I miss you, Fallout

khain

khain

[X] Sarcastic
Hi,

I've been reading you guys for a while, and my complete disappointment in Fallout 4 has made me decide to register.

I warn you, it's mainly to rant and vent.

I'll just copy here the review I've posted on Metacritic - again, I pretty much registered just for that. It just needed to get out, I suppose.

It's just funny how all I can think about for the last two weeks are the great highlights from when I was playing Fallout 1 & 2. Nostalgia FTW.

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I have restarted my game for the third time yesterday. The first time, it was because a key NPC had just disappeared, yesterday I just lost the ability to crouch. I decided to start all over again, in a kind of hopeful way - maybe if I went back to square one, I would minimize the risk of bugs or something. And then I was hit by the bug where you're stuck right out of the pod until you restart your console.


So, yeah, even by Bethesda standards, this is painful. I've had buggy saves in their RPGs before, but the worst that had happened was to have a secondary quest I couldn't finish in Skyrim. Never anything this terminal and annoying. And I'm not mentioning all the bugs I managed to work around: crash to PS4 home when changing Piper's weapon, and so on.


Then, there's what Bethesda have done with Fallout, and that's worse than any technical glitch.


I can't stand the dialog system. I used to love it in the old Fallout games, and Planescape: Torment, when you had pretty much half a screen of dialogue options to read, and in certain cases having to be real careful about what you picked. The new system is just risk-free, over simplified nonsense.


Cardboard cutout characters, complete lack of substance in their backgrounds...


It just doesn't feel like a RPG any more. I miss my drug-addicted prizefighter from Fallout 2, a guy who had amassed terrible karma before setting on the path of redemption. That guy had a story, that guy had a style of his own, that guy was FUN. He was utterly rubbish at many things, he had to give up on some parts of the game because of that, and he felt real.


This guy I'm playing in Fallout 4 can just do everything, and he can do it very well. He's neither a beacon of hope leading a rebellion, nor the scourge of the wasteland terrorizing settlements. He's just an asshat who tinkers in his shed and just happens to own 4 power armours and 3 Fat Men despite having been outside the vault for a week or so.


I miss the quests from the old Fallout games where you could kill a guy subtly by tampering with his heart medication, rather than HAVING to blow his brains out with a shotgun.
(Spoilers ahead)


The bit in the Combat Zone is, for me, very representative of the turn that Bethesda has taken. In an old Fallout game, you could have probably done any of the following:
1. Wait for a fight night to rob the betting money
2. Enter the cage yourself and become the local champion
3. Bet on any fighter to rake in some caps
4. Buy out one the fighter to have as a companion
and probably more.


In Fallout 4, well, none of that. You're in a place, where there are other people. Therefore you will fight, and kill them all, and loot them to get back to base and continue building your glorified shed. Woohoo.


It's a decent shooter, despite the glitchy stuff. The modding mechanism on weapons is rather fun, and as usual the random exploration of places is by far the most exciting element of the game.


But it's jut not a Fallout game any more, and it's not really an RPG either.
 
The Combat Zone was one of my first major dissapointments, and I went in sceptical as hell.
I've seen others comment on it as well, and it is indeed very representative.

The "interesting locations" are purely superficial. The "rule breakers" behind those bars further exemplify the absurd pointlessness of it - you can unlock the door. What for? Well, to kill them obviously! Why wouldn't we all want to kill unarmed, helpless people, kneeling down, with their hands tied behind their backs? That's who we are, right? Murdering sociopaths!

The little loading screen with the naval cannon, that goes right ahead to assume this is something you really want to do. It doesn't even say "kill raiders" with it, but "kill people"

So much for role-playing, "lol, we know you only want to kill people, you little sociopath, you can't fool us ;D" (this on top of an allready worrying snippet I saw somewhere, where a FO3 dev(?) was bragging about the awesomeness of taking a human life - watch it fade, dude, wtf, I'm just gonna waaaalk away sloooowly)

Can you imagine a similar "info screen" in FO1? Right out of the blue, just "The missile launcher is the answer to the age old question - would it be fun to murder people with high explosives? Yes! Yes it would!"

Not to say it's not potentially fun to cause havoc, I love some sadism, such as drawing the New Reno gangster shoot-outs out into the streets, try to get Ol' Man McGee into the fight, watch the hookers stab patrons to death - but to go right ahead and make the assumption in a loading screen "Wouldn't it be fun to murder prostitutes en masse? Yes! Yes it would!"
 
zegh8578 said:
The little loading screen with the naval cannon, that goes right ahead to assume this is something you really want to do. It doesn't even say "kill raiders" with it, but "kill people"
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Well, that's because there aren't that many people who aren't raiders. ;p

When it comes to the naval cannon, I sold it right after getting it. Didn't even fire a shot. It was my little "SCREW YOU Bethesda!" moment.
 
