What GOTY tells us, and how it might affect Fallout.

[MutatedPanda]

"The Witcher 3" took home the Game of the Year award (and rightfully so) for 2015, the same year as Fallout 4, a game that has been anticipated for over 7 years. Now, if Bethesda really cares about the Fallout franchise, and are legitimately willing to change the series for the better, than I really think they need to take a step back and look at the fact that a relatively lesser known game company won the highest (I think) award for games in 2015.
Now, I want to know, do you guys think Bethesda will take their eyes off their sales charts for a moment, and even so much as contemplate that they should put effort into games that people will enjoy instead of pumping out the same garbage every few years?

(Also, not sure if this is the right thread for this, but if not, I'd be happy to move it)

 

[Irwin John Finster]

do you guys think Bethesda will

The answer to any question that begins with this phrase is always going to be "no."

FO4 is creatively bankrupt and people who think it is a deep experience are intellectually bankrupt.

It's a business now and it made a lot of money and that's all there is to it.

 

[MutatedPanda]

The answer to any question that begins with this phrase is always going to be "no."

FO4 is creatively bankrupt and people who think it is a deep experience are intellectually bankrupt.

It's a business now and it made a lot of money and that's all there is to it.

Unfortunately.

 

[mrchaos]

Best thing to do is leaving the dialogue wheel behind. There was a negative response from pretty much everyone.

I hope they use something else besides a father/child motive story.

 

[Spacemunkey]

I think the best thing to come out of FO4's lack of awards is the shotgun like blast to Todd Howard's ego,it's about time he isn't praised for every turd he shits out. As for what this means for BGS as a studio I can't say, but I do know that even people who say Skyrim is the best RPG ever are complaining about the lack of depth in FO4.

 

[Irwin John Finster]

As for what this means for BGS as a studio I can't say, but I do know that even people who say Skyrim is the best RPG ever are complaining about the lack of depth in FO4.

I feel that way regarding Fallout 3 compared to Fallout 4. Fallout 3 wasn't a great RPG or anything but it is a masterpiece of an RPG compared to Fallout 4. When I played Skyrim I realized the trend was making these games more and more linear and shallow to the point of being an action game.

 

[DVL]

I hope they use something else besides a father/child motive story.

Well, I do suppose that the father-daughter plot feels very much like the gaming equivalent of Oscar baiting. So far, it's rarely done well.

Fallout 4 - bad
Bioshock Infinity - bad
Dishonored - has potential but bad
Last of Us - good

 

[MercenarySnake]

GOTY awards are useless, to answer your question though..my response is, *laughs uncontrollably*. Their creativity is now non-existent and the only thing they want now is high sales numbers and money. Half Life 3 has a higher chance of releasing than a good Fallout game from Bethesda.

 

[MutatedPanda]

GOTY awards are useless, to answer your question though..my response is, *laughs uncontrollably*. Their creativity is now non-existent and the only thing they want now is high sales numbers and money. Half Life 3 has a higher chance of releasing than a good Fallout game from Bethesda.

Sounds about right.

 

[mrchaos]

Bioshock Infinity - bad

I disagree with that. Unlike F4 it doesn´t shoehorned it right at beggining and instead it cames has wham episode at the end. The rest of the game is enjoyable, since the gunplay is better than F4.

 

[ZigzagPX4]

do you guys think Bethesda will

The answer to any question that begins with this phrase is always going to be "no."

"Do you think Bethesda will continue to cater to the lowest common denominator in the gaming community and continue to streamline and simplify Fallout until it is essentially of no gameplay value?"

"Do you think Bethesda will not improve their grasp over their skills at trying to create a coherent narrative and an engaging RPG?"

"Do you think Bethesda will go further with this doomed slope they've begun to slide down with Fallout 4?"

"Do you think Bethesda will make whatever next game they develop an oversimplified, overhyped piece of garbage?"

 

[Theinnerfish]

Bethesda makes every new game of theirs more and more "welcoming" to the new players. In this pursuit they've reached to an extreme (just like Bioware did with ME3) where even the casual players they gathered throughout the last couple of years , find Fallout 4 way too alienating.

It happens when a developer forgets the fact that even though casualisation brings new players; it's the unique things in their products make these new players stay. For example if Call of Duty: Multi-player becomes more arcade and "noob" friendly(like new Battlefront) they start losing their players.

Same goes for any RPG. Once Bioware turned their back on the formula that made their game so beloved: sales went down, fans got salty even outright hostile toward the developers, backslash after backslash and so Bioware(actualy EA) took a step back with Dragon Age(and probably with Mass Effect too)

GOTY matters and while they're minority(when you only care about sale numbers) fans matter too. The hype they create at 9gag, reddit and etc. more efficent than any TV commercial AND IT'S F**KING BILLION TIMES MORE EFFICENT THAN THAT DISGUSTING HOLLYWOODESQUE LAUNCH PARTY WITH THOSE IMBECILE SCUM WHO DIDN'T EVEN HEARD OF FALLOUT! (i had to take it out of my system, god if this party was done in my country under my jurisdiction i would take everyone of them under custody for a night. Just so i could ease my bitterness. I wouldn't even care if it'd cost me my career.)


I don't know about consoles but as far as i can say, Fallout 4 sells worse than Skyrim by miles. Because i still remember for months Skyrim was "the" top seller and it was at the top 10 more than a year. Also it made it to the top 10 during every steam sale.

As it's once wisely said:



So yeah they're going to take a hint.

