Fallout 4 VS Skyrim

Ragemage

Wept for Zion
Sorry if a thread like this has been made before, I checked the General Gaming, General Fallout, and Fallout 4 forums and didn't see a thread like this. Closest thing I found was an old thread discussing how many people were playing Fallout 4 compared to Skyrim upon release. ( http://www.nma-fallout.com/threads/skyrim-vs-fallout-4-who-is-playing.204997/page-6#post-4127511 )

Before we get started, I must note a few things: As a warning this is going to probably be quite a long thread, so prepare to do a lot of reading. Secondly, I will not be discussing mods here at all. This might come as a shock to many of you but I actually enjoy vanilla Skyrim without mods. I think it's fairly fun on its own. Thirdly, this thread is going over the points I believe make Skyrim a superior game to Fallout 4, this will be the brunt of the thread. If this doesn't sound interesting to you, move on, because that's what this is entirely going to be about. Finally, I will not be bringing up DLCs. This will be about the vanilla game only.

Anyway, let's begin. For some context, Skyrim was my very first Elder Scrolls game back when it first released. It was also one of my very first PC games. Before that I was what you might call a "console peasant". I thought the game was great, it held my interest for a long time. This was, of course, before I knew of the majesty that is Morrowind, but I digress. Fallout 3 was my first Fallout game, and although I grew to love New Vegas so much more than Fallout 3, I still thought Fallout 3 was a decent game and though Fallout 4 would take all the good aspects of 3 and New Vegas to make the greatest game of all time. It was not. I have recently gone back to play Skyrim because I wanted to try using the same character all the way from Morrowind to Skyrim and see how much I could develop said character. I believe I have a very good grasp at what makes these games different from one another.

Difference 1: Being a Proper Villain

In Skyrim, there are a multitude of different ways you can shape your character to be an evil bastard. There are 2 entire major guilds dedicated to being an evil character, the Thieves' Guild and the Dark Brotherhood. In the Thieves' Guild, you do as the name implies. You steal, you rob, you pickpocket, you plant evidence in peoples' houses, you get innocent people framed and sent to jail, and at times you may even murder, all in the name of thievery. In the Dark Brotherhood, you become an assassin with one goal, kill your target, no matter whom it is. You will be sent on a variety of missions to hunt someone down and kill them in a manner of your choosing, ranging from a poor gutter peasant begging for bread, to the emperor's niece at her own wedding. Many of the people you slaughter for the Dark Brotherhood are not evil, and in fact you aren't even allowed to question why you should kill said person, your only orders are to carry out the contract and kill. You have to be a cold blooded killer to work in the Dark Brotherhood, empathy and caring are no-nos.

There are also many minor factions and groups you can join that can be considered evil in Skyrim. As a prominent example, you can join a cannibal cult that worships Namira, the Devourer of the Dead. Once in that cult you'll be able to dine on any corpse you wish for health back, much like the cannibal perk in Fallout 4, the difference here being there's an actual group associated with said perk that you can interact with.

Speaking of Namira, a Daedric God (think a demon lord), you can worship all the Daedric Gods in the game. Each one has their own unique quest and artifact you can achieve, but in order to get them you'll usually have to commit some very evil acts. There are 13 in total, ranging from commiting drunken crimes across Skyrim to murdering your own companion to bring one of the gods to the mortal plane.

So, in essence, there are many evil groups you can join in Skyrim, ranging from large to small. There are also many sidequests and the like that can reflect an evil nature. For example, while trying to discover corruption in the city of Markarth, you end up in jail. Once you are jail, you can actually release one of the most notorious crime lords in Skyrim, the leader of the Forsworn. You can also become a bloodsucking vampire, hated and feared by all, living only during the night hours and draining blood from sleeping victims all throughout the land. Many of the quests in Skyrim are linear, it's true, but a lot of them do have a good and evil outcome, and this is what makes Skyrim good for evil playthroughs.

In Fallout 4, however, the opportunity to be evil doesn't exist. It just doesn't. Most of the quests only have one outcome, and it's usually a good one. In fact, I can list all the evil moments in Fallout 4 on my fingers. Here is every single undeniably evil moment that ties in with a quest:

1. Giving Mama Murphy enough drugs until she ODs.

2. Giving the deathclaw egg to the Diamond City restaurant instead of returning it to its mother. (and this one's debatable because it's a fucking deathclaw, the one thing throughout all the Fallout games that will rip you to shreds in an instant if you get anywhere near their line of sight)


3. Telling Paul Pembroke you don't know anything about the drugs when asked after you help him kill a drug dealer, and then proceed to hoard all the drugs to yourself once you break up the drug deal.

