy to save them the resources and fill the blank, boring white canvas of a game they've created

i really don't get how people can give publishers like EA shit or devs like acitivision shit when bethesda is literally a company that exploits its own lack of ingenuity and creativity for profit. skyrim and fallout 4 are literally just recycled morrowind; after two engines later, the gameplay (not just combat but every actual mechanic) is almost exactly the same. well, i guess the attack animations are better at least.

why the fuck, after the genius of the original developers (interplay) and the devs who managed to take the shite that was F3 and with the same assets make a superior game (obsidian), does bethesda get to fucking go to the bank with the franchise and still receive critical acclaim when they literally took the fallout franchise and forced it into the oblivion framework whilst streamlining and casualising the actual roleplaying elements, only to release the same fucking game with no real meaningful gameplay additions nearly ten years later?

out of interest jack, how much of those 1000 hours, the hours you enjoyed, are of the vanilla bethesda Fallout 4? and i don't just mean without mods; i mean doing the bethesda designed quests etc, because when it comes to free play (roaming the map and making you're own fun) that's barely any credit to bethesda, because they've just essentially chucked the variables in for you to make your own entertainment - i could put my 4 year old cousin into a playpen and chuck a random boxful of toys in, without any mind to whats actually in it, and she could still probably amuse herself with the resources i've provided. that doesn't mean i'm due credit for being a great play maker with children

 

and also, level of enjoyment =/= a critical assessment of quality. i had a fuck load of fun messing around with Rome 2 yet whilst still thinking of it as a shit game

just because you like something does not mean its objectively good. i have a lot of fun watching the film Meatball Machine but i still know that, when expose to my own critical assessment, it doesn't stand up as a good film

but then i can read Melville's Moby Dick and, even though I found it so boring that it sent me to sleep, still appreciate that, from my own critical assessment, its a fantastic novel

so yeah, you might love fallout 4. that doesn't mean its not an objectively shit game, from a critical standpoint. like those examples i listed; level of enjoyment =/= critical assessment of quality

 

and of course, if its not clear, i'm not implying that there's anything wrong with enjoying something which isn't objectively good, because only pretensions fuckers only allow themselves to enjoy "masterpieces". i'm just saying that fallout 4 is, objectively, a shit game

 

fucking wow lol

i was being sincere when i said, unfortunately, you must have posted before my final edit. if you have access to my edit history for my posts jack, you'll also see that i constantly edit my long posts up towards a whole thirty minutes after initially posting. and i'm also surprised to hear that there are no other individual edits before the final one you've "exposed", because i often write a post and then make numerous edits on here, especially when its at night and i dont expect anyone's on. check my posts in the Political Profile thread for an example, i may be wrong, but they should have a similar edit history

so you've made a zinger here and i kinda wonder if you regret it, because i only didn't mean anything by my posts (a conversation about the quality of F4 sounded fun to me and, seeing your douglas/disagree i thought i could bait a debate about it), instead you've decided based on a small unfortunate accident that i must be a lying piece of shit

So when I read your reply, first sentence being "I love this conversation, and everything about this conversation", I thought "oh cool, he gets where i'm going with this and is enjoying the chance to debate about this". needless to say, i was pretty disappointed to see that you were actually just building up for your zinger

(your zinger being that apparently i'm stupid enough to edit my post vipar-style to try and defeat your arguement in hindsight, while drawing attention to the edit despite the fact i know you're an admin and can check that. i actually reworded that first sentence jack to "unfortunately you must have started typing before my final edit which had this line:" because i didn't want it to come across as me trying to zinger you, but that there's genuinly been an unfortunate case that, unfortunately, could make you feel like you had egg on your face by jumping the gun about by playtime. but, you know, for trying to actually be polite about that because i understood instantly how embarrasing that might be (notice how i didn't linger on your comment about playtime or take the piss out of you for it), ive got to be honest and say i kinda feel like by trying to make clear the situation and stop it from coming across as trying to embarrass you its only motivated you to misinterpret the situation and embarrase me, which you have truth be told)

but whatever man. i've got no way of course to back up my claims of my intentions there. so fuck it, whatever, enjoy your zing ratings because apparently you'd much rather think that, for the first time in our relationship, i've actively and purposely lied to you in an attempt to "zinger" you and that it wasnt a genuine mistake/accident that occurred

 

Jack, at some point we going to laugh around a couple of pints at all the stupid shit that's ever gone on between us man

 

tbh, it might have been different you said "I find the game shit" instead of making it seem like an actual fact that the game is shit (for everybody).

 

I like this idea of discussing games, however I will say I'm a little bit cautious to say what I think about the game as I'm afraid people might take what is a genuine opinion as some sort of attack or attempt at de-value their experience altogether. Essentially, these are my thoughts on the game and they make not align with what you think, but that's ok!

