The game actually does give some justification in lore. A few years before the story, they used to have a working government. Then, a synth came in and started shooting people. This led to mass chaos, and the group was slowly destroyed by paranoia mixed with the constant super mutant and raider attacks. So, the institute might be to blame for most of it. Them making the mutants would keep the surface from gaining too much power to fight back. Especially because they were planning to reveal themselves soon. The real question is, why are there so many people staying in random places when raiders and mutants are constantly attacking and destroying the few things they did build?
@@rolay7730 Again, some stuff is poorly explained though. For every answer, you have 10 more questions. If you feared the human population, why couldn't you just create a literal endless army to overtake them? Why replace settlers when your birds make greater spies? Why not recruit the endless pre-war ghouls for info and knowledge? Why replace people at all when again, you can just use birds as better and less conspicuous spies? Why do setters struggle to survive despite being born and raised in a lawless mutant wasteland? Why set up a "settlement" next to a mutant camp? Again, the world just seems illogical and it doesn't seem intentional, rather, its just poor design and bad "videogame logic" that most players ignore.
@@AlexAdrift I already agreed that it was stupid they would stay in such small settlements with the mutants around. That is stupid video game logic, but there are answers to most of the points. 1) The institute can not just make an endless army of synths. They make a LOT of synths but they still cost resources. We know the institute needs more resources, with them needing trips to the outside world to steal more. Not to mention they can't keep the human synths they currently have under control. Though I guess you could argue they actually did try this with the super mutants. They are an army sent to the surface to destroy. The only reason it stopped was because the head scientist sabotaged it and ran away. 2) You can't influence people with birds. When they replaced the mayor, they gained control of Diamond City. I honestly thought it was bad writing when they had some random guy get replaced just so they could test out some GMO seeds. But it still shows that they can use human synths for lots of things birds can't do on the surface. 3) There aren't endless pre-war ghouls. The number that actually existed before the war and kept their sanity would be low. Even if they can talk, it doesn't mean they have gained a lot of skills over the last 200 years. Ghouls don't have to worry about radiation. They can survive on heavily irradiated food and water. They don't need a lot of resources to survive, meaning why would they learn how to grow food or purify water? Not to mention the extreme mental damage most of them have, both from radiation or just the trauma of rotting while alive. It makes sense that people would be scared of ghouls. There are feral ones everywhere, and the ones that talk still look like monsters. Not to mention, they smell like rot.
@@rolay7730 While it is explained, I just think most of it is just poor excuses so that the game can justify the gameplay. 1) While not endless, they would easily have enough to take out settlements of two people, like most settlements in the world, and diamond city, which is guarded by dudes in literal umpire gear. If your super secret organization can create literal doppelganger humans, yet can't take out dudes with catchers mits, you have a problem. Not to mention, you had super mutants. 2) Again, replacing people for influence never worked. You discover it every time. People get suspected, like the mayor. Clearly, the devs wanted the game to be like a witch hunt, so they had to have the institute place spies, spies that are always discovered and illogical to begin with. If everyone knows about your spies and your replacements, you are clearly terrible at creating spies. Again. Idiots to justify the gameplay, no different than the settlements. 3) My point about the ghouls was this. If they've survived for 100s of years, then they clearly know how to survive. Being a ghoul doesn't make you immune to bullets or deathclaws, so clearly, these characters should know survival. However, despite this, they are still treated as idiots. I just personally feel an organization built on pre-war knowledge and science might want to study the pre-war ghouls, considering they kidnapped a pre-war human child. Again, I make these points only to showcase that despite Bethesda trying to explain things, such as dumb settlers and the odd motivations of the institute, I just personally feel their explanations don't make sense.
Yeah, I think the game tried to be comedic, yet became a punchline itself. The game thinks we are laughing with it, when in reality, we are laughing, and cringing, at it.
The joy of it is that Bethesda is no more. It's senior people all retired and all we have left is Todd Howard running around the Microsoft offices bragging about how he made Skyrim.
Bethesda was always ridiculously overrated. Back in days Gothic2 was much better than Morrowind, Witcher1 much better than Oblivion, but most people never even heard of these games because small studios have no money for marketing and media hype. Skyrim is overrated a f, and Fo3 and Fo4 are not even real Fallout games. Starfield just exposed all their flaws, not even paid shiIIs can save them.
@@bdleo300Let's not go that far with Witcher 1 or try to put down Morrowind or Oblivion. They deserve their status. I do wish Gothic2 got some more love, though
@@bdleo300 I agree with the FO3 hate, but without it we wouldn't have had the bones to build FNV on, so it at least has that redeeming quality. FO4 has no redeeming qualities.
The 200 year old baseball equipment they use as protection against super mutant attacks also protects them from radiation, trench foot, starvation, and of course, foul balls.
I will be honest; the world-building is pretty crappy in Fallout 4. But the crafting and inventory system was so much better than Starfield. I just don't get why they would make it so hard to craft anything. In Fallout 4, the settlement box connects to the workbenches. In Starfield, I made a base, and it took 10 minutes just to make a ham sandwich because I had to look through all the boxes in the base.
Yeah, great point. Starfield is a massive downgrade. The outposts are limited, the crafting is more tedious yet nothing is added, junk went back to being useless, resources are just easier to buy, your build options have greater limitations, and you can't even store all your companions and crew in a singular location anymore.
Imagine if Bethesda actually leaned in this idea fully and intentionally, with everyone being very technologically and socially regressed. Being able to choose a proper background for your character and having it be extremely important to gameplay. With no real initial objective, you just wander around and learn about the region and choosing to solve conflicts, and unite groups to attempt to gain back that prewar normalcy or tearing everything down because why not the worlds already blown up. I just feel like fallout 4 never really went into the whole psychology of someone who’s entire world is blown up and now they have to live with stinky tribals and get shot at by raiders on the daily,
Yeah, that is the problem playing as "Nate" and then still trying to give the player choice. And I like your idea, I think a proper background system could help lead to better roleplay and character creation.
@@richardarriaga6271 Assimilation and replacing people always seemed like the dumbest form of control and intel gathering. You could create a literal messiah, arm them with supplies, charisma, and knowledge, then influence the entire region. You could create endless agents to join every faction. This is clearly better than "replacing Karl with a robot and nobody will tell."
Calling it now. ES6 is gonna be the same Bethesda shit, terrible writing, terrible worldbuilding, terrible engine. ES6 is gonna be more of the same. As we saw with Starfield, it's all Bethesda is capable of
Literally the reason I refused to play Fallout 4 until the amazing mod (made for free by the way and still has custom models and even actual professional voice actors) Sim Settlements 2 where settlers will actually build and develop the settlements on their own, your only input is what sorts of plots you want set (living, farming, leisure, municipal, defense, etc.) and eventually you can have settlers create settlements on their own depending on an assigned unique leader NPC's traits and specialties.
You don't even have to wait. The mod lets you build the city planner desk from the start of the game. You don't even need to assign unique ncps to them, any unnamed settler will do. I haven't bothered building a settlement in years.
I loved the settlement building and had themes for the settlements in my head for building an empire like Red Rocket being the robot factory, boat yards at the water settlement etc but the Sim Settlement mods do look incredible, they could literally be a game in and of itself
@@the1andonlytitch If sim settlements was a spin-off title, some fans, including myself, would LOVE it. Plus it would mean that Bethesda could focus on RPG elements and worldbuilding for the next Major Fallout.
It's all the settlement building. That's what makes Fallout 4 seem so much different than the others--adding in settlement building. In order to make those mechanics engaging and challenging, they have to be deeply incorporated into the whole thing. Which means making some pretty ridiculous concessions, like "somehow in 200 years nobody bothered to try rebuilding this very obviously fertile farmland."
Yeah, that is where most of the issues originate from. I think that is why they made 76 a prequel. Gives a better explanation for the settlements, buildings, and untouched exploration.
@@AlexAdriftUnfortunately they screwed that up too. I don't know who thought turning Fallout into an MMO utterly devoid ofcities, factions, or NPCs was a good idea. Fallout 4, multiplayer, preferably PvE on a smaller scale like invite-only would've been great. But there is no faster way to ruin a franchise than to turn it into an MMO. It necessarily sacrifices all meaningful substance in favor of quick profit.
It's even worse than idiocracy. Bear with me. - Idiocracy has the excuse that people got dumber over many generations. At the very least the knowledge got lost. E.g., no living soul still knows WTH plants need, because that knowledge got lost. - Fallout 4 has ghouls that were alive since before the war. It's not even conjecture, there's TWO in Goodneighbour alone (plus some in FO3) that tell you as much. And not all of them are random uneducated folks. There's an engineer at the Slog, for example. You're NOT the only pre-war person around. Even those born in the most recent idiocracy age, didn't have to wait for you to teach them ye olde pre-war smarts. They had people from that age all along. As a simple example: At least some of them must still KNOW what, say, an adobe wall is. Or how to just melt some asphalt (you only need a bucket and some wood) to make bitumen paper for a roof. But nope, they'll sleep in homes with wide gaps in the walls for the wind to blow through, under incomplete roofs, on a wet blanket, while it actually rains on them. Forget raiders, that will kill you next winter in Boston. Yet they're incapable of even learning from the pre-war ghouls anyway. BUT IT GETS WORSE. The major factions have devolved just as much, for no obvious reason. E.g., the BOS actually forgot how to army. In NV you actually have to dig into their archives to re-discover something as elementary as the chain of command. And by FO4 time, they're down to just a loose band of irregulars who work for loot instead of pay or even a guaranteed meal, buy their own gear, have even less idea that a chain of command even is a concept, and generally are more like the old Ottoman Bashi-bazouk irregulars than any modern army. Or read the holotapes when you get to find Brandis. They're so focused on running with the loot, that they just leave their mates and subordinates behind to die for no reason. E.g., Knight Astlin is back at the National Guard training yard to secure the base... but Brandis never goes there to even as much check on her, much less retrieve her. No, seriously, he actually says he doesn't know what happened to his team. He legs it to the bunker up north on his own, and that's it. E.g., the Institute never actually managed to make a new processor or even new version of the operating system. Not only their terminals literally display the same OS version, and are vulnerable to the same 200 year old hacks. No, it's worse. As shown in Curie's companion quest, their synth chips are literally bit-for-bit compatible with a pre-war Miss Nanny. Like, you can just copy the program and data from a Miss Nanny into one, and it will just work. They presumably miniaturized the chips, but they just are otherwise the same. It's flippin' sad, really...
Great points about the ghouls and factions. There is no reason for either of them to be stupid or shallow. The factions, especially the institute, made no sense to me. Their motives were always weird to me and setting them up as the boogeyman was goofy. Why watch people? Why replace people? Why create clones? All this, when they can just spy on people using birds, something settlers won't notice compared to their literal family members, or just subjective people using an endlessly created army. Again, they were better when they had an air of mystery around them cause their motives and actions are illogical in my opinion. As for the ghouls and wastelanders, Some would have an excuse to not be book smart, but everyone would know the basics of survival. Imagine growing up in a mutant wasteland. You would know survival, especially ghouls who have survived 100s of years. Wouldn't they know how to deal with the wasteland better than anyone? They would know building, crafting, cooking, hunting, trading, and survival.
@@AlexAdrift Yeah, that's what I don't get. I mean, like, you even have prewar ghouls at the Slog, and even they don't seem to figure out stuff like "build a door and make some shutters for those broken windows." I mean, they don't even have the "not book smart" excuse, since they have a literal pre-war engineer there, in addition to all that experience. That said... Oh, the Institute's relationship with the commonwealth is... a whole other rabbit hole. I mean, going back to the basics, why even antagonize them? The institute can manufacture decently high tech stuff, that sells well, though they could realistically even just mass-produce bottle caps. (It's not laser science.) Like, instead of starting shooting people at University Point for not having the hard drive they wanted, imagine just going, "Right, lads. We're prepared to pay 10,000 caps to whoever has it or finds it." Not only that would motivate those guys to go back and start digging, but they'd have caravans from all over the commonwealth and beyond lining up to see if they can't sell some old data to the Institute. BTW, also what I said about the Institute technology is also just scratching the surface. I mean, ok, they only miniaturized computers, but for example they actually REGRESSED in lasers. For the same Joules used (as in battery charge), Institute lasers actually do less damage. It's literally like spending the last 220+ years to produce a gun that's actually worse than the 1800 pattern Baker musket.
@@NegotiatorGladiarius Yeah, you are making great points. You'd think the actual devs would discuss and brainstorm these issues, but clearly they haven't. The truth is that the Institute was better as a mysterious faction in the shadows. When you bring them into the spotlight, the entire faction and questline looks idiotic. They are supposed to be "scientists" yet this is a strong argument that they are the worst and dumbest faction in the fallout franchise.
