Fallout 4 VS Skyrim

[Ragemage]

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I'll agree with you there wholeheartedly. I still remember being shocked by the twist of the Dark Brotherhood storyline. The Thieves' Guild questline didn't hold much water with me since it was basically a lot of glamorized fetch quests, but I really enjoyed the Dark Brotherhood questline and working for the Daedra, just like in Skyrim. Though the DB in Oblivion has much more variety than Skyrim's. Who else remembers the party mission? That's probably my favorite in the whole game, just because I love murder mystery books and games like "Clue".

 

[Dr Fallout]

I'll agree with you there wholeheartedly. I still remember being shocked by the twist of the Dark Brotherhood storyline. The Thieves' Guild questline didn't hold much water with me since it was basically a lot of glamorized fetch quests, but I really enjoyed the Dark Brotherhood questline and working for the Daedra, just like in Skyrim. Though the DB in Oblivion has much more variety than Skyrim's. Who else remembers the party mission? That's probably my favorite in the whole game, just because I love murder mystery books and games like "Clue".

My favorite was also the party mission. I loved how you could manipulate them and it did really feel like a murder mystery from the eyes of a murderer.

Imagine that with the dialogue depth of Fallout 1/2/NV?

Would play again.

 

[Ragemage]

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I think the one thing that sets Fallout 4's, Skyrim's, and Oblivion's twists apart, is that in Oblivion there are hints that let you know it's coming. In Skyrim it was just like "Oh, btw, this person's a traitor, lololol surprise bitch" and in Fallout 4 it's like the second you enter the Institute "lol you thought that 10 year old boy was your son? Naw fam this is"

But in Oblivion, take the Dark Brotherhood questline for example. There are very subtle hints that clue you in on what's coming beforehand. The letters looking slightly different than the one's you got originally, the fact that some of these targets are actually waiting for you to show up instead of being oblivious, and so forth. Same for the Thieves' Guild when it comes to the Gray Fox. There are clues to be found that can lead you to figuring out the mystery early, in comparison to Skyrim and Fallout 4 where it's literally dropped on you like a grand piano with no subtle hints whatsoever.

 

[Dr Fallout]

I think the one thing that sets Fallout 4's, Skyrim's, and Oblivion's twists apart, is that in Oblivion there are hints that let you know it's coming. In Skyrim it was just like "Oh, btw, this person's a traitor, lololol surprise bitch" and in Fallout 4 it's like the second you enter the Institute "lol you thought that 10 year old boy was your son? Naw fam this is"

But in Oblivion, take the Dark Brotherhood questline for example. There are very subtle hints that clue you in on what's coming beforehand. The letters looking slightly different than the one's you got originally, the fact that some of these targets are actually waiting for you to show up instead of being oblivious, and so forth. Same for the Thieves' Guild when it comes to the Gray Fox. There are clues to be found that can lead you to figuring out the mystery early, in comparison to Skyrim and Fallout 4 where it's literally dropped on you like a grand piano with no subtle hints whatsoever.

I have to admit, that's true. After studying Oblivion it's actually quite good with some quests. Lackluster gameplay, pathetic dialogue and generic world ruined that in my opinion.

 

[MercenarySnake]

Skyrim has about as much "roleplaying" as Fallout 4 unless you try to fix it with mods or LARP it out which still fails.

I still remember wonderful quotes such as "I work for Belethor, at the general goods store", playing as a Khajit with the guards saying "Is that fur, coming out of your ears?" and last but not least "Another wonderer here to lick my father's boots".

Skyrim atleast tries to give some tiny form of roleplaying even if it's shit while Fallout 4 just doesn't even try to hide it.
I like to think of Skyrim as nothing more than a modding platform as well as a hiking simulator and Fallout 4 as a wacky fun time without your brain simulator


TL;DR they're both shit.

 

[Mr Fish]

Personally i think that as a game on its own merits fo4 is far superior but as rpgs theyre both lacking in their own ways.

