The failures of Fallout 4 as an RPG

Which one is the best RPG? Does not necessarily have to be the best game...

  • Fallout 4

    Votes: 1 2.3%

  • Mass Effect 2

    Votes: 1 2.3%

  • Witcher 3

    Votes: 18 41.9%

  • Dragon Age: Origins

    Votes: 8 18.6%

  • The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

    Votes: 15 34.9%
  • Total voters
    43
ZigzagPX4

ZigzagPX4

The Swiftness of the Ranger
http://fraghero.com/6-games-that-are-better-rpgs-than-fallout-4/

So while the site above is mostly a random game journalism clickbait site with usually inaccurate news, the fact that unimportant sites report on this shows that even the most basic levels of the audience understands the lack of RPGness to it. This plus the fact that it was linked from two Facebook pages, both of which were generally mainstream, shows that while Bethesda's target audience understands perfectly that Fallout 4 is a poor RPG, they simply do not care.

And while some of the examples of RPGs on that list isn't the best in the world (Mass Effect 2, as a sterling example of RPGs? Not really), the article outright mentions that Fallout 2 was a better RPG. At this point I would really go so far as to assume that Bethesda's target audience and most of the people on the Fallout 4 train at the moment perfectly understands and existence of the classic Fallout games and simply don't mind.

But in a way, this sorts of demonstrates awareness and shows that people aren't exactly blindly and mindlessly following Fallout 4 just because it appeals to all their wants. Instead, people play Fallout 4 because there are people that actually enjoy loot-shooters with repetitive outpost clearing and crafting/settlement system. Just a thing to keep in mind, that's all.

Also, I would like to bring back up the discussion on how exactly Fallout 4 fails as an RPG. Feel free to elaborate on all the little details.

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Clarification: Please stop asking me why the games I included these games, why I didn't include that game, etcetera. This list is derived directly from the article I linked, barring Fallout 2 and New Vegas, in light of the fact that we all know there's a slight bias towards them on this forum, and that they would definitely win if put on the poll.

Is this an unfair way of setting out the polls? Absolutely. But we're here to judge these games as RPGs. Not circle around how much we love good RPGs for the umpteenth time in this forum.
 
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I went TW3, of those choices TW3 was the only one I felt unsure what consequences my decisions would have, and it was awesome.
 
I think there are a lot of ways to do an RPG that are equally valid, and this makes ranking these things on a line difficult. Like restricting to tabletop for a minute here (where nobody questions whether the RPGs are, in fact, RPGs), you can have your standard "got to get to the bottom of the dungeon and kill the lich" that's more or less linear and involves a lot of combat, you can have your wide open Roleplaying Setting qua Game where the PCs exist in an environment and there's stuff going on and the PCs can get involved with whatever and whomever they like, and there's the the more linear but decidedly narrative RPG where the PCs get wrapped up in certain plots involving GM characters and are able to perturb the plot though their interactions with Storyteller characters (e.g. they can't change that the Duc is attempting a coup, they can only help, hinder, or ignore him.)

So I think it makes sense to look at roleplaying games not as a binary or a continuum, but as a three dimensional continuum. The three types outlaid above could be seen as lying along the "mechanical", "setting", and "character" axes respectively. Along these lines I do think that Mass Effect 2 is a roleplaying game, as it fairly-closely models any of the dozens of courtly-intrigue/character drama RPGs I've run in tabletop. It's just not an effective mechanical roleplaying game (your choices of weapons and skills are so limited as to be basically trivial), and there's very little external space for you to explore. But, just like the "six people are trapped on an oil rig and one of them is secretly a monster" roleplaying scenario, this counts too.

The interesting thing about Fallout 4 is that it seems to fail on all three axes. There are a ton of perks and weapons but ultimately how you build your character doesn't seem to matter at all, because it's so easy to get everything that you could want, and it's not like there's interesting synergy in combining powers (a la "I can trip on an AoO, I can make an AoO on a successsful trip, and I can make an AoO when the enemy falls prone" in one of your dungeon oriented games). There's a big ol' setting in Fallout 4, but ultimately it doesn't seem to care that much about what the PC does (it's not like the Raiders stop respawning ever), except in those odd situations where it cares about what the PC does and literally nothing else (which appears to me to be akin to serving boiling hot soup to counteract salad that has frozen). Regarding the character dimension, this is where Fallout 4 really falls short since there are very few characters that appear to have agendas that they pursue in any way except "waiting around for the PC to do it for them", and your interactions with other characters are pretty much limited to "Yes", "Sarcastic Yes", "Later", and "Wut" so there's not a lot of depth to explore there.

But the long and short of it is that I don't think we can rate RPGs linearly saying "this is more of an RPG than this other thing" when "roleplaying game" is not a one-dimensional entity. The problem with Fallout 4 is that it seems to fall short in every dimension that defines a roleplaying game.
 