4. Not giving Austin the Mole Rat cure in Vault 81 and keeping it for yourself.

5. Killing Hancock's bodyguard and helping Bobbi steal his treasure at the end of the "The Big Dig" quest.

6. Telling that farmhand to kill the hostage at the Forged HQ.

7. Selling Billy into slavery instead of taking him home.

8. Releasing Lorenzo Cabot from prison and helping him kill his family.

9. Lying about not finding the Super Mutant cure to Virgil, causing him to kill himself.

And unfortunately, that's literally it. These are the only times you can be pure evil in the game. I'm not counting grey incidents like Covenant, because you may not see synths as human, just like them. This also includes the choice of killing a certain companion or not. It's not evil, because you may synths as just robots.

So yeah. Whilst Skyrim has 2 major guilds dedicated to evil acts, lets you worship evil gods + do tasks for said gods, and has many tiny evil groups you can join (such as the Forsworn and the cannibal cult), Fallout 4 only has 9 evil moments in the whole damn game and there are ZERO evil factions you can join. No Raiders, no cultists, no nothing. You can't even join the Forged if you convince the farmhand to shoot the hostage and complete his initiation, they turn hostile on you regardless. It's pathetic when compared to Skyrim's vast amount of evil acts.


Difference 2: Roleplaying


Ah yes, roleplaying. Considering the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series alike are meant to be roleplaying games, this is probably the most important aspect to get right. There are many different ways to define a roleplaying experience, but for the sake of this article I'm going to go with the most basic of definitions: Roleplaying is meant to shape your character. The point of roleplaying is to make your character how you want and be able to act out their personality traits and find ways to express how your character acts/what their morals are. Neither Skyrim nor Fallout 4 does this particularly well, but I feel Skyrim does it better.

In Skyrim, for example, if you wish you can completely avoid the main quest and have it never come up. If you want to focus entirely on the Civil War aspect of the game or run around doing minor quests, you can do that. As long as you avoid doing missions for the Jarl of Whiterun, dragons will never start spawning, no one will talk about dragons, and Alduin never appears again until you start working on the main quest. Essentially this also means you never get dragon shouts, which means you can act as an ordinary everyday person. For example, in one of my recent games, I opted to not start the normal way with nearly being executed, seeing Alduin, telling everyone dragons are back, etc. Instead I started my character off on a Lumber Mill site. My character spent his first few in-game days chopping firewood, rolling logs onto the saw mill to be cut up, and he actually got paid for it by the site overseer. Not only that, but I was also allowed to sleep in the workers' hut alongside the other workers once I earned my keep.

I could have essentially kept being a woodcutter as long as I wanted, oblivious to dragons or anything else from the main quest. What I'm trying to say is, as long as you don't go to Dragonreach and do quests, the main quest literally cannot start, and no one will bring it up ever. It means as long as you never go there, you can live any sort of life you want. My woodcutter ended up living a pretty normal life, occasionally taking up bounties from the Jarl of his hold to clear out a bandit camp or 2, but for the most part he just lived peacefully. I'll also bring up the fact that in Skyrim, you start off as a blank slate. You are a nobody, no one knows who you are, you aren't revered in any sense of the word, you're just a randy. This means you can shape your character however you wish without a problem.

In Fallout 4, however, the main quest is constantly shoved in your face. Always. You cannot escape it. Unlike Skyrim, where you're a blank slate, your entire backstory is predetermined. No matter how you shape your character, he will always be a former military man who grew up in the suburbs with a wife and child, or you will be a female lawyer who grew up in the suburbs with a husband and child. There is no one to change this. You cannot shape your character's backstory because it is already predetermined. You can't even decide your character's sexual preference because you will always have a husband or wife and a child together. You don't even get to name your child, he will always be a he and named Shaun. This might have been "meh"-worthy if they didn't bring it up again outside of the main quest, but no. It's constantly brought up, even during side missions. In many, many quests, your character will constantly ask "Where's my son, where's Shaun?" While in Skyrim if you simply avoided Dragonsreach no one would ever bring up dragons and you would never become the Drabonborn, in Fallout 4 your character constantly brings up his son and his family. I'll give a minor quest example of this:

There's a quest in a place known as Bunker Hill where you meet an old man who wants to recover a piece of his grandfather so he can have something to remember him by, and the first thing your character does is bring up his dead wife and how he knows how painful it is to lose family. Another example would be whenever you try to romance companions they will ALWAYS say "But what about your wife? Don't you miss her?" or "Are you sure we have time for romance when you should be looking for your son?" and so forth. There is literally no escape. Your family and your predetermined history are constantly brought up not just in the main quest, but in tons of side quests and even by your companions as well. As another example, when you first meet the Brotherhood, your character will bring up how he had military training pre-war, even if you didn't pick a prompt related to that.