The Institute as a whole are just stupid. They have smart mouths, but stupid brains. If a group of people have the same idea and goal of "Mankind redefined" and want other people to be on board with said goal, why in the world would you cause chaos and destruction to the same exact people? I can somewhat excuse the Broken Mask Incident because if not mistaken it was an early test for a Gen 3 Synth, the human-like ones. But the Commonwealth Provisional Government (CPG) incident was just stupid. They literally had their chance to integrate themselves into society and convince some people that they're doing this for the betterment of humanity, but nope! They just went in there under the disguise of normal settlers, and just shot up the entire room causing the end of the CPG. Not only that, but because of their stupid ways to become integrated within society, they inadvertently cause settlements like The Covenant with their imperfect ways to tell if someone's a synth or not (Like seriously, it only takes someone to answer Swatter in their little test thing to mark one as a Synth), and even stupider groups like the Railroad whose only main goal is to make Synths have free will for some reason, even if it costs another human's life (harkening back to Patriot/Liam Binet). Fallout 4's writing is a complete mess. And it's all thanks to Bethesda.
I live in New England. A few weeks back I didn't shut the door tightly and the wind pushed it open about an inch. After a few minutes the whole downstairs of the house cooled several degrees. It was in the low 30s outside. It wasn't one of those cold snaps. 30s is something this region would see even with insane global warming. Everyone in that game outside of the institute wouldn't be there because their ancestors would have died from exposure.
@@AlexAdriftYou’d love the Frost mod then. It takes place during the initial nuclear winter in Boston and everyone being a dumb shoot-first, ask-questions-later psycho actually makes sense.
@@AlexAdrift, ATOM RPG and its sequel ATOM RPG Trudograd comes much closer to rational. P.s. The setting is Ukraine post Nuclear War (if the Cold War ended in nuclear fire instead of the USSR breaking up).
Diamond City was a huge letdown. Biggest settlement in the area, and it barely houses a dozen or so people. Rivet City, on the other hand, felt like a bigger, more lived-in place. I know raiders would be a concern in this setting, but has no one tried to rebuild? That, and giving us a predefined backstory were just awful choices.
The main problem with Bethesda is that there's just no reason for them to be using the Fallout IP like they are. It's clear that they want a wacky post-nuke apocalyptic setting, but it's supposed to be CENTURIES after the bombs dropped in Fallout. The central point in New Vegas and FO 1 and 2 is that people are rebuilding, getting organized. Cultures are forming. People are building cities, making skyscrapers of their own. They're powering their towns with efficient energy. They're mastering agriculture. Humanity is climbing out of the hole. A great example is how the NCR is a bonafide *nation*. It's a straight-up country. It has infastructure, its wealthy enjoy the use of motor vehicles and paved highways, there's a functional democratic government with voters and legislatures and civilian benefits, there are labor unions and taxes that are collected go into welfare for the poor. It even had a gold standard to its currency, and things are advanced enough that they swapped to FIAT. Bethesda doesn't understand this at all. They just want a fun and LE EPIC post-apoc shooter game. Which is fine, but they're butchering the IP to get it. We're actually supposed to believe that in the Commonwealth, nobody's cleaned up any of the skeletons who've just been sitting around dead for 200 years and in major areas that are densely inhabited. Folks are still wearing 200 year old clothes that they scavenged off of corpses as their main means of clothing. People are still squatting out in bombed-out skyscrapers built pre-war all over Boston. People are fighting over cans of Cram at the Superdupermarts. Nobody knows how to build or farm or fight off raiders or ghouls. They struggle to collect water or do much of anything. This is how Vault Dwellers should be acting fresh out of the Vaults, but it's people who've been living in the wastes for centuries. It should be centuries past the bombs, but by Bethesda's perspective it feels like it's been a few weeks at most. Nobody is organized. Factions require you to do literally everything for them as the designated errand boy (and eventually you become errand boy slash supreme leader (who also has no real power and still get told what to do like a lackey)) to function whatsoever. In Obsidian titles, you feel like the story just happens to have you in it. In F3 and 4, you're basically Jesus. The story hinges on your very breath, and if the player dies, the wasteland itself seems to cease to exist.
Great points. I think they wanted a game that was more built on exploration compared to social navigation, hence why 76 is set so far in the past. It gives a better reason for things to be unexplored. It seems like it took Bethesda years and multiple games to understand this.
There are a also few questions I never hear anyone asking when it comes to any Fallout game. These include: 1) How in the hell is every wastelander literate? Literacy is not the first thing you need to know in order to survive. 2) How come the Vault-dwellers and the wastelanders still speak the same language, despite being isolated to centuries? It's easier to understand the point if we bear in mind that, comparatively, we live during the WWI when it comes to the years passed after the Great War in Fallout 4.
@@mikitz For 1, it makes a lot more sense in the Obsidian games than the Bethesda ones. Plenty of people aren't literate in the original Fallouts. Granted, it's not like you walk around with a book in any of the games and ask people around to read parts of it for you, but I'm sure literacy rates are awful in F1 and 2. By New Vegas it should be much better generally as people are climbing out of the hole. Things are probably on par with the 1700s or so. It would of course differ based off of region. People in NCR territory are very educated, while those in the wastes would be more of a gamble -- likely relying on Followers schools and so on. Those in the Brotherhood of Steel would be literate. Practically nobody in the Legion would be, other than slavery logistics offices. It doesn't make any sense that people in F4 would be literate, though. It's just left ambiguous. There's no schools, no formal education anywhere. The biggest, most civilized city you can go to is a bombed out baseball stadium filled with fuckin scrap shacks. People are eating irradiated canned goods and there's no agriculture. Still everyone can read because idk, I guess Emil didn't feel like writing any more. For 2, I think that's mainly to do with the universal easiness and adaptability of English. IIRC English is the easiest language in the world to learn, and the bulk of it has barely changed since the 1300s even when literacy was a non-object. Though there are plenty of tribes who don't speak English all over the West, descended from native Americans and so forth. Vault Dwellers do have particular quirks in how they speak that set them apart from garden variety wastelanders, like talking in a chipper tone of voice and with slang specific to their Vault, usually deriving from Old World jive talk.
People act as if personally offended whenever I point out the same stupidity of this game, calling me a New Vegas stan, or some other form of an oppressive gaming elitist. But when actually looking at the difference between this and New Vegas from an critical point of view, is it any wonder I preffer one over the other? And the fact people are offended really prooves this further; Fallout 4 really is an idiotic game for absolute morons. Modders really do deserve credit for trying to make games better. Starfield is modders trying to add life to a creatively dead game, and Fallout 4 is modders trying to add sense to a retarded world
Personally, I think some people are just defensive of the things they enjoy. I think we all are to some degree, including myself. I personally don't care when people defend the game, I care more when people forgive or make excuses for the company that has done terrible things and succeeded regardless because of their blind support.
I think the same, I still play fallout 4 cus I love the series and the vibes ever since the first two games, but I sorely miss how captivated I was in FNV’s, F1’s, and F2’s story and characters. Bethesda can make great game worlds that are fun to explore but I wish they took the RPG aspect more seriously. I don’t think a fallout 5 like fallout 4 would be a horrible game, but it would feel like the certain death for the narrative of fallout.
@@carlwinslow5905 While Fallout 3 was my intro to the series, I do feel bad for the OG fans such as yourself. Most have only had New Vegas and mods for the past two decades.
To be fair, fallout 2 started the trend of "just about everything is a reference" but it wasn't as blatant. Fallout 3 was "sets set the game a few years after the bombs...no wait i meant 200 years and the people still act like the bombs fell yesterday" and fallout 4 is just creatively bankrupt. From its main story and other quest. Bethesda just made a theme park, you come and visit, see the people role-playing what they think a post apocalyptic world would look like, then you go home. 4 honestly is the worst. Why is everyone living in trash and with skeletons? Why is everyone acting as if they new life before the apocalypse and are just now crawling out the ashes? Its been 200 years and these people act nostalgic for a culture they never knew or were apart of. If you go to modern day Boston it is nothing like it was 200 years ago so why is it in Bethesda's fallout everything is static. Humanity is just frozen and unable to recover and advance which is not the case in 1 and 2. In those games you see that people have built villages and aren't living in burnt out ruins. You got the brotherhood of steel which is actually developing its own technology and not just hording old world technologies Bethesda is just honestly pretty trash when it comes to any sort of writing. All that interesting lore in the elder scrolls was fan source from back in the early days of the internet from a forum or was written by Michael kirkbride who stopped working at Bethesda after morrowind. The lore in oblivion mostly came from his notes and that hack of a replacement Emilio or whatever his name is butchered everything. He also did the bad writing in fallout 3, 4, and skyrim. And i say he is a bad writer as a fact because he did like a 40 minute rambling in which he explained his writing methods which boils down to "who cares no one is going to pay attention and keep it stupid simple" Honestly now that I'm ranting and the allure of Bethesda games has been broken i can't see the appeal of any of them. Morrowind and daggerfall feel outdated which is not fault of their own they are still fun games but the other ones are middle of the road and janky. Mods are cool but when i download enough mods to overhaul skyrim to be ripoff vampire the masquerade or fallout 4 to be bootleg stalker am I even playing a Bethesda game anymore? If your game is so trash that i need to overhaul it tgat its no longer recognizable to the base game then something is wrong. Okay thats my 2 cent rant
I need to double check this information but if I recall Kirkbride said that Oblivion was going to continue Morrowind's more weird and non traditional fantasy design but then Tod Howard watched Lord of the Rings and immediately wanted Oblivion to be generic medieval fantasy. That's why there are no sabre's , crossbows, and spears because those aren't seen as "traditional fantasy". (Yes I am aware that some fantasies have these things like crossbows but they aren't common and are seen as "non-traditional fantasy").
only fallout 2 references worked and if you didn't get them they weren't done like bethesda does them with giant "look here THE THING! did you see it? did you clap?"
@@ryszakowyIt's also distracting. Take the whole are-synths-human theme that started in F3; it's blatantly just a Bladerunner "homage". But what's that got to do with surviving the nuclear apocalypse? It just takes you out of the game, out of your suspension of disbelief, reminds you that this is just a joke.
your idea of the commonwealth needing to suspect the player more is actually interesting character building. because it kinda adds a conflicting layer to synths. people are understandably afraid of synths replacing them. but like... somehow people in goodneighbor, the place where people go for refuge if they have nowhere else to go, people will still kill you if they suspect you are a synth. a synth literally got caught because a person that drinks and cheats abruptly changed into a better person. that kinda... raises some flags. like it kinda makes it feel like the commonwealth is outright forcing you to become a certain type of person. and if you are outside those categories, you might be a synth. my character to me (a ghoul survivor) would be angry that his goodneighbor neighbors would think that he is a synth. just because he is a goodie two shoes that likes focusing on a hobby that isn't killing, drinking, and surviving. he is like a young adult in a old ghouls body. and he would think it is unfair that people would expect him to be more sleazy, carefree, or tired for a ghoul.
Dude, the fact that everyone just accepts the Survivors story at face value despite yelling and screaming about how terrified they are of synths is ridiculous. Worse, why does nobody believe their from a vault? It's been 200 years. Surely someone must have found the giant fuck off door of Vault 81 right?
I know game mechanics exist but Nora doesn't makes any sense, while in the other games you were a vault dweller, courier (wastelander) or soldier (Nate), in this one you are... a lawyer. Yet you get out the pod and instantly know how to shoot every weapon, use power armor, craft all kinds of items, run faster than Usain Bolt and kill any enemy including Coursers which are supposedly one of the deadliest foes in the game, the Terminator equivalent of Fallout. Yet Nora can 1v5 them and still win by hitting them with a 30kg sledgehammer. What?
naww, even then still very stupid and limited game, unless to install a total conversion like what London seems to be the game is absolutely an insufferable trash fire!
I saw somebody on Twitter say that Bethesda's fallout games are written as if the bombs only dropped ~20 years ago, and something about that stuck with me. How much better would the world of Fallout 4 be if the story took place in 2161, like Fallout 1 did. You really mean to tell me while the east coast is living like wild animals, the west coast has not only a government, but a faction strong enough to oppose said government? Will say, FO4 Worldbuilding and plot is terrible, but the gameplay is so mind numbingly fun that ive started many playthroughs and only finished like 2
Have you ever been to Boston? If you don't get how the Fallout 4 population can be so dumb, just visit modern day Boston, and you'll see the bombs might have been a slight improvement, even.
Imagine fallout 4, but it was the size of if not bigger than Skyrim, and had the same amount of options for how to build your character and go about exploring the world, but also with a more coherent and meaningful main story like seen in New Vegas. Thats what i was expecting and instead got a bunch of mods for Fallout 3. Also, so annoyed that so much of the game revolved around Synths.
Fallout 4 was, to quote Todd Howard, the "stepping out" moment for me: terrible, immersion-breaking writing with mediocre / long overdue game mechanics made me realize there are better shooters available since Bethesda no longer makes RPGs. Starfield is a logical continuation in Bethesda's long line of dumbing down their games to reach a wider audience.
