PC World mentions Fallout4 as game of the year even though they think it's a bad game

[Irwin John Finster]

Me too I started Deus Ex HR revolution again, funny how a dialogue wheel can be done right in a game that's what like 3 years old.

I honestly feel like Deus Ex HR beats F4 in every way including as an RPG and shooter.

I'm sure almost any game could beat Fallout 4 in terms of being an RPG but despite enjoying Human Revolution myself I wouldn't go as far as calling it an RPG. Now Deus Ex 1 on the other hand is sort of like an RPG while being a FPS.

I agree. My point was merely to explain that Human Revolution is more of an RPG than F4 and a lot of other games which are claiming to belong to the RPG genre.

 

[MercenarySnake]

Me too I started Deus Ex HR revolution again, funny how a dialogue wheel can be done right in a game that's what like 3 years old.

I honestly feel like Deus Ex HR beats F4 in every way including as an RPG and shooter.

I'm sure almost any game could beat Fallout 4 in terms of being an RPG but despite enjoying Human Revolution myself I wouldn't go as far as calling it an RPG. Now Deus Ex 1 on the other hand is sort of like an RPG while being a FPS.

I agree. My point was merely to explain that Human Revolution is more of an RPG than F4 and a lot of other games which are claiming to belong to the RPG genre.

No doubt, no doubt. It's not hard to surpass Fallout 4 as an RPG due to how they decided to gut many of the leftovers that still had a part of Fallout in them. Hell even that "Grognak the Barbarian" Pipboy game is way more of an RPG than the actual game itself!!!

 

[Ilosar]

Me too I started Deus Ex HR revolution again, funny how a dialogue wheel can be done right in a game that's what like 3 years old.

I honestly feel like Deus Ex HR beats F4 in every way including as an RPG and shooter.

I'm sure almost any game could beat Fallout 4 in terms of being an RPG but despite enjoying Human Revolution myself I wouldn't go as far as calling it an RPG. Now Deus Ex 1 on the other hand is sort of like an RPG while being a FPS.

I agree. My point was merely to explain that Human Revolution is more of an RPG than F4 and a lot of other games which are claiming to belong to the RPG genre.

No doubt, no doubt. It's not hard to surpass Fallout 4 as an RPG due to how they decided to gut many of the leftovers that still had a part of Fallout in them. Hell even that "Grognak the Barbarian" Pipboy game is way more of an RPG than the actual game itself!!!

I actually sepent some time on that mini-game. I think it is a clear throwback to Wasteland 1-era games, which is nice.

About VA for player characters, I think it can add to the experience if it is properly done. Especially in 3d RPGs with cutscenes, where everyone speaks but your character stands there looking at everyone with blank eyes without saying a word. While Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite Bioware game, on that front I prefered Inquisition which offers 2 VAs per gender, and they are generally pretty good, with the best easily being the females one however. Alix Wilton Reagan does a great job and her voice fits a human or elf PC perfectly.

I'd also be hard pressed to imagine playing The Witcher without Geralt being voiced even if half his dialog sounds like a half bored monotone by convention.

At the same time playing Pillars of Eternity made me apppreciate a silent protagonist. It's not really what you do, it's how you do it. Bethesda going for a voiced protagonist could have worked, they just don't have the writing chops and VA direction to do so. And of course the terrible dialog wheel doesn't help.

 

[Crni Vuk]

At least they are taking SOME flak for it this time. I mean not as serious like reviews telling people not to buy the game or god forbid that it's a bad game. But you can't ignore some of the nudges thrown at Bethesda this time, where some call it a super-duper-awesome-game, but feel that it moved to far away from what an RPG is, and that in a time where the term RPG is really nothing more but a shallow term.

Only the future can tell us what that means for Bethesda games. I mean, who knows? Maybe the next Bethesda game will contain a dialog wheel with only 2 answer this time ...

