Fallout 76. Worried? Excited? Both?

[Anteros]

Well, my point is that slavish devotion to what the peanut-gallery commentariat chooses to post about won't get you any closer to making a great game, because you're never going to get a clear vision, and nobody has infinite money and time with which to develop a game. At day's end, you need to make triage decisions as to where your development dollars go, and by any objective measure, Bethesda's decisions have produced a successful game. While maybe some of those decisions have displeased a vocal percentage of the franchise's original following, it's pretty clear that Bethesda have gained far more than they have lost, in terms of overall audience.

Sure, which is why Fifa, Madden, etc have all been the exact same game with yearly releases for 10 years. Because they appeal to the lowest common denominator. Maybe that's what you want for Fallout, but it's not for me. If you enjoy stuff like that then I'm glad for you, but I'm still sad to see the types of games that I enjoy die to make way for it.

And I agree with Cheesegear: Why let the story bother you? If bad writing is going to keep you from enjoying a game, you're going to find a lot less joy in gaming than you otherwise might. Ultimately, the older you get, the less uncritical reception you're going to give to anything; movies, TV, people, anything.

I really don't find "you'll understand when you're older" to be a compelling argument. Or anything but condescending really. I doubt you're older than me anyway.

That aside, of course bad writing is going to bother someone who only views the content for the sake of being immersed in the story, and I can't believe you'd seriously argue otherwise. If you don't care about the stories then why can't you just go play Rust, CoD, or any of the other billion games that aren't story driven, and leave the story driven franchises to people who enjoy them? I suspect you care about the stories here more

Sure, but I don't think the fallacy isn't applicable in this case. Lots of people watch reality TV. That doesn't make it good. Few people go to see Shakespeare plays. That doesn't make them bad. Now I'll concede that popularity is more pertinent in evaluating the merit of art than, say, science, economics, or politics, but I still would rather operating on the undertaking that nobody has the right to tell someone else what they ought to enjoy. If you really like watching The Bachelorette, who am I to tell you that it's utter tripe?

You literally just told me what I ought to enjoy. In the last paragraph.

Just because someone prioritizes other features in a game above the narrative does not mean that person is suffering from some kind of mental illness. Did you ever play Space Ace or Dragon's Lair? They had great visual effects, but I can't say they were great games, because the gameplay in them was crap. In my opinion, the dialogue tree navigation and story in RPGs is a lot like Space Ace: It's not gameplay, it's just a series of inputs to get to the end, and see what happens. If that's what you want out of a game, I really do recommend picking up Obsidian Entertainment's back-catalog.

I don't believe I implied any sort of mental illness for disagreeing with me? At the very least, I didn't intend to. I understand that you don't like these sorts of RPG games with dialogue trees and such, but Fallout has traditionally always appealed to the audience that does enjoy these things. Of course we're sad to see one of our favorite franchises stop appealing to us. Wouldn't you be?

As for Obsidian, I'd say that anyone you're even having this conversation with in the first place probably grew up with their games and has already played them.

That is literally how The Dark Tower ends seven books. Stephen King literally puts in a bit, shattering the fourth wall, before the last Chapter of seven books.

Yes, and I hate that series as a result. All that build up and world building, and he uses the worst ending possible. The whole series was ruined. You're not winning any points with me with that argument.

Then again, even King admits that he's horrible at writing endings. It's why I avoid his work.

ME3's ending actually did retroactively taint my enjoyment of the hundreds of hours I'd put into the series.

I put a massive amount of weight on getting satisfying conclusions to stories that interest me, enough that weak endings have ruined several film and comic series I followed. I'm actually kind of jealous that you have the ability to ignore whether a story has a cohesive resolution, since my demand for them has gotten in the way of my fun many times.

Mine too, and it's the reason I haven't re-played the series. We put an incredible amount of effort for hundreds of hours to customize our characters and our stories because we were told that our decisions really mattered. Then, at the end of the day, they just had us pick our ending based and nothing we had ever done made any difference at all. It instantly took the series from my favorite of all time to just good/mediocre.