Also Pat saying "stop having the plot be finding a family member" and explained his reasoning I feel like this might be the most correct take Pat has had in a long time, he's absolutely right
except that his confused samurai champloo ghost of tsushima example sucks because your uncle in GoT is cool and when you finally meet up with him you fight alongside him and it's awesome, so Ghost does it fine, and in Samurai Champloo the fact that they have no clue who the samurai who smells like sunflowers is and no reason to be looking for him aside from it being something to do, is something pointed out repeatedly during the show
but yeah the "I gotta find my wife" or "I gotta find my sister" or "I gotta find my daughter" shit is like, yeah I love both my siblings but I don't care about YOUR sister, and as he pointed out it works in Nier because you are actually caring for that character ACTIVELY as part of the ACTIVE story
Days Gone also has the "muh missing loved one" plot but its done much better. The game starts with a flashback of you losing her, but its put on the backburner untill halfway where you find evidence of her being alive. Then the plot becomes "find muh girlfriend". Then you FIND her and you work together untill the ending.
One of the strongest points that I honestly don't see talked about enough is that Dying Light 1 had a big redeemable quality that was when the story started getting obsessed with itself, the player character also starts to check out and get annoyed by it, to the point that when the main villain launches into a Far Cry villain speech, he screams "Would you just shut the fuck up?!"
Silent Hill 2 also didn't require you to care about Mary. You're not necessarily even trying to save her. They tell you right at the start that she's dead and make James seem like some kind of lunatic for looking for her. Your reason for wanting to find her isn't, "I need to save Mary." It's to solve a mystery.
The "uncorrupted DNA" shit from Fallout 4 falls apart once the narrative declares that the Institute MURDERS all of the other uncorrupted frozen candidates
There’s enough evidence in the game that initially the intent was for the PC to be the best Synth the institute ever made but they chickened out at the last minute. Or maybe they thought the general populace was to stupid to get it.
@@FoehnAlkaiser that synth thing is completely insane and they fucking retconned it the far harbor dlc where a synth asks you about your origin story and hes like "really dude, you think youre from before the bombs dropped? do you realize how unlikely that is?" and you have a dialogue choice thats literally "i guess i might be a synth lol" i just beat it for the first time last year and its easily one of the worst games ive ever played, triple a or otherwise
@@god47398 Considering it's basically just the main story that's cringe it sounds like you haven't played many games if it's easily one of the worst for you tbh.
It would have been TOO obvious for the player to be Synth after the reveals. But now we're back to "SUBFARTED EXPACTSHUNS" and it would just be a better story.
The moment Father walked into the room in Fallout 4 I just pumped him full with lead. I didn't even figure our that he is Shaun, I was just "oh hey there is the faction leader that terrorizes everyone and he just walks towards me unarmed like an idiot, better use this chance." And it was so funny to me when I found out he was Shaun.
man the institute might be one of the worst written factions in any RPG in recent memory. they make literally no sense in the world. their goals are fucking stupid and psychopathic, they're pretty much an entire joke once you see them after hours of building them up as big important people and to add insult to injury their weapons and gear are AWFUL and look like shitty plastic toys and it makes the Legion look professional
Yeah, the voiced dialogue for the protagonist in fallout 4 was basically everything people worried about it prior to release said it would be. It limited dialogue options tremendously. It dumbed down the writing as well. It also had the problem that it did what bioware did with mass effect where they try to give you a summation of a dialogue choice with a couple words. But there were times it didn't accurately represent what the dialogue was actually saying. It's why the most popular mod, or one of them, for FO4 was the dialogue list option to be like FO3/NV. So you could see exactly what you were saying. But that revealed yet another new problem. It made it clear that your choices in most dialogues were 1) Yes. 2) Sassy Yes 3) Eager Yes 4)No, fuck you, but yes actually. And that was the majority of responses you could have.
31:04 When Shaun said that my instant reaction was: "WHAT DO YOU MEAN I WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND??? I HAVE MAX INTELIGENCE AND 100 IN SCIENCE WTF! _BY ACTUAL FALLOUT STANDARS I SHOULD BE RUNNING THIS PLACE!!!"_ Fallout 4 is in my list of media titled: "Don't think about it, will induce rage!" With an asterisk going: "good enough combat thou"
Whats worse about Fallout 4 is that the explanation for why the institute does what it does is actually in an unmarked audiotape just lying in a random room of the institute. The "grand plan" amounts to "We tried to organize the wastelanders into a democratic society once, it blew up in our face cause of paranoia, now we are just gonna turtle up in our underground society and use synth doppelgangers to ensure the wastelanders are disorganized and divided and never a threat to us." And yet the institute treats you like you are too stupid to understand this.
And the Institute were explicitly responsible for blowing up the path towards a unified government by sending a synth to kill all of the settlement leaders during their negotiations.
@@1nHarmsWay That is actually up for debate. The game is deliberately ambiguous as to why the unified government died before it was born. The wastelanders say that the institute set up the inaugural meeting and turned it into a bloodbath cause all their leaders were in the same place. The institute says that it was a disaster because of general paranoia and mistrust on the part of the wastelanders towards the institute and each other. The institute lost people too and that's why they closed themselves off; they can't afford to lose that many high IQs again. Its super interesting but the game NEVER lets you bring it up with any NPCs beyond a cursory level. Meanwhile in New Vegas you can have a debate about hegelian dialectics with Caesar. It's like they started to put some nuance and ambiguity into 4's story and just gave up.
Yo. Where can I find that audio tape? Because I’m like 6 play throughs deep and have given up all hope of finding narrative consistency from the Institute.
@@LookADistarction From the Fallout wiki: Director's Recording 52: In the institute, on a side table in the board room on the top level (east side). There is also Director's recording 108: In the director's quarters, upper level, opposite the globe and radio inside an open white box, resting on two other white boxes. Got some things about the content of the tapes wrong cause this was 5 years ago, but the gist is there.
Dying Light 2 may be one of the strongest examples of "tell, don't show" in modern memory. Maybe worse, given that what they DO show directly contradicts what they tell you. It's absurd.
@@dogsoldier123 It's what Pat says on the podcast about the Peacekeepers. The free people/hippies say that the PKs are militant, corrupt, and fascist, but the game never shows you this. The PKs overall are good and reasonable people. I'm like 30 hours in and have yet to run into a situation where the PKs acted badly. Even people saying the leader is a narcissist, but the guy seems genuinely cool.
@@Lunar_Sovereign They're hiding behind some scrap metal or something from some soldiers that are right in front of them and she goes "they're coming. don't make a sound, _AAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDSSSSS"_
Dying Light 2 is a game with a plot I do not care about that slowly made me care. Not because the plot was good, but because the Survivors were all such pricks I sided against them whenever possible out of pure spite. Every decision I made I thought "I hope the Bazaar suffers horribly from me doing this." So in a way I suppose the plot worked better than Dying Light 1 where I had no investment. Fun parkour and stabby stabs tho
I tried to help sophie because i thought she was in trouble at the hotel. They tried to murder me. i sided with her again because she had a crossbow in my face and i thought i was lying. I blew up the big windmill which i never agreed to,then i restarted the whole game (no manual save slots in 2022) out of pure spite. Fuck em!
It's utterly baffling to me that the game obviously wants you to side with the survivors who are a rabble of cultlike unhinged lunatics, and go against the PK who are a group with actual organization and idea for the future while being nothing but reasonable throughout the majority of the game. Survivors: tried to lynch you as soon as they saw you. "Outsiders must die." PK: Catch you trying to sneak through a guarded area and would be in the right thinking you were an enemy hostile and engaging you. Instead they interrogate and let you go. They even offer to get you where you want to go so long as you help them first. [spoilers from here] Even worse are the faction endings. Survivor ending: magical utopia where everything is wonderful PK ending: LMAO we Einsatzgruppen now. Let's murder everyone who disagrees with us.
Tap to skip dialogue line, hold to skip cutscene. This should be the standard so there's an option for everyone except for unskippable because anyone who like sunskippable isn't a human.
Lisa the Painful manages to do both things Woolie and Pat want to see in their "missing family member" plot hook. Not only does the player get to spend enough time with Buddy to care about her more than just a random kid, but the moment you find her puts the whole game in a radically different light.
@@cameronrichter3449 the what now? AFAIK, there are no trans people you get to meet in Lisa. Only a group of crossdressing dudes that do that to eek out a living in the farsical and grimdark hellscape of Olaf.
I think my favorite part of Dying Light 2 is when a character at the start of the game asks "Hey remember that guy you've been searching for over the course of 20 years? And your character is forced to ask "Who?" To which the response is basically "That nazi scientist that tortured you for your entire childhood" And your response is "Oh right that guy" What great storytelling
Hot take, I fucking *hate* any and all attempts at trying to capture the Walking Dead style of storytelling with zombie fiction. I'm so fucking sick of it, it's always going to be miserable and boring and it always ends with everyone dying so don't bother getting attached. If Dying Light had no attempt at a serious story and was like 'Go dropkick that zombie for extra points' I would've called it Game of the Decade.
I've personally grown tired of the "Maybe *we* were the real monsters all along," story that a lot of recent zombie media has been putting out. Like, I get humans can be bad, but can we have a story about people actually getting along and working together during the zombie apocalypse? Something different, for once?
@@kamikazelemming1552 No. Because what you are talking about isn't recent. It's basically the entire core theme of zombie movies since the original Night of the Living Dead and the Romero movies. The zombies are never the core problem. They're a horrific disaster that causes people and society to fall apart because of refusal to trust and work together. I think Zombieland is the only movie that is just about goofing with zombies.
If I can speak in general for a second misery porn in fiction is starting to not be interesting because like the Walking Dead formula it's too predictable and can be downright manipulative.
Pat's impassioned rant about why the plot of fallout 4 is bad is one of the best things I've heard in a while. Woolie's face as Pat (accurately and factual) recounts the plot is magnificient.
To be as fair as possible, in Skyrim, first you are chosen to be executed by an overzealous Imperial commander, and the person directly under them apologizes AND helps you escape while bound after you leap from the parapet.
Yeah, I think it just needed to do a slightly better job of making sure you knew it was mainly that one Imperial Captain at the start being a douche rather than their group as a whole, as well as giving the Stormcloaks some negative points during the opening as well. Like maybe having one of them try to use a child as hostage to escape or something like that.
And there isn't really any evidence that Ulfric Stormcloak is a foreign agent, only that he is an influential person that foreign powers have an eye on
What's funnier is that there's an overworld NPC interaction where a Free Woman is injured and is refusing help from the PK that wants to do first aid on her. Free Woman is basically being a Karen to the PK while the PK says that they're not going anywhere until they help her. Another thing, there's a quest where a Mom is missing his 2 kids and asks for your help and quickly retracts her request when she finds out that you are a Pilgrim/Outsider. When you do find the kids, you find out that they did something horrible and almost died because of that, and the resolution? You either expose the kids and mom to be sh*t people to a little boy or tell a white lie to the little boy so that he won't die trying to find his lost dog. Basically the Free Folk can and will screw over anyone if they can profit from it. Only a few people are genuinely good. That said, the PKs are upfront but when you do go against them, they will come after you.
Getting to the top of the VNC tower also gave me a "WTF I DONT EVEN" facepalm moment that I wont spoil. From that point on the Survivors could go fuck themselves and I laughed IRL when I met Sophie again afterwards in the Bazaar.
30:00 Shaun's plan in F04 was to eventually create a completely bio-mechanical Synth that would be able to breed with humans which would eventually lead to all the downsides of being human being breeded out. The Institute replacing humans was to both gain positions of power and also gain data on how humans operate. The Institute is like one month away from perfecting cloning technology by the time Fallout 4 starts, and instead of using that technology to do... anything for humanity they've been kidnapping and murdering people to collect data for a massive Eugenics program. It's unironically the plot of Binary Domain Also kind of the plot of Fallout 3 but... less genocidal I guess?