[ ] YES
[x] SARCASTIC - YES

 

[Khannis]

At least they are taking SOME flak for it this time. I mean not as serious like reviews telling people not to buy the game or god forbid that it's a bad game. But you can't ignore some of the nudges thrown at Bethesda this time, where some call it a super-duper-awesome-game, but feel that it moved to far away from what an RPG is, and that in a time where the term RPG is really nothing more but a shallow term.

Only the future can tell us what that means for Bethesda games. I mean, who knows? Maybe the next Bethesda game will contain a dialog wheel with only 2 answer this time ...

[ ] YES
[x] SARCASTIC - YES

Unfortunately I think that the torrential downpour of fat cash maaaaaay make the flak hard to hear over at Bethesda. But silver-lining I guess, still makes me wet dream about them saying "Yeah, you know? They're right... Obsidian, come over here! How many years do you need to make the best Fallout game ever?"

 

[Irwin John Finster]

At least they are taking SOME flak for it this time. I mean not as serious like reviews telling people not to buy the game or god forbid that it's a bad game. But you can't ignore some of the nudges thrown at Bethesda this time, where some call it a super-duper-awesome-game, but feel that it moved to far away from what an RPG is, and that in a time where the term RPG is really nothing more but a shallow term.

Only the future can tell us what that means for Bethesda games. I mean, who knows? Maybe the next Bethesda game will contain a dialog wheel with only 2 answer this time ...

[ ] YES
[x] SARCASTIC - YES

Unfortunately I think that the torrential downpour of fat cash maaaaaay make the flak hard to hear over at Bethesda. But silver-lining I guess, still makes me wet dream about them saying "Yeah, you know? They're right... Obsidian, come over here! How many years do you need to make the best Fallout game ever?"

This is the future of Fallout and Elder Scrolls:

 

[berlin1945]

it's either write crap like that, or tell the truth about a game that was supposed to bring it all

 

[coldroll]

I don't know how this game is fun let alone addictive, I installed over 10 mods for it and I can't pick the game back up. I mean it's SOOO boring that even the mods I was using didn't give me some sort of urge to play it again. I've been playing older and way better games worth my time since then so it doesn't matter.

I actually had fun and found it addictive. In the beginning. While the whole thing was shiny and new and all that jazz. I mean, I thought we were on to something here... The first thing that hit me (aside from the whole dialogue/voiced shit, obviously) was when I couldn't talk Kellogg down. Then I thought "Wait... You mean my only option is to kill this guy?". Then I found a nailboard that somehow froze people. The I started noticing how much of the game's content was really only radiant shit (which I refused to believe at first, in a comedic manner).

Finally, I was just thinking, let's finish this thing and at least see all the choices and endings. And boy was I disappointed... All that work for a "Yay, you finished it! Keep playing if you want, nothing's really changed".

EDIT: Not to mention ressurecting-raiders-turned-legendary-bullet-sponges

I thought the voice acting was great and hating the game just because the main character has a voice actor is pretty dumb since the chosen one talks in Fallout 2 except you don't hear his voice. Voice acting is the least of all problems this game has they actually got the voice acting right. The problem is they made Fallout 4 into a generic boring game where none of your choices matter in the end and the game gets old really fast. It's the same crap where people hate the game just because it's not ismoteric. The game sucks because it's a piece of shit not because of a graphical change or camera view.

I'm going to have to go ahead and say that the male protagonist voice acting was awful. Maybe the female character had a better voice actor, but the male was clearly given his lines and asked to record them without knowing anything about Fallout or the game itself. The lines were cut and pasted together to form conversations such that dialogues have incredibly obvious changes in tone of speech, or the lines just glitch out entirely. Nothing flows and I have since stopped playing Fallout 4 and gone on to games with actual voice acting.

It is the worst voice acting and dialogue I have ever seen in any video game I have played, and I have played almost every major video game you might compare this too.