Anyway!

I've enjoyed my experience with Fallout 4, but I've always had a sense when playing it could have been much more than it was. When I think Bethesda nowadays, the term I think of when describing them is 'Jack of trades, master of none' in the sense they lay all these foundations for things, which if focused, could be a great game play mechanics; except they are left falling a little flat because the wide scope their trying achieve.

I've had a deep love for the Fallout franchise ever sense I bought Fallout 3 on release back in 08, it was the first RPG I truly played and loved every aspect of it, the idea of being in this quirky post-fallout world, with Americanisms from 60's amped up to 11, crazy over the top blood/gore (I'm looking at you bloody mess perk, where I shoot someones foot and their head falls off) sprinkled with dark humour; made for a really enjoyable experience.

With the bar already so high, Fallout: New Vegas only continued to propel that bar even further up, with a game that took everything I said above and managed to add so much more substance to world, NW is the perfect example, in my eyes, of great story telling and character depth done right; I cared deeply about each companion in that game due to the wealth of backstory they had, spending 5-10 minutes or more just sitting there talking to them, finding out about their history was one the best components about NW.

So with that in mind, I was expecting Fallout 4 to be an amazing experience especially with the new engine. I wanted it to encapsulate the same magical experience I had when I played Skyrim for the first time.

So getting down to the game, instead of shitty pro-intro to my view of the game, overall I enjoyed my experience of Fallout 4 but there so many elements in the game I was either disappointed with or felt could have been more fleshed out.

One of my major peeves with this game is the companions.

There are definitely some interesting characters when you look at them at a surface level but when you start to learn more about them there isn't actually much there, take Curie for example, as she is by far my favourite because I'm a sucker for A.I. developing a conscious and 'becoming' human, that concept is so interesting to me; so naturally I gravitated more towards Curie. During my entire time with Curie I was looking forward to the conversations and the potential to understand the perspective of a once robot, turned 'human' and experiencing all these feelings, emotions and in my case, falling in love with the protagonist. Except at every point the character development felt so lack-luster, each conversation happened so quickly or hardly had any depth to it, especially when there was so many opportunities to expand certain ideas of experiences.

Having come from a Obsidian developed Fallout where I have connected to mostly all of the characters, and it gave the characters time and respect to develop their story-line over small comments during your exploration or 10-15 minute sit downs where you can ask a lot of questions about the character; it makes Fallout 4's story and characters look so small in comparison.

Granted you can't romance characters in NW but it hardly feels anything has actually happened once you romance a character in 4. There doesn't feel like there is any good amount of conclusion or impact for that story arc.

Looking back on my Fallout 4 experiences so far, I can't say there have been that many memorable story/quest moments. The only quest I feel harkons back to older Fallout games is the robots on the ship, other than that it's a fairly forgetful story experience. As far I remember there weren't as many genuine side quests, or at least none that I felt were worthy of that title. Fallout 3/NW has so many quirky little story quests you could complete whether it's helping out a man-turned tree, saving child slaves, sending ghouls into space or recruiting prostitutes, there so many cool quests to complete that really gave me a 'Fallout Experience'.

And like Savage said, it's a shame they dumbed down the conversation mechanics and I wonder if they did that because they introduced voiced protagonists, maybe if they stuck to text-based conversations we would have had a more developed system.

Graphically though, I really like the look of Fallout, people complain it still looks bad or something along those lines, but I think it looks great and really enjoy walking through decrepit old cities that are populated by all sorts of undesirables. It's a small note, but I really like the changes they made with power-armour, in the other games it just felt like a more heavily armoured piece of clothing but in this it actually feels like your in some sort of walking tank, it really nails that technological superiority aspect of the brotherhood.

There is something about Bethesda that I'm getting a little worried about and that is it's community elements. Bethesda advocate for community and it's mods, which is great, I think we all know that mods have the potential to significantly increase enjoyment factor as well as the games life. This may just be me, but I can't help but shake the feeling that Bethesda are not fulling developing certain areas because they know, or expect, the community to make a mod to improve it. Building in Fallout 4 felt really tiresome and annoying at times for me, especially when I didn't really have that much to work with, so naturally I turned to mods and low and behold there was a mod that added in so many more building variants. I'm wondering if that Bethesda are laying these foundations of game play mechanics down with half arsed development, so that the community can pick up where they didn't finish and I think that's a bit scary.

Anyway, I'll leave these thoughts here. I don't know what to full too much more of a page up with this. But again, I can't stress enough that I did actually enjoy my experience, I just wish it was more than it was.

 

I'm so glad the whole pay for mods fiasco went down so badly for Bethesda, you can tell that if the community didn't take a stand they would have implemented that in all of their new games.

