Rebuttal of Escapist's "Bethesda Killed Fallout" article

Regardless if they are art or not, video games still follow established rules. There's design philosophies that are used that have been tested time and time again because they work (unlke the crap Todd Howard thinks work).

Games like Fallout 3 fail in too many aspects to be consider good in any capacity. So people can't throw around platitudes or just say "i had fun" as a measure of quality.


There are games that i don't care about that i still appreciate for how well they are designed.
 
I would love to use that "It's art so it can't be measured" defense when submitting a piece to a client or on my art classes, but I don't want to be laughed at and blacklisted so...
 
Video games incorporate graphic design, music, and writing - things traditionally in the art sphere. When a creator is passionate about their work, it shines through in the results. If it's a dull, hollow cash grab, it shows as well.

But even a game like Fallout 76 has art:

The player opens a door to a small broom closet; a woman's corpse is slumped in the corner, a pistol is held in her hand. Dried blood is splattered on the wall. Nearby, there is a holodisk. Playing the holodisk results in several minutes of audio dialogue - her personal journal, recorded over several days, explaining how she ended up in a broom closet that can't be opened from the inside. She chronicles what she thinks and how she feels, right up to her final moments. How the player emotionally reacts to this is subjective.

But if the player walks into the closet and closes the door, trapping themselves as the woman was, they can easily open it from the inside. In fact, the door clearly has a handle. And the door was never locked. Even if it was locked, she had a gun with plenty of ammo and could've tried to shoot her way out. It doesn't make sense that she was trapped. This is objectively bad game design.

Walpknut said:
I would love to use that "It's art so it can't be measured" defense when submitting a piece to a client or on my art classes, but I don't want to be laughed at and blacklisted so...
Click to expand...

The whole point of an art class is to teach the objective aspects of art. You can measure aspects of art, but you can't 100% predict what an individual's subjective reaction to it will be.
 
mannawyadden said:
But even a game like Fallout 76 has art:

The player opens a door to a small broom closet; a woman's corpse is slumped in the corner, a pistol is held in her hand. Dried blood is splattered on the wall. Nearby, there is a holodisk. Playing the holodisk results in several minutes of audio dialogue - her personal journal, recorded over several days, explaining how she ended up in a broom closet that can't be opened from the inside. She chronicles what she thinks and how she feels, right up to her final moments. How the player emotionally reacts to this is subjective.

But if the player walks into the closet and closes the door, trapping themselves as the woman was, they can easily open it from the inside. In fact, the door clearly has a handle. And the door was never locked. Even if it was locked, she had a gun with plenty of ammo and could've tried to shoot her way out. It doesn't make sense that she was trapped. This is objectively bad game design.
Click to expand...
That sounds like the most generic instance of "Envirormental storytelling" to be honest.

Also, if she had a gun and was trapped in the closet....


(haha, it's funny because he is a terrible person)

Why didn't she just shoot the lock? That actually sounds kinda comedic.

Kinda reminds me of this Netflix anime Violet Evergarden, every episode is beautifully animated and it always contain at least one crying scene per episode, sometimes more, everyone has a tear jerker story too. That doesn't make it a piece of art. Hell it doesn't make is compelling, and it's the most flat and hackney way to pull strings from viewers.

People need to understand: not everything you like is automatically art.
 
Last edited:
Walpknut said:
Why didn't she just shoot the lock? That actually sounds kinda comedic.
Click to expand...

I just said "shoot her way out", not shoot the lock, which doesn't really work in real life. Might've been worth a try, at least before shooting herself.

Walpknut said:
People need to understand: not everything you like is automatically art
Click to expand...

"Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or performing artifacts, expressing the author's imaginative, conceptual ideas, or technical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power."

If you're saying that the game developers did not put a single drop of creativity or imagination into any aspect of their game, that's a pretty big insult to them and their work. But I guess that's your intent...to insult it.

It's fine. I personally came to these forums because I'm a Fallout fan and want to talk about things that I like, not sit around talking with people who don't like them about why they don't like them.
 
Last edited:
Well then I am throwing a big insult at them and their work because Fallout 76 is a soulless husk made to sell texture files and PNGs to idiots.

