Falllout 4's lack of engaging mechanics

C

Charwo

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
I think in talking about Fallout 4's failings as an RPG, we fail to mention something as important: mechanically it's a very boring game, and when it's not boring, it's tedious.

The settlement system is gut-wrenchingly awful. Anytime you want to build something in a video game, it's basically like building with Lego blocks while your hands are bathed in topical novocaine. Building settlements from scratch, without attracting special NPCs, or being able to plug into an economy that goes outside the wasteland? This is time waster! Why couldn't they have looked at Helgen Reborn and modeled their settlement building on that? Helgen Reborn was fun, and more importantly, you didn't do any of the building yourself. But you got a nice looking settlement that you felt you had a hand in creating, got some questing in to boot.

And aside from just shooting people all the time, what else is there? They took out dual weilding, there's no custom animations or anything. You think I'd hesitate to play Fallout 4 again in a melee build if there were glory kills like there are in DOOM?! That'd be fucking amazing Or even animation like TomInfinate did for New Vegas, where you actually have animated lethal and nonleathal takedowns. You stab people in the chest, you break necks, it's fantastic. Or if they'd put in sentries that if you didn't sneak up on them, they'd ring a bell for reinforcements like in Wolfenstien. Or even if they had pickpocket minigame from Dishonored, where you could lift a coinpurse off gaurds.

For fuck's sake, you don't get XP for not killing people. And if you don't kill the robots but instead hack them? No XP either.

And the worst thing was having animations for hacking into robots. What used to be a simple promt to disable in 3 and NV takes several seconds of tedious, unavoidable animations and interacting with a terminal.

Those are my complaints. What do you think Fallout 4 should have done to be interesting mechanically?
 
In short, all blame on Todd, it's all his idea to leave all these crappy gimmicks instead of working on actual content. Audience is stupid enough to see that these radiant quests are endless, amirite?
 
A minor one would be get rid of the crappy relationship mechanic. Instead of having a pop up telling you "Piper is wet from you picking the lock" have the actual characters tell you how they feel about certain actions. Just imagine when you sell Arcade to the Legion in New Vegas, instead of Arcade giving you shit about it when you talk to him, you just got "Arcade hated that".

Again it's minor, but whenever it happens it takes you out of the game somewhat.
 
Prone Squanderer said:
A minor one would be get rid of the crappy relationship mechanic. Instead of having a pop up telling you "Piper is wet from you picking the lock" have the actual characters tell you how they feel about certain actions. Just imagine when you sell Arcade to the Legion in New Vegas, instead of Arcade giving you shit about it when you talk to him, you just got "Arcade hated that".

Again it's minor, but whenever it happens it takes you out of the game somewhat.
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The key word in that critique is mechanic. In regards to how the relationships work in FO4, the biggest concern is that they feel too mechanical, when something like a relationship value is supposed to feel more natural. Before I grew tired with the game and stopped playing, I think I had maxed out approval with Piper simply through lockpicking.

However, a counterarguement I've heard about the New Vegas companion interactions is that they're too contexual; take Boone for instance, you can miss his whole quest through no fault of your own if you don't bring him to the trigger points or skip pass them. Raul and Lily also have that problem, and that's on top of the potential for bugs, you know what I'm saying?
 
Yeah, the mechanics are poorly integrated.
  • The dialogue system limits roleplaying potential even for modders.
  • Settlement building and the legendary effect system in particular kills immersion (and lore).
  • Building defensible settlements and arming settlers is basically pointless, because you always have to go back personally or they will lose. So you can either do most of the work and gtfo faster, or you can become a spectator to a crude battle that has to be entirely one sided if you don't want to be penalized.
  • Settlements are a chore that eases the burden of scavenging and bartering, and since you need ridiculous amounts of things and the economy is total garbage, it's basically necessary.
  • Somehow they managed to take a system with some ridiculous number of possible weapons and armors, and ended up with less variety because it's just a bunch of tiered crap, with only a handful of even near-optimal setups (thus eliminating the fun of collecting true uniques).
  • They didn't add techniques to melee/unarmed (which NV had), or any real tactical elements to combat. In fact they made everything a bullet sponge and set it on an indefinitely sliding scale. Which makes getting stronger feel hollow.
  • There aren't any specialized builds because it's one size fits all, so your character just needs to level up more to do something that would normally require another playthrough. Which wasn't a bad thing because it affected how you would play through the game.
  • Companions grant permanent perks even when they aren't around, making their differences less significant, and incentivizing players to game the system for perks, rather than completing the story of that character--or enjoying their unique companionship.
  • Companions require you to play the game their way instead of trying to figure out more about them, in order to find their quest triggers.
  • Radiant quests are required for certain paths (most of the ones people would actually do).
  • There are barely different versions of the same quest depending on which quest line you chose.
 
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Fallout 4 is specifically catered to the FPS genre's crowd. The game has no real RPG mechanics in game, stories and actions are linear as well hollow.

The current trend with Bethesda is to maximize profits, to do this they opted to design the IP around what is considered the majority demographic to sell their games. Unfortunately the majority of the demographic is under aged players, those of limited intellect, or those easily amused by repeating quests.

The game's design is to maximize the combat mechanics by forcing all other aspects of the game to point right back to them.

Basically the game pushes players to use combat in almost all scenarios to continue the game. This short sighted design seriously shows how little effort was placed into the game.

Also if you would like to understand their creative process feel free to go onto youtube and search their lead writer. He did a lecture that literally discussed nothing, failed to elaborate or define topics, and even used a power point with random photos completely unrelated to the topic being elaborated. If that is any indication of the current state of affairs at Bethesda, they have a serious problem.
 
I think Bethesda was heavily inspired by Ubisoft's various Icon 'em Up games that are/were all the rage. The focus of the gameplay is on exploring a large open world, finding new icons and getting random quests to do stuff at other icons. Then you get more friendly icons and sometimes these icons are under attack so you must help them or you'll lose icons. At the friendly icons you can then build stuff to make your icons better than other icons. You can even activate radio beacons to find more radio sources that lead you to more icons!
 
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