I think Noah Caldwell Gervais described the issue with FO4 really well, that the game fundamentally does not conceptualize itself beyond being a video game. There’s no pretension that the settlements are inhabited by real people or that it wouldn’t make sense for the minutemen’s general to become a raider overlord.
You want to know what the problem with the boy in fridge quest? He's been trapped in a fridge for 200 years, next to a general thoroughfare, between several former and active settlements, and his parents are in house a 2 minute jog away. Oh, and the moment you find him, a slaver materializes to also want to claim him. It's a really dumb quest which adds to the sense that much of the world is frozen until the PC moves into proximity.
The world we play in is a West World type simulation that Father is using to try and create the perfect parent he never had. Endlessly simulating variants until he finds the right version...
I remember reading that originally the quest was meant to play out differently, and that you’d end up taking him on as a temporary/semi-permanent companion until you found a new adoptive parent to take him in. If that is the case, then it would likely mean his parents wouldn’t have originally been around and potentially that having them just be over there at the home was a last minute addition when they decided to cut that part of the quest. It would explain why it’s probably the dumbest part of an already silly quest.
the main 2 issues i had with the Settlement system is the way it DOESNT conform to the land, and you couldnt fix up old homes only trash them for parts to make even more leaky homes. and the 2nd issue is the shelters you can build. its all either trash or rotten old bunker style. they could have fixed it by basically adding more industry to a settlement like focused on prepping wood or trying to create concrete or glass. but i guess that would still create questions like why didnt any NPC's do any of that the last 200 years.
according to the ttrpg they did but then an ice age happened and during the ice age a crazy follower of atom made a cult that summoned a giant rad worm and destoryed a bunch of settlements around the glowing sea while a few raider groups killed each other off for resources cuz well ice age means no farming so they cant raid to farm and alot of the smaller settlements like a moving train full of basically pacifist circus people and artists left the region due to the ice age and others got killed by being overran by crazy atom cultists. and it all boils down to that dark lovecraftatian god had given the leader of the crazy atom cult power and ya have to stop his ascent into semigodhood. if i remember correctly from the vid theepicnate did on it. personally i think they just added all that to the ttrpg cuz the commonwealth is too fucking empty to have an actual rpg in it.
you can build machines in your settlement to craft ammo with. i really liked that, it makes sense that you wont find enough ammo so you'll have to make your own and it also gives the settlements more value as well as the trash you loot. but you most probably will find more than enough ammo, building a ammo workshop is a total waste of time. and that's the case for pretty much everything settlement related. they give you oppertunities that aren't just unnecessary but way to much of an hassle compared to the other options you got outside of settlment management. they obviously wanted to flesh out the survival aspect of Fallout, but at the same time not forcing the player to interact with it apart from it's tutorial quests, so this system got no real weight. and that way you end up with something conceptually interesting implemented in a way that makes it just an annoying additional chore instead of an interesting and fun mechanic.
If you're on PC, the Rebuild Collection fixes the rundown settlement buildings to pristine condition ala Covenant, albeit with a junk cost. It's one of my favorite mods for FO4
And at the Fallout 4's launch there really wasn't a whole lot of diversity in what you could build, only having the basic beat-up wood and metal options for structures, along with the lack of anything. It took them an update, 4 DLC's, 3 of which were literally dedicated to the workshop, and still barely fixing the system, only giving more diversity in what you could build. Also, responding to your last point. Apparently Bethesda just thinks that people would automatically forget basic carpentry and masonry after the apocalypse.
I ended up agreeing with you about the important characters. I also think that Diamond City accepts Nick precisely because he doesn't "pass" as a human, so there's no ambiguity, which I found to be actually good writing.
Fun Fact! You can't skip the Memory Den scene but there is nothing stopping you from just sprinting from scene to scene. The doors will open. It's basically skipping it. The last one may be an exception though.
The main reason people dislike the Kid in the Fridge quest while being fine with the U.S.S. Constitution quest is that the latter does not conflict with anything in the series, nor does it conflict with basic logic. As you've said multiple times, Billy definitely should have gone feral after 210 years alone in a fridge even if we disregard the need for food, water, and oxygen (a random dude in a coffin in 2 is not the same.) His parents still living within walking distance of the fridge is insanely lucky for the kid, but how did they go over 200 years living in the area without hearing him? Conversely, the U.S.S. Constitution quest does not ask you to turn your brain off for the sake of enjoying it. Nothing in it lacks logical sense. We've seen robots with personalities many times before in basically every Fallout game, and the thought of these robots wanting to sail isn't too far-fetched. There are scavengers who actively do not care about that mission and just want the salvage on the boat. Again, this makes logical sense. Attaching rockets to a ship seems silly, but there's nothing in terms of logic which would prevent it from happening. One of these quests ask you to throw logic out the window for the sake of it. The other allows you the chance to find logical solutions to the presented problems. The quality of the quest is not the problem here.
I think Shaun naming you director is objective proof you’re not a synth. He would NEVER put a synth in charge of the institute’s future if he knew about it.
exactly, its nice to think about and a solid theory otherwise but yeah that just completely unravels it. the brotherhood gives more of a shit about synths than father does
@23:20 “fallout 4 was rife with performance issues, something Bethesda seems notorious for lately.” While not exactly false, Bethesda’s bug issues have existed so long that people were joking about it on message boards back when Daggerfall released…. IN 1996, NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO.
10:30 Ghouls in Fallout 4 also Need Food and Water as seen in game, including the Settlement System. Emil is just a Hack writer, but Howard is equally to blame since he is the Boss, so the Buck stops with Him.
7:20:20 there’s a slight loophole to this actually- if you never recruit Preston as a companion (I.e. don’t finish the first radiant quest) and finish all the raider quests first his affinity won’t be affected. You’ll still have to finish open season before you can do any minuteman quests but Preston won’t hate you.
@@UlyssesCrab with it being bethesda we're talking about here, i wouldn't wodner if they didn't even do this out of ill intend but rather wanted to shine with theire 'next gen' update when the spotlight on Fallout 4 is the brightes, but in usual bethesda passion f'd it up in the most basic way.
10:40 in fallout 1 entire town of necropolis dies from dihydration if you just take the water chip. So ghouls surviving for a month without water may be possible. 200 years though? Nah dawg
I respectfully disagree on the point about junk. It feels like the changes to junk are guilty by association with your larger problems with the game's crafting. Giving the junk in the game a mechanical benefit gives it meaning beyond set dressing. This encourages the player to pay more attention to their environment. The encumbrance system simultaneously encourages the player to only pick up what is needed. If you need copper for something, only pick up junk which provides it. If you know something is always useful, grab it when you can. The desire to grab everything not nailed down is not inherently true for all players.
In New Vegas it feels like I never run out of ways to play it or experiences to have roleplaying as different characters. Where as with Fallout 4, it feels like its exactly the same game every time I play it
yup event with the alt ghoul start. only new game play was with overhaul mods like horizon and frost. with new vegas i always play one build cuz i find perception broken and i enjoy playing a cowboy from an old spaghetti western.
Because it is, like it starts the same and pretty much ends the. Even if the endings look different and take place in one of two locations, it’s just exactly the same..
One of my gaming biggest regrets was giving fallout 4 a chance and doing a playthrough of each faction thinking they might have learned from New Vegas and had different main quest endings. Nope a complete waste of time.
Its the opposite for me. New vegas feels exactly the same every time i play it, while fallout 4 feels different everytime. Guess it really depends on when you get introduced to the series.
I don't think earlier Fallout games lacked a theme of hope, I just think it was more of a subtext. Yeah, things were bad and there were plenty of people willing to do anything to survive, but there were also people actively trying to survive and learn from the past. In many ways, it's still the same as the old world. (War never changes.) The Great War wasn't the end, it was a new chapter for humanity. In Fallout 4, through narrative, visual, and auditory changes, the undercurrent of hope is now front and center. Every faction beyond raider factions is trying to make the world better in its own way. The colors are bright, plant life is relatively abundant, and the music has a lot more concluding high notes to make the player go, "I should keep pushing forward." TL;DR: Earlier Fallout treats hope as subtext, Fallout 4 treats it as main text.
With the exception of 3 (I wonder why🤔) the previous games were about the post-post apocalypse. BGS is obsessed with the "feel" of post apocalypse, despite being set 200 years after the event, which makes no sense.
This game was the moment that I decided Bethesda was no longer making games I was interested in, I’ve always been an RPG enthusiast and it really bummed me out to watch Bethesda alter the dialogue, skills and power armor to the point that Immediately after the deathclaw fight I put the game down and never touched it again
i preordered the one right below the special edition so i got the season pass at a discount and took a day off work. i could visibly feel the smile on my face die. no ron pearlman opening was a gut punch but even after the deathclaw fight and i realized the world was mostly empty so i could play city builder i got alittle bitter and just started ranting to friends as i played it about everything wrong with it lore wise. i beat it once. i only ever said nice things about far habor and the boat side quest inthe main game cuz it actually felt like fallout. everything else wasnt fallout it was a decent fps with a city builder and light rpg mechanics thats not fallout. oh i also said the voice acting was decent esp since they got both shepards to do the voices of nate and nora but i felt like they were wasted not being characters who had some actual personalities.
I had a similar experience during the first couple of hours, but after accepting that Fallout 4 is simply a different thing, I let this game take me on its' journey and finally understood how great it is in what it's trying to be.
@@youarealwayscorrect Fallout 4 isn't that bad to be honest. it's just a bad Fallout. but if i imagine the Fallout 4 we got, just with the little Fallout sauce actually in there, it could have been amongst the top game in the franchise. the base is there and pretty promising, they just stopped before doing anything with it.
@Buttersaemmel the only "good fallout game" is Fallout 1, the rest just keep strongly deviating from the original idea. Personally, I am okay with it as long as the game is good. The next Fallout game could be a GTA clone or whatever, but as long as it turns out well, I'll be satisfied. But that's just me.
03:45:00 you can shoot Kent yourself the moment you enter the room as the Shroud. There's a funny reaction of everyone involved. Maximum psycho for sure
I've spent more of my 578 hours playing fallout 4 making settlements,I know I'm the outline but it's my favorite thing to do. You can also make your settlements self-sufficient in one area like you were saying. I normally have 3 to 5 different farm settlement because you get the most resources from them if they focus on a few things.
51:00 this moment bugs me so much because it is SO stupid. These guys want Shaun for his pristine pre-war dna. They even refer to your character as 'the backup', so clearly the adults would be useful too. is your plan to A) Wake them up, give them some coffee, explain that the world is a wasteland but you're here to take them to a safe, comfortable new home, or B) Try to take the baby by force and if that doesn't work murder 1 of the 3 known people that still has what you need, and make a lifeling enemy out of the last one. Kellogg doing what he did was so colosally stupid that I can't take this story or world seriously in any way.
honestly, same. They have scientists, knowledgeable people, a facsimile of old world authority, and instead of using any of that to talk to reasonable pre-war people, they send in a "post world" merc and let him shoot a mother and let every other vault dweller die except the father/husband that watched him murder the wife/mom so, so, so unbelievably wasteful and stupid
I think so many people critique bethesda in such depth because their old games made us all feel that the medium of videogames had incredible potential that had yet be reached, in a way that few if any other games did. But instead of trying to reach that potential, they have just dumbed down the games and added random features unrelated to the rest of the game to try to appeal to a wider audience.