The Fallout 4 encounter with Kellogg is even worse than Pat describes. You chase him down at his hideout, instigate every encounter with him and the synths he keeps around for no reason, he WILLINGLY EXPLAINS HIMSELF TO YOU, but before he can completely reveal the "twist" to you, your character is FORCED TO DECIDE TO KILL HIM. For no reason, that I can tell, other than that he HAS to be dead for the next step in the main quest, where you pull out a brain implant and go on a VR quest through his entire life's story... which is also mostly composed of blatant misdirection to further pad out the plot and preserve the "twist". It's bad writing NESTED INSIDE EVEN WORSE WRITING. IT'S A WHOLE QUEST LINE MADE UP OF "wouldn't it be cool if?" MOMENTS WITH NO ATTEMPT AT LOGICAL CONSISTENCY WHATSOEVER, IN PURSUIT OF A TWIST THAT MAKES THE STORY *WORSE*
I think talking to Kellogg with no choice for a peaceful solution is a punishment for not being smart enough to sneak attack crit his face with a mini nuke from the doorway.
When I see people shit on oblivion / Skyrim, I think about fallout 4. Anything that was questionable in Bethesda games before was made exponentially worse in that title.
@@larrymeadows7535 in a more linear story, I'd agree with you, but this is supposed to be an RPG. I'm supposed to be allowed to choose what my character wants to do. A binary kill/spare choice was the cliche minimum-effort "character choice" in video games a DECADE ago.
"Is the twist shittier than nothing" is actually a legitimate point of contention for a LOT of fiction authors. There is so much discussion on the idea of "if the explanation for the mystery does not give as much enjoyment as the concept of the mystery alone, should you even bother explaining it?" It's how you end up with shit like midichlorians, or Korra completely explaining the creation of the Avatar and humanizing something that was better off as a cosmic force. Some things are better off being left unexplained, so that the fans can draw their own conclusions.
Midichlorians are a terrible, no one will dispute that, but the origin of the Avatar was one of the best parts of the Second Season, if not the best, so I'll have to disagree with you there, unfortunately.
@@kamikazelemming1552 I liked it but at the same time if I kinda think it would have been better if it didnt happen if that makes sense? Like I did like the episode itself but I think as a whole I think I would have much preferred for that kinda thing to go unexplained.
@@kingragnarok7302 I hear that that's the part of season 2 people enjoy the most, but I can see what OP means. It overexplained the Avatar Mythos to a point where it even kinda contradicts the original show.
@@masterdhegamer6661 The Avatar as a concept did not need an explanation and the way Raava and Vaatu are portrayed is a complete misunderstanding of the idea of yin and yang. Raava is pure good and Vaatu is pure evil, and that's not how taoism treats light and darkness. In the original ATLA, the Avatar is a cosmic being almost as old as time itself - you see generations of former Avatars. It's never explained how the Avatar came to be because it didn't *need* to be explained. The idea of the Avatar being a representation of nature's need for balance was great. Avatar Wan's story just humanizes the idea of the Avatar and removes the mysticism. Now you know exactly what the Avatar is. It's just a light spirit buff. It would have been far more interesting if Raava/Vaatu literally didn't exist, and if the entire story were just Wan realizing he had access to all four styles of bending. Going on a journey to learn how to appropriately harness all four elements, learning from all four cultures as a result, and culminating in him being the only one who could act as the relatable middleman between all four of the peoples. That's far more in line with a traditional Eastern story than the way it's done in Korra. The fact that there even is contention about Avatar Wan kind of shows you that a lot of people didn't like how they gave the Avatar an origin story, because it wasn't particularly impressive.
I would just like to correct something here - Ulfric Stormcloak isn't working with the Thalmor. He's an uncooperative asset to them, since the region being destabilized is beneficial to them. But if he wins, he's not handing Skyrim over, he basically turns Skyrim into a guerilla warfare zone that the Thalmor don't want to fuck with. The actual best result for Skyrim is if the two sides don't fight and unite, because they both hate the Thalmor. Also the racism of the Stormcloaks feels like a tacked on thing because otherwise there really wouldn't be a surface level reason why you wouldn't want to join + the imperials are actually also very racist, especially general Tullius, but mainly against the nords, although they still refer to you as a cat or lizard rather than a Khajiit or Argonian. Which is funny then that the opposite is the case with the Stormcloaks - Ulfric himself is pretty tolerant and respectful and his people aren't, and Tullius is a big racist but his people aren't.
Plus there's also a bunch of historical and geographical context as to why Ulfric is doing what he's doing, which the civil war quest line doesn't really tell you about
@@Hegataro People who say the imperials are 100% on the right don't know about the Night of Tears, elves literally massacred a ton of Atmorans after relations had been stablished just cause.
@@Neodeleux come on bro you have to look at what you're typing and realize that of fucking course people don't know about this shit. the issue with the "who is the better side" is that the game loves shoving in your face how racist the stormcloaks are and even have them use segregation. the player isn't gonna base how much they want to support a faction based on some niche history of something that the character never experienced.
Ulfric isnt a plant. He is a Chaotic element the thalmor let escape so he could, without then even nudging him towards it, start a civil war to weaken the empire
As someone who has actually done multiple playthroughs of both sides of the civil war in skyrim, Pat's obvious bias towards the empire while misremembering facts about both sides every 2 seconds made it grating to hear. That being said, it's just Pat. Never assume anything he says is even close to 100% factually correct, more like a 60-70% range correct from my experience hearing talk about things he knows only in a superfluous manner. TL;DR Pat's wrong about Ulfric, both sides have their merits but both sides also have a ton of glaring problems, besides the real enemy is the Aldmeri Dominion, specially the Thalmor.
@@Neodeleux You'll find Tullius at that thalmor party if you beat the civil war before then and if im remembering correctly he doesn't want to be there and he agreed with Ulfric in the end about matters
@@Neodeleux to be fair skyrim does a fucking god awful job with the entire civil war sidestory. unless you're actively looking for those things its incredibly easy for it to be missed not to mention its just incredibly bland so you can't really blame him for not remembering a crap sidestory in a game he hasn't played in years.
What Pat talks about reminds me of Witcher 1. There is a supposed conflict and discrimination of humans against "non-humans". But the non-human elves look all like clones and act arrogant as fuck. They also commit atrocities like having people being eaten by ants alive, while pressuring Geralt to join them. This culminates in a quest (a bank-robbery) in which you either join them, or they turn hostile, locking any completionist out of a neutral ending. Meanwhile the supposed "rascist" faction, lets you (a mutant witcher) join them, while acting entirely reasonable and only being like "take your time, you are always welcome to join the flaming rose!". I always join them, even if i decided not to do it when I replay. There is also a huge dissonance between the first and second game because of this.
yeah it doesn't help that the none-human resistance people are literally only a massive issue for the none-humans since everytime the scoietel or however you call it do something it leads to horrible violence against elves and dwarves and it just makes the resistance people look like huge idiots since they never actually have any goals. like it would be one thing if the none-humans where already being killed in mass or something since at that point any reprisals would be worth the risk but every elf and dwarf is just like "can you just fucking knock it off you're getting us killed"
I genuinely love the story of Everhood, but people all caps yelling at Woolie for not liking it is...Come on, man. It's a game, and the plot has problems. Screaming and crying is only going to make you look ridiculous.
Yeah... it does hurt a little bit tho cuz (at least from where he is at) the reason he is having problems is that he's going off the beaten path for side shit that will not go away if the next beat is taken. And it's like, if he wants more gameplay, he is the only one preventing himself from that. It's a mindgoblins moment that's kind of unfortunate to see play out.
That game seemed way cooler to me before you could fight back, I straight up lost interest the second I saw the ability to fight back instead of dance to death
That was a bad tweet, you DONT need 500 hours for this, it can take you around 25 hours to complete the Main Story. By "500 hours" they mean side quests, msq, collectibles, etc. Etc. So 100%, and that number is probably inflated as hell since now im sure I can just google "all collectibles Dying Light 2" and find all of them in a few hours
The institute tried to guide and work with humanity but failed miserably. They need Shawn's DNA because it was undamaged by radiation. He died of super cancer.
I completely agree with pat about borderlands 3, I loved 2+the story and speedran it, but 3 just feels so different and the story is just so in the way
Bl2 still has the problem of unskippable story and worse, doing the story 2 more times on higher difficulties. Like i knew the outcome already, why not just skip the whole story for my second playthrough and only do side quest for the guns you want. I didnt bother to play any other characters after i maxed my third VH because i got sick of it.
The stormcloak bit wasn't fully accurate. The plant thing was a theory with no actual evidence other than it would be cool, the thalmor dossier on Ulfric states they want him to be free to keep the empire busy. The tutorial also had an imperial officer help you get to the keep and allow you to choose who to go with, making it less of a big arrow promoting stormcloaks and the game making you choose on the spot. The real problem to me with it is how it's less stormcloaks versus imperials and thalmor versus nords.
well there is also the part where the stormcloaks are racist in the dumbest and most overt way possible and how it makes no sense for whats going on. where literally just his specific city has super racism with segregation slums while the rest of skyrim is totally fine with other races living together for the most part. so it just makes ulfric look like a weirdo who's scared of dark elves for no reason which is even worse when you take into account the foresworn stuff and how none of this can be taken up with Ulfric, people try to defend Ulfric but the biggest issue is that he actively makes the entire war a race issue because "skyrim is for the nords" which is the most on the nose political metaphor there could be
@@joedatius Did you play Morrowing? Dark elves neighbor Skyrim and they have a robust slave trade. They love enslaving Nords. A lot. Only second to Argoninans and Khajiits.
Even if he's not actively a plant, there's still notes from the thalmor explicitly pointing out that he's doing what they want, even if he doesn't actively worth for them. Either if he's just a stupid patsy instead of an active traitor, you still can't let him win.
the dossier says that Ulfric was a valued Thalmor asset, but became uncooperative after the Markarth Incident. it says that Thalmor could re-establish contact with him but instead choose to help the Stormcloaks indirectly because the war serves their goals.
@@iamnuff1992 "Ulfric first came to our attention during the First War Against the Empire, when he was taken as a prisoner of war during the campaign for the White-Gold Tower. Under interrogation, we learned of his potential value (son of the Jarl of Windhelm) and he was assigned as an asset to the interrogator, who is now First Emissary Elenween. He was made to believe information obtained during his interrogation was crucial in the capture of the Imperial City (the city had in fact fallen before he had broken), and then allowed to escape. After the war, contact was established and he has proven his worth as an asset.The so-called Markarth Incident was particularly valuable from the point of view of our strategic goals in Skyrim, *although it resulted in Ulfric becoming generally uncooperative to direct contact.* Operational Notes: Direct contact remains a possibility (under extreme circumstances), but in general the asset should be considered dormant. As long as the civil war proceeds in its current indecisive fashion, we should remain hands-off. The Incident at Helgen is an example where an exception had to be made - obviously Ulfric's death would have dramatically increased the chance of an Imperial victory and thus harmed our overall position in Skyrim. (NOTE: The coincidental intervention of the dragon at Helgen is still under scrutiny. The obvious conclusion is that whoever is behind the dragons also has an interest in the continuation of the war, but we should not assume therefore that their goals align with our own.) A *Stormcloak victory is also to be avoided, however, so even indirect aid to the Stormcloaks must be carefully managed*." So yes you can let him win it would piss the Thalmor off if he did
I feel like with the factions in dying light 2 they wanted it to be some "shades of gray" shit, but instead i just ended up hating both of them. like the survivors are useless and are constantly backstabbing you and each other, and the PK's, while they are upfront with you and overall seem like the "better choice", end up killing a bunch of innocents for a crime they didnt commit and talk about raping prisoners. So now i just do parkour challenges and towers.
The story feels like it wants you to like the pks. But the city rewards are hands down survivors lol. Pretty poor overall. Pks would almost be ok if they werent trying to monopolize violence
@@vVAstrAVv I think you meant the survivors being the ones the game wants you to like mate. They keep hammering it that you're supposed to like them, while the pk's are the evil fascist dudes.
@@str8apem88 well i havent got past the giant antenna in central but so far its been. "hey work with aitor... Now these guy... Noq jack... Now thia ASSHOLE" and so on
No you can't ask reasonable questions about his motivation and who he works for. Todd Howard has to tell you how to feel about that amazing child that you love in this role playing game.
Yeah, contrast with FNV where you can talk down Legate Fucking Lanius...somehow some mercenary can't be talked down and is MUCH less reasonable than some crazy warlord who crucifies people.
