I will respond to Crudblud's mini-review here:
We start off with a couple of robots looking in a mirror, and you get to choose what the robots will look like. Every time you change something about one robot's face, both it and its fellow robot will comment on the change. After a few hundred "there's the handsome man I married"s and "I clean up pretty good"s I realised that, short of picking an entirely different preset to start with, there was very little I could do to make the man-robot not look like Jon Bernthal's derpy brother, and gave up.
You jest, but at one point during
Far Harbor, a character actually tries to raise the question of whether or not you might be a synth yourself. Presumably this was because the folks at Bethesda had recently watched
Blade Runner for the first time and wanted to impress upon the world just how deep and enlightened they were.
everyone except the protagonist is killed by Totally Not Hal 9000 during cryosleep. Yeah, the vaults have cryopods for no apparent reason, other than they really wanted to have the opening sequence be the day the bombs fell, and yet have you play the same guy in 2288 or whatever.
Vault 111 was outfitted with cryopods to study the effects of long-term suspended animation on unsuspecting human subjects. The other inhabitants were killed by the mercenary who abducted Shaun, only keeping you alive because of your genetic similarity to Shaun, which becomes important later.
But before that, before the robots shape-shifting and making the same three comments about it over and over in the bathroom, we of course have war. And you know what they say, war never changes. Oh my god. Three times this monotonous goon spouts the catchphrase in the first couple of minutes, and whoever directed the voice over clearly did not learn the Pinter pause lesson—if you tell the actor to pause, they will do it for too long. The space between "war" and "war never changes" must be something like five full seconds, the longest comma there ever was. And it's not like you don't know what he's about to say. There's nothing deep about it at this stage, if ever there was. It beggars belief. Not even Ron Perlman could have saved this pile.
He says it a fourth time if you open up your closet and look at your old uniform. Also:
<Saddam> War..........war never changes
<Crudblud> That fucking pause
<Crudblud> Why would you say that to yourself in the mirror anyway
<Crudblud> What a horribly written mess that is
<Saddam> Bethesda has no idea what it means
<Saddam> They can't even come up with a new meaning for it
<Crudblud> It's just a catchphrase people identify with the series
<Saddam> Like, I'm not saying there's one objective meaning to it that you have to fully understand or else you're wrong
<Saddam> But they don't even try to make it mean anything
<Crudblud> "Hey guys this is totally Fallout for reals haha war never changes haha war...war never changes! See? We're doing it! We're really doing it!"
<Saddam> It's an empty catchphrase
<Crudblud> It's worse because they have him say it so many fucking times
<Crudblud> I also love how they expected me to have any sort of attachment to people I'd spent all of five minutes with
<Crudblud> Like, even Taken Dad at least talked to you more than once
<Crudblud> They should have either made the intro sequence much longer or scrapped the frankly idiotic frozen for centuries storyline altogether
<Saddam> Heart-Wrenching Personal Story™
<Saddam> An ideal fit for a freeform RPG!
* SexWarrior (~John@cpc120900-sotn16-2-0-cust12.15-1.cable.virginm.net) has joined
* ChanServ gives channel operator status to SexWarrior
<Crudblud> It's amazing, they actually managed to do a worse job of their second attempt
<Crudblud> It's a shame, because the actual shooting things part of the game seemed pretty decent
<SexWarrior> Oh boy what's the disappointing game
<Crudblud> Fallout 4
<Crudblud> Well, "disappointing" would be the wrong word, my expectations were pretty low coming from F3
<Crudblud> But they improved the FPS aspect while making the RPG aspect even worse somehow
I touched a little on the way the game handles dialogue earlier, and it does definitely seem like what was annoying to look at in the pre-release gameplay footage is just as bad if not worse to actually play with. Each conversation point consists of you clicking on one of four preset options, none of which actually indicates what you're going to say. I thought the "yes" "no" "sarcastic" thing was a joke, but it really is that unclear. Like, it's nowhere near as wildly misleading as the "truth" "doubt" "lie" mechanic could be in L.A. Noire, but I don't feel like this "role-playing game" is actually allowing me to role-play in any real sense, because all the information I would need in order to be able to do it is hidden. During your side of the conversation, the camera inexplicably jumps out of first person perspective so that you can see the man-robot trying and failing to activate its expression module. It's a minor annoyance sitting like icing on top of a cake made of shit, but why on earth they decided to have the camera do that is beyond me.
They did it because it's what more story/character-driven RPG series, like
Mass Effect,
Dragon Age, and
The Witcher, have been doing lately. But Bethesda wasn't willing to give you a main character with a developed personality and lengthy dialogue options like those games do, so they bizarrely tried to mash it together with their usual style of a freeform RPG with a blank slate for a main character. An attempt at having it both ways ended up having it neither way. Incidentally, if you use the mod that shows you your "real" dialogue options, it becomes laughable just how blatantly dishonest the whole system is:
If they wanted to switch gears and do something more about story or character, that would be fine, but this superficial, shallow disguise satisfies nobody. Yeah, a lot of people liked F4, but I'm sure that none of them were actually invested in the characters or found the inane story to be moving or compelling.
I definitely prefer the feel of combat in this game to Fallout 3, and obviously it is a better looking game, but this second attempt at a dramatic Heart-Wrenching Personal Story™ is even worse than the first. Maybe it gets better and more compelling the further you go, but I'm pretty confident that isn't the case.
It gets worse. It gets so, so much worse. You've really cheated yourself out of the full F4 experience by not following this idiotic story to its sappy conclusion.
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