That's exactly what they did. I would urge people to try and replay Skyrim without mods. That's where BGS started slipping, you can feel how "mass appeal" everything is.
@@ChiefCrewin It's BlackRock dude, not Bethesda. The story you are describing is a story that can be told for many game studios. Furthermore, everyone loved the WITCHER 3 but that was basically Assassin's creed game with Witcher senses pff! What a lazy boring game mechanic. That had all the hallmark main stream game mechanics, the quest icons and question marks. Furthermore Bethesda games are systems games, like simulations where you can have multiple quests running at one time, which is not the case with other games, the physics and the many moving parts is what Bethesda games are known for I think. Anyway, many of these studios have to borrow money, and are loaded with debt. It's something you hear about with Private Equity firms, and the push to live service is a trend everywhere, which is why you see the microtransactions, endless "updates" and "next gen updates" and endless patches that change the game play even (Cyberpunk2077 has went through multiple gameplay changing patches over the course of years, and then 2.0 and Phantom Liberty). It's not Todd Howards fault, or Bethesda's fault perse. If you read about private equity firms they buy up companies and then load them with debt and sabatoge then take the assets, these companies are being looted and plundered and then hung out like a corpse.
The Jet thing, even as a mistake, always seemed so blown out of proportion. Everyone was like 'but the kid says he invented it!' and I'm just like, yeah? The narcissistic little jackass? Never seemed like a 'reliable narrator' and its very easy to just be like 'he found a formula and lied' or 'he made something similar to a thing that had existed' or any number of things. Having continuity and established lore is important but little things that could have so many valid explanations being made out as huge examples of a gotcha is kind of dumb. The Nate thinks executing civilians is funny thing is a much better example (and glad that was walked back quick) because thats like, hey, kind of important aspect to a character who's mental head space I'm supposed to inhabit. That would have been far more of an issue, IMO, if it was actually confrmed.
It's not just Jet. Jet is just a good example of Bethesda's fallout lore, where they obsessively bring back things and seem allergic to new ideas. Every game has to have the enclave, has to have the brotherhood of steel, has to have supermutants and FEV. Coast to Coast, it's the same factions fighting over the same things. They brought Jet to their fallouts despite it really not making any sense that a drug that primarily exists to enslave a mining town in California would cross the entire continent to Washington D.C, and then in Fallout 4 they go ahead and just make it a pre-war drug. Maybe they could've made a point about Myron being a liar with an overinflated ego, but that's not what they did, that's just fans attempting to fill the holes in Bethesda's own writing. They didn't intend to make a statement about Jet and Myron, they literally just lazily put it in their games because Jet is a drug in fallout.
@@doghat1619 Your literally just repeating what I said about jet back at me because you either didn't fully read what I said or your comprehension is lacking. You also want to let me know its not jet, when again I clearly indicate there are other retcons and whatnot that they have done. In fact, I even list a second example and how that one would have been bad. I have to conclude its comprehension. You know keywords from my post but don't seem to know the content of it. That, or your a bot. Not sure, don't care really. Have fun.
im not annoyed at jet for myron thing. im annoyed at jet cuz it was said repeatedly by other people ya need brahim shit to produce jet and brahims only showed up after the bombs. but like idk maybe non mutant cows can make the right shit to make jet who knows. i think the jet was just a tipping point. my biggest grip with bethsada's lore is even after 200 years they refuse to allow humanity to hit post post apocaylpse to the point the entire east coast will never have a functioning society going and they are obsessed with the brotherhood of steel to the point the west coast which refuses to allow outsiders to join suddenly are powerful again cuz king arthur who isnt high elder and even if he as the council wouldnt let him go against the codex is thriving by not following the codex and allowing recruitment. but yes the jet thing is stupid. and emil deserves to be made fun of for the stupid executing civilians thing and i feel like people like to bring that up after the walk back cuz he keeps trying to insert dumb shit into the first 2 games. and also everyone was annoyed about the ncr being nuked by a dying bos in the show.
Emil Pagliarulo is the _LEAD_ writer and designer of a studio that keeps letting all these silly little inconsistencies and poorly implemented retcons slip through. Todd Howard is in charge of him and all the teams decisions, which has led to a culture of fixing it later and doubling down on the mistake in the meantime. _Some_ of the Todd and Emil haters might blow it out of proportion and claim some wild personal grievances, but those two are _directly_ responsible for almost everything that comes out of that studio and _nothing_ will change as long as they still think there's nothing wrong at Bethesda. (Personally I blame the accursed _Creation_ _Club_ for the downfall of Bethesda. It's just too tempting to monetize the hell out of it, and what does the community get back? A couple of $8 "quests" and $5 weapon skins in their brand new AAA title (Starfield) with no alternative in game skins, not even basic repaints.)
Honestly, I haven't seen anyone go "too far" with the Emil hate. As you say, he's in charge. Then when you hear him say in interviews he hates a centralized design document because it stifles creativity, you wonder how they're able to even ship a working project .
@ChiefCrewin watch any Fallout 3 or 4 breakdown by Creetosis and count the number of Emil tangents he goes on. While I don't think his criticisms are wrong, it can feel like beating a dead horse after the third time hearing the same arguments
@@RevulsiveLooper Creetosis is one of those youtubers I find myself agreeing with most of the time but then his tone/attitude turns me off. But, as Bethesda has demonstrated over the years, as long as money keeps coming out just keep kicking that horse.
Difference between Fridge Boy and USS Constitution is the amount of effort put into it: Fridge Kid is just an extremely basic escort quest with little to no logic behind it. And worse, as everyone knows, it doesn't fit into the world and it's rules. Hell, escorting Prestons' Minutemen to Sanctuary for example at least gives us couple of extra dialogue lines on the way.. And moves the plot forward. And while slapping Museum Constitution full of Robots and rocket engines is a different kind of weird, it's the kind of "technological absurdity" that makes sense in Fallout World. It doesn't need justification to exist.
We could’ve had a secret ending where Nate starves to death in the memory den because he refuses to leave the memory of his pre-war life. Imagine the breakdown he has when he sees his wife and (infant) son again, before the world went to hell.
TLDR; I thought this was a super insightful and thorough vid that echoed a lot of my problems and thoughts that I had about Fallout 4 and their worldbuilding/NPC flatness, especially as a New Vegas fan. To me, F04 was a game wherein we were given a role to play rather than given the opportunity to find a role of our own to explore. While I could write a dissertation, I’ll spare you the suffering of the formatting of YT comments. I thought this video was spectacular and really resonated with the concerns and disappointments you raised about the lack of Companion/NPC depth and the overall ability to enmesh yourself within the world created in FO4. My reference point for what I expect from a Fallout game is New Vegas because I *truly* felt like I was a guy being a dude that accidentally inherited a wasteland and its problems. I felt deeply connected to my companions and like I was *actually* learning how to be a person again in a world that just tried to kill me. I was so disappointed with FO4, that after I got the different endings, I didn’t want to touch it again. It felt really hollow to me. You never had to choose if you wanted to send power to the Strip or Freeside, whether you wanted to flood a farm with radiation to save people trapped in a vault, and you definitely didn’t go on a hero’s journey trying to find a brain for your favorite robotic dog homie. Where was the underlying class struggle? Where were the ugly truths of surviving nuclear warfare? Why was this apocalypse so “lighthearted”? Ultimately, I feel like the best part of New Vegas (and what I miss the most in FO4) is the diversity in personality, emotion, and motivation of the NPCs we encounter/recruit. We could’ve had new iterations of people like the King, Old Lady Gibson-all of them with their own extremely developed personal histories that existed long before you and will continue to go on after you. The FO4 follower flavor quests really missed out on allowing the player to get an internal glimpse of their companions' lives and I think that’s the true disservice. War has changed and I don’t like the way it looks now. Thank you for your insight, now on to the New Vegas Retrospective!
I played 100 hours of fo4 the week it came out and not much of it since then. I exhausted the game to its full extent then. And now, i only played Starfailed for like, maybe 10 hours max? because they learned literally NOTHING aside from "don't voice the mc in big RPG". like its LITERALLY the same game, 10 years later. its tragic and embarrassing. Especially next to BG3, which proves that if your game is GOOD people will turn up for it, you don't need to dumb down a game to appeal to the widest audience.
If you ran out of stuff to do in fo4 within a hundred hours but not previously fallout games your lying.. content wise fo4 has way more and more repayable content. Recently played through all recent fallout games the only one I didn’t enjoy was 76 due to it just not feeling like a fallout game
@@Povertycabthat's... completely untrue. There's no way FO4 has more to experience than NV or 3, and if by pure numerical value it is true, it certainly doesn't feel like it.
@@ChiefCrewin it just is, alot of npcs in f03 you cant interact with. while alot in 4 you can. things are more detailed in 4 look wise, plus you can build and change areas in 4 while 3 is nothing
this game always felt like when youre eating a bowl of cheap cereal, only to realise that its going soggy and gross too fast, so you barely have any chance to appreciate what is actually enjoyable about it before being left with an unappealing, disappointing slurry.
on the new Power armour, If they had nate go up to it because garvey and friends didnt know how to operate it and have him go "Hmmmm the generator has degraded too much to be used, but I bet I could cores as a back up" then go looking for one would alleviate that issue and have that busted old frame be the only frame available until you side with the brotherhood or find a fully functioning one later.a couple of very small changes fixes it quite nicely. like a lot of FO4 it feels like they decided to just send the first draft of things with out revisions.
Settlements are a choice. You only have to build the few things for the main quest. You can take the local leader perks and have the settlements linked to each other for trade lines so they all share food water and scrap. You can slowly take over the wasteland without being violent at all. Nearly every settlement has the material needed to make the generator and radio you need to summon your first settler, from there you can send him as a trade line. The robotics dlc takes this to a whole new level with custom deathbots as your provisioners. All the common junk you need for armor or weapons can be bought as shipments from merchants. Trashcan Carla herself sells most of them and she comes to Sanctuary often. Add the short bunker hill quest to set up trader posts and you have even more people visiting you with stuff to sell. I spent a long ass time in fallout 4 BECAUSE of the settlement system. The base looting and shooting is only so fun. Setting up the castle to automatically power its traps and turrets and lock all doors when it is attacked via alarms, settler guards, and logic gates is way cooler to me. I have a video on my channel where I spent legit 5 months or so making a crazy intracate vault base with a shit ton of silly stuff to explore and a roller coaster conveyor that rides through it
I enjoy the video, and I don't exactly think highly of Fallout 4 without a solid modlist, but I do have to point out that at the start of the game, you seem to misinterpret what's happening. Nate's intro speech was him rehearsing a speech he was planning to give at the veteran's hall, which is what Nora is supposed to be explaining when she cuts in. It wasnt really meant to be a joke. No judgement if thats how it felt to you. I've just been re-watching the video before bed, and that reading of the scene rubbed me the wrong way one too many times, I guess XD Edit - Nick pretending to be Kellog *was* just a joke
A part of fallout 4 that goes unappreciated is how they insert the history of Boston into the game. You have Hancock who carrys some of the ideals of the real John Hancock,or the entire faction of the minutemen. And the cabot family? They're descendants of a figure in Boston's history. That's not even the beginning of historical references. Even if you hate every part of fallout 4 I hope you can appreciate that out of every fallout game,it takes advantage of the setting the most. (I also love fallout 4,it's my fav)
To me that part is one big redeeming part of FO4 for me. I have some personal ties to the city so seeing the level that they represented the city itself and some of the subsequent integrations and references to rl history hit a sweet spot for me personally (i am well aware that this is not the case for many people)
Thanks for making my Saturday again. I know this game ain't exactly the most exciting thing to get through and I can't even imagine the hours of editing afterwards, but you still put out an excellent video here.
