Fallout 4 review roundup #2

Another video by Noah Gervais, this time about things you have to overlook or adjust yourself to in order to enjoy the game. He even mentions NMA at one point.

Frankly, after 35 hours or so I got so bored with the game that I don't think I will return to it at least until all the DLCs are out. It even gave me the new appreciation for Fallout 3, which I haven't played since New Vegas came out. I forgot how much fun it is to just roam around the map (especially its northern part, where there are no major settlements and no "dialog-heavy" characters), collecting stuff, reading notes and killing monsters, especially after I replaced all in game music with my own selection of tracks (FO:Tactics, Homeworld 1&2 and Zork:Nemesis). And you can actually walk 100 meters without encountering yet another army of raiders or super mutants, which makes the map feel much bigger than F4's one.
And The Pitt is actually pretty good. It's probably the closest Bethesda will ever come to creating something resembling real Fallout.
 
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The thing is, Playing Fallout 4 as what it is doesn't seem to even work all the time. Particularly in those places/situations where the game doesn't even manage to deliver what it's trying to achieve.

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I also really can't agree with his assessment, which boils down to, just lower your standards far enough, and you can enjoy the game just fine!
 
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Yeah, not a fan of the message either. If we start doing that with FO4 then let's just do it with every game... No more standards.
 
The thing is, I wouldn't mind so much adjusting my standards if there was a game out there able to offer me the kind of RPG experience I'm after. If that was the case, I would abandon the now streamlined franchises and turn to those other offerings.

And there just isn't.

I agree that indeed, the random exploration can lead you to stumble across some fun stuff - but it's always the same kind of fun as opposed to a diverse experience.

Finally, almost complete absence of choices and a rather meaningless character evolution aren't a matter of standards in an RPG, they're sort of necessary to claim you're part of the genre, so no, I'll never just look past those in a Fallout game.
 
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If I am thristy for engaging in videogame gunfights I rather just play Planetside 2. Playing against other people always beats fighting brain dead npcs. I never played Fallout to "shoot and loot doods" I played it for the RPG mechanics, for the multiple paths to quests and the effect of player action.

Fallout only started becoming about the Loot and Shoot when bethesda got their hands on it. And Honestly, Fuck Bethesda.
 
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Crni Vuk said:
The thing is, Playing Fallout 4 as what it is doesn't seem to even work all the time. Particularly in those places/situations where the game doesn't even manage to deliver what it's trying to achieve.
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It actually does.

I know it must be hard for you to accept that Fallout 4 is a good game but it simply doesn't have what you're looking in a game, and likely never will, so just move on really. No one is forcing you to play it.
 
Walpknut said:
Fallout 4 doesn't have what Fallout fans want from a Fallout game, or even what the creators of Fallout set out to do with the series. It's now just a name for Bethesda to wrap their mass market pandering by comitee developed trash.
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See you're speaking as if Fallout Fans is a single monolithic entity that has NO DIFFERENT OPINIONS. Or something silly like only people that liked the classics are the "true" fans.

Anyway, what the first creators of the franchise wanted with Fallout literally does not matter anymore, they shouldn't have sold the IP in the first place. Bethesda are the new creators of the franchise, and as a fan of Fallout I really like their style of games. I would admit easily that Fallout 4 has a lot of flaws but it's not a trash game by any stretch of imagination.
 
Fallout 4 eventually de-evolves into a crapfest of explosions, Vaultboy animations popping up on screen every 10 seconds accompained with their specific loud sound effect and enemies exploding into coins and gore and weapons with so many "KEWL!" adjectives on the name that they don't even fit on the menu.
Anyone who would see something like that would think that it's like what a mom in the 90's or a panic mongerer political pundit thinks all games are like and not representative of the medium.... but no, it's an actual videogame that Bethesda put out under the name of what was once a brainy rpg series.

Enjoy your cultural vandalism.
 
frajaq said:
Walpknut said:
Fallout 4 doesn't have what Fallout fans want from a Fallout game, or even what the creators of Fallout set out to do with the series. It's now just a name for Bethesda to wrap their mass market pandering by comitee developed trash.
Click to expand...

See you're speaking as if Fallout Fans is a single monolithic entity that has NO DIFFERENT OPINIONS. Or something silly like only people that liked the classics are the "true" fans.

Anyway, what the first creators of the franchise wanted with Fallout literally does not matter anymore, they shouldn't have sold the IP in the first place. Bethesda are the new creators of the franchise, and as a fan of Fallout I really like their style of games. I would admit easily that Fallout 4 has a lot of flaws but it's not a trash game by any stretch of imagination.
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Well, no one said that to be a Fallout fan you have to hate Fallout 4, that you can't enjoy Fallout 4, or that you can't enjoy what Bethesda is doing.

