[Ghost Spaghetti]

That's disappointing.

It was really jarring when my character who just watched mysterious people steal her potato baby and kill her husband, woke up to discover everyone she ever knew dead, and emerged into an irradiated Hell, meets a group of friendly survivors and her dialogue options don't include:
"What the f*** is going on? What's happened to the world? Some people stole my spud kid and killed my hubby, do you know about anyone like that?"

But instead gives you the option of "Minutemen? So I guess I went back in time, too lol." and "Of course I'll help you get a power armour suit up and running and help you mow down people who, for all I know, might be the good guys here."

I don't mind too much that an RPG tells me broadly what my character is going to be - I like the Deus Ex series - but if you're going to sell me the idea that I can make my own choices in the world, don't make those choices illusory. Actually, Deus Ex gives a great example of  decision-making in an RPG done right. Adam is given the choice of upgrading himself with a free upgrade to stop frequent debilitating and annoying glitches. If you follow the usual "Yes of course I'll do thie thing you told me to, narrative" decision then a later boss can use the upgrade to disable all your powers and leave you practically defenceless in a really hard fight, but if you say 'no,' then when he presses the button, you just smile and you can face him with all your powers intact. It's just a little decision which doesn't hugely affect the the story, but it does mean you actually have decisions which make a difference to how the game is played.

Imagine if, when the VaultTec guy came calling you really could just tell him to get stuffed and slam the door in his face. When the klaxons start blaring, you're not let through by the national guard to V111 and you have to navigate a tricky conversation tree to get them to register you at the last moment.

[Saddam Hussein]

No, Jim, this is not progressive.  This is just Bethesda being lazy.  Also:

[beardo]

Come now, Saddam. Can't have the console generation be forced to use their heads, now can we?

[Vongeo]

No, Jim, this is not progressive.  This is just Bethesda being lazy.  Also:

RIGHT! That fucking guy. I would understand his point if they were like actively acknowledging it, but they don't right?

[GeneralD]

Hey, if you guys want it to be challenging all you have to do is turn the difficulty up to Survival mode. Then you get the tension of not knowing whether that thousand rounds of ammunition you bought will be able to get you past those two mirelurks, or if you'll face the terrifying ordeal of having to punch them to death while walking backwards and mainlining your hundred stimpaks.

Seriously though, I don't know what anyone else was expecting from this given that this has been the trend Bethesda's followed since Oblivion. It's just nice to see a little[i/] bit of depth in the inventory/crafting systems that gives the mountains of crap lying around some use. The benefit of these games is that they're eminently modifiable, so you can already get mods that make the game difficult without being tedious.

[Saddam Hussein]

Seriously though, I don't know what anyone else was expecting from this given that this has been the trend Bethesda's followed since Oblivion.

Personally, I expected something along the lines of what Skyrim felt like compared to Oblivion.  Make no mistake, Skyrim had plenty of flaws, and I certainly don't think as highly of it now as I did when I first played it, but it wasn't afraid to distinguish itself from its predecessor, and in fact made a ton of improvements.  The dialogue was much more naturalistic, and even let you display a rudimentary personality in your choice of responses.  The environment was bold and striking.  The history and lore behind the setting, and how the current story fits into it, were unique and distinctive in a genre that usually seems to aspire to homogeneity (don't even start, Rushy).  There were plenty of memorable towns, there was a fascinating culture to the population, etc.  And they even got some fantastic actors like Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow to lend some gravitas to the proceedings.  Again, there were flaws, the two that stuck out the most for me being the poor quest design and removal of the attributes, but it was still a bold step for the series, and Bethesda clearly put a huge amount of time and effort into it.