Games with actual "great" dialogue and voice acting:
Deus Ex HR
All previous Fallouts
Elder Scrolls (Skyrim had stupid writing, but the voice acting itself was fine)
All Bioware games
Wasteland 2
Pillars of Eternity
All Witcher games

I could go on...even Deus Ex 1's budget voice acting was better.

"WHERE'S MY SON?!?? WHERE?>>>WHA WHA WHAR SHAUN????" is "great" voice acting? Ok.

You want voice acted protagonist? Fine. But if it is terribly voice acted and the lines are cringe-worthy 90% of the time, I'm not playing the game for 100 hours. If it's a 3 hour movie I can forget 1 bad voice actor, but in a 75-100 hour game I'm not going to be saddled with terrible dialogue and acting. So yea the voice acting is actually a pretty big deal since they decided to force a voiced protagonist on us and then made it really bad.

Those games don't have shit on Resident evil for the ps1 and mega man 8,Silent hill,for the ps1 as well as other games. Like the Nintendo CDI games with way worse voice acting than Fallout 4 hell look at Fallout 3 even has worse voice acting most of the time (except a few exceptions) than Fallout 4. I mean look at these videos as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrQgeF7MW-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmMispgpUs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdJgD4xKSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG7JtcY_eUA

I've played hundreds of other games throughout the years that are even worse than these examples forgive me for not being able to memorize all of them. Also not all the voice acting was bad in Wasteland 2 but I do agree most of it wasn't great either.

How is it with Dragon 3? Don't they allow you to chose your race again?

Still, I don't get this fetish with voiced protagonists and RPGs. I mean it makes sense in Mass Effect and the Witcher, because the characters there, are for the most part, defined.

But a game like Fallout? Or Dragon Age? Not so much. A voiced protagonist also means that you will have much less dialog and you have no way to actually role play or even allow it.

Dragon Age Inquisition made a mistake in only giving each race 2 choices in voices, and while I felt they could work for the human or elf races, the dwarf and qunari just didn't work for me. A lot of people like DAI I just found it meh. I found that no matter how you tried to play your character the world at large still funneled you into a set role, not to mention the mmo style side quests(collect 10 ram meat) that plague the entire game.

That's the problem with voice acting, isn't it? Not enough room for role playing characters that don't fitt the ordinary vision of what a fighter or mage should be.

I mean, how do you express a character with a heavy accent? Or under the influence of narcotics? This is much easier to achieve only trough writing. You can create dialogs with nuances, where a voice actor would have 1. to be extremely talented and 2. very expensive. And this is not only true for the player, but also for many of the NPCs. There is no room for imagination anymore. Games have to be like movies and a cinematic experience, or they are not entertaining anymore. It kills the interactivity of the medium though.

It could be done it's just the developers are lazy and don't include more voice actors for whatever character the player wants to play as it would cost more money to hire more voice actors but in the end it would be a more worth it to engross the player and suspend their belief. If money wasn't the issue they could include as many different voices for every players play style. Dragon Age origins did a half ass attempt at this but it failed! Because they didn't include enough voices and just gave up half way through the process.

 

[Irwin John Finster]

I don't know how this game is fun let alone addictive, I installed over 10 mods for it and I can't pick the game back up. I mean it's SOOO boring that even the mods I was using didn't give me some sort of urge to play it again. I've been playing older and way better games worth my time since then so it doesn't matter.

I actually had fun and found it addictive. In the beginning. While the whole thing was shiny and new and all that jazz. I mean, I thought we were on to something here... The first thing that hit me (aside from the whole dialogue/voiced shit, obviously) was when I couldn't talk Kellogg down. Then I thought "Wait... You mean my only option is to kill this guy?". Then I found a nailboard that somehow froze people. The I started noticing how much of the game's content was really only radiant shit (which I refused to believe at first, in a comedic manner).

Finally, I was just thinking, let's finish this thing and at least see all the choices and endings. And boy was I disappointed... All that work for a "Yay, you finished it! Keep playing if you want, nothing's really changed".