Haven't got far enough to get the naval cannon, but I completely agree.

That's another thing, in the previous game, I felt like a proper character if I just had a Mad-Maxesque leather armor and a .44 magnum. Badass, but nimble.

Now, it feels like I'm not doing it right if I'm not walking around in a Power Armor while carrying an arsenal that would suit a fighter jet. It's almost obscene.

Along the lines of encouraging mayhem, there's also the fact that the Intimidation perk is only unlocked waaaay down the line. I'm sort of guessing it's because its mechanics probably don't work very well, but I would have liked to have access to this earlier if it means you can handle encounters with small groups in a more realistic manner. Because I'm getting tired of a lone raider charging at me with his dick and his knife when I'm obviously gonna drop him.

It's just a mess.

Where are the tricky hostage situations that you can resolve peacefully provided you think carefully about what to say, where are all the parts where brains and wit count for something...
 
So, erm, I'm going to take the liberty of resurrecting my own 'review' thread.

T'was the weekend before Christmas. And in rural Surrey, in the southern parts of England, the weather was miserable. Mild, but grey and wet.

So, I decided that I would give Fallout 4 one last chance. In fact, I decided that I would go through the main story since I hadn't done that yet.

I'm now DONE with this horror of a game, and I can go back to the NV replay I started a few days ago. But not without a final rant...

Obviously there are spoilers ahead. Not that you should care.

First things first, when I rated that game initially I gave it a 6/10. I will now take that down to a 3 or 4. Apart from GTA 5 recently, I can't remember the last time I rushed through the main story of a game just to get the checkbox ticked. It procured me no enjoyment whatsoever, and it summarized very well everything that is wrong with it.

I particularly hated finding information in the institute that I couldn't act upon. Hey, I now have a list of informants. Oh, I can't confront them. Hey, I have proof of who's been replaced by a Synth. Oh, I can't do anything either.

Every single goddamn part of the final quest is a doom-like level. Against Synths, against Gunners, against robots, against turrets. There's only ONE part that gave me a glimpse of a role playing game:

I was playing as a Railroad, so the bombing of the BoS zeppelin was fun. Disguise yourself, pass a couple of speech checks... Very barebone, but it was an oasis of decent play in the middle of Quake.

I felt completely powerless through most of it. I couldn't refuse anything, I couldn't convince people of anything, I couldn't choose how any of it played out. It was a linear catastrophe, some button mashing festival that I couldn't care less about.

Of course there were battles in the previous good episodes - but there was a build up to them, there was some dramatic tension, it felt like there was something at stake. FO4 does such an amazing job at trivializing massacres that you can't even tell a boss battle from another one. It's just all mindless canon fodder slaying.

It's not like I didn't know, or like I was still hoping for something better. But the mockery of 'choices' I was able to make were just so superficial that I felt insulted. The game doesn't just prevent me from having an influence, it makes a fucking point of SHOWING ME HOW I COULD HAVE. Dangling possibilities in front of me only to take them away. All I can do is don my power armour and go shoot things. There were so many times where I paused the game to rant to myself about the choices I would have liked to have.

I know FO3 is not respected on these boards, but as bad as it was, I still think it had enjoyable moments, and I really didn't rush through the end of it with this sense of having been made a fool of. It wasn't good, but it wasn't as horrendous as this.

Well, it's done now. Back to New Vegas.

Screw you, Toddy-boy.
 
khain said:
I know FO3 is not respected on these boards, but as bad as it was, I still think it had enjoyable moments.
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I loved Fallout 3 and all the DLC. I think NMA gets a bad reputation in large part because the so-called "fanboys" have terrible arguments for why Fallout 3 was a good game and refuse to accept any of its very real faults. In other words, NMA seems to get a lot of hate from people who come here, post a terrible opinion, get called out, and go tell other sites all about their awful experience.

Fallout 3 had lots of faults but I still fell in love with it. If you want to know why, look at Fallout 4 and compare it to Fallout 3. You can clearly see that Fallout 3 at least left SOME of the RPG in the game - the dialogue system for example was much better in 3 than in 4.

I loved New Vegas and all its DLC even more than Fallout 3, but I think Fallout 3 had a nice ambiance and the writing was actually decent, or at the very least it was acceptable especially when you compare it to what we have on our hands with F4.

Fallout 3 was the game that introduced me to Fallout, and the reason I played every single Fallout game except Brotherhood of Steel. If I had played Fallout 1 and 2 and THEN gone on to Fallout 3, I can certainly understand why that would be a drastic change and disappointment.

