Fallout VI: Shotguns and Six-Shooters

[factotum]

I would disagree with your first point, Balmas: it is *not* necessary for your character's backstory to be your own in an RPG. The Witcher series proves that--you can't even pick a different name for your character in that, you have to play as Geralt of Rivia; the story, however, is so darned good that it sweeps you along regardless. Part of this, of course, is because CD Projekt Red actually give you role-playing opportunities and actual *choices* in pretty much every quest and subquest, even to the extent that there are specific quests in The Witcher 3 which depend on which characters survived from the previous game.

I therefore don't think the problem here is having a fixed backstory--there's so little of it that you could insert pretty much any character anyway. (Example: you want your male character to hate authority, yet he used to be in the military? Easy, say he got drafted into the military because of the war and then discharged dishonourably due to insubordination). The problem is therefore Bethesda's general inability to give you any substantive choice in the quests. This has been true of pretty much all their RPGs since Morrowind, but Fallout 4 takes it to the next level by giving you four conversation choices, three of which are basically "Yes I'll do it" with varying levels of snark and one of which is "I might be back later". There's never an option to say "No, I won't do this for you, and if I see you again I'm putting a bullet between your eyes for asking", or to switch sides partway through a quest. Same thing happens in Skyrim--once you've entered the haunted house in Markarth you ain't coming out again without killing Vigilant Tyranus, even if you have to do it in self-defence once he goes loony and tries to kill you--but there's so many more locations and quests in that game that you notice it less.

[Mutazoia]

Having been playing ESO for a while now, I can easily surmise that most of the complaints about FO4 boil down to Bethesda having to split development time and resources between the two projects, and ESO is a FAR bigger cash cow than FO4 (subscription fees and the real money store), and thus got the lions share of the attention. FO4 is no red headed stepchild, but there is clearly a favorite in the family.

[Gwyn chan 'r Gwyll]

Having been playing ESO for a while now, I can easily surmise that most of the complaints about FO4 boil down to Bethesda having to split development time and resources between the two projects, and ESO is a FAR bigger cash cow than FO4 (subscription fees and the real money store), and thus got the lions share of the attention. FO4 is no red headed stepchild, but there is clearly a favorite in the family.

ESO took no development resources from Bethesda. Bethesda licensed it to a separate studio and published it.

[The_Jackal]

ESO took no development resources from Bethesda. Bethesda licensed it to a separate studio and published it.

Exactly. While money is fungible, the team that worked on Fallout 4 and Skyrim did almost no work on ESO. Also, the 'ESO makes more money' argument is also unprovable and suspect. For one thing, Fallout 4 sold plenty of DLC, and more copies of its game, and running a MMO has considerably higher costs. We'd have to get a look at Zenimax's balance sheet to see which project made more money, but I'd bet that Skyrim and Fallout 4 have outperformed ESO, simply because if they didn't, Zenimax would be talking about the next ESO or Fallout game being a F2P MMO, and that is absolutely not happening.

As for the complaints about Fallout 4, I'm of the opinion that they're driven by a debate about what a Fallout game should be, insofar as there's a sizable cohort of players who want more focus put on the story & dialogue. There's also a bunch of clickbait merchants who make money from saying outrageous things, and saying that a critically acclaimed video game is "garbage", and then hijack what I refer to as the text adventure game police position and use it to farm youtube views. I assert that the people who really don't like Fallout 4 won't spend any time talking about it, in the same way that I rarely spend any time talking about games that I bought that I didn't like, e.g.: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning or Arkham Origins.

[Rodin]

Exactly. While money is fungible, the team that worked on Fallout 4 and Skyrim did almost no work on ESO. Also, the 'ESO makes more money' argument is also unprovable and suspect. For one thing, Fallout 4 sold plenty of DLC, and more copies of its game, and running a MMO has considerably higher costs. We'd have to get a look at Zenimax's balance sheet to see which project made more money, but I'd bet that Skyrim and Fallout 4 have outperformed ESO, simply because if they didn't, Zenimax would be talking about the next ESO or Fallout game being a F2P MMO, and that is absolutely not happening.

