A story about the neo-nazi Illuminati using a long forgotten oil rig to initiate a life destroying apocalypse and a tribal happens to stop them.
A story about a lump of sentient flesh using a long forgotten virus to initiate a life destroying apocalypse and a vault dweller happens to stop them.
A story about football gear wearing Romans using a long forgotten Dam in order to initiate a freedom destroying invasion and a mailman happens to stop them.
Look, I don't know about you, but these sounds like fun stories. If someone recommended to me books with these premises, I would get them ASAP. It wasn't that Obsidian games weren't over-the-top. Admittedly, they are, and that's fine because it keeps the games from getting boring. I mean, seriously, just read those three lines. That doesn't sound dumb, it sounds fun.
The actual difference between those games and Bethesda's, is that Obsidian's work has
verisimilitude. That's the word you're supposed to use when it comes to consistent lore, not "realistic". It sticks to the rules it sets, that's what RPG fans mean when they clamour for "realism". Sure, creating a world with theoretically functional economy, politics and social issues seems excessive to most gamers, but if I guess right, it's kind of what the original Fallout intended.
Nothing's wrong with a story about bunker-dwelling kid who searches for their father in order to restore purified water to the wastes. Nothing's wrong with a story about a middle-class citizen being frozen for two centuries and waking up to a wiped-out world, then having to hunt down their spouse's killer and their missing child. They're cliché ridden as hell, sure, but these concepts are actually even less over-the-top than Obsidian's stuff.
It's that in practice, Bethesda uses a lot of overused clichés, plot twists that everyone saw coming, and does poor background storytelling along with having minimal consistency. Okay, that's fine for most games. Hell, most action-focused movies do pretty much the same thing. It's just that it's not fine for the people who came for Fallout, which was the opposite of everything I mentioned in the first line of this paragraph.
Definite rules for fictional science, a detailed world, and on top of those, a fairly okay story (nah, they weren't nearly the gems people make them out to be). It worked. Like I said, boring and nerdy for most people, but immersion in a fictional yet well-written world is how RPG fans roll. It was kinda the point of Fallout. Me, I'm not the biggest fan of RPGs, but I understand why other people like them, and while I loved Fallout 3, I understand how it was a step-down from what was probably a massive amount of effort on Black Isle's part. As such, I understand how much of a cliff drop Fallout 4 was from the status quo.
Huh, this went on a lot longer than it should have. I should probably go do something productive. Like sleep.