Yeah, I tend to agree. Every step they take forward, another aspect of their games takes a step back. Their games just no longer feel rewarding. You are simply hunting generic loot instead of meaningful and worthwhile experiences. A sad distinction.
Yeah Fallout is wacky sometimes and expected, but in some aspects the worldbuilding is needlessly crappy or goes overboard. Makes NewVegas look realistic in comparision :)
not that difficult between "we are getting attacked by bandits, help us" and "bandits come here every day at 12 pm and shoot at our walls while wearing literal gimpsuits and bed mattresses so i don't know about you but i like it when it's quiet and shit, helps me think it would be rickety righteous if you could make them skiddadle"
its not just fallout4, the actual world of the USA is currently teetering on the brink of idiocrazy. ( need proof, talk to a teacher, talk to a person who works a help desk, talk to a postmand or a store owner trying to hire help.
I still can't believe that anyone who knew anything about Boston thought it was possible for people to live for two centuries in thin-walled drafty shacks. The devs knew it snows in Boston, right? And it snows HARD! But sure, you can live in a shack that won't even keep the rain off your bed. No problem!
Really surprised they didn't include snow/weathers/seasons when everyone views Boston and that region as a northern cold area. Plus, a "nuclear winter" game sounds amazing.
@@AlexAdrift At worst, it's a bunch of jokes and majorly played for laughs like that cyclops overseer is. (I'm sure he shouldn't even be alive from his cyclopia.)
Remember about people complaining that "showrunners went too far away from the source material?" I hope that DO happen in Fallout show - because that gives hope that showrunners come up with something better than Bethesda's whatever-slop.
I could imagine Nate eventually becoming president of the commonwealth with Piper as first lady, Garvey as war minister, Curie as health minister, Danse as secretary of state, Cait as culture minister, Valentine as chief of police, Strong as the president's bodyguard, Hancock as minister of trade, and Macready as education minister. He would have continued to secretly aid the railroad after the destruction of the institute and signed a peace treaty with the brotherhood. By the time Garvey succeeds him as president, the commonwealth would be on a similar level to the NCR
I love this clusterfuck of a game. The logic is nonexistent and the writing is ridiculous but I've got 900+ mods and it's eternal entertainment. And the protagonist is silent, obviously.
I play FO1, FO2, and FONV for the writing and the atmosphere. I play FO4 (with mods) for the gunplay and the survival mode exploration. I don't play FO3.
It’s like what Noah Caldwell said about it, You play as a guy trying to recreate his civilisation whilst having no self awareness about that civilisation’s part in creating this mess in first place. Unlike in 3 Bethesda has become too enamoured with the pre-war world to satirise it properly.
Fallout 4 suffered a lot because of whatever decision made them jump the timeline back 200 years. It would've been more fun and made more sense if they just tried to work the story around it being 10-40 years after the bombs dropped
Guess I'm VERY guilty of neglecting my child lol I've got over a thousand hours into Fallout 4 and still haven't seen a single ending. Every time I remembered I had a kid I was supposed to be finding, I also remembered that I had to collect the excess water from my settlements to sell for building supplies lol.
@@AlexAdrift , yeah, sure. I hope that Bethesda will never make any games and will go bankrupt, because they deserved it a long time ago with mods, season passes and other unnecessary trash.
feels like Bethesda's appeal is also one of the things that harm their games: they always try to make the series accessible to reach as many people as possible, new players included, even if it makes the series not be a series anymore. they don't make Fallout's society rebuild, Super Mutants still exist, etc, it's almost as if every Fallout is a Fallout 1, because any of them can be used as an entry point, but this stuns the lore, world-building and general progression of the history that said, it helps them market the games, so it works to an extent edit: grammar
Fallout 4 was my last Bethesda game. I didn't hate it, but it definitely soured my opinion of Bethesda and made me more pessimistic about future games - so I decided from that point on, that I would at least check the reviews before buying any future Bethesda games... which had the unintended side effect of making me not buy any more Bethesda games.
I do think as the years have went by that there has been changes to the company that has hurt their products. It seems that for whatever reason, their recent endeavors have been plagued by bad ideas and greedy business. Have these things always been there and we just ignored them? Or has the success of their titles changed them fundamentally?
@@AlexAdrift I think it has more to do that Bethesda used to be a smaller company - when they made Morrowind and Oblivion there was a limit to how egregious they could be in their greed (as I understand it, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy when they released Morrowind) - they didn't have the brand recognition or dedicated fanbase to get away with being lazy or greedy. Not to mention the culture of the AAA industry has shifted significantly since then, predatory practices like microtransactions and releasing unfinished buggy products wasn't as broadly tolerated by the gameplaying public as it is today. And finally, the gaming market back then was fairly niche, they had a smaller pool of potential buyers, so customer satisfaction was a big deal - a bad reputation could sink a company. In today's market the playerbase is basically disposable: No matter how much you anger or outrage your fans, as long as you appeal to the lowest common denominator, it's likely that enough people will buy your game to make a profit - at least if you gouge them with microtransactions, subscriptions, battle passes, and all that kind of stuff. Just look at Fallout 76; a complete flop, the worst game release in Bethesda's history - and yet they still made a ton of money on it.
well, it's not that i dont want to find my son.. but i gotta help the minutemen to rebuild... afterward, they'll point me to diamond city which lead me to detective which lead me to joining the railroad and now i'm stuck doing quest for the railroad...
Instead of responding to that amber alert, I'm gonna go play plumber and electrician for strangers...don't worry...my infant son will be fine. He's tough like his dead mother.
Maybe I am wrong but i have a feeling that Fallout 1 & 2 had situation where even tho to us the players and observers so to speak the world was cartoonish, to the in game characters that world was real and they were grounded in it. After Fallout 3 and 4 i have a feeling that characters in it are somewhat aware that they are living in simulation and that's why all of the stupidity. Its all Tranquility Lane, and every single character is somewhat aware of that. That constant flirting with the 4th wall. That, one line Muggy says in NV : "Of course I'm obsessed! They made me this way! You think I don't know how crazy I sound? Of course I do! THEY PROGRAMMED ME TO KNOW THAT TOooo-arrr..." I agree, In the Fallout 4 everyone is stupid because the game requires them to be stupid. Or else, this roller coaster ride wont work and amusement park isn't amusing. I feel that with every iteration Fallout is less Fallout and more Borderlands. And, i hate Borderlands.
Yeah, it is moving away from a pollical satire that shows the dark comedy of the human condition and more about gameplay experiences, hence the amusement park feeling. From Nuka World, to 76 advertising, Fallout is nothing more than a nonserious theme park with characters playing dress up, the world trying to make you laugh, and logic ignored in service of the player. The world is loud, audacious, and inviting, yet an inch deep. Some fans prefer this lighter playland tone because they love the aesthetic and gameplay, personally, I miss the worldbuilding and the wild, nuanced characters that filled it.
I think Fallout 3 fits in this too. Just because they have cities in that one, doesn't mean squat, as they still have little infrastructure to actually feed their populations. And Megaton feels like a movie gag.
You're forgetting the dozen or so other stupid meme settlements. Durr muh vampires Durr muh superhero fight Durr muh wierd cannibals that act like the war they were born 200 years after never happened Durr muh town with nothing but kids Durr muh town with nothing but teenagers Durr muh republic of Dave Durr muh druids. People constantly trying to argue that 3 had a better world than NV straight up gives me headaches.
I've replayed Bethesda's games so many times, to the point where I can't really take the stories seriously anymore. Now, it feels more like a "reason why I'm doing anything" aside from me joking about absurdities whether intentional or not. Bethesda to me is the kind of universe you play countless times without actually accomplishing anything. It feels like the story is just background for discovering as much absurd stuff as possible along the way while also getting addicted to RPG mechanics like it's crack. (This is Pre-Fallout 76 btw)
@@AlexAdrift Maybe. But that's just what I think. Replaying a game for so long makes most things feel just as natural as breathing. I mostly know the Bethesda universe as a canvas for all sorts of crazy and unintentionally funny stuff to happen both officially and unofficially. This is probably an extremely steamy take and I apologize, it's a bit hard to describe in a way I feel is right.
I’d argue that Fallout 4 is objectively a bad game just like Starfield Not just bad though, F4 is probably the biggest disappointment in gaming history
I would easily say it is the most divisive. Some hate the game/voiced protagonist yet love the building. Some love the voiced protagonist yet dislike other aspects. Then, some love the entire game including Preston, while some hate the entire game. Seems there isn't a shared consensus.
Fallout 4 is singlehandedly my least favorite game and my favorite one. Ive dedicated around a month now to completely overhauling the games story and gameplay with mods, my favorite game ever
Kinda late to these type of games but ive played fallout nv, fallout 3, fallout 4, fallout 76 and skyrim. So far Starfield is the only bad game for me🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️
When I first heard that Bethesda was going to buy Fallout IP I thought to myself: sure, why not, they made Terminator Future Shock in the 90s that was basically a FPS in an apocalyptic setting, they can do it. You could drive a car or fly a plane freely in that game. It defined the controls for FPS for years to come (I remember one reviewer saying who would ever want to control a shooter this way :D (for the younger people - Terminator FS was the first shooter where you controlled the player with mouse and keyboard, basically the standard controls now)) Then the Fallout 3 game came out and it was..... its something... but at least we had a new fallout game... Its 2024 and bethesda can not make a game where you can drive a car in fallout nor you can fly freely in starfield... the best things that they had in their engine in the 90s yet stayed with the things that were in that engine due to hardware limitations - loading screens...
It's crazy how almost 30 years later the original "Fallout" is still the best game set in the Fallout world to date. Despite so many tries, so many millions of dollars invested, still nothing beats the original. It's not about the graphics, it's not about more choices, more open world. It's about the story. Well written, well narrated story, in which we, as players, can participate. At least that's what cRPG's are about. If you just enjoy shooting weird monsters in post apocalyptic setting, that's fine. Just don't try to pretend there's something more to it. If you do, you get the grotesque results like Bethesda's interpretation of Fallout. Give me a good story and you can keep the fancy graphics, complex game mechanics, a sandbox world with trllions of side quests to explore. All of this will never come close to justify a poorly written, not engaging story.
New character frozen, dumb new world, is a pretty common sci-fi trope, but I do agree that there are a lot of accidental similarities. Gene Roddenberry had this plot twice (Genesis 2 and Andromeda), and the video game Crystallis are a couple of examples of this plot.
I've played Fallout 4 for years, and I only just watched Idiocracy recently, so this was a really interesting video you made. My theory for why everyone in the Commonwealth is stupid is because every couple of days a radiation storm blows through, which I don't imagine is very healthy and probably causes brain damage and birth defects, among other health issues.
I disagree that mods cant save it. Some of the mods, and that one set in London, are technically fallout 4, it just doesnt use Bethesdas world that much. Even those stories that is set in the commonwealth let you skip the bethesda main story. However, I have had a great time playing my female overboss. You just need 8 raider bases and the rest you steamroll for food, meaning you never have to think about them again. It wasnt hard creating her backstory. She had planned to kill both Nate and the child for the insurance money when the bombs dropped, so that bummed her out, but finding the raiders and getting an army was great luck. The only problem is that I am running out of things to do, and she would never follow the main story, but whatever, still have far harbor to do, and this time I dont have to care about settlements. Or choices.
Not long ago I played F4 again only for the sake of the America Rising 2 mod. Suddenly motivations make sense: if playing as male character you are former soldier and it makes sense to join proper government agency from your time. Your life pre-war was without mutants, so it would make sense if your character's motivation of bringing the world back to how it was aligns with the ideals of the Enclave. The organisation itself has very pragmatic goals and motivations that fit a government's strategic goals. You get rewarded appropriately for your efforts to ranks that make sense towards your importance or required information clearance. Lastly it was the attitude towards the institute that made other factions seem so childish as in this mod their reaction was: "Oh they are enemy unless we can recruit them. Synths are ok tools to potentially bolster our strength and save the lives of our troops, but the main prize is that hydroponic facility that grows clean not irradiated crops that could feed the Enclave!" In some respect this mod also pays homage to Fallout 3 Enclave that wanted a to control a clean water source. NCR also knew importance of clean water, crops grown on it and importance of energy. Diamond City is soaked in irradiated water.
_Fun fact about water:_ *it can't get irradiated.* It can, however, carry fallout, but I very much doubt any of it would remain after a few years, much less 200. Basically, Fallout 3's plot is based on the dumb assumption that water can not only be radioactive, but that it also stays that way forever.
@@bickboose9364 Those deep water pools that are used as a storage for fresh radioactive waste from NPP are so effective as dissipaters of radiation, that you can take a swim in them safely as long as you keep more than like 3 meters away from the actual nuclear waste. So yeah, Fallout's concept of anything nuclear or radiation is completely nonsensical.
