I completely agree with this. In fact, if you just went off the back side of the starting area past the graveyard, you died a very quick death.
I too enjoyed F:NV, but they were different games. I did, however, like the lack of instant power armor in F:NV, and a slightly different approach to sneak/stealth which seemed less gamey, if only slightly. I’ll sum that up as, it was harder.
I am really puzzled at this objection. This pretty much describes most RPG’s that I play. They all pretty much require you to talk with certain people and do things to advance the story. Scratching my head here on this one . . .
[quote=“DeepT, post:4820, topic:71429, full:true”]
By contrast in fallout 4, there are just a few stories you DON’T just read about on terminals (not counting the main quest stories).[/quote]
Did we play the same game? Here are some Fallout 4 sidequests:
Most companions have quests
Valentine Detective files
Confidence Man
The Big Dig
There Be Monsters
Hole in the Wall
Human Error
Last Voyage of the USS Constitution
Kid in a Fridge
Mystery Meat
Out in Left Field
Painting the Town
Public Knowledge
Special Delivery
The Gilded Grasshopper
The Secret of Cabot House
The Silver Shroud
Troubled Waters
Into the Fire
Taking Independence
All of the various companion quests
There’s a lot more than just reading terminals.
Sure, but Bethesda takes it to the next level. It’s an open world game, now go here and do this exact sequence of events with these NPCs. There is never an option. You go talk to Person X and they do Y. There are no branches. In a game all about “choices” and whatnot it’s annoying.
Your quest is to find your kid. Your only option is to find Nick. Literally the only way. You can’t beat a Bethesda game without an NPC doing something that you can’t. Catch a dragon. Open a door. Find a kid. Whatever, the NPC has to do it because you can’t. No branches, no options, follow the predetermined route in a game that’s literally all about doing your own thing and making your own story.
So I don’t disagree with this aspect existing, but I am honestly curious what similar game doesn’t have these periodic gates in story telling? I really can’t think of one, but I would love to play anything like that.
Every game tends to have them to an extent, but most offer options of how to do them. Bethesda offers one way, which invariably is a big scripted event with an unkillable NPC. Never anything else.
Lets compare say New Vegas’s “kill the guy that shot you” quest vs the “go find my kid (ie Nick)”. Getting to the dude can be done a ton of different ways. You can just wander off to Vegas and look for him, track him and find out from NPCs, lots of ways to find him. Once you find him, you can walk into the casino and shoot him, join his side, lure him into his room and assassinate him, etc.
Find Nick involves, go to Diamond City and take the quest his secretary give you. You can turn down the quest, but she’ll give it to you again since it’s literally the only way to progress, he’s the only person on the planet that can help you, you can’t wander the wastes and figure it out any other way. Then you go to the vault and let him out and encounter the guys and then you go to the next part where you get into his room and then track him with the dog. There are no options to skip Nick, the room, or the dog tracking.
It’s just lazy writing. They don’t bother to allow options and never really have. Even if it was a matter of two different things it would be more interesting. But instead it’s just a game of “essential” NPCs that have to do things you can’t, usually while spouting exposition the whole time as you stand around waiting for them.
I really liked this one. It was fun in multiple ways, both the locations it took me to, the asylum, and all the notes and comments along the way. The rewards were also nice.
Okay so I’m a bit confused here. In not just Fallout 4, but in most open world games and RPGs these days you have limited pathways along a main quest, but certainly multiple decision points as part of them. Like the typical good/neutral/evil/give-me-money choices that are part of many conversations, and to be honest part of MOST conversations in Fallout 4.
So what you missed entirely is:
But you don’t have to like your kid, or let him live, or side with him, or, and this is key, ever go find him at all. You can also join up with a faction and let that get you to the same finish of the main quest. Even outside that quest, you can join factions, randomly wander around, build settlements, etc. You can play 400 hours in this game and never finish that one quest.
I do not agree with that being limited in any way. It is no different than the quests that determine getting to sections of or finishing games like Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, GTA5, Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption, or any number of games noted as open world/RPG/free-choice.
You can remove all those quest givers and stories and what not, but what you’d be left with isn’t what we all play and think of as RPGs. We play them TO role play. TO be good or evil. TO choose our friends and foes.
@ShivaX this is a good breakdown:
https://cdn.gamerant.com/wp-content/uploads/fallout-4-mission-tree.png
Missed this as I was typing out that last reply, but I’m trying to remember here. Didn’t Bethesda come under some scrutiny in a previous game because major quest givers weren’t essential and could be killed and it cause progression problems? Was it Morrowind?
I think the “quest/story problem” in Fallout 4 all stems from the decision to add a voiced main character. The main story has to be on rails because of recorded dialogue limitations. The missing child thing is a whole different “fail” but the limitations imposed by a voiced main character are what threw me off when I first started playing. Thankfully I was able to get past it on my 2nd try because I think Fallout 4 is a great game.
