Fallout 4 Is Better Than You Think

5545Trey

Underground Deviant

This is somewhat of a sequel to Jon's "Fallout 3 Is Better Than You Think". While the structure is similar, he outlines different aspects of Fallout 4. Surprised there hasn't been a thread on this yet, since this was uploaded on Sept, 27 — over a year ago.

He also released a follow-up (Oct. 11), addressing the issues that people have already complained about since the game's launch, so I don't think he said anything new here, but here it is, anyway.

I just wish he'd realize how flawed Fallout 3 really is, and a make second part for his already flawed defense of the game.
 
I think the more we ignore this guy, the better. Not about to give him any views.

I just wish he'd realize how flawed Fallout 3 really is, and a make second part for his already flawed defense of the game.
A lot of his arguments were made in bad faith, specially targetting people like Hbomberguy (ironically Hbomberguy made a video with bad faith arguments targetting Matthewmatosis's video on Dark Souls 2). He did this for views and he also knows Bethesda fans are insecure and need validation. So the big youtuber with hundred of thousands subscribers coming out to the defend of their favorite game gives the fans validation and "arguments" to parrot whenever someone throws shit at Fallout 3.

It's why he's never gonna make a video talking about the flaws of the game, it would go completely against his agenda.
 
Once again (with feeling). You don't know what the fuck I think about Fallout 4, MATN. Don't tell me what I think, you're not a mindreader just a pompous piece of Eurotrash.
 
Favorite argument in this video: "Perks are fun to take, so they're better than skills. Black Isle would agree with this, since in Fallout New Vegas they boosted perks to every second level!"

That was the moment this guy lost any shred of credibility to me
 
Yeah, while keeping skill points. What was he even attempting with that argument? Did he forget that New Vegas kept the skills?
 
Yeah, while keeping skill points. What was he even attempting with that argument? Did he forget that New Vegas kept the skills?
He was just trying to demonstrate the gernal principle that perks are fun to take, and by extension it's more exciting to replace skills with perks.

The reason the argument is so insanely disingenuous is the framing: Obsidian didn't decrease the interval from 3 to 2 from Fallout 2 to New Vegas, they increased it from 1 to 2 from Fallout 3. At that point I realized there was absolutely no way he actually believed anything he was saying in any of these essays.
 
He was just trying to demonstrate the gernal principle that perks are fun to take, and by extension it's more exciting to replace skills with perks.

The reason the argument is so insanely disingenuous is the framing: Obsidian didn't decrease the interval from 3 to 2 from Fallout 2 to New Vegas, they increased it from 1 to 2 from Fallout 3. At that point I realized there was absolutely no way he actually believed anything he was saying in any of these essays.

It's also entirely counterproductive because Perks are fun....when they aren't incremental bonuses to stuff like gun effectiveness and when they're suited to builds and not just a flat Call of Duty style system where you just upgrade across the board and unlock everything. Which is exactly the perk philosophy that Bethesda takes in 3 and 4.

The worst perks in Black Isle Fallout were the ones that just added +10% to Skills and that kind of thing, and that's basically what most of the 4 perks are outside of a few exceptions.
 
The entire point of skill points is to do the "boring" effectiveness increase while leaving the perks to do the more unique stuff. Having every character build being forced to take several perks just to counter-act the bullshit level scaling is terrible and it just leads to characters having a bunch of overlap in perks.
 
Aside from perks, my favourite part was "junk economy" and how it's the first game that really allows you to "roleplay as a scavenger".

And then goes on how choosing to collect duct tape instead of a gas can is a form of roleplay. Plus how your roleplaying evolves, because later on you need desk fans and circuit boards instead of glue and tape.
 
Aside from perks, my favourite part was "junk economy" and how it's the first game that really allows you to "roleplay as a scavenger".

And then goes on how choosing to collect duct tape instead of a gas can is a form of roleplay. Plus how your roleplaying evolves, because later on you need desk fans and circuit boards instead of glue and tape.
Either he's joking, or this is proof that you have to scrape really, really hard the bottom of the barrel to say anything positive about Fallout 4 outside of its shooting mechanics.
 