Well, Fallout 4 ist just the "logical" extrem of BADthesda! I mean Fallout 1 and 2 showed a world on the road to recovery (from Shady Sands founding the NCR, to cities coming together (even if led by crime families!) etc. - Fallout 3 onwards on the other hand sadly showed a hopeless wasteland (except New Vegas, where the NCR shows up, where Vegas itself is nearly unharmed by the bombs etc.), without ANY PROGRESS! Seriously, we should have had more factions like the NCR by now, trying to rebuild, maybe even negotiating treaties (end goal? Re-Form them US of A!)
The thing that most irks me about the Bethesda Fallouts is they take place 50 and 60 years after Fallout 1, and the world seems to have regressed even further in that time. It makes no sense.
I recently started a new play through of Fallout 4 and I can’t look at the world the same way now (though admittedly I have a bunch of mods installed that already made me feel that way) great video btw 👍🏾
BTW, since I wrote so much criticism about its plot, Steam says I have literally 1800 hours in Fallout 4. (I'm not even rounding it up or down. Weird that it's actually a multiple of 100:p) Which is how I know what every single NPC and terminal ever says. Plus in other FO games. Plus I've spent thousands of hours modding Beth games, as in actually 3D modelling and texturing stuff. I'm also one of the guys who literally took a hex editor to FO3 before it had a GECK, to help create all those tools. (Not out of any altruism, mind you. I just couldn't wait for Beth to get their crap together.) So I don't HATE their games. You don't do that if you hate them. Just... I wish they'd make a bit more sense... Ya know what I mean?
Oh yeah, I understand. There is just some stuff that even us fans can't overlook and UA-cam is a great forum to discuss these things with your fellow fans and trolls.
Because Bethesda wanted to market the size and scope of the world. The thing that was neglected was content to fill said world. The game is as wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle.
In fairness: we come from a society that has compulsory childhood education. None of us have an experience of a society without this baseline education, and being so ubiquitous for the last 4generations we largely take it forgranted.
it's proof their abilities degraded...if Skyrim wasn't obvious then fallout 4 is and if Fallout 4 isn't then F76 is and if F76 fails to drive home the message SF has it seems.... maybe we make skyrim the grace period? that's still 3 flipping games that they've gotten worse on.... but no I'm not allowing it...4 games the studio has progressively slipped on, we can forgive 2011 but the second release we can no longer forgive cus they never patched out all the issues, never just paid the modders $100 and used their patch cus that'd be too easy, no they shortcutted it and released it as it was by the end of Skyrim's dev period eveey time they released it LMAO and the complaints Skyrim did get went unheeded in fallout 4 and the problems got worse and worse and now we're al awake and angry in short fallout 4 is proof Bethesda learned nothing from their history of mistakes or other devs outdoing em with less luxury in the process, new vegas made in 1 year and change, and still outdid BGS on every level!
@@judgedrekk2981 There is a scary trend that their games are getting worse. You aren't alone in thinking that. Plenty of people do. However, Bethesda values profit over product anymore. As long as their games sale, they will only continue making poor games.
It's like.. I love the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series and I hate that Bethesda just not only keeps dumbing everything down but also just drops the quality of each new release by a shit ton. Like how the hell do people feel right defending a company who is blatantly telling you that they don't care about their games and only care about money?
That is the very reason I make videos on the subject. I see the company make games that are inferior in many ways, yet have greater amounts of monetization.
I instantly liked the video for the title because it's exactly my thoughts. I love the America Rising 2 and Sim Settlements 2 mods because they bring seriousness in all this parody of a parody of a post apo world
I got sick of building settlements. All the settlers do is complain, they need more beds, they need more crops, they need this and that, like they do not know how to get or make anything. When you play you are just a nanny helping to take care of a bunch of children.
@@AlexAdrift And a the lack of respect you get from some you help. Vault 81, you go through hell to help save that boys life, yet now and then as you walk past a guard they will say we are still watching, or just because your wearing that Vault suit does not make you one of us. The funny part is you have taken way more powerful fights and battles they could give you, and yet they think they can kick your ass. Just like the Railroad, even after took you out Kellogg and a Institute courser, they want act tuff like they think they take you down. Yet at the same time if courser showed up, they would crap their pants. When they made this game, they could of done better on programming some of their lines. Case in point if you take out the Institute before you go to Bunker Hill, and Go there even for the first time. The Mayor there will walk up to you and say to you something like ok you got some powerful friends and we don't need any trouble here so the settlement is yours. That is one of few time some one in the game show you any real fear or respect, knowing who you are. In fact the first time this happened to me in the game, I was like say what, it took me a moment to take it in, what she said to me.
Hands down, the writing is the worst. It peaks in the Far Harbor dlc and I could not be bothered to play Nuka World. I did enjoy exploring, and I spent way more time base building than I should but to me it can feel hollow if I didn't want to interact with the npcs. Its actually why i thought not having any in 76 was a good idea. It wasn't, but you can see my logic.
Yeah, I can see your logic. And I agree with Far Harbor, it tried its best to fix Fallout 4's issues and plenty of others think its the best part of Fallout 4 as well.
TBF to bad guy options, like, its been found most players don't really play evil playthroughs, at least in first playthroughs, and thus most devs don't put too much depth into them
I used to be like that playing Fallout 1 and 2 where the dialogue is deep and i actually felt bad when i played evil. Starting in Fallout 3 i played super evil. and to be honest i found it much more enjoyable. The Bos despite being 'good guys' (which is not what fallout is supposed to be like) are somehow much more unlikable than in the first games where they are total assholes lol
Fallout 4 is so stupid that the faction that should be the smartest (Institute), is led by the dumbest villain I've ever seen in a game. P.S. I love this damn game anyway lol
Nah, it’s Hideo Kojima’s *Snatcher* You and your wife are frozen and thawed out post-apocalypse, and you have to end a threat to humanity by androids while finding out where your son is with the help of a robot ally
Their is some thing intriguing to hear that actual Boomers see the world from the eyes of the protagonist of the game/movie, where every one else is stupid and they are right and the world they live in is just an empty shell of a world long gone and now is just an apocalypse. But in reality the early 50s 60s and 70s we think of only exists in commercials. Maybe the idealistic views of the past applies more to the younger generations that havent lived through those old times. Similar to how a lot of people see Rome at its height as the ideal society.
Good point. Perhaps it was their intention to make the game look "stupid" and "sinful" in comparison to our character's outlook on society because of the clear generational divide. Of course our idealistic character would see squatters, bums, mutants, ghouls, and chems as perverse. That what the wasteland really needs is a good ole dose of "old school values." Was this Bethesda's intention? I doubt it. But still a unique way to view the game and its themes.
People always love to boast about how great Bethesda is at world building and environmental storytelling, but this game really was not good at either, also skeletons being placed somewhere is easy as fuck literally, anybody could do it and it’s not “great” environmental storytelling just because you put a toaster and a skeleton in a bathtub
Personally, I liked their environmental storytelling because it actually contained a story. Most games didn't care. This has sadly changed though. Bethesda used to tell a story with a seemingly mundane cave and I personally liked that. The story told there meant more than the loot itself. However now, Bethesda cares more about the shiny loot and will literally populate caves with generated nonsense. Personally, I no longer care about the cave's story because it is randomly generated, repetitive, or doesn't contain one at all. The amount of unmarked quests and thoughtful stories have seemingly decreased. A fall from grace IMO.
This deserves way more views. As for the subject matter of the vid, I'd go further and say that all Beth open world games since Oblivion are basically Idiocracy. Their stated game design paradigm has been "how do we say yes to the player as much as possible". To accomplish that, they have to rob agency from the NPCs inhabiting their world.
Thanks! And great point. The NCPs in their games are only there to serve the player. Looking at Starfield, you can tell the NPCs have been lobotomized, with shopkeepers just standing there motionless for an eternity. A far cry from their previous games.
Thanks for watching! Did you like Fallout 4's worldbuilding? Let me know and remember to drink Brawndo!
By the makers of Sex Panther and another wonderful Omni Consumer Product
The game actually does give some justification in lore. A few years before the story, they used to have a working government. Then, a synth came in and started shooting people. This led to mass chaos, and the group was slowly destroyed by paranoia mixed with the constant super mutant and raider attacks. So, the institute might be to blame for most of it. Them making the mutants would keep the surface from gaining too much power to fight back. Especially because they were planning to reveal themselves soon.
The real question is, why are there so many people staying in random places when raiders and mutants are constantly attacking and destroying the few things they did build?
@@rolay7730 Again, some stuff is poorly explained though. For every answer, you have 10 more questions. If you feared the human population, why couldn't you just create a literal endless army to overtake them? Why replace settlers when your birds make greater spies? Why not recruit the endless pre-war ghouls for info and knowledge? Why replace people at all when again, you can just use birds as better and less conspicuous spies? Why do setters struggle to survive despite being born and raised in a lawless mutant wasteland? Why set up a "settlement" next to a mutant camp? Again, the world just seems illogical and it doesn't seem intentional, rather, its just poor design and bad "videogame logic" that most players ignore.
@@AlexAdrift
I already agreed that it was stupid they would stay in such small settlements with the mutants around. That is stupid video game logic, but there are answers to most of the points.
1) The institute can not just make an endless army of synths. They make a LOT of synths but they still cost resources. We know the institute needs more resources, with them needing trips to the outside world to steal more. Not to mention they can't keep the human synths they currently have under control.
Though I guess you could argue they actually did try this with the super mutants. They are an army sent to the surface to destroy. The only reason it stopped was because the head scientist sabotaged it and ran away.
2) You can't influence people with birds. When they replaced the mayor, they gained control of Diamond City. I honestly thought it was bad writing when they had some random guy get replaced just so they could test out some GMO seeds. But it still shows that they can use human synths for lots of things birds can't do on the surface.
3) There aren't endless pre-war ghouls. The number that actually existed before the war and kept their sanity would be low. Even if they can talk, it doesn't mean they have gained a lot of skills over the last 200 years. Ghouls don't have to worry about radiation. They can survive on heavily irradiated food and water. They don't need a lot of resources to survive, meaning why would they learn how to grow food or purify water? Not to mention the extreme mental damage most of them have, both from radiation or just the trauma of rotting while alive.
It makes sense that people would be scared of ghouls. There are feral ones everywhere, and the ones that talk still look like monsters. Not to mention, they smell like rot.
@@rolay7730 While it is explained, I just think most of it is just poor excuses so that the game can justify the gameplay.
1) While not endless, they would easily have enough to take out settlements of two people, like most settlements in the world, and diamond city, which is guarded by dudes in literal umpire gear. If your super secret organization can create literal doppelganger humans, yet can't take out dudes with catchers mits, you have a problem. Not to mention, you had super mutants.
2) Again, replacing people for influence never worked. You discover it every time. People get suspected, like the mayor. Clearly, the devs wanted the game to be like a witch hunt, so they had to have the institute place spies, spies that are always discovered and illogical to begin with. If everyone knows about your spies and your replacements, you are clearly terrible at creating spies. Again. Idiots to justify the gameplay, no different than the settlements.
3) My point about the ghouls was this. If they've survived for 100s of years, then they clearly know how to survive. Being a ghoul doesn't make you immune to bullets or deathclaws, so clearly, these characters should know survival. However, despite this, they are still treated as idiots. I just personally feel an organization built on pre-war knowledge and science might want to study the pre-war ghouls, considering they kidnapped a pre-war human child.
Again, I make these points only to showcase that despite Bethesda trying to explain things, such as dumb settlers and the odd motivations of the institute, I just personally feel their explanations don't make sense.
Unlike idiocracy which is made to be purposely stupid. Fallout 4, when especially looking at the main writer, is accidentally stupid.
Yeah, I think the game tried to be comedic, yet became a punchline itself. The game thinks we are laughing with it, when in reality, we are laughing, and cringing, at it.
keep it simple stupid
The main writer in the mirror:"keep it simple stupid."
Worse, it's stupid that thinks it's smart.
I think the main writer enjoys being stupid, to the point where he mistakes his brand being simplicity instead of the stupidity we see it as.
The joy of it is that Bethesda is no more. It's senior people all retired and all we have left is Todd Howard running around the Microsoft offices bragging about how he made Skyrim.
Bethesda was always ridiculously overrated. Back in days Gothic2 was much better than Morrowind, Witcher1 much better than Oblivion, but most people never even heard of these games because small studios have no money for marketing and media hype. Skyrim is overrated a f, and Fo3 and Fo4 are not even real Fallout games. Starfield just exposed all their flaws, not even paid shiIIs can save them.
@@bdleo300Let's not go that far with Witcher 1 or try to put down Morrowind or Oblivion. They deserve their status.