As for the complaints about Fallout 4, I'm of the opinion that they're driven by a debate about what a Fallout game should be, insofar as there's a sizable cohort of players who want more focus put on the story & dialogue. There's also a bunch of clickbait merchants who make money from saying outrageous things, and saying that a critically acclaimed video game is "garbage", and then hijack what I refer to as the text adventure game police position and use it to farm youtube views. I assert that the people who really don't like Fallout 4 won't spend any time talking about it, in the same way that I rarely spend any time talking about games that I bought that I didn't like, e.g.: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning or Arkham Origins.

There's different values of "didn't like". There's those who utterly hated it and didn't get more than a few hours in, and I would say that they probably wouldn't talk about it that much after the initial "WTF were they thinking??" posts.

The other type is the ones who played through the whole thing, and got a bad taste in their mouths in retrospect and got left bitter. Like me. The difference I see is in the amount of time I've got listed in the games on Steam: Fallout 4 - ~60 hours, with that representing one playthrough + two abortive attempts - one my first modded character, the second an attempt at survival mode. I would guess that the original playthrough was around 50 of those hours. Fallout: New Vegas - 160 hours. Elder Scrolls: Skyrim - 200 hours. I don't have Steam stats for Fallout 3 or Oblivion as they were both pre-Steam, but I had similar hours into each. My Morrowind time would likely clock in at around 400 hours.

It's hard to argue that Fallout 4 is a bad game. It's got decent shooter mechanics and a huge world. It's just that it's so much worse than the other games in the series, because they tried a bunch of new stuff that didn't work very well.

[snowblizz]

Got 248hrs in Vanilla Skyrim. Completed most except Civil War and the Dragons thingy.

242hrs in FO:NV never completed it entirely though. Still got final battle undone as could never decide the whole pick faction deal. Same with Skyrim really.

Meanwhile 322hrs in FO4 and done maybe half, maybe bit more, duno. Supposed to go to the glowing sea or something next they tell me. "How will you ever survive?" Am thinking my Mk6 X1 and a Hazmat suit should do it. :P

[LibraryOgre]

At a bet, the Brotherhood underwent a few schisms.

At the start, you largely had the Lost Hills bunker. However, as the NCR grew, there was bleed from that chapter, between those who said "Yay, there's civilization, it's now our job to help it build with the knowledge we have gained" and the group that said "No, we should keep hoarding knowledge because we can use it better." I would guess this schism happens sometime around FO2 (with the defeat of the Enclave, and the growth of the NCR to cover most of the West Coast), and a mixed group got sent East, becoming the Chicago and Capital Wastelands Brotherhoods. The Capital Wasteland Brotherhood famously had its schismatics, who became the Outcasts, while the West Coast Brotherhood had its schismatics go into the Mojave.

So, if you'd taken the Mojave Brotherhood at looked west, you probably had remnants of the original Brotherhood as technocrats involved in the NCR... but as a semi-independent adjunct to the government. Probably still had families over there proud of their history, and organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, but for Maxson's faction.

[Balmas]

Short question in between. After reading about several quite interesting things about NV/the Courier I feel extremely intrigued to play this game next. Is it recommended to play NV or Fallout 3 first?

If you're going to be playing them one after another, then you'll want to play Fallout 3 first. There were a number of problems that Fallout 3 which the New Vegas devs addressed in creating their game. As such, it might be a bit frustrating to go from New Vegas to Fallout 3.

However, I'm going to join the bandwagon saying that if you haven't played either game, then Tale of Two Wastelands is probably the best answer. The installation is pretty idiot-proof, and your game experience will be much better with the New Vegas mechanics than with Fallout 3's.

I would disagree with your first point, Balmas: it is *not* necessary for your character's backstory to be your own in an RPG. The Witcher series proves that--you can't even pick a different name for your character in that, you have to play as Geralt of Rivia; the story, however, is so darned good that it sweeps you along regardless. Part of this, of course, is because CD Projekt Red actually give you role-playing opportunities and actual *choices* in pretty much every quest and subquest, even to the extent that there are specific quests in The Witcher 3 which depend on which characters survived from the previous game.

I therefore don't think the problem here is having a fixed backstory--there's so little of it that you could insert pretty much any character anyway. (Example: you want your male character to hate authority, yet he used to be in the military? Easy, say he got drafted into the military because of the war and then discharged dishonourably due to insubordination). The problem is therefore Bethesda's general inability to give you any substantive choice in the quests. This has been true of pretty much all their RPGs since Morrowind, but Fallout 4 takes it to the next level by giving you four conversation choices, three of which are basically "Yes I'll do it" with varying levels of snark and one of which is "I might be back later". There's never an option to say "No, I won't do this for you, and if I see you again I'm putting a bullet between your eyes for asking", or to switch sides partway through a quest. Same thing happens in Skyrim--once you've entered the haunted house in Markarth you ain't coming out again without killing Vigilant Tyranus, even if you have to do it in self-defence once he goes loony and tries to kill you--but there's so many more locations and quests in that game that you notice it less.

I think I actually made the point that established characters can be fun if the story draws you in. That was why I then transitioned to saying that Fallout 4 doesn't have the story you'd need to make this established character good.

As for the complaints about Fallout 4, I'm of the opinion that they're driven by a debate about what a Fallout game should be, insofar as there's a sizable cohort of players who want more focus put on the story & dialogue. There's also a bunch of clickbait merchants who make money from saying outrageous things, and saying that a critically acclaimed video game is "garbage", and then hijack what I refer to as the text adventure game police position and use it to farm youtube views. I assert that the people who really don't like Fallout 4 won't spend any time talking about it, in the same way that I rarely spend any time talking about games that I bought that I didn't like, e.g.: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning or Arkham Origins.

Here's the thing, though. You say that people are upset that Fallout 4 isn't good because it isn't what they think it should be. That's a legitimate grievance, if you get a sequel that takes a radical departure from what a series has always been about. Imagine if Borderlands 3 was released as a Bejeweled clone. Or a Telltale Game that asks you to make no choices. Or a Witcher game where Geralt doesn't have any impact--it's endless quests to go out and kill monsters, with no underlying story. Under those circumstances, you'd be perfectly justified in saying that this doesn't add up, that this isn't what the game ought to be.

That's what we got in Fallout 4. Fallout has always been a series that emphasized story, dialogue, good characters, and the freedom to do whatever the player wants. Instead, we got a game with crap story, dialogue that serves no purpose, maybe ten good characters out of a hundred others, and less freedom than ever before. And people who love this franchise have criticized it accordingly. This game may be fun and entertaining, and I wouldn't be as hard on it as I am if it didn't bear the Fallout name and logo. That's because in anything but window-dressing, it has very little in common with what Fallout has been before.

[The_Jackal]

Here's the thing, though. You say that people are upset that Fallout 4 isn't good because it isn't what they think it should be. That's a legitimate grievance, if you get a sequel that takes a radical departure from what a series has always been about. Imagine if Borderlands 3 was released as a Bejeweled clone. Or a Telltale Game that asks you to make no choices. Or a Witcher game where Geralt doesn't have any impact--it's endless quests to go out and kill monsters, with no underlying story. Under those circumstances, you'd be perfectly justified in saying that this doesn't add up, that this isn't what the game ought to be.

Well, I have some semantic issues with the word grievance, but we'll leave those lie. Let me just rebut by pointing out that to Zenimax Media will take your objections into account while they're collecting your money, along with money of the 12 million other people who bought the game.

That's what we got in Fallout 4. Fallout has always been a series that emphasized story, dialogue, good characters, and the freedom to do whatever the player wants. Instead, we got a game with crap story, dialogue that serves no purpose, maybe ten good characters out of a hundred others, and less freedom than ever before. And people who love this franchise have criticized it accordingly. This game may be fun and entertaining, and I wouldn't be as hard on it as I am if it didn't bear the Fallout name and logo. That's because in anything but window-dressing, it has very little in common with what Fallout has been before.

Fallout I and Fallout 2 were isometric, top-down sprite games that would barely pass muster for an indie title in today's market. Would a better story or more dialogue choices or more ability to have your decisions affect the world have improved the game? Of course! My argument, however, is that money is fungible, and the people arguing that these features are more important to the success of the game than what Bethesda DID wind up focusing on are deluded to the point of lunacy.

You're entitled to your opinion, of course, and if you're not taken with the direction Bethsoft is taking with Fallout, you'll probably be well served by not buying the next installment, and instead sinking that money into Undertale or something. But my Steam profiles shows I've spent 455 hours in the game, and I'm still having fun, so maybe, just MAYBE the crummy story doesn't matter so much as you pretend.

[Rynjin]

Or maybe, just throwing this out there, you're having a lot of fun with a game a lot of people find objectively bad because your taste is different than theirs.

"I have 455 hours XD this game is great" is a really dumb measurement of quality. So is "Lookit all these sales lol". Neither of those dismiss the complaints people have about this game.

I managed to struggle through 113 hours of this game because I WANTED to like it, but its flaws kept weighing it down. This is not bashing a game we haven't played by any means.

And yes, you bet your sweet ass I'm going to think twice before buying the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout.

[Triaxx]

I was less than impressed with Fallout 4 when I first started playing. But it has grown on me. It's not a perfect game, but it's flaws while very prevalent, I don't feel they detract enough to render the game bad.

Could it be better? Absolutely. Am I satisfied I bought the game? Certainly.

The change I would make is to have more than one objective for a lot of the missions. And not simply: stuff you were going to do anyway.

Investigate cave. Take macguffin to quest giver, then possibly steal it back.

[factotum]

I don't think I've ever said Fallout 4 is a bad game. It's a lot of fun while it lasts. It's just that it could be so much better. All this stuff about money being fungible doesn't really wash--the DLC Far Harbor provides some real meaty quests and atmosphere that are simply missing from the main game, are we to assume it thus cost a lot more to produce? If more of the main game's content matched up to Far Harbor I wouldn't have any complaints.

[snowblizz]

Or maybe, just throwing this out there, you're having a lot of fun with a game a lot of people find objectively bad because your taste is different than theirs.

Which would mean those people are finding the game subjectively bad. You don't get to define what's objectively bad you know.

[The_Jackal]

Or maybe, just throwing this out there, you're having a lot of fun with a game a lot of people find objectively bad because your taste is different than theirs.

Which is an entirely symmetric argument, as well as rhetorically contingruous one. "A lot of people find it objectively bad" is an oxymoronic statement. If many people find it bad, and others done, then by definitions, there's no objectivity involved. More to the point, however, Zenimax media and Bethsoft aren't trying to cater to YOU. They're trying to cater to as broad a swath of the video game market they can, and the design choices they made in Fallout 4 have been validated by critical acclaim and fat stacks of cash.

"I have 455 hours XD this game is great" is a really dumb measurement of quality. So is "Lookit all these sales lol". Neither of those dismiss the complaints people have about this game.

I'm not trying to rebut your opinion, that's futile. I'm rebutting the idea that what you think would be an improvement would actually make the game more successful or popular, given the game has a finite budget (which it must have).

I managed to struggle through 113 hours of this game because I WANTED to like it, but its flaws kept weighing it down. This is not bashing a game we haven't played by any means.

Okay. I question the perspective of anyone who spends nearly three work weeks doing something they're not enjoying without being paid for it, but if you felt you had to push through the whole thing before you were ready to declare it unsatisfactory, that's certainly your privilege.

And yes, you bet your sweet ass I'm going to think twice before buying the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout.