@@grahamcarpenter5135 It's not even that he can't be talked down, it's that YOU THE CHARACTER can't be talked down or take any route that isn't kill him. Bethesda's main quests always seem to put the player on rails and it gets worse everytime.
@@aiydsfordayssarron6542 Let’s be honest, how many of us ditched the main quest for a while (this means we are also ditching our old man child) and just fucked around our 1st playthrough. I did.
@@noblehobolo3968 I never finished the main quest. After I met the institute and found out how stupid the shit with Sean was I stopped playing the main quest.
What about a "I HAVE TO FIND MY (friend, sister, zelda, whatever)" plot where you actually find them about 20% into the plot and then they become a party member/playable character/summon/call-in.
The Evil Within 2 had that for the first half you're talking about. After defeating Stefano, the first major villain, you immediately find the main character's daughter, who you've been searching for since the start of the game. This happens about 1/3 into the story. After that, the daughter is captured by the main character's wife, who has gone completely insane, and in order to reach her you need to fight past Father Theodore, Stefano's boss and a *LITERAL* Jojo villain. And than you fight your goo wife in a custody battle for the ages.
it works particularly well in horror games, ive found. Especially when you end up swapping to that character for either a section or the second half of the game.
the crazy thing about the imperials vs stormcloaks thing in skyrim is that it is an actually well-thought out, complex, and messy affair with a lot of extremely good reasons for the local nordic populace to fight on both sides of the war, and actual pages of setup with in-universe events that caused it to occur, and then the questline is literally the second worst quest in the entire game. both sides' quests are copy and pastes of each other with only a SINGLE quest step changed (imperials defend whiterun, stormcloaks siege whiterun). the only quest that ends up being worse is the companions, which i refuse to do every single playthrough i do on principle of it just being excruciatingly boring
I expected so little from Bethesda usual story writing, I called that major twist right after we got unfrozen - "No way its been 5 minutes after I was refrozen, its probably been like 50 years and my son is now main villain, cause that the dumbest shit Bethesda can come with thinking its smart" . They did got me thinking I was wrong with how kellog was not old and fake Shawn, but at the final reveal man did I laugh so hard at that stupid shit I called out being real plot.
For me it was Far Cry 5 and beyond. I wanna play the open world sandbox, and the fact that just playing the normal game loop to be interrupted by plot sucks. 3 and 4 weren't like that, the plot required plot missions. But then 5 if you played too much you'd be forced into a story mission. Even in the middle of other missions, you can lose progress because you got shot by a bliss bullet while flying a plane trying to destroy cargo trucks or something. It feels really bad
they really got high on their ass with the "the villain is interacting with you all the time" from 3 and 4. which in those games where enjoyable for different reasons, in 3 Vaas was charismatic and scary while Pagen min was eccentric and fairly funny at times. problem is after that 5's characters are all boring as dirt and not interesting to have talk to you and add to the problem that ubisoft decided to have the player character be a literal nobody mute it makes for even less interesting interactions.
Dying light 2 sounds like Chris wanted to do a morally grey story but when he got replaced they didn't know how to do that. That's why the story feels so disjointed.
I knew fallout 4 was gonna be a dud when most of the reveals and the marketing was about how they improved their shooting so much. And then I actually got the game and boy was I right when a vast majority of missions felt like "go here, kill everyone. Use the shooting we marketed to you."
For a second I thought I was having a stroke when he brought up Jin Sakai & the Sunflower Samurai. But also, I feel like Ghost of Tsushima is one of those games that did a decent job with this. There's actual reasons for urgency, there's actual reasons for the character to be taken & to save him beyond "he's my uncle". He doesn't exist to be Jin's only reason for doing stuff, and he's got his own shit going on. Also it doesn't drag out the saving quest for the whole game or do the "your princess is in another castle" bs that they easily could have done with act 2.
yeah exactly, there is certainly the personal drive with him being his father figure but he is also the leader of the island and has control over the what remains of tsushimas army so its also a logical strategic goal along with being a geographic goal as the location is also the next step to access the next part of the island so there is never a point where the player feels divorced from the plot since your goals will always align with Jins. Afterwords they even add on to this with doing a fantastic job by showing why Jin respects his uncle in the way he does and at that point since the player has had so many scenarios dealing with characters who have started as reluctant or scared to fight back, finding your father and the first thing you do with him is both of you running down the enemy really does a great job giving the player a good reason to want to support jins uncle which in turn makes their later confrontation even more powerful.
I think it’s fair to say that Skyrim pushed you towards the stormcloaks at first, but there is a fair amount of story depth in that civil war and it’s leaders. Especially in comparison to the factions in Fallout 4… the institute in particular. They go from being a clear empirical villain that kidnaps / replaces people to being made to look benevolent when you interact with them directly later on. There’s no real reason for their actions, almost no interesting explanations or context in computer notes, it makes so little sense it just falls apart.
Apparently the issues came up with the writing even before it had to be redone. Avellone was writing most of the quests as well and the devs ran into problems due to the way he was writing them, as if they were quest steps you'd see in kotor or NV.
@@turkish8969 I think the issue was the way he wrote them with little combat or gameplay elements in mind. I'm guessing most of it was dialogue heavy with little interaction with the open world.
Yeah god forbid my open world rpg gave me options to choose from besides Yes, No, Sarcastic No and shooting guy A or guy B. My brain wouldn't handle it for sure.
@@Toxic_Korgi To be fair ... They hired Avellone, what did they expect ? It's like hiring Tiger Woods and wondering why the guy is playing golf instead of football.
I'm gonna disagree with Pat here and say that the ending where you join the Institute is actually the BEST ending in Fallout 4. I say this for the same reason that the Yes Man ending is the best ending in New Vegas: the player becomes the leader of the Institute to replace Shaun (yay, nepotism!) so you can just say "and then under the leadership of the player the Institute stopped doing pointlessly evil shit and used their advanced technology for the betterment of the wasteland, DA END."
In cybersleuth? Pretty sure there's a fan mod so you can skip cut scenes on pc. I like the story but I totally get that the option to bounce over it should be there, especially for people playing through a second time.
@@jjrambles683 I want to like cyberslueth more, but I sorely wish there was autoadvance on all the text and cutscenes. I love letting the voicelines play out, so I'm stuck babying the button and bogging down the pace. It's the only thing keeping me from playing more of it consistently.
@@gamemaniac2013 yeah it sucks cause cybersleuth, and hackers memory especially, otherwise do so many things right and are like the only good digimon games
Pat's solution of in radio chatter for story does not even save Daemon x Machina, as every level is fucking full of radio dialog in a fast paced action game that I literally could not keep up with even with the english dub (I wanted the japanese dub it had the funi gundam guys in it) I felt like I was missing the whole story
i've gotten back into neo twewy and going back to previous days to redo some sidequests and there's a skip cutscene button but no skip dialogue button. you just have to mash through every time. it still takes over 30 seconds each scene and there are a TON of dialogue scenes. also the sidequests are often an hour into a chapter. you need to do every sidequest to get every upgrade, which includes useful features like equipping multiple uber pins, increasing the difficulty, chaining more noise together for higher drop rates, and automatically converting money pins into money.
I have a kind of hot take, and that is I actually don't mind if games decide to not be very reactive. Like, I don't need every game to gave dialogue choices and factions, and be a Witcher 3 or Disco, sometimes I'm fine with a simple fetch quest that gives you decent rewards. The problem is that once every 100 hour open RPG game starts offering "choices that matter" it actually discourages me from playing them, because I actually don't want that experience too often, because often it's done poorly, plus it's time consuming. Like, if a game is 5 hours long and is highly reactive, I'll replay it and see what the choices are, but if I play Dying Light 2 and am offered dozens of choices, I actually don't really care what the alternate paths are. And I really dislike finding out a choice I made 12 hours ago locks me out of a gameplay opportunity. Tl;Dr, not every game needs meaningful choices, especially long open world/rpg games, and ESPECIALLY if the story isn't really interesting and I don't care about the characters.
@@Brandonious15987 Yeah, it's a concept that basically requires writing mastery, and the problem is not that many companies can do it. Another example is Ubisoft did it in AC Odyssey, and I felt that it REALLY didn't work there. Also, obligatory David Cage reference.
I've seen many people saying they were sure Aiden is voiced by Roger Craig Smith, but I just don't hear it. I've played a shit ton of Resi 5 and 6, his inflections are grounded in my mind.
I think it's Troy Baker. As SOON as Aiden opened his mouth, I heard Delsin Rowe from inFamous and I haven't stopped hearing him since. It's a little more gruff because zombie game, but yeah, listen to some of Delsin and you might hear it. Looked it up, and yeah, Jonah Scott is definitely telling that he voiced Aiden, but they pushed him in a direction that feels really familiar. Idk.
To take Pat's own words from back in the day; an especially bad/shitty twist can cause arc nullification. All that work and development? It meant nothing but wasted time
I like how Woolie has people screaming at him that Everhood isn't "like Undertale" when the game's big gameplay twist doesn't even make sense if you're not at least passingly familiar with Undertale. Like... SPOILERS An RPG where you kill a bunch of people to be the good guy doesn't make sense as a basic premise outside of the existence of pacifism route tropes, because that's literally 95% of all RPGs ever made. It's like a platforming game trying to convince you why you should jump and then treats it like its a twist that you need to jump to finish the game.
No need to play Undertale to understand. The game explicitly tells you and laboriously explains, repeatedly in multiple ways, what you have to do and why. If anything the undertale comparison is a disservice to both games.
Idk what pats talking about i had an easy time joining the empire. Maybe im too pragmatic but whethwr they were gonna kill me anyways cus fuck it they were still actually fighting alduin and evacuating its people. Stormcloaks were like "oh fuck yeah lets get outta here"
I mean its not hard to forgive them, literally right after that stuff the imperials are all like "wow that was cringe of her sorry about that bro" also it helps that the imperials have a general who actually seems like an intelligent and competent person while Ulfric at best is explained as someone who forced the foresworn off their homes, segregated the other races, is disliked by the greybeards and spends his time in the douchy king pose in his castle. which is kinda weird because even though the stormcloaks are made up to be more "traditional down to earth nords" Ulfric is the far more arrogant faction leader. they probably should of had him do more then just sit on his throne in front of a giant feast all day. whats really weird is that they had an amazing opportunity to allow the player to actually get to know ulfric or tullius and have you get to understand why they are fighting, but nope instead we travel with two nobodies instead of two major characters who could of given us major insights on the events from their perspective
The more good shit you experience the more glaring the problems with bad shit are from my experience, so your tolerance goes wayyyy down for crappy stuff unless you're actively looking for it a la bad funny movie hunting.
I watched someone else's playthrough of Daemon x Machnia and it was enough to convince me not to bother, even when it was free, despite being a lifelong hardcore armored core player (playing the series since the PS1 demo disc).
My personal standout for most hated storybeat in dying light 2 is definitely the "stolen flour" quest. Where everyone is complete a-holes to each other, attempting to get each other killed to cover their own asses, only for everyones lives to be saved by a fucking piece of underwear. Which, for the overall antagonist of that story has so little value in exchange for something worth A TON to many, as well as like a handful of peoples lives.
25:18 that technically happened with Starbound, there was supposed to be a much larger overarching that brutally died on the cutting room floor which would've involved you essentially pulling a Dragon Age Origins to solve each individual races problems to get to them to team up to beat the big bad. All that really remains in implementation is the core story. Guess you can decide for yourself if you feel it became better as a result.
Wasn't Ulfric no longer an asset, and had gone rogue a long time ago? I thought him helping the Thalmor was limited to having once cracked under torture or something. Also, I must have had some kind of glitch because the Stormcloaks didn't give me any racial slurs for being a dunmer, just a line about how if Skyrim was my home I should fight for it from that one general in the bear hat.
It's even better, he cracked after the Thalmor had already won that conflict anyway, they just lied to him so he would feel remorseful about having cracked. The Thalmor themselves state in a dossier that Ulfric actually winning is bad for them as a united Skyrim is a smear on their plans. Some of the stormcloaks are definitely racist tho, making the Argonians live on the docks in Windhelm for once, but it's definitely a minority and not a sentiment of the whole movement. Stormcloaks are about leaving an stagnating empire that sold them to the Thalmor after they bled their own people fighting their war against the elves, with the ban of the worship of Talos being the straw that broke the camel's back.