EDIT: Not to mention ressurecting-raiders-turned-legendary-bullet-sponges

I thought the voice acting was great and hating the game just because the main character has a voice actor is pretty dumb since the chosen one talks in Fallout 2 except you don't hear his voice. Voice acting is the least of all problems this game has they actually got the voice acting right. The problem is they made Fallout 4 into a generic boring game where none of your choices matter in the end and the game gets old really fast. It's the same crap where people hate the game just because it's not ismoteric. The game sucks because it's a piece of shit not because of a graphical change or camera view.

I'm going to have to go ahead and say that the male protagonist voice acting was awful. Maybe the female character had a better voice actor, but the male was clearly given his lines and asked to record them without knowing anything about Fallout or the game itself. The lines were cut and pasted together to form conversations such that dialogues have incredibly obvious changes in tone of speech, or the lines just glitch out entirely. Nothing flows and I have since stopped playing Fallout 4 and gone on to games with actual voice acting.

It is the worst voice acting and dialogue I have ever seen in any video game I have played, and I have played almost every major video game you might compare this too.

Games with actual "great" dialogue and voice acting:
Deus Ex HR
All previous Fallouts
Elder Scrolls (Skyrim had stupid writing, but the voice acting itself was fine)
All Bioware games
Wasteland 2
Pillars of Eternity
All Witcher games

I could go on...even Deus Ex 1's budget voice acting was better.

"WHERE'S MY SON?!?? WHERE?>>>WHA WHA WHAR SHAUN????" is "great" voice acting? Ok.

You want voice acted protagonist? Fine. But if it is terribly voice acted and the lines are cringe-worthy 90% of the time, I'm not playing the game for 100 hours. If it's a 3 hour movie I can forget 1 bad voice actor, but in a 75-100 hour game I'm not going to be saddled with terrible dialogue and acting. So yea the voice acting is actually a pretty big deal since they decided to force a voiced protagonist on us and then made it really bad.

Those games don't have shit on Resident evil for the ps1 and mega man 8,Silent hill,for the ps1 as well as other games. Like the Nintendo CDI games with way worse voice acting than Fallout 4 hell look at Fallout 3 even has worse voice acting most of the time (except a few exceptions) than Fallout 4. I mean look at these videos as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrQgeF7MW-0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmMispgpUs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdJgD4xKSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG7JtcY_eUA

I've played hundreds of other games throughout the years that are even worse than these examples forgive me for not being able to memorize all of them. Also not all the voice acting was bad in Wasteland 2 but I do agree most of it wasn't great either.

How is it with Dragon 3? Don't they allow you to chose your race again?

Still, I don't get this fetish with voiced protagonists and RPGs. I mean it makes sense in Mass Effect and the Witcher, because the characters there, are for the most part, defined.

But a game like Fallout? Or Dragon Age? Not so much. A voiced protagonist also means that you will have much less dialog and you have no way to actually role play or even allow it.

Dragon Age Inquisition made a mistake in only giving each race 2 choices in voices, and while I felt they could work for the human or elf races, the dwarf and qunari just didn't work for me. A lot of people like DAI I just found it meh. I found that no matter how you tried to play your character the world at large still funneled you into a set role, not to mention the mmo style side quests(collect 10 ram meat) that plague the entire game.

That's the problem with voice acting, isn't it? Not enough room for role playing characters that don't fitt the ordinary vision of what a fighter or mage should be.

I mean, how do you express a character with a heavy accent? Or under the influence of narcotics? This is much easier to achieve only trough writing. You can create dialogs with nuances, where a voice actor would have 1. to be extremely talented and 2. very expensive. And this is not only true for the player, but also for many of the NPCs. There is no room for imagination anymore. Games have to be like movies and a cinematic experience, or they are not entertaining anymore. It kills the interactivity of the medium though.