Hard to get invested in the tragic story of an idiot that got trapped in a closet with a gun and then blew their brains out for being trapped in a closet. Also the classic convenient tape recorder and diary everybody leaves. That's not hackney writing at all.
 
Sitting in the darkness at 1 AM listening to a young woman's trembling voice as she faced death makes me feel something.

Finding a dead cat laying next to a dead body in a building makes me feel something. Finding a handwritten note a few minutes later in a different area about how the cat was named Chester and how its owner wants to keep it safe amplified it even more.

Results may vary for others.
 
Finding someone with a gun trapped in a closet would make me start laughing and sing Trapped in the closet. Finding the convenient tape recording and convenient diary would make me roll my eyes, hearing the trademark Bad voice acting on Bethesda games trying to pull at my string would make me yawn. It probably glitching out and spawning a T posing zombie with a baseball bat would annoy me.

Just like finding the 100th skeleton with a Teddy bear and a Nuka cola starts registering as white noise. If "woman kills herself because she is trapped in a closet" is the best Emile Pagliarulo can come up with I think this whole gimmick of theirs has reached it's decay point a while ago.
 
Last edited:
Not to mention a lot of those quests make no sense. Why would a character be holding some paper that tells their final moments, and why would they write it down when they are trying to survive in their current situation? To what purpose does it serve? This type of quests only works if someone is writing a diary or going on an expedition and writing down on a journal detailing each day.

This is one of the easiest methods of making quests and Bethesda overuses it to the point it makes no sense for the method to be used. Hell, Fallout 76 is mostly this.
 
"I am bleeding out.... good thing I have my taperecorder ready" the Fallout world took Soundcloud too far.
 
I didn't play Fo76-Fo4 nor intend to.
But from what i recall from Fo3, they didn't seem to have planned much content.
A lot of the content was left to individual dev improvisation. While some of it might have been good or average, it doesn't make the game itself great, as those little things were incidental and not the purpose, nor the main course of the game. Most of the main content and most of the secondary stuff was an underworked crap.
 
If the Fallout franchise ever goes back to competent hands, I would love for whoever gets it to make fun of the "convenient tape recording the tragedy" by having all Holodisks be unimportant shit, like music the user recorded off the radio or a little kid playing with the recorder making silly voices, or a mixtape.
 
Walpknut said:
If the Fallout franchise ever goes back to competent hands, I would love for whoever gets it to make fun of the "convenient tape recording the tragedy" by having all Holodisks be unimportant shit, like music the user recorded off the radio or a little kid playing with the recorder making silly voices, or a mixtape.
Click to expand...

So you'd rather they be a complete waste of storage space on your PC that contribute nothing at all to the lore? Nah, I prefer them as they are.
 
SMBComix said:
So you'd rather they be a complete waste of storage space on your PC that contribute nothing at all to the lore? Nah, I prefer them as they are.
Click to expand...
They definitely contribute a shitton to the lore in Fallout 1&2, but in 3? Nah, they're garbage that's, like Walp pointed out, already wastes of storage space and resources despite of "contributing" to "the lore". Judging from people's reaction to 4, it's even worse.
 
Black Angel said:
They definitely contribute a shitton to the lore in Fallout 1&2, but in 3? Nah, they're garbage that's, like Walp pointed out, already wastes of storage space and resources despite of "contributing" to "the lore". Judging from people's reaction to 4, it's even worse.
Click to expand...

Whose reaction? The echo chamber on this forum? Or the general playerbase?

Walpknut said:
They are already wastes of storage space and resources.
Click to expand...

In your opinion. I personally enjoy them and feel they contribute a lot to the world-building.
 
They contribute a lot to making everything feel more artificial and dumb. "I am trapped in the broom closet and all I have are a gun and a tape recorder with a tape with nothing else in it! Time to record myself crying before I shoot myself!".
 
It's also one of the laziest ways to add to the world building. It can work when it's appropriate and in small quantities, but Bethesda overuses it so much that it makes the world feel lifeless and artificial.

I'll take quests with actual living beings, talking to you, with personalities and motivations that add to the world over some random recorder or note on the floor telling me how they lived before they died.
 
Last edited:
"I am malnourished, dehydrated and I think I split my stomach open on a piece of scrap, but I gotta tell my diary how much this hurts. It's my kink".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top