[edit]

Wrote that at work on my phone so I couldn't go into detail but anyway, Skyrim is fucking awful as not only an RPG, but as an action adventure game, a dungeon crawler and even as an exploration game.

Oh yeah sure Skyrim got tons of quests and there's evil quests and there's good quests but you know what a lot of them comes down to? Do or don't do. Very seldom is there any middleground or choice you can make. If you get the quest to help a daedra lord do some evil shit then the only way to get rid of it from your quest log is to do the quest and to do it the one way that is asked of you. I'm sorry, but that is not good RPG design. I don't give a shit about it being a "choose your own adventure", if we're going to go into whether or not it is an RPG then it is simply not a viable excuse in Skyrim's favour to say that because there's evil quests and good quests that that somehow makes it an RPG. It doesn't.

I can choose to follow traffic and not shoot people in GTA, does that mean that it is also an RPG? Of fucking course not.

Here's an example, up at uh... The Mage's College, that town (more like a settlement, seriously, it's not even big enough to be considered a village) there's the jarl's right hand man who's a... Dunmer? The race with red eyes, and the Jarl thinks that because of his race that means that he has capacity for magic and so the right hand man wants to cement that misplaced trust by you snatching a staff from the inn's owner.

Now here's the thing, you can't tell the Jarl about him not being a mage, you can't tell the inn's owner of what he wants to do, you cant' buy the staff from the inn's owner.

The only thing you can do... Is steal the staff and return it to him.

I'm sorry, that somehow means that Skyrim is a good RPG? Fuck no. That is completely unacceptable for an RPG.

This isn't a simple quest that only revolves around 1 person and a few monsters that needs to be killed, no, there are 3 characters who are involved in this quest. The guy wanting to dupe the jarl, the jarl being duped, and the person you're stealing from. This quests 'should' offer choices, yet there is but one solution; Steal the staff.

Skyrim throws a fucking pickup-truck full of darts at a wall, of course some are going to strike right. But how many strikes the wall or simply bounces off it and falls to the ground?

Here's a rule of thumb that I follow, if you have to "make believe" in order to roleplay then it means that the game you're playing is not an RPG. You can make believe that you're doing certain stuff in Saints Row too but that ain't an RPG either. Make believe should be used as sprinkles on top. For example, in FNV I played a certain character that would not dig up graves and in fact respected the dead so much that he would lay some form of tribute on their grave or corpse. But when I got to a quest or a dialogue then guess what? I got actual RPG choices, because FNV is actually an RPG.

So the story someone here told about being a lumberjack? Sounds more like a waste of time to me than roleplaying. All you did was bugger around doing fuckall. I could constantly get drunk and bug around in alleys in GTA IV but that does not mean I'm roleplaying as a hobo. It means that I'm 'pretending' that I'm roleplaying as a hobo. There's a big difference.

With that said, I'd say FO4 is far more of an RPG than Skyrim is. Don't get me wrong both games usually comes down to KILL LOOT RETURN but at least FO4 offers dialogue where it feels like I have some control over what my characters personality is going to be like. At least in FO4 there's a bunch of quests where I get offered real choices. In FO4 the main quest splits into 4 paths.

And FO4 is simply more fun. There is actually stuff worth scavenging (for a while at least, until you get demi-god status, but at that point you could just go to the theatre and give that upstanding gentleman all your worldy possessions and start over. Enemies actually feel varied. The AI is better. The dungeons are far faaaaaaar less repetitive. And while it has less characters at least they got 'character'. Skyrim feels like they just went around and copy pasted the same cliché's over and over again. Doesn't help that just about everyone and their dog shares the same voice actor.

