The State Of Fallout, What Does it mean going forward and Letting Go

R.Graves said:
For sure.... But I enjoyed skyrim for some reason...
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Personally I don't even see how people enjoy Skyrim.
I've tried to replay it many times and I just get sick and tired of how tediously repetitious it is.
But, whatever, different strokes and all.

Just saying, Skyrim deserves absolutely no cred what so ever when it comes to its RPG design. It's just as bad as Fallout 4. Hell, in ways it is even worse.
 
Mr Fish said:
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Skyrim's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but it's a much better RPG than Fallout 4. For one thing, your entire background is a complete blank slate. You get to make up everything about your character from the get-go. Heck, there's points in the game where some characters will ask you personal questions, like about your family, and you can answer in multiple ways to help shape your character. In Fallout 4 literally everything about your character is premade from the beginning and you can't change a single thing besides appearance.

Let's also not forget the fact that Skyrim actually lets you be evil by joining the Dark Brotherhood, serving evil Lovecraftian gods, killing off an entire royal bloodline, etc etc. Fallout 4 meanwhile has less evil moments than I have fingers, and 3 of the 8 evil moments in FO4 take place during Kid in a Fridge and Cabot House, so they really shouldn't even count.

There's also the fact that Skyrim still had actual speech checks that did shit other than just granting you more money.

To me, it also felt like there was more of an emphasis in building your character a certain way, like back in Morrowind. Be a thief, a mage, a warrior, etc, but don't try to be all at once or you're gonna have a bad time. True you can mix and match fairly easily, but it's at least not as easy to do as in FO4.

Skyrim also has many quests with at least 2 endings. Many, and I do mean many, of FO4's quests only have a single ending that cannot be changed, with the only difference being some minor dialogue changes.

Skyrim's not much of an RPG, but a better RPG than FO4? God yes. What exactly makes Skyrim a worse RPG than FO4 to you? I'm genuinely curious.
 
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Well, in Skyrim the race of your character is meaningless. Fallout 4 also has some form of restriction to your character with its SPECIAL and perk system which while I find it horrible it at least limits the character. Fallout 4 also offers 4 dialogue options, always, even if those options usually mean the same thing you can at the very least roleplay the tone in which you accept the quest. Compare that to Skyrim where I don't even remember a single time I got a real dialogue choice that wasn't just straightforward linearity. Fallout 4 also allows you to make a choice in the main quest whereas Skyrim's is completely linear.

Fallout 4 also has more speech checks than Skyrim does and and a lot of times it actually did have some impact on what happened.

As to being evil, I don't care. Being "evil" in an RPG is so childish anyway, it usually just comes down to senseless violence for the sake of violence and besides, what's the point in being evil if it isn't acknowledged? But the biggest issue I have with Skyrim's quests is that it is "do or don't do". Yes. You c can be evil. IF... You do an evil quest. However, if you do a quest where your character does it for the sake of being good then you usually don't get a choice in the matter if you want to complete the quest. So yeah, you can be evil, if you do an evil quest. So what? That's not really roleplaying to me. Roleplaying would be allowing me the option to be greedy, heartless or altruistic in a quest. How many quests actually allow that in Skyrim? Most of the time the only roleplaying option you get is if you go out of your way to make-believe roleplay. Like, oh I'll look for this girls pendant but when I find it I'm gonna keep it to myself and never complete the quest.

In Fallout 4 you can crush some radio hosts dream.
You can sabotage a ship of robots that just wanna reach water.
You can let loose a super mutant that's clearly off his rockers and let him wander about civilized areas.
You can eat people.
You can side with a bunch of genocidal maniacs (Brotherhood/Institute).
You can sell a ghoul kid to some random merc.
There's lots of time that you can be "evil" in Fallout 4.
And that's the thing. Fallout 4 gives you the option to be evil during these quests/events.
Whereas in Skyrim, if you want to do the Dark Brotherhood questline then you 'have' to be evil.
There is no choice.

And hell, if we follow Skyrim's example of "do or do not" when it comes to quests then it just opens up even more options to be evil in Fallout 4. For example; You could scrap all of Sanctuary Hills and let Preston and his cronies have nothing and then just leave. You could avoid ever finding your son or shooting him on the spot when you see him as "Father". You could behave like an asshole to your companions constantly. You could let that dumb ghoul kid stay locked up in the fridge.

See how easy it is to be "evil" when it comes to "do or don't do"?

I will say this though; At least Skyrim has quests 'designed to be evil'. Fallout 4 doesn't have many of those. It has quest where you can be evil but none geared specifically towards being evil.

As to blank slate, sure, Skyrim's got that going for it, so what? I mean, a blank canvas is only as good as the tools you can use to paint it with. And yeah, Skyrim does have a character building system that allows for players to specialize a lot more than in Fallout 4. That's true. I wouldn't consider that roleplaying though. If I play as a Scout in Team Fortress 2 then eventually I'll get damn good at playing a scout but that don't mean that it is an RPG. And even so, Fallout 4 still allows you to do the same thing. Only it isn't as tedious as Skyrim is. And ultimately, what does it matter if your character turned out a mage, rogue or paladin if the only reaction you get out of people is a generic comment from the guards? Like, yeah, your fire mage and your brutish orc warrior will play somewhat differently but when we get down to it you're just choosing to kill a draughr with a cleave or a fireball; Regardless of the character, that draughr will be killed and no one will react to it.