By contrast, F4 is mostly just more of the same from F3.  The setting is basically the same - it's neat to see some of the landmarks of Boston, sure, but they're few and far between, and when you get down to it, it's pretty hard to tell one major city from another when you're just picking through the rubble.  The buildings you can explore are the standard factories, hospitals, offices, etc. that we've all seen before.  The enemies are usually the standard Super Mutants/generic raiders/zombies feral ghouls.  The main quest is once again a sappy, cringey melodrama with a prescriptive role for the protagonist to fit into, and as I noted earlier, it's basically a role-reversal of F3's story.  I could probably go on, but the point is that they didn't have to do any of this.  Like Crudblud said a few pages back, the Fallout setting is fanciful enough to let you get away with including pretty much anything you want.  Set it in Alaska and have Russia invade.  Set it on an island a post-war nation is trying to colonize where the protagonist stumbles onto Things Man Was Not Meant To Know in its ancient ruins.  Set it on a pre-war moon base where the current inhabitants are trying to decide whether or not they should try to return to Earth.  It's not hard to come up with ideas that don't rely on elements we've already seen.

A design document from Bethesda for F4 has been leaked:



Also, there's this, which is very real and in no way a joke:

[Saddam Hussein]

There isn't a whole lot of information in F4 on what happened to the Capital Wasteland from F3, but some of the dialogue from generic BoS members indicates that in the ten years since the events of that game, the wasteland is now even more chaotic and lawless than ever before, overrun with raiders and SMs, and the BoS has basically lost any real control over the area.  Project Purity, the BoS's war with the Enclave, everything the Lone Wanderer and the other characters of F3 fought so hard to achieve...it was all for nothing.  I'm not sure why Bethesda would do something like this.  I can understand them wanting to go somewhat darker and edgier after F3's whimsical worldbuilding and its epic/heroic/TES-inspired story, but there are better ways to achieve that tone than stomping all over previous games.

[Crudblud]

There isn't a whole lot of information in F4 on what happened to the Capital Wasteland from F3, but some of the dialogue from generic BoS members indicates that in the ten years since the events of that game, the wasteland is now even more chaotic and lawless than ever before, overrun with raiders and SMs, and the BoS has basically lost any real control over the area.  Project Purity, the BoS's war with the Enclave, everything the Lone Wanderer and the other characters of F3 fought so hard to achieve...it was all for nothing.  I'm not sure why Bethesda would do something like this.  I can understand them wanting to go somewhat darker and edgier after F3's whimsical worldbuilding and its epic/heroic/TES-inspired story, but there are better ways to achieve that tone than stomping all over previous games.

tbh I can believe that happened because the Capital Wasteland in F3 was populated exclusively by complete fucking idiots.

[Lord Dave]

There isn't a whole lot of information in F4 on what happened to the Capital Wasteland from F3, but some of the dialogue from generic BoS members indicates that in the ten years since the events of that game, the wasteland is now even more chaotic and lawless than ever before, overrun with raiders and SMs, and the BoS has basically lost any real control over the area.  Project Purity, the BoS's war with the Enclave, everything the Lone Wanderer and the other characters of F3 fought so hard to achieve...it was all for nothing.  I'm not sure why Bethesda would do something like this.  I can understand them wanting to go somewhat darker and edgier after F3's whimsical worldbuilding and its epic/heroic/TES-inspired story, but there are better ways to achieve that tone than stomping all over previous games.

It's possible they took all the data from players and what they did, analyzed it, and found that most players just killed anyone they wanted.  Which was also everyone they could.

So they made the history match.

[beardo]

[Saddam Hussein]

I knew there was more to the Combat Zone than just what they gave us in the game - yet another place full of generic raiders to kill.  I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened with the robot racetrack in Easy City Downs.  Also, it was pretty disappointing to hear the commentator stretching so much to avoid ending the video on a bad note.  "Well the fact that these game files even exist shows that Bethesda still cares () and besides modders will hopefully salvage the game."

[Snupes]

Patricia writes for Kotaku, and if you call Fallout 4 a bad game it ignites a shit storm in the community, so most reviewers there tiptoe the edge of actually saying it despite the fact that their reviews reek of it. It's annoying.