Either he's joking, or this is proof that you have to scrape really, really hard the bottom of the barrel to say anything positive about Fallout 4 outside of its shooting mechanics.

There are a scant few quests that are pretty much amazing if you can headcanon most of Boston is a ruined shooting galley. THink everything like Goodneighbor in terms of rough but not a warzone.

DC Blues, Big Dig, Cabot House minus ALL mention of Vegas, The Gilded Grasshopper (anything with Nick), The Silver Shroud, even the Combat Zone cut content fully restored is a fun time, as is the Railroad quests IF you have the imagination to see Boston as a dangerous neo noir city

The problem is without that headcannon, these quests are badly, badly framed. THat's the real sin of Fallout 4, the map doesn't match the feel of the main quest or the good side quests. There is a 15 hour good game in here, the problem is Boston, not the whole Commonwealth but Boston itself is an abomination/ If it were generally in the same shape as Boston from the Last of Us, in terms of infrastructure, security, crime, etc. Fallout 4 would be a decent game. The problem beyond any stupid lore bits of the Institute which can be worked around is all Boston.

The bad game design elements, the settlement system, and the junk salvage system don't really sink the game itself. They are TERRIBAD decisions and any focus on them cheapens the story. It's ALL Boston itself.

But a lot of the things that cause Fallout 4 to suck narratively, and narrative is always the key in a traditional RPG, have their roots in the Fallout Bible and Fallout 2: the Vault Social Experiment, the absolutely incoherent description of life right before the bombs fell (the Sino American War, at least the 11 year WW3 we have doesn't make sense), the notion the transistor wasn't invented until the 2070s and the notion of 120 years of cultural stasis, all of these things that irk to see in Fallout 4 are Chris Avellone's fault, Todd is only guilty of following his lead and not junking the Fallout Bible entirely in spirit as well as letter.

The series jumped the shark in 2. 2's a great game, but it's lore extensions mortally wounded the franchise. Because Fallout 2's worldbuilding was tropey and dumb and taken on face value rather than clever and subversive amazingly justified. Fallout 1 looked like a B movie in all the right ways, what made it the game it was is that it WASN'T, it was fairly serious SciFi.

Fallout has been on the road to self-parody for a long time. Fallout is an A movie that looks like a B movie and at it's best it ignores the B material (Honest Hearts, Point Lookout, most of New Vegas) or uses campiness and seeming silliness to set you up for a long series of gut punches (Old World Blues, Nuka World's non raider quests, the Hubbulogists and almost anything to do with Vault City's medical conversations from Fallout 2).

Fallout 4 does have a number of those moments. Not enough, but thi is not all of Bethesda's doing, they're just incompetent implementers of the rot.
 
Fallout 4© Is Better Than You Think







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But a lot of the things that cause Fallout 4 to suck narratively, and narrative is always the key in a traditional RPG, have their roots in the Fallout Bible and Fallout 2: the Vault Social Experiment, the absolutely incoherent description of life right before the bombs fell (the Sino American War, at least the 11 year WW3 we have doesn't make sense), the notion the transistor wasn't invented until the 2070s and the notion of 120 years of cultural stasis, all of these things that irk to see in Fallout 4 are Chris Avellone's fault, Todd is only guilty of following his lead and not junking the Fallout Bible entirely in spirit as well as letter.

I can agree with the rest and what you're saying makes sense, but I think you're making a mistake conflating the settings of FO4 and the FOB. Fallout is set in a retrofuturist world. It takes (how the people of the 90s saw) how the people of the 50s saw the future, sets that as the cultural and technological baseline, then develops a world around that by imagining how that world would work (then collapse to see how it would work then). It's not the 50s, it's the future shaped through the lens of the 50s, then elaborated.