Which is fine. Nobody has the authority to tell you what to enjoy. I don't like the illegal defense rule in baskeball, and I'm not saying your complaints aren't ill-founded or invalid. I'm just saying that by any ACTUALLY objective measure, Fallout 4 is a huge success, and is, in my opinion, a fun game. It's just not the spiritual successor to the Interplay text adventure game from 1998, and while that's totally true, it's not an argument that's going to get much traction with anyone in the power to change the franchise.

I don't think I've ever said Fallout 4 is a bad game. It's a lot of fun while it lasts. It's just that it could be so much better. All this stuff about money being fungible doesn't really wash--the DLC Far Harbor provides some real meaty quests and atmosphere that are simply missing from the main game, are we to assume it thus cost a lot more to produce? If more of the main game's content matched up to Far Harbor I wouldn't have any complaints.

While I'm inclined to agree with you when you say that FO4 could have been better, I really think that you and others are vastly underestimating the structural costs of developing a new game, as opposed to expansion content for a game that's launched. This cost disparity also, I believe, also accounts for the greater story complexity between Fallout 3 and New Vegas. For FO3 and FO4, Bethsoft spends the majority of their development efforts on fundamentals; implementing game systems, adding graphical features, tweaking the engine, etc. The producer of the follow-up game or the DLC has the privilege of building upon that foundation. I frankly find it surprising that Betsoft isn't still producing new DLC content for Skyrim and Fallout 4, even now, as that would likely be far more profitable for them. However, I suspect that they're interested in pushing their engine to integrate new features from id Tech 6.

[Rynjin]

Things can be objectively flawed, and still subjectively enjoyed.

The Transformers films have many objective flaws (poor direction that makes many scenes incoherent, lazy writing filled with plot holes, inconsistency, and wholly offensive writing on many of the jokes) and yet are EXTREMELY successful.

Success is not and never has been a measure of quality.

This is ignoring that the only sales figures we know for sure are day 1 sales of Fallout 4. Long term I would not be surprised if Skyrim beats it, even discounting the Special Edition release.

Okay. I question the perspective of anyone who spends nearly three work weeks doing something they're not enjoying without being paid for it, but if you felt you had to push through the whole thing before you were ready to declare it unsatisfactory, that's certainly your privilege.

That, really, is the problem with it being a thoroughly mediocre game that I was really looking forward to when it came out. At first, I liked it. The more I played it the more I disliked it, but I never really hated it. I figured at first "I just don't like it because it's new, I'll warm up to it". And the FIRST go around, the world is fun to explore, the characters and quests seem interesting, and the gameplay is solid.

It's the second attempt to play the game that really starts showing the cracks. All of the quests are very similar in objective, and you will (read: are forced to) make the same general decisions on any given side quest, and the main quest basically comes down to two major decisions: 1.) Which faction did you join? and 2.) Did you kill Shaun or not?

The characters? You've heard their dialogue, and there's not much depth in the side characters after the first chat with them. This is not a game where people say new things after certain events transpire. Nothing you say or do is going to change Moe the baseball man, even if you (accidentally because the dialogue system is HOT GARBAGE at conveying what the options actually mean) call him an ******* and correct him on how to play baseball and then scam him out of twice the money he wanted to give you.

The gameplay? All the weapons are basically the same, and all the character builds are basically the same. Pistols and rifles do not play fundamentally differently, they just deal different damage and one can shoot farther and more accurately. Melee weapons are a change of pace, but there are roughly two weapons that are viable each for melee and unarmed by about level 30, which doesn't help because there's only like 12 different melee weapons in the game anyway. There's not really any working toward a build since most of the core perks are available from level 1 unless you absolutely tanked Agility AND Perception. There's also an overemphasis on gear customization. The crafting perks are all but required.

If it were more in your face terrible on a first playthrough (or at all) I wouldn't have so many hours on it, for sure.