So to summarize, in Skyrim your character's backstory is completely up to you. What they do for a living is also completely up to you. You don't have to become the "chosen one" and can simply avoid the main quest all together. In Fallout 4 your entire character backstory is pretty much completely determined for you, along with your sexual preference, and there's hardly any wiggle room to change anything else about their personalities.

Difference 3: Immersion

Ah yes, immersion, such a bad word around here isn't it? Well I can't think of any other word to aptly describe what I'm going over next. If you know a different word, be my guest and suggest it.

So immersion, sucking you into the game world, making you feel a part of the game. That's very important for all games, but especially for roleplaying games. So where does Skyrim succeed where Fallout 4 fails here? I think the most important difference between the 2 would be that Skyrim is, for the most part, fairly serious. There aren't that many jokes or obnoxious humor that occur. Are there jokes and the like during quests? Of course there are, Sheogorath is one big funny joke of a daedric god. Cicero is probably my favorite character in the game because of the dark humor he provides during the Dark Brotherhood questline. Some of the books and journals in the game can also provide a good laugh. But the thing is, they aren't prevalent. Skyrim takes itself seriously, with over one hundred different books dealing with lore, myths, religion, different regions of Skyrim, monsters, and so forth. The only times I can recall the game purposefully trying to be humorous are Sheogorath, some of the other Daedric quests, the Throw Your Voice Shout, and a few random occurrences. (for example, in one of the random bandit caves, you may come across an old man guarding the entrance. After killing him, you can read his journal, which is hilariously blank, and find out he was actually blind the whole time, and only put in charge of the gate because he was the bandit leader's uncle and needed money: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Ulfr_the_Blind )

Fallout 4, meanwhile, doesn't seem to take itself very seriously at all. From Kid in a Fridge to Cabot House, the game comes off as very silly at times. There's also the fact that almost every single location in the game contains a teddy bear or skeletons doing something "lewd", such as sitting on the toilet or stuck in a 69 position. It's everywhere. Since Kid in a Fridge and Cabot House have been positively beaten to death, I'll go over a different part of the game I found silly. There's a particular cult in the game, the "Pillars of the Community", which is basically run by a scam artist. That's not the problem, I like the fact they tried to add a cult. The problem is, is that this cult is filled with naked people (because they take all your possessions once you join), 2 armed guards, and the leader himself, a guy in a business suit. This cult, which basically has no way to defend itself, is smack dab in the middle of the city, literally a few yards away from a massive super mutant camp and a ghoul infested subway system. There's no way they should be surviving where they are. The same can be said for many locations in the game, along the lines of "How the Hell are they surviving out here?", particularly with settlements. Most, if not all the settlements in the game save for Sanctuary are usually smack dab in the middle of Raider, Gunner, Super Mutant, or Ghoul territory. I've had towns that are only a hop skip and a jump away from a major super mutant base. These people should be Mutant food, not trying to start a colony. Considering how much of Fallout 4 is underwater, I feel they really should have filled up all the water with more land and spaced out locations more so it made sense. As it is, everything's too tightly packed together, with Super Mutants living inches away from Raider encampments, and it just completely breaks immersion and throws suspension of disbelief out the window. There's plenty of other incidents of the game not taking itself seriously, such as the stupid joke terminals in the GNR building, the Silver Shroud quest, the fact that the only nonhostile Children of Atom members are living in the goddamn middle of a nuclear blast crater with 0 radiation protection, and so forth and so on. I could go on all day, but I want to try and keep this short as it's gone on way too long already.

So, now we've reached the end. I could add more points to this, but these are the 3 main differences between Fallout 4 and Skyrim I wanted to address. Do you agree with what I'm saying? Do you have more to add to what I've pointed out already? Do you see flaws in my arguments? Please discuss below, and thanks for reading.
 
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To be honest, I actually can enjoy Skyrim. Not as an RPG, but as an action-adventure sandbox I can. FO4 on the other hand...god , at this point the game almost makes me vomit with rage. Dunno, maybe it's because I never really cared much for TES, while FO4 was a stain on my favorite franchise.
 
