Overall, they did a good job getting that 'Fallout' feeling bang on to respect the mantle of the prior titles and make it stand on its own feet. They did succeed here.
Keep in mind that Fallout was Fallout's first time, and they nailed it. One issue with Fallout 3 is Bethesda developers, rather than looking at Fallout and imitating that, they looked at Fallout 2 and went that route. They just didn't do the Theme Park Town thing, but they went full on with goofy shit. They also showed that they couldn't break themselves away from a fantasy setting by turning the Super Mutants in to Orcish types, which only got worse in Fallout 4. They had to include the vampires but not really vampires.
They also wanted West Coast Fallout but on the East Coast when there's no reason why the East Coast would look anything like the West Coast since the reasons the West Coast looks like it did were because of things that were only found on the West Coast. They took a wrecking ball to the lore just to get a square peg in a round hole, and toss everything they could in an area where that stuff shouldn't exist.
I did enjoy Fallout 3 a lot but New Vegas is still the king
Fallout 3 is better than Fallout 4, which goes to show that Bethesda is really bad at looking at what someone else has done and adding to it without wrecking everything. That sums up both Fallout 3 and Fallout 4. With Fallout 3, they had Fallout and Fallout 2 to use for their world, but they took some of the worst aspects of Fallout 2 and ran with it. With Fallout 4, they had New Vegas to look at, and they completely shit the bed. They completely casualized Fallout to the point where it's not even a role playing game anymore. They casualized the SPECIAL system to the point where skills like lockpicking and speech have no nuance. They went from a system of having locks and speech checks can not only have a percentage value that range from 0% to 95% BUT ALSO have additional modifiers in Fallout and Fallout 2 to one that just has a scale from 0% to 95% in Fallout 3, then down to only having four difficulties of lock and four difficulties of speech check in Fallout 4.
In Fallout and Fallout 2, just as an example, you encounter a lock. It can have a base difficulty of 85%, right? It's a super tough lock. Since the skill for lock picking could range from 0% to 255%, you can toss on environmental factors. Is it dark? Add 25%. Are you in combat? Add 35%. Anything your skill has above 100% goes towards offsetting the environmental add ons. Bethesda failed to understand that, or just dumbed it down because most of their audience don't understand why it's possible to have a skill above 100%. New Vegas didn't fix this, probably because of the time crunch and J.E. Sawyer never understood this either.
The reason I compared The Outer Worlds to Fallout 4 is because it's also casualized. I'm not saying the difficulty should be raised, but there should be consequences for actions. There should be something that comes along later if you take the easier route. The Outer Worlds had a much better character system than Fallout 4 that allows for a lot more design elements, but the designers didn't really push the envelope on it.
However, the decline continued whilst Bethesda remained at a consistent level. It's like a drop followed by a straight line, whilst the likes of O*sidian and B*oWare just continued fucking dropping. Endlessly. It's like, I hate Skyrim, but it's somewhat okayish to play in terms of fun. Fallout 4, despite butchering what little vestiges of RPG was left after Fallout 3, is still, somewhat fun to play (so long as you stay the fuck away from any and all quests).
I don't know. I see a consistent decline from Bethesda from Morrowind on. With just Elder Scrolls, each game forward removed whole chunks of the character system until you got to Skyrim, which barely had one at all. With Fallout 3, they
mostly implemented SPECIAL as it was in the previous games. As least, that is to say, it's recognizable as the SPECIAL system in Fallout 3. Fallout 4 completely gutted it. I've heard the character system in Fallout 76 is better, but I can't bring myself to buy an online Fallout.
Shattered Space has mostly negative reviews on Steam, they're done. Growing so much so quickly destroyed their culture.
Growing so much so quickly yet also moving at a snail's pace on releases. They've been rewarded for their bad decisions so many times, they just continue to make worse and worse choices. Not having an overall game design document for the games they're making and just letting designers do their own thing rears it's head more and more often with their most recent four games. As I pointed out already in this thread, they couldn't even nail down the synth lore in Fallout 4. A design document would have gone a long way towards not having all the mistakes made with what synths are. Either they don't need to eat and sleep or Danse and the rest of the Brotherhood of Steel wouldn't have known he's a synth. You can't be around for 15 or so years and never figure out that you're not hungry or sleepy means you're not human.
You had two different designers with two opposing reasons on why synths are supposedly scary.
The issue with modern (RP)Gs is that everybody wants to tell their grand stories.
This is true. They really need to focus more on a compelling world than a compelling story. The story should be more about how you play your game while the world is doing it's thing with your assistance.