I'm not saying Fallout 4 is miles above Skyrim. There are some things Skyrim does better but there are some things Fallout 4 does better but when we get down to it neither surpass one another. For me, at least Fallout 4 is fun to play as a shoot n looter whereas SKyrim is just horrifyingly tediou and repetitive and it makes me want to kill myself if I play it for an extended period of time.
 
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You know, R.Graves, I'm not picking on you or anything but really man, tone down on the ellipses, you use them way to often and usually in incorrect contexts, just a little annoyance.
 
Izak said:
You know, R.Graves, I'm not picking on you or anything but really man, tone down on the ellipses, you use them way to often and usually in incorrect contexts, just a little annoyance.
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That's completely fair. I was mostly using them as a way to seperate thoughts and to be honest I suck at punctuation. Can't do it. So those are mostly an attempt at making my thoughts easy to understand rather than just a jumbled mess.
 
Call me a optimist or a fool if you wish, but I still think it's a little bit to early to give up hope while Obsidian and inXile still around.
 
Mr Fish said:
As to being evil, I don't care. Being "evil" in an RPG is so childish anyway, it usually just comes down to senseless violence for the sake of violence and besides, what's the point in being evil if it isn't acknowledged? But the biggest issue I have with Skyrim's quests is that it is "do or don't do". Yes. You c can be evil. IF... You do an evil quest. However, if you do a quest where your character does it for the sake of being good then you usually don't get a choice in the matter if you want to complete the quest. So yeah, you can be evil, if you do an evil quest. So what? That's not really roleplaying to me. Roleplaying would be allowing me the option to be greedy, heartless or altruistic in a quest. How many quests actually allow that in Skyrim? Most of the time the only roleplaying option you get is if you go out of your way to make-believe roleplay. Like, oh I'll look for this girls pendant but when I find it I'm gonna keep it to myself and never complete the quest.

In Fallout 4 you can crush some radio hosts dream.
You can sabotage a ship of robots that just wanna reach water.
You can let loose a super mutant that's clearly off his rockers and let him wander about civilized areas.
You can eat people.
You can side with a bunch of genocidal maniacs (Brotherhood/Institute).
You can sell a ghoul kid to some random merc.
There's lots of time that you can be "evil" in Fallout 4.
And that's the thing. Fallout 4 gives you the option to be evil during these quests/events.
Whereas in Skyrim, if you want to do the Dark Brotherhood questline then you 'have' to be evil.
There is no choice.

And hell, if we follow Skyrim's example of "do or do not" when it comes to quests then it just opens up even more options to be evil in Fallout 4. For example; You could scrap all of Sanctuary Hills and let Preston and his cronies have nothing and then just leave. You could avoid ever finding your son or shooting him on the spot when you see him as "Father". You could behave like an asshole to your companions constantly. You could let that dumb ghoul kid stay locked up in the fridge.

See how easy it is to be "evil" when it comes to "do or don't do"?
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For the most part I agree with what you're saying, except for this big ole segment right here.

First of all eating people happens in Skyrim too, you just need the Ring of Nemeria to do it, which you get by joining a cannibal cult. Skyrim lets you join evil genocidal maniacs too, the cannibal cults and the many cults of the daedra. So that's not really a contest either. In fact, Skyrim has a lot more evil factions you can actually join instead of just 1 debatedly evil faction, the Institute. You also mention how you can not give a rat's ass about your kid and shoot Shaun on sight when you first meet him, but I can do that for shittons of Skyrim characters too. Raeloff's probably a good example. He rescues you from the destruction of Helgen, you both escape together, and then what can you do? Murder his family in Riverwood and proceed to kill him as "thanks" for saving your life. I'd say that's a lot worse than shooting your son, a potential psychopath.

Second of all Skyrim has a lot more opportunities to be evil. Sure some quests are tailored to just be evil and there's no good alternative, but in a game where a lot of the quests are tailored to being specifically good, I don't mind that. In Fallout 4, quest-wise, these are all the evil quest options in the entire game:

1. Sabotaging the USS Constitution

2. Not giving that kid in Vault 81 the mole rat cure (I'm not even going to go over the fact that apparently this cure is a "cure-all" for any disease ever, so if we kept it, why the fuck didn't we have the option to give it to Shaun and cure his cancer since Curie states it can literally fix ANY disease known to man? Ahem, anyway)

3. Allowing Lorenzo Cabot to roam free instead of killing him, and then become an immortal god by taking his Jesus Juice every week

4. Selling Billy into slavery

5. Telling Virgil, for no reason whatsoever, that you didn't find the super mutant cure at the Institute, upon which he asks you to put him out of his misery. You can't even do anything with the cure if you don't give it to him, so this is pointless.