To be honest, I actually can enjoy Skyrim. Not as an RPG, but as an action-adventure sandbox I can. FO4 on the other hand...god , at this point the game almost makes me vomit with rage. Dunno, maybe it's because I never really cared much for TES, while FO4 was a stain on my favorite franchise.
Agreed, Skyrim really had great role playing opportunities. You know the kind where you make your own?
 
The worst thing about Fallout 4 is the totally friggin' schizophrenic approach it forces you to take with the main story. Like you said, it jams the whole "frantic parent looking for his/her kidnapped child" in your face at every opportunity, while at the same time, urging you to run around doing "KILL LOOT RETURN!" quests, farting around building settlements and trying to bed every NPC you run across. Doesn't help that interacting with just about all of the NPCs is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

Even Fallout 3 did a better job at this. Sure, you were shoehorned into looking for your dad if you followed the main quest, but at the same time you could you rationalize along the lines of "Dad went and fucked up my nice cozy life in the vault. Serves him right if he ends up as super mutant shit!" and then just go off and do whatever you wanted. And you'd at least run into a few somewhat interesting characters on your travels. In Fallout 4, it's like, "OMG I've got to find my baby, but first let me put the finishing touches on the sperm shooting out of the giant dick sign I just spent 20 hours building at my settlement! Wait, here comes Preston with another settlement for me to build a giant dick sign in!" Seriously, WTF?
 
Agreed, Skyrim really had great role playing opportunities. You know the kind where you make your own?

Yes, you have to make your own roleplaying opportunities in Skyrim, that much is obvious. The difference is, Skyrim actually gives you the tools to at least pretend to RP, whereas Fallout 4 gives you nothing. In the example I listed above, I talked about how my character had come across a logging mill and became a logger for the woman who owned the place, getting paid for the work he did. It essentially became his job. So in essence I pretended my character was a lumberjack, but the game gave me the all the tools I needed to keep that pretend-rp going, such as chopping wood, getting paid for work, having a bed to sleep in at the end of the day, and so forth.

In Fallout 4 there's nothing like this. Sure you can pick crops for people sometimes but that's the only odd job out there. In Skyrim you can chop wood for people, pluck crops, dig in mines for a living, and so forth. Basically what I'm trying to say is that, while Skyrim severely lacks in the roleplay department, it at least gives you an outline on how you could roleplay a scenario. Since I never start the main quest, perhaps my character really is a woodcutter and just works at that lumber mill all his life. Things like that. Meanwhile in Fallout 4, every single sidequest, main quest, and even companions remind you of your son and how it's apparently of the utmost importance you save him. In Skyrim, as long as you don't start the main quest, there is 0 responsibility. Since the main quest is what makes dragons start spawning, as long as you don't start the main quest, dragons don't spawn and you can live a very normal life of being a miner, a lumberjack, a fisherman, etc etc. In Fallout 4 though, even if you avoid the main quest as much as possible, it'll still rear its ugly head anyway because your character will spout off about his wife and child randomly during side quests, when talking to companions, and so forth and so on without any input from you, the player. Do you understand what I'm saying? It's late here and I hope I'm not rambling but this is a really important point. Both games don't hold a candle when it comes to roleplaying compared to say, Fallout New Vegas, but Skyrim at least lays out the tools for you to make a decent story, there are many ways to create an rp scenario in Skyrim. In Fallout 4, everything revolves around the main quest of finding your son, whether you want it to or not.
 
I wanted to try using the same character all the way from Morrowind to Skyrim and see how much I could develop said character.
I know this isn't a Skyrim vs Fallout 4 vs Morrowind thread, but I would have been nice to see some comparisons to Morrowind when discussing and making an argument in Skyrim's defense.

In Skyrim, there are a multitude of different ways you can shape your character to be an evil bastard. There are 2 entire major guilds dedicated to being an evil character, the Thieves' Guild and the Dark Brotherhood. In the Thieves' Guild, you do as the name implies. You steal, you rob, you pickpocket, you plant evidence in peoples' houses, you get innocent people framed and sent to jail, and at times you may even murder, all in the name of thievery. In the Dark Brotherhood, you become an assassin with one goal, kill your target, no matter whom it is.