[Rodin]

The gameplay? All the weapons are basically the same, and all the character builds are basically the same. Pistols and rifles do not play fundamentally differently, they just deal different damage and one can shoot farther and more accurately. Melee weapons are a change of pace, but there are roughly two weapons that are viable each for melee and unarmed by about level 30, which doesn't help because there's only like 12 different melee weapons in the game anyway. There's not really any working toward a build since most of the core perks are available from level 1 unless you absolutely tanked Agility AND Perception. There's also an overemphasis on gear customization. The crafting perks are all but required.

The melee weapons thing is part of why one of my playthroughs was so short - I found General Chao's revenge within my first hour of play, and then began wondering why I couldn't find anything better. Turns out, that weapon is the third best melee weapon in the game. I'm sure putting one of the best melee weapons in the game a short walk south of Concord must have made sense to somebody at Bethesda, but it sure strikes me as violating some pretty basic game design guidelines.

I seem to recall that what finished off that playthrough was getting the Super Sledge and finding out they made it incredibly crap.

[LibraryOgre]

So, I'm starting Fallout 2, with the Restoration Patch, and wondering what kind of build I should make.

Currently, I'm looking at Gifted and Good Natured, with St 5 P 8 E 5 C 4 I 8 A 8 L 8, and tagging Melee Weapons, Steal, and Doctor... the ample opportunities to improve Unarmed has me not tagging that, I tend to improve and tag Energy weapons later, and Steal plus Doctor means a lot of good XP (and bonus healing, which is useful early in the game).

Any other thoughts?

[Triaxx]

I prefer unarmed instead, because while you might have a critical fail and drop your weapon, you'll be less likely to not be able to kick someone to death. Plus the animation is amusing. Everyone kicks like Chun-li.

Though doing both works. Put some points into throwing, because grenades are awesome. No where near as common as in later games, but against robots, accurately throwing pulse grenades is a life-saver.

[LibraryOgre]

I prefer unarmed instead, because while you might have a critical fail and drop your weapon, you'll be less likely to not be able to kick someone to death. Plus the animation is amusing. Everyone kicks like Chun-li.

Though doing both works. Put some points into throwing, because grenades are awesome. No where near as common as in later games, but against robots, accurately throwing pulse grenades is a life-saver.

TBH, I regret not going Melee Weapons last game (I went Unarmed). But there's so many opportunities to improve your Unarmed (tribal lands, Klamath, San Francisco, New Reno) that it seems a waste to TAG the thing. And an early Melee Weapons skill seems a lot more useful than Small Guns.

Oh, and Grenades are fun. I pretty much only use Pulse Grenades, but that's because they're so useful against robots.

[NeoVid]

Jackal pointed out one of the things that I found most depressing about FO4: It's the worst of the series at being Fallout, but it's also the best at making money, so it's likely to set the standard for the series from now on.

[Triaxx]

Frags are delightful, especially if you find spots you can throw them through windows.

The special bandits outside San Fran are, if you can kill them, a consistent source of Plasma Grenades. And those are among the small number of easy ways to deal with Enclave patrols. One to either side of the middle typically wipes the group. Trick is having the AP for it.

[LibraryOgre]

Thus the 8 Agility... APs for days.

[Triaxx]

I always found it annoying bonus move was at the end of your AP. So I get a move bonus but can't use it to get into position first.

[BladeofObliviom]

I always found it annoying bonus move was at the end of your AP. So I get a move bonus but can't use it to get into position first.

?

Are you sure? I've used it to poke out of a corner, shoot people using all of my normal AP, and then take cover again quite a few times. It's especially useful on the Oil Rig. Either the Restoration Patch fixes that or you're getting a weird bug.

[Triaxx]

Restoration must fix it, because it's always shown up as 4 yellow dots that I can't use for anything other than walking.

[BladeofObliviom]

Restoration must fix it, because it's always shown up as 4 yellow dots that I can't use for anything other than walking.

Well, that is exactly how it works, but it should use those up first if you move before taking other actions.