I think at this point, the main questline in bethesdas games will usually be the worse or make no sense. Skyrim is a clusterfuck and the Institute in FA4 is the biggest "throwing potential in the trash/lazy writting" ive seen. Thou to defend abit the empire on the intro sequence.: The captain is a bitch while the guy checking the prisoners honeslty doenst like the situation but cant do anything due to problaby being lower rank and the Thalmor being around, who are one of the biggest headache in he entirety of the ES story, due to their lore. Most of the empire's problems fall down to.: - Having made a peace treaty to early with the Thalmor faction; - Having to deal with a rebellion that is also the Thalmor's fault.
Best "finding family memeber" moment in a game for me was Gears of War 2 where Dom is looking for his wife. I was absolutely gutted when they actually did.
Funniest part about Fallout 4 is that justifying the androids is the easiest thing in the world: We want power but want to avoid a direct confrontation, so lets infiltrate the governments of Wasteland communities and take over from the inside.
The combat also suffered. Even if you do a heavy attack with a two handed weapon, if you get even slightly nicked before landing then the entire attack is negated. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t getting hit from seven different directions at once.
Yeah, the combat and its feel, were a definite downgrade compared to DL1. I mean, I still enjoyed the combat, despite it frustrating me at points (bloody biters grab spamming me at night can go to hell), but theres no way I can honestly say it was better than DL1 in that regard.
The human combat feels a lot better to me than the first but in DL1 I kinda accidentally did the post game prison raid in the first 10 minutes so I had an assault rifle and broke human encounters anyway.
I really loved DL1, so i was hyped for DL2... and then I spent 10 hours just mashing through cutscenes and not really getting to play the game or explore the map, or do anything fun. I'm just gonna let it stew for a few months and hope the devs update it to make it fun in the mean time. edit: also all the combat perks except dropkick are boring, and why the heck do you need QTEs to open chests and such? WHY !??
Man, Daemon X Machina was so fun. Remember those loli sisters that were supposedly "experimented on" and it was NEVER BROUGHT UP AGAIN? Remember the Immortals and how you had the one mission that explained literally jack-shit other than "oh, they literally can't die. Why? Fuck you, that's why."
@@cyberninjazero5659 It's really more of they try to explain it but get cut off halfway through and just kinda wiggle their fingers and go "sci-fi...!" Specifically, I'm talking about the pilots, not the enemies called Immortals. That part I understand.
@@MethodiaLordae I appreciate your comment, but the fact you had to put a question mark at the end there kinda signifies how many details they don't really expound upon. Like, I completely forget what the fuck Grief's plan was and when i went back to get the other ending it was practically the same thing. At least his music is a total banger.
>Free People get the least bad ending and the Peacekeepers get the worst ending I see Techland's writers have learned ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING since Dead Island, Riptide and Dying Light: The Following. They should stick strictly to development and shut down their writing department permanently so that it's strictly on a mercenary hire basis. What a mental health hazard.
oh god i forgot about dead islands fucking ABYSMAL story and it has the same fucking issue as it wont fucking shut up about it. its like a story that came straight out of a call of duty zombies ripoff but is treating itself like its the walking dead. who in the right mind thought it was a good idea to have dead island to be taken seriously as a story.
A game I actually stopped playing because I just hated how the story got in the way was Superhot, I really didn't care for the overly edgy meta story, I hated how you couldn't skip it, it just felt tacked on. I played the VR version in a VR bar a while ago and it was perfect, arcadey stages that went from one awesome situation to the nex. Apparently the PC version got an update that changed certain parts of the story, which is funny because my issue is the game wasted time having a story to begin with, it's just so much easier to think of the game being about a bunch of angry red nudists than whatever game-theory bait it felt like it was going for.
I had the same problem with daemon x machina. Played both of the demos on switch, was cool enough to overcome switch performance, bought it on pc, played the first like 2 hours, got sick of the big unga bunga meathead character screaming at me about his tattoos or whatever, and uninstalled it. Really fun gameplay tho
man ive been watching pat tell ulfric stormcloaks story wrong for a decade now. ulfric is not a plant, the thalmor tortured him when they captured to make him hate elves so that he would try to take over skyrim to destablilize the empire so the empire would rely more on the thalmor. ulfric is considered an asset by the thalmor but he isnt a plant or a spy, pat. skyrim has more weaknesses than strengths but its story sure as fuck isnt weak
Yep, even the Thalmor state in a document that Ulfric actually winning the civil war would be bad for them, they need the conflict to continue, neither side winning benefits them as an united skyrim is a problem to them, specially when Hammerfell is also a probable ally to a civil war Free Skyrim vs the Dominion.
Far Cry 5 has a bad case of "good game, terrible story." The best way I can describe it is this: the bad guys of Far Cry 5 are four Kai Lengs. Like the guy from Mass Effect, three Kai Lengs working for a big Kai Leng.
Xcom 2 was like this. Central, Shen, Tegan, and especially the chosen don't shut the eff up & it usually locks the controls, so I can't play until they're done. I love it so much but they need to shut it.
Somewhere between Fallout 4 and Resident Evil 8 I got so tired of the "find your family member" story. And the worst part is that it's such a lazy, yet effective way to get people to be all like "omg this os so emotional".
God the rug pull for the brotherhood of steel in FO4 fuckin sucked, at least for me. I didn’t play FO1/2 so I didn’t know what they were about before playing FO4 so my only context for them was FO3/NV where in 3 they were massive hero good guys and in NV they were odd recluses. Then you get FO4 and I’m like hell yeah the brotherhood the good guys! Then as you do their main story quest they suddenly turn and go “hey you have to ice the railroad.” But they aren’t actively hurting anyone? They are just dudes with thoughts and emotions. “Nah man they are synths and we hate that” and give you no way to talk them down like at all. It has to happen. And I was just sitting there like what the fuck man, I’ve already dedicated myself to this path this far too late to back out now. And fuckin slaughtered them and now I don’t have the chance to go and learn more about them. At least with NV you can actually talk down the legion and say “hey this is dumb dude” and because you are such a charismatic and/or business finesser they will go “…ok…” then fuck off. FO4 basically says fuck your charisma stat and that pisses me off. A little side note I played FO4 and previously FO3/NV when I was a teenager around the middle years of highschool so like sophomore or junior. So some of the bigger story beats and little subtexts or hints flew right under my radar. I have played nv more recently tho.
I understand that the broothhood of steel has different chapters but the flipfloping with their goals is really annoying which is a shame because the first time seeing them enter with the blimp was genuinely great and added a layer of authority that could of made their stake in the commonwealth interesting but they completely flounder under their stupid nostalgia nonsense with the "hey guys remember FO3?!" and turn into genocidal maniacs because "duhh machine bad" except there could of EASILY been a third option of having them team up with the Railroad or making a compromise like having most of the synths join the brotherhood. not to mention the synth stuff is just dumb because the synths are so indistinguishable from humans that they're literally just humans with implanted memories, so the only actual issue here is nock it off with the replacement bullshit and then your fine.
I was so done with the find the baby plot of FO4 by the time I killed dollar store Jason Statham. After that fight I vowed to slay that baby at all costs. I was very pleased it ended up being encouraged 😂. FO4 gun play was good but everything else made me sad.
Bruh my name is Aidan and in my entire 24 years of life so far, no one has ever called me Aidan-Bobaidan (thank god). It always sounds so weird hearing people say my name a bunch in a video.
I enjoyed the story for the most part, enough so that it was my entire hook for getting the game in the first place, along with the co-op, but boy do I have agree with you on the ending(s).
Dying Light 2 doesn't seem like it's gonna have anything as good as Rais going on another generic monologue in 1 and Crane just turning around to yell "Shut the fuck up!"
Its super weird cause like, once you get to the second 3rd of the game, you totally can just ignore the story, but then again, my experience with its story is most of the time the dialouge doesn't even play its just npcs looking at me weird and then a mission marker The annoyance though, is the games zones are level rated, 1 level difference is the difference between a 3rd of a guys healthbar with a power attack and a 20th and the only way to raise your level to not drag your ass through these zones is to progress the story which is baffling to me
@@v8bitecho no when youre on the skill screen the bar in the upper right is your "level". Im sure that that determines gear drops. Like your survivor rank did in dl1
"Come on Aiden-bo-baiden, josef mengele is trying to put us on the death train."
Also Pat saying "stop having the plot be finding a family member" and explained his reasoning I feel like this might be the most correct take Pat has had in a long time, he's absolutely right
except that his confused samurai champloo ghost of tsushima example sucks because your uncle in GoT is cool and when you finally meet up with him you fight alongside him and it's awesome, so Ghost does it fine, and in Samurai Champloo the fact that they have no clue who the samurai who smells like sunflowers is and no reason to be looking for him aside from it being something to do, is something pointed out repeatedly during the show
but yeah the "I gotta find my wife" or "I gotta find my sister" or "I gotta find my daughter" shit is like, yeah I love both my siblings but I don't care about YOUR sister, and as he pointed out it works in Nier because you are actually caring for that character ACTIVELY as part of the ACTIVE story
Days Gone also has the "muh missing loved one" plot but its done much better. The game starts with a flashback of you losing her, but its put on the backburner untill halfway where you find evidence of her being alive. Then the plot becomes "find muh girlfriend". Then you FIND her and you work together untill the ending.
@@Svoorhout85 and even then it's not some huge shocking "I was the villian all along, now fight me or join me in the evil"
A broken Pat can be right twice
One of the strongest points that I honestly don't see talked about enough is that Dying Light 1 had a big redeemable quality that was when the story started getting obsessed with itself, the player character also starts to check out and get annoyed by it, to the point that when the main villain launches into a Far Cry villain speech, he screams "Would you just shut the fuck up?!"
Kyle was such an unexpectedly relatable guy. SO many moments where his dialogue perfectly matches what the player is thinking.
"BE A MAN!"
@@alastor8091 ...HULK!
Silent Hill 2 also didn't require you to care about Mary.
You're not necessarily even trying to save her. They tell you right at the start that she's dead and make James seem like some kind of lunatic for looking for her.
Your reason for wanting to find her isn't, "I need to save Mary." It's to solve a mystery.
Who sent the letter?
Why?
What does it mean?
The "uncorrupted DNA" shit from Fallout 4 falls apart once the narrative declares that the Institute MURDERS all of the other uncorrupted frozen candidates
There’s enough evidence in the game that initially the intent was for the PC to be the best Synth the institute ever made but they chickened out at the last minute. Or maybe they thought the general populace was to stupid to get it.
yeah they could have literally just taken every hostage and used their dna, why even make shawn the leader at all
@@FoehnAlkaiser that synth thing is completely insane and they fucking retconned it the far harbor dlc where a synth asks you about your origin story and hes like "really dude, you think youre from before the bombs dropped? do you realize how unlikely that is?" and you have a dialogue choice thats literally "i guess i might be a synth lol"
i just beat it for the first time last year and its easily one of the worst games ive ever played, triple a or otherwise
@@god47398 Considering it's basically just the main story that's cringe it sounds like you haven't played many games if it's easily one of the worst for you tbh.
It would have been TOO obvious for the player to be Synth after the reveals.
But now we're back to "SUBFARTED EXPACTSHUNS" and it would just be a better story.
when Pat mixed Samurai Champloo up with Ghost of Tsushima I thought I was actually going fucking insane
♪"He talks crazy talk."♪
The moment Father walked into the room in Fallout 4 I just pumped him full with lead. I didn't even figure our that he is Shaun, I was just "oh hey there is the faction leader that terrorizes everyone and he just walks towards me unarmed like an idiot, better use this chance." And it was so funny to me when I found out he was Shaun.
man the institute might be one of the worst written factions in any RPG in recent memory. they make literally no sense in the world. their goals are fucking stupid and psychopathic, they're pretty much an entire joke once you see them after hours of building them up as big important people and to add insult to injury their weapons and gear are AWFUL and look like shitty plastic toys and it makes the Legion look professional
Based and ambush pilled
"Ah but you see protagonist, it was I, this whole ti-OH GOD OH FU-"
Yeah, the voiced dialogue for the protagonist in fallout 4 was basically everything people worried about it prior to release said it would be. It limited dialogue options tremendously. It dumbed down the writing as well. It also had the problem that it did what bioware did with mass effect where they try to give you a summation of a dialogue choice with a couple words. But there were times it didn't accurately represent what the dialogue was actually saying.