I respectfully disagree. In a game where most people are given generic leveled commoner or wealthy items and the people you kill are quested, it pales in comparison to Morrowind, FO1, 2 and NV where you can kill everyone. Let's say I want to be evil and kill the thieves guild, so I attack Brynjolf. Unfortunately for the people of Riftin he has been given god status, not just set essential, invulnerable. He will slaughter the entire town if you punch him in the face. Can you be evil to Narfi before doing the DB? No. Only when Bethesda says it's the right time. Can you be "evil" to others similarly to the way you were to Narfi? Only quest related ones, and some of those only get enabled (exists) to be killed. Fallout 1, 2 NV and Morrowind didn't suffer this. In those games all NPC's had a set of rules that applied to everyone. In Sklyrim and Fallout 4, corners are cut to make the quests not need a fail state, or a false fail state. Killing Jack is no different then killing Narfi imo. They are the guys you are allowed to kill.

There are also many minor factions and groups you can join that can be considered evil in Skyrim. You can worship all the Daedric Gods in the game. Each one has their own unique quest and artifact you can achieve, but in order to get them you'll usually have to commit some very evil acts. There are 13 in total, ranging from commiting drunken crimes across Skyrim to murdering your own companion to bring one of the gods to the mortal plane.
None of these things change the world other then an occasional psychic guard dialogue or a ridiculously gamey bounty of 1000 Skyrim bucks. These evil deeds are only allowed at set times and not really RP as it is a choice of whether you choose to do evil quest or not. In the other games you don't need a quest to tell you it is okay to be evil and you now need not worry about consequence as there is none. I see Skyrim no different then Fallout 4 in this regard.

In Fallout 4, however, the opportunity to be evil doesn't exist. It just doesn't.

Slaughtering generic same-name settlers is considered evil by the game. If those settlers had a name and were not on a template I would agree.
Building settlements as a way to feed cannibalism or to have a shooting galley could be considered mean. The game doesn't have a quest to tell you to do this but it does allow it. I'm not defending F4, just showing that in what you have mentioned here, it doesn't seem better or worse.

You can't even join the Forged if you convince the farmhand to shoot the hostage and complete his initiation, they turn hostile on you regardless. It's pathetic when compared to Skyrim's vast amount of evil acts.
Guided evil tours is what Skyrim offers, Fallout 4 has less guided evil tours. Both games keep you on a short evil leash.

Roleplaying is meant to shape your character. The point of roleplaying is to make your character how you want and be able to act out their personality traits and find ways to express how your character acts/what their morals are. Neither Skyrim nor Fallout 4 does this particularly well, but I feel Skyrim does it better.
With the gutting of dnd mechanics every character you make is just as good at everything as the last. Too often people are more then happy to take the mold of template classes. Orc warrior, Breton Necromancer. In previous titles there would be pro and cons to race/class choice. In Skyrim it literally doesn't matter. Having an idle marker such as a lumber mill or wood chopping block is no different then having a surplus of shitty ammo or a cooking pot. You can't pick Lumber Jack as a class, much like you can't pick cook or Gun Runner. Some games that have been classed as the best of all time don't even have modern idle markers to allow players to pretends they are something they are not, you would need to use your imagination. Based on the Lumber Mill, how did you define your role play in Fallout 1 or 2? How did you define your roleplay in Morrowind? Person who is adept at keeping blight out of their eyes?

In Skyrim, for example, if you wish you can completely avoid the main quest and have it never come up.
You have to avoid Whiterun and pretend the opening never happened, but yes it can be avoided. The same can happen in Fallout 4. There are more things to avoid but it is possible. Avoid Concord, Avoid Fusion Cores, Avoid Helping settlers and settlements. Since Fallout 4 doesn't have many quests the list of ones to avoid are small. Also, if you avoid the main quest in Skyrim you can not complete the Civil War quest, You won't be able to complete Dawnguard or Dragonborn. It might be less noticeable in Skyrim, but the same tactics are required for both games of trial and error in which things the game will and will not allow you to do.

There's a quest in a place known as Bunker Hill where you meet an old man who wants to recover a piece of his grandfather so he can have something to remember him by, and the first thing your character does is bring up his dead wife and how he knows how painful it is to lose family.
Skyrim thankfully does not have a voiced PC, so it gets an auto-win in that area, unfortunately there are dragon word walls that you can collect and try to avoid while they call to your dragon blood and you have an inventory menu dedicated to your Dragonborn power. It would be like walking around Fallout 4 hearing Shaun, Shaun,
Shaun, Shaun,when ever you go to a "dungeon" or having a menu in your pipboy call My Baby Shaun.

Another example would be whenever you try to romance companions they will ALWAYS say "But what about your wife? Don't you miss her?" or "Are you sure we have time for romance when you should be looking for your son?" and so forth. There is literally no escape.
Not true, Hancock doesn't, Curie doesn't, I don't think Strong gives a shit and Danse only cares about the Brotherhood. Dogmeat can't talk. So there are at least 5 vanilla companions that never mention it, not including DLC that don't care either. All the 'romance' options in Skyrim go off of one template for shared voice dialogue, it makes it supper easy to make a follower mod, but none of them have anything unique to say as they are all copy paste.