It could be done it's just the developers are lazy and don't include more voice actors for whatever character the player wants to play as it would cost more money to hire more voice actors but in the end it would be a more worth it to engross the player and suspend their belief. If money wasn't the issue they could include as many different voices for every players play style. Dragon Age origins did a half ass attempt at this but it failed! Because they didn't include enough voices and just gave up half way through the process.

The list I provided was a list of games with great voice acting, not bad voice acting. If you have to go all the way back to old Nintendo games to find examples of games with worse voice acting than Fallout 4 then my point rests - F4 has awful voice work.

My list was a list of what could be considered peers of F4. If Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed can churn out annual games with good production quality I don't see any reason to cut Bethesda any slack for having 4 to 7 years and expecting people to gobble up this clearly mediocre effort. It defines the phrase "phoning it in."

 

[Spacemunkey]

My list was a list of what could be considered peers of F4. If Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed can churn out annual games with good production quality I don't see any reason to cut Bethesda any slack for having 4 to 7 years and expecting people to gobble up this clearly mediocre effort. It defines the phrase "phoning it in."

Wish they would have brought Liam Neeson back, at least then finding your lost child by murdering your way through the game would have felt right.

 

[Irwin John Finster]

My list was a list of what could be considered peers of F4. If Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed can churn out annual games with good production quality I don't see any reason to cut Bethesda any slack for having 4 to 7 years and expecting people to gobble up this clearly mediocre effort. It defines the phrase "phoning it in."

Wish they would have brought Liam Neeson back, at least then finding your lost child by murdering your way through the game would have felt right.

They only hire good voice actors for characters that either die in the very beginning of the game or have very few lines at all. Like Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean in Oblivion and Liam Neeson in Fallout 3.

I don't even know if the voice actors are to blame because I've come to believe they were just given a script containing only their lines completely out of context so they had no idea what the other actors would be saying, then just recorded each line separately and inorganically.

Probably because they spent 90% of their budget on marketing and making Codsworth say 1000 names.

 

[Crni Vuk]

Actually, I found Patrick and Neeson to be mediocre voice actors, but most probably for the reasons that they are decent actors rather than very great voice actors and the fact that they had shitty scripts to work with. With Patrick even that he is actually more suited as actor for TV shows - many of his movies outright suck, like all of the Trek movies.

I like Neeson as actor, in most of his movies at least he is doing a decent job. But he needs a camera, something that allows acting, to perform well. His voice alone, isn't simply enough. He's not so much a bad voice actor as more an over priced one I think, he can't be cheaper than all the other ones out there. For example, the guy who voiced Alex Jenson in Deus Ex:HR left a much better impression and he was probably much cheaper to get than Neeson. But, he also had a decent source material to work with I guess. Fallout 3s plot was a clusterfuck to begin with.

Anyway, I wish those big AAA games would slow down with all this fully voiced stuff. I know it's great for marketing, trailers, hype and all that. But it really kills what games should be about. Interactivity, player input, not cinematic experiences. That's what we have movies for!

 

[Irwin John Finster]

Actually, I found Patrick and Neeson to be mediocre voice actors, but most probably for the reasons that they are decent actors rather than very great voice actors and the fact that they had shitty scripts to work with. With Patrick even that he is actually more suited as actor for TV shows - many of his movies outright suck, like all of the Trek movies.

I like Neeson as actor, in most of his movies at least he is doing a decent job. But he needs a camera, something that allows acting, to perform well. His voice alone, isn't simply enough. He's not so much a bad voice actor as more an over priced one I think, he can't be cheaper than all the other ones out there. For example, the guy who voiced Alex Jenson in Deus Ex:HR left a much better impression and he was probably much cheaper to get than Neeson. But, he also had a decent source material to work with I guess. Fallout 3s plot was a clusterfuck to begin with.

Anyway, I wish those big AAA games would slow down with all this fully voiced stuff. I know it's great for marketing, trailers, hype and all that. But it really kills what games should be about. Interactivity, player input, not cinematic experiences. That's what we have movies for!