[Benjamin Franklin]

I knew there was more to the Combat Zone than just what they gave us in the game - yet another place full of generic raiders to kill.  I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened with the robot racetrack in Easy City Downs.  Also, it was pretty disappointing to hear the commentator stretching so much to avoid ending the video on a bad note.  "Well the fact that these game files even exist shows that Bethesda still cares () and besides modders will hopefully salvage the game."

Sounds like they cut a generic arena style combat that is in every other RPG. If they had included it, the anti-Bethesda malcontents would just call it a copy of (insert RPG that has this overused mechanic).

[Saddam Hussein]

But arena fights are nothing new to the series.  F3 and NV had them, and F2 had boxing matches.  And even if it did come across as derivative, that's no reason to outright scrap it in favor of just having you kill everyone immediately as usual.  No, I'm certain that its removal had nothing to do with Bethesda's artistic vision for the game.  They cut it for technical reasons - most likely either laziness, incompetence, or them simply running out of time.  On a related note:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/44sgi2/light_spoilersafter_a_lot_of_thought_i_was/

I'm really glad to see that the fan backlash (for lack of a better word) is still going strong, even on mainstream websites like reddit.  It may seem like too little too late when the major reviewers have already handed out their customary gushing reviews, but if this keeps up, Bethesda may be forced to take notice of how dissatisfied so many of their customers are.  For example, IIRC, some of the bosses behind Star Trek: Into Darkness and Prometheus have taken notice of the very vocal hatedoms their movies have garnered on the Internet and promised to do better with future installments, despite the fact that they both were reasonably well-liked by critics.  Maybe something similar to those situations might happen here.

[Snupes]

I love how everyone dances around actually calling the game anything less than "great". Everyone punctuates their descriptions of all the game's flaws and disappointments with "don't get me wrong, I love it (seriously, I do [really, I love this game!]!)!" Kotaku's been raining criticism nonstop on the game from day 1 and even they're seemingly afraid to say it's not a good game. It's such a weirdly specific trend.

[Saddam Hussein]

https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/fallout-4-add-ons-automatron-wasteland-workshop-far-harbor-and-more/2016/02/16/77

Bethesda has put so much hard work into their DLC that now they want you to pay them even more!  At least I've already bought the season pass.  Anyway, while the Far Harbor add-on looks potentially interesting, I'm concerned that it'll be more of the Lovecraftian nonsense that we saw in the Cabot questline, which is really not a good fit for this series.

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/103/?

All this does is mute the sound of the PC's voice.  I still have to watch him mouthing the words silently.  BAAAWWWWWW.

Ah, but by turning off the dialogue camera in the options, I am spared the awkwardness of seeing my own character mouthing his lines.  It's much better now, a lot like how the previous two games in the series handled dialogue.  I recommend everyone try it. 

http://www.polygon.com/2016/2/19/11057096/dice-award-winners-announced

Oh, for fuck's sake.  My hopes that Bethesda might actually notice the rumblings of dissatisfaction under the general wave of hype-fueled 9/10 reviews just went up in smoke.  They've just been given all the encouragement they need to continue making every game dumber and simpler than the last.  I might even be angrier by it winning "Best RPG" than GotY.  It's an open-world action game, but it's not an RPG.

[beardo]

lol, Saddam is mad.

[Saddam Hussein]

I am mad, yes.  Here, have a comic from a dumb fanboy:



I love how the artist uses an example of something that isn't actually in the game to demonstrate how fun F4 is.  For it to be accurate, it would show the fan killing a group of raiders and raving about how fun it is, while another frame shows us that he's already done that, and nothing but that, hundreds of times before.  Here's a better comic:

[Benjamin Franklin]

Stop having fun playing shitty games that I hate.

[Fortuna]

Where is the fun in a game you can't lose at? 20 minutes into the game and you have power armor. This represents a wider problem in our society where everyone thinks they are destined for some greater purpose, and to be able to get there without any ingenuity or work. Here, I found a better game for all of the ones who think Fallout 4 is completely amazing: