[George]

You need their help getting the equipment set up...After that, you don't have to give a shit about that faction anymore.

It's a lot easier with their help, but you can build the teleportation device by yourself, an option that I appreciate Bethesda including.  What you do need a faction for, however, is the final step of destroying the enemy faction(s) and completing the game.

But obviously they won't help you unless you also help them with something, which makes perfect sense. A favour for a favour. If you don't want to feel like you have to "join" them, just pretend you're using them to further your goal.

But at the end of the game, the PC doesn't really have a goal of their own; they're just fulfilling their chosen faction's goal of destroying their enemies.  Bethesda was clearly assuming that by that time, the players would be invested enough in their factions to want to see their plans through to the end.  Which is fair enough, but the PC would have no idea of that when they first meet the factions, and so you're given very little leeway to imagine yourself joining them for any other reason than the fact that you're a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed eager-beaver hero, like Chris pointed out.

Also:

[George]

This looks like it may just be the worst add-on of all.  None of what we're seeing here makes any sense, and I just know that there won't be any kind of plausible explanation when it's finally released, because Bethesda doesn't care about that kind of thing.  "not interested in discussing how realistic things are in an alternate universe post-apoc game w/ talking mutants and ghouls," and all that.  You'd think that Bethesda, given all their work with TES, would understand and appreciate how much effort goes into creating and maintaining a fictional universe, and therefore have a bit more respect for the world that another dev created, but they don't.  They see the Fallout franchise as a sandbox for them to jerk off over.  You can't even call what they're doing "experimenting," because there's no variation (with the exception of Far Harbor, as previously discussed).  They just keeping churning out the exact same thing over and over again - a big, dumb shoot-em-up disguised as an RPG with a heavy focus on crafting, set in a cuh-razy, wacky world (without any charm or humor) where everything keeps on repeating and nothing ever changes.  Speaking of repetition, it looks like Bethesda is rehashing the Hubologists from F2:



Fuck F4, and fuck Bethesda.

[beardo]

[Ghost Spaghetti]

I think I've softened on F4 a bit. I mean, it still doesn't work as a WRPG, and the inventory system is far too complicated for my liking (especially the guns and outfits, the sheer number of which are bewildering unless you're prepared to spend hours combing over) but there are some genuinely brilliant gameplay moments here. For instance, just outside Diamond City there's a theatre which seems empty at first glance, until one of the mannequins on stage turns out to be a synth and tries to kill you. I also enjoyed a tense battle in an abandoned building filled to the rafters with Super Mutants. I got to the top and physically flopped back in relief at having made it.

[honk]

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.

[Crudblud]

Thanks Saddam. The Blade Runner thing was already in Fallout 3. There's an android guy who don't know it in Rivet City and a Commonwealth science guy comes looking for him. It's a truly riveting tale.

Also, I posted up a sort of rewrite of my Fallout 4 review on my blog, but just talking about the writing, mostly.

[honk]

Thanks Saddam. The Blade Runner thing was already in Fallout 3. There's an android guy who don't know it in Rivet City and a Commonwealth science guy comes looking for him. It's a truly riveting tale.

I still don't understand why the "good" outcome of that quest was to remind the android who he really was, when he was the one who wanted his mind to be wiped in the first place.

Also, I posted up a sort of rewrite of my Fallout 4 review on my blog, but just talking about the writing, mostly.

Bethesda doesn't have a "writing staff." They don't hire professional writers to do their writing; they just have everybody write their own material as they go along. That's presumably how you get something like "Kid in a Fridge" alongside bizarre Lovecraftian fanfiction.

I don't quite agree with you about not spending enough time with the family, though. There are a number of games that rely on a brief scene establishing the relationship between the player character and a loved one to get the player invested in their fate, and they often work out just fine. For example, Splinter Cell: Conviction has a flashback to Sam Fisher comforting his young daughter that manages to be genuinely sweet without being overwrought, The Witcher 3 opens with a dream taking the form of a pseudo-flashback that shows us Ciri, a charming, likable character, and the kind of relationship she has with Geralt. And Red Dead Redemption doesn't give us any such scene at all, instead framing John Marston's relationship with his family entirely through his own words. Those games make what F4 so utterly failed at work not because they spent more time setting it up, but because their setups were competently scripted, written, and voiced. F4's beginning doesn't fail to resonate because it's short, or because we haven't seen enough of the lives of Nate, Nora, and Shaun. It fails because the characters are bland and one-dimensional, the dialogue is dull and uninspired, and the voice actors give bored, disinterested performances. Seeing more of their lives wouldn't change this. Ten times zero gives the same answer as one times zero.