It's why the most popular mod, or one of them, for FO4 was the dialogue list option to be like FO3/NV. So you could see exactly what you were saying. But that revealed yet another new problem. It made it clear that your choices in most dialogues were 1) Yes. 2) Sassy Yes 3) Eager Yes 4)No, fuck you, but yes actually. And that was the majority of responses you could have.
Sassy Yes.
31:04 When Shaun said that my instant reaction was: "WHAT DO YOU MEAN I WOULDN'T UNDERSTAND??? I HAVE MAX INTELIGENCE AND 100 IN SCIENCE WTF! _BY ACTUAL FALLOUT STANDARS I SHOULD BE RUNNING THIS PLACE!!!"_
Fallout 4 is in my list of media titled: "Don't think about it, will induce rage!" With an asterisk going: "good enough combat thou"
Whats worse about Fallout 4 is that the explanation for why the institute does what it does is actually in an unmarked audiotape just lying in a random room of the institute. The "grand plan" amounts to "We tried to organize the wastelanders into a democratic society once, it blew up in our face cause of paranoia, now we are just gonna turtle up in our underground society and use synth doppelgangers to ensure the wastelanders are disorganized and divided and never a threat to us." And yet the institute treats you like you are too stupid to understand this.
Reminds me of 'World's End' but that was better written
And the Institute were explicitly responsible for blowing up the path towards a unified government by sending a synth to kill all of the settlement leaders during their negotiations.
@@1nHarmsWay That is actually up for debate. The game is deliberately ambiguous as to why the unified government died before it was born. The wastelanders say that the institute set up the inaugural meeting and turned it into a bloodbath cause all their leaders were in the same place. The institute says that it was a disaster because of general paranoia and mistrust on the part of the wastelanders towards the institute and each other. The institute lost people too and that's why they closed themselves off; they can't afford to lose that many high IQs again. Its super interesting but the game NEVER lets you bring it up with any NPCs beyond a cursory level. Meanwhile in New Vegas you can have a debate about hegelian dialectics with Caesar. It's like they started to put some nuance and ambiguity into 4's story and just gave up.
Yo. Where can I find that audio tape?
Because I’m like 6 play throughs deep and have given up all hope of finding narrative consistency from the Institute.
@@LookADistarction From the Fallout wiki: Director's Recording 52: In the institute, on a side table in the board room on the top level (east side). There is also Director's recording 108: In the director's quarters, upper level, opposite the globe and radio inside an open white box, resting on two other white boxes. Got some things about the content of the tapes wrong cause this was 5 years ago, but the gist is there.
Dying Light 2 may be one of the strongest examples of "tell, don't show" in modern memory. Maybe worse, given that what they DO show directly contradicts what they tell you. It's absurd.
As someone who doesn't care about spoilers plz elaborate
@@dogsoldier123 It's what Pat says on the podcast about the Peacekeepers. The free people/hippies say that the PKs are militant, corrupt, and fascist, but the game never shows you this. The PKs overall are good and reasonable people. I'm like 30 hours in and have yet to run into a situation where the PKs acted badly. Even people saying the leader is a narcissist, but the guy seems genuinely cool.
Jesus, with all the lead-up on Aiden's name, I was terrified Pat was gonna say the sister calls you Aids.
that would be great! especially if she said it like rich evans every time.
@@Lunar_Sovereign They're hiding behind some scrap metal or something from some soldiers that are right in front of them and she goes
"they're coming. don't make a sound, _AAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDSSSSS"_
Dying Light 2 is a game with a plot I do not care about that slowly made me care. Not because the plot was good, but because the Survivors were all such pricks I sided against them whenever possible out of pure spite. Every decision I made I thought "I hope the Bazaar suffers horribly from me doing this." So in a way I suppose the plot worked better than Dying Light 1 where I had no investment. Fun parkour and stabby stabs tho
Also why the hell do the Renegades all talk like weird goblin creatures like seriously they are so stupid sounding?
@@kapkant6197 they ARE weird goblins
@@antwan121000 ah I had a feeling it was something like that. Still they all sound like they are gonna tell me i'm too late and weed's been legalised
I tried to help sophie because i thought she was in trouble at the hotel. They tried to murder me. i sided with her again because she had a crossbow in my face and i thought i was lying. I blew up the big windmill which i never agreed to,then i restarted the whole game (no manual save slots in 2022) out of pure spite. Fuck em!
It's utterly baffling to me that the game obviously wants you to side with the survivors who are a rabble of cultlike unhinged lunatics, and go against the PK who are a group with actual organization and idea for the future while being nothing but reasonable throughout the majority of the game.
Survivors: tried to lynch you as soon as they saw you. "Outsiders must die."
PK: Catch you trying to sneak through a guarded area and would be in the right thinking you were an enemy hostile and engaging you. Instead they interrogate and let you go. They even offer to get you where you want to go so long as you help them first.
[spoilers from here]
Even worse are the faction endings.
Survivor ending: magical utopia where everything is wonderful
PK ending: LMAO we Einsatzgruppen now. Let's murder everyone who disagrees with us.
Tap to skip dialogue line, hold to skip cutscene. This should be the standard so there's an option for everyone except for unskippable because anyone who like sunskippable isn't a human.
Lisa the Painful manages to do both things Woolie and Pat want to see in their "missing family member" plot hook. Not only does the player get to spend enough time with Buddy to care about her more than just a random kid, but the moment you find her puts the whole game in a radically different light.
Lisa the Painful is awesome, probably one of my favorite RPGs
Pat has it in his library and still hasn't touched it. I'm not even sure he knows he has a cameo in it.
I don't think Pat would be a fan of the transphobia in Lisa the Painful
@@cameronrichter3449 the what now? AFAIK, there are no trans people you get to meet in Lisa. Only a group of crossdressing dudes that do that to eek out a living in the farsical and grimdark hellscape of Olaf.
I would trade my firstborn to see Pat or Woolie play LISA. Come for the rich narrative, stay for your bulldozer driver's license.
I think my favorite part of Dying Light 2 is when a character at the start of the game asks
"Hey remember that guy you've been searching for over the course of 20 years?
And your character is forced to ask "Who?"
To which the response is basically "That nazi scientist that tortured you for your entire childhood"
And your response is "Oh right that guy"
What great storytelling
Well you're not forced to ask who, that's just to give the player more context as an optional dialogue choice.
@@Triple-Four You're right it's an optional dialogue choice to give the player any form of context considering you had literally none before it.
Hot take, I fucking *hate* any and all attempts at trying to capture the Walking Dead style of storytelling with zombie fiction. I'm so fucking sick of it, it's always going to be miserable and boring and it always ends with everyone dying so don't bother getting attached. If Dying Light had no attempt at a serious story and was like 'Go dropkick that zombie for extra points' I would've called it Game of the Decade.
I've personally grown tired of the "Maybe *we* were the real monsters all along," story that a lot of recent zombie media has been putting out. Like, I get humans can be bad, but can we have a story about people actually getting along and working together during the zombie apocalypse? Something different, for once?
@@kamikazelemming1552 No. Because what you are talking about isn't recent. It's basically the entire core theme of zombie movies since the original Night of the Living Dead and the Romero movies. The zombies are never the core problem. They're a horrific disaster that causes people and society to fall apart because of refusal to trust and work together.
I think Zombieland is the only movie that is just about goofing with zombies.
Walking dead style? You mean just zombie stories in general
If I can speak in general for a second misery porn in fiction is starting to not be interesting because like the Walking Dead formula it's too predictable and can be downright manipulative.
@@kamikazelemming1552 that is pretty much entirely the foundation of the zombie genre, not really a recent development.
Pat's impassioned rant about why the plot of fallout 4 is bad is one of the best things I've heard in a while. Woolie's face as Pat (accurately and factual) recounts the plot is magnificient.
To be as fair as possible, in Skyrim, first you are chosen to be executed by an overzealous Imperial commander, and the person directly under them apologizes AND helps you escape while bound after you leap from the parapet.
Yeah, I think it just needed to do a slightly better job of making sure you knew it was mainly that one Imperial Captain at the start being a douche rather than their group as a whole, as well as giving the Stormcloaks some negative points during the opening as well. Like maybe having one of them try to use a child as hostage to escape or something like that.
And there isn't really any evidence that Ulfric Stormcloak is a foreign agent, only that he is an influential person that foreign powers have an eye on
What's funnier is that there's an overworld NPC interaction where a Free Woman is injured and is refusing help from the PK that wants to do first aid on her. Free Woman is basically being a Karen to the PK while the PK says that they're not going anywhere until they help her.
Another thing, there's a quest where a Mom is missing his 2 kids and asks for your help and quickly retracts her request when she finds out that you are a Pilgrim/Outsider. When you do find the kids, you find out that they did something horrible and almost died because of that, and the resolution? You either expose the kids and mom to be sh*t people to a little boy or tell a white lie to the little boy so that he won't die trying to find his lost dog.
Basically the Free Folk can and will screw over anyone if they can profit from it. Only a few people are genuinely good. That said, the PKs are upfront but when you do go against them, they will come after you.
Getting to the top of the VNC tower also gave me a "WTF I DONT EVEN" facepalm moment that I wont spoil. From that point on the Survivors could go fuck themselves and I laughed IRL when I met Sophie again afterwards in the Bazaar.
30:00 Shaun's plan in F04 was to eventually create a completely bio-mechanical Synth that would be able to breed with humans which would eventually lead to all the downsides of being human being breeded out.
The Institute replacing humans was to both gain positions of power and also gain data on how humans operate.
The Institute is like one month away from perfecting cloning technology by the time Fallout 4 starts, and instead of using that technology to do... anything for humanity they've been kidnapping and murdering people to collect data for a massive Eugenics program.
It's unironically the plot of Binary Domain
Also kind of the plot of Fallout 3 but... less genocidal I guess?
Also the plot of Armitage III
The Fallout 4 encounter with Kellogg is even worse than Pat describes. You chase him down at his hideout, instigate every encounter with him and the synths he keeps around for no reason, he WILLINGLY EXPLAINS HIMSELF TO YOU, but before he can completely reveal the "twist" to you, your character is FORCED TO DECIDE TO KILL HIM. For no reason, that I can tell, other than that he HAS to be dead for the next step in the main quest, where you pull out a brain implant and go on a VR quest through his entire life's story... which is also mostly composed of blatant misdirection to further pad out the plot and preserve the "twist".
It's bad writing NESTED INSIDE EVEN WORSE WRITING. IT'S A WHOLE QUEST LINE MADE UP OF "wouldn't it be cool if?" MOMENTS WITH NO ATTEMPT AT LOGICAL CONSISTENCY WHATSOEVER, IN PURSUIT OF A TWIST THAT MAKES THE STORY *WORSE*
I think talking to Kellogg with no choice for a peaceful solution is a punishment for not being smart enough to sneak attack crit his face with a mini nuke from the doorway.
When I see people shit on oblivion / Skyrim, I think about fallout 4. Anything that was questionable in Bethesda games before was made exponentially worse in that title.
I agree that it was handled sloppily, but you don't kill him for no reason. You kill him as revenge for killing your spouse
@@noobishmacgaming and that's because of Skyrim. They stopped caring after that.
@@larrymeadows7535 in a more linear story, I'd agree with you, but this is supposed to be an RPG. I'm supposed to be allowed to choose what my character wants to do. A binary kill/spare choice was the cliche minimum-effort "character choice" in video games a DECADE ago.
"Is the twist shittier than nothing" is actually a legitimate point of contention for a LOT of fiction authors. There is so much discussion on the idea of "if the explanation for the mystery does not give as much enjoyment as the concept of the mystery alone, should you even bother explaining it?" It's how you end up with shit like midichlorians, or Korra completely explaining the creation of the Avatar and humanizing something that was better off as a cosmic force.
