The flaw of Fallout 4 is not the writing or world-building

CT Phipps

CT Phipps

Carbon Dated and Proud
No, allow me to state my issue with Fallout 4.

I think it's a good game. I think it's enjoyable. I think it's entertaining. I think the Commonwealth isn't badly conceived and I like all of the Factions.

*half the audience leaves*

I think it's SHALLOW.

This is the problem I have with the game and why I like Fallout 3, for all of its flaws, enough to be one of my all-time favorite games but Fallout 4 keeps losing credibility with me. It's the fact the game COULD have been great and didn't actually need any necessary changes or removal from its systems.

No, for me at least, its the fact it's very obvious this game was half-assedly written and created with the absolute minimum of effort in every conceivable way. The ideas are all there to make something magnificent but it's all just a theme park because you can't ENGAGE with any of them. It took me a while to realize this but my problem with things are it's about as immersive as an MMO with one player.

There's Four Factions in the game but there's only two endings. You can Destroy the Institute or you can Save the Institute with the dialogue being barely different for the former endings for three factions. There's a few moments which hint at a MUCH BETTER much more realized set of endings like Patriot's suicide or the letter from Piper about you taking over the Institute.

These things needed to be included and every companion giving different reactions for each side but it was all them giving the same answer to almost everything you said. Even as early as the game's beginning, the character's react the same way to whether you hate newspapers or love them--ridiculous as that question is, it's symbolic of the issues.

The frustrating thing about the game is you can only kill things inside it or make the occasional speech check (which works like Obi-Wan Kenobi waving his hand). The Combat Zone and Robot Races are one example of this but it's actually everywhere. When you find out the Mayor is a slave of the Institute, how about telling Hancock? How about talking to Shaun about Synth sentience? How about asking how the Railroad became an army that apparently has dozens if not hundreds of members? There's a thousand monsters to slay and loot to scavenge but no ability to affect the plot. It's actually worse than Borderlands 2 because at least you aren't FOOLED into believing you're able to interact with anything.

The game is, to cop a D&D term, incredibly Railroaded.

I actually think it would have benefited from the cut content where Dance can become head of the BOS despite the fact he's a Synth. Yes, it would have been STUPID but it would have increased your ability to engage with the story. I didn't like Far Harbor's factions or the island but it was at least something you could solve in multiple ways with different effects. You could (almost) fully explore Kasumi's condition and get her kicked out of her home, kill her, or convince her to return.

Fallout 4 is a wide pond but not a terribly DEEP one and that's it's biggest flaw to me. The writing isn't great but the problem is none of the ideas are explored--agree with them or not.

Even my beloved Nuka World needed the fully explored option of liberating it.
 
Well, only took over two years. Could have, would have, SHOULD have. Doesn't matter, because those hypothethics do not and will not ever exist beyond your imaginations.

The writing and worldbuiling are shallow and half-assed. Most systems are Shallow and Half Assed. The campaign is S.A.H.A. The progression is S.A.H.A after around level 10. The so clamoured settlement system is S.A.H.A. And now the acronym gag has gone weary, I have to wonder which aspect of the game can you go and say "wow this took at least a fair lot of heart and work to exist in the game in its current form". Because I can't think of one. Well, maybe except the soundtrack, which in it of itself has the issue of meddling the tone all over the place like if it was Skyrim or something, the original tracks from that guest star are meh and most of the radio is Fo3's again, which again had the issue of mostly being "LOL FALLOUT".

And as an aspiring game designer, I don't say it out of spite; it's just that the sole lack of attention to detail beyond the inconsequential bullshit nobody cares about (wow more skeletons and teddy bears), it just feels so gutted down to me.

There's no one thing that you can change and suddenly would make everything better besides a complete redo from ground up, or the most extensive TC for a Bethesda game to date, and the reason why it's hard to put it aside as pettiness is because it's the baby of one of the biggest publishers and developers out there today.

I myself have watched all of the Transformers movies as they came to my TV provider service and do actually remember the first one pretty damn fondly. Albeit it's pretty obvious that the already low quality of these movies ha dgone out the damn window, it was enjoyable. Because ALL entertainment is "enjoyable". That is the most bottomline function of it. Something absolutely NOT enjoyable would be something that exited your screen and shoved pictures of intercourse feauturing your loving grandma in your face. And hey, if it sways one's way one could even enjoy that as well.

I'm not even going to say "as art", because that's a needlessly considered as sinonym to virtuousness. I'm going to say, though, that undoubtedly we should expect at least A BIT more from such a studio, such a franchise and even such a public.
 