I once did a playthrough where every settlement I had to help, I killed. Preston not once catches on that there's a link between them asking for help, and me reporting them dead. Bethesda with Fallout 4 really didn't want you to think outside the box, and had no contingencies (on average) if you did
For the Kid in a fridge point I agree that one goofy quest isn’t the end of the world but that’s not why people have a problem with it, they have a problem with it because 1.Retcons aside the quest still makes zero logical sense whatsoever and 2. The developers very clearly want us to take the world of fallout 4 seriously with the synth moral dilemma, companion quests, final faction choice, attempt at emotional connection to Sean, etc but then they make these cartoon BS quests that make the world feel ridiculous and I can’t take anything seriously at that point when there’s dozens of kid in a fridge esque moments. Also the quest itself is trying to be serious and stupid at the same time like the option of child slavery isn’t exactly a knee slapper if u ask me, plus your companions have plenty to say in a VERY serious fashion if you treat the kid poorly so no it’s not just that the quest is silly that’s why people hate it, it’s the greater context that makes Kid In a fridge the culmination of a lot of narrative issues with Fallout 4 that makes people hate it.
@@frej7422 because it sucks! I have to sit through an annoying as hell animation every time I want to get in or out, if makes my character floaty to control, I have to keep it fuelled or it’s basically unusable, the integrated UI looks ridiculous and is ugly… I have more reasons but I’m sure that’s enough for a UA-cam comment
Fallout 4 was the game where I felt the shift with Bethesda, at first it wasn't entirely terrible. I feel like Fallout 4 is still a fun game, but it's where things didn't entirely feel like Fallout anymore. Certain Aesthetic choices, tone shift, the voiced protag which resulted in far less depth and dialog choices, less Skill checks and the outright removal of skills in favor of the Special System and Perks. It's still a fun Shooter in a decent Bethesda world (The Glowing Sea is probably my favorite area in any Fallout game because of how absolutely devastated it is.), but it lacks a lot in the RPG department. It was a step down, but at that time I still believed they could recover and they did slightly with Far Harbor... then it was downhill from there: Nuka World, 76 (Which I think improved some things I enjoyed the setting, the return of durability on gear, some of the weapons (Black Powders being the most fun imo), armor and enemies. But the online live service component absolutely killed any improvement I felt.), Starfield (Butchered imo the last great thing Bethesda had going for them, World Design. In favor of wide as an ocean deep as a puddle procedural generation.) I went from being optimistic for the Elder Scrolls 6 to probably not even going to bother trying it on Game Pass, Especially if the setting is in fact Hammerfell. They have this incredible Fantasy Series, and they might make the setting boring human lands for the third game in a row.
You probably know this, but you can actually skip some of this by walking to the next memory before you are told to. Saving some time in the process. However, you can not skip the last one.
Quick note about your section on Deacon. While i do agree his mysterious nature does make him slightly more appealing, i think you might be falling right into his facade by the last affinity conversation. I think its very likely that story about his lover and the gang he killed is also a lie. For one, we can go to university point and not read a single entry to ever suggest that gang existed in the first place. Also, if Deacon didn't know his lover was a synth, how did the Deathclaws know she was a synth? Its not some dirty secret someone can find out by looking through their previous history. The whole point is that they are indistinguishable from humans and the only surefire way to tell the difference is by killing the synth. So how did they find out but Deacon never did? His whole lesson was that any sad backstory or idea could be fake, and i think its pretty naive to assume that because he just says, "No, but this one is real though" that it actually is. Thats the useful thing about lies. You don't have to reveal afterwards that its a lie.
I love video essays like this, especially those that are made with extreme effort and dedication. Amazing video to watch while I'm on my way to work or listen to while I'm trying to sleep. It's been 5 days and I've finally finish this video. Keep up the good work!!
Appreciate the video and agree with a decent proportion of it overall, though I view some of it slightly differently overall. Most disappointing part is that you completely skipped over Survival mode to the extent it doesn't sound like you've ever played it. In my opinion it makes an awful lot of the game's design make a lot more sense, massively improves on how difficulty is handled in prior games, and generally contradicts your conclusion - it was a labour of love released free of charge, knowing full well its harsh features would turn away large swathes of the audience from ever playing it.
Do you have any idea how happy i am right now? I use your new vegas retrospective to fall asleep to because I have so much on my mind all the time (undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety, stress, and being a student paramedic) and your NV retrospect has helped me fall asleep countless times over the past year. I am beyond happy that you have posted an equally detailed retrospect of my favourite fallout game. Thank you for helping me❤
On my one and only playthrough of Fallout 4, I kept the fact that I was looking for my son a complete secret. No one knew what I was doing out there. Then one NPC wound up saying "Now you can find Shawn." And I nearly quite playing the game at that point. Interplay would have never made that mistake. Then I got that DLC that's like Beyond Thunderdome. I raided a few places, then later, I meet up with Preston again and he's really mad at me. He tells me I should be ashamed of myself and states that he wants nothing to do with me. But I hadn't done any of my missions with him, so I started taking quests witt him developing a Bethesda split personality. One momment he's telling me how nice it is to see me, the next he's disgusted by me. Killian from Fallout 1's Junk Town was better designed than this. Killian and Preston are similar characters. If you don't do what Killian needs, he hates you and all future quests provided by him, even trade, is stonewalled by the player. But Preston's outrage is purely superficial. God forbid you the game have replayability by having player choice stonewall you from accessing missions, like a proper Fallout game. No, Bethesda wants ONE playthrough, where player choice doesn't even exist, even in Fallout 3. And you're able to experience everything in the game, from the first playthrough. It should be an embarrasment that a 20+ year old game is more next gen than the the new game, within the same IP. The only thing Fallout 3 and 4 have going for them is improved graphics. Their VATS system sucks. They just planted Fallout into an Elder's Scrolls sandbox. I'd rather NOT have a huge map, if that means I have more player choice. In my mind, if Fallout isn't a top down turn based RPG, then it needs to be an immersive sim that would play as a post apocalyptic Deus Ex 1 and Mandkind Devided. Anything other than that is just laziness or a complete lack of understanding what Fallout even is.
let's take diamond city then: everyone in the whole state is nervous because of the institue, people are going missing and you can't trust anyone. and now YOU, a total stranger, are snooping around in town obviously looking for something or someone, but you don't tell anyone (or your anwsers sound oddly suspicious). this whole situation could've let to tension between the player and the residents. now do you try to proof that you're not from the institute in a questline for when the player acted this way? do you fail to proof it, get banned from the city, and now you have to follow another path to find Shauwn? maybe you could alternativley sneak in again at night, if you got a stealth build? maybe you're so suspicious that they start to attack you and you have to shoot your way out (or you attack first)? that's 3 different ways (on top of the intendet) just from your decission to not tell anyone, how this whole questchain could've split. 4 different ways even to then go about it. i'm not saying my different paths here are well written, those situation definetly need to be written and build out better, but that's not my job and i just wanted to show how easy someone without creativity like me can make this more interesting and give the player real choice. heck if a player doesn't want to tell, then let them take speakchecks to decide if they become suspicious or not and you make the build more important again.
The Fallout 3 & New Vegas retrospectives were awesome works of art. But this is your magnum opus. A very thorough dive past the polished surface level of Fallout 4 that goes deep into the murkry depths of issues, mistakes, & oversights made by a developer who was once the best in the industry. With all that being said, I still love Fallout 4. But, I love more what it could have become with further TLC.
The optimistic vibe of FO4 is a direct result of the protagonist having a grounded foundation of a life of pre-war luxury. It’s hard to sell life ending doom when you play a protagonist so removed from want that even free Vault access is an uninteresting chore they’d probably pass on if the game allowed it. I also feel that with the exception of New Vegas you’ve always been pigeon holed into the kind of character you’re supposed to play and believing otherwise is revisionism at best. The first 3 Fallouts you play a character removed from the violence of the outside until the game forces you outside and all 3 by default start with a sense of right/wrong and justice, again to believe otherwise is head cannon not supported by the lore.
on the settlement building, I am the type of player who enjoyed building up a base I also am the type who enjoys building up self sufficient settlements to "help" the npcs but in fo4, it feels like a slog, a good settlement gives me, and the npcs, nothing. I ended up always picking like... 2 spots to be my bases, first in the early game it was the gas station, because sanctuary was stolen by npcs I couldnt tell no, and later in the game it was the alleyway in the middle of the map, and I made some very pretty bases there, especially with mods to let me phase objects half into the walls. But again, I wanted a home base, ala the lucky 38 but with more customization, not really a big list of empty areas that *could* have been interesting but instead are mostly empty so *I* can do the devs work and make a town, really hollow.
I disagree with the point that Skyrim didn’t have handcrafted content cause it had plenty. It did have radiant quests but those felt more like side stuff. I do agree with a lot of points on Fallout 4. I liked Far Harbor but the game itself was disappointing. It lacked what I loved from 3 and NV. It felt like it wanted to be different games. The colors and the factions made it want to be a more lively world but they also wanted it to be a wasteland. They wanted a survival crafting looter game but they also wanted an rpg. As such both sides end up feeling lesser.
Junk having a new mechanical depth is a nice feature in concept, but in practice it just goes to bog down the game for me. Even if I were to look up what exactly I needed to craft something (mod, settlement piece, etc) and tag all the recquired items so that the junk I need is highlighted, it still incentivises me to grab everything. A singular item requires like 4 or 3 ingredients on average, so if I beforehand tag all the junk items that have atleast one of those and collect them only, my inventory is still goint to be bloated with junk. I have once found 20 different pieces of junk that all have steel, but none of them had the screws or adhesive i needed. After I finally return home with everything I need, and craft what I wanted, I almost immedietely need to do the whole cycle again because a new thing I want to craft requires Nuclear Material that I somehow didnt get from the 20 different steel items i found. Why do all this when I can just grab anything and everything I see and most likely get all the things for the item I want, plus whatever I might want to craft later? Now this is just personal experience, but I really believe that junk being so required for any kind of non-leveling progress bogs it down so hard. Cool weapon or armor i found i might want to give to my settlers; oop too much junk. A PA piece that I need to complete a set; oop too much junk. Its junk all the way down. The Junk must flow. Too much junk makes Nate a Dull boy.
1:32 I do like the weapon modification system. it makes it feel like you are scavenging your weapons together, and the modifications allow for customization and also provide an increase in power. It actually made me excited to find scrap that I knew would have the right materials I needed for the next upgrade.
4:28:40 you can't justify anything by saying "it's just a joke". As if there is no way to put a joke into this game, without making it a lore and immersion breaking moment.
@@SuperRADLemonsure, and I agree. But when something can be explained with "this is just a joke". Then everything can be explained this way. Then there's no limits anymore, and no reason to build a consistent and involved story, just put in as many "jokes" as you can and call it a game. I'm not against the jokes, I'm just want the quests be quests (not necessarily all serious) and jokes be good (or lame) jokes weaved into the narrative.
Ads are kinda curated based on the user. I still place them on the timeline, but you won't see all of them. If you skip em you see less even if they are applied to the timeline. I also space them out more the further you get into the video so you shouldn't get them every 5 minutes
@@SuperRADLemon No worries. It makes me feel good knowing channels I enjoy can bring in revenue in so many different ways. This time it was just slightly jarring. I listen during work through earbuds or while I'm driving to my next appointment so there were a few "Oh my god, another one?" moments. Pull the phone out. Hit skip. No problem.
I was LITERALLY thinking about Cass while you were talking about Cait's questline! Like obviously both have a moral setup, Cait's continuation of drugs to keep her strong power wise or clean her so she can live and set up her own life on her own terms and Cass's perpetuation of violence for revenge on her family business or letting her realize that death isn't always a necessary justice. But for Cait they didn't want to give you too many options it seems, they wanted you to go with their choice of "Drugs are bad and you need to be clean" with no alternative. It could have been so much cooler for there to be alternative perks given depending on how you approached and dealt with the companion quests, like how Raul gives you a repair perk or a combat perk depending on what you choose for him to follow for the rest of his ghoul life after telling you about his own past. Companions in Fallout 4 are just one-note cookie cutter stereotypes, sure they may have like one or two things that when you put them up with head canon interpretations they can be really cool, unless they're Nick Valentine then they are always cool, but outside of that I never liked any companion beyond the perk they could give me when I was done making them happy and dump them into Starlight Drive-In to never see again. It also sucks how hamfisted certain companions are pushed onto you, like Dogmeat appearing miraculously just to advance the Kellogg questline or when both Nick and Piper basically puppy dog eye you to guilt you into choosing one of them to bring to Goodneighbor for the brain lane quest, giving a sad but "Alright but you know where I'll be" answer when you deny them walkies.
Watching danse make a big show of putting on his helmet for it to just not appear while he walks along acting like everything is fine is fallout to the core right? Thanks for articulating so much about my frustrations with this game that I love and hate can’t stop playing but don’t feel like I’m playing anything anymore just motions… I’m glad it’s not me becoming boring or playing it wrong
Fallout 4 was my introduction to Fallout. I loved it. Many years later I played New Vegas and 2, which then lead to me becoming a huge fan of RPG games in general. Now I don't love Fallout 4. (edit) Except for Codsworth. He will always be up there right next to Mr. New Vegas on the silly dudes scale
The Shroud isnt batman, hes The Shadow. its an old radio play (much in the same tone as the shroud) There was also a movie of it starring alec baldwin pretty decent movie if you like cheezy stuff. "what evil lurks in the hearts of men? only the shadow knows!"
Meeting Shaun is especially more tragic depending on how many scars your character has. For me in my playthrough I had no mask or helmet on and you can just see the trauma and shock in my characters face both emotionally and visually because of the fact his face was covered in bullet graze marks and burn marks from his time searching.
@2:30 I don't see a capitalist commentary for 1 and 2, but 2 DEFINITELY felt like a commentary on imperialism and expansionism, and how America in particular acts on the international (or inter-settlement/faction) that were brought up again and definitely took a more economic streak in New Vegas (especially when it came to groups like the Crimson Caravan and the Van Graffs), and I think those 3 were also heavy on the understanding of corporatism's role in all that. 3 and 4 didn't seem to have much of that though there are still moral questions... Not that it matters much. I would have preferred the whole series played up those differences.. where you could see how groups and areas interact, territorialism and the like. New Vegas kinda did that with the post-game slide show, but I would love to actually see and experience those differences in more ways than a loose (and pretty consequence free) affinity system like in Vegas. I think letting the raiders from Nukaworld into the Commonwealth is the closest that ever gets but that was so cartoonish it barely counts. Since Bethesda is unlikely to ever do that, are there any games that do that people can suggest? Where you can see things like contrasting economic, cultural or social environments? Like.. if we helped the Legion, there actually IS an impact on the strength/number of raiders in their territory, but you can't buy stimpacks in their territory, type of thing?
Those that the Institute replace know they are Synths. Those who don't know they're a synth are escapees. Amelia Stockten is an esaped synth adopted by old man Stockten.
You're one of the only video essayists whose opinions on the Fallout franchise I actually agree with. A lot of the popular Fallout essays/retrospectives come off as whiny but you have really solid analysis, loved this video
Nuka World should have had an option to declare war on the raiders therein and create a military/espionage campaign against the park, giving the Minutemen the depth and development they so critically lack the entire game
The reason I don't hate the memory den that much is that you can skip through it pretty quickly on repeat playthrough. You don't have to actually stick around and watch all the memories, if you keep going the path will keep building in front of you, the only one you actually have to watch is the last one. So, just a small correction.
12:50 it was not handled at all. Aside from stating that they don't care about the lore and will change it at will. The point is not in making a mistake. The point is they do it on a regular basis. Making mistakes seems to be their modus operandi. That's where the hate comes from. They almost f***ing it all up on purpose. For sh!ts and giggles.
Playing the game with the pip boy app open on my iPad honestly changed the whole thing for me. It was so quick and convenient, to the point that I don't enjoy playing without it nearly as much.
I will say I’m probably in the minority but I LOVED the crafting system, cause it was a fun way incentivize grabbing junk that in previous games I thought ‘man, i wish i could build a scope or use some of this garbage to help me out here’ The looter shooter thing made way more sense to me when I found out they brought on some Destiny devs in for the gunplay I’ve never really seen the appeal of a stealth archer in Skyrim, can someone please tell me why it’s that fun in the game?
Far Habor Shipbreaker can be triggered usually near the Lumber Mill using the pipboy or by following Longfellows quest line (I also used Nick, so pipboy for me). That thing is one h3ll of a bullet sponge. Longfellow can give you a hint to Shipbreaker's weakness, but the weakness still isn't that weak so up to you if you want to. And the quests for Far Habor effect how the Habormen treat the synths if you get Dema to confess later on. You have to do a load of side quests or they'll destroy Arcadia and the only way to get enough is to complete the Captain's Dance (the Mirelurk Queen). Of course, if you don't get/want Dema to confess then they are optional.
You know, not too long ago I was playing a modded run of the game, and when I got to Vault 88, the raiders there were non hostile. I opened the door without attacking them, and found out that the three raiders at the door are scripted to walk inside the vault, but then just hang around in the room beyond, pacing around and fighting any ghouls that they see. But nobody playing the base game would ever see this, due to raiders being hostile be default. Could be that there was supposed to be a trigger or something to let them get inside, but was switched off.
4:27:10 "It's a joke quest in an absurdist fantasy that has been absurd since the very first entry" has very "It's a movie about space wizards and laser swords" energy. In other words, it feels like you're saying the criticism of this quest is ridiculous because the series has always had ridiculous elements. It makes it sound like you arbitrarily don't think this one instance is worthy of criticism despite your previous statements to the contrary. And saying that people who don't like this quest's existence don't respect the work the developers put in is disingenuous. It's not a criticism of the development overall, it's a criticism of the writing and the creative choices that led to this quest being in the game and making it to launch. If it's a joke quest (because we can't say that definitively), then it's one that didn't land well for a large portion of the audience. The fact that it exists makes the Fallout world worse as a result, and if it were removed entirely from the game, it would be a net positive.
@@SuperRADLemon I appreciate you taking the time to respond to this, as I know there are a lot of other comments. While you did say it could be criticized, it does feel like you think people are criticizing it without merit, and there's plenty of merit to those criticisms. The setting has elements which are far-fetched or ridiculous, but that does not mean logic ends when you boot up the game. I do agree that some people get a little too bent out of shape about this quest existing. However, I don't think that excuses the poor quality of the quest's writing and the logic problems you have to ignore for the quest to make sense. This quest could have made sense and still worked as a joke quest if they said Billy had only been trapped in the fridge for a day or two. Again, thank you for taking the time to read my comment and respond. I genuinely appreciate it when a content creator shows they're willing to consider dissenting opinions and engage with them.
If you yell at me, I'm legally allowed to cry in a corner.
No one puts baby in the corner
What if I yell a thank you at you?
Well. If you insist...
If your Fallout 76 retrospective isn't 10 hours I am suing
I have to level up my charisma to ten and get to level 56 before I unlock the ability to use intimidate on humans
8 hours is quite good for an intro, I assume parts 2-5 are dropping anytime soon.
I love finding a "fall asleep to" video that lasts for 16 night. Less time spent finding a new one.
@@KorianHUNsame, long videos like this are a blessing
@@KorianHUNI always put on one of these and wake up to can you beat fallout new Vegas as X
@@deezboltz Can you beat Fallout New Vegas while being chased by Malcolm Homes?
I think Noah Caldwell Gervais described the issue with FO4 really well, that the game fundamentally does not conceptualize itself beyond being a video game. There’s no pretension that the settlements are inhabited by real people or that it wouldn’t make sense for the minutemen’s general to become a raider overlord.
The salt factorys review is absolutely spot on. If you haven't seen it i highly recommend it.
Annoying part is you dont really become a general or a raider overlord. They just call you that but you still have to do all of the work
that is a very neat point that summarizes the issue quite well
You want to know what the problem with the boy in fridge quest? He's been trapped in a fridge for 200 years, next to a general thoroughfare, between several former and active settlements, and his parents are in house a 2 minute jog away. Oh, and the moment you find him, a slaver materializes to also want to claim him. It's a really dumb quest which adds to the sense that much of the world is frozen until the PC moves into proximity.
The world we play in is a West World type simulation that Father is using to try and create the perfect parent he never had. Endlessly simulating variants until he finds the right version...
In my head he’s only been there since the Quincy battle that pushed the minutemen out took place, not the Great War
I’ve always wondered how someone read the premise for this and was like yeah that’s okay
I remember reading that originally the quest was meant to play out differently, and that you’d end up taking him on as a temporary/semi-permanent companion until you found a new adoptive parent to take him in.
If that is the case, then it would likely mean his parents wouldn’t have originally been around and potentially that having them just be over there at the home was a last minute addition when they decided to cut that part of the quest.
It would explain why it’s probably the dumbest part of an already silly quest.
@@StunnyBruhWell shit son. Now that would have been the PERFECT fallout 4. 😅
the main 2 issues i had with the Settlement system is the way it DOESNT conform to the land, and you couldnt fix up old homes only trash them for parts to make even more leaky homes.
and the 2nd issue is the shelters you can build. its all either trash or rotten old bunker style.
they could have fixed it by basically adding more industry to a settlement like focused on prepping wood or trying to create concrete or glass.
but i guess that would still create questions like why didnt any NPC's do any of that the last 200 years.
according to the ttrpg they did but then an ice age happened and during the ice age a crazy follower of atom made a cult that summoned a giant rad worm and destoryed a bunch of settlements around the glowing sea while a few raider groups killed each other off for resources cuz well ice age means no farming so they cant raid to farm and alot of the smaller settlements like a moving train full of basically pacifist circus people and artists left the region due to the ice age and others got killed by being overran by crazy atom cultists. and it all boils down to that dark lovecraftatian god had given the leader of the crazy atom cult power and ya have to stop his ascent into semigodhood. if i remember correctly from the vid theepicnate did on it.
personally i think they just added all that to the ttrpg cuz the commonwealth is too fucking empty to have an actual rpg in it.