Point is Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson are 1000 times better than whoever did the male protagonist of Fallout 4. You could pay any one of us in hamburgers and we'd probably do a better job. But I don't know if it is the fault of the voice actor or the writers because the lines are just bad regardless.

 

[Spacemunkey]

Actually, I found Patrick and Neeson to be mediocre voice actors, but most probably for the reasons that they are decent actors rather than very great voice actors and the fact that they had shitty scripts to work with. With Patrick even that he is actually more suited as actor for TV shows - many of his movies outright suck, like all of the Trek movies.

I like Neeson as actor, in most of his movies at least he is doing a decent job. But he needs a camera, something that allows acting, to perform well. His voice alone, isn't simply enough. He's not so much a bad voice actor as more an over priced one I think, he can't be cheaper than all the other ones out there. For example, the guy who voiced Alex Jenson in Deus Ex:HR left a much better impression and he was probably much cheaper to get than Neeson. But, he also had a decent source material to work with I guess. Fallout 3s plot was a clusterfuck to begin with.

Anyway, I wish those big AAA games would slow down with all this fully voiced stuff. I know it's great for marketing, trailers, hype and all that. But it really kills what games should be about. Interactivity, player input, not cinematic experiences. That's what we have movies for!

I think Patrick Stewart was a victim of the material, I find him quite funny in his work on American Dad.

 

[Hassknecht]

Actually, I found Patrick and Neeson to be mediocre voice actors, but most probably for the reasons that they are decent actors rather than very great voice actors and the fact that they had shitty scripts to work with. With Patrick even that he is actually more suited as actor for TV shows - many of his movies outright suck, like all of the Trek movies.

I like Neeson as actor, in most of his movies at least he is doing a decent job. But he needs a camera, something that allows acting, to perform well. His voice alone, isn't simply enough. He's not so much a bad voice actor as more an over priced one I think, he can't be cheaper than all the other ones out there. For example, the guy who voiced Alex Jenson in Deus Ex:HR left a much better impression and he was probably much cheaper to get than Neeson. But, he also had a decent source material to work with I guess. Fallout 3s plot was a clusterfuck to begin with.

Anyway, I wish those big AAA games would slow down with all this fully voiced stuff. I know it's great for marketing, trailers, hype and all that. But it really kills what games should be about. Interactivity, player input, not cinematic experiences. That's what we have movies for!

I think Patrick Stewart was a victim of the material, I find him quite funny in his work on American Dad.

Yeah, he's a brilliant voice actor when his lines aren't shite.

 

[coldroll]

Actually, I found Patrick and Neeson to be mediocre voice actors, but most probably for the reasons that they are decent actors rather than very great voice actors and the fact that they had shitty scripts to work with. With Patrick even that he is actually more suited as actor for TV shows - many of his movies outright suck, like all of the Trek movies.

I like Neeson as actor, in most of his movies at least he is doing a decent job. But he needs a camera, something that allows acting, to perform well. His voice alone, isn't simply enough. He's not so much a bad voice actor as more an over priced one I think, he can't be cheaper than all the other ones out there. For example, the guy who voiced Alex Jenson in Deus Ex:HR left a much better impression and he was probably much cheaper to get than Neeson. But, he also had a decent source material to work with I guess. Fallout 3s plot was a clusterfuck to begin with.

Anyway, I wish those big AAA games would slow down with all this fully voiced stuff. I know it's great for marketing, trailers, hype and all that. But it really kills what games should be about. Interactivity, player input, not cinematic experiences. That's what we have movies for!

I think Patrick Stewart was a victim of the material, I find him quite funny in his work on American Dad.

Yeah, he's a brilliant voice actor when his lines aren't shite.

He was pretty awesome as the narrator in Ted as well.

 

[fakeangel]

On the topic of VA's, Courtnay Taylor is overall better than her counter part, but even she could not make the ending narration work.

Strangely enough, she is even allowed to make small liberties to her script, which most of the time results in a better delivery, but in the ending, it sounded even worse.