[LibraryOgre]

At least in FO1, the bonus AP happened before your usual AP, and couldn't happen after. If you had Bonus Move, your first couple hexes would say 0, indicating how many AP it would take to move that far.

[Triaxx]

Never worked like that for me. Didn't get far enough into 1 to know it was supposed to behave like that in 2.

[The_Jackal]

Things can be objectively flawed, and still subjectively enjoyed.

The Transformers films have many objective flaws (poor direction that makes many scenes incoherent, lazy writing filled with plot holes, inconsistency, and wholly offensive writing on many of the jokes) and yet are EXTREMELY successful.

Sure. But Fallout 4 isn't the Transformers. The first Transformers movie received decidedly mediocre review (Metascore 61), and it goes down from there. Fallout 4 generally received positive reviews (Metascore 84), and while user scores are definitely more mixed, there's a generally observable trend that users a far more likely to write a bash review than a positive one. Now review scores are also skewed, because reviewers rarely have time to play the entire game through, and so perhaps the late story didn't inform their reviews as much, this is definitely possible. However, when you look at Fallout 4 user reviews on metacritic, positive and negative reviews are pretty evenly split. Is the game SUBJECTIVELY bad? Inarguably, there is evidently a large cohort of people who felt strongly enough about the game to pan it. But here's the thing: I posit to you that games are more than their stories. I agree that Fallout 4 has problems, and the story is one of those problems, but it remains in my opinion, a good game, overall. For ME, fixing the story fixes very little of what I think is important about what Fallout 4 whiffed on. A bad story can't make a great game bad, and a bad game with a good story is still a bad game.

Success is not and never has been a measure of quality.

Well, there's a repudiation of the free market. I find that in the real world, quality and success are rarely apart for long, especially for items which aren't necessities. Maybe if you need a roof over your head and shoes on your feet, buying poor quality, cheap products might make sense, but a AAA video game doesn't satisfy any of those conditions.

This is ignoring that the only sales figures we know for sure are day 1 sales of Fallout 4. Long term I would not be surprised if Skyrim beats it, even discounting the Special Edition release.

I doubt very much there's much incentive for Zenimax to mislead their shareholders about the reception of one of their games, and even if Skyrim does outsell Fallout 4 (a position I agree with), that doesn't make Fallout 4 a bad game.

That, really, is the problem with it being a thoroughly mediocre game that I was really looking forward to when it came out. At first, I liked it. The more I played it the more I disliked it, but I never really hated it. I figured at first "I just don't like it because it's new, I'll warm up to it". And the FIRST go around, the world is fun to explore, the characters and quests seem interesting, and the gameplay is solid.

Okay. For me, the story and dialogue, in most games, are a sideshow. It's fine if they're good, slightly annoying if they're bad, but ultimately something I'm going to skip as much as possible so I can get back to playing. I'm here to shoot fools in the wasteland, the reasons why are only so important.

It's the second attempt to play the game that really starts showing the cracks. All of the quests are very similar in objective, and you will (read: are forced to) make the same general decisions on any given side quest, and the main quest basically comes down to two major decisions: 1.) Which faction did you join? and 2.) Did you kill Shaun or not?

Well, I've only done one ending for the main mission arc, so I can't compare how much it holds up with a different faction. But as I've said, that choice really just changes the hitbox of the enemies I'll be shooting when I bother to complete the main mission. But there's plenty of missions that I thought were fun, I thought many of the companions were likable and I liked gaining reputation with them.

The characters? You've heard their dialogue, and there's not much depth in the side characters after the first chat with them. This is not a game where people say new things after certain events transpire. Nothing you say or do is going to change Moe the baseball man, even if you (accidentally because the dialogue system is HOT GARBAGE at conveying what the options actually mean) call him an ******* and correct him on how to play baseball and then scam him out of twice the money he wanted to give you.