I also think the voiced protagonist is the reason you see so many comparisons with Witcher 3. Once you add a voice you cannot have them just be “blank slate wakes up in prison” anymore. If the character has a voice and a back story all of the sudden then it should be judged against other main characters in other games.
The Witcher 3 comparison is a bit unfair though be cause Geralt is the coolest MFer that ever lived in a made up world.
Yeah, I do not like the voiced main character at all, in any of these games, really. The voices rarely sound like, well, i want my character to sound.
I do wish F4 had more nuance, sure. I mean, the endgame is truly bizarre in its 0/1 binary outcomes, all of which totally defy logic. None of the end states is one most players would voluntarily create. Maybe Bethesda is making a meta-commentary on the futility of agency! Or, maybe, yeah, this is not the strong point of the game, period. If could, say, work with one of the factions to bring their cool toys to the Commonwealth and give up the nasty stuff they were doing, or convince another faction to co-opt the bogeyman and use their resources instead of nuking 'em, or whatever, that 'd be cool. But, eh, kill 'em all, God will know his own.
I think Bethesda has just voluntarily given up on narrative coherence and consistency in their open worlds. Making all of the disparate elements and scenarios in their games tie logically into each other is proof of the axiom “perfect is a pain in the ass, and usually isn’t worth it anyway”. I’m sure that someone at Bethsoft notices things like George Clooney not noticing that you’re lugging a robot companion around, but realizes it’s not game-breaking and isn’t really worth the dev time.
Unfortunately, that kind of “shrug, it’s a corner case” thinking goes into their main quests, where it absolutely shouldn’t go. Stuff like kids still throwing shade at you after you’ve become the dovakin is a little sloppy, and F4’s “tie the story threads together by any means necessary” is IMHO the biggest blemish on an otherwise excellent game.
Now, world-building coherence and consistency in F4 is another breed of cat altogether. Bethsoft gleefully continues to cling on to the F1/F2’s world-building regardless of the fact that 200 years have passed and somebody would have moved those old bones out to the dump by now. Hell, maybe a couple of generations of somebodies. But I think we’re all pretty happy just tooling along with the 50’s nostalgia, windows-are-still-broken-and-the-beans-are-still-edible zeitgeist of the first two games.
The time warp seems so unnecessary though. What was the motivation for doing this? Was it purely a plot device or was it sort of a tool for Bethesda to stake out there own claim in the Fallout universe. Was there some type of licensing issue when it was bought from Interplay/The Caens?
I always thought the 200 year leap was also a commentary on how broken society is and how it’s never coming back. By the end of Fallout 2, you can see parts of society like the New California Republic already rebuilding society. With that rebuilding comes things like sweeping away rubble, fixing broken windows, etc. By showing DC and Boston still in ruins 200 years after the war, it seemed to me commentary on how completely broken society still is. That no one ever bothered to do those types of things.
Plus as far as cans of food, they had super-preservatives in the future that didn’t allow nature to reclaim the food. They were super vacuum sealed and preserved.
I figured that it was the only way they could make something like the Institute make any sense (as much as it could anyways, they created teleporters but they need to kidnap some random dude to help them run a pre-war reactor?) was if science had time to rebuild.
That may be the difference in people who get lost in a Bethesda game (like me) and those who find them “meh.” I play without any focus on “beating the game.” The main quest and other quests are just interesting things part of a huge world for me. I couldn’t tell you much I recall about the main quest in Skyrim, and I would have enjoyed the world just as much had their been no main quest. I spent months just exploring the world with my characters backstory and history mainly created in my head and played out in the world Bethesda gave me.
Same for Fallout 4. I love this huge world in which I can explore and create my own stories to my heart’s content. I really enjoy how the world is going on out there, battles are being fought, without me.
Here’s a really ignorant (literally!) question: I’m level 29, and Preston just gave me the Castle story/quest. From everything I’ve read, this can be pretty challenging. My armor is pretty “meh”, I haven’t invested in armor perks yet, just using what I find, armor stats are 86-80-35. So I thought, well, I’ve got this T-51 and T-60 power armor I’m lugging around (my one cheat mod on my PS4 is a weight cheat mod) I’ll put it on before I get to the Castle.
So I found a Power Armor Frame in a school on the way to the castle, and I stood in front of it and my only options were Transfer and - well, just transfer. So I transferred my full set to the Power Armor Frame - but there’s no suit to step into. It appears to just be storing it.
How in the heck do I put this stuff on?
If your armor is not repaired, you can’t equip or mount it on a frame; that’s one thing that might be going on. But did you, um, hit the key or button to Equip (that is, wear) the pieces of armor on the frame? Like when giving stuff to a companion or settler, you gotta actually equip it for them, maybe.
I didn’t see an equip button. I transferred it but there was no armor visible on the frame.
Hmm. No clue then. I usually ignore frames as I have a bajillion back at Sanctuary but I’ve not been able to enter one, unless it was bugged.