I still remember and loved the time when the airships show up. I might have said this on the thread several pages back, but I wanted more moments like that, but I never found them before I gave up on the game.
Well, NV was good for quests and story but that was Obsidian. FO3 wasn’t especially memorable (in my opinion, base don my trouble remembering) aside from having one of the worst endings I’ve come across in an RPG before they changed it. Seriously, what heavy-handed nonsense.
On the other hand, Skyrim’s main quest was completely forgettable and frankly I wasn’t impressed with most of the rest of it (I didn’t do the DB one people seem to rave about; did the Mage college one that was hot trash). But people love Skyrim for reasons beyond the base game quests so obviously quests aren’t everything.
Re-reading my W3 comments, it might look as though I’m spoiling for an argument. I’m not – I last played it well over a year ago so I wouldn’t be able to cite chapter and verse on what didn’t work anyway. But I like western-style RPGs and I like E. Europe bleak stuff (Stalker, Metro, I even played through Cryostasis) and so W3 seemed like it should have hit that intersection with gusto. Instead, I found it disappointing and just faded off of it and onto other games. That’s just one man’s experience though and obviously a lot of people like it so I won’t pretend that it’s “bad” even if I can’t appreciate what others like about it.
Interesting point.
Let’s pretend we re-implement Fallout: New Vegas using the FO4 engine. But also fix my pet peeve in FO4: the console-centric “only four possible responses” conversation limitation. Because that shit is just a straitjacket. And would be game-breaking for FO:NV.
What do we have then? Is it a better game?
Or, to take it in the different but similar direction, how about FO5 being the FO4 engine (maybe with more tweaks, including widening the conversation system), set in the traditional California-centric (Obsidian-centric) milieu of “true” Fallout. Is this game better than FO4?
IMNSHO, The thing about FO4 that makes it not a gaming milestone is the weakness of the writing and the limitations inherent in skimping out on interactivity and player agency. Bethesda kind of short-changed the “R” part in “RPG” in favor of having voice-acted player speech, plus a thousand possible pronounced player names or titles. Waste of development effort, I say. And not really balanced by the settlement development mini-game.
I agree. What would you do to make an arena shooter different than Quake 3, other than spiff up the graphics and sound to match 2016 standards, rather than 1999 standards?
That’s why the shooter genre branched out into a bunch of sub (and in some cases sub-sub) genres- military shooters(CoD, BF), mil-sim shooters (Operation Flashpoint, ARMA), sci-fi shooters (Mass Effect, Gears of War, HALO, Titanfall), and the character-centric arena shooters (TF2, Overwatch), and even a RPG shooter genre (Half-Life, Fallout3 and later, etc…)
For me though, the major complaint to Fallout 4 is that it’s not epic enough. Not that the story isn’t gritty, or doesn’t force you to make hard choices, but rather that you’re not doing anything on the scale of say… Fallout 1, 2 or 3.
I think this is a good observation, as is GargoyleWB’s observation that part of its excellence was a gradual thing building on previous titles.
A huge issue I had with Fallout 4 was I didn’t really want to help any of the major factions. The Brotherhood were stubborn jerks, The Railroad basically told me I wasn’t cool enough to be their friend and to fuck off, the Minutemen seemed totally unable to get their shit togetherm and I didn’t actually think The Institute were particularly evil. I kept looking for way to get The Brotherhood and the Institute to sit down and talk with each other, but it wasn’t there. It also seemed logical to me that the Brotherhood and the Minutemen would team up since they fundamentally wanted the same thing, but again, nope.
Contrast that with New Vegas where Caesar’s Legion were very obviously Not Very Nice People At All and the New California Republc at least Meant Well And Were Not Evil, with House as the authoritarian dictactor If You Like That Sort Of Thing - and there was the bonus option of you telling everyone to get stuffed and taking over yourself.
I felt like I earned my right to be Emperor Of The Mojave Wasteland in New Vegas; at the end of Fallout 4 I felt like I’d probably made things worse in many respects.