Fallout 4 storytelling in a nutshell.

Ahem...
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The baby with an enlarged head is meant to be a joke...
Ya'll do realize that, right?
 
People were arguing that these skeletons were a more "natural, realistic, and immersive" way of storytelling than old RPGs that tell stories through writing and dialogue...
 
Yeah, and some were talking about the baby's big head as if Bethesda were serious about its implementation when to me it just comes across as yet another one of their humorous skeleton placements.

Anyway, it's not natural, realistic or immersive simply because skeletons don't stay at the exact same spot for 200 years even if they were isolated. They'd fall apart after all the joints decay. And since most of the skeletons are not in isolated areas then animals or humans would have moved/gnawed/eaten/taken the bones.

There's not much of a discussion to be had really. It's yet another dumb idea by Bethesda that is there to look neat rather than make sense.
 
Yeah, I'll just pretend my post was never read....

We can all shit on bethesda being inept (Like always) Or we can use this as a time of productivity and shit on it some more by not just point how the flaw by providing proper and correct usage of environmental story telling.

As i said in Half-Life 2 set it up perfectly in the first opening.
 
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While it's true that a good amount of these skeletons are for the sake of lolz! even more are simply out of place or outright ridiculous. Like the ones where people sit and live next to them. As if NPCs are placed in the world randomly and after the skeletons.

Also filling the world with that many lolz! is a bit overkill.
 
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Those bar owners never cleaned up the dead people. That's sure to attract some customers. It's also dumb how they are all nearly intact, they would decompose or at the very least be scattered by rodents and other animals.
 
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Maybe Boston likes using skeletons as decorations, attracts more customers. Maybe in the Bethesdian Fallouts there was a special medicine created to make everyone's skeletons well preserved and last for 100s of years.
 
they're 200 year old Halloween decorations, at least that's what it said in the 200 year old newspaper, I even circled the article with a 199 year old pen I found.
 
Did some more mental exercise.


If were are going to accept the premise of environmental story telling. We're going to need to see it right.

Beyond Half-Life 2 movies in particular have always had a lot of significance in the pacing of it's seen to the props it uses. For instance, Stanly-Kubrick's the shining is an example of what i'm describing.

In convince the viewers that the place they are in is gritty, and unsettling, We get to see massive pans of the overlook hotel as well as with the duration of the movie see massive amount of snow that encompasses the facility making it almost impossible to leave the hotel. The music also adds to how eerie environments are set up in each clip. One of it's most iconic scenes was the the vast amount of empty space with millions of ways someone could enter and disappear, this uncertainty as Shelley Duvall's Character with a simple old style type writer with a desk and a chair in the middle of everything paper around. Camera panning out showing different places where the Jack Nicholson's character could be hiding. A dark and sinister music slowy vibrant and echos within.




The problem with Bethesda's "environmental story telling" is that the skeletons have no effect on the player it doesn't immerse them into the world and as Tolkien would have said it, Sustain narrative consistency. Bethesda's way of story telling is akin to that of a five year old with finger paint. They smear the shit everywhere and pretend to be deep and philosophical. Or at-least, their fans paint them as such.

I'm not going to write an entire essay, But what we can learn from this is that we need the mood and the setting to intertwine at times to create the atmosphere we authors, writers, directors and game designers profoundly desire.
 
After seeing and failing to care about the twelfth skeleton propped up by the developers into a "humorous" position, they didn't even register to me anymore. Same with the teddy bears (did they not get this gimmick out of their system in Fallout 3?)

The fucking mannequins, though, I got so sick of being mysteriously propped up in the middle of the road every time I reentered the cell that I would deliberately charge into out of impotent hate.
 
Lanfear said:
After seeing and failing to care about the twelfth skeleton propped up by the developers into a "humorous" position, they didn't even register to me anymore.
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I think this is a very good point and I would like to expand upon it. There is a blog piece by Joel Burgess, lead level designer for Skyrim and Fallout 4.
http://blog.joelburgess.com/2013/04/skyrims-modular-level-design-gdc-2013.html
First it is interesting to note that Art fatigue was considered when creating Skyrim as Bethesda did not want to be criticized as they were with Oblivion. Joel discusses some of the ways that art fatigue can come about and an especially good quote, "Art fatigue sets in where this repetition becomes obvious and erodes the authenticity of the world." which closely demonstrates what I would like to coin, a new fatigue. Environmental story-telling fatigue and Level design fatigue.

It is clear in this article that Joel understands the formula to break up world story telling for authenticity. If every location you enter has lulz teddy bears and lulz skeletons it becomes repetitive. This is the reason why you and many others will stop noticing it, not because it doesn't tell a story, but because you see it everywhere you go. The same can be said about radiant quest having quest fatigue, or settlement building fatigue, it is all repetition, I know that I got pewpew fatigue quite quickly.

In an effort to keep this post on this subject I would like to theorize that the level design group at Bethesda was understaffed/overworked. Being creative when world building is easy in one location, sometimes it can be easy in 50 locations, but if your team has 1200 locations it will feel like every area was made by the same person, predictable, obvious and boring.

I think the story telling of Fallout 4 is unbalanced
90% is environmental, repetitive and predictable and told by level designers.
5% is quest, taking ideas from other games and popular movies told by quest writers, also repetitive.
5% is quest, copy/paste from the previous title and told by quest writers, also repetitive.

I believe that Bethesda put all their eggs in the voiced protagonist basket and realized it was more then they could chew, they then put a focus on level designers to fill in the gaps. Forcing level designers to be responsible for story burnt the level design team out and this is where repetition and breaking all the formula created for Skyrim came in.
 
Dragon Age: Inquisition did this too, and I'm highly confident Mass Effect: Andromeda will be the same way. Too many companies want to reach the number of hours in content that the Witcher 3 brought, and are unwilling to spend that much time into actually writing a story, so they just throw in as much filler as they can. The Witcher 3 changed the face of modern RPG development and no one is willing admit this yet. I'm just waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 to roll along and hammer the point home so hard, companies will have to actually make coherent RPGs or just give up the genre to proper developers entirely.

They all want bragging rights. "We've got over 400 hours of content!" And just under 50 hours of that content is the actual main plot and all the unique side quests. The rest are fetch quests and dungeon clearings. The reason Inquisition got away with it and Fallout 4 didn't was because their game didn't come out a complete mess and had prettier graphics. Oh, and the plot was much more plausible to comprehend. It doesn't make Inquisition a good game, it's just does what it sets out to do better than Fallout 4 does.

But it's not going to get away for long. MMOs are online for a reason, and as a result there's a reason why MMOs don't work offline. The social parts and the living game economy are what makes MMOs work. You take that away and you've got a pointless time-waster better used reading a book.
 
DirtyOldShoe said:
In an effort to keep this post on this subject I would like to theorize that the level design group at Bethesda was understaffed/overworked. Being creative when world building is easy in one location, sometimes it can be easy in 50 locations, but if your team has 1200 locations it will feel like every area was made by the same person, predictable, obvious and boring.
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Probably true. Despite all my vitriol, I don't blame Bethsoft's ground level staff for what happened with Fallout 4. It's quite clear that the company is mean as hell when it comes to reinvesting their profits into new games.

I'll still never understand who thought the hundreds of skeletons, teddy bears and mannequins were interesting or funny though. The game's lead designer must be like that guy at a party who tells a joke that people laugh at once, and then just keeps repeating it to people it over and over again until it makes their ears bleed.
 
I'm excited to see if the setup of the Bethesda Montreal studio will change everything for the better or not.
 
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