I do wish Gothic2 got some more love, though
@@bdleo300 TBH the good thing about bethesda games are mods not the games themselves
@@bdleo300 I agree with the FO3 hate, but without it we wouldn't have had the bones to build FNV on, so it at least has that redeeming quality. FO4 has no redeeming qualities.
Is Emil still there? If so, you won't see anything half-decent from them.
how is it that no one in diamond city has trench foot from living in the mud all day?
The 200 year old baseball equipment they use as protection against super mutant attacks also protects them from radiation, trench foot, starvation, and of course, foul balls.
Aaaahhhhh my brain. That reminds me of the HPV foot video 🤮🤮
I will be honest; the world-building is pretty crappy in Fallout 4. But the crafting and inventory system was so much better than Starfield. I just don't get why they would make it so hard to craft anything. In Fallout 4, the settlement box connects to the workbenches. In Starfield, I made a base, and it took 10 minutes just to make a ham sandwich because I had to look through all the boxes in the base.
Yeah, great point. Starfield is a massive downgrade. The outposts are limited, the crafting is more tedious yet nothing is added, junk went back to being useless, resources are just easier to buy, your build options have greater limitations, and you can't even store all your companions and crew in a singular location anymore.
I don't like Fallout 4 but it's miles better than Starfield, it's not even close
@@klayn5611 Yeah, I prefer Fallout 4 myself.
You sound like a fool for playing the game.
@@Horsemanray That is insane. So Bethesda's biggest innovation wasn't an original thought? Wild.
Imagine if Bethesda actually leaned in this idea fully and intentionally, with everyone being very technologically and socially regressed. Being able to choose a proper background for your character and having it be extremely important to gameplay. With no real initial objective, you just wander around and learn about the region and choosing to solve conflicts, and unite groups to attempt to gain back that prewar normalcy or tearing everything down because why not the worlds already blown up. I just feel like fallout 4 never really went into the whole psychology of someone who’s entire world is blown up and now they have to live with stinky tribals and get shot at by raiders on the daily,
Yeah, that is the problem playing as "Nate" and then still trying to give the player choice. And I like your idea, I think a proper background system could help lead to better roleplay and character creation.
Would be interesting if the Institute actually made people stupid to pacify them.
@@richardarriaga6271 Assimilation and replacing people always seemed like the dumbest form of control and intel gathering. You could create a literal messiah, arm them with supplies, charisma, and knowledge, then influence the entire region. You could create endless agents to join every faction. This is clearly better than "replacing Karl with a robot and nobody will tell."
fuck... thattd be really funny
Wtf I just read the title and it instantly clicks. Everyone is so dumb that they just instantly make you in charge
Oh that's a good point. Should have been in the video
Calling it now. ES6 is gonna be the same Bethesda shit, terrible writing, terrible worldbuilding, terrible engine. ES6 is gonna be more of the same. As we saw with Starfield, it's all Bethesda is capable of
Hopefully not. I hope Todd and company have one more gem up their sleeves...
@@AlexAdrift You know full well they don't
Don't forget the 6 voice actors voicing every single NPC.
Literally the reason I refused to play Fallout 4 until the amazing mod (made for free by the way and still has custom models and even actual professional voice actors) Sim Settlements 2 where settlers will actually build and develop the settlements on their own, your only input is what sorts of plots you want set (living, farming, leisure, municipal, defense, etc.) and eventually you can have settlers create settlements on their own depending on an assigned unique leader NPC's traits and specialties.
Yeah, fantastic mod. I was hoping Starfield would adopt some of the system for their outposts, but nope. Bethesda made them worse.
You don't even have to wait. The mod lets you build the city planner desk from the start of the game. You don't even need to assign unique ncps to them, any unnamed settler will do. I haven't bothered building a settlement in years.
I loved the settlement building and had themes for the settlements in my head for building an empire like Red Rocket being the robot factory, boat yards at the water settlement etc but the Sim Settlement mods do look incredible, they could literally be a game in and of itself
@@the1andonlytitch If sim settlements was a spin-off title, some fans, including myself, would LOVE it. Plus it would mean that Bethesda could focus on RPG elements and worldbuilding for the next Major Fallout.
" you guys neglected your real life children to play this" 😂
Pulling no punches around here.
It's all the settlement building. That's what makes Fallout 4 seem so much different than the others--adding in settlement building. In order to make those mechanics engaging and challenging, they have to be deeply incorporated into the whole thing. Which means making some pretty ridiculous concessions, like "somehow in 200 years nobody bothered to try rebuilding this very obviously fertile farmland."
Yeah, that is where most of the issues originate from. I think that is why they made 76 a prequel. Gives a better explanation for the settlements, buildings, and untouched exploration.
@@AlexAdriftUnfortunately they screwed that up too. I don't know who thought turning Fallout into an MMO utterly devoid ofcities, factions, or NPCs was a good idea.
Fallout 4, multiplayer, preferably PvE on a smaller scale like invite-only would've been great. But there is no faster way to ruin a franchise than to turn it into an MMO. It necessarily sacrifices all meaningful substance in favor of quick profit.
It's even worse than idiocracy. Bear with me.
- Idiocracy has the excuse that people got dumber over many generations. At the very least the knowledge got lost. E.g., no living soul still knows WTH plants need, because that knowledge got lost.
- Fallout 4 has ghouls that were alive since before the war. It's not even conjecture, there's TWO in Goodneighbour alone (plus some in FO3) that tell you as much. And not all of them are random uneducated folks. There's an engineer at the Slog, for example.
You're NOT the only pre-war person around. Even those born in the most recent idiocracy age, didn't have to wait for you to teach them ye olde pre-war smarts. They had people from that age all along.
As a simple example: At least some of them must still KNOW what, say, an adobe wall is. Or how to just melt some asphalt (you only need a bucket and some wood) to make bitumen paper for a roof. But nope, they'll sleep in homes with wide gaps in the walls for the wind to blow through, under incomplete roofs, on a wet blanket, while it actually rains on them. Forget raiders, that will kill you next winter in Boston. Yet they're incapable of even learning from the pre-war ghouls anyway.
BUT IT GETS WORSE. The major factions have devolved just as much, for no obvious reason.
E.g., the BOS actually forgot how to army. In NV you actually have to dig into their archives to re-discover something as elementary as the chain of command. And by FO4 time, they're down to just a loose band of irregulars who work for loot instead of pay or even a guaranteed meal, buy their own gear, have even less idea that a chain of command even is a concept, and generally are more like the old Ottoman Bashi-bazouk irregulars than any modern army.
Or read the holotapes when you get to find Brandis. They're so focused on running with the loot, that they just leave their mates and subordinates behind to die for no reason. E.g., Knight Astlin is back at the National Guard training yard to secure the base... but Brandis never goes there to even as much check on her, much less retrieve her. No, seriously, he actually says he doesn't know what happened to his team. He legs it to the bunker up north on his own, and that's it.
E.g., the Institute never actually managed to make a new processor or even new version of the operating system. Not only their terminals literally display the same OS version, and are vulnerable to the same 200 year old hacks. No, it's worse. As shown in Curie's companion quest, their synth chips are literally bit-for-bit compatible with a pre-war Miss Nanny. Like, you can just copy the program and data from a Miss Nanny into one, and it will just work. They presumably miniaturized the chips, but they just are otherwise the same.
It's flippin' sad, really...
Great points about the ghouls and factions. There is no reason for either of them to be stupid or shallow. The factions, especially the institute, made no sense to me. Their motives were always weird to me and setting them up as the boogeyman was goofy. Why watch people? Why replace people? Why create clones? All this, when they can just spy on people using birds, something settlers won't notice compared to their literal family members, or just subjective people using an endlessly created army. Again, they were better when they had an air of mystery around them cause their motives and actions are illogical in my opinion. As for the ghouls and wastelanders, Some would have an excuse to not be book smart, but everyone would know the basics of survival. Imagine growing up in a mutant wasteland. You would know survival, especially ghouls who have survived 100s of years. Wouldn't they know how to deal with the wasteland better than anyone? They would know building, crafting, cooking, hunting, trading, and survival.
@@AlexAdrift Yeah, that's what I don't get. I mean, like, you even have prewar ghouls at the Slog, and even they don't seem to figure out stuff like "build a door and make some shutters for those broken windows." I mean, they don't even have the "not book smart" excuse, since they have a literal pre-war engineer there, in addition to all that experience.
That said...
Oh, the Institute's relationship with the commonwealth is... a whole other rabbit hole. I mean, going back to the basics, why even antagonize them? The institute can manufacture decently high tech stuff, that sells well, though they could realistically even just mass-produce bottle caps. (It's not laser science.)
Like, instead of starting shooting people at University Point for not having the hard drive they wanted, imagine just going, "Right, lads. We're prepared to pay 10,000 caps to whoever has it or finds it." Not only that would motivate those guys to go back and start digging, but they'd have caravans from all over the commonwealth and beyond lining up to see if they can't sell some old data to the Institute.
BTW, also what I said about the Institute technology is also just scratching the surface. I mean, ok, they only miniaturized computers, but for example they actually REGRESSED in lasers. For the same Joules used (as in battery charge), Institute lasers actually do less damage. It's literally like spending the last 220+ years to produce a gun that's actually worse than the 1800 pattern Baker musket.
@@NegotiatorGladiarius Yeah, you are making great points. You'd think the actual devs would discuss and brainstorm these issues, but clearly they haven't. The truth is that the Institute was better as a mysterious faction in the shadows. When you bring them into the spotlight, the entire faction and questline looks idiotic. They are supposed to be "scientists" yet this is a strong argument that they are the worst and dumbest faction in the fallout franchise.
@@AlexAdrift Aye, as you say, some things are better off as a mystery.
The Institute as a whole are just stupid. They have smart mouths, but stupid brains.
If a group of people have the same idea and goal of "Mankind redefined" and want other people to be on board with said goal, why in the world would you cause chaos and destruction to the same exact people?
I can somewhat excuse the Broken Mask Incident because if not mistaken it was an early test for a Gen 3 Synth, the human-like ones.
But the Commonwealth Provisional Government (CPG) incident was just stupid. They literally had their chance to integrate themselves into society and convince some people that they're doing this for the betterment of humanity, but nope! They just went in there under the disguise of normal settlers, and just shot up the entire room causing the end of the CPG.
Not only that, but because of their stupid ways to become integrated within society, they inadvertently cause settlements like The Covenant with their imperfect ways to tell if someone's a synth or not (Like seriously, it only takes someone to answer Swatter in their little test thing to mark one as a Synth), and even stupider groups like the Railroad whose only main goal is to make Synths have free will for some reason, even if it costs another human's life (harkening back to Patriot/Liam Binet).
Fallout 4's writing is a complete mess. And it's all thanks to Bethesda.
I live in New England. A few weeks back I didn't shut the door tightly and the wind pushed it open about an inch. After a few minutes the whole downstairs of the house cooled several degrees. It was in the low 30s outside. It wasn't one of those cold snaps. 30s is something this region would see even with insane global warming. Everyone in that game outside of the institute wouldn't be there because their ancestors would have died from exposure.
I personally think a "Nuclear Winter" Fallout game set in the North would be awesome.
@@AlexAdriftYou’d love the Frost mod then. It takes place during the initial nuclear winter in Boston and everyone being a dumb shoot-first, ask-questions-later psycho actually makes sense.
@@mrviking2mcall212 Sounds really unique. I'll have to check it out.
@@AlexAdrift,
ATOM RPG and its sequel ATOM RPG Trudograd comes much closer to rational.
P.s. The setting is Ukraine post Nuclear War (if the Cold War ended in nuclear fire instead of the USSR breaking up).
@@aralornwolf3140 I'll have to check them out. Thanks for the recommendations.
Dude.
They're Bostonians...
I don't think provoking them is wise...
Exactly, at this rate the next game will be even worse as it will be set in. . . Dear god no. . . New Jersey!
@@keegan6863
Quasimodo predicted all of this!
they lack the accent!, they're bethesdians....ugh
@@keegan6863 Fallout 76 already let's you go there.
Diamond City was a huge letdown. Biggest settlement in the area, and it barely houses a dozen or so people. Rivet City, on the other hand, felt like a bigger, more lived-in place. I know raiders would be a concern in this setting, but has no one tried to rebuild?
That, and giving us a predefined backstory were just awful choices.
Yeah, you highlight some of the issues for sure. I personally like the diamond city expansion mods, they give the city some well needed depth.
Lead poisoning vs radiation posioning
Idiocracy has president camacho
Fallout 4 doesnt
You can guess Wich one is the better
President Camacho has my vote
The main problem with Bethesda is that there's just no reason for them to be using the Fallout IP like they are. It's clear that they want a wacky post-nuke apocalyptic setting, but it's supposed to be CENTURIES after the bombs dropped in Fallout. The central point in New Vegas and FO 1 and 2 is that people are rebuilding, getting organized. Cultures are forming. People are building cities, making skyscrapers of their own. They're powering their towns with efficient energy. They're mastering agriculture. Humanity is climbing out of the hole. A great example is how the NCR is a bonafide *nation*. It's a straight-up country. It has infastructure, its wealthy enjoy the use of motor vehicles and paved highways, there's a functional democratic government with voters and legislatures and civilian benefits, there are labor unions and taxes that are collected go into welfare for the poor. It even had a gold standard to its currency, and things are advanced enough that they swapped to FIAT.
