Review 13 Shocking Facts about Fallout 4 That Will Forever Change the Way You Think about RPGs

[laclongquan]

The thing that's really weird though? Bethesda has spent BIG money getting top-notch writers in to try and improve their writing (getting Brian from V:TmB was one well-known example, but there's been a whole stream of them - it's clear that they've known it's a weakness and have been desperately trying to improve it for 10 years now). And they've consistently failed, to the point where almost all of their big-money writing hires do one game, then leave for far less certain job prospects and definitely lesser pay.

That tells me that there's something truly structurally wrong with their writing development. That it isn't just a matter of intent - if they didn't want to be doing 100x better, they wouldn't have been hiring these guys - but something in their development system itself.

For a while you could blame the open world gamestyle. But after FO:NV and Witcher 3, that doesn't fly anymore. Ok, I'll accept Witcher 3 as the kind of insane project that will never be the norm for a major studio, but FO:NV was a 'project to contract', made to budget, none of the endless time/budget to handcraft to insane detail a massive open world that Witcher 3 had - it had a good-but-not-alltime-great studio working on about the same budget that Bethesda would have given themselves to produce an expansion pack, and the difference in writing quality is astonishing. Sure, Obsidian has always has writing as one of its main strengths, but still - it's not like they had MCA on board in a major way apart from Dead Money (which is really like a mini-AMAZING-AWESOME game that happens to be a DLC for FONV rather than indicative of FO:NV itself, which is Sawyer through and through (lot's of logic, good DMing, good setting, no real art to it).

Like I said times and agains, there must be a fucker with huge influence in writing direction inside Beths. Its shitty style is not something achieved by coincidence and/or neglect, but intentionally controlled. Anyone against that style will be kicked out or not used.

I dont care who he is, Pagmilio or whoever. He must have firing authority in hand, and intimately control over almost every lines of texts going in in order to achieve that. He also must be in-crowd management circle to maintain that kind of style from at least Morrowind to now. Nothing ever escape that style other than FNV.

That's why unless he lose in management-debate we will never see any outsourced Beth game again, aka FNV2 or the like.

 

[Morality Games]

Well, classical Bethesda was

which basically means right way you have a Nintendo-like philosophy of "games made by programmers" rather than "games made by writers" or "games made by designers."

This is pretty evident from Fallout 3 especially, where they approached worldbuilding from a "What kind of cool shit and environments can we program into existence?" without much concern over whether the content was fun (design) or logically conceived (writing).

Tim Cain would be the most elevated example of "games made by programmers" instead of games made by writers or designers in the history of RPG design. Fallout started as Tim Cain wanting to make a new video game engine on Interplay's nickel.

Unsurprisingly, Arcanum's writing and design was somewhat haphazard, but was an open world with lots of cool things programmed into it.

 

[GarfunkeL]

And Arcanum's world was logical and made sense. Sure the magic vs tech division broke down if you analyzed it closely enough but the world was believable. Boston and Washington are both places were nobody could actually survive. It's not quite that bad in Skyrim, for some reason.