Far Harbor was the only part of the game where I felt that I was playing an actual Fallout game. The atmosphere, quests, characters, and locations were a big step up from the main game. The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. actually did something in the DLC and it even has multiple different endings. From the impression I got from the interview, it's like there are multiple little game studios within the company itself. The differences between Far Harbor and Nuka World are like day and night, for example.
Bethesda needs more direction, but it's like they implement stuff into the game, then remove it, then they lose interest, or things become mixed up, they need one unified vision, or one person directing them and overseeing the project.
I feel like I'd like the whole "no skills, only perks" change if the perks themselves were a bit more dynamic, and there was an actual level cap.
People keep saying that "the new system allows for greater specialization than the old one", but that's simply untrue given the simple fact that there is no limit to leveling, so you can get 10 in every SPECIAL stat and get every single rank of every single perk. That doesn't result in a specialized character, that results in a jack of all trades who's also a master of all trades.
And there's not a player enforced "soft cap" like there is in TES games. In TES, you basically stop leveling once every skill is at max, or once you get all the skills you actually use at max and stop there. In Fallout, you get XP for pretty much every action you do, so there is no stopping.
What bothered me is how features were weirdly squared away behind some SPECIAL barrier and it didn't let me do things without going against my character.
If I wanted to get a night-scope for a gun or build a doo-dad for my settlement I'd have to spend multiple perk points in intelligence and then another point in "Science!" (gun nut for energy weapons) just so I can craft things that I would have rather just had the option of purchasing from someone else.
And if you wanted to play a sneaky character then you'd be stuck shooting things because you couldn't get a silenced weapon until at least lvl 13. Doesn't help that you pretty much have to take the crafting perks so you can stay competitive because the game is dependent on bulletsponges and weapon upgrades (that you can't buy or find) instead of giving you a healthy selection of progressively powerful base weapons.
[editline]27th November 2016[/editline]
like what's the point of crafting perks if i pretty much [I]need [/I]to take them. If the entire game is based around crafting then don't give the illusion that it's not.
[QUOTE=cdr248;51435728]If I wanted to get a night-scope for a gun or build a doo-dad for my settlement I'd have to spend multiple perk points in intelligence and then another point in "Science!" (gun nut for energy weapons) just so I can craft things that I would have rather just had the option of purchasing from someone else.[/QUOTE]
Oh I'm now painfully reminded how settlement building mechanics shit all over the world-building again :'( Apparently no one but a dude/gal from the Vault has thought about building settlements... guess everyone's been really lazy until someone took that one kid, and the world was never the same again.
It's just something about the perk system that makes progression feel even less organic than previous games
From what I've gathered over the years and from ex employees and comments from people working at BGS, they basically hate working on Fallout and would rather work on Elder Scrolls and it was something forced on them by suits. I think this game just feels like a perfect example of mailing it in.
Honestly I hope someone comes along and makes a Elder Scrolls clone in the same style but just does it better all around, it would probably whip them into shape to make a better game.
[QUOTE=Saxon;51435859]From what I've gathered over the years and from ex employees and comments from people working at BGS, they basically hate working on Fallout and would rather work on Elder Scrolls and it was something forced on them by suits. I think this game just feels like a perfect example of mailing it in.[/QUOTE]
Can I get a source on that? :v:
[QUOTE=Smoovedawg1;51431889]I hope they never do voiced protagonist again. I hated that so much.
Anyway If they get as much of a step up from Skyrim as the did from Oblivion then we'll have something truly great.[/QUOTE]
I wouldn't have a problem with the voiced protagonist if the dialogue wasn't so god damn shoddy and appalling.
It's a do or do not, you either don't do voiced protagonist at all or if you do you go all the way with multiple voice actors for the players to choose from in character creation with the diverse dialogue options.
F:NV hit the ball out of the park with dialogue choice, if you had low or high intelligence the options reflected that. You were not limited to 3 or 4 choices, but a overwhelming tree of choices which could drastically change the course of the game for you.