You have to download 20+ mods to fix the settlement building
you can build machines in your settlement to craft ammo with.
i really liked that, it makes sense that you wont find enough ammo so you'll have to make your own and it also gives the settlements more value as well as the trash you loot.
but you most probably will find more than enough ammo, building a ammo workshop is a total waste of time.
and that's the case for pretty much everything settlement related.
they give you oppertunities that aren't just unnecessary but way to much of an hassle compared to the other options you got outside of settlment management.
they obviously wanted to flesh out the survival aspect of Fallout, but at the same time not forcing the player to interact with it apart from it's tutorial quests, so this system got no real weight.
and that way you end up with something conceptually interesting implemented in a way that makes it just an annoying additional chore instead of an interesting and fun mechanic.
If you're on PC, the Rebuild Collection fixes the rundown settlement buildings to pristine condition ala Covenant, albeit with a junk cost. It's one of my favorite mods for FO4
And at the Fallout 4's launch there really wasn't a whole lot of diversity in what you could build, only having the basic beat-up wood and metal options for structures, along with the lack of anything. It took them an update, 4 DLC's, 3 of which were literally dedicated to the workshop, and still barely fixing the system, only giving more diversity in what you could build.
Also, responding to your last point. Apparently Bethesda just thinks that people would automatically forget basic carpentry and masonry after the apocalypse.
I ended up agreeing with you about the important characters. I also think that Diamond City accepts Nick precisely because he doesn't "pass" as a human, so there's no ambiguity, which I found to be actually good writing.
Fun Fact! You can't skip the Memory Den scene but there is nothing stopping you from just sprinting from scene to scene. The doors will open. It's basically skipping it. The last one may be an exception though.
Correct.
11:25 "whether he was at fault or not"
Except he was as a design director and a lead writer.
And then he went on to..."lead" Starfield...
The main reason people dislike the Kid in the Fridge quest while being fine with the U.S.S. Constitution quest is that the latter does not conflict with anything in the series, nor does it conflict with basic logic. As you've said multiple times, Billy definitely should have gone feral after 210 years alone in a fridge even if we disregard the need for food, water, and oxygen (a random dude in a coffin in 2 is not the same.) His parents still living within walking distance of the fridge is insanely lucky for the kid, but how did they go over 200 years living in the area without hearing him?
Conversely, the U.S.S. Constitution quest does not ask you to turn your brain off for the sake of enjoying it. Nothing in it lacks logical sense. We've seen robots with personalities many times before in basically every Fallout game, and the thought of these robots wanting to sail isn't too far-fetched. There are scavengers who actively do not care about that mission and just want the salvage on the boat. Again, this makes logical sense. Attaching rockets to a ship seems silly, but there's nothing in terms of logic which would prevent it from happening.
One of these quests ask you to throw logic out the window for the sake of it. The other allows you the chance to find logical solutions to the presented problems. The quality of the quest is not the problem here.
I think Shaun naming you director is objective proof you’re not a synth. He would NEVER put a synth in charge of the institute’s future if he knew about it.
exactly, its nice to think about and a solid theory otherwise but yeah that just completely unravels it. the brotherhood gives more of a shit about synths than father does
Only 8 hours, SuperRAD? Quit slacking off.
bro fell off💀💀
It was on the short side sadly
Good job son, now I expect another 10 hours on Fallout London by Thanksgiving.
PLEASE 🙏🙏🙏😤😤😤
@23:20 “fallout 4 was rife with performance issues, something Bethesda seems notorious for lately.”
While not exactly false, Bethesda’s bug issues have existed so long that people were joking about it on message boards back when Daggerfall released…. IN 1996, NEARLY THIRTY YEARS AGO.
When it's my sleepover and I can choose the next video:
I've been looking for this. A long meaty F4 video that isn't just the main story.
10:30 Ghouls in Fallout 4 also Need Food and Water as seen in game, including the Settlement System. Emil is just a Hack writer, but Howard is equally to blame since he is the Boss, so the Buck stops with Him.
7:20:20 there’s a slight loophole to this actually- if you never recruit Preston as a companion (I.e. don’t finish the first radiant quest) and finish all the raider quests first his affinity won’t be affected. You’ll still have to finish open season before you can do any minuteman quests but Preston won’t hate you.
SuperRAD really said "Alright here's a vid that will cover you for an 8h workday + 30min break" 😂
What do we do for the other 11 seconds?
@@UlyssesCrabgo to war, cus yk...
It's how I watched it just now XD
Yeah, it's about to fill up my shift.
At the rate Bethesda is removing features, they are only about 2 games away from making dating Sims.
That depends, will they remove dialogue next? Or construction?
@@RedShocktrooperRST you're right, they already removed meaningful dialog and choices. I guess they'll just release slideshows instead.
Somehow I’m sure we’ll still receive “Next-Gen Updates” that break mod support the day the mod that’s keeping the community alive is set to release 😑
@@UlyssesCrab with it being bethesda we're talking about here, i wouldn't wodner if they didn't even do this out of ill intend but rather wanted to shine with theire 'next gen' update when the spotlight on Fallout 4 is the brightes, but in usual bethesda passion f'd it up in the most basic way.
Dating Sims require more effort than a standard Todd game. Lock picking ain't gonna get you laid, friend.
10:40 in fallout 1 entire town of necropolis dies from dihydration if you just take the water chip. So ghouls surviving for a month without water may be possible. 200 years though? Nah dawg
They basically retconned themselves that in fallout van Buren tho, but of course that game never ended up coming out.
I respectfully disagree on the point about junk. It feels like the changes to junk are guilty by association with your larger problems with the game's crafting.
Giving the junk in the game a mechanical benefit gives it meaning beyond set dressing. This encourages the player to pay more attention to their environment. The encumbrance system simultaneously encourages the player to only pick up what is needed. If you need copper for something, only pick up junk which provides it. If you know something is always useful, grab it when you can. The desire to grab everything not nailed down is not inherently true for all players.
In New Vegas it feels like I never run out of ways to play it or experiences to have roleplaying as different characters. Where as with Fallout 4, it feels like its exactly the same game every time I play it
yup event with the alt ghoul start. only new game play was with overhaul mods like horizon and frost. with new vegas i always play one build cuz i find perception broken and i enjoy playing a cowboy from an old spaghetti western.
Because it is, like it starts the same and pretty much ends the. Even if the endings look different and take place in one of two locations, it’s just exactly the same..
One of my gaming biggest regrets was giving fallout 4 a chance and doing a playthrough of each faction thinking they might have learned from New Vegas and had different main quest endings. Nope a complete waste of time.
Its the opposite for me. New vegas feels exactly the same every time i play it, while fallout 4 feels different everytime. Guess it really depends on when you get introduced to the series.
@@StolasXBthere ain't no way 😂
When salt factory vids are too short for your tastes
He got a bunch wrong about Halo.
Salt factory doesn't even make good content haha
These people are amateurs...look up PatricianTV.
his voice is obnoxious
I don't think earlier Fallout games lacked a theme of hope, I just think it was more of a subtext. Yeah, things were bad and there were plenty of people willing to do anything to survive, but there were also people actively trying to survive and learn from the past. In many ways, it's still the same as the old world. (War never changes.) The Great War wasn't the end, it was a new chapter for humanity.
In Fallout 4, through narrative, visual, and auditory changes, the undercurrent of hope is now front and center. Every faction beyond raider factions is trying to make the world better in its own way. The colors are bright, plant life is relatively abundant, and the music has a lot more concluding high notes to make the player go, "I should keep pushing forward."
TL;DR: Earlier Fallout treats hope as subtext, Fallout 4 treats it as main text.
With the exception of 3 (I wonder why🤔) the previous games were about the post-post apocalypse. BGS is obsessed with the "feel" of post apocalypse, despite being set 200 years after the event, which makes no sense.
This game was the moment that I decided Bethesda was no longer making games I was interested in, I’ve always been an RPG enthusiast and it really bummed me out to watch Bethesda alter the dialogue, skills and power armor to the point that Immediately after the deathclaw fight I put the game down and never touched it again
i preordered the one right below the special edition so i got the season pass at a discount and took a day off work. i could visibly feel the smile on my face die. no ron pearlman opening was a gut punch but even after the deathclaw fight and i realized the world was mostly empty so i could play city builder i got alittle bitter and just started ranting to friends as i played it about everything wrong with it lore wise. i beat it once. i only ever said nice things about far habor and the boat side quest inthe main game cuz it actually felt like fallout. everything else wasnt fallout it was a decent fps with a city builder and light rpg mechanics thats not fallout. oh i also said the voice acting was decent esp since they got both shepards to do the voices of nate and nora but i felt like they were wasted not being characters who had some actual personalities.
I had a similar experience during the first couple of hours, but after accepting that Fallout 4 is simply a different thing, I let this game take me on its' journey and finally understood how great it is in what it's trying to be.
@@youarealwayscorrect Fallout 4 isn't that bad to be honest.
it's just a bad Fallout.
but if i imagine the Fallout 4 we got, just with the little Fallout sauce actually in there, it could have been amongst the top game in the franchise.
the base is there and pretty promising, they just stopped before doing anything with it.
@Buttersaemmel the only "good fallout game" is Fallout 1, the rest just keep strongly deviating from the original idea. Personally, I am okay with it as long as the game is good.
The next Fallout game could be a GTA clone or whatever, but as long as it turns out well, I'll be satisfied. But that's just me.
Ew, nostalgia bias@@youarealwayscorrect
03:45:00 you can shoot Kent yourself the moment you enter the room as the Shroud. There's a funny reaction of everyone involved. Maximum psycho for sure
Haha awesome
I've spent more of my 578 hours playing fallout 4 making settlements,I know I'm the outline but it's my favorite thing to do. You can also make your settlements self-sufficient in one area like you were saying. I normally have 3 to 5 different farm settlement because you get the most resources from them if they focus on a few things.
Only 8 hours? I'm in.
Oh sweet, more material to paint Warhammer minis to
10/11/2024 Edit: Finished up an entire Tau Commander wooooooooo
I was thinking the same thing
Glad to hear someone else does this as well. Whitelight also is a good source of those
51:00 this moment bugs me so much because it is SO stupid. These guys want Shaun for his pristine pre-war dna. They even refer to your character as 'the backup', so clearly the adults would be useful too. is your plan to A) Wake them up, give them some coffee, explain that the world is a wasteland but you're here to take them to a safe, comfortable new home, or B) Try to take the baby by force and if that doesn't work murder 1 of the 3 known people that still has what you need, and make a lifeling enemy out of the last one.
Kellogg doing what he did was so colosally stupid that I can't take this story or world seriously in any way.
honestly, same. They have scientists, knowledgeable people, a facsimile of old world authority, and instead of using any of that to talk to reasonable pre-war people, they send in a "post world" merc and let him shoot a mother and let every other vault dweller die except the father/husband that watched him murder the wife/mom
so, so, so unbelievably wasteful and stupid
It's funny that you mention Batman during the Silver Shroud stuff. In BTAS, young Bruce watches a show with a hero that looks like the Shroud.
I think so many people critique bethesda in such depth because their old games made us all feel that the medium of videogames had incredible potential that had yet be reached, in a way that few if any other games did. But instead of trying to reach that potential, they have just dumbed down the games and added random features unrelated to the rest of the game to try to appeal to a wider audience.
That's exactly what they did. I would urge people to try and replay Skyrim without mods. That's where BGS started slipping, you can feel how "mass appeal" everything is.