Some things are better off being left unexplained, so that the fans can draw their own conclusions.
Excuse you, the best part of Korra was the story about the first avatar, what are you talking about?
Midichlorians are a terrible, no one will dispute that, but the origin of the Avatar was one of the best parts of the Second Season, if not the best, so I'll have to disagree with you there, unfortunately.
@@kamikazelemming1552 I liked it but at the same time if I kinda think it would have been better if it didnt happen if that makes sense? Like I did like the episode itself but I think as a whole I think I would have much preferred for that kinda thing to go unexplained.
@@kingragnarok7302 I hear that that's the part of season 2 people enjoy the most, but I can see what OP means. It overexplained the Avatar Mythos to a point where it even kinda contradicts the original show.
@@masterdhegamer6661 The Avatar as a concept did not need an explanation and the way Raava and Vaatu are portrayed is a complete misunderstanding of the idea of yin and yang. Raava is pure good and Vaatu is pure evil, and that's not how taoism treats light and darkness. In the original ATLA, the Avatar is a cosmic being almost as old as time itself - you see generations of former Avatars. It's never explained how the Avatar came to be because it didn't *need* to be explained. The idea of the Avatar being a representation of nature's need for balance was great.
Avatar Wan's story just humanizes the idea of the Avatar and removes the mysticism. Now you know exactly what the Avatar is. It's just a light spirit buff. It would have been far more interesting if Raava/Vaatu literally didn't exist, and if the entire story were just Wan realizing he had access to all four styles of bending. Going on a journey to learn how to appropriately harness all four elements, learning from all four cultures as a result, and culminating in him being the only one who could act as the relatable middleman between all four of the peoples. That's far more in line with a traditional Eastern story than the way it's done in Korra.
The fact that there even is contention about Avatar Wan kind of shows you that a lot of people didn't like how they gave the Avatar an origin story, because it wasn't particularly impressive.
Pat screaming "SHAUUUN" gave me flashbacks to that one glitch in Heavy Rain
SHAUN
I would just like to correct something here - Ulfric Stormcloak isn't working with the Thalmor. He's an uncooperative asset to them, since the region being destabilized is beneficial to them. But if he wins, he's not handing Skyrim over, he basically turns Skyrim into a guerilla warfare zone that the Thalmor don't want to fuck with.
The actual best result for Skyrim is if the two sides don't fight and unite, because they both hate the Thalmor.
Also the racism of the Stormcloaks feels like a tacked on thing because otherwise there really wouldn't be a surface level reason why you wouldn't want to join + the imperials are actually also very racist, especially general Tullius, but mainly against the nords, although they still refer to you as a cat or lizard rather than a Khajiit or Argonian. Which is funny then that the opposite is the case with the Stormcloaks - Ulfric himself is pretty tolerant and respectful and his people aren't, and Tullius is a big racist but his people aren't.
Plus there's also a bunch of historical and geographical context as to why Ulfric is doing what he's doing, which the civil war quest line doesn't really tell you about
@@Hegataro People who say the imperials are 100% on the right don't know about the Night of Tears, elves literally massacred a ton of Atmorans after relations had been stablished just cause.
@@Neodeleux come on bro you have to look at what you're typing and realize that of fucking course people don't know about this shit. the issue with the "who is the better side" is that the game loves shoving in your face how racist the stormcloaks are and even have them use segregation. the player isn't gonna base how much they want to support a faction based on some niche history of something that the character never experienced.
Ulfric isnt a plant. He is a Chaotic element the thalmor let escape so he could, without then even nudging him towards it, start a civil war to weaken the empire
As someone who has actually done multiple playthroughs of both sides of the civil war in skyrim, Pat's obvious bias towards the empire while misremembering facts about both sides every 2 seconds made it grating to hear. That being said, it's just Pat. Never assume anything he says is even close to 100% factually correct, more like a 60-70% range correct from my experience hearing talk about things he knows only in a superfluous manner.
TL;DR Pat's wrong about Ulfric, both sides have their merits but both sides also have a ton of glaring problems, besides the real enemy is the Aldmeri Dominion, specially the Thalmor.
@@Neodeleux Pat? Wrong about something? Hold the fucking presses.
@@Neodeleux You'll find Tullius at that thalmor party if you beat the civil war before then and if im remembering correctly he doesn't want to be there and he agreed with Ulfric in the end about matters
@@Neodeleux to be fair skyrim does a fucking god awful job with the entire civil war sidestory. unless you're actively looking for those things its incredibly easy for it to be missed not to mention its just incredibly bland so you can't really blame him for not remembering a crap sidestory in a game he hasn't played in years.
@@joedatius I can't blame Pat for not remembering, but I can call him out for not at least trying to look stuff up first.
What Pat talks about reminds me of Witcher 1. There is a supposed conflict and discrimination of humans against "non-humans". But the non-human elves look all like clones and act arrogant as fuck. They also commit atrocities like having people being eaten by ants alive, while pressuring Geralt to join them. This culminates in a quest (a bank-robbery) in which you either join them, or they turn hostile, locking any completionist out of a neutral ending. Meanwhile the supposed "rascist" faction, lets you (a mutant witcher) join them, while acting entirely reasonable and only being like "take your time, you are always welcome to join the flaming rose!". I always join them, even if i decided not to do it when I replay. There is also a huge dissonance between the first and second game because of this.
yeah it doesn't help that the none-human resistance people are literally only a massive issue for the none-humans since everytime the scoietel or however you call it do something it leads to horrible violence against elves and dwarves and it just makes the resistance people look like huge idiots since they never actually have any goals. like it would be one thing if the none-humans where already being killed in mass or something since at that point any reprisals would be worth the risk but every elf and dwarf is just like "can you just fucking knock it off you're getting us killed"
Man, Pat and Woolie really need to play LISA the Painful. It does everything they're talking about and nails it.
They have actually they talked about it in the old podcast
I genuinely love the story of Everhood, but people all caps yelling at Woolie for not liking it is...Come on, man. It's a game, and the plot has problems. Screaming and crying is only going to make you look ridiculous.
Yeah... it does hurt a little bit tho cuz (at least from where he is at) the reason he is having problems is that he's going off the beaten path for side shit that will not go away if the next beat is taken. And it's like, if he wants more gameplay, he is the only one preventing himself from that. It's a mindgoblins moment that's kind of unfortunate to see play out.
That game seemed way cooler to me before you could fight back, I straight up lost interest the second I saw the ability to fight back instead of dance to death
Some games might need a "Don't give me a story" difficulty setting lmao. Also about Dying Light 2, don't you just "need" 500 hours of this?
That was a bad tweet, you DONT need 500 hours for this, it can take you around 25 hours to complete the Main Story.
By "500 hours" they mean side quests, msq, collectibles, etc. Etc. So 100%, and that number is probably inflated as hell since now im sure I can just google "all collectibles Dying Light 2" and find all of them in a few hours
@@dragonbro59 It was a bad tweet indeed lol.
Like Metal Gear Solid games (except 1 and 5). Like, Jesus Christ, can I get 15 uninterrupted minutes of gameplay?
The institute tried to guide and work with humanity but failed miserably.
They need Shawn's DNA because it was undamaged by radiation. He died of super cancer.
I completely agree with pat about borderlands 3, I loved 2+the story and speedran it, but 3 just feels so different and the story is just so in the way
Bl2 still has the problem of unskippable story and worse, doing the story 2 more times on higher difficulties. Like i knew the outcome already, why not just skip the whole story for my second playthrough and only do side quest for the guns you want. I didnt bother to play any other characters after i maxed my third VH because i got sick of it.
The stormcloak bit wasn't fully accurate. The plant thing was a theory with no actual evidence other than it would be cool, the thalmor dossier on Ulfric states they want him to be free to keep the empire busy. The tutorial also had an imperial officer help you get to the keep and allow you to choose who to go with, making it less of a big arrow promoting stormcloaks and the game making you choose on the spot. The real problem to me with it is how it's less stormcloaks versus imperials and thalmor versus nords.
well there is also the part where the stormcloaks are racist in the dumbest and most overt way possible and how it makes no sense for whats going on. where literally just his specific city has super racism with segregation slums while the rest of skyrim is totally fine with other races living together for the most part. so it just makes ulfric look like a weirdo who's scared of dark elves for no reason which is even worse when you take into account the foresworn stuff and how none of this can be taken up with Ulfric, people try to defend Ulfric but the biggest issue is that he actively makes the entire war a race issue because "skyrim is for the nords" which is the most on the nose political metaphor there could be
@@joedatius Did you play Morrowing? Dark elves neighbor Skyrim and they have a robust slave trade. They love enslaving Nords. A lot. Only second to Argoninans and Khajiits.
Even if he's not actively a plant, there's still notes from the thalmor explicitly pointing out that he's doing what they want, even if he doesn't actively worth for them.
Either if he's just a stupid patsy instead of an active traitor, you still can't let him win.
the dossier says that Ulfric was a valued Thalmor asset, but became uncooperative after the Markarth Incident. it says that Thalmor could re-establish contact with him but instead choose to help the Stormcloaks indirectly because the war serves their goals.
@@iamnuff1992 "Ulfric first came to our attention during the First War Against the Empire, when he was taken as a prisoner of war during the campaign for the White-Gold Tower. Under interrogation, we learned of his potential value (son of the Jarl of Windhelm) and he was assigned as an asset to the interrogator, who is now First Emissary Elenween. He was made to believe information obtained during his interrogation was crucial in the capture of the Imperial City (the city had in fact fallen before he had broken), and then allowed to escape. After the war, contact was established and he has proven his worth as an asset.The so-called Markarth Incident was particularly valuable from the point of view of our strategic goals in Skyrim, *although it resulted in Ulfric becoming generally uncooperative to direct contact.*
Operational Notes: Direct contact remains a possibility (under extreme circumstances), but in general the asset should be considered dormant. As long as the civil war proceeds in its current indecisive fashion, we should remain hands-off. The Incident at Helgen is an example where an exception had to be made - obviously Ulfric's death would have dramatically increased the chance of an Imperial victory and thus harmed our overall position in Skyrim. (NOTE: The coincidental intervention of the dragon at Helgen is still under scrutiny. The obvious conclusion is that whoever is behind the dragons also has an interest in the continuation of the war, but we should not assume therefore that their goals align with our own.) A *Stormcloak victory is also to be avoided, however, so even indirect aid to the Stormcloaks must be carefully managed*."
So yes you can let him win it would piss the Thalmor off if he did
I feel like with the factions in dying light 2 they wanted it to be some "shades of gray" shit, but instead i just ended up hating both of them. like the survivors are useless and are constantly backstabbing you and each other, and the PK's, while they are upfront with you and overall seem like the "better choice", end up killing a bunch of innocents for a crime they didnt commit and talk about raping prisoners. So now i just do parkour challenges and towers.
The story feels like it wants you to like the pks. But the city rewards are hands down survivors lol.
Pretty poor overall.
Pks would almost be ok if they werent trying to monopolize violence
@@vVAstrAVv I think you meant the survivors being the ones the game wants you to like mate. They keep hammering it that you're supposed to like them, while the pk's are the evil fascist dudes.
@@str8apem88 well i havent got past the giant antenna in central but so far its been. "hey work with aitor... Now these guy... Noq jack... Now thia ASSHOLE" and so on
The shit with Kellogg in fallout 4 is easily one of the worst and most frustrating scenes in a game.
No you can't ask reasonable questions about his motivation and who he works for.
Todd Howard has to tell you how to feel about that amazing child that you love in this role playing game.
Yeah, contrast with FNV where you can talk down Legate Fucking Lanius...somehow some mercenary can't be talked down and is MUCH less reasonable than some crazy warlord who crucifies people.
@@grahamcarpenter5135 It's not even that he can't be talked down, it's that YOU THE CHARACTER can't be talked down or take any route that isn't kill him. Bethesda's main quests always seem to put the player on rails and it gets worse everytime.
@@aiydsfordayssarron6542 Let’s be honest, how many of us ditched the main quest for a while (this means we are also ditching our old man child) and just fucked around our 1st playthrough. I did.
@@noblehobolo3968 I never finished the main quest. After I met the institute and found out how stupid the shit with Sean was I stopped playing the main quest.