The wrong choice of words could infuriate or the right choice could pacify the NPC you were speaking with. You could make them give something up, ally with you, intimidate or smooth talk them, and more. You could actually[I] talk one of the antagonists into bed with you and then kill them in their sleep.[/I] You could turn the antagonist own faction against them and kill them under their own roof and get away with it if you had a focus on speech and evidence to back it.
In a open world game a dialogue system like that is absolutely necessary and if you have the balls to do voiced protagonists go all the way and get different voices on top of all the different dialogue.
Now, of course a lot of people are going to feel differently from me and I get it. Different tastes after all, I just hope they learned from their fuck up and if they ever try it again to do it right.
[QUOTE=DeEz;51434495]Yeah good luck sub-licensing without cutting profits in half because the contracts are so terrible.[/QUOTE]
For most houses that would be true. For Zeni [release the Hounds at the merest hint of infringement] max? Not even kind of buying it. These are games that sell in 40-50 million copy lifetime range. They more than have the resources to make either their own tools or make the tools end-user applicable, by a great, great margin without even eating into their bottom line.
How quickly you forget how many times DooM restarted, with the the entire staff being paid that entire time. They will make plenty of return on their investment, that's been factually proven for over a decade.
Yes I am quite aware of the development history of Doom, thanks.
Also recreating tools like for example the Havok suite just to make life easier for modders is insanity.
[QUOTE=Rahu X;51435688]I feel like I'd like the whole "no skills, only perks" change if the perks themselves were a bit more dynamic, and there was an actual level cap.
People keep saying that "the new system allows for greater specialization than the old one", but that's simply untrue given the simple fact that there is no limit to leveling, so you can get 10 in every SPECIAL stat and get every single rank of every single perk. That doesn't result in a specialized character, that results in a jack of all trades who's also a master of all trades.
And there's not a player enforced "soft cap" like there is in TES games. In TES, you basically stop leveling once every skill is at max, or once you get all the skills you actually use at max and stop there. In Fallout, you get XP for pretty much every action you do, so there is no stopping.[/QUOTE]
Aye. Although I still like pouring a bunch of points into stuff.
Part of me wonders how a Bethesda game would be if it combined the progression systems of Oblivion and New Vegas. Because I do quite like the whole "your skills improve as you use them" thing in TES, since it encourages practice and actually makes sense in a way. But while I do like pumping points into my skills in Fallout, having the amount of skill points you gain be linked to your Intelligence does make for a bit of min-maxer's anxiety since you likely want to get as many skill points as possible, and if you have a lower INT score than you'd like, your progression per level would be weaker than it would normally.
The way I'd probably do it would probably do what Oblivion does, where you level your skills through practice and putting them to use. But while skill points would no longer be for pumping up your skills point-by-point, and the amount you gain no longer linked to Intelligence, they would instead be used to unlock the different Ranks of your skills. For example, when you start out your skills are Novice rank, and can only go up to 30, but as you accrue skill points you'll eventually gain enough to unlock the Adept rank of that skill and raise its level cap to 60, and later on in the game you'll end up having enough skill points laying around to unlock Master rank and raise the cap to its final limit of 100. That way, your assignment of skill points wouldn't be for inorganically pumping up your skills at sporadic intervals, but instead raising the limits of your own potential to let your skills grow further as your character gradually becomes an expert.
In addition, perhaps do away with the notion of a "character level" and instead have levelling your skills be what gives you the skill points, while Perk Points pop up as rewards for certain quests. Though with the right balancing of skill point gain, you'd still end up hitting the "soft cap" once all of your skills reach a certain point, due to the cost of unlocking higher Tiers of your skills, and you'd eventually end up with most of your skills at Adept rank, and a select few at Master rank, with a few skills still hovering around Novice rank.
