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Bethesda made another open world game thats full of stupid fetch quests. Dammit. Why must they keep shitting on my nostalgia.
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I didn't mind the transition introduced with Fallout 3. I always like the exploratory elements of large open world games on 1st person view. I tended to ignore the weak points of these games for the pleasure they would give me on that regard. And New Vegas did approach something more like a real and interesting narrative.
But Fallout 4 is one large disappointment. I haven't bought the game yet, because I don't trust most of triple-A games during the first few months after launch and because I also don't trust gaming websites to give me objective reviews. I prefer to listen to actual gamers on boards and other forums. And the general opinion has been negative. Adding to this, there's the counter effect that overexposition tends to bring to people like me. I just tend to grow irritated and develop a negative bias. Websites like RockPaperShotgun run a large number of articles on Fallout 4, each one more ridiculous than the other on a daily basis. And this for a game most of their editors consider inferior. Of course, this also fuels my distrust for gaming journalism.
Fallout 4 just tend to further my feelings that we can't just have a good thing for long. Well established studios, running well established IPs, will eventually ruin these IPs. And sooner than later. There's some sort of unspoken law in economics that precludes the possibility that Intellectual Property management can become a process of constant improvement in quality. We need studies on this, all the more because it is not exclusive to the gaming industry.
Generally speaking, the gems are with less known studios, struggling to make an impression on a new IP. It's hard to imagine how unimaginative and technological inferior Fallout will keep on being while on the hands of a company like Bethesda, known also for the poor launch quality of their titles that can take half an year of continuous patches to become stable.
But above all I think that we are lacking quality in game narrative, from the big studios. And as I get older, I feel that triple-A games aren't really doing much to keep up with the expectations of my generation, that started video gaming back in the 80s. Maybe that's just what it is; The Triple-A video game industry sits on that comfortable spot of young adult appeal, (for now) the largest slice of the market.
This is also starting to affect the indie industry. As independent studios realize the economical value of appealing to the masses, and as places like Kickstarter help them understand these masses, we get to see less labours of love and more mechanistic, meant to serve a purpose, not a desire of the programmer(s). But it still remains the industry where we can get the largest percentage of interesting and imaginative titles.
Fallout 4 will probably not make it into my hard drive. And my natural cynicism tells me that Fallout NV is very likely the last of the Fallout games for me. Meanwhile, written in Java, by one person, with substandard graphics, Neo Scavenger has been able to give me a much more fun experience of a post-apocalyptic video game for more than an year now. The one good thing is that inevitably, someone somewhere will develop a great new IP that we can enjoy for sometime until it too becomes ruined.
Sorry, for the long post. -
My trusted game (p)reviewer is Total Biscuit. The only thing he seems to have done about Fallout 4 is this old clip:
Maybe more is to come.Comment
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So has anyone here actually played it? I've been vaguely tempted but have this suspicion it'll just be fallout 3 (II) or III if you count New Vegas. While I enjoyed the 3rd I'm not going to spend my money on the same game. Chances are I'll get it eventually, I'll just wait for it to go cheap & have the expansions. Nothing annoys me more then buying a game early & being "rewarded" by not getting the "full" game I'd get if I'd just waited.Comment
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I dunno if you saw, but TotalBiscuit was re-diagnosed with terminal cancer. I'm not sure he's going to be doing anything else unless he manages to get healthier again.My trusted game (p)reviewer is Total Biscuit. The only thing he seems to have done about Fallout 4 is this old clip:
Maybe more is to come.Glaurung, Father of the Dragons says, 'You cannot avoid the ballyhack.'Comment
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The whole SPECIAL/perk system redo is great. MODding community is active to fix things you don't like (I use total timestop VATS, without it the game loses tactical feel and becomes too FPS to my tastes, also armors on top of clothes mod and few others). I didn't finish New Vegas, only touched Fallout3, played F1-2-tactics multiple times. My rating on F4 is: great! Playing a cha/int pistolier, modding my own armors/guns, it's been great fun.
Quests? Yes there are repeatable "go there kill stuff, go there find stuff", but I think those are just for leveling reasons to give the game more "leveling content" for those who want to make an insane character... Sure most quests are linear, but with a dialogue mod so you can see the options fully fleshed out, well, there are Fallout-like options. =P
This game renewed Fallout series for me, Fallout 3 killed them for me, New Vegas gave it a little spark of life, but this ... the SPECIAL/perk redo is the best.Comment
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I feel the exact opposite, I dropped about 80 hours into fallout 4, and its a very shallow game.
The new special/perk combination pretty much ruined charachter building, since its full of mostly useless/joke perks. The quests (main, and side) are all very bland and almost exclusively consist of go here, get that. The dialogue options do pretty much nothing. And the weapon choices are bland, only two or three decent weapons in the game, which you get early. For most quests/areas there isnt really the option to go at them any way other than how they intended. Pickpocketing for example is damn near useless, and the only real reason to sneak is because various enemies cant see you while you shoot at them from four foot away. They dumbed the game down substantially, even from 3/NV, which dumbed the game down substantially from 1/2.
I much preferred the original two games, and 3 I felt was a somewhat misguided, but decent transition to the modern era.
All of that being said, the world is very nicely built, I found the most enjoyment from it just wandering around and ignoring the quests. I did that to the point that for some time I forgot I was supposed to be saving my child.
That gets to the root of it, its story is boring enough that I could forget im supposed to save my kid. Its also horribly buggy, ive had to use the console to fix so many broken quests/npcs. Though I dont really hold that against them since all software has bugs, and games are notoriously hard to catch all the bugs.
As far as open world rpgs go, the Witcher 3 nukes it from orbit.Comment
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The simple "problem" with all FO bashing here is - people will be playing this "crap" years from now, with all those fancy GotYs long time gone and forgotten.
Bethesda is like wine, launch is just the beginning.My name is Goblin. James Goblin.Comment
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