Fallout 4 is far superior to Skyrim in every way. As a dungeon crawler. As an exploration game. As an RPG (but even then it is still shit IMO, it's just that Skyrim is putrid, buginfested, AIDS-riddled shit) but more so as an action adventure game. Its characters are more interesting to talk to. Its dialogue is better for the sole fact that it isn't boring straight forward "I'm a robot bleep bloop what is X". Its storyline is better (Despite its plot holes and lore breaking I found it far more immersive than Skyrim's bag of cliché's). There is a point to looting shit. The art design is better and more varied. The voice actors are miles ahead of Skyrim's. It doesn't have a tried and proven shitty "learn by doing system" (of which I understand the appeal but in practice it just means tedious grinding).

Only thing Skyrim outperforms FO4 in is how many more times you can be evil. FO4 lacks that I'd say. Oh and no dumb voiced protagonist.

 

[Ragemage]

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Personally I don't see where you're getting the idea that Fallout 4 has any more choice than Skyrim does. You listed examples such as fetching that staff for the mage in Winterhold, and how you can't tell the Jarl he isn't a mage, but there's tons of quests like that in Fallout 4 too.

As an example, and this is probably the one that pissed me off the most, there's a big Institute quest called "Growing a Better Crop". In that quest, you're tasked with delivering seeds to a synth who is disguised as this family's father. Well when you deliver the seeds to him, you find out that apparently one of the farmhands has found out he's a synth, and has run away to Goodneighbor to help buy a sort of "militia" to take the father down. Well since I wasn't actually working with the Institute and I was a Railroad spy, I thought I might be able to convince the synth father to abandon the farm, come with me, and start a new life, thus making the farmhand happy, allowing the family to realize their real father is dead, and give the synth a chance to live his own life.

Instead, what it all boiled down to was, no matter what I said to the guy in Goodneighbor, the farmhand back on the farm holds the father at gunpoint. I can't tell the family that the father really is a synth or do anything with that, no, literally the only option I'm given is either shooting the farmhand or talking him down. There is no way to expose the father despite the fact I'm not actually working for the Institute, and it's completely railroaded.

There's tons of quests like that. I can give a lot more examples if you genuinely need more proof. Playing back through Skyrim recently I completely 100% agree with you that Skyrim has jack shit when it comes to choice in many, many missions, but don't you dare say Fallout 4 has far more choices when it's exactly the same. Neither have choice, at all, in over 50% of the missions.

It's funny actually, I noticed it a lot more when it came to Fallout 4. Maybe because I'd just come right off the heels of finishing New Vegas for the 4th time, but the lack of choice stood out to me hard in FO4. Skyrim's just as bad though, I'll give you that. In fact, Skyrim is worse when it comes to lack of choice in missions, but Fallout 4 is almost on the exact same level. You seem to be under the impression that there's miles of difference between the 2.

Also, I'm the one who brought up the lumberjack story. I never said that was a good RP experience, I was simply pointing to it as an example of the game giving you the tools to pretend to RP. Like I said in a previous post, both Skyrim and FO4 are shit at roleplaying, but Skyrim at least gives you the tools to pretend to RP, whereas Fallout 4 shoves you onto a railroad and never lets you off, with no way to pretend anything. I'd compare it to giving an artist a blank piece of paper and telling him to make a masterpiece, then giving him a single paintbrush and 3 colors to paint with. That's Skyrim. Fallout 4 is someone giving an artist a blank piece of paper, 1 color, and no paint brush, leaving him to paint with his fingers desperately until someone rips the piece of paper in half and throws it away.

 

[Risewild]

I can't play Skyrim for more than 30 minutes and then I close it and never play that save game anymore... I try to play it twice each year, I take more time to mod it than actually play it .