Well, yeah. I've been saying basically that since Fallout 4 was released. It has a lot of good ideas, but ALL of them are implemented with an air of laziness and shallowness.
The base gameplay isn't too bad, I enjoy how it feels as an FPS/RPG-lite, but everything is shallow. Without mods to expand on every element it gets boring very, very quickly, because it's all just smoke and mirrors. Yeah, you can walk around for hours and find new locations, but these locations mostly don't have anything interesting going on. They're either a settlement where you can do a randomized quest to get them on your side or a bunch of hostiles that you kill. Sometimes you get some tidbits of interesting stories in terminal entries and stuff, but all in all they're quite pointless.
Settlements "allied" to you are pointless as well, because they never evolve on their own, you have to rebuild the entire wasteland yourself, by hand, with a limited set of stuff and wonky mechanics. It's fun for a very short time (slightly longer with some mods), but certainly not enough to do it over and over again for settlements that are not Sanctuary.
 
I can't help but wonder what the game would have been liked if they'd not REMOVED anything or changed the premise but simply added a lot more content relating to player choice, lore, and interaction. It would have required even more ridiculous amounts of voice acting but if they spent more time giving unique responses versus letting Codsworth call you Furiosa then I think this game would have been much better.

Maybe it is too BIG to account for all these variables but the sheer amount of times you can't do ANYTHING but shoot up the place or Speech check is amazing.
 
The "will call you by your own name!" gimmick is completely lost as soon as you play in any other of the avaleible languages for the game. Nevermind how IMO most are probably better.
 
Prone Squanderer said:
Made them a shit ton of cash though.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, no one would be crazy enough to say that it is not an easily sellable material. I could stay here all day citing the reasons for the success of this game, like having one of the best trailers of all time, the public conquered by skyrim wanting to check out the next game by Bethesda, the steady reviews etc
 
Beating a dead horse here, m8, we all came to that conclusion pretty quickly upon playing Fallout 4 for a few hours. Only ever kind of enjoyment I can get out of it is simply making an uncaring merc and blow shit up with pure explosives and that still can't keep me interested for long.
 
I think it pisses me off primarily because I WANT to play the Brotherhood of Steel with a fully formed arc explaining how the Fallout 3 Brotherhood became evil and what to do about it. The thing is, this is probably lost on the people here who hate F3, but those guys MEANT something to me and were among my fictional friends (so to speak).

Seeing it all glossed over with nary a mention of the Lone Wanderer pisses me off to no end.

I feel similarly, to a lesser extent, with the Institute.
 
Even good parts of it are so badly connected to the rest of the game and its world.

Quests are mostly bad- they have good concept (mostly), but they explored them so badly. Really, even Cabot House could be something interesting, instead of Ancient Aliens guy from History Channels wet dream.

Base building like in Minecraft- but in Minecraft I don't have to haul my ass back to base every time I get one Redstone hotplate over my carrying capacity. I don't have to look inside those caves for tin cans like some damn hobo trying to get some change for bottle of cheap beer.

Companions affinity- good idea, but badly done. Do I have to add something more than "Your grandson loves how you wear power armour! You are one step closer to entering his butthole, just pass this charisma check and listen to three lines of his story!"

Enemies- we have whole Fallout bestiary! After that street with unnamed raiders with some terminal journals you pass Supermutants camp, then you have generic military mercenaries encampment. You go past that pier with mutant crabs and roaches and BAM! Deathclaw! You also get into fight with ferals and ghoul gangsters. My first 20 minutes in downtown Boston and I already met all enemies.

Dialogue wheel- always 4 options. Even if there should be one or two. I'm not talking that there should be more, I hate reading (especially newspapers).

DLC/Season Pass- Fallout 1 and 2- no DLCs.
FO3- Point Lookout, Pitt, True Ending DLC, COD simulation and that one where you are watching Ancient Aliens on History Channel.
FO:NV- HH, DM, LR, OWB, pre- order items and extra guns
FO4- 3 packages with stuff to build, RobCo Certified with 30 minutes quest, Point Lookout 2.0 and Nuka world.
You could buy all previous games on Steam (on sale, I know) and pay less than for Season Pass after price rise.

To sum up- it could be good.
 
Shallow is exactly how I described it in an argument on here not too long ago. I thought it went without saying on this forum. Amazingly some people can and will argue to the contrary, and they're not all vapid Beth fans who love the newest thing the most. I was pretty surprised tbh.
 
I think everyone here already realises what you are saying.

While we complain about the writing and world-building a lot(And rightly so), I think everyone realises the wider problem is that Bethesda makes shallow, easily-consumable games with not much substance.
 