[QUOTE=jimbobjoe1234;51433242]If they want to regain the respect and trust of their fans Bethesda needs to seriously reevaluate how they run things. [b]If axing a few people[/b] means a [b]better product[/b] then perhaps that is something they need to do.
[/QUOTE]
Unfortunately the gaming industry will never go back to this way of thinking and the people in charge actually define a better product by those 'few' people buying the game in the former.
I'm not planning to buy another Fallout or Elder Scrolls game again tbh, apart from New Vegas which still has it's own flaws, I think the last time they released a good product in those series was Shivering Isles almost 10 years ago and it doesn't look like they're going to get any better.
[QUOTE=LtKyle2;51435891]F:NV hit the ball out of the park with dialogue choice, if you had low or high intelligence the options reflected that. You were not limited to 3 or 4 choices, but a overwhelming tree of choices which could drastically change the course of the game for you. [/QUOTE]
It doesn't help Beth's case that all of it was better written. There were lines that made you feel like a proper badass or a proper cunt and those lines could only really deliver in your head. Like that one moment when NCR soldier lady asks you to bring back the corpse of her husband, an NCR ranger IIRC. When you succeed, the NCR soldier at the block post asks you - why have you gone through all that, you're not even NCR, and among the variants there's a "I made a promise to pvt. XYZ" to which you get a response along the lines of "Glad I'm not standing on your way then".
That's a [i]very[/i] minor quest, it barely even qualifies as a quest, there's a very high chance you'll miss it altogether on your first playthrough, and yet the attention to dialogue is above and beyond anything Beth's hacks could've hoped for. Their level is "Sarcastic" roulette featuring "Two calzones and a pizza, name's fuck you" delivered with the most lifeless, deadpan or outright cringeworthy ("say it like frankenstein" comes to mind, where Taylor utters an unsubtitled "uhh sorry") performance their two voice actors could muster.
There's not a lot of life in a lot of aspects of 4, some stuff seems nice and there are pretty nice setpieces, but it doesn't feel like there's atmosphere in it, or at least not a Fallout one, it suffers the same issue 3 did of "Why is everything acting like it's been 20 years since the bombs fell despite it being 200". NV did it right by showing what life would be like in the aftermath the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, where life in terms of goals and lifestyles are almost similar to pre-war ones, but on a more frontier level since society has changed.
[QUOTE=ChicagoMobster;51436982]There's not a lot of life in a lot of aspects of 4, some stuff seems nice and there are pretty nice setpieces, but it doesn't feel like there's atmosphere in it, or at least not a Fallout one, it suffers the same issue 3 did of "Why is everything acting like it's been 20 years since the bombs fell despite it being 200". NV did it right by showing what life would be like in the aftermath the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, where life in terms of goals and lifestyles are almost similar to pre-war ones, but on a more frontier level since society has changed.[/QUOTE]
Fo4 does justify that though, by stating that life was better at some point before the Institute started fucking with the world above, releasing supermutants (Bethesda just can't give generic enemies a rest, can they), assassinating politicians, disrupting cooperation... Granted, the justification for that kind of activity by the Institute is, well, as strong as everything else regarding the Institute. About as strong as a wet toilet paper, but hey, that's an improvement over Fo3.
That's fair and I'm glad they tried to justifiy it but even still the world outside of downtown Boston is mostly raiders with some Super Mutants here and there. It feels almost like they didn't want to create more settlements out there so they made settlement building and left it to us to make the populated Commonwealth
I can never get over how nothing plot related makes sense in F4. The entire motivation of the game relies on actions being taken by idiots who [sp]kill your husband for NO REASON.[/sp]
Like, legit, no faction has a motivation that makes sense, and how they interact with the institute by the end had me going "Are you fucking kidding me".
Like, there was no way that the plot wasn't just sent through after one draft. It actively stops making any sort of sense past the intro.
He's good at hyping up his games. He's not good at defending them.