It's interesting when we this notion to TES because Skyrim had a range of both fetch quests and genuine side quests with story and never saw that as an issue. I guess it's because I'm used to quirky silly side quests in Fallout, that when they become generic fetch quests or 'go kill these people' quests I quite annoyed because it's already been established in the previous games that's what Fallout is about.

Where as Skyrim I just loved running around doing my thing, exploring, killing monsters etc. etc.

Although I will say, Bethesda need to make their conclusions for guilds more impactful. Becoming the head of the Dark Brotherhood or Thieves Guild never really felt like you were the Big Boss, everyone still kind of treated you the same way - if they could make so that you actually did some form of guild management or business that would cool and would actually feel like you are the Grand Master of the guild.

 

.

I thought Valentine was a cool character, and Piper was waifu material, but I didn't really enjoy the companion feature this time round. Although Bethesda definitely learnt something from Skyrim (fuck me, how can you design a dozen or so lobotomised drooling nonentities and call them companions? I know they're technically 'Followers' but I expected them to do a little more than just mindlessly follow me), I do feel that link between their "opinion" of you and your dialogue choices was actually pretty backwards and contradictory. Like you said, instead of now thinking "well, how would my character reply to this?" answering dialogue became "well, what would my companion like to hear?". To be honest I thought that's a terrible feature; while I love games that do manage to give you an actual dynamic with party members, making it a basic 'say what they want to hear because there's a nice perk for making them want to fuck you" just made me feel like the only way I could play my character was as a sociopathic serial-seducer.

(I think that could have been fixed by making it either a) less obvious what people like, b) replaced with a system where its your actions, not your dialogue choices, that decide your companions attitude to you or c) removing perks for having a top affinity so that the dialogue doesn't become that dialogue minigame)

That's an interesting way to measure enjoyment to be honest, the 'water cooler moments', has made me wonder what my own internal system of measuring how much I like a game is. I wonder if, unfortunately, in my playthrough before I dropped the game if I just had the bad luck of playing all the dull quests but, after 50 hours, that surely can't be the case. I do remember Trinity Towers all of a sudden tho, that was a memorable mission and, tho I can vagualy remember it, a little better than the "Pirate Ship full of Robots" quests and a few others where I thought the emphasis was placed not on bloody making the quality of the quest good, but just the concept so that it felt 'iconic' or memorable - style over substance. Admittedly, F4 has some more substance than the barron wasteland that was Skyrim.

-------

I do think you've made a compelling case for your enjoyment of the game, but for me, despite liking some of the stuff you mentioned at first glance, there was always a problem I found that ruined the concept. Like the radio - Travis was pretty funny and his segments were well written. But hearing the same comedic routine or joke over and over again is grinding for me, no matter how funny I found it the first time. And I felt like, while repeating the same dialogue made sense for Mr New Vegas because he was pretty clearly an AI, having Travis, a human character you can meet, repeat himself over and over just ruined my immersion.

I will admit that I heavily disagree with you here. Like, almost idealogically aha. Nothing should ever be dumbed down simply to make more money. This is the problem with the whole "videogames can be art" argument I find; what art has ever been dumbed down to reach a more mainstream audience (aka make more money?) When I played Fallout 4 it was because I expected the same sort of Fallout game that had come before. Obviously 3, bethesda's last own attempt, was a total mess with its "I'm Liam Neeson and you are my son and we're in the water business now", I thought that that surely wouldn't dumb down obsidians effort F:NV. But the money spent on giving the main character a voice, the whole effort of going to the effort to design the main story made so little sense to me. Yeah, ok, having a MC with a voice is neat, but I'm going to start skipping my dialogue anyway because I'm more interested in what the NPC has to say as opposed to a verbal articulation of the sentence I've choosen to reply with. And in their attempts to make it more wideappealing they've ironically made it, as you said, "not everyone's thing". Particularly not the thing for original fans of Fallout's RPG roots, or players of grand, open world player driven RPGs in general.

Why spend money designing that, when not only does it grate against the RP experience, but it also is replacing a dialogue system that's still fine. It's the same with quests and how, to me, it seemed like there was only ever one definitive way to complete them.