One of the things that once made me close Skyrim was in one of the first times I started playing the game and I reach the half destroyed city where the Mage's College (or whatever it is called) where everyone is still pissed off about half of the city being destroyed by a tsunami or something, then I manage to enrol into the College just by casting a low level spell , then I talked with the NPCs there and one of the important NPCs tells me that they are still trying to find how and why the tsunami happened and it is a big mystery and they are really interested in knowing everything they can about it...
Later I stumble upon a little rocky island that has a trap door and takes me into an underground lab or something and there is a journal saying who (and why and how and all of that) made the tsunami happen and I thought "That's cool, no one directed me into this island, no quest to find out this information, no quest marker on the map. Makes it feel cool and hidden and not like they handed me this information on a silver plate."
Then I went back to the Mage's College and went to talk to the NPC so I could brag how I found who and why and how the tsunami happened and the NPC just has generic dialogue, we can't do anything with the information we just learned... Information that the game takes a lot of effort to tell us it is important for the Mages to find out...

After that I just turned the game off... Shallow game is shallow and doesn't hold my interest for long, even when they managed to make it a bit interesting it is just that, shallow...

 

[0wing]

And that what's happening when Fallout 'R00L of K00L' 3 puts the mask of New Vegas on itself. You may have variety in the story but nope, it's blocked.
Though I really don't know how many branching paths and being able to control someones' lives can be not k00l.

 

[Millim]

I didn't know where else to post this, so this is kind of off-topic
But you might interested in this video

It really does make me see F4 in a different light, I understand it a bit more.
And while I won't go as far as to say I really like it, there is something to enjoy.

 

[0wing]

And while I won't go as far as to say I really like it, there is something to enjoy.

I though of the same when playing it until the obvious problems revealed. Random generated loot and weapon mod system. These two things makes exploration aspect pointless. You'll go explore a promising location only to find a random generated stock of modded pipe guns or 10mm pistols. (and the fact that every locations is a straight line)
Another problem always persecutes me is that there's no point to raise gunnut perk points since eventually in level 20-30 I always find the desired modded gun anyway. Same with power armor. It's a loophole of pointlessness. And don't even start with the praise of level designer's job. The visual mini stories always boils down to teddy bears doing naughty stuff or a manequins with in-yo-face symbolism 90% of the time.
Are you guys in your United States so nuts and obsessed with automation you even trust your gameplay experience to it?

 

[Jogre]

It really does make me see F4 in a different light, I understand it a bit more.
And while I won't go as far as to say I really like it, there is something to enjoy.

Watched that video all the way through. These are my thoughts:

He's giving Fallout 4 too much credit as a game about exploration and being the player. It basically goes against everything that was once Fallout, and lets face it, those fans who were there from the originals didn't play it for exploration and combat. He's being a bit overly-apologetic about a game that kills the very reasons that those fans who loved it from the start loved the game.

He also pulls the classic "There's still Wasteland 2" excuse. One of the best post-apocalyptic RPG franchises ever made just loses its Roleplaying edge, and his excuse is "There's still an installment of a more squad focused Post Apocalyptic RPG, that doesn't have the same level of depth, or the same unique world as Fallout. Don't bitch about losing one of your favourite franchises because there's still....something I guess."

 

[Crni Vuk]

Guys, Oblivion has the best bad guy quests.

I look back and hate Oblivion the game, but love some of it's quests.

You have to admit, there are some great gems.

You could probably find a peanut in a turd, if you searched hard enough, but ... well ... great! Now I have this image stuck in my head.

 

[Millim]

He also pulls the classic "There's still Wasteland 2" excuse. One of the best post-apocalyptic RPG franchises ever made just loses its Roleplaying edge, and his excuse is "There's still an installment of a more squad focused Post Apocalyptic RPG, that doesn't have the same level of depth, or the same unique world as Fallout. Don't bitch about losing one of your favourite franchises because there's still....something I guess."

Yeah, I get that.
It just goes back to my question on why Bethesda bought the IP in the first place, it feels like they wanted to troll people who liked the originals.
I would have been much happier if Bethesda just did their own Post-Apoc IP.
It's not like they could have done Fallout 3 with different Factions.
The Brotherhood of Steel could just have easily been swapped for a different Faction, one with the same principles as they were like in F3.
The same with the Enclave.
Swap the Outcasts for a group who went against what their new leader says (what they essentially are in F3, but with different ideologies).