Bethesda doesn't understand this at all. They just want a fun and LE EPIC post-apoc shooter game. Which is fine, but they're butchering the IP to get it.
We're actually supposed to believe that in the Commonwealth, nobody's cleaned up any of the skeletons who've just been sitting around dead for 200 years and in major areas that are densely inhabited. Folks are still wearing 200 year old clothes that they scavenged off of corpses as their main means of clothing. People are still squatting out in bombed-out skyscrapers built pre-war all over Boston. People are fighting over cans of Cram at the Superdupermarts. Nobody knows how to build or farm or fight off raiders or ghouls. They struggle to collect water or do much of anything. This is how Vault Dwellers should be acting fresh out of the Vaults, but it's people who've been living in the wastes for centuries. It should be centuries past the bombs, but by Bethesda's perspective it feels like it's been a few weeks at most. Nobody is organized. Factions require you to do literally everything for them as the designated errand boy (and eventually you become errand boy slash supreme leader (who also has no real power and still get told what to do like a lackey)) to function whatsoever.
In Obsidian titles, you feel like the story just happens to have you in it. In F3 and 4, you're basically Jesus. The story hinges on your very breath, and if the player dies, the wasteland itself seems to cease to exist.
Great points. I think they wanted a game that was more built on exploration compared to social navigation, hence why 76 is set so far in the past. It gives a better reason for things to be unexplored. It seems like it took Bethesda years and multiple games to understand this.
There are a also few questions I never hear anyone asking when it comes to any Fallout game. These include:
1) How in the hell is every wastelander literate? Literacy is not the first thing you need to know in order to survive.
2) How come the Vault-dwellers and the wastelanders still speak the same language, despite being isolated to centuries?
It's easier to understand the point if we bear in mind that, comparatively, we live during the WWI when it comes to the years passed after the Great War in Fallout 4.
@@mikitz For 1, it makes a lot more sense in the Obsidian games than the Bethesda ones. Plenty of people aren't literate in the original Fallouts. Granted, it's not like you walk around with a book in any of the games and ask people around to read parts of it for you, but I'm sure literacy rates are awful in F1 and 2. By New Vegas it should be much better generally as people are climbing out of the hole.
Things are probably on par with the 1700s or so. It would of course differ based off of region. People in NCR territory are very educated, while those in the wastes would be more of a gamble -- likely relying on Followers schools and so on. Those in the Brotherhood of Steel would be literate. Practically nobody in the Legion would be, other than slavery logistics offices.
It doesn't make any sense that people in F4 would be literate, though. It's just left ambiguous. There's no schools, no formal education anywhere. The biggest, most civilized city you can go to is a bombed out baseball stadium filled with fuckin scrap shacks. People are eating irradiated canned goods and there's no agriculture. Still everyone can read because idk, I guess Emil didn't feel like writing any more.
For 2, I think that's mainly to do with the universal easiness and adaptability of English. IIRC English is the easiest language in the world to learn, and the bulk of it has barely changed since the 1300s even when literacy was a non-object. Though there are plenty of tribes who don't speak English all over the West, descended from native Americans and so forth.
Vault Dwellers do have particular quirks in how they speak that set them apart from garden variety wastelanders, like talking in a chipper tone of voice and with slang specific to their Vault, usually deriving from Old World jive talk.
People act as if personally offended whenever I point out the same stupidity of this game, calling me a New Vegas stan, or some other form of an oppressive gaming elitist. But when actually looking at the difference between this and New Vegas from an critical point of view, is it any wonder I preffer one over the other? And the fact people are offended really prooves this further; Fallout 4 really is an idiotic game for absolute morons. Modders really do deserve credit for trying to make games better. Starfield is modders trying to add life to a creatively dead game, and Fallout 4 is modders trying to add sense to a retarded world
Personally, I think some people are just defensive of the things they enjoy. I think we all are to some degree, including myself. I personally don't care when people defend the game, I care more when people forgive or make excuses for the company that has done terrible things and succeeded regardless because of their blind support.
@@AlexAdrift Like I said, a game for morons
fallout 4 has me scared for the next single player fallout release
Hopefully Fallout 5 doesn't continue the poor Bethesda trend.
We all said that when fallout 3 came out because that's when Bethesda bought the IP. Haha
I think the same, I still play fallout 4 cus I love the series and the vibes ever since the first two games, but I sorely miss how captivated I was in FNV’s, F1’s, and F2’s story and characters. Bethesda can make great game worlds that are fun to explore but I wish they took the RPG aspect more seriously. I don’t think a fallout 5 like fallout 4 would be a horrible game, but it would feel like the certain death for the narrative of fallout.
@@carlwinslow5905 While Fallout 3 was my intro to the series, I do feel bad for the OG fans such as yourself. Most have only had New Vegas and mods for the past two decades.
@@cannoniacocca1211 Yeah, hopefully they bring back aspects of New Vegas going forward. I doubt it though.
To be fair, fallout 2 started the trend of "just about everything is a reference" but it wasn't as blatant. Fallout 3 was "sets set the game a few years after the bombs...no wait i meant 200 years and the people still act like the bombs fell yesterday" and fallout 4 is just creatively bankrupt. From its main story and other quest. Bethesda just made a theme park, you come and visit, see the people role-playing what they think a post apocalyptic world would look like, then you go home. 4 honestly is the worst. Why is everyone living in trash and with skeletons? Why is everyone acting as if they new life before the apocalypse and are just now crawling out the ashes? Its been 200 years and these people act nostalgic for a culture they never knew or were apart of. If you go to modern day Boston it is nothing like it was 200 years ago so why is it in Bethesda's fallout everything is static. Humanity is just frozen and unable to recover and advance which is not the case in 1 and 2. In those games you see that people have built villages and aren't living in burnt out ruins. You got the brotherhood of steel which is actually developing its own technology and not just hording old world technologies
Bethesda is just honestly pretty trash when it comes to any sort of writing. All that interesting lore in the elder scrolls was fan source from back in the early days of the internet from a forum or was written by Michael kirkbride who stopped working at Bethesda after morrowind. The lore in oblivion mostly came from his notes and that hack of a replacement Emilio or whatever his name is butchered everything. He also did the bad writing in fallout 3, 4, and skyrim. And i say he is a bad writer as a fact because he did like a 40 minute rambling in which he explained his writing methods which boils down to "who cares no one is going to pay attention and keep it stupid simple"
Honestly now that I'm ranting and the allure of Bethesda games has been broken i can't see the appeal of any of them. Morrowind and daggerfall feel outdated which is not fault of their own they are still fun games but the other ones are middle of the road and janky. Mods are cool but when i download enough mods to overhaul skyrim to be ripoff vampire the masquerade or fallout 4 to be bootleg stalker am I even playing a Bethesda game anymore? If your game is so trash that i need to overhaul it tgat its no longer recognizable to the base game then something is wrong. Okay thats my 2 cent rant
I need to double check this information but if I recall Kirkbride said that Oblivion was going to continue Morrowind's more weird and non traditional fantasy design but then Tod Howard watched Lord of the Rings and immediately wanted Oblivion to be generic medieval fantasy.
That's why there are no sabre's , crossbows, and spears because those aren't seen as "traditional fantasy".
(Yes I am aware that some fantasies have these things like crossbows but they aren't common and are seen as "non-traditional fantasy").
only fallout 2 references worked and if you didn't get them they weren't done like bethesda does them with giant "look here THE THING! did you see it? did you clap?"
I agree that Bethesda storytelling and NPC's have always been shit. Just feels like they've never put any thought into them.
@@ryszakowyIt's also distracting. Take the whole are-synths-human theme that started in F3; it's blatantly just a Bladerunner "homage". But what's that got to do with surviving the nuclear apocalypse? It just takes you out of the game, out of your suspension of disbelief, reminds you that this is just a joke.
Well said ! nail it to the core
Can you imagine if Mike judge wrote a fallout quest line? That would be awesome
That would be great.
your idea of the commonwealth needing to suspect the player more is actually interesting character building. because it kinda adds a conflicting layer to synths. people are understandably afraid of synths replacing them. but like... somehow people in goodneighbor, the place where people go for refuge if they have nowhere else to go, people will still kill you if they suspect you are a synth. a synth literally got caught because a person that drinks and cheats abruptly changed into a better person.
that kinda... raises some flags. like it kinda makes it feel like the commonwealth is outright forcing you to become a certain type of person. and if you are outside those categories, you might be a synth.
my character to me (a ghoul survivor) would be angry that his goodneighbor neighbors would think that he is a synth. just because he is a goodie two shoes that likes focusing on a hobby that isn't killing, drinking, and surviving. he is like a young adult in a old ghouls body. and he would think it is unfair that people would expect him to be more sleazy, carefree, or tired for a ghoul.
Dude, the fact that everyone just accepts the Survivors story at face value despite yelling and screaming about how terrified they are of synths is ridiculous.
Worse, why does nobody believe their from a vault? It's been 200 years. Surely someone must have found the giant fuck off door of Vault 81 right?
We live in idiocracy, games like fallout 4 proves this.
This aged very well, re upload it and title it "Fallout TV show is Idiocracy"
Ha. That video might be incoming.
I know game mechanics exist but Nora doesn't makes any sense, while in the other games you were a vault dweller, courier (wastelander) or soldier (Nate), in this one you are... a lawyer. Yet you get out the pod and instantly know how to shoot every weapon, use power armor, craft all kinds of items, run faster than Usain Bolt and kill any enemy including Coursers which are supposedly one of the deadliest foes in the game, the Terminator equivalent of Fallout. Yet Nora can 1v5 them and still win by hitting them with a 30kg sledgehammer. What?
first rule of playing bugthesda game - remove yout ability to think and question
Nora could have been an army lawyer. They have them at court martials
This game is fun when you have 50 mods installed. 😅
The mods help
naww, even then still very stupid and limited game, unless to install a total conversion like what London seems to be the game is absolutely an insufferable trash fire!
With mods FO4 is actually a great game.
@@judgedrekk2981 FO4 is actually the best Bethesda game, but I guess most of them are trash.
Only 50 mods? So you just play "fixed vanilla" then?
People who vehemently confess to love Fallout and still keep supporting what Bethesda does to the series is the real Idiocracy at play here.
Seriously. Even the Fiends in New Vegas weren't total dummies (unless you told them you had drugs in which case they instantly became gullible).
I saw somebody on Twitter say that Bethesda's fallout games are written as if the bombs only dropped ~20 years ago, and something about that stuck with me. How much better would the world of Fallout 4 be if the story took place in 2161, like Fallout 1 did. You really mean to tell me while the east coast is living like wild animals, the west coast has not only a government, but a faction strong enough to oppose said government?
Will say, FO4 Worldbuilding and plot is terrible, but the gameplay is so mind numbingly fun that ive started many playthroughs and only finished like 2
I think Bethesda themselves realized this, hence why 76 is a prequel. It helps support the untouched looting, exploration, and reasons for building.
Have you ever been to Boston? If you don't get how the Fallout 4 population can be so dumb, just visit modern day Boston, and you'll see the bombs might have been a slight improvement, even.
I can hear the Boston armies readying their pitchforks...
You don't need to watch Idiocracy...
We are living it these days.
Can't say I disagree
literally 1984
@@JimTheCurator lidderally
I'm baitin, go away!
Imagine fallout 4, but it was the size of if not bigger than Skyrim, and had the same amount of options for how to build your character and go about exploring the world, but also with a more coherent and meaningful main story like seen in New Vegas. Thats what i was expecting and instead got a bunch of mods for Fallout 3. Also, so annoyed that so much of the game revolved around Synths.
Fallout 4 was, to quote Todd Howard, the "stepping out" moment for me: terrible, immersion-breaking writing with mediocre / long overdue game mechanics made me realize there are better shooters available since Bethesda no longer makes RPGs. Starfield is a logical continuation in Bethesda's long line of dumbing down their games to reach a wider audience.
Yeah, I tend to agree. Every step they take forward, another aspect of their games takes a step back. Their games just no longer feel rewarding. You are simply hunting generic loot instead of meaningful and worthwhile experiences. A sad distinction.