They should just give the rights back to Obsidian and let them make a proper Fallout game again, I'd even prefer to see an isometric Fallout game again. Especially since they've been on a roll with these RPGs as of late.
Let the original visionaries continue on their work rather than let bunch of people who dislike it work on it.
If I were to name one thing that they could bring back to Fallout 4 it would be the proper skill system. It not only made making a character easier, visa vi you put more points into a skill you get better at doing the things related to said skill like guns or laser weapons. In F4 you have to put perks into gun nut, science, and the three main ranged weapon skill trees just to keep up with the combat armored 2000 odd health raiders that fill the mid to late game wasteland. Furthermore the skill system makes your character YOURS, rather than playing as some war veteran looking for his kid. You can be a scientist who's always spouting techno-babble, or a brawler who knows 40 ways to break a kneecap, or a master of the deal who knows how to get the most out of every cap. Instead you are, like many other aspects of the game, railroaded into a preset character whose personality is barely above that of Preston Garvey. I miss the various skill based speech checks where you could put your hard earned points and perks to use, whereas now the only way to convince someone is to down Grape Mentats and dress your Sunday best.
In short, I miss role playing, rather than playing a role Bethesda set for your character to follow.
What buried FO4 in the Bad Game Graveyard for me was the abysmally bad DLCs, after I got around 70 hours in the basegame I knew they would make or break it, and it started off fantastically with Far Harbor but all of the rest were just complete disappointments and didn't reach anywhere near the diversity we got from FO3 and New Vegas.
[QUOTE=Blooper Reel;51432814]Both Fallout 4 and Skyrim have this weird phenomena where you just don't want to actually explore because there's not actually anything to see.
The 'worldbuilding' really just amounts to an audiolog/note here and there next to a posed skeleton, pretty much everything else is the same identical looking dungeons filled with generic ghouls/bandits/raiders/falmer whatever
The falmer dungeons in skyrim were so exhausting to get through because there's zero variety and almost nothing of interest besides not-goblins to fight[/QUOTE]
I feel like you and me played a different game completely in regards to Fallout 4. Skyrim was a peice of shit for those exact reasons, but the world building of Fallout 4 is as good if not better than Fallout 3. As with the case with Fallout 3, if you didn't find interesting things in the world, you weren't looking hard enough. I mean hell, I can immediately think of 4 different little detailed clips from the world I found completely on my own, such as the communications outpost with a dude that was being slowly driven insane, the rise and fall of a post-war community established immediately after the bombs fell., the tale of two brothers each trying to kill each other over the docks, the serial killer's house, etc. Hell as I'm typing this, I'm coming up with more and more in my head. Yeah sure, there are a number of dungeons that are simply there for cannon fodder, but those were there in Fallout 3 and hell, even Fallout New Vegas to some extent. If you really think there's nothing to the world of Fallout 4, go back and play it and actually fucking explore a little.
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;51438624]What buried FO4 in the Bad Game Graveyard for me was the abysmally bad DLCs, after I got around 70 hours in the basegame I knew they would make or break it, and it started off fantastically with Far Harbor but all of the rest were just complete disappointments and didn't reach anywhere near the diversity we got from FO3 and New Vegas.[/QUOTE]
It was even more disappointing after they increased the price of the Season Pass due to their "expanded DLC plan", that turned out to be one more substantial DLC and a couple of Workshop add-ons.