Fallout 4 has to be the answer. Is this IQ test? Am I to find the intruder? I swear Fallout 4 is the only shooter game in this list of RPGs. What was the question again please?
 
Only the worst Beth appologists would deny that Fo3 & Fo4 are low on the RPG side.
Most people that buy and like the game just don't care. They don't agree or disagree, they don't care.
But most of those people aren't really vocal about it. They just buy the game, play it for a while, then pick the next game...
 
Witcher 3 win.s Tons of choice and consequences, with decisions that are tough and hard. Every one has an angle, and most of the time they're justified in some way.
 
DAO did it for me. I had a good laugh being a female elf going through the Grey Warden ritual. While all the men around me were worrying about surviving the ritual, my response was 'Looks like I'm the only man around here.' And it did not need a [Sarcastic] tag.
 
Fallout 2 and NV were on the list. I took them out on purpose, because otherwise they would win.

:smug:

MercenarySnake said:
Fallout 4 is not even an RPG though..it's a shooter and not a very good one at that. Forgot Fallout 1 on that poll as a best RPG choice.
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Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas was both on the list of better RPGs than Fallout 4(made by the same audience that enjoyed Fallout 4, so at least they know quality) but I deliberately took it out because one, there's going to be an unintentional bias towards those games for sure considering this is a Fallout forum, and two, Fallout 2 was an RPG with so much depth it surpasses the rest of the list and would obviously make it unbalanced.

So I decided to make a poll that would actually turn out not-so-biased. In that I was biased myself. But nevermind that. I made this poll deliberately full of pseudo-RPGs that were more focused on narrative than the roleplaying experiences, so it would be more of a thought-provoker.

Corvega said:
Fallout 4 has to be the answer. Is this IQ test? Am I to find the intruder? I swear Fallout 4 is the only shooter game in this list of RPGs. What was the question again please?
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I just took the list of "Better RPGs than Fallout 4" from that article page and put it into a poll, then removed Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas because I know there's a bit of bias lean towards them in this forum and also because they would most certainly beat all the others if put in.
 
Dragon Age: Origins definitely deserves to be played. It has an entirely different opening Act depending on which race you choose to play as, and that just shows great effort on the part of the developers. But then the sequel became the example everyone points to when they want to explain how EA ruins videogames.

Mass Effect 2? Why not 1 or 3? Certainly not the best RPGs but I recently played through the whole Mass Effect series and I think it's one of the best sci-fi games ever made as a whole series.

The "Indoctrination Theory" that was made to explain the ending to the series was phenomenal, and even if you don't agree with it I personally feel the series turned out very well which is hard to do with video game trilogies. However, there was a definite lack of consequences to choices you made throughout the series that should have been built upon more in order to be a truly great RPG.

Witcher series is a better RPG - Witcher 2 has an entirely different second half depending on a choice you make in the first Act of the game. That's good effort. And the environmental storytelling is actually thought-out and planned well rather than being random skeletons in funny, nonsensical positions like FO4. The combat and bestiary are well-done if you actually read up on it. Also, the choices you make don't always turn out well and you really are left worrying about unforeseen consequences to your actions - something lacking in many games which present the simple "Will you be a nice guy or a douche?" choices.

Why is FO4 even on the same list as those other games lol?
 
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One of the reasons F4 fails has a rpg is the lack of player agency. Barring the beggining of the game, before the player goes to the vault, the problem starts with the first quest where you have to help the minutemen remnants against a group of raiders.

You can´t simply choose not to get involved, something you could do in previous titles, or join the raiders, and neither can you alternate methods besides kill everyone.

This then repeats itself during the rest of the mainquest and sidequests for the entirety of the game.
 
mrchaos said:
One of the reasons F4 fails has a rpg is the lack of player agency. Barring the beggining of the game, before the player goes to the vault, the problem starts with the first quest where you have to help the minutemen remnants against a group of raiders.

You can´t simply choose not to get involved, something you could do in previous titles, or join the raiders, and neither can you alternate methods besides kill everyone.

This then repeats itself during the rest of the mainquest and sidequests for the entirety of the game.
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You literally can only say yes.
 
Dr Fallout said:
Sure, the only thing people need are different versions of the same thing.
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The best way I can think of rescuing the dialogue wheel (besides having a choice of saying no) is to have an investigate option. Chosing it opens another wheel that gives the chance of asking about everything (considering the sole survivor, this would be crucial).
 
mrchaos said:
Yeah, that´s the problem with the dialogue wheel in a nutshell
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You *can* do a dialogue wheel where you get different choices that lead to different places. You will probably want more than four options, and descriptions that are more helpful than a couple of words, and a game that has a lot more verbs than "shoot" and "loot", but it can be done.

I mean, you just take the dialogue list from any game that has a dialogue list and you put it in a circle then you have a dialogue wheel. Fallout 4 just implements the worst dialogue wheel I've ever seen.
 
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