[Crudblud]

I still don't understand why the "good" outcome of that quest was to remind the android who he really was, when he was the one who wanted his mind to be wiped in the first place.

Because war...










...war never changes.

Or at least I'm assuming that would be the rationale of whoever wrote that quest. Alternatively, "don't ask me for good writing in a game with super mutants!"

Bethesda doesn't have a "writing staff." They don't hire professional writers to do their writing; they just have everybody write their own material as they go along. That's presumably how you get something like "Kid in a Fridge" alongside bizarre Lovecraftian fanfiction

I don't quite agree with you about not spending enough time with the family, though. There are a number of games that rely on a brief scene establishing the relationship between the player character and a loved one to get the player invested in their fate, and they often work out just fine. For example, Splinter Cell: Conviction has a flashback to Sam Fisher comforting his young daughter that manages to be genuinely sweet without being overwrought, The Witcher 3 opens with a dream taking the form of a pseudo-flashback that shows us Ciri, a charming, likable character, and the kind of relationship she has with Geralt. And Red Dead Redemption doesn't give us any such scene at all, instead framing John Marston's relationship with his family entirely through his own words. Those games make what F4 so utterly failed at work not because they spent more time setting it up, but because their setups were competently scripted, written, and voiced. F4's beginning doesn't fail to resonate because it's short, or because we haven't seen enough of the lives of Nate, Nora, and Shaun. It fails because the characters are bland and one-dimensional, the dialogue is dull and uninspired, and the voice actors give bored, disinterested performances. Seeing more of their lives wouldn't change this. Ten times zero gives the same answer as one times zero.

I'm working with the assumption, perhaps ill-advisedly, that if they had had to come up with a more thorough presentation of the domestic icebox then it might have thawed a little. In any case, as you know, I think the prescriptive approach to character that Bethesda takes in these games is wrongheaded, but I do think it could have been tolerable if the family had been more fleshed out. I haven't played the games you cite, and I'm sure they are better at handling personal character moments than Fallout 4, although in at least two of those cases it seems you're talking about established characters who have been in several games and developed during that time. I know the Witcher series also has a whole bunch of source novels to draw upon, which helps. Anyway, my preferred option is still the "emerge from cryosleep with family intact" set-up, but I wouldn't trust Bethesda with that either, if their marriage and adoption "mechanics" from Skyrim are anything to go by. Basically what I'm saying is I would much prefer it if they handed development over to other studios and just acted as publisher instead.

[Cain]

Seriously, who plays Fallout for the story? I just want to finally be able to live out my bigoted hatred against all those filthy ghouls. Also, Fallout 4 has the best writing of the Bethesda Fallout games.
"Another settlement needs your help."
"Another settlement needs your help."
"Another settlement needs your help."

[Benjamin Franklin]

I read books for the gameplay.

[honk]

4/18: Take it up with Pete Hines and Bethesda, as they're the ones who apparently think that people want a Heart-Wrenching Personal Story™ about love and family when they play a Fallout game.

...



Not going to be playing this, whatever it is. Fuck Bethesda.

[Rushy]

What happened to the other 71 games between Fallout 4 and Fallout 76?

[Rama Set]

What happened to the other 71 games between Fallout 4 and Fallout 76?

They were exclusive to Windows 9

[honk]

https://kotaku.com/sources-fallout-76-is-an-online-survival-rpg-1826425333

Fucking lol. Because Metal Gear Survive did so great, right? I can see why they'd want to jump on this bandwagon.

[Cain]

I just want to kill n00bs with a fat man

as such, I approve

Edit: Fuck, it's a survival game. Nevermind

[Benjamin Franklin]

This might be my new favorite game without ever playing it. Not only is the idea cool and the game have a ton of potential, but it's going to trigger all the Fallout purists out there. Best game ever.

[Snupes]

It's going to trigger those with good taste in games.

[Benjamin Franklin]

It's going to trigger those with good taste in games.

lol you haven't even seen the game yet

[beardo]

I'm gonna play the shit out of this game just to annoy Saddam.

[Crudblud]

Guys, guys, this Fallout news is far more important.