Fallout Fallout 4 Thread

[DosBuster]

Thinking back to that video and how the developers had not only a great interest into complex systems akin to Redstone in Minecraft it made me think about Beth games as a whole.

Todd Howard once upon a time said that not only do they not focus on characters he also admitted most other developers do them better, so in that case, what are Bethesda trying to do? It's not story, it might be a simulation-type deal, but who knows.

 

[Infinitron]

Shamus and his crew are LPing FO4, it seems:

Update: Bubbles might be satisfied to learn that Fallout 4 is slowly driving Shamus mad: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?cat=188

How do I get into Diamond City? Charm my way past the gate guards? Sneak in through the sewer? Bribe my way in? Lockpick the back entrance? Wear a guard disguise and walk in? Make friends with a resident and enter the city as their guest? Pay a sketchy half-crazed ghoul with a persecution complex to build a bomb to blow a hole in the wall? Hack a terminal to make a bot go haywire and create a distraction? Get hired as a caravan guard and enter with the rest of the group when they reach the city?

Oh, sorry. Those are things you’d put in a Fallout game like New Vegas or the 2D Fallouts. But THIS is a Bethesda game, which means the only way in is through a nonsensical, scripted, non-branching, completely banal dialog / cutscene where the rules are made up and your choices don’t matter.

The Fallout 4 developers could’ve tried to put some light roleplaying into their alleged roleplaying game and handled entering Diamond City the way Obsidian handled entering New Vegas. But instead they just copied the same sophomoric approach they used for entering the Citadel back in Fallout 3: A stilted, awkwardly framed dialog that can’t decide if it wants to be cinema or interactive so it decides to split the difference and fail at both.

Having the four-choice “I have no idea what I’m about to say” dialog wheel is directly at odds with their idiotic no-choice plot. And both of those ideas are at odds with the concept of “roleplaying game”. And none of this is helped by their fully voiced pre-war protagonist who never seems interested or curious about the world around them or about connecting with people who have pre-war memories to find out what’s happened in the last 210 years[1].

It’s not that the various designers weren’t on the same page, it’s like they were deliberately working against one another.

I think Fallout 4 wouldn’t be nearly so infuriating if the dialog didn’t keep making promises that the writer never intended to keep. It makes it sound like wall-painter guy has stories to tell, but he’s just a nonsense fetch quest. You meet a big bad guy who wants to talk, but the conversation is dumb and pointless because my character isn’t allowed to ask any interesting questions. You meet people with pre-war memories, or strange backstories, or in odd situations, which makes it seem like they’re designed specifically to deliver exposition and stories. But no. It’s just another bland NPC who wants to give you caps to kill a bunch of crap.

In most games, the designer will use a story to hook you into doing a quest. In this game I kept doing quests, hoping to find a story somewhere.

I was usually disappointed.

We’re here to rescue a private detective, in the hope that he’ll be able to help us find Shaun. To do that, we have to fight a bunch of thematically dissonant prohibition-era styled gangsters[2] that don’t mesh with either the cold-war or the post-apocalypse aesthetic the game is allegedly based on. This is on top of the fact that “organized crime” makes no sense in a society this primitive. What sort of criminal activity would these guys engage in? Whose laws are they breaking? What government would oppose them? Who are they extorting? Who are their customers / victims?

I’m not saying Fallout 4 needs to spend hours burying us in exposition and codex entries to build up some Tolkien-sized mythos. I understand that this is a game about shooting and looting. But the game tries to adopt this super-serious tone and then presents the story of a cartoon world of goofy childish nonsense. These guys aren’t “The Mob”. They’re an all-male tribe with no visible means of making a living. This isn’t even a “What do they eat?” level question. This is far more basic: What do these guys DO? What do they WANT? These guys have the same needs (none) and motivations (endless murder) as the psychos in Borderlands. But the psychos in Borderlands are a comical element of a deliberately absurdist world, and the Triggermen here are attached to what is ostensibly a serious story. (SHAAAAUN!)