Your family and your predetermined history are constantly brought up not just in the main quest, but in tons of side quests.
Fallout 4 doesn't have tons of any quests other then radiant and those never mention your kid, other than Warwick, but only if you mention it.

when you first meet the Brotherhood, your character will bring up how he had military training pre-war, even if you didn't pick a prompt related to that.
I didn't have that issue, I suppose it is one of the dialogues at that point, but this comment is going a bit off track saying that you can't avoid the main quest. Your issue here is that player being voiced at all and not being able to inject your own persona. I agree. For that quest though, it can be avoided.

So to summarize, in Skyrim your character's backstory is completely up to you. What they do for a living is also completely up to you. You don't have to become the "chosen one" and can simply avoid the main quest all together.
Skyrim: Prisoner who get's saved because Alduin the World Eater is curious about you, the Dragonborn. Hadvar or Ralof telling you to start a quest that forces you to become Dragonborn and reminded by entering one of the main holds castles.
Fallout 4: Ex-Military or Lawyer who is saved by a Vault-Tec guy who is reminded by their robot Butler, a number of companions and quests.
Fallout NV: Courier who was shot in the head, Reminded by some companions in dialogue (Cass), First quest objective and several points on the map as well as multiple quests, NPC and the main radio station. "In recent news, A courier was found in Goodsprings bla bla bla"

I think the issue here isn't that it is a forced background, but it is a limited background and there is actually voice for it. Generic courier is cool, but if Courier 6 started all dialogue with, "I was shot in the head bla bla bla, NV would suffer too."

Immersion. There aren't that many jokes or obnoxious humor that occur. Are there jokes and the like during quests?
Fallout 4, meanwhile, doesn't seem to take itself very seriously at all.
Immersion and suspension of disbelief can be different for most people, for me, hearing the same long winded hellos every time I walk through town over 300 hours breaks my immersion.

"I work for Belethor, at the general goods store!"
"I work with my mother, to sell fruits and vegetables..."
"Do you get to the Cloud District very often? Oh, what am I saying, of course you don't."
"You tried mercenary work? It might suit you."
"Olfrid, patron of the great Clan Battle-Born, a name I'm sure you know well."
"I don't claim to be the best blacksmith in Whiterun. That honor belongs to Eorlund Gary-Mane..."
"I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow in the knee."

Skyrim is the first Elder Scrolls game to have full blown life story hellos instead of like the older games when people would great you with. "Greetings" "Hello" "Hail"

For the rest of your article I agree 95%

I'm not apologizing for Fallout 4 and I am definitely not saying it is a good game. What I have learned from my time on NMA is that there is little difference between Skyrim and Fallout 4.
 
Fully agree, Skyrim certainly wasn't strong on dialogue, writing etc. But at least it had heart, the world looked nice, it was a lot more immersive then Fallout 4, you had actual politics, with the Thalmor, the Empire, the stormcloaks and the like (though it wasn't explored properly in the game)

Skyrim is superior in every way to Fallout 4
 

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but there's a few things I need to point out.

1. You don't actually have to avoid Whiterun entirely. Hell, you don't even have to avoid Dragonreach entirely. In order to not start the main quest, the ONLY thing you have to do is never talk to Jarl Balgruuf about dragons. You can even do quests involving talking to the Jarl, such as collecting a bounty on some bandits, completing the quest "The Whispering Door", etc. You just never tell him about the dragons. Also the only content you can't start without the main quest is part of Dragonborn. You can still go to Solsthiem without the main quest, you can even do a lot of the quests there, you just can't kill Miraak because technically he isn't there yet. You can do everything else though.

2. You don't need to start the main quest to start Dawnguard. As a perfect example, my current character is a dark elf named Morvyn Dran. Using an alternate start mod, I started the game as a vampire instead of the vanilla way. I never started the main quest, and when I hit level 10, I was able to join the vampire clan of Dawnguard without a hitch. I fully completed Dawnguard without ever doing a single mission for the main quest.

3. Sure some of the companions don't bring up your dead wife and your baby, but a lot of them do. Nicky's personal quest parallels your journey a lot in that he's looking for revenge on the guy who shot his wife, MacCready's trying to find medicine to save his son, Piper's personal quest involves helping her taking care of her sister, Hancock has a bad relationship with his brother, and so forth and so on. Almost all of them have one thing in common, family. Not all the companions bring it up, no, but most of them do. And Hancock does bring up your family when you romance him, for the record.