The oddball thing is this WASN'T as severe a problem in Skyrim. There were places you could have expanded the storyline like giving you a chance to side with the Silver Hand against the Companions or more dialogue but generally, if you were willing to read up on things like Ulfric Stormcloak's Rebellion or the Forsworn uprising, you could find all of the details of the past few decades of Skyrim history.

There were few big obvious holes in the narrative unlike in Fallout where there were always things you should say but couldn't.
 
CT Phipps said:
I think it's SHALLOW.
Click to expand...
First of all lemme clarify that the writing and world building are nothing short of insulting garbage and at the very least is on a level unacceptable for this franchise. However yes this is arguably an EVEN BIGGER problem. This has been a problem for a while. Maybe even since before morrowind but it's there in morrowind too. Not that morrowind is shallow but in every Bethesda game anything potentially interesting anything with plausible repercussions anything with storytelling or world building potential never amounts to anything more than a footnote.
 
R.Graves said:
First of all lemme clarify that the writing and world building are nothing short of insulting garbage and at the very least is on a level unacceptable for this franchise. However yes this is arguably an EVEN BIGGER problem. This has been a problem for a while. Maybe even since before morrowind but it's there in morrowind too. Not that morrowind is shallow but in every Bethesda game anything potentially interesting anything with plausible repercussions anything with storytelling or world building potential never amounts to anything more than a footnote.
Click to expand...

I think the problem with that is the lack of ending slides. You can have any number of consequences with ending slides as the consequences HAPPEN but they don't have to happen NOW. I argued the ideal way to do this would be to have the ending slides happen after you finish the game and then you can continue the game.

The big issue I have with Fallout 4 is that it's really a betrayal even to the fans of Fallout 3. The people here, generally, hate Fallout 3 and consider it non-canon anyway so it doesn't bother people how much the lore of F3 was tortured but for those who love F3 and consider it their favorite in the franchise along with NV--its a real kick in the balls. Bethesda doesn't even respect it's OWN lore as they gloss over the Lone Wanderer, Kill Sarah Lyons, and don't explain innumberable questions about the Capital Wasteland players returning would have.
 
CT, what... happened? Did you stumble upon a bundle of red pills? :mrgreen:

Seeing a bit of complete denial here on responses. It's still quite competent and is most definitively fun, until you get to a point when you realize you're not anymore, where you can choose to go on and squeeze the toothpaste to see where the main story leads, fuck around aimlessly until you get bored or just drop it. Like all Bethesda games really, except without the lasting appeal.
 
Arnust said:
CT, what... happened? Did you stumble upon a bundle of red pills? :mrgreen:

Seeing a bit of complete denial here on responses. It's still quite competent and is most definitively fun, until you get to a point when you realize you're not anymore, where you can choose to go on and squeeze the toothpaste to see where the main story leads, fuck around aimlessly until you get bored or just drop it. Like all Bethesda games really, except without the lasting appeal.
Click to expand...

I gave Fallout 3 a 10 out of 10 and it's on my "all time favorite games" lists.

I gave Fallout 4 an 8 which is a massive step down.

It may be a 6 or 7 now.

Basically, the game being fun and decent doesn't keep it from being something I felt was a massive step down from Bethesda's previous work in Skyrim and Fallout 3. It's kind of the frustrating thing here as the general tone here is that Fallout 4 is more of the same but to the dedicated Bethesda fan....no it's not.

It's worse.
 
CT Phipps said:
I gave Fallout 3 a 10 out of 10 and it's on my "all time favorite games" lists.

I gave Fallout 4 an 8 which is a massive step down.

It may be a 6 or 7 now.

Basically, the game being fun and decent doesn't keep it from being something I felt was a massive step down from Bethesda's previous work in Skyrim and Fallout 3. It's kind of the frustrating thing here as the general tone here is that Fallout 4 is more of the same but to the dedicated Bethesda fan....no it's not.

It's worse.
Click to expand...
I'd say that "favourite", "best" and "important personally" can be completely different listings. Favourite are games that you keep coming back to and have little to no problems with, best are which are closest to objectivity in quality and worth reccomending to others, and Important games that ahve been quite significant in your life or just on your enjoyment of the medium. For you Fo3 seems to be between the first and the latter.

But I digress, I don't think anybody in cold and without a bit of the bile could say that it's a step down even from Bethesda's standard. Pretty noticeable that they've just given up once they've managed to get theit game that will have sold the most ever and will make them known for the most. Fallout is pretty clearly an appetizer between TES and TES now.
 
Didn't we conclude this in our review? That the game is simply not interesting and there's no motivation to spend time in?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top