Let us say we can understand it - and indeed we can. But let me ask you this, why would we have to actually understand it?
It doesn't change that Fallout saw a huge shift with its mechanics, the narrative (quest structure, story telling), and subsequently with the experience you get from the gameplay. And I am saying this without giving First Person, Real time or Turn Based any value, a change still remains a change what ever if we understand the reasons or not.
Fallout was always a product created for a niche, what the majority finds as unneccatable at this point, should be of little importance for a developer. And in fact, for the people working on Fallout 1, it was not that important.
Here again, the masses, their opinion (if there is any), or what is popular does not equal right or quality.
The fact still remains, Bethesda bought the licence to a game that was never designed or meant to be a First Person Shooter and turned it into something that resemebles Call of Duty more than anything else, we can only speculate about Bethesdas intentions and motivations at this point, but I would say they are pretty clear to me. They go with what is popular and think sells well. Their biggest motivation is money and making lots of it. And they don't even shy away from lobotomising their own franchises on the altar of profit. As Gizmo very accurately described, the worlds Bethesda creates are the kind of worlds where you as the player is thrown in a theme park where even the concept of challange or failure doesnt really exist.
As far as gaming goes, Bethesda is pretty much this, when it comes to game development:
We very well understand that people love different things. Hell, many here can also enjoy mindless shooters, that's definetly not the problem. But I would not get the idea to turn for example Doom in to a clone of Sim City just because Sim City might be my favourite kind of gameplay. Something like that would be extremly silly.
But that's pretty much what happend here with Fallout 1/2 changed to Fallout 3/4.
They don't have to pay anyone tribute. They just have to make a Sequel to Fallout. That's all we ever demanded. What they make however, are spiritual successors to their Elder Scrolls formula, with their open world gameplay and dumbed down gameplay/story. And oh yeah, no one ever asked for Bethesdas help. Do you or anyone SERIOUSLY believe they bought Fallout out of pure generosity? Com on. It was simply a good deal for them, and they have simply outbide everyone else. For Bethesda, Fallout is a form of investment. No one's spending millions of dollars on something simply because they think it is fun to work with. Not as company. Fallout as franchise is simply very easy to work with from a monetary point of view. It was easy for Bethesda to squeze Fallout into their open-world formula without the need to create a completley new lore and franchise, which is not only expensive but also risky.
Most of us can accept that. If it wasn't writen so cringworthy and sloppily. Harold is just the tip of the iceberg. But I feel there is no need to name all the smaller and bigger details. Those have been discussed to death.
Not if the mechanics are a defining factor of the product we are talking about.
To make it simple, you can not use a game like Tetris for example, turn it in to a first Person shooter, like Call of Duty or Doom, and call it Tetris 2. It just doesn't work that way and this is NOT opinion anymore at this point.
Mechanics can become a part of the game, if the game for example was created with those mechanics in mind. If you want to deliver a certain experience. Like if your intention as developer is to make a strategicial and turn based game. Than you can't provide this experience with First Person combat and real time gameplay. Because those are two fundamentaly different mechanics.
You can chose a certain narrative for your game, and set the focus completely on that, where the story and setting define your game and where the mechanics become just a tool to push the narrative forward - See L.A. Noire as example, or the psychological metaphors in Silent Hill, those can work in thrid person, first person, you name it. But in other cases you can create a game like Pac Man or Angry Birds where the mechanics become the defining factor of the game and where the story and characters are so meaningless that they could be easily replaced by what ever you want. It doesn't matter.
Those are not rules which are set always in stone, they are guidelines. But it still matters. There are many hybrid mechanics and where the gameplay and story are interacting, and a lot of other factors to consider. But you have to start somewhere, particularly if you create a design. And the best way is to start with the basics. Even if you have a game where certain mechanics are mixed together, like RPG mechanics in shooters, it still happens that one of those mechanics will be the dominant one. It is easier to declare Deus Ex as first person shooter instead of a role playing game, simply because the shooter mechanics play a much larger role. Disciples 3 is more of a strategy game than a role playing game for example and so on.
Quality is also not a matter of opinion. Only if you compare two works with similar quality, but I can clearly tell that some work has more quality inside than others. Like between a very good and a very bad painting. You can compare styles, for example if something is better in water colours compared to oil or pastel, if both artists are skilled. Or if you enjoy surrealism over cubism. Or if you enjoy Sci Fi over Drama. That is opinion. But it doesn't take a genious to figure out where the main problems are in Rob Lefields Comics. And that there are comic artists out there that do a much better job.
Since when is beeing the majority or a popular opinion the benchmark for beeing right or wrong? I, and anyone here, *couldn't care less what billions of people think Bethesda is or isn't.
*Edit, fixed typo
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