The Vaults could have been swapped for something.

Look, everything could have been swapped.
And I would rather have found Fallout through an amazing game, than just an alright game.
I'm kind of jealous of those who started with New Vegas.

 

[Black Angel]

I'm kind of jealous of those who started with New Vegas.

I'm more jealous of those who started from Fallout 1. Must've felt awesome to grow up with such a legendary franchise. Although, I'm aware of what they feel about what Bethesda have done, so I guess it's a mixed blessing between us all.

 

[0wing]

I'm more jealous of those who started from Fallout 1. Must've felt awesome to grow up with such a legendary franchise.

I'm jealous of those who started from Fallout when it's came out in late 20st century and not barely before FO3 in late 00s.

It just goes back to my question on why Bethesda bought the IP in the first place, it feels like they wanted to troll people who liked the originals.
I would have been much happier if Bethesda just did their own Post-Apoc IP.

Maybe they knew that people tasted and got into Fallout dilogy and found out that they can start the hype train. They were right. If only Interplay get it...

 

[Jogre]

It just goes back to my question on why Bethesda bought the IP in the first place, it feels like they wanted to troll people who liked the originals.
I would have been much happier if Bethesda just did their own Post-Apoc IP.

I can kind of understand why they did it. Fallout was a very profitable franchise, with a very large and fanatic following by the time they had brought it. It's kind of like if a really cult classic franchise had driven itself in to bankruptcy, you'd probably be tempted to buy it and cash out on it's audience.

Of course, there plan was a partial success, as they drove away a lot of hardcore fans, but at the same time got a new, much larger audience of casuals. And now that they have such a big following, they can't just end the franchise and make a new IP for there twisted vision of Fallout, since there are a bunch of new "fans" who think that Fallout is something that it's not.

 

[Millim]

I can kind of understand why they did it. Fallout was a very profitable franchise, with a very large and fanatic following by the time they had brought it. It's kind of like if a really cult classic franchise had driven itself in to bankruptcy, you'd probably be tempted to buy it and cash out on it's audience.

Of course, there plan was a partial success, as they drove away a lot of hardcore fans, but at the same time got a new, much larger audience of casuals. And now that they have such a big following, they can't just end the franchise and make a new IP for there twisted vision of Fallout, since there are a bunch of new "fans" who think that Fallout is something that it's not.

Yeah, that's kind of the sad thing.
Too many times I've read someone say Fallout is about the Combat and "those moments" and for a while, I'm ashamed to admit I was like that too.
I'm hoping as they grow older, these new fans, or specifically "Fallout Kids" grow up and play the old ones, if only for an appreciation of what Fallout is. Even if they don't see what Fallout is truly meant to be, I hope they take from it that Bethesda has indeed done something to mess up what the game is. Whether it be intentional or not.

I just in hope that there's a parallel universe out there where Bethesda is making good and honest Fallout games which are adored by the same Fanbase.

 

[NotAcasul]

I can kind of understand why they did it. Fallout was a very profitable franchise, with a very large and fanatic following by the time they had brought it. It's kind of like if a really cult classic franchise had driven itself in to bankruptcy, you'd probably be tempted to buy it and cash out on it's audience.

Of course, there plan was a partial success, as they drove away a lot of hardcore fans, but at the same time got a new, much larger audience of casuals. And now that they have such a big following, they can't just end the franchise and make a new IP for there twisted vision of Fallout, since there are a bunch of new "fans" who think that Fallout is something that it's not.

We've seen Bethesda respond to the criticisms of Fallout 4 in the newest dlc. Could they learn from their past mistakes and create a Fallout on par to the originals?

 

[Mr Fish]

We've seen Bethesda respond to the criticisms of Fallout 4 in the newest dlc. Could they learn from their past mistakes and create a Fallout on par to the originals?

No, they can't.
Because that's what Fallout 4 should've been after FO3 and FNV.
Yet FO4 is still FO4.