 

[Walpknut]

THat launch party is a metaphor for everything wrong with this game.

http://imgur.com/9NQUk74

Just pure and unadulterated sell out.

I disagree with that. Unlike F4 it doesn´t shoehorned it right at beggining and instead it cames has wham episode at the end. The rest of the game is enjoyable, since the gunplay is better than F4.

Bioshock Infinite is just as badly written as FO4, it just had it's head so far up it's own ass that some people got sucked in too. The gunplay was also pretty terrible, specially the 3 times repeated Ghost lady boss battle, all the plasmids where basically the same and the story lost all narrative rythm after they get inside the first Portal.

 

[PossibleCabbage]

Well, the thing is that there's not just one GotY award, there are many, and the big ones don't happen until the spring (the DICE and the GDC awards). But if we're assuming that the reaction to Fo4 in those award shows is consistent with the overall reaction to the game, the lessons Bethesda should take away from this reaction include:

- There's an uncomfortable tension between "mess around and do what you like" and suddenly when you're doing a plot mission "my character thinks this is the most important thing in the world" and this tension is heightened by voicing the character.
- Fallout 4 constantly makes assumptions about your character, and people don't like it when those assumptions don't match how the player views their character.
- People generally wanted more opportunities to roleplay, which encompasses both that a player wants to be able to say what they think their character would say here, and to be able to solve problems in a variety of ways.
- In keeping with this, that "slaughter all who stand before you" is not periodically punctuated by narrative details that provide context and meaning to the aforementioned slaughter highlights how repetitive "go and kill those Raiders" gets.

A lot of the problems with Fallout 4 is that it's trying to be two things that don't really go together at the same time. The whole "voiced protagonist with a really urgent mission" thing can work fine in an RPG, provided that it's the sort of RPG that isn't 100+ hours of faffing around doing whatever you happen to find interesting at the moment; it has to be a somewhat more directed experience It will be really interesting honestly to see how the Mass Effect Andromeda people are going to respond to the reaction to Fallout 4 given that they're trying to arrive at approximately the same place (combining an open world and exploration, with characters and narrative). At least Bioware has the instincts to occasionally punctuate with "okay, here's why killing all those people mattered", which is something that's sorely missing in Fallout 4 (which actually makes the point that killing all those Raiders *doesn't* matter, because they'll be back in two weeks.)

 

[Theinnerfish]

Bioshock Infinite is just as badly written as FO4, it just had it's head so far up it's own ass that some people got sucked in too. The gunplay was also pretty terrible, specially the 3 times repeated Ghost lady boss battle, all the plasmids where basically the same and the story lost all narrative rythm after they get inside the first Portal.

I wouldn't call it badly written. That game have a beautiful story. Problem with that game is its RPGish mechanics utterly guttered and it filled with guns and murder just for the sake of it. Gutting and mutilating the police force of Colombia was simply ridiculous. The game has the story and the style of an adventure yet it's gameplay a rather soulles murderfest.

Fallout 4 suffers from same contradiction between gameplay and story. Caring parent who kills people and eats their corpses? I mean our character in her perspective just one hour away from her old life, yet she can accept a mission about killing people(raiders).

I'm telling Preston that i just woke up from a 200 year long cryo sleep and he gives me quest: A quest about murdering people. It's not the problem though; the problem is my character accepts this quest like it's nothing.

Fallout 4's story: A parent enters a Vault, jumps 200 years into the future, gets out from the Vault and after few minutes starts killing people. Bioshock 2 deserves critism but calling it as badly written as Fallout 4 is a real low blow.

 

[Walpknut]

A beautiful story? What? It's a story about a murderous psychopath rescuing a generic-ly written Disney Princess from a bunch of one dimensional caricatures that then turns into the most boring application of a multiverse premise I have ever seen in my life.

 

[MercenarySnake]

Can't forget "Constants and variables".
So deep.

 

[Theinnerfish]

A beautiful story? What? It's a story about a murderous psychopath rescuing a generic-ly written Disney Princess from a bunch of one dimensional caricatures that then turns into the most boring application of a multiverse premise I have ever seen in my life.

Maybe it's the potencial father in me but i liked that Disney Princess' first time seing the sun or dancing for the first time or her shock during witnessing a murder. I liked deterministic theme of the story as well. While i'm no scientist i read and follow science yet it's multiverse premise didn't irked me. There were gaps in the story yes however i'm yet see a movie, book or game without gaps so i gave it a pass.

 

[Walpknut]

The fact that Elizabeth is a Disney Princess that is baffled by racism in the early 1900 despite spending her whole life locked up in a statue getting experimented on (they even collect her period blood fir shit sake) with no social interaction, and one would imagine being only allowed to read things that subscribed to Comstock's ideology (Unless Comestock is that fucking stupid on top of beaing so one dimentionaly evil) is just shitty writting.

 

[Theinnerfish]

The fact that Elizabeth is a Disney Princess that is baffled by racism in the early 1900 despite spending her whole life locked up in a statue getting experimented on (they even collect her period blood fir shit sake) with no social interaction, and one would imagine being only allowed to read things that subscribed to Comstock's ideology (Unless Comestock is that fucking stupid on top of beaing so one dimentionaly evil) is just shitty writting.

Well this is so nitpicking.

Reading and seeing are different things by the way: i would consider my younger self a racist; reading every shit relevant, talking about it. However when i saw what real racism is with my own eyes that situation felt utterly wrong and i was baffled by total ignorance of these people.

Though if you accept, let's drop this. Like Interstellar, arguing about Bioshock 2 never ends well .