No different from Skyrim here. Or any other sandbox game, really. Even in a game like Bioshock Infinite, where the developer puts really great effort into making Elisabeth likable and making you care about her, she doesn't really have a very deep well of dialogue. This is the price of having fully animated and voiced characters. Doing this stuff and making it good is expensive and difficult. Maybe one day there will be text to speech which will allow you to make a computer be able to act, and animations techniques are getting better every year, but right now? This stuff is hard.

The gameplay? All the weapons are basically the same, and all the character builds are basically the same. Pistols and rifles do not play fundamentally differently, they just deal different damage and one can shoot farther and more accurately. Melee weapons are a change of pace, but there are roughly two weapons that are viable each for melee and unarmed by about level 30, which doesn't help because there's only like 12 different melee weapons in the game anyway. There's not really any working toward a build since most of the core perks are available from level 1 unless you absolutely tanked Agility AND Perception. There's also an overemphasis on gear customization. The crafting perks are all but required.

Some of that is the limitation of the genre, though some of the more interesting choices are under heavy weapons. One of the downsides of the perk system they chose is that it dis-incentivized using more than one weapon type. And putting a magic system into Fallout would be incongruous to say the least, nevermind that unmodded, Skyrim's magic system is hot garbage too.

As for crafting being necessary, I don't know about that. If you're willing to wait a bit for enemies to drop stuff, you can eventually get stuff that's just as good as what can be crafted. That said, you'll get there a lot quicker by spending perks. What I'd argue is this: There's not enough interesting things to spend perk on, period. Making crafting LESS useful does not improve that condition. My problem with crafting is that only a few specific weapons actually scale with you as your crafting improves. Is there a pistol who benefits from having gun nut 4? Again, not bad, but definitely could have been better.

The toughness perks were pretty yawn-worthy, and scale terribly as difficulty increases. The hacking and lockpicking perks were entirely dispensible, as the most they ever did was give you access to a closet with some ammunition and a handful of caps. There was a missed opportunity. Deus Ex had alternate paths to objectives which yielded to hacking sixteen years ago.

But for me, none of these niggles are enough to convince me that the game is BAD, and I really think that's because I didn't come to it armed with a bunch of expectations loaded up from having played and loved earlier iterations of the series.

[Rynjin]

Honestly, I question why you're so into the game given the playstyle you seem to have. If the world is just a shooting gallery to you, and the world, characters, and plot are meaningless, you should be judging Fallout 4 on its merits as a shooter.

And it's not a great shooter. It definitely makes a better FPS than its predecessors (though New Vegas has an undeniable charm to its very Skill rather than skill based shooting), but there are a lot better games that just let you brutally murder things in awesome, satisfying ways. The new DOOM remake sounds like it'd be more up your alley than Fallout 4. That game is hilarious. All this deep lore and the MAIN CHARACTER can't give two ****s about it. And I mean that as a positive.

So even judging Fallout 4 just on its own merits, and JUST on its merit as a shooter-looter (when that should just be a tiny part of a game like this)...it still falls short of another game released a few months later by the same publisher. And any of the Borderlands games, for that matter. Better shooting, better looting, funnier dialogue, worse plot, and co-op.

Well, there's a repudiation of the free market. I find that in the real world, quality and success are rarely apart for long, especially for items which aren't necessities. Maybe if you need a roof over your head and shoes on your feet, buying poor quality, cheap products might make sense, but a AAA video game doesn't satisfy any of those conditions.

Entertainment media is a whooooooooooooooooooooooooooole different beast than physical products. People don't "ironically enjoy" a crappy footstool or vacuum cleaner. They do media.

There's also the fact that consumed media stays consumed. If your vacuum sucks or is broken you can return it. If your movie sucks, you can't get a refund on the ticket. If you play most games, you can't just return it 10 hours in (or can't get a full refund).

And even there, those crappy tv infomercial products work on the same principle as bad media. We don't need to make a product good, because we make it so cheaply that every purchase is pure profit for us. We also make it a huge pain in the ass to refund it, and when the well dries up we move on to the next product/game. Why do you think Uwe Boll was allowed to make so many films?