There's a difference between the 50s' idea of the future after a nuclear war, and the 50s after a nuclear war and there's robots and stuff, which is what Bethesda and FO4 in particular uses. There are literally mobsters in post-apocalyptic Boston. Slacks, bowler hats, letterman jackets and suits are everywhere. Ect ect. That's what makes the narrative so boring, because it's not actually creating anything new in terms of considering how society and people could develop, it's just jamming tropes into a dead, static, soullessly unimaginative world. And then they jam even more shit in for no good reason and like you say none of it fits together and you have to take everything with a metric ton of salt up the arse.
 
There are also literally mobsters in New Reno
...well yeah, because it's a city run by crime families? Boston is just a wasteland. What I meant by that is the Triggermen are clearly meant to be New England mafiosi jammed into the world from 50s tropes, I'm pretty sure that's even meant to be their "origin story" from all the ghoul members.
 
...well yeah, because it's a city run by crime families? Boston is just a wasteland. What I meant by that is the Triggermen are clearly meant to be New England mafiosi jammed into the world from 50s tropes, I'm pretty sure that's even meant to be their "origin story" from all the ghoul members.
Reno remaining dominated by mafia tropes 200 years after the apocalypse. Obviously the Triggermen are worse than New Reno, but it's not primarily because they're acting like tropey mobsters. It is 1) because, as you say, the Core Region is generally better in terms of world building so New Reno is more justifiable, and 2) because New Reno actually does something more with these tropes than literally just presenting the trope. Things are actually done with the concept, you can actually interact with it, whereas the Triggermen are purely setpieces/cardboard cutouts without even the barest level of depth.

As to their origin story - I'm pretty sure that they dress like that because they discovered the ruins of that Vault for rich people and found suits, so their leader made them dress up like that. Could be wrong though, haven't played Fo4 in years.
 
Why is Fallout 4 better than New vegas? Lemme just trash-talk everything that New vegas did wrong and never explain what actually makes Fallout 4 a better game.
 
Fallout 4 is not better than what I think. It's a great action and potentially a survival game (7.5 out of 10 for me) but yes, the it's the least Fallout'ish of all the Fallout games. It's kind of like what they said about Skyfall. "It's a good movie, but not really a Bond movie". I didn't like Skyfall though.

NV did the best job overall, having a story, choices and consequences and a great gameplay - a hybrid of Classic Fallout and Fallout 3.
 
I think it's kind of hilarious that I actually love Fallout 3 and think its one of my all time favorite games but think of Fallout 4 as having lost most of what made that game great.

The Fallout 3 hate is so great here, people react to said statement as me stating that the Joker is much worse than Bullseye.

They don't see the differences so I can't explain why Fallout 4 pisses me off so much.

Well, one at least fact can be explained: Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time and I worship that film so seeing F4 steal so much of it and get EVERYTHING WRONG about it and not even make you able to do some Blade Running is enough to make it the mother of all missed opportunities.
 
I think it's kind of hilarious that I actually love Fallout 3 and think its one of my all time favorite games but think of Fallout 4 as having lost most of what made that game great. The Fallout 3 hate is so great here, people react to said statement as me stating that the Joker is much worse than Bullseye.

I can't deny that Fallout 3 is a great game in its own right, but also it's very similar in story to Fallout 4. In Fallout 3, you look for your dad who went outside the vault to purify the wasteland's water supple, while in Fallout 4 you go looking for your child. Even cheesier, perhaps. 1 thing I dislike about Fallout 4 is how you can just build water purifiers after you get to a settlement. In Classic Fallout, purified water was the biggest issue.


They don't see the differences so I can't explain why Fallout 4 pisses me off so much. Well, one at least fact can be explained: Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time and I worship that film so seeing F4 steal so much of it and get EVERYTHING WRONG about it and not even make you able to do some Blade Running is enough to make it the mother of all missed opportunities.

It is a great film, if you the greatest ever? Ok. Fallout 4 takes influence from The Terminator too (regular synths look like terminators) and there's The Courser, which looks like a combination of The Matrix agents, Neo and was supposed to be the greatest killing machine made by The Institute.

With all this said, Fallout 4 can be great, depending how you choose to play and treat it. Does it have great storytelling, choice or even make sense? No. In that regard, it lacks soul or whatever word you want to use. I merely enjoy it as a great survival game platform.
 
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