@@ChiefCrewin It's BlackRock dude, not Bethesda. The story you are describing is a story that can be told for many game studios. Furthermore, everyone loved the WITCHER 3 but that was basically Assassin's creed game with Witcher senses pff! What a lazy boring game mechanic. That had all the hallmark main stream game mechanics, the quest icons and question marks. Furthermore Bethesda games are systems games, like simulations where you can have multiple quests running at one time, which is not the case with other games, the physics and the many moving parts is what Bethesda games are known for I think. Anyway, many of these studios have to borrow money, and are loaded with debt. It's something you hear about with Private Equity firms, and the push to live service is a trend everywhere, which is why you see the microtransactions, endless "updates" and "next gen updates" and endless patches that change the game play even (Cyberpunk2077 has went through multiple gameplay changing patches over the course of years, and then 2.0 and Phantom Liberty). It's not Todd Howards fault, or Bethesda's fault perse. If you read about private equity firms they buy up companies and then load them with debt and sabatoge then take the assets, these companies are being looted and plundered and then hung out like a corpse.
The Jet thing, even as a mistake, always seemed so blown out of proportion.
Everyone was like 'but the kid says he invented it!' and I'm just like, yeah? The narcissistic little jackass? Never seemed like a 'reliable narrator' and its very easy to just be like 'he found a formula and lied' or 'he made something similar to a thing that had existed' or any number of things.
Having continuity and established lore is important but little things that could have so many valid explanations being made out as huge examples of a gotcha is kind of dumb.
The Nate thinks executing civilians is funny thing is a much better example (and glad that was walked back quick) because thats like, hey, kind of important aspect to a character who's mental head space I'm supposed to inhabit. That would have been far more of an issue, IMO, if it was actually confrmed.
It's not just Jet. Jet is just a good example of Bethesda's fallout lore, where they obsessively bring back things and seem allergic to new ideas.
Every game has to have the enclave, has to have the brotherhood of steel, has to have supermutants and FEV. Coast to Coast, it's the same factions fighting over the same things. They brought Jet to their fallouts despite it really not making any sense that a drug that primarily exists to enslave a mining town in California would cross the entire continent to Washington D.C, and then in Fallout 4 they go ahead and just make it a pre-war drug.
Maybe they could've made a point about Myron being a liar with an overinflated ego, but that's not what they did, that's just fans attempting to fill the holes in Bethesda's own writing. They didn't intend to make a statement about Jet and Myron, they literally just lazily put it in their games because Jet is a drug in fallout.
@@doghat1619 Your literally just repeating what I said about jet back at me because you either didn't fully read what I said or your comprehension is lacking.
You also want to let me know its not jet, when again I clearly indicate there are other retcons and whatnot that they have done.
In fact, I even list a second example and how that one would have been bad.
I have to conclude its comprehension. You know keywords from my post but don't seem to know the content of it. That, or your a bot. Not sure, don't care really. Have fun.
im not annoyed at jet for myron thing. im annoyed at jet cuz it was said repeatedly by other people ya need brahim shit to produce jet and brahims only showed up after the bombs. but like idk maybe non mutant cows can make the right shit to make jet who knows. i think the jet was just a tipping point. my biggest grip with bethsada's lore is even after 200 years they refuse to allow humanity to hit post post apocaylpse to the point the entire east coast will never have a functioning society going and they are obsessed with the brotherhood of steel to the point the west coast which refuses to allow outsiders to join suddenly are powerful again cuz king arthur who isnt high elder and even if he as the council wouldnt let him go against the codex is thriving by not following the codex and allowing recruitment. but yes the jet thing is stupid. and emil deserves to be made fun of for the stupid executing civilians thing and i feel like people like to bring that up after the walk back cuz he keeps trying to insert dumb shit into the first 2 games. and also everyone was annoyed about the ncr being nuked by a dying bos in the show.
@@Kris-wo4pj I don't care.
And it shows@@artificersills
I know you’re known for your BIG retrospectives but this takes it to a whole new level. This should be called “The MASSIVE Fallout 4 Retrospective”.
Emil Pagliarulo is the _LEAD_ writer and designer of a studio that keeps letting all these silly little inconsistencies and poorly implemented retcons slip through. Todd Howard is in charge of him and all the teams decisions, which has led to a culture of fixing it later and doubling down on the mistake in the meantime. _Some_ of the Todd and Emil haters might blow it out of proportion and claim some wild personal grievances, but those two are _directly_ responsible for almost everything that comes out of that studio and _nothing_ will change as long as they still think there's nothing wrong at Bethesda.
(Personally I blame the accursed _Creation_ _Club_ for the downfall of Bethesda. It's just too tempting to monetize the hell out of it, and what does the community get back? A couple of $8 "quests" and $5 weapon skins in their brand new AAA title (Starfield) with no alternative in game skins, not even basic repaints.)
Honestly, I haven't seen anyone go "too far" with the Emil hate. As you say, he's in charge. Then when you hear him say in interviews he hates a centralized design document because it stifles creativity, you wonder how they're able to even ship a working project .
@ChiefCrewin watch any Fallout 3 or 4 breakdown by Creetosis and count the number of Emil tangents he goes on.
While I don't think his criticisms are wrong, it can feel like beating a dead horse after the third time hearing the same arguments
@@RevulsiveLooper Creetosis is one of those youtubers I find myself agreeing with most of the time but then his tone/attitude turns me off.
But, as Bethesda has demonstrated over the years, as long as money keeps coming out just keep kicking that horse.
Difference between Fridge Boy and USS Constitution is the amount of effort put into it:
Fridge Kid is just an extremely basic escort quest with little to no logic behind it. And worse, as everyone knows, it doesn't fit into the world and it's rules.
Hell, escorting Prestons' Minutemen to Sanctuary for example at least gives us couple of extra dialogue lines on the way.. And moves the plot forward.
And while slapping Museum Constitution full of Robots and rocket engines is a different kind of weird, it's the kind of "technological absurdity" that makes sense in Fallout World. It doesn't need justification to exist.
a new superrad video a week before the new dragon age comes out? the world is healing
That aged like fine old milk
You uh...you haven't looked into Veilguard have you
We could’ve had a secret ending where Nate starves to death in the memory den because he refuses to leave the memory of his pre-war life.
Imagine the breakdown he has when he sees his wife and (infant) son again, before the world went to hell.
silent hill 2 ass ending jeez that's depressing
TLDR; I thought this was a super insightful and thorough vid that echoed a lot of my problems and thoughts that I had about Fallout 4 and their worldbuilding/NPC flatness, especially as a New Vegas fan. To me, F04 was a game wherein we were given a role to play rather than given the opportunity to find a role of our own to explore.
While I could write a dissertation, I’ll spare you the suffering of the formatting of YT comments. I thought this video was spectacular and really resonated with the concerns and disappointments you raised about the lack of Companion/NPC depth and the overall ability to enmesh yourself within the world created in FO4. My reference point for what I expect from a Fallout game is New Vegas because I *truly* felt like I was a guy being a dude that accidentally inherited a wasteland and its problems. I felt deeply connected to my companions and like I was *actually* learning how to be a person again in a world that just tried to kill me. I was so disappointed with FO4, that after I got the different endings, I didn’t want to touch it again.
It felt really hollow to me. You never had to choose if you wanted to send power to the Strip or Freeside, whether you wanted to flood a farm with radiation to save people trapped in a vault, and you definitely didn’t go on a hero’s journey trying to find a brain for your favorite robotic dog homie. Where was the underlying class struggle? Where were the ugly truths of surviving nuclear warfare? Why was this apocalypse so “lighthearted”?
Ultimately, I feel like the best part of New Vegas (and what I miss the most in FO4) is the diversity in personality, emotion, and motivation of the NPCs we encounter/recruit. We could’ve had new iterations of people like the King, Old Lady Gibson-all of them with their own extremely developed personal histories that existed long before you and will continue to go on after you. The FO4 follower flavor quests really missed out on allowing the player to get an internal glimpse of their companions' lives and I think that’s the true disservice.
War has changed and I don’t like the way it looks now.
Thank you for your insight, now on to the New Vegas Retrospective!
I played 100 hours of fo4 the week it came out and not much of it since then. I exhausted the game to its full extent then. And now, i only played Starfailed for like, maybe 10 hours max? because they learned literally NOTHING aside from "don't voice the mc in big RPG". like its LITERALLY the same game, 10 years later. its tragic and embarrassing. Especially next to BG3, which proves that if your game is GOOD people will turn up for it, you don't need to dumb down a game to appeal to the widest audience.
If you ran out of stuff to do in fo4 within a hundred hours but not previously fallout games your lying.. content wise fo4 has way more and more repayable content. Recently played through all recent fallout games the only one I didn’t enjoy was 76 due to it just not feeling like a fallout game
@Povertycab I just didn't enjoy fo4 for the reasons mentioned in this video. It just felt repedatove and boring after 100 hours
@ that’s kinda my point, exploration wise it’s more to do and see in fo4 than NV and probably 3. At 100 hours a majority of story games get old
@@Povertycabthat's... completely untrue. There's no way FO4 has more to experience than NV or 3, and if by pure numerical value it is true, it certainly doesn't feel like it.
@@ChiefCrewin it just is, alot of npcs in f03 you cant interact with. while alot in 4 you can. things are more detailed in 4 look wise, plus you can build and change areas in 4 while 3 is nothing
this game always felt like when youre eating a bowl of cheap cereal, only to realise that its going soggy and gross too fast, so you barely have any chance to appreciate what is actually enjoyable about it before being left with an unappealing, disappointing slurry.
on the new Power armour, If they had nate go up to it because garvey and friends didnt know how to operate it and have him go "Hmmmm the generator has degraded too much to be used, but I bet I could cores as a back up" then go looking for one would alleviate that issue and have that busted old frame be the only frame available until you side with the brotherhood or find a fully functioning one later.a couple of very small changes fixes it quite nicely.
like a lot of FO4 it feels like they decided to just send the first draft of things with out revisions.
Huh. Damaged power armour frames. Such a simple concept. And one that even seems feasible to add.
Settlements are a choice. You only have to build the few things for the main quest.
You can take the local leader perks and have the settlements linked to each other for trade lines so they all share food water and scrap. You can slowly take over the wasteland without being violent at all. Nearly every settlement has the material needed to make the generator and radio you need to summon your first settler, from there you can send him as a trade line.
The robotics dlc takes this to a whole new level with custom deathbots as your provisioners.
All the common junk you need for armor or weapons can be bought as shipments from merchants. Trashcan Carla herself sells most of them and she comes to Sanctuary often.
Add the short bunker hill quest to set up trader posts and you have even more people visiting you with stuff to sell.
I spent a long ass time in fallout 4 BECAUSE of the settlement system.
The base looting and shooting is only so fun. Setting up the castle to automatically power its traps and turrets and lock all doors when it is attacked via alarms, settler guards, and logic gates is way cooler to me.
I have a video on my channel where I spent legit 5 months or so making a crazy intracate vault base with a shit ton of silly stuff to explore and a roller coaster conveyor that rides through it
I enjoy the video, and I don't exactly think highly of Fallout 4 without a solid modlist, but I do have to point out that at the start of the game, you seem to misinterpret what's happening. Nate's intro speech was him rehearsing a speech he was planning to give at the veteran's hall, which is what Nora is supposed to be explaining when she cuts in. It wasnt really meant to be a joke. No judgement if thats how it felt to you.
