FO4's World Design Failure

[HuemangeBeans]

This may be a controversial topic, but it's really more of a lament. I'm giving FO4, the only Beth game I haven't completed since Morrowind, another try with Magnum Opus wabbajack list. It's reminding me why I haven't ever seen the ending. The world design is confusing, interior and exterior locations both. From the pastel blue and yellow palette used, to the odd oval-shaped windows, to the too-tiny interiors where a skyscaper level consists only of a single room with hallway attached. Then onto exteriors where the tops of buildings are connected to freeways and each other with wooden planks to create a labyrinthine network that prevents the player from getting their bearings and is not believable in the slightest, every building has an extensive fire escape stairway, and groups of enemies wait in closets three stories off the ground so they can pop-out in a recreation of a light-gun shooting gallery.

 

What gets me the most, what really kills it for me, is you have 4 or 5 competing enemy enemy factions literally sitting on each other's lap in order to ambush the player. I leave Cabot House, to have the security robots run up the street to fight Super Mutants on patrol. After clearing out the mutants on the street and the bots that aggroed me because a companion's stray shot barely nicked their health bar, I enter a building to get jumped by seven or so raiders, one with a missle launcher waiting just on the other side of the door. Clear them out, to go downstairs and use a key to unlock a door and exit, where I'm crouched on the other side of the door in sneak mode and still another group of super mutants ambush me before I can take a step.

 

Enemy encounters are so frequent and buildings so tightly packed together and networked into each other there's no way to get bearing for direction, to make a distinction between one street or building from another. It's not the least bit believable in a real-world scenario. Gunners, Mutants, Bandits, Brotherhood, Ghouls, and Synths couldn't all coexist in this seemingly unending trench warfare from street to street for more than a couple days. Instead, the situation would quickly resolve itself and result in the scenario where each faction would have it's own section of the city warded off and protected against intrusion from other factions. There'd be a super mutant section of the city, a section overrun by ghouls, a section barricaded off by bandits. Not a situation where super mutants are guarding the entrance and exit doorways for bandits and every street is another faction embroiled in a skirmish war with each other.

 

It's not just implausible, but impossible how enemies are distributed throughout Fallout 4's world. Even for a videogame, it doesn't take into account how the field of battle functions in the slightest. Idk how internal testing didn't catch this glaring game design problem... j/k.

[HuemangeBeans]

'Bout 20 hours in, thinking of throwing in the towel. I miss the kill-cam from NV, where even outside V.A.T.S. you'd be rewarded with a little cinematic if you scored a nice head-shot. That's been completely removed, most likely because enemies with 10x's the HP are mixed in with regular enemies for some reason. The combat loses a lot of intensity, headshots are not as lethal to the player or to NPC's as they should be and the game feels much more slow-paced and unreal as a result. Feels like shooting targets at a range, not things that are supposed to be alive within a virtual world.

 

Then there's the super mutants with bottlecap mines. Who are 'bout 8ft tall, and can somehow become completely invisible and totally silent to seemingly spawn out of thin-air to deliver a one-shot kill to the player after they've spent 5-10 minutes clearing out the other enemies. That's fun, right? It makes sense that super mutants put aside their feasting on human flesh while bathing in radiation to learn about the safety procedures of building and using high-explosive weaponry? You could hear a creature that big breathing from 10ft away, let alone move. The two 125lb girls following me stomp around like elephants while a giant 500lb 8ft tall super mutant just got done with ballerina practice and has been studying the ranger arts of moving silently through the wilderness for the past three decades while undergoing rigorous training in explosives and demolitions?

 

Who does the sound design and concept creation phase of an enemy like this and doesn't see a problem, where every other game that has kamikaze enemies uses weak enemies that can be killed in a shot or two while FO4 thinks to make their totally silent and invisible 8ft tall suicide bombers into walking tanks that take a nuke to kill in time? How did this game get positive reviews when basic common-sense game design stuff is thrown out the window to create anti-fun one-shot unavoidable death, in an RPG?

 

No logic was applied to the consistency of FO4's gameworld. I thought...magnum opus, almost 800 mods, that's gonna fix all this game's problems and it's going to be awesome. Darn. I'll probably try one of the total conversion zombie mods, instead.

[HuemangeBeans]

I'd guess they had to put cheap shots like SM exploders and the ol' fast-travel into landmine fields because the firefights lack the intensity of FO3 and NV. In those games, you had to end combat in seconds, or you'd get shot to death. In FO4 the player can sit there munching bloatfly carcasses and out regen incoming small arms fire. We're probly lucky bandits don't have brahmin burgers, it'd be a stalemate. There isn't the same sense of danger from immediate death by headshot crits as in the earlier two FO's, so it's a trade-off.

Edited March 16, 2023 by HuemangeBeans

[fraquar]

The issue with this game is the further you go away from the Ground Zero event you should see one of two things:

a) Some semblence that society has rebuilt itself.

or

b) A scenario where EVERYTHING is scarce, like Caveman scarce. Spend two weeks trying to find some flint for an arrow scarce.

 

You don't see EITHER in Fallout 4, a world 210 years removed from armageddon.

 

The one thing it has going for it is the Settlement Building system. Though far from perfect, you at least have the ability to transform a small portion of the worldspace as you see fit - not like anyone in the last 210 years has even tried.....

Edited March 17, 2023 by fraquar

[showler]

The best way to deal with Fallout's time problem is to imagine that there were multiple interceding incidents in the meantime that destroyed whatever they had succeeded in building. Such as when the Institute destroyed the attempt to build a proper regional government in the Commonwealth.

 

Fallout lore has many such incidents mentioned and it seems the only time progress actually sticks is when the player character is around to intervene.

[HuemangeBeans]

The best way to deal with Fallout's time problem is to imagine that there were multiple interceding incidents in the meantime that destroyed whatever they had succeeded in building. Such as when the Institute destroyed the attempt to build a proper regional government in the Commonwealth.

 

Fallout lore has many such incidents mentioned and it seems the only time progress actually sticks is when the player character is around to intervene.

I like that idea. There's gotta be some reason for all those competing groups to be in constant conflict, like a search for the One Ring scenario. I can see why they did it, so there's constant gunfire and explosions happening in the distance as you explore. I can also see how they really worked to recreate the Boston skyline, how the building actually look now compared to how they would appear as ruins. I can admire that, although I still get lost walking across the street. The Magