Despite Bethesda's Flaws...

Nah.

I didn't have much legitimate fun with any of Betheseda's games from the past 10 years, and I know I won't with Fallout 4 so I'm voting with my wallet on that one.

The thing with Beth's games is that they always look full of promise and intrigue from the get go (when you get past the usual 20 minute dungeon) "So let's go take a look!", but from thereon, without expecption, little by little the house of cards starts coming crumbling down. And it does so with ever increasing speed the further one goes until one sees the game for what it acually is: a hollow cake (and all the legitimate credit goes to the people painting the surface); the flaws and mishaps, the repetitiveness, the paradox of being full yet empty (the emptiest games that have no room left), it all piles up and only rarely the "good" outweighs the "bad". The drive for their games most often is: "Maybe it gets better in a while", which of course never happens (or very rarely at most).

I'm not spending another dime in their products.

 

Here's what Bethesda does right;
-World design. They're really good at making worlds that are fun to be in.
-Art design. I love the aesthetics of their Fallout games (though technical fidelity is an area they lack in) and even Skyrim looked kinda interesting.
-Gameplay. Many of their games have pretty decent gameplay.

Here's what they do wrong;
-Literally everything else.

 

I played Fallout 3 when I was like 18 or 19 so I was still pretty dumb back then and I dunno, I enjoyed it. I turned off my brain when playing it and it was fun. Now that I've grown up (26) I look at it and I can't understand how anyone ever liked its clunky ass combat, UI, AI and movement. I can never understand how someone could like its repetitive and non-rewarding gameplay. And I can't put myself back in the mindset I had at the age of 18/19.

Fallout 4 on the other hand, it shows me what I felt in every Bethesda game. It starts out great with lots of distractions and new things to be found but as you trudge along things start to get more and more repetitive and more and more tedious and you start noticing the flaws that pile up on one another until eventually you just want to be done with the fucking thing.

A film, a book, a tv-show and yes indeed A GAME should end on a high note, you should not feel like the last 30 minutes of a film (or the entire later half of it) was a chore to get through just so you could see the end. And that's the problem of Bethesda games, they start out pretty damn neat (for a brainless game that is) but get repetitive and tedious and show so many cracks that you'd think the whole thing would splinter apart at a mere breeze of wind.

It's about the overall product. If the start and end of a story is great but the inbetween is dull and boring then it doesn't matter how good the start and end is because in order to get the full story you have to endure the awful middle.

So, Bethesda games, are they great? No. They're bloated, far far too bloated. They're great at first but gets worse the longer you play and because of how a Bethesda game is set up you'll play for at the very least a few dozen hours. And how you feel about the game when you end it is how you're going to remember it most distinctly as it is the last memory of it you'll have. And every Bethesda game I've played I've been glad to be over with by the time I decide to just trudge through the main story.

Just cause a game takes a long time to finish and you get a lot of playtime hours out of it does not mean that the game is inherently good or that all of those hours were enjoyable.

Hotline Miami is a game that is over relatively quickly but I enjoy every bit of it. Well, except the hospital sequence but it is important to the story so I dunno... Point is, a Bethesda game might demand a hundred hours out of you. But that doesn't mean that it will be a hundred hours of genuine enjoyment.

Eventually, you just play a Bethesda game for the sake of playing it. You turn into a zombie. Just aimlessly wandering around, killing shit and looting stuff and doing quests while barely even listening to the NPC's because that's what you're supposed to do.

Only good thing to come out of their fistful of shit is the mods.

[edit]

Anyway, I forgot this part.
The AI is shit in Bethesda games.
The quest design is patronizing.
The dialogue and writing overall is pathetic.
The world design is vastly overrated IMO and I find it repetitive and far too scaled down.
The combat is repetitive, predictable and clunky.
The UI is a clunky chore to get through.

Only good thing about Bethesda games is that they are a good way to train yourself into how to become a mindless zombie that gets an apathetic kick out of distractions.

They're like when you get a fling with a hot chick and you're flirting and you kiss and you go to her place and then when you finally take off your clothes and lie down on her sofa she shows just how much of a dead fish she is. And you try to make the most out of it but... Well... You're going to leave unsatisfied.

 

BGS has never made great RPG's they made great choose your own adventure games with RPG elements, except all that is gone in FO4. The entire game hand holds and railroads until you do what it wants how it wants and all aspects of the game are tied to the MQ.

 

I agree with all you said on FO3. While you were 19 or so when Fallout 3 came out, I believe I was around 12 or 13. I'm 20 now, and even though FO3 was my first Fallout game and I absolutely loved it back in the day, I can't even play it now. I only have 130 hours in FO3. I have over 500 in New Vegas meanwhile.

The last Bethesda game I can say I truly adored and enjoyed was Morrowind. I fucking love Morrowind. I also like the guild quests in Oblivion, such as the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves' Guild, but that's it. I can't even say I enjoyed Skyrim's guilds anymore because looking back at them, I see now how linear they are. Morrowind's guilds usually gave you 2 or 3 different ways to complete your contract/task/assignment. Skyrim's are all straightforward except in usually how you kill someone.

 

No, it starts out somewhat promising at first. A whole new world to explore, landmarks in the distance you would like to see up close, stuff from the previews you want to see for yourself, the desire to find useful goods so that you feel more capable and able to defend yourself, and of course finding people to talk so you can get more information about this world and do quests.

But very early on the games already sort of broke with the atmosphere.
I remember leaving the Vault in Fallout 3 for the first time and while wandering around the nearby town I entered someone's home who immediately demanded to know what I was doing here.
This is the first being I have met outside the Vault but my character doesn't react at all like that, no questions in which you ask her if there are more people nearby or how she has managed to survive because as far as you know there is no civilization on the surface left.

Then as you wander around further you discover how disjoined the world starts to feel, barely any other travelers or caravans despite there being a load of raiders and Super Mutants, barely any kind kind of biosphere such as herbivores on which the various regular and mutant predators would prey.
Buildings full of stuff that never have been scavenged despite two hundreds years having passed and several settlements already having formed. (plus a lot of this is still intact and usable despite being exposed to the weather)

I even don't like the art that much. I know the whole 'don't speak bad about the dead' but I much rather would have preferred the art style of Fallout 1 and 2 being turned into 3D and more expanded on this as the art now sometimes feels rather steampunk-ish than than a 50s retro future.

Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 aren't even that good as sandbox games as there is only so much you can do and so far you can go.

 

The thing that always kills me in this discussion is that Bethesda both released Morrowind and had Obsidian show them that it is possible to have FO1/2 narrative depth in their own interpretation of Fallout.

The only conclusion I can come up with is that making complex RPG decision trees, dialog, interesting characters, etc. is really hard and their sales continue to improve without those elements so they probably ask themselves why they should spend all this time and effort into features that don't increase their sales.

It makes me think of Insominac dropping the 60fps requirement for their games in the PS3 era. They put out a statement something to the effect of 60fps doesn't sell more games but flashier graphics do. A smooth framerate is important to a lot of people but its not as important as bloom to the general masses.

That being said I really enjoy both Fallout 3 and 4, putting hundreds of hours into each title despite all of their ovbvious issues. I just think their generally fun games, but usually terrible rpgs.

 

But if they did put those RPG/UI/dialogue features in [even as toggle options in a menu], I'm sure as shit many of us here would have gladly paid for a copy of the game. And everyone who already paid for it would have paid for it anyway because they suffer from consumptivitis. They are a culture born and bred to consume products without thought, so that argument is moot.

This is why so many games these days are terrible - developers used to give a shit about making a good game regardless of the money, that was just a secondary bonus separate from the glory of being the best game maker in the business.

Now money is the primary goal and making a good game gets a back seat. Thanks very fucking much publishers and producers - you've really done a number on those of us who can discern the difference between quality and quantity in modern products.

 

Despite their flaws, wait, they lack a lot of flaws, so they are automatically better at Fallout.

 

I can completely agree with this, honestly.

 

You have so far posted 128 messages in less than a week.

Literally every one of your messages is bragging about how much you love Fallout 4, and every one of your status updates is about how much you hate it here.

Seriously, you are a sad and pathetic person, who obviously has some serious issues that you need to get over. Why don't you get a life?

 

Stop feeding the troll. Your anger makes him stronger.
He'll be banned soon, so chill out and ignore him for the time being.

 

Not sure about his being banned soon, Suaside acknowledged him and then moved right along without banning him.

 

Well if he continues trolling and ruining the experience for everyone else SuaSide will have no other choice.

 

I get where people are coming from with this whole angle on Bethesda. But, I can't help but feel that you're giving them too much credit.

I couldn't bring myself to get more than halfway through Fallout 4. It wasn't like I noticed all of it's glaring problems, missed opportunities and writing faux pas and yet couldn't pull myself away from it because of all that radically fun totally awesome raw gameplay. I had to force myself to play it and, even then, couldn't muster the willpower to see it through.

It seemed just so utterly incoherent in it's design philosophy. I honestly believe that a significant portion of Fallout 4's problems come from a failure in project management. Their focus is so divided and so many of their ideas seem half-baked and tacked on. In my opinion, even their world-building fell flat this time around.

I'll concede your point about the art direction, though. There were many parts of Fallout 4's visual design that I was able to appreciate.

 

I just can't agree that Fallout 3 is a good game. It just isn't, I'm sorry.

Yeah some guy made some nice concept art. So what? Plenty of things that don't see the light of day have nice concept art. Plenty of bad games, including Fallout 3, have good concept art.

Here's the thing. Fallout 3 is poorly written. It just is. None of the characters are interesting and the story is a straight rip-off of Fallout and Fallout 2 (and Fallout 4's story is shockingly a rip-off of Fallout 3's). There is zero world building meaning that there's no logical infrastructure to anything. It is literally one big dumb playground for players to shoot things in.

The other major problem is that Fallout 3 is just a bad game, period. The combat and level design is shockingly poor for a game where combat is essential to the gameplay. Almost all non-ranged weapon enemies are a simple matter of kiting. There's a radroach? Run backwards and shoot. There's a radscorpian? Run backwards and shoot. And that's only in the beginning.

Most games have you start with fairly weak enemies and then you move up from there. Fallout 3 doesn't do that because every enemy scales to your level. No matter whether you're level 3 or level 30, no matter what weapons you have, you will always be able to fight super mutants, a lot of the time with relative ease. With VATS, being able to pause whenever you want to heal, and all the rest of this stuff, making the game easy.

Halfway through the game's story you kill the most powerful enemy in the game: the behemoth. The game happily gives you the most powerful weapon in the game to accomplish this (though I managed to kill the thing without it on my first playthrough anyway). Later on you meet the Enclave. You think, oh they'll be hard right? Nope. They also have to be levelled to the player's level because you first meet them in a railroaded sequence where the player would otherwise be trapped if they weren't prepared enough. So Bethesda solved this problem by making the Enclave easy as well.

The game ends with a giant robot fighting your battles for you even though any other game that was thinking more about entertainment than stroking the player's ego would've had you fighting against the giant robot as a climactic final boss battle (akin to the Master/Lou and Frank Horrigan in the original Fallout games). Instead the final boss is some guy you know little about (with goals that you also know nothing about) who you can kill in one hit. Boy what an achievement.

The game is just one big heap of random crap to do without challenge and even less substance. It's just boring, with zero replayability. There's no emotional attachment, because all the characters are idiots, the villains are either monsters or their intentions are completely vague. The moral choices are irrelevant, allowing you to play out every quest without consequence, and the "humour" constantly shoved in the player's face is juvenile and poorly written. I played Fallout 3 in 2008 (and back then I was somewhat sympathetic to Bethesda's games) but even in 2009 onwards I never once picked up the game since. This compared to the numerous playthroughs I've done of Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout New Vegas.

 

So a bunch of people with very few posts who joined NMA recently think Fallout 4 is great? I'm shocked...

Seriously though, the mental gymnastics some people go through to make Fallout 4 not be a disaster are amazing to watch.