I've just been re-watching the video before bed, and that reading of the scene rubbed me the wrong way one too many times, I guess XD
Edit - Nick pretending to be Kellog *was* just a joke
A part of fallout 4 that goes unappreciated is how they insert the history of Boston into the game. You have Hancock who carrys some of the ideals of the real John Hancock,or the entire faction of the minutemen. And the cabot family? They're descendants of a figure in Boston's history. That's not even the beginning of historical references. Even if you hate every part of fallout 4 I hope you can appreciate that out of every fallout game,it takes advantage of the setting the most. (I also love fallout 4,it's my fav)
To me that part is one big redeeming part of FO4 for me. I have some personal ties to the city so seeing the level that they represented the city itself and some of the subsequent integrations and references to rl history hit a sweet spot for me personally (i am well aware that this is not the case for many people)
@julzsadventuresinmusic7492 yeah if they ever do a fallout game in texas I hope they give our history the same treatment.
The Institute can't cure Father because he IS the cancer
Thanks for making my Saturday again. I know this game ain't exactly the most exciting thing to get through and I can't even imagine the hours of editing afterwards, but you still put out an excellent video here.
🤯
if they remastered NV on the FO4 engine it would be extremely cheap for them and would prolly become GOTY
There's a mod project in the works for this, it's called F4NV or something like that
sean is the embodiment of "no it's the children who are wrong"
I once did a playthrough where every settlement I had to help, I killed. Preston not once catches on that there's a link between them asking for help, and me reporting them dead. Bethesda with Fallout 4 really didn't want you to think outside the box, and had no contingencies (on average) if you did
Even Dean Domino admitted he wasnt certain how his ghoulism works and he was one for 200 years
For the Kid in a fridge point I agree that one goofy quest isn’t the end of the world but that’s not why people have a problem with it, they have a problem with it because 1.Retcons aside the quest still makes zero logical sense whatsoever and 2. The developers very clearly want us to take the world of fallout 4 seriously with the synth moral dilemma, companion quests, final faction choice, attempt at emotional connection to Sean, etc but then they make these cartoon BS quests that make the world feel ridiculous and I can’t take anything seriously at that point when there’s dozens of kid in a fridge esque moments. Also the quest itself is trying to be serious and stupid at the same time like the option of child slavery isn’t exactly a knee slapper if u ask me, plus your companions have plenty to say in a VERY serious fashion if you treat the kid poorly so no it’s not just that the quest is silly that’s why people hate it, it’s the greater context that makes Kid In a fridge the culmination of a lot of narrative issues with Fallout 4 that makes people hate it.
I love how the thumbnail shows off the one undeniable part of fallout 4 that everyone agrees is pretty cool.
The spark particle effect?
I hate the power armour in 4!
@@UlyssesCrab How?
@@frej7422 because it sucks!
I have to sit through an annoying as hell animation every time I want to get in or out, if makes my character floaty to control, I have to keep it fuelled or it’s basically unusable, the integrated UI looks ridiculous and is ugly… I have more reasons but I’m sure that’s enough for a UA-cam comment
Fallout 4 was the game where I felt the shift with Bethesda, at first it wasn't entirely terrible. I feel like Fallout 4 is still a fun game, but it's where things didn't entirely feel like Fallout anymore. Certain Aesthetic choices, tone shift, the voiced protag which resulted in far less depth and dialog choices, less Skill checks and the outright removal of skills in favor of the Special System and Perks. It's still a fun Shooter in a decent Bethesda world (The Glowing Sea is probably my favorite area in any Fallout game because of how absolutely devastated it is.), but it lacks a lot in the RPG department. It was a step down, but at that time I still believed they could recover and they did slightly with Far Harbor... then it was downhill from there: Nuka World, 76 (Which I think improved some things I enjoyed the setting, the return of durability on gear, some of the weapons (Black Powders being the most fun imo), armor and enemies. But the online live service component absolutely killed any improvement I felt.), Starfield (Butchered imo the last great thing Bethesda had going for them, World Design. In favor of wide as an ocean deep as a puddle procedural generation.) I went from being optimistic for the Elder Scrolls 6 to probably not even going to bother trying it on Game Pass, Especially if the setting is in fact Hammerfell. They have this incredible Fantasy Series, and they might make the setting boring human lands for the third game in a row.
You probably know this, but you can actually skip some of this by walking to the next memory before you are told to. Saving some time in the process. However, you can not skip the last one.
A must during the memory den
Quick note about your section on Deacon. While i do agree his mysterious nature does make him slightly more appealing, i think you might be falling right into his facade by the last affinity conversation. I think its very likely that story about his lover and the gang he killed is also a lie. For one, we can go to university point and not read a single entry to ever suggest that gang existed in the first place. Also, if Deacon didn't know his lover was a synth, how did the Deathclaws know she was a synth? Its not some dirty secret someone can find out by looking through their previous history. The whole point is that they are indistinguishable from humans and the only surefire way to tell the difference is by killing the synth. So how did they find out but Deacon never did? His whole lesson was that any sad backstory or idea could be fake, and i think its pretty naive to assume that because he just says, "No, but this one is real though" that it actually is. Thats the useful thing about lies. You don't have to reveal afterwards that its a lie.
I have been waiting 2 years for this video. My body is ready. 🤙🤙
18:15 I actually really enjoyed the companion app. I never had the pip boy enclosure, but I loved having my map open next to me as I explored.
Just got home from work, thank you for making the rest of my day unproductive.
I love video essays like this, especially those that are made with extreme effort and dedication. Amazing video to watch while I'm on my way to work or listen to while I'm trying to sleep. It's been 5 days and I've finally finish this video. Keep up the good work!!
Appreciate the video and agree with a decent proportion of it overall, though I view some of it slightly differently overall.
Most disappointing part is that you completely skipped over Survival mode to the extent it doesn't sound like you've ever played it. In my opinion it makes an awful lot of the game's design make a lot more sense, massively improves on how difficulty is handled in prior games, and generally contradicts your conclusion - it was a labour of love released free of charge, knowing full well its harsh features would turn away large swathes of the audience from ever playing it.
Do you have any idea how happy i am right now? I use your new vegas retrospective to fall asleep to because I have so much on my mind all the time (undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety, stress, and being a student paramedic) and your NV retrospect has helped me fall asleep countless times over the past year. I am beyond happy that you have posted an equally detailed retrospect of my favourite fallout game. Thank you for helping me❤
btw you can skip to the end of the memory den sequence by just running past everything
Length 8:30:11
Looks like strand type videos are back on the menu, boys
This retrospective is longer that the main story
Yeah
Sick burn lol
You know it's a good video when you can start it, go to sleep and get your full 8 hours, wake up and its still playing
On my one and only playthrough of Fallout 4, I kept the fact that I was looking for my son a complete secret. No one knew what I was doing out there. Then one NPC wound up saying "Now you can find Shawn." And I nearly quite playing the game at that point. Interplay would have never made that mistake.
Then I got that DLC that's like Beyond Thunderdome. I raided a few places, then later, I meet up with Preston again and he's really mad at me. He tells me I should be ashamed of myself and states that he wants nothing to do with me. But I hadn't done any of my missions with him, so I started taking quests witt him developing a Bethesda split personality. One momment he's telling me how nice it is to see me, the next he's disgusted by me.
Killian from Fallout 1's Junk Town was better designed than this. Killian and Preston are similar characters. If you don't do what Killian needs, he hates you and all future quests provided by him, even trade, is stonewalled by the player. But Preston's outrage is purely superficial.
God forbid you the game have replayability by having player choice stonewall you from accessing missions, like a proper Fallout game. No, Bethesda wants ONE playthrough, where player choice doesn't even exist, even in Fallout 3. And you're able to experience everything in the game, from the first playthrough.
It should be an embarrasment that a 20+ year old game is more next gen than the the new game, within the same IP.
The only thing Fallout 3 and 4 have going for them is improved graphics. Their VATS system sucks.
They just planted Fallout into an Elder's Scrolls sandbox.
I'd rather NOT have a huge map, if that means I have more player choice.
In my mind, if Fallout isn't a top down turn based RPG, then it needs to be an immersive sim that would play as a post apocalyptic Deus Ex 1 and Mandkind Devided.
Anything other than that is just laziness or a complete lack of understanding what Fallout even is.
let's take diamond city then:
everyone in the whole state is nervous because of the institue, people are going missing and you can't trust anyone.
and now YOU, a total stranger, are snooping around in town obviously looking for something or someone, but you don't tell anyone (or your anwsers sound oddly suspicious).
this whole situation could've let to tension between the player and the residents.
now do you try to proof that you're not from the institute in a questline for when the player acted this way?
do you fail to proof it, get banned from the city, and now you have to follow another path to find Shauwn?
maybe you could alternativley sneak in again at night, if you got a stealth build?
maybe you're so suspicious that they start to attack you and you have to shoot your way out (or you attack first)?
that's 3 different ways (on top of the intendet) just from your decission to not tell anyone, how this whole questchain could've split.
4 different ways even to then go about it.
i'm not saying my different paths here are well written, those situation definetly need to be written and build out better, but that's not my job and i just wanted to show how easy someone without creativity like me can make this more interesting and give the player real choice.
heck if a player doesn't want to tell, then let them take speakchecks to decide if they become suspicious or not and you make the build more important again.
@Buttersaemmel Exactly. Everything in Behesda Fallout is sloppy. There's nothing of interest in any of it.
@@Buttersaemmel for sure.
The Fallout 3 & New Vegas retrospectives were awesome works of art. But this is your magnum opus. A very thorough dive past the polished surface level of Fallout 4 that goes deep into the murkry depths of issues, mistakes, & oversights made by a developer who was once the best in the industry. With all that being said, I still love Fallout 4. But, I love more what it could have become with further TLC.
Thanks man, really appreciate you saying that.
The optimistic vibe of FO4 is a direct result of the protagonist having a grounded foundation of a life of pre-war luxury.
It’s hard to sell life ending doom when you play a protagonist so removed from want that even free Vault access is an uninteresting chore they’d probably pass on if the game allowed it.
I also feel that with the exception of New Vegas you’ve always been pigeon holed into the kind of character you’re supposed to play and believing otherwise is revisionism at best.
The first 3 Fallouts you play a character removed from the violence of the outside until the game forces you outside and all 3 by default start with a sense of right/wrong and justice, again to believe otherwise is head cannon not supported by the lore.
on the settlement building, I am the type of player who enjoyed building up a base
I also am the type who enjoys building up self sufficient settlements to "help" the npcs
but in fo4, it feels like a slog, a good settlement gives me, and the npcs, nothing.
I ended up always picking like... 2 spots to be my bases, first in the early game it was the gas station, because sanctuary was stolen by npcs I couldnt tell no, and later in the game it was the alleyway in the middle of the map, and I made some very pretty bases there, especially with mods to let me phase objects half into the walls. But again, I wanted a home base, ala the lucky 38 but with more customization, not really a big list of empty areas that *could* have been interesting but instead are mostly empty so *I* can do the devs work and make a town, really hollow.
I disagree with the point that Skyrim didn’t have handcrafted content cause it had plenty. It did have radiant quests but those felt more like side stuff. I do agree with a lot of points on Fallout 4. I liked Far Harbor but the game itself was disappointing. It lacked what I loved from 3 and NV. It felt like it wanted to be different games. The colors and the factions made it want to be a more lively world but they also wanted it to be a wasteland. They wanted a survival crafting looter game but they also wanted an rpg. As such both sides end up feeling lesser.
It has the content but it definitely suffered from the lack of
Junk having a new mechanical depth is a nice feature in concept, but in practice it just goes to bog down the game for me. Even if I were to look up what exactly I needed to craft something (mod, settlement piece, etc) and tag all the recquired items so that the junk I need is highlighted, it still incentivises me to grab everything.