Yeah Fallout is wacky sometimes and expected, but in some aspects the worldbuilding is needlessly crappy or goes overboard. Makes NewVegas look realistic in comparision :)
not that difficult between "we are getting attacked by bandits, help us" and "bandits come here every day at 12 pm and shoot at our walls while wearing literal gimpsuits and bed mattresses so i don't know about you but i like it when it's quiet and shit, helps me think it would be rickety righteous if you could make them skiddadle"
its not just fallout4, the actual world of the USA is currently teetering on the brink of idiocrazy. ( need proof, talk to a teacher, talk to a person who works a help desk, talk to a postmand or a store owner trying to hire help.
You can see why the film feels more like a prophecy
@@AlexAdrift I have been warning people about this since the film first came out, nobody listened :(
I still can't believe that anyone who knew anything about Boston thought it was possible for people to live for two centuries in thin-walled drafty shacks.
The devs knew it snows in Boston, right? And it snows HARD! But sure, you can live in a shack that won't even keep the rain off your bed. No problem!
Really surprised they didn't include snow/weathers/seasons when everyone views Boston and that region as a northern cold area. Plus, a "nuclear winter" game sounds amazing.
I'm scared for the fallout show.
Hopefully it is good. I like Jonathan Nolan's screenwriting credits so hopefully the writing is okay.
@@AlexAdrift At worst, it's a bunch of jokes and majorly played for laughs like that cyclops overseer is. (I'm sure he shouldn't even be alive from his cyclopia.)
Remember about people complaining that "showrunners went too far away from the source material?"
I hope that DO happen in Fallout show - because that gives hope that showrunners come up with something better than Bethesda's whatever-slop.
I could imagine Nate eventually becoming president of the commonwealth with Piper as first lady, Garvey as war minister, Curie as health minister, Danse as secretary of state, Cait as culture minister, Valentine as chief of police, Strong as the president's bodyguard, Hancock as minister of trade, and Macready as education minister. He would have continued to secretly aid the railroad after the destruction of the institute and signed a peace treaty with the brotherhood. By the time Garvey succeeds him as president, the commonwealth would be on a similar level to the NCR
I never made that connection before, but it really is the same story but grim and nuclear
Too much misinformation about the lore. Pretty bad critique.
But this video only made me want to replay it for the fourth time, thanks!
You are welcome!
I love this clusterfuck of a game. The logic is nonexistent and the writing is ridiculous but I've got 900+ mods and it's eternal entertainment. And the protagonist is silent, obviously.
When people claim they are struggling with the game, my answer is always the same...Mods.
I play FO1, FO2, and FONV for the writing and the atmosphere.
I play FO4 (with mods) for the gunplay and the survival mode exploration.
I don't play FO3.
Plants do infact need electrolytes tho, fertilisers include potassium for a good reason lol
You would either be a king of Idiocracry or burnt like a witch because you know nerdy black magic...
It’s like what Noah Caldwell said about it, You play as a guy trying to recreate his civilisation whilst having no self awareness about that civilisation’s part in creating this mess in first place.
Unlike in 3 Bethesda has become too enamoured with the pre-war world to satirise it properly.
Cool take
@@AlexAdrift Yeah Noah’s a smart dude, he very efficiently tore Fallout 4 a new arse hole.
@@aldraone-mu5yg Ha. Sounds informative and painful.
Fallout 4 suffered a lot because of whatever decision made them jump the timeline back 200 years. It would've been more fun and made more sense if they just tried to work the story around it being 10-40 years after the bombs dropped
I think they learned this lesson, hence why 76 is a prequel. It explains more of the exploration and building aspects they wanted to include.
Guess I'm VERY guilty of neglecting my child lol
I've got over a thousand hours into Fallout 4 and still haven't seen a single ending. Every time I remembered I had a kid I was supposed to be finding, I also remembered that I had to collect the excess water from my settlements to sell for building supplies lol.
Yeah, only weirdos save Shaun. Lol
Why save your child when another settlement needs your help?
The "Get yourself a swatter!" character could have fit seamlessly in Idiocracy
He would certainty fit inside Costco.
Fallout 4 just tells you what Todd Howard thinks of the people of Boston 😂
Better than Starfield... I think that playing with paper airplane is much more fun than playing Starfield
Some aspects are better, like the building.
@@AlexAdrift , yeah, sure.
I hope that Bethesda will never make any games and will go bankrupt, because they deserved it a long time ago with mods, season passes and other unnecessary trash.
@@Slymarbo-b5f by mods are you referring to the paid ones or their reliance on modders to fix their game/make it fun to play
@@nemo3029 , paid mods. It's completely ridiculous, mods should always be free
@@Slymarbo-b5f true but corps finding more ways to be greedier
feels like Bethesda's appeal is also one of the things that harm their games: they always try to make the series accessible to reach as many people as possible, new players included, even if it makes the series not be a series anymore. they don't make Fallout's society rebuild, Super Mutants still exist, etc, it's almost as if every Fallout is a Fallout 1, because any of them can be used as an entry point, but this stuns the lore, world-building and general progression of the history
that said, it helps them market the games, so it works to an extent
edit: grammar
That's fair. As their games have suffered in my opinion, they've also had major financial success, meaning things are unlikely to change.
Fallout 4 was my last Bethesda game. I didn't hate it, but it definitely soured my opinion of Bethesda and made me more pessimistic about future games - so I decided from that point on, that I would at least check the reviews before buying any future Bethesda games... which had the unintended side effect of making me not buy any more Bethesda games.
I do think as the years have went by that there has been changes to the company that has hurt their products. It seems that for whatever reason, their recent endeavors have been plagued by bad ideas and greedy business. Have these things always been there and we just ignored them? Or has the success of their titles changed them fundamentally?
@@AlexAdrift I think it has more to do that Bethesda used to be a smaller company - when they made Morrowind and Oblivion there was a limit to how egregious they could be in their greed (as I understand it, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy when they released Morrowind) - they didn't have the brand recognition or dedicated fanbase to get away with being lazy or greedy.
Not to mention the culture of the AAA industry has shifted significantly since then, predatory practices like microtransactions and releasing unfinished buggy products wasn't as broadly tolerated by the gameplaying public as it is today.
And finally, the gaming market back then was fairly niche, they had a smaller pool of potential buyers, so customer satisfaction was a big deal - a bad reputation could sink a company.
In today's market the playerbase is basically disposable: No matter how much you anger or outrage your fans, as long as you appeal to the lowest common denominator, it's likely that enough people will buy your game to make a profit - at least if you gouge them with microtransactions, subscriptions, battle passes, and all that kind of stuff. Just look at Fallout 76; a complete flop, the worst game release in Bethesda's history - and yet they still made a ton of money on it.
well, it's not that i dont want to find my son.. but i gotta help the minutemen to rebuild... afterward, they'll point me to diamond city which lead me to detective which lead me to joining the railroad and now i'm stuck doing quest for the railroad...
Instead of responding to that amber alert, I'm gonna go play plumber and electrician for strangers...don't worry...my infant son will be fine. He's tough like his dead mother.
Maybe I am wrong but i have a feeling that Fallout 1 & 2 had situation where even tho to us the players and observers so to speak the world was cartoonish, to the in game characters that world was real and they were grounded in it.
After Fallout 3 and 4 i have a feeling that characters in it are somewhat aware that they are living in simulation and that's why all of the stupidity. Its all Tranquility Lane, and every single character is somewhat aware of that. That constant flirting with the 4th wall. That, one line Muggy says in NV : "Of course I'm obsessed! They made me this way! You think I don't know how crazy I sound? Of course I do! THEY PROGRAMMED ME TO KNOW THAT TOooo-arrr..."
I agree, In the Fallout 4 everyone is stupid because the game requires them to be stupid. Or else, this roller coaster ride wont work and amusement park isn't amusing.
I feel that with every iteration Fallout is less Fallout and more Borderlands. And, i hate Borderlands.
Yeah, it is moving away from a pollical satire that shows the dark comedy of the human condition and more about gameplay experiences, hence the amusement park feeling. From Nuka World, to 76 advertising, Fallout is nothing more than a nonserious theme park with characters playing dress up, the world trying to make you laugh, and logic ignored in service of the player. The world is loud, audacious, and inviting, yet an inch deep. Some fans prefer this lighter playland tone because they love the aesthetic and gameplay, personally, I miss the worldbuilding and the wild, nuanced characters that filled it.
I think Fallout 3 fits in this too. Just because they have cities in that one, doesn't mean squat, as they still have little infrastructure to actually feed their populations.
And Megaton feels like a movie gag.
You're forgetting the dozen or so other stupid meme settlements.
Durr muh vampires
Durr muh superhero fight
Durr muh wierd cannibals that act like the war they were born 200 years after never happened
Durr muh town with nothing but kids
Durr muh town with nothing but teenagers
Durr muh republic of Dave
Durr muh druids.
People constantly trying to argue that 3 had a better world than NV straight up gives me headaches.
I've replayed Bethesda's games so many times, to the point where I can't really take the stories seriously anymore. Now, it feels more like a "reason why I'm doing anything" aside from me joking about absurdities whether intentional or not.
Bethesda to me is the kind of universe you play countless times without actually accomplishing anything. It feels like the story is just background for discovering as much absurd stuff as possible along the way while also getting addicted to RPG mechanics like it's crack.
(This is Pre-Fallout 76 btw)
Interesting take and I'm sure some people agree
@@AlexAdrift Maybe. But that's just what I think. Replaying a game for so long makes most things feel just as natural as breathing. I mostly know the Bethesda universe as a canvas for all sorts of crazy and unintentionally funny stuff to happen both officially and unofficially.
This is probably an extremely steamy take and I apologize, it's a bit hard to describe in a way I feel is right.
I’d argue that Fallout 4 is objectively a bad game just like Starfield
Not just bad though, F4 is probably the biggest disappointment in gaming history
I would easily say it is the most divisive. Some hate the game/voiced protagonist yet love the building. Some love the voiced protagonist yet dislike other aspects. Then, some love the entire game including Preston, while some hate the entire game. Seems there isn't a shared consensus.
Fallout 4 is singlehandedly my least favorite game and my favorite one. Ive dedicated around a month now to completely overhauling the games story and gameplay with mods, my favorite game ever
pretty much building my dream game
Sounds amazing. When its finished make sure you share it. Lol
I'm sure some would love to play it.
@@AlexAdrift Lool im learning a lot about xedit so i probably will learn how to make one of those preset mods and publish it
Kinda late to these type of games but ive played fallout nv, fallout 3, fallout 4, fallout 76 and skyrim. So far Starfield is the only bad game for me🤷🏾♂️🤷🏾♂️
When I first heard that Bethesda was going to buy Fallout IP I thought to myself: sure, why not, they made Terminator Future Shock in the 90s that was basically a FPS in an apocalyptic setting, they can do it. You could drive a car or fly a plane freely in that game. It defined the controls for FPS for years to come (I remember one reviewer saying who would ever want to control a shooter this way :D (for the younger people - Terminator FS was the first shooter where you controlled the player with mouse and keyboard, basically the standard controls now)) Then the Fallout 3 game came out and it was..... its something... but at least we had a new fallout game...
Its 2024 and bethesda can not make a game where you can drive a car in fallout nor you can fly freely in starfield... the best things that they had in their engine in the 90s yet stayed with the things that were in that engine due to hardware limitations - loading screens...
It's crazy how almost 30 years later the original "Fallout" is still the best game set in the Fallout world to date. Despite so many tries, so many millions of dollars invested, still nothing beats the original.
It's not about the graphics, it's not about more choices, more open world. It's about the story. Well written, well narrated story, in which we, as players, can participate. At least that's what cRPG's are about. If you just enjoy shooting weird monsters in post apocalyptic setting, that's fine. Just don't try to pretend there's something more to it. If you do, you get the grotesque results like Bethesda's interpretation of Fallout.
Give me a good story and you can keep the fancy graphics, complex game mechanics, a sandbox world with trllions of side quests to explore. All of this will never come close to justify a poorly written, not engaging story.
Some people like the looting shooting, while others like the RPG elements. Bethesda though? They like money.
Remeber kids "It has electrolytes"
Amen...
Wait, does Nuka-Cola have electrolytes? If so, they didn't use it in advertisement.
This video deserves much more views and likes!
Thanks!
New character frozen, dumb new world, is a pretty common sci-fi trope, but I do agree that there are a lot of accidental similarities.
Gene Roddenberry had this plot twice (Genesis 2 and Andromeda), and the video game Crystallis are a couple of examples of this plot.
I've played Fallout 4 for years, and I only just watched Idiocracy recently, so this was a really interesting video you made. My theory for why everyone in the Commonwealth is stupid is because every couple of days a radiation storm blows through, which I don't imagine is very healthy and probably causes brain damage and birth defects, among other health issues.
I'm sure it doesn't help.