Aiden Aiden Bo Baiden Banana Fana Fo Faiden Meenie Miney Mo Maiden
Imagine ace combat but the game stops you every few seconds to bring up metal gear radio calls.
Yeah whoever wrote DL2 has never seen a children before. And they were held in cold storage until age 21, so they never even got to be one.
What about a "I HAVE TO FIND MY (friend, sister, zelda, whatever)" plot where you actually find them about 20% into the plot and then they become a party member/playable character/summon/call-in.
The Evil Within 2 had that for the first half you're talking about. After defeating Stefano, the first major villain, you immediately find the main character's daughter, who you've been searching for since the start of the game. This happens about 1/3 into the story.
After that, the daughter is captured by the main character's wife, who has gone completely insane, and in order to reach her you need to fight past Father Theodore, Stefano's boss and a *LITERAL* Jojo villain.
And than you fight your goo wife in a custody battle for the ages.
it works particularly well in horror games, ive found. Especially when you end up swapping to that character for either a section or the second half of the game.
the crazy thing about the imperials vs stormcloaks thing in skyrim is that it is an actually well-thought out, complex, and messy affair with a lot of extremely good reasons for the local nordic populace to fight on both sides of the war, and actual pages of setup with in-universe events that caused it to occur, and then the questline is literally the second worst quest in the entire game. both sides' quests are copy and pastes of each other with only a SINGLE quest step changed (imperials defend whiterun, stormcloaks siege whiterun).
the only quest that ends up being worse is the companions, which i refuse to do every single playthrough i do on principle of it just being excruciatingly boring
I expected so little from Bethesda usual story writing, I called that major twist right after we got unfrozen - "No way its been 5 minutes after I was refrozen, its probably been like 50 years and my son is now main villain, cause that the dumbest shit Bethesda can come with thinking its smart" .
They did got me thinking I was wrong with how kellog was not old and fake Shawn, but at the final reveal man did I laugh so hard at that stupid shit I called out being real plot.
For me it was Far Cry 5 and beyond.
I wanna play the open world sandbox, and the fact that just playing the normal game loop to be interrupted by plot sucks.
3 and 4 weren't like that, the plot required plot missions. But then 5 if you played too much you'd be forced into a story mission. Even in the middle of other missions, you can lose progress because you got shot by a bliss bullet while flying a plane trying to destroy cargo trucks or something.
It feels really bad
they really got high on their ass with the "the villain is interacting with you all the time" from 3 and 4. which in those games where enjoyable for different reasons, in 3 Vaas was charismatic and scary while Pagen min was eccentric and fairly funny at times. problem is after that 5's characters are all boring as dirt and not interesting to have talk to you and add to the problem that ubisoft decided to have the player character be a literal nobody mute it makes for even less interesting interactions.
Dying light 2 sounds like Chris wanted to do a morally grey story but when he got replaced they didn't know how to do that. That's why the story feels so disjointed.
I knew fallout 4 was gonna be a dud when most of the reveals and the marketing was about how they improved their shooting so much. And then I actually got the game and boy was I right when a vast majority of missions felt like "go here, kill everyone. Use the shooting we marketed to you."
For a second I thought I was having a stroke when he brought up Jin Sakai & the Sunflower Samurai.
But also, I feel like Ghost of Tsushima is one of those games that did a decent job with this. There's actual reasons for urgency, there's actual reasons for the character to be taken & to save him beyond "he's my uncle". He doesn't exist to be Jin's only reason for doing stuff, and he's got his own shit going on. Also it doesn't drag out the saving quest for the whole game or do the "your princess is in another castle" bs that they easily could have done with act 2.
yeah exactly, there is certainly the personal drive with him being his father figure but he is also the leader of the island and has control over the what remains of tsushimas army so its also a logical strategic goal along with being a geographic goal as the location is also the next step to access the next part of the island so there is never a point where the player feels divorced from the plot since your goals will always align with Jins. Afterwords they even add on to this with doing a fantastic job by showing why Jin respects his uncle in the way he does and at that point since the player has had so many scenarios dealing with characters who have started as reluctant or scared to fight back, finding your father and the first thing you do with him is both of you running down the enemy really does a great job giving the player a good reason to want to support jins uncle which in turn makes their later confrontation even more powerful.
I think it’s fair to say that Skyrim pushed you towards the stormcloaks at first, but there is a fair amount of story depth in that civil war and it’s leaders. Especially in comparison to the factions in Fallout 4… the institute in particular. They go from being a clear empirical villain that kidnaps / replaces people to being made to look benevolent when you interact with them directly later on. There’s no real reason for their actions, almost no interesting explanations or context in computer notes, it makes so little sense it just falls apart.
Have never said "I dont play it for the story" more than this game
Apparently the issues came up with the writing even before it had to be redone. Avellone was writing most of the quests as well and the devs ran into problems due to the way he was writing them, as if they were quest steps you'd see in kotor or NV.
But those games did it right for the most part. You shouldnt change your math steps just because someone else does it right
@@turkish8969 I think the issue was the way he wrote them with little combat or gameplay elements in mind. I'm guessing most of it was dialogue heavy with little interaction with the open world.
Yeah god forbid my open world rpg gave me options to choose from besides Yes, No, Sarcastic No and shooting guy A or guy B. My brain wouldn't handle it for sure.
@@Toxic_Korgi To be fair ... They hired Avellone, what did they expect ? It's like hiring Tiger Woods and wondering why the guy is playing golf instead of football.
I would love an entire podcast of just talking about awful twists that make the story worse.
@@NocturneJester Yeah!
@@NocturneJester That was the worst twist I ever experienced.
Detroit : become human
The twist about Alice
I'm gonna disagree with Pat here and say that the ending where you join the Institute is actually the BEST ending in Fallout 4. I say this for the same reason that the Yes Man ending is the best ending in New Vegas: the player becomes the leader of the Institute to replace Shaun (yay, nepotism!) so you can just say "and then under the leadership of the player the Institute stopped doing pointlessly evil shit and used their advanced technology for the betterment of the wasteland, DA END."
I'm having the same problem playing Digimon. There is so much story and text they throw at you and you can't skip it.
In cybersleuth? Pretty sure there's a fan mod so you can skip cut scenes on pc. I like the story but I totally get that the option to bounce over it should be there, especially for people playing through a second time.
@@jjrambles683 I want to like cyberslueth more, but I sorely wish there was autoadvance on all the text and cutscenes. I love letting the voicelines play out, so I'm stuck babying the button and bogging down the pace. It's the only thing keeping me from playing more of it consistently.
@@gamemaniac2013 yeah it sucks cause cybersleuth, and hackers memory especially, otherwise do so many things right and are like the only good digimon games
@@jjrambles683 I agree with you that both cybersleuth games are great, but i can't have you diss my baby Digimon World 3 like that.
@@Neodeleux I still need to play 3, honestly.
Pat's solution of in radio chatter for story does not even save Daemon x Machina, as every level is fucking full of radio dialog in a fast paced action game that I literally could not keep up with even with the english dub (I wanted the japanese dub it had the funi gundam guys in it) I felt like I was missing the whole story
I think Pat's point was that at least you can ignore it and still play instead of being stopped by cutscenes mid mission.
I was cracking up at Pat's description of the plot twist of Fallout 4. XD "I'M Shaun!"
i've gotten back into neo twewy and going back to previous days to redo some sidequests and there's a skip cutscene button but no skip dialogue button. you just have to mash through every time. it still takes over 30 seconds each scene and there are a TON of dialogue scenes. also the sidequests are often an hour into a chapter. you need to do every sidequest to get every upgrade, which includes useful features like equipping multiple uber pins, increasing the difficulty, chaining more noise together for higher drop rates, and automatically converting money pins into money.
Is it good? I liked TWEWY on the DS but I looked at the box art of the new game and decided then and there that I hate every single character on it.
Born to game
Forced to cringe
I have a kind of hot take, and that is I actually don't mind if games decide to not be very reactive. Like, I don't need every game to gave dialogue choices and factions, and be a Witcher 3 or Disco, sometimes I'm fine with a simple fetch quest that gives you decent rewards. The problem is that once every 100 hour open RPG game starts offering "choices that matter" it actually discourages me from playing them, because I actually don't want that experience too often, because often it's done poorly, plus it's time consuming. Like, if a game is 5 hours long and is highly reactive, I'll replay it and see what the choices are, but if I play Dying Light 2 and am offered dozens of choices, I actually don't really care what the alternate paths are. And I really dislike finding out a choice I made 12 hours ago locks me out of a gameplay opportunity.
Tl;Dr, not every game needs meaningful choices, especially long open world/rpg games, and ESPECIALLY if the story isn't really interesting and I don't care about the characters.
I'm kinda with you. It doesn't matter how much influence I have over a story if its boring.
@@Brandonious15987 Yeah, it's a concept that basically requires writing mastery, and the problem is not that many companies can do it. Another example is Ubisoft did it in AC Odyssey, and I felt that it REALLY didn't work there. Also, obligatory David Cage reference.
I've seen many people saying they were sure Aiden is voiced by Roger Craig Smith, but I just don't hear it. I've played a shit ton of Resi 5 and 6, his inflections are grounded in my mind.
I think it's Troy Baker. As SOON as Aiden opened his mouth, I heard Delsin Rowe from inFamous and I haven't stopped hearing him since. It's a little more gruff because zombie game, but yeah, listen to some of Delsin and you might hear it.
Looked it up, and yeah, Jonah Scott is definitely telling that he voiced Aiden, but they pushed him in a direction that feels really familiar. Idk.
Roger was the voice of the protagonist of the first game.
@@bellboy64 I know, I recognised his voice. Had to look it up just to confirm though 😁
If you want to know how effective ace combat's story delivery is, watch the video where the radio chatter is shrek and donkey
To take Pat's own words from back in the day; an especially bad/shitty twist can cause arc nullification. All that work and development? It meant nothing but wasted time
Fallout 4: Find Baby
Fallout 3: Become Baby
I like how Woolie has people screaming at him that Everhood isn't "like Undertale" when the game's big gameplay twist doesn't even make sense if you're not at least passingly familiar with Undertale.
Like... SPOILERS
An RPG where you kill a bunch of people to be the good guy doesn't make sense as a basic premise outside of the existence of pacifism route tropes, because that's literally 95% of all RPGs ever made. It's like a platforming game trying to convince you why you should jump and then treats it like its a twist that you need to jump to finish the game.
No need to play Undertale to understand. The game explicitly tells you and laboriously explains, repeatedly in multiple ways, what you have to do and why.
If anything the undertale comparison is a disservice to both games.
Idk what pats talking about i had an easy time joining the empire. Maybe im too pragmatic but whethwr they were gonna kill me anyways cus fuck it they were still actually fighting alduin and evacuating its people. Stormcloaks were like "oh fuck yeah lets get outta here"
Maybe you're just a masochist and you subconsciously thought that the imperial officer lady from the intro was a tempting dommy-mommy
@@MattManDX1sir I am a man of culture.
Aela the huntress is mommy
I mean its not hard to forgive them, literally right after that stuff the imperials are all like "wow that was cringe of her sorry about that bro"
also it helps that the imperials have a general who actually seems like an intelligent and competent person while Ulfric at best is explained as someone who forced the foresworn off their homes, segregated the other races, is disliked by the greybeards and spends his time in the douchy king pose in his castle. which is kinda weird because even though the stormcloaks are made up to be more "traditional down to earth nords" Ulfric is the far more arrogant faction leader. they probably should of had him do more then just sit on his throne in front of a giant feast all day. whats really weird is that they had an amazing opportunity to allow the player to actually get to know ulfric or tullius and have you get to understand why they are fighting, but nope instead we travel with two nobodies instead of two major characters who could of given us major insights on the events from their perspective
Getting older lowers your tolerance for bad shit sadly.
It also makes you bitter, stuck in your ways, and less likely to enjoy actually good new things just because they are new.
Got to find the balance
The more good shit you experience the more glaring the problems with bad shit are from my experience, so your tolerance goes wayyyy down for crappy stuff unless you're actively looking for it a la bad funny movie hunting.
I watched someone else's playthrough of Daemon x Machnia and it was enough to convince me not to bother, even when it was free, despite being a lifelong hardcore armored core player (playing the series since the PS1 demo disc).