4. I don't view roleplaying as how I listed here, both Skyrim and Fallout 4 are terrible roleplaying games. My point was that for the sake of this argument I was going to define roleplaying in the most bare bones way possible so we could see, at minimum, which of these so-called "rpgs" is better at what it tries to sell itself as. You see what I'm saying?

5. True, Skyrim does restrict you in what you can do, especially when it comes to killing people such as the Thieves' Guild, you're right about that, but there are times where you can get around it. For example, when you first meet Astrid at the start of the Dark Brotherhood questline, you don't have to obey her and kill a hostage. You can straight up kill her instead. Once you do, this starts a quest that lets you destroy the rest of the Dark Brotherhood for the Imperials. It's not much but it's there. And at the very least Skyrim keeps in mind the fact that players want to be evil. Like I said, there are numerous evil factions you can join throughout the game. In Fallout 4 there's no evil factions at all. Not a single one. Any evil faction that could have potential, you end up having to kill, such as the Forged or the raiders at Combat Zone.
 
Skyrim has a much larger world, full of quests and places to go and people to meet, but it's still a very shallow game, suffering the same issues as Fallout 3 and 4. So much handholding in the final main quest, too much of a focus on a special savior than an average person caught up in a larger picture. I wanted to like Skyrim, I really did, but the long, boring dungeons, the slow plodding fights dragged things down for me. What's the point of exploration when it all boils down to mostly the same thing: Kill and loot. Just as getting pipe weapons in Fallout 4's lame, so is getting clunky low level gear in Skyrim. These two games share so many of the same issues, and one being a bit better than the other doesn't mean much to me. I played Skyrim once, just as I'm most likely to play Fallout 4 once. When I loaded up Fallout 4 for the first time, a bit excited to see how the game would pan out, I cringed at the Skyrim-styled loading screen. I thought, "Oh no, it's Skyrim all over again. I hated Skyrim."
 
I said this, so we are in agreeance here.

2. Using an alternate start mod, I started the game as a vampire instead of the vanilla way.
I will not be discussing mods here at all. This might come as a shock to many of you but I actually enjoy vanilla Skyrim without mods.
You got to follow your own forum thread rules Ragemage.

3. And Hancock does bring up your family when you romance him, for the record.
Can you link a reference to this because he has been romanced in my girlfriends game twice and I watched. It literally never came up.

4. I don't view roleplaying as how I listed here, both Skyrim and Fallout 4 are terrible roleplaying games. My point was that for the sake of this argument I was going to define roleplaying in the most bare bones way possible so we could see, at minimum, which of these so-called "rpgs" is better at what it tries to sell itself as. You see what I'm saying?
If what you are saying is that they are both trying to be an RPG and they both fail, then yes, I see what your saying. Unfortunately RPG was injected with mods for Skyrim. Base game is Action/Light Fantasy.

5. True, Skyrim does restrict you in what you can do, especially when it comes to killing people such as the Thieves' Guild, you're right about that, but there are times where you can get around it. For example, when you first meet Astrid at the start of the Dark Brotherhood questline, you don't have to obey her and kill a hostage. You can straight up kill her instead. Once you do, this starts a quest that lets you destroy the rest of the Dark Brotherhood for the Imperials. It's not much but it's there. And at the very least Skyrim keeps in mind the fact that players want to be evil. Like I said, there are numerous evil factions you can join throughout the game. In Fallout 4 there's no evil factions at all. Not a single one. Any evil faction that could have potential, you end up having to kill, such as the Forged or the raiders at Combat Zone.
I respect what your saying, but for me, if those people don't matter if they live or die and your only acknowledgment is a guard telling you he "knows" it's not really evil. Most of the people Bethesda allows you to kill are enabled for the DB and otherwise would not be in the world. It's not like walking up to Trudy and shooting her in the face because you want to roleplay that in some way. NV doesn't tell you to kill her, but the option is there and game shapes around your choice. Killing Astrid in Skyrim only limits that quest structure. No one other that guards know. Besides all those people are expendable except 3 so even if you wanted to be a good guy, you can't 'illiminate' the DB, because those three are removed from the game. Skyrim has you on a leash.
 
You got to follow your own forum thread rules Ragemage.

I was just referring to how I was currently playing the game. The point still stands that you can fully complete Dawnguard without ever needing to start the main quest.

As for Hancock bringing up your family, yeah, gimme a sec, I gotta figure out where his lines are.