“Maybe this world isn’t supposed to be serious?”

Okay. But then where are the jokes? Where’s the sense of madcap fun? The only comedy here is watching VATS fight with the physics engine to create emergent chaos. That’s cute, butGarry’s Mod does it better and it doesn’t make you sit through infantile dialog in the process.

When we confront Skinny Malone, what is the player supposed to be feeling? Dread? Amusement? Anger? What’s the mood of this scene? I honestly can’t tell.

The writer went to all the trouble to write, design, and cast these two unique characters. Yet we bump into them with nothing in the way of dramatic buildup and then they vanish from the story. We can kill Darla or spare her, but that choice has about as much meaning as deciding if you want to kill a supermutant with a shotgun or a sledgehammer. We know nothing about her and have nothing invested in her story. We don’t even know what her relationship is with Skinny Malone until we meet them, at which point the game immediately offers you the chance to attempt to spare her.

Would you like to spare this total stranger Y/N?

Whee. “Roleplaying”.

You can tell a Saints Row style story. You can tell a Last of Us style story. But do not put The Last of Us story inside of a Saints Row world and expect it to work. The virtue of Saints Row is that it knows it’s dumb and it invites you to laugh along with it. The virtue of Last of Us is that it’s a drama between carefully written characters. This is the worst of both worlds. We don’t get the pathos of a proper drama, but we also don’t get to revel in the absurd fun of a playfully ridiculous world. It’s just lazy drama that’s hopelessly neutered by the incoherent worldbuilding and complete lack of self-awareness.

Spoiler: The game isn’t going to improve anytime soon. Buckle up.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Good ol shamus. More people need to trash this game more.

 

[Metro]

Critiquing Fallout 4 is like picking a fight with an invalid. People know what type of game it is without some lengthy deconstruction meant solely to make the author look witty.

 

[Trojan_generic]

It is perhaps apropos that the game will end in a theme park. After all, that’s what Fallout 4 really is: a series of largely disconnected rides and experiences that are often entertaining, but for the most part shallow and not quite as good as they seemed in the brochure.

'Nuka-World' Is The Final DLC For 'Fallout 4'

Well predicted.
Edit: fuck, this was already mentioned in the tl;dr; article. The news value is that this will be the last one:

According to a tweet from Pete Hines, Bethesda’s vice president of public relations and marketing, the Nuka-World DLC will be the final installment in the series of Fallout 4 add-ons.

 

[DosBuster]

It is perhaps apropos that the game will end in a theme park. After all, that’s what Fallout 4 really is: a series of largely disconnected rides and experiences that are often entertaining, but for the most part shallow and not quite as good as they seemed in the brochure.

'Nuka-World' Is The Final DLC For 'Fallout 4'

Well predicted.

Not a prediction, we already knew it was the final dlc at that point.

 

[Trojan_generic]

It is perhaps apropos that the game will end in a theme park. After all, that’s what Fallout 4 really is: a series of largely disconnected rides and experiences that are often entertaining, but for the most part shallow and not quite as good as they seemed in the brochure.

'Nuka-World' Is The Final DLC For 'Fallout 4'

Well predicted.

Not a prediction, we already knew it was the final dlc at that point.

OK, just saw this as news somewhere else today. Nothing to see here, move along.

 

[Infinitron]

The descent into madness continues:

So the hunt to find Kellog is broken. But it’s broken in a REALLY ANNOYING WAY, which is that it has various contradictory excuses sprinkled around the world, and taken in isolation they seem to address one fault or another. So you point out plot hole A, but then an apologist claims this is explained by excuse B. But then you point out that excuse B doesn’t make sense because of contradiction C, and then someone ELSE points out that C is maybe justified by theory D. This seems to solve the problem, until you realize that D doesn’t work with B, and thus you end up arguing in circles forever. Most importantly, there never comes a time where you can map out what happened and why. You’re forever concocting and dismissing theories.