A singular item requires like 4 or 3 ingredients on average, so if I beforehand tag all the junk items that have atleast one of those and collect them only, my inventory is still goint to be bloated with junk. I have once found 20 different pieces of junk that all have steel, but none of them had the screws or adhesive i needed. After I finally return home with everything I need, and craft what I wanted, I almost immedietely need to do the whole cycle again because a new thing I want to craft requires Nuclear Material that I somehow didnt get from the 20 different steel items i found. Why do all this when I can just grab anything and everything I see and most likely get all the things for the item I want, plus whatever I might want to craft later?
Now this is just personal experience, but I really believe that junk being so required for any kind of non-leveling progress bogs it down so hard. Cool weapon or armor i found i might want to give to my settlers; oop too much junk. A PA piece that I need to complete a set; oop too much junk.
Its junk all the way down. The Junk must flow. Too much junk makes Nate a Dull boy.
General, we received word of a new 8 hour retrospective that just dropped I’ll mark it on your map
1:32 I do like the weapon modification system. it makes it feel like you are scavenging your weapons together, and the modifications allow for customization and also provide an increase in power. It actually made me excited to find scrap that I knew would have the right materials I needed for the next upgrade.
youtubers always pushing for that 8 minute mark
4:28:40 you can't justify anything by saying "it's just a joke".
As if there is no way to put a joke into this game, without making it a lore and immersion breaking moment.
I clearly say it's still critiquable
@@SuperRADLemonsure, and I agree. But when something can be explained with "this is just a joke". Then everything can be explained this way. Then there's no limits anymore, and no reason to build a consistent and involved story, just put in as many "jokes" as you can and call it a game. I'm not against the jokes, I'm just want the quests be quests (not necessarily all serious) and jokes be good (or lame) jokes weaved into the narrative.
It's a framing device to explain why something happened. We can still then look at why, even as a joke, it was done poorly
...have there always been ads every five minutes? I don't remember there being so many.
Ads are kinda curated based on the user. I still place them on the timeline, but you won't see all of them. If you skip em you see less even if they are applied to the timeline. I also space them out more the further you get into the video so you shouldn't get them every 5 minutes
@@SuperRADLemon No worries. It makes me feel good knowing channels I enjoy can bring in revenue in so many different ways. This time it was just slightly jarring. I listen during work through earbuds or while I'm driving to my next appointment so there were a few "Oh my god, another one?" moments. Pull the phone out. Hit skip. No problem.
I think the weirdest thing about Eddie Winters is his clothes are perfectly clean and ironed.
I was LITERALLY thinking about Cass while you were talking about Cait's questline! Like obviously both have a moral setup, Cait's continuation of drugs to keep her strong power wise or clean her so she can live and set up her own life on her own terms and Cass's perpetuation of violence for revenge on her family business or letting her realize that death isn't always a necessary justice. But for Cait they didn't want to give you too many options it seems, they wanted you to go with their choice of "Drugs are bad and you need to be clean" with no alternative. It could have been so much cooler for there to be alternative perks given depending on how you approached and dealt with the companion quests, like how Raul gives you a repair perk or a combat perk depending on what you choose for him to follow for the rest of his ghoul life after telling you about his own past. Companions in Fallout 4 are just one-note cookie cutter stereotypes, sure they may have like one or two things that when you put them up with head canon interpretations they can be really cool, unless they're Nick Valentine then they are always cool, but outside of that I never liked any companion beyond the perk they could give me when I was done making them happy and dump them into Starlight Drive-In to never see again. It also sucks how hamfisted certain companions are pushed onto you, like Dogmeat appearing miraculously just to advance the Kellogg questline or when both Nick and Piper basically puppy dog eye you to guilt you into choosing one of them to bring to Goodneighbor for the brain lane quest, giving a sad but "Alright but you know where I'll be" answer when you deny them walkies.
Wild Wasteland didn't originate from New Vegas, yes... BUT...
Bethesda Fallout treat the whole game as Wild Wasteland.
Longer than each Joseph Anderson's FO4 videos combined?
impressive
Watching danse make a big show of putting on his helmet for it to just not appear while he walks along acting like everything is fine is fallout to the core right?
Thanks for articulating so much about my frustrations with this game that I love and hate can’t stop playing but don’t feel like I’m playing anything anymore just motions… I’m glad it’s not me becoming boring or playing it wrong
Fallout 4 was my introduction to Fallout. I loved it.
Many years later I played New Vegas and 2, which then lead to me becoming a huge fan of RPG games in general.
Now I don't love Fallout 4.
(edit) Except for Codsworth. He will always be up there right next to Mr. New Vegas on the silly dudes scale
Love your retrospectives! Excited to spend the next 8 1/2 hours of my life playing city skylines with you in the background
The Shroud isnt batman, hes The Shadow. its an old radio play (much in the same tone as the shroud) There was also a movie of it starring alec baldwin pretty decent movie if you like cheezy stuff. "what evil lurks in the hearts of men? only the shadow knows!"
Lemme know when you get to the part where I mention this
@@SuperRADLemon adhd won and i got distracted by digimon. Ill take yer word for it.
Meeting Shaun is especially more tragic depending on how many scars your character has. For me in my playthrough I had no mask or helmet on and you can just see the trauma and shock in my characters face both emotionally and visually because of the fact his face was covered in bullet graze marks and burn marks from his time searching.
@2:30 I don't see a capitalist commentary for 1 and 2, but 2 DEFINITELY felt like a commentary on imperialism and expansionism, and how America in particular acts on the international (or inter-settlement/faction) that were brought up again and definitely took a more economic streak in New Vegas (especially when it came to groups like the Crimson Caravan and the Van Graffs), and I think those 3 were also heavy on the understanding of corporatism's role in all that. 3 and 4 didn't seem to have much of that though there are still moral questions... Not that it matters much.
I would have preferred the whole series played up those differences.. where you could see how groups and areas interact, territorialism and the like. New Vegas kinda did that with the post-game slide show, but I would love to actually see and experience those differences in more ways than a loose (and pretty consequence free) affinity system like in Vegas.
I think letting the raiders from Nukaworld into the Commonwealth is the closest that ever gets but that was so cartoonish it barely counts.
Since Bethesda is unlikely to ever do that, are there any games that do that people can suggest? Where you can see things like contrasting economic, cultural or social environments? Like.. if we helped the Legion, there actually IS an impact on the strength/number of raiders in their territory, but you can't buy stimpacks in their territory, type of thing?
Those that the Institute replace know they are Synths. Those who don't know they're a synth are escapees. Amelia Stockten is an esaped synth adopted by old man Stockten.
You're one of the only video essayists whose opinions on the Fallout franchise I actually agree with. A lot of the popular Fallout essays/retrospectives come off as whiny but you have really solid analysis, loved this video
Which are "whiny? lol
What is "whiney" to you?
Nuka World should have had an option to declare war on the raiders therein and create a military/espionage campaign against the park, giving the Minutemen the depth and development they so critically lack the entire game
brother make a superrad big retrospective fallout 1 and 2 plsss
One day
I assume that's how long the video will be, right?...Right?!@SuperRADLemon
The reason I don't hate the memory den that much is that you can skip through it pretty quickly on repeat playthrough. You don't have to actually stick around and watch all the memories, if you keep going the path will keep building in front of you, the only one you actually have to watch is the last one. So, just a small correction.
Crazy, almost overlooked the video in my list. Off I go fall asleep to it 100 times. Got it finished in November then^^
12:50 it was not handled at all.
Aside from stating that they don't care about the lore and will change it at will.
The point is not in making a mistake. The point is they do it on a regular basis. Making mistakes seems to be their modus operandi. That's where the hate comes from. They almost f***ing it all up on purpose. For sh!ts and giggles.
Playing the game with the pip boy app open on my iPad honestly changed the whole thing for me. It was so quick and convenient, to the point that I don't enjoy playing without it nearly as much.
I will say I’m probably in the minority but I LOVED the crafting system, cause it was a fun way incentivize grabbing junk that in previous games I thought ‘man, i wish i could build a scope or use some of this garbage to help me out here’
The looter shooter thing made way more sense to me when I found out they brought on some Destiny devs in for the gunplay
I’ve never really seen the appeal of a stealth archer in Skyrim, can someone please tell me why it’s that fun in the game?
Ah, finally something I can watch the entirety of on break at work.
Far Habor
Shipbreaker can be triggered usually near the Lumber Mill using the pipboy or by following Longfellows quest line (I also used Nick, so pipboy for me). That thing is one h3ll of a bullet sponge. Longfellow can give you a hint to Shipbreaker's weakness, but the weakness still isn't that weak so up to you if you want to.
And the quests for Far Habor effect how the Habormen treat the synths if you get Dema to confess later on. You have to do a load of side quests or they'll destroy Arcadia and the only way to get enough is to complete the Captain's Dance (the Mirelurk Queen). Of course, if you don't get/want Dema to confess then they are optional.
I think this is the longest video I've ever seen pop up in my subscription list
You missed his 12 hours huh?
he has longer. also dont look up skyrim retrospectives one dude has a 20 hour two parter on it.
@@Kris-wo4pj Yeah that is Patrician...I like all the longform takes.....
You know, not too long ago I was playing a modded run of the game, and when I got to Vault 88, the raiders there were non hostile. I opened the door without attacking them, and found out that the three raiders at the door are scripted to walk inside the vault, but then just hang around in the room beyond, pacing around and fighting any ghouls that they see. But nobody playing the base game would ever see this, due to raiders being hostile be default. Could be that there was supposed to be a trigger or something to let them get inside, but was switched off.
4:27:10 "It's a joke quest in an absurdist fantasy that has been absurd since the very first entry" has very "It's a movie about space wizards and laser swords" energy.
In other words, it feels like you're saying the criticism of this quest is ridiculous because the series has always had ridiculous elements. It makes it sound like you arbitrarily don't think this one instance is worthy of criticism despite your previous statements to the contrary. And saying that people who don't like this quest's existence don't respect the work the developers put in is disingenuous. It's not a criticism of the development overall, it's a criticism of the writing and the creative choices that led to this quest being in the game and making it to launch.
If it's a joke quest (because we can't say that definitively), then it's one that didn't land well for a large portion of the audience. The fact that it exists makes the Fallout world worse as a result, and if it were removed entirely from the game, it would be a net positive.
I make it very clear that the quest can be criticized and I am just offering rational
@@SuperRADLemon I appreciate you taking the time to respond to this, as I know there are a lot of other comments. While you did say it could be criticized, it does feel like you think people are criticizing it without merit, and there's plenty of merit to those criticisms. The setting has elements which are far-fetched or ridiculous, but that does not mean logic ends when you boot up the game.
I do agree that some people get a little too bent out of shape about this quest existing. However, I don't think that excuses the poor quality of the quest's writing and the logic problems you have to ignore for the quest to make sense. This quest could have made sense and still worked as a joke quest if they said Billy had only been trapped in the fridge for a day or two.
Again, thank you for taking the time to read my comment and respond. I genuinely appreciate it when a content creator shows they're willing to consider dissenting opinions and engage with them.
No I think it's definitely worth the criticism, my issue is that people get irrationally angry with the quest in ways that are unproductive
Bro is REALLY trying to stretch for them ads huh
(I love you and how you always upload these exactly when I am in bed to watch them)