I think @138 has the right of it; as a player, you know what’s what. As the character, the persona Bethesda has crafted (and I use that term quite loosely) for you, you are locked into a really stupid misunderstanding that any normal person would instantly dismiss as silly. It’s not that the game forces you to do anything–indeed, the game itself is (rightfully, I think) structured to reward you for exploring, building, leveling, all that. Trouble is, narratively, that path clashes with the character design and story arc they have laid in front of you IMO. That’s where the issue is, it’s a disconnect between those parts of the game experience. Sloppy design.
So what was the character supposed to do to avoid the ludonarrative dissonance?
Run with a panicked screaming in the direction their heart tells them to go while stumbling into a pack of mutants that beat you to death? Would that have satisfied the urgency of the narrative?
Yup. It’s handled much better in Fallout 3 (where the timespan is much more proximate), New Vegas (where you’re set adrift immediately with a loose long-term goal) and Fallout 76 even (where you’re just emerging from a Vault and trying to figure shit out with a general “the Overseer went out first, maybe figure out what happened there” thing to poke out when you get around to it). If you want a “find a specific person” motivation it needs to be clear that this is a realistic goal and you need to have a trail to follow. You should probably also have a bit more tie to them as a player, but eh.
Or of course there’s the classic Fallout motivations of “we need a thing we can’t get locally to save our community”. I think that works better than finding a specific person, tbh.
138
5325
I’d argue that “searching for stolen child” was a really stupid narrative in the first place.
In Fallout 3, you can search for your Dad, but you’re given all kinds of opportunity to be an asshole to him while in the Vault as a child, so it would make sense to not go looking for him.
In New Vegas, seek revenge on Benny or don’t.
But in Fallout 4, they stole your fucking son. What else would a normal parent do?
It’s ironic that the most overly-narrative game in the series has the least urgent main plot. As much as anything you end up in Vegas because the map is functionally linear and there’s nowhere else to go.
Yeah, fair enough. :-)
The main campaign narratives (or critical paths) are rarely the strongest draw for me in Bethesda games so they don’t factor much in my experience.
I’m not sure about that. I loved the game but some of the missions in ME3 seemed a lot less urgent to me given the galaxy was being destroyed by a Reaper invasion.
Whereas I as a non-parent who doesn’t really like kids found it completely unmotivating. So it’s really a bad move from multiple perspectives.
I have easy access to clean water in real life, but the quest to go get a water purifier for your people was understandable and urgent. If you can’t separate your real life situation from whatever urgency a story is trying to impart, then that’s not an obstacle any writer can overcome. You may not have kids, but you should understand the basic feeling a father would have for his missing son.
I thought the main quest in F4 was dumb (not for the reason above) but there’s a certain amount of what-ya-gonna-do when you make an open-world game with no hard time limits. People want main quest stories, but they also don’t want to be railroaded into doing them exclusively. Shrug.
I do. But it’s Fallout 4. I’m not playing a defined character with a defined personality and an established relationship with the characters. I’m basically just playing me except they’ve written a tiny amount of dialogue for me and I’ve had a baby shoved in front of my face for like 30 seconds. It’s not impossible to make me care about being a father in a videogame. But it’s impossible to make me do that and also give me a self-insert protagonist and a sandbox. Compound that with giving me almost no time with them and a child that’s too young to meaningfully interact with and it’s just a non-starter.
I guess what I’m saying is Fallout 4 just assumes that people will all have the instinctive reaction that they must protect the baby and they don’t need to do the legwork to invest us because, I mean, baby, right?
I think of myself as a normal parent. If I’m unfrozen only to find the vault abandoned and full on skeletons on the floor I’m going to figure it was a while since anyone was around. Then given the cold trail I can see perfectly well regretfully settling into a new life. The FO4 main quest only falls apart, for me at least, when you get to Diamond City and suddenly Kellogg and the synth kid Shawn reappear as more recent events and the disconnect between whether your partners death was recent or not becomes evident.
For me, the problem was really that I felt the urgency that the character seemed to feel, but saw no in-game reason to actually act on that urgency. My rational game playing side was at war with my dramatic empathic side, and loot whoring won!
Grifman
5334
They could have solved a lot of the issue of urgency vs. doing “other stuff” by making some requirements to advance the main quest (beyond what they did, which was trivial - find Nick, find Kellog, etc.). For example to go to the Glowing Sea (which was a main quest requirement), you really needed to be prepared with powered armor. If it had been really rare, they could have required you complete certain quests or find certain materials to get that far. But instead, they handed out powered armor like candy to children, so that was never difficult.
I played a ton of Fallout 4. I think I visited almost all POIs on the map. I also agree that the story of missing child now wander about if you feel like it was ridiculous but no more so than any other Bethesda game. E.g. these portals from Oblivian are destroying the world as we know it… but only after you have become the leader of the thieves, fighters and mage guild.
What I felt was the flaw of the terrible Fallout 4 story was the frigging Replicants. They took a side quest from. Fallout 3, that had no place in the world they had built, and then made an entire game around it.
I don’t usually see myself as a “cannon” guy, but keep your Tyrell corporation out of my small nukes and huge microchip world.
138
5336
I thought the inclusion was much more clever after my recent replay of Fallout 3 that actually mentions the Commonwealth and the Railroad. I’d completely forgotten about that.
Where I think they dropped the Synth ball was setting up the whole, “You’re not so-and-so!!! You’re just a synth!” / “No, wait! I am so-and-so!!!” angle in the game. Like nothing ever really comes of it, does it? I mean, there’s some random encounters of the type I mentioned, and there’s a bit with the Mayor, but that’s pretty much it, isn’t it?
What? I never take powered armor to the Glowing Sea. It never feels needed as I’m normally drowning in Rad-X and RadAway by then.
I like to explore while I am there, so I want PA so I can take my time, but I guess you could do it with you RX and RA.
Plus if you’re playing on survival half the crap in the glowing sea is a 1 hit kill if you’re not in power armor.
I never play survival for specifically that reason. I don’t have time for a Fallout game that forces me to treat every encounter as a possible one hit kill. Mostly I’ve explored the Glowing Sea with stealthy snipers in rad suits (switching to something better inside) or combat armor and at least some chem related perks. It’s not the best part of the game but I actually like having an area that makes me weight the benefits of exploring more versus getting in and out fast.
No survival mode means I can fast travel out also! Cheesy as everything but handy.
Tohree
5341
Man, all this Fallout 4 talk inspired to me re-install the game, backlog be-damned. While I have no problem ignoring the main storyline, I used the Start Me Up alternative start mod this to skip through some of the early sequence bits. This is a handy mod for those that want to lift out as much of the early main quest stuff as possible. Just tried the option to skip the whole prologue after character creation and it worked just fine.
I played a lot of vanilla survivor and now I add mods that remove some of the annoying bits. Sleep or Save is one of my favorites. This one lets you quick save at any open bed. No resting required.