EDIT: His lines aren't on "The Vault" so I can't pull up the exact line. I may have misphrased what I was saying. He doesn't bring up your family exactly when you romance him by hitting the romance button, but he brings it up in the subsequent "like" "adore" and so forth long talks at least once or twice. I'll try to find a video of it if I can.
 
Skyrim was a excellent role playing game, and better than Fallout 4, which is just Farcry lite, and it picked roles for you, unlike Skyrim.
 
I was just referring to how I was currently playing the game. The point still stands that you can fully complete Dawnguard without ever needing to start the main quest.
You won't be able to complete Dawnguard or Dragonborn.
For some bizarre reason, you need the Dragon Elder Scroll to complete Dawnguard. That is the scroll you unlock the Dragonrend shout with. Which means you will have to talk to Septimus. Is that the main quest to Skyrim? No, but it is a part of it and your destiny.

As for Hancock bringing up your family, yeah, gimme a sec, I gotta figure out where his lines are.
I think you might have Hancock mixed up with someone else. But I'd love to see this in action. We opened up all Hancock lines in the scene view and he says nothing like that.. MacCready does though.
 
I think you might have Hancock mixed up with someone else. But I'd love to see this in action. We opened up all Hancock lines in the scene view and he says nothing like that.. MacCready does though.

You're probably right, but I could swear he brings up your family when he mentions his "brother troubles". Something along the lines of "Well I got problems with my brother, what about you and your family? Did you get along?" I could be thinking of Piper though or something considering half of her damn dialogue consists of questions about your old predetermined life.
 
Skyrim was a vanguard for the dumbing down of Fallout. Skyrim was dumbed down and it's writing was awful in a lot of places. Most of the faction quests involve you becoming the leader of the entire faction after only a few quests, and in Fallout 4 they go even further with this stupidity and just make you head of the factions from the moment you meet them. For example:

1) Dark Brotherhood storyline is absurd and short and ends with you becoming head of the Dark Brotherhood because the leader was jealous or some idiocy.

2) Mages guild: don't even get me started. You show up and they promote you straight to head of the Mages Guild after a few quests, ahead of everyone else who has already been there much longer and were in much higher positions.

The dialogue choices in Skyrim were also very limited, and you accumulate a bunch of dungeon crawls that you can't refuse. In Fallout 4 they are even more limited and now it's the worst dialogue wheel in the history of games.

I think a lot of people spent more time modding Skyrim than actually playing and enjoying the game.

The one good thing about Skyrim is that it is not as dumbed down as Fallout 4. But I correctly predicted Fallout 4 would probably be really stupid and dumbed down based on my experience with Skyrim. With Fallout 4, it seems they've given up on writing and are now trying to make a game with quests that are almost entirely procedurally generated. In other words, an Offline-MMO.
 
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I'm going to be an odd one out, but I absolutely loved Skyrim. At first, I balked when I saw the dumbed down stats system, but the perks effectively replaced them in a way that worked. The visuals were crisp. The story, for me being a little 15 year old kid, was epic. The idea that I could go around and punk on dragons was amazing. And the lore kept me immersed in the experience. I can see why people hate Skyrim (though they are being a bit of a fuddy-duddy), but at least it did a lot of things right.

Where Fallout 4 failed is that they tried to repeat what they did to Skyrim, but take it a step forward. When they dumbed down the stats, they offered no tangible replacement. Fallout is an inherited franchise, so retcons are extra shitty. The story, from what I've heard, just doesn't work. And your character's predetermined status does no justify how awesome they get (being the leader of this faction, getting that power armor right out the gate, etc etc.) unlike how in Skyrim you're given an actual REASON why you should be leader of this group or that (even if it's crappy, a reason's a reason).
 
Skyrim was a decent time for me.
I didn't love it like most people did, I just played it, spent about 75 hours or so on my 360, did all the DLCs and just enjoyed it for what it is.
It certainly took me longer than other games out there for me to get bored of it.

Fallout 4 was just a complete mess, it's unfocused which is a shame as I believe it could have been good. I can regard Fallout 4 as an "Okay Game" overall. If I had to rate them, my scores would look a little like this;
Skyrim: 7/10
Fallout 4: 4/10

Neither really wowed me, maybe because F3 wowed me at the time and New Vegas still gets me everytime.
I played better in their "Genre's" and even in their own franchises.

I probably won't pick up TESVI until the Legendary Edition comes out, if only to keep the tradition going as I have the GOTY editions for each TES game from Morrowind.
 
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