This is annoying if – like me – one of your coping mechanisms for plot holes is to simply document them. But the complexity of the brokenness makes such a task impossible. Every excuse is supported by broken excuses which are supported by broken excuses, leading out into this endless fractal of stupidity and frustration. It’s like the Mandelbrot set, but for bad ideas instead of numbers.

So to get anywhere in this analysis, we need to spoil the big twist of the game. That’s not bad, since the twist is both obvious and nonsensical. Here goes:

Shaun is now 80 years old.

This is OBVIOUS, because the game showed you being re-frozen after the kidnapping. Most players realize RIGHT AWAY that some probably-significant interval of time has passed. But then your character is stupidly railroaded into looking for a “baby”, despite the fact that they really ought to know better. And even if they don’t, the PLAYER knows better and thus we get frustrated waiting for our character to catch up to what we already know. This can work if the writer has a strong pre-built protagonist like Geralt or Adam Jensen, but even then it requires a fine touch to avoid annoying the player. But in a game with a quasi-blank-slate protagonist like this one, having our avatar spend most of the game oblivious to something we figured out in the first five minutes is pretty much the kiss of death for tension, immersion, and roleplaying. Instead of working to unravel a mystery, we spend the entire running time waiting for our character to pull their head out of their ass so we can get on with things.

This is also NONSENSE, because everything else in the gameworld contradicts this. And here is where we get caught arguing in circles:

Plot hole A: Kellog hasn’t aged a single day in the last 80 years.

Excuse B: He’s part machine and so he doesn’t age.

Contradiction C: So if the Institute has CURED AGING, why is Shaun OLD and about to DIE?

Theory D: Maybe they didn’t actually cure aging as such. Maybe the Kellog we meet is just a synth based on the Kellog we saw at the start of the game?

But then we meet Shaun and he talks about Kellog like he’s a single person and not a series of synths. And since old-Shaun obviously despises Kellog so much, why would he continue to make synth copies of him? And if he’s a synth then what’s the difference between Kellog and a Courser?

Let’s do another one:

Plot hole A: Kellog was in town with a ten-year-old version of Shaun “a while ago”. That should have been decades ago!

Excuse B: Nick is a syth. Maybe he remembers back that far?

Contradiction C: You’d think Nick – being a detective and all – would note details like this. “We’re looking for a kid and our suspect left town 60 years ago.” He talks to Ellie about “the Kellog case” like it’s something she would remember, not some ancient cold case from before she was born. And other people seem to remember Kellog as well, and nobody has reclaimed or re-purposed the house, which would certainly happen if it stood empty for any length of time.

Theory D: Maybe the ten year old Shaun is a synth and was here more recently?

Contradiction E: But why? Why would the institute send Kellog to Diamond city with a child robot clone of their aging leader?

Theory F: Well, maybe this is all part of Shaun’s plan (or Kellog’s plan?) for you to pick up the trail and hunt him down?

But why? Why have us follow such a convoluted trail? How would that advance ANYONE’S goals?

Last one:

Plot hole A: Kellog moved out of town “a while ago”. It’s long enough that people have noticed he’s “gone”, and not just “out of town for a couple of days”. Yet he departed recently enough that a dog is able to pick up his scent across a vast swath of wilderness.

Excuse B: Well maybe something about radiation and smells? Or maybe Dogmeat is slightly mutated to have super-smelling? Or…

Rebuttal C: Just… no. Also shut up. There has to be an upper limit on the amount bullshit we’re required to invent in order to patch a plot that is obviously broken in multiple places.

What we end up with is a world where all of the various characters are engaged in a massive conspiracy to obscure the obvious “twist”, so that the game will be able to “surprise” you with it later.

Surprise! That thing you thought was true but everyone acted in nonsensical ways to pretend it wasn’t true… IS ACTUALLY TRUE! DUN DUN DUN!