Damn, I'd love to see Woolie play New Vegas one of these days.
My personal standout for most hated storybeat in dying light 2 is definitely the "stolen flour" quest. Where everyone is complete a-holes to each other, attempting to get each other killed to cover their own asses, only for everyones lives to be saved by a fucking piece of underwear. Which, for the overall antagonist of that story has so little value in exchange for something worth A TON to many, as well as like a handful of peoples lives.
some one hasn't talked to Ulfic as a non Nord
"Doktor; turn off my CRINGE inhibitors..."
25:18 that technically happened with Starbound, there was supposed to be a much larger overarching that brutally died on the cutting room floor which would've involved you essentially pulling a Dragon Age Origins to solve each individual races problems to get to them to team up to beat the big bad.
All that really remains in implementation is the core story.
Guess you can decide for yourself if you feel it became better as a result.
The only thing I will say is "ave, true to caesar"
RETRIBUTION
Wasn't Ulfric no longer an asset, and had gone rogue a long time ago? I thought him helping the Thalmor was limited to having once cracked under torture or something. Also, I must have had some kind of glitch because the Stormcloaks didn't give me any racial slurs for being a dunmer, just a line about how if Skyrim was my home I should fight for it from that one general in the bear hat.
It's even better, he cracked after the Thalmor had already won that conflict anyway, they just lied to him so he would feel remorseful about having cracked.
The Thalmor themselves state in a dossier that Ulfric actually winning is bad for them as a united Skyrim is a smear on their plans.
Some of the stormcloaks are definitely racist tho, making the Argonians live on the docks in Windhelm for once, but it's definitely a minority and not a sentiment of the whole movement. Stormcloaks are about leaving an stagnating empire that sold them to the Thalmor after they bled their own people fighting their war against the elves, with the ban of the worship of Talos being the straw that broke the camel's back.
I think at this point, the main questline in bethesdas games will usually be the worse or make no sense.
Skyrim is a clusterfuck and the Institute in FA4 is the biggest "throwing potential in the trash/lazy writting" ive seen.
Thou to defend abit the empire on the intro sequence.:
The captain is a bitch while the guy checking the prisoners honeslty doenst like the situation but cant do anything due to problaby being lower rank and the Thalmor being around, who are one of the biggest headache in he entirety of the ES story, due to their lore. Most of the empire's problems fall down to.:
- Having made a peace treaty to early with the Thalmor faction;
- Having to deal with a rebellion that is also the Thalmor's fault.
The first time I went through Fallout 4 I thought Father was lying about being Shaun and murdered them the instant I regained control of my character
Best "finding family memeber" moment in a game for me was Gears of War 2 where Dom is looking for his wife. I was absolutely gutted when they actually did.
Spoiler: that twist in fallout 4 made destroying them for taking your baby that much more fun and guilt free.
I'm feeling the Borderlands 3 take, I want to scream at every character in that game to shut the fuck up for like a second
That was my feelings on the Tiny Tina DLC
Same for me but for like 30-50% of BL2 onwards.
It’s why BL1 is my favorite. Most of the shitty repetitive dialogue is in text.
I just force closed BL3 after the fakeout credits roll. Haven't touched it since. Can't stand the characters or plot in that.
Funniest part about Fallout 4 is that justifying the androids is the easiest thing in the world: We want power but want to avoid a direct confrontation, so lets infiltrate the governments of Wasteland communities and take over from the inside.
The combat also suffered. Even if you do a heavy attack with a two handed weapon, if you get even slightly nicked before landing then the entire attack is negated. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t getting hit from seven different directions at once.
Yeah, the combat and its feel, were a definite downgrade compared to DL1. I mean, I still enjoyed the combat, despite it frustrating me at points (bloody biters grab spamming me at night can go to hell), but theres no way I can honestly say it was better than DL1 in that regard.
Ah, Dark Souls 3 Poise. We meet again.
The human combat feels a lot better to me than the first but in DL1 I kinda accidentally did the post game prison raid in the first 10 minutes so I had an assault rifle and broke human encounters anyway.
I kind of anticipated the plot twist would be that you were frozen for much longer cause the timelines didn't add up
I really loved DL1, so i was hyped for DL2... and then I spent 10 hours just mashing through cutscenes and not really getting to play the game or explore the map, or do anything fun.
I'm just gonna let it stew for a few months and hope the devs update it to make it fun in the mean time.
edit: also all the combat perks except dropkick are boring, and why the heck do you need QTEs to open chests and such? WHY !??
Man, Daemon X Machina was so fun. Remember those loli sisters that were supposedly "experimented on" and it was NEVER BROUGHT UP AGAIN? Remember the Immortals and how you had the one mission that explained literally jack-shit other than "oh, they literally can't die. Why? Fuck you, that's why."
I mean they're called "The Immortals" that's kind of the whole thing. You can't die after having that name it's just not allowed
it's so funny because after repurchasing it for the PC i thought it had more significance but it's only a few bits of dialouge
@@cyberninjazero5659 It's really more of they try to explain it but get cut off halfway through and just kinda wiggle their fingers and go "sci-fi...!"
Specifically, I'm talking about the pilots, not the enemies called Immortals. That part I understand.
They're kind of uploaded to a sattelite?
@@MethodiaLordae I appreciate your comment, but the fact you had to put a question mark at the end there kinda signifies how many details they don't really expound upon. Like, I completely forget what the fuck Grief's plan was and when i went back to get the other ending it was practically the same thing.
At least his music is a total banger.
…god Ruiner is such a good game.
It sure is. I'm still hoping for an eventual sequel. Loved it.
>Free People get the least bad ending and the Peacekeepers get the worst ending
I see Techland's writers have learned ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING since Dead Island, Riptide and Dying Light: The Following. They should stick strictly to development and shut down their writing department permanently so that it's strictly on a mercenary hire basis. What a mental health hazard.
oh god i forgot about dead islands fucking ABYSMAL story and it has the same fucking issue as it wont fucking shut up about it. its like a story that came straight out of a call of duty zombies ripoff but is treating itself like its the walking dead. who in the right mind thought it was a good idea to have dead island to be taken seriously as a story.
OMG i never thought of such a good summary that just pins it perfectly good shit
A game I actually stopped playing because I just hated how the story got in the way was Superhot, I really didn't care for the overly edgy meta story, I hated how you couldn't skip it, it just felt tacked on. I played the VR version in a VR bar a while ago and it was perfect, arcadey stages that went from one awesome situation to the nex.
Apparently the PC version got an update that changed certain parts of the story, which is funny because my issue is the game wasted time having a story to begin with, it's just so much easier to think of the game being about a bunch of angry red nudists than whatever game-theory bait it felt like it was going for.
Hilarious that I got an ad for Dying Light 2 in the middle of watching this video.
I had the same problem with daemon x machina. Played both of the demos on switch, was cool enough to overcome switch performance, bought it on pc, played the first like 2 hours, got sick of the big unga bunga meathead character screaming at me about his tattoos or whatever, and uninstalled it. Really fun gameplay tho
man ive been watching pat tell ulfric stormcloaks story wrong for a decade now.
ulfric is not a plant, the thalmor tortured him when they captured to make him hate elves so that he would try to take over skyrim to destablilize the empire so the empire would rely more on the thalmor. ulfric is considered an asset by the thalmor but he isnt a plant or a spy, pat.
skyrim has more weaknesses than strengths but its story sure as fuck isnt weak
Yep, even the Thalmor state in a document that Ulfric actually winning the civil war would be bad for them, they need the conflict to continue, neither side winning benefits them as an united skyrim is a problem to them, specially when Hammerfell is also a probable ally to a civil war Free Skyrim vs the Dominion.
I suppose Pat isn't short for Patience.
Far Cry 5 has a bad case of "good game, terrible story." The best way I can describe it is this: the bad guys of Far Cry 5 are four Kai Lengs. Like the guy from Mass Effect, three Kai Lengs working for a big Kai Leng.
Golly, look at all the war crimes, Aiden-bo-Baiden!
Xcom 2 was like this. Central, Shen, Tegan, and especially the chosen don't shut the eff up & it usually locks the controls, so I can't play until they're done.
I love it so much but they need to shut it.
Somewhere between Fallout 4 and Resident Evil 8 I got so tired of the "find your family member" story.
And the worst part is that it's such a lazy, yet effective way to get people to be all like "omg this os so emotional".
God the rug pull for the brotherhood of steel in FO4 fuckin sucked, at least for me. I didn’t play FO1/2 so I didn’t know what they were about before playing FO4 so my only context for them was FO3/NV where in 3 they were massive hero good guys and in NV they were odd recluses. Then you get FO4 and I’m like hell yeah the brotherhood the good guys! Then as you do their main story quest they suddenly turn and go “hey you have to ice the railroad.” But they aren’t actively hurting anyone? They are just dudes with thoughts and emotions. “Nah man they are synths and we hate that” and give you no way to talk them down like at all. It has to happen. And I was just sitting there like what the fuck man, I’ve already dedicated myself to this path this far too late to back out now. And fuckin slaughtered them and now I don’t have the chance to go and learn more about them. At least with NV you can actually talk down the legion and say “hey this is dumb dude” and because you are such a charismatic and/or business finesser they will go “…ok…” then fuck off. FO4 basically says fuck your charisma stat and that pisses me off.
A little side note I played FO4 and previously FO3/NV when I was a teenager around the middle years of highschool so like sophomore or junior. So some of the bigger story beats and little subtexts or hints flew right under my radar. I have played nv more recently tho.
I understand that the broothhood of steel has different chapters but the flipfloping with their goals is really annoying which is a shame because the first time seeing them enter with the blimp was genuinely great and added a layer of authority that could of made their stake in the commonwealth interesting but they completely flounder under their stupid nostalgia nonsense with the "hey guys remember FO3?!" and turn into genocidal maniacs because "duhh machine bad" except there could of EASILY been a third option of having them team up with the Railroad or making a compromise like having most of the synths join the brotherhood. not to mention the synth stuff is just dumb because the synths are so indistinguishable from humans that they're literally just humans with implanted memories, so the only actual issue here is nock it off with the replacement bullshit and then your fine.
I was so done with the find the baby plot of FO4 by the time I killed dollar store Jason Statham. After that fight I vowed to slay that baby at all costs. I was very pleased it ended up being encouraged 😂. FO4 gun play was good but everything else made me sad.
Funny because whether or not it's intentional playing the first Dying Light and viewing the story as a corny action movie made me care more about it.
I wish rais would stfu but otherwise yeah me too
Bruh my name is Aidan and in my entire 24 years of life so far, no one has ever called me Aidan-Bobaidan (thank god). It always sounds so weird hearing people say my name a bunch in a video.
I beat it. Dying lights 2’s writing was incredibly cringe and particularly the ending sequence had me in tears laughing at how dumb it was.
I enjoyed the story for the most part, enough so that it was my entire hook for getting the game in the first place, along with the co-op, but boy do I have agree with you on the ending(s).
Plot was alright but the execution was poor. The twist was what got me laughing. The unreliable narrator did not work for me with this one.
The cringe was the dialogue and most characters to clarify.
Dying Light 2 doesn't seem like it's gonna have anything as good as Rais going on another generic monologue in 1 and Crane just turning around to yell "Shut the fuck up!"
@@kapkant6197 I miss how much you can meme the story in dying light one, 2 can't even be interesting or funny
Its super weird cause like, once you get to the second 3rd of the game, you totally can just ignore the story, but then again, my experience with its story is most of the time the dialouge doesn't even play its just npcs looking at me weird and then a mission marker
The annoyance though, is the games zones are level rated, 1 level difference is the difference between a 3rd of a guys healthbar with a power attack and a 20th and the only way to raise your level to not drag your ass through these zones is to progress the story which is baffling to me
No level is tied to your total parkour/str points
@@vVAstrAVv your skill tree seems to be but theres another level system for overall gear drops thats different as far as I can tell
@@v8bitecho no when youre on the skill screen the bar in the upper right is your "level". Im sure that that determines gear drops. Like your survivor rank did in dl1
It actually makes the other team seem bad as you pick sides to make you feel justified to matter what you choose