The question is, are you a Fallout fan who likes the setting in general, or what the game actually is.

There are definetly a lot of inbetweens and there might not be a true Fan out there or a clear definition, thankfully.

But at the end of the day, the core of the discussion between old Fallout and Nu-Fallout, really, boils down to two very different design principles, and which one you prefer more.

The old design, with Tim Cain and his Team, can be more or less reduced to this, a quote from Timothy:

"My idea is to explore more of the world and more of the ethics of a post-nuclear world, not to make a better plasma gun."

The new Fallout design, under Bethesda with Todd and Emil is, to losely quote Todd:

"(...)to explore, killing enemies, finding awesome loot, to kill stronger enemies and finding better loot"

It has become basically this
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vs.

this
GA_tFE.gif

 
These Nu-Fallout fans are more Bethesda fans than actually Fallout fans. So many of them are so dismissive of what the games were even actually about, even dismissive of lore and consistency. They just want to play a Post Apocalyptic Bethesda Hiking game, they have no actual love for the setting in the least. TH game could just be called The Mad max Scrolls and they would have the exact same attachement to them.
 
That's incorrect, there are a lot of cool elements/story settings in F3/4/NV that I can't find anywhere else and liked a lot. I doubt I would enjoy "The Mad Max Scrolls" or whatever
 
frajaq said:
Crni Vuk said:
The thing is, Playing Fallout 4 as what it is doesn't seem to even work all the time. Particularly in those places/situations where the game doesn't even manage to deliver what it's trying to achieve.
Click to expand...

It actually does.

I know it must be hard for you to accept that Fallout 4 is a good game but it simply doesn't have what you're looking in a game, and likely never will, so just move on really. No one is forcing you to play it.
Click to expand...

I am not talking strictly about the Fallout experience, but actually what you can expect from a Bethesda game.

For example, you can't tell me with a straight face that the settlement building isn't sometimes a real huge source of frustration, when your little fence or stair case isn't snapping correctly to the other objects again, and you spend the last 20 min. to figure it out. Why they never created actually a good and usefull UI for it, will probably stay a mystery and something that modders will have to fix ... really, it is so wide spread, it's almost a kind of meme with Bethesda. I can't remember a Beth game where the modders are not coming up with new UIs and other fixes.

Another example, random loot. Bethesda is so much about exploration and beeing out there finding super awesome stuff. But I feel this Diablo-like approach that they have since Oblivion, really puts a dampener on that. Why should I be out there, and actually trying to explore something in the hope of finding really great items, if the content is for the most part tied to your level and generated in an almost random fashion. Particularly silly when you solve some quest or what ever, where you received some item as reward. Hey you rescued our town! Super hero of awesomness, take this ... item, ... that uh ... was for generation owned by our town and blessed by the gods! That you will just sell to the vendor the moment you step out just of here. At this point, the game could just hand you the caps/money for everything you find, because it becomes superficial anyway.

Or when the immersion of the game is falling apart, for what ever reason. Could be anything really. A bug, a stupid dialog, immortal NPCs, runing in to an invisible wall, you name it.

To say this, again, I am talking about Bethesda typical stuff, I have no clue how much of that is in Fallout 4, but some of it will be there, I am sure.
 
If you're smart you quickly figure out which pieces work best with what with settlement, but it really does require some additional polishing from Beth's part.

As for the exploration part, what exactly do you want? This is how Beth games are. A lot of people find exactly what you describe fun, salvaging anything you can from the ruins of the Commonwealth and shooting raiders/gunners/mutants in the face. Also yes most quests just give you straight up money at the end.

For the immersion part that's really up to personal taste. I've had like, only once found a quest-breaking bug (Virgil's Serum quest) and I found the fix real quick without needing console. For me what annoyed a lot was the AI pathfinding that's really stupid. But is that a deal breaker? No
 
The reason I do not plan to play Fallout 4 is less about them being unfaithful to Fallout and more about Bethesda's historically lazy game design and polish (doubly heinous when it comes to define a franchise I respected). They have specialized in creating large worlds full of content, but never put the same effort into either mechanics or story, which are the two most important parts of a game for me. I have read enough reviews and seen enough footage of the new game to know that it has all of the same weaknesses and makes all of the same mistakes as their previous games. After hundreds of hours in their game worlds, what I see is titles that sell massive, glittering empty shells full of promises that they never deliver. So until they start improving on their previous iterations instead of just updating the graphics, I am done supporting them. From what I've seen, they've instead chosen to tack on whatever features happen to be popular right now instead (building towns?). It seems the only way they could manage to make the games they should be making is to hand them off to their mod community for a couple years...
 
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