Dear Bethesda, please hire a writer. You have the budget, and this is disgraceful.

 

[Jaesun]

Betheda. lol

And they still continue to rake in MILLIONS. And people complain?

 

[undecaf]

Bethesda's doing their utmost to improve the game.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/07/06/codsworth-can-now-say-300-new-names-in-fallout-4

 

[Onholyservicebound]

dindu nuffin

 

[Sigourn]

Pretty sure the character editor is the only swell thing about this game.

 

[you know what time it is]

I'm sure it's been asked a bunch of times already, but what are the chances of Obsidian having a go at fallout again?

 

[Jaesun]

0

 

[you know what time it is]

 

[Genma:TheDestroyer]

Never ever. For every person still making topics with titles like Am I the Only One Who Liked FO3 Better? It Just Feels More...Epic, there was someone else who enjoyed New Vegas more. To the point that while journalists were busy giving Bethesda's latest masterpiece the usual tongue bath, they'd slip in a sentence here or there. "The questlines are a bit more linear than those of New Vegas", or "Those who expected this or that to return from New Vegas will find that-", etc. Doesn't seem like much, but to some on the Bethesda team? Battery acid on naked skin.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Andre_Michaud
this guy is gay. I'm still having a tough time adapting to " IN YOUR FACE I'M GAY" situations

 

[Epsilon]

I only just learned of Cabot House and all the things going on there. Such as the alien serum the inhabitants have been using to keep themselves alive for 200 years, or the fact that one of them is using an alien device to talk with alien gods who explain to him that there's an alien city underneath the commonwealth and underneath New Vegas - thus enabling Bethesda to make the events in that game completely redundant in future Fallout games. Together with the heavy implication, in Mothership Zeta, that aliens started the great war, not humans. Not the human condition, not human wants or needs or ambitions. No "War never changes". Aliens did it. This really makes me hate Bethesda and their moronic designers even more. Especially Emil Pagliarulo.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Emil was overrated to begin with, he wrote an acceptable/tolerable questline in a game that was average to begin with.
It was clear from the start when spoilers came out about Fallout 3 and how Emil interpreted the Brotherhood of Steel for example that he had absolutely no idea what Fallout is about.
Truth be told, I wonder if this guy has even read or watched anything about subjects like science, history, society and other fields of knowledge, or studied literature, or read books, or even have done something remotely like a course in writing.
I can be wrong of course as I absolutely have no knowledge about this guy's background, but I just question if he has ever done something remotely that makes you think that becoming a writer for video games would be be some of the best uses of this guy's skills and creativity.

I brought up stuff like science and history, or even reading literature and mythology as a lot of creative writers have been influenced by such sources to write their own works, later on movies.
These days it seems more that writers are other copying other writers when it comes to books in general, comics, and of course video games.

 

[DosBuster]

Emil actually got his start as a designer at Looking Glass.

Actually, I just stumbled upon this recently posted video where he gave a keynote on writing for games.

 

[Space Satan]

Totally not Skyrim with guns

 

[Epsilon]

Emil actually got his start as a designer at Looking Glass.

Actually, I just stumbled upon this recently posted video where he gave a keynote on writing for games.

He got started as a game journo for Adrenaline Vault, before going to Looking Glass. So he's a game journo turned Q&A turned Design/Vocal work on Thief 2, then moved on to do quest design on TES3:Bloodmoon and Oblivion before becoming a lead designer and writer on Fallout 3.

 

[DosBuster]

Totally not Skyrim with guns

Uh, yeah, dude they use the magic system in fallout 4 to achieve some gameplay things, that's really not an uncommon thing. If the code can be used easily in other games then you reuse it, simple.

 

[Sigourn]

If the code just works in other games then you reuse it, simple.

 

[DosBuster]

If the code just works in other games then you reuse it, simple.

Well, to be fair, we can say at least the magic system in skyrim did work, at least in regards to how it allowed effects to be applied to actors.