And Fallout 4 was an incredible disappoint for me, and I am a fan of Fallout 3. So basically F4 is an awful disappointment for even a F3 fan.
 
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Irwin John Finster said:
khain said:
I know FO3 is not respected on these boards, but as bad as it was, I still think it had enjoyable moments.
Click to expand...
I loved Fallout 3 and all the DLC. I think NMA gets a bad reputation in large part because the so-called "fanboys" have terrible arguments for why Fallout 3 was a good game and refuse to accept any of its very real faults. In other words, NMA seems to get a lot of hate from people who come here, post a terrible opinion, get called out, and go tell other sites all about their awful experience.

Fallout 3 had lots of faults but I still fell in love with it. If you want to know why, look at Fallout 4 and compare it to Fallout 3. You can clearly see that Fallout 3 at least left SOME of the RPG in the game - the dialogue system for example was much better in 3 than in 4.

I loved New Vegas and all its DLC even more than Fallout 3, but I think Fallout 3 had a nice ambiance and the writing was actually decent, or at the very least it was acceptable especially when you compare it to what we have on our hands with F4.

Fallout 3 was the game that introduced me to Fallout, and the reason I played every single Fallout game except Brotherhood of Steel. If I had played Fallout 1 and 2 and THEN gone on to Fallout 3, I can certainly understand why that would be a drastic change and disappointment.
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Fallout 3 did have some good points but in general it was badly written crap. Thematic silly crap that made me laugh at the stupidity (super heroes?) but still crap. Though I don't mind if people like the games, as long as they have good reasons to back it up, or at least acknowledge it's faults and failures.
 
Irwin John Finster said:
Fallout 3 had lots of faults but I still fell in love with it. If you want to know why, look at Fallout 4 and compare it to Fallout 3
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I didn't much care for it. If you want to know why, look at Fallout 3 and compare it to Fallout.

(That doesn't mean that it was a bad game; just a bad choice of game to forcibly include into the Fallout series. As far as FO3's art design, and landscaping goes though, it was pretty spot on perfect IMO ~with some notable exceptions.)
 
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Gizmojunk said:
Irwin John Finster said:
Fallout 3 had lots of faults but I still fell in love with it. If you want to know why, look at Fallout 4 and compare it to Fallout 3
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I didn't much care for it. If you want to know why, look at Fallout 3 and compare it to Fallout.

(That doesn't mean that it was a bad game; just a bad choice of game to forcibly include into the Fallout series.)
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Yeah it falls apart... but before you murder me... I actually noticed in cases many more unimportant choices in Fallout 3 then Fallout. They weren't always good but still...

Kill me now.
 
Was that meant as reply to IJF?

I had fun in FO3. The best times were solo walks in the deep wastes, far ~far away from any NPCs or settlements. Aside from a dense [large] animal predator population comparable to a rainforest, I thought they did the Wasteland pretty well.
 
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Jesus, Fallout 3 was HORRIBLE. Seriously. The whole plot of the thing makes no goddamn sense at all. It's absolutely ridiculous.

I don't like Fallout 4 for many, many reasons, but c'mon, it is a better plot. Not Fallout-worthy, or even good RPG-worthy, but 3's was just... I have no words to describe it. Fallout 4 at least gives you some choice, such as factions, even though it doesn't matter that much, because in the end you have very little agency... But Fallout 3 gave you no choice at all. It was find your father - help BoS - kill Enclave - start Purifier. Could you tell your father to go fuck himself for leaving you to die? Nope. Could you tell the BoS to fuck themselves? Nooooooope. Could you, perchance, not kill the Enclave (or god forbid, join them)? Nope, nope and nope. Could you blow up the Purifier? Nooooooooooooope.

Seriously, can an RPG get worse than this?
 
Placeholder said:
Dr Fallout said:
Fallout 4 was a major failure. Bethesda better learn about their mistakes, cause if not...
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Dr Fallout said:
Well actually Fallout 3 had lots of minor choices...

Shitty as many were.
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The point is, they don't want to learn.
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Worse... They don't want to change it, because there is more money in it the way they intentionally designed it to be. They are not stupid people, but that's their minimum target ~is it not?
 
Gizmojunk said:
Placeholder said:
Dr Fallout said:
Fallout 4 was a major failure. Bethesda better learn about their mistakes, cause if not...
Click to expand...
Dr Fallout said:
Well actually Fallout 3 had lots of minor choices...

Shitty as many were.
Click to expand...

The point is, they don't want to learn.
Click to expand...
Worse... They don't want to change it, because there is more money in it the way they intentionally designed it to be. They are not stupid people.
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Debatable.
 
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