6. Blowing up the Institute (not sure if this one should count either, since the alternative is killing the entire Railroad and Brotherhood)

7. Betraying that young guy in Diamond City into giving you the entire drug stash after you help him stop a drug raid.

8. Lieing to Moreno about who stole his drugs and then get paid by the father of the son you shot during the drug deal to kill Moreno. (Not sure if this one should fully count either really, considering Moreno's an evil bastard, and so is the father of the son you kill)

9. This one's a lot more grey (surprisingly) than it is good or evil but I guess I'll include it: Siding with the scientist living under Covenant and helping her continue her Synth checking experiments.

10. Making Mama Murphy OD

11. Convincing that farmboy to kill a hostage at the Forge HQ (and they all turn hostile on you regardless so really not sure if this one should count either considering the result is the exact same as if you'd let the hostage go free and there's no extra reward or anything)


And quest-wise, unfortunately, that's literally it. Those are all the evil quest moments in the entire game. Hell, some of those I listed may not even be considered evil by other people. Meanwhile in Skyrim I can list a lot of quests that have evil outcomes but also have good choices. The cannibal quest I keep bringing up is one of those. You can either join the cannibal cult or help a priest of Mara destroy the place. I could more or less attribute this to the fact that Fallout 4 only has 70 quests as opposed to however many Skyrim has, but honestly that just shows Bethesda's laziness considering Skyrim came out SIX years ago now. If you can think of more, kindly list them, because after playing through the game twice those are the only ones I found.

Sure if I want to run around like a chicken with my head cut off, eating people, killing everyone in the game, that's possible to do in both Skyrim and Fallout 4. The difference here is the fact that Skyrim at least has a tiny bit of thought put into an evil playthrough by making specifically evil quests and factions, whereas Fallout 4 has barely any.
 
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a721402 said:
Call me a optimist or a fool if you wish, but I still think it's a little bit to early to give up hope while Obsidian and inXile still around.
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Chris Avellone has left Obsidian, InXile has very little connection to Fallout, other than Brian Fargo being in it, Obsidian have mentioned over and over again that it's incredibly unlikely that Bethesda will give the series to someone else, and especially not them. I'm afraid there is little hope.
 
JO'Geran said:
Chris Avellone has left Obsidian, InXile has very little connection to Fallout, other than Brian Fargo being in it, Obsidian have mentioned over and over again that it's incredibly unlikely that Bethesda will give the series to someone else, and especially not them. I'm afraid there is little hope.
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Well, he do left but it's not mean he will never be back in the future, and InXile now holding the right of Van Buren (the FO3 we need), and a little hope still is a hope.
 
Call me a fatalist but it better to Fallout just die already. As time goes by, the lesser effort is invested into each Fallout game developed by Bethesda. Don't know if it is true or not but Bethesda originally contracted to do three Fallout games and that's it. Now when they holding the whole franchise it is questionable considering Fallout Shelter as a game.
 
I'm not such a big fan of Avallone personally (pure treason, I know). I find the politics of recovery and growth in the post-apocalyptic world far more interesting than everything being blown to shit by nukes.
 
I suppose every franchise has to end sometime...yet the way Fallout had to go out is just sad. It came close to dying after FO2, and honestly...maybe that would have been for the best. Sure, we wouldn't have gotten NV, but the franchise also wouldn't have been stained by FO3 and 4.
 
Stains can be ignored, all and all I'm happy with the 4 good games that came out of the franchise, and (hopefully) I'll be happy with the new Fallout games fans are making, like Mutants Rising and Van Buren.
 
Izak said:
Stains can be ignored, all and all I'm happy with the 4 good games that came out of the franchise, and (hopefully) I'll be happy with the new Fallout games fans are making, like Mutants Rising and Van Buren.
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Ah, good point. We probably won't get another good "official" Fallout, with fan-made games, there are huge possibilities. Knowing Bethesda, they'd probably send their lawyers after the authors. Seriously, they fucking sued a company for using "Scrolls" as the name for a game. I'm not sure, but fan-made games would be classified as fair use (assuming the authors aren't trying to make money off it), right?
 
Well, really they're just large scale mods for Fallout 2 and Bethesda's generally been very good about modifying their games; I guess Van Buren could hypothetically see some legal trouble considering Inxiles trademark and Bethesda's owning the design docs, but they'd have to be pretty huge pricks to pursue that through the courts.
 
Izak said:
Stains can be ignored, all and all I'm happy with the 4 good games that came out of the franchise, and (hopefully) I'll be happy with the new Fallout games fans are making, like Mutants Rising and Van Buren.
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4 good games?
 
Eh I've moved on but that doesn't mean I'm forgetting about Fallout 1 and 2. Cliche as it is life is too short to have a anti-Bethesda brigade, it's okay to shit on their games every now and again but for me all the Fallout criticizing has become boring and depressing for me and the Codex has made me realize shitting on all bad games as well as listening to other people doing it is a ton of fun.
I love Fallout 1 and to a lesser extent 2 but it's time to move on don't you think?
 
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