Like, I don't really get why Bethesda needed to betray the Role Playing roots of the game; are you telling me that the mainstream audience of 15 - 20 year old boys that they're aiming for wouldn't appreciate a game where they had freedom of choice? That they needed a Game Master to completely decide not only the scenario, but their own character as well? Imagine looking forward to all the interesting characters you could come up with for a new session of Dungeons and Dragons, only for the GM to go "actually i think it'd be more cinematic if you played this character i've written for you. don't worry, you can still decide whether he picks the decisions ive written for him politely or sarcastically!"

i know that the mainstream audience is consider less "adventurous" but why the hell did bethesda think they're so dumb and needing hand-holding that they literally whittled the game down to being a non-rpg. In the 50 hours I played I can't remember a single decision I was allowed to make. And I mean a real decision, influencing the lives of other characters or the fate of certain things, like the multitude of things I would of had to pause, decide what I think was best/in character for my character in NV before I had even hit The Strip. Other than dialogue and the ending decision between factions, I didn't experience any control over my experience other than how i phrased my replies to other characters (the replies 90% of the time getting the same result) or my mere agency over where I wanted to go next. In some ways, I don't think its too far removed to make the case that Fallout 4 was as much of an RPG as GTA5

And I know that this might all be read as nitpicking, but I think it all adds up to a game that selling itself as something its not; a linear (quest's progression etc), unopen to player's role-playing RPG. They're called Role Playing games for the actual root of that word; making up a character and playing as them, with the fun being a mix between exploring the world and enjoying the relationship between inputtable decision making and your own imagination. If Fallout 4 wasn't a Fallout game, I could maybe give it some slack. If it didn't advertise itself as an RPG, I could maybe give it some slack. But it did both of those things and turned out to be a complete failure

 

i suddenly remember an hour long argument with goat when we were 15 caused by his insistence that gta4 was an rpg

 

"something was shit" and "i thought something was shit" are the exact same sentiment.

one's just more geared towards trying to prevent offence from people who can't handle something they liked being called shit by someone.

If Savage entered my mumble channel right now and said "You know Casey, Harambe was a shit", my reaction ("why do u think harambe was a shit") will be the exact same as if he said "You know Casey, I think Harambe was a shit". Unless I'm not interested in discussing why Savage thinks Harambe might be a shit, or worry that I might not be capable of refuting the argument he puts across, in which case I'd fall back on "well, everyone's entitled to their own opinion on harambe :^)".

 

basically this. it's the same thing with safe spaces; having your own opinion about a game challenged isn't something to take offense to, but should be used as an exercise in debating. It's only by having your opinion challenged that you can actually reflect on your own like for something, your argument for it, and weigh up the depth of that argument. The only alternative is an interlectual 'safe space' where everyone's too hesitant to step on other toes over a simple thing like "i thought something sucked while you quite liked it". Some of the most productive and thought provoking conversations I've had started when someone said "you liked that game/album/movie? i thought it was shit". I've even had teachers at school say something like that to me after I've mentioned my liking for something. It's not rude, just the start of actual conversation and debate as oppose to the godawful "well, let's agree to disagree" deflection of any stimulating debate

I bet you would have romanced EDI if crippled Seth Green didn't beat you to it first, you robot loving degenerate fuck

I never encountered Curie I don't think but I remember feeling the same way about the companions I did encounter. It's another reason I hated the affection system; to actually get your companions to reveal their characterisation, you had to rack up enough affinity points at the expense of actually role playing your MC.

Indeed, it seems like the quests in Fallout 4 are few and far between, which is weird because the quests that do exists aren't good enough to justify a "Quality over Quanitity" explanation.

Something I also didn't like was how Fallout 4 failed completely to capture the moral ambiguity of New Vegas' main factions and the choice between them. Other than Caesar's Legion, which you could tell something had gone wrong at some point and in the game just ended up being the "evil faction" as opposed to a return to a despostic but effecient society built on slave labour like Rome itself, the rest of the factions all had an interesting dynamic going on. House represented an Authoritarian future where House promised a future based around meaningful scientific development to put life back on track, at the cost of democracy. Yet, at the same time, House came across as dictator, not a tyrant and made it clear that he didn't care about interfering in the individual lives of those in his society, leaving your interpretation of his genuineness up to you. The NCR offered a closer return to democracy at the cost of a corrupt and inefficent, far-spread government; the morality of why you should answer to a load of politicans stationed in a land far, far away. Wild Card offered, essentially, a libertarian future for the Wasteland at the cost of Mr House's efficent leadership and technical developments.

Fallout 4 had the Brotherhood of Steel (conservatives who are mean to synths), Railroad (liberals who care about the social justice of synths), Minutemen (a poor man's wild card option) and The Institute (progress at the cost of evil evil science). The factions were less about choosing one ideaology over another and instead choosing how you felt about Synths (an issue which Bethesda presented as bias and subtle as "If you don't like synths then you're basically a racist")

Bethesda are scrum; that's the only thing I took away from the whole paid-for mods scenario. Despite relying on modders for years to fix their half-backed mechanics, they then turned around and tried to fucking exploit them by attempting to create an economy where only it would actually truly profit. A literal piss in the face of the people who have properly already made Bethesda millions, because god knows there's people like me who wouldn't buy a bethesda game if there weren't mods to fix the inevitably wasted potential.[/quote][/QUOTE]

 

this fucking thread

 

cunt