[QUOTE=JCDentonUNATCO;51438624]What buried FO4 in the Bad Game Graveyard for me was the abysmally bad DLCs, after I got around 70 hours in the basegame I knew they would make or break it, and it started off fantastically with Far Harbor but all of the rest were just complete disappointments and didn't reach anywhere near the diversity we got from FO3 and New Vegas.[/QUOTE]
You can tell they wanted to make DLC that expanded more on the protag's backstory a la the New Vegas DLCs but after the complete shitstorm that got churned out regarding the voice acting and the terrible dialogue they had to improvise
They were probably already underway with Far Harbour during development of the main game and that's why the rest of the DLCs do nothing but focus on settlement building
[editline]28th November 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=TornadoAP;51438666]I feel like you and me played a different game completely in regards to Fallout 4. Skyrim was a peice of shit for those exact reasons, but the world building of Fallout 4 is as good if not better than Fallout 3. As with the case with Fallout 3, if you didn't find interesting things in the world, you weren't looking hard enough. I mean hell, I can immediately think of 4 different little detailed clips from the world I found completely on my own, such as the communications outpost with a dude that was being slowly driven insane, the rise and fall of a post-war community established immediately after the bombs fell., the tale of two brothers each trying to kill each other over the docks, the serial killer's house, etc. Hell as I'm typing this, I'm coming up with more and more in my head. Yeah sure, there are a number of dungeons that are simply there for cannon fodder, but those were there in Fallout 3 and hell, even Fallout New Vegas to some extent. If you really think there's nothing to the world of Fallout 4, go back and play it and actually fucking explore a little.[/QUOTE]
Maybe I'm asking for too much but it's just that I want something a little more substantial than, say, a handful of notes telling you what happened. I'm sure half those notes could have easily been turned into fully-fledged quests.
Like, for example, the whole underground area in the quest with Bobbi No-Nose. It's a slog of ghouls and mirelurks but you've got Bobbi and the engineer tagging alongside you constantly bantering at oneanother and you've got a cool robot to clear the blockages ahead of you. The dialogue's fun and involving, it constantly asks input from you that isn't shooting at things. I'd love more of that for exploration.
Also, first impressions kinda play into it aswell. When you've dealt with letdowns like the Combat Zone you're gonna be a little more skeptical to go dungeon-crawling if all you're gonna expect are a bunch of raiders/mirelurks/whatevers and a note at the end telling you that hey yo, shit's fucked.
Everything aside from Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas is non canon to me. Maybe it is because I grew up with Fallout 1 and 2 but Fallout 3 and 4 feel so fucking bad to me.
Just remember, when developing fallout 1 they had the goal that almost every quest should have at least 3 different possible ways to complete the quest. You could sneak, charm, or fight your way out of almost everything. Then there were dozens of different times where there were unique ways to solve quests. Fallout 4 has about 1-2 and they almost always devolve to pure combat. No skill checks when talking to people, no way to avoid combat all together (like you could in Fallout 1), and speech checks are often not really game changing like they were in Fallout 1. You could convince the Master in F1 to kill himself, you could kill him, or you could nuke him. The solutions to Fallout 4s endings are all the same, you fighting a shitload of people and then the faction(s) you fight gets destroyed.
[QUOTE=Ager O'Eggers;51432809]It seems Bethesda's writer has big daddy issues, if FO3 and FO4's stories are anything to go by.
EDIT:
Also, he takes the lazy, terrible shortcut to "emotional storytelling" by having your character's child in distress. I don't care about Shaun, no matter how emphatic my voiced character might be about the matter. I'm more attached to a stray dog I found by a gas station.[/QUOTE]
It's funny when you consider how much urgency there actually was in fallout 1 and 2 compared to either 3 or 4 really. Despite there being no voiced protags and the impact being much less directly personal.
[QUOTE=Blooper Reel;51432814]Both Fallout 4 and Skyrim have this weird phenomena where you just don't want to actually explore because there's not actually anything to see.
The 'worldbuilding' really just amounts to an audiolog/note here and there next to a posed skeleton, pretty much everything else is the same identical looking dungeons filled with generic ghouls/bandits/raiders/falmer whatever
The falmer dungeons in skyrim were so exhausting to get through because there's zero variety and almost nothing of interest besides not-goblins to fight[/QUOTE]
Plus with crafting and enchanting there was no real point in exploring dungeons fairly early into the game because what you could find was nowhere near as good as what you could craft.
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