I disagree that mods cant save it. Some of the mods, and that one set in London, are technically fallout 4, it just doesnt use Bethesdas world that much. Even those stories that is set in the commonwealth let you skip the bethesda main story. However, I have had a great time playing my female overboss. You just need 8 raider bases and the rest you steamroll for food, meaning you never have to think about them again. It wasnt hard creating her backstory. She had planned to kill both Nate and the child for the insurance money when the bombs dropped, so that bummed her out, but finding the raiders and getting an army was great luck. The only problem is that I am running out of things to do, and she would never follow the main story, but whatever, still have far harbor to do, and this time I dont have to care about settlements. Or choices.
Mods can save the game, its harder saving the world without wiping it clean. So many mods just create an entirely new world space and characters.
To be fair, if you look at anything close enough and stretch things far enough you can always make connections to other things.
Of course, but some are more "limber" than others.
Not long ago I played F4 again only for the sake of the America Rising 2 mod. Suddenly motivations make sense: if playing as male character you are former soldier and it makes sense to join proper government agency from your time. Your life pre-war was without mutants, so it would make sense if your character's motivation of bringing the world back to how it was aligns with the ideals of the Enclave. The organisation itself has very pragmatic goals and motivations that fit a government's strategic goals. You get rewarded appropriately for your efforts to ranks that make sense towards your importance or required information clearance.
Lastly it was the attitude towards the institute that made other factions seem so childish as in this mod their reaction was: "Oh they are enemy unless we can recruit them. Synths are ok tools to potentially bolster our strength and save the lives of our troops, but the main prize is that hydroponic facility that grows clean not irradiated crops that could feed the Enclave!"
In some respect this mod also pays homage to Fallout 3 Enclave that wanted a to control a clean water source. NCR also knew importance of clean water, crops grown on it and importance of energy. Diamond City is soaked in irradiated water.
Yeah I've heard the mod is incredible. I need to try it sometime.
_Fun fact about water:_ *it can't get irradiated.* It can, however, carry fallout, but I very much doubt any of it would remain after a few years, much less 200.
Basically, Fallout 3's plot is based on the dumb assumption that water can not only be radioactive, but that it also stays that way forever.
@@bickboose9364 Those deep water pools that are used as a storage for fresh radioactive waste from NPP are so effective as dissipaters of radiation, that you can take a swim in them safely as long as you keep more than like 3 meters away from the actual nuclear waste.
So yeah, Fallout's concept of anything nuclear or radiation is completely nonsensical.
Well, Fallout 4 ist just the "logical" extrem of BADthesda! I mean Fallout 1 and 2 showed a world on the road to recovery (from Shady Sands founding the NCR, to cities coming together (even if led by crime families!) etc. - Fallout 3 onwards on the other hand sadly showed a hopeless wasteland (except New Vegas, where the NCR shows up, where Vegas itself is nearly unharmed by the bombs etc.), without ANY PROGRESS! Seriously, we should have had more factions like the NCR by now, trying to rebuild, maybe even negotiating treaties (end goal? Re-Form them US of A!)
presenting the president of the Enclave of the United States Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho
This game is fun, you guys are just mean
Despite my honest critiques, I do find aspects of the game to be fun.
The thing that most irks me about the Bethesda Fallouts is they take place 50 and 60 years after Fallout 1, and the world seems to have regressed even further in that time. It makes no sense.
Yeah, some inconsistencies with the lore for sure
5:24 so...how exactly is fictitious, post-nuclear Boston any different than modern reality?
"Fallout 4 mods can't save the games"
that's absolutely quite true and that's the reality that I wish I could refund the game..
I recently started a new play through of Fallout 4 and I can’t look at the world the same way now (though admittedly I have a bunch of mods installed that already made me feel that way)
great video btw 👍🏾
Thank you! And hopefully you can still enjoy your play through
BTW, since I wrote so much criticism about its plot, Steam says I have literally 1800 hours in Fallout 4. (I'm not even rounding it up or down. Weird that it's actually a multiple of 100:p) Which is how I know what every single NPC and terminal ever says.
Plus in other FO games. Plus I've spent thousands of hours modding Beth games, as in actually 3D modelling and texturing stuff. I'm also one of the guys who literally took a hex editor to FO3 before it had a GECK, to help create all those tools. (Not out of any altruism, mind you. I just couldn't wait for Beth to get their crap together.)
So I don't HATE their games. You don't do that if you hate them. Just... I wish they'd make a bit more sense... Ya know what I mean?
Oh yeah, I understand. There is just some stuff that even us fans can't overlook and UA-cam is a great forum to discuss these things with your fellow fans and trolls.
@@AlexAdrift Indeed.
This is why starfield is disappointing! It’s still cool! But why is there only like three or four towns? Why isn’t there any real world building???
I liked the "NASA Punk" aesthetic, however, it felt wasted in a game that felt shallow.
Because Bethesda wanted to market the size and scope of the world. The thing that was neglected was content to fill said world. The game is as wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle.
@@DigitalApex Great point
In fairness: we come from a society that has compulsory childhood education. None of us have an experience of a society without this baseline education, and being so ubiquitous for the last 4generations we largely take it forgranted.
Fallout 4 is proof Bethesda doesn't understand how to build a compelling narrative and a world that makes sense.
Yeah, the game has some major issues with its world.
it's proof their abilities degraded...if Skyrim wasn't obvious then fallout 4 is and if Fallout 4 isn't then F76 is and if F76 fails to drive home the message SF has it seems....
maybe we make skyrim the grace period? that's still 3 flipping games that they've gotten worse on....
but no I'm not allowing it...4 games the studio has progressively slipped on, we can forgive 2011 but the second release we can no longer forgive cus they never patched out all the issues, never just paid the modders $100 and used their patch cus that'd be too easy, no they shortcutted it and released it as it was by the end of Skyrim's dev period eveey time they released it LMAO
and the complaints Skyrim did get went unheeded in fallout 4 and the problems got worse and worse and now we're al awake and angry
in short fallout 4 is proof Bethesda learned nothing from their history of mistakes or other devs outdoing em with less luxury in the process, new vegas made in 1 year and change, and still outdid BGS on every level!
@@judgedrekk2981 There is a scary trend that their games are getting worse. You aren't alone in thinking that. Plenty of people do. However, Bethesda values profit over product anymore. As long as their games sale, they will only continue making poor games.
@@AlexAdrift and other Bethesda games don't?
It's like.. I love the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series and I hate that Bethesda just not only keeps dumbing everything down but also just drops the quality of each new release by a shit ton. Like how the hell do people feel right defending a company who is blatantly telling you that they don't care about their games and only care about money?
That is the very reason I make videos on the subject. I see the company make games that are inferior in many ways, yet have greater amounts of monetization.
I instantly liked the video for the title because it's exactly my thoughts. I love the America Rising 2 and Sim Settlements 2 mods because they bring seriousness in all this parody of a parody of a post apo world
Fallout 4 was lack luster
Yeah, but hey, at least it has mods
I got sick of building settlements. All the settlers do is complain, they need more beds, they need more crops, they need this and that, like they do not know how to get or make anything. When you play you are just a nanny helping to take care of a bunch of children.
Yeah, the complaints can really ruin immersion. You can build a literal utopia and they'll still chime off "easy living this ain't"
@@AlexAdrift And a the lack of respect you get from some you help. Vault 81, you go through hell to help save that boys life, yet now and then as you walk past a guard they will say we are still watching, or just because your wearing that Vault suit does not make you one of us. The funny part is you have taken way more powerful fights and battles they could give you, and yet they think they can kick your ass. Just like the Railroad, even after took you out Kellogg and a Institute courser, they want act tuff like they think they take you down. Yet at the same time if courser showed up, they would crap their pants. When they made this game, they could of done better on programming some of their lines. Case in point if you take out the Institute before you go to Bunker Hill, and Go there even for the first time. The Mayor there will walk up to you and say to you something like ok you got some powerful friends and we don't need any trouble here so the settlement is yours. That is one of few time some one in the game show you any real fear or respect, knowing who you are. In fact the first time this happened to me in the game, I was like say what, it took me a moment to take it in, what she said to me.
Hands down, the writing is the worst. It peaks in the Far Harbor dlc and I could not be bothered to play Nuka World. I did enjoy exploring, and I spent way more time base building than I should but to me it can feel hollow if I didn't want to interact with the npcs. Its actually why i thought not having any in 76 was a good idea. It wasn't, but you can see my logic.
Yeah, I can see your logic. And I agree with Far Harbor, it tried its best to fix Fallout 4's issues and plenty of others think its the best part of Fallout 4 as well.
Far harbor is awesome i agre. Nuka world just doesn't fit with the tone and character's backstory, but that's just another fo4 problem @@AlexAdrift
Fallout 4 be8ng better than Starfield is fucking sad. 8(?) years difference and the quality went down, lol.
Lots of stuff regressed. Ship building is nice though...
how the fuck are nate and nora losers? they accomplished more than most of our generation. law school is hard!
TBF to bad guy options, like, its been found most players don't really play evil playthroughs, at least in first playthroughs, and thus most devs don't put too much depth into them
I used to be like that playing Fallout 1 and 2 where the dialogue is deep and i actually felt bad when i played evil.
Starting in Fallout 3 i played super evil. and to be honest i found it much more enjoyable.
The Bos despite being 'good guys' (which is not what fallout is supposed to be like) are somehow much more unlikable than in the first games where they are total assholes lol
Seems the content creator here has no friends
Do the voices in my head count?
Fallout 4 is so stupid that the faction that should be the smartest (Institute), is led by the dumbest villain I've ever seen in a game.
P.S. I love this damn game anyway lol
Ha. Despite my critiques, I still played it more than I should have as well.
Nah, it’s Hideo Kojima’s *Snatcher*
You and your wife are frozen and thawed out post-apocalypse, and you have to end a threat to humanity by androids while finding out where your son is with the help of a robot ally
Another great game. And it sounds like they definitely share some similarities.
@@AlexAdrift Bethesda included a Snatcher easter egg in 3, they KNEW what they were doing with 4
@@ianmason96 That is wild. I'll have to check it out cause it sounds interesting.
Idiocracy is what Starfield would be if it were honest. Actually, I'm pretty even in Idiocracy, they still used phones.
The lack of communication in Starfield is jarring and its only purpose is to have the player run or fly somewhere like a medieval messenger.
the whole synth thing was probably meant to be commentary on the red scare but the thing (1982) did it probably as best as you could.
Yeah, you can also compare it to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
honestly fuck knows what it was meant to be
bethesda did everything wrong about institute and synths
@@ryszakowy Yeah, poorly done faction in my opinion.
Fun fact: had to trade my child during the chip crisis for a new GPU
I am sure they will be missed 🙏
Wait fallout 4 had themes?
When speaking or interacting with Preston, the game showcased themes of pain...sorrow...anguish...wrath...vengeance...and unintended comedy.
Fallout 4 sounds like misanthropy as a video game
Their is some thing intriguing to hear that actual Boomers see the world from the eyes of the protagonist of the game/movie, where every one else is stupid and they are right and the world they live in is just an empty shell of a world long gone and now is just an apocalypse. But in reality the early 50s 60s and 70s we think of only exists in commercials. Maybe the idealistic views of the past applies more to the younger generations that havent lived through those old times. Similar to how a lot of people see Rome at its height as the ideal society.
Good point. Perhaps it was their intention to make the game look "stupid" and "sinful" in comparison to our character's outlook on society because of the clear generational divide. Of course our idealistic character would see squatters, bums, mutants, ghouls, and chems as perverse. That what the wasteland really needs is a good ole dose of "old school values." Was this Bethesda's intention? I doubt it. But still a unique way to view the game and its themes.
Good video. Pretty colors and the funny man talking. Bring back the funny man haha
Ha. Thanks!
People always love to boast about how great Bethesda is at world building and environmental storytelling, but this game really was not good at either, also skeletons being placed somewhere is easy as fuck literally, anybody could do it and it’s not “great” environmental storytelling just because you put a toaster and a skeleton in a bathtub
Personally, I liked their environmental storytelling because it actually contained a story. Most games didn't care. This has sadly changed though. Bethesda used to tell a story with a seemingly mundane cave and I personally liked that. The story told there meant more than the loot itself. However now, Bethesda cares more about the shiny loot and will literally populate caves with generated nonsense. Personally, I no longer care about the cave's story because it is randomly generated, repetitive, or doesn't contain one at all. The amount of unmarked quests and thoughtful stories have seemingly decreased. A fall from grace IMO.
Kamaun guies! Emil Pagliarulo said that design documents aren't needed anymoar! You all make paper airplanes outta the lore anyways ...
This deserves way more views.
As for the subject matter of the vid, I'd go further and say that all Beth open world games since Oblivion are basically Idiocracy. Their stated game design paradigm has been "how do we say yes to the player as much as possible". To accomplish that, they have to rob agency from the NPCs inhabiting their world.
Thanks!
And great point. The NCPs in their games are only there to serve the player. Looking at Starfield, you can tell the NPCs have been lobotomized, with shopkeepers just standing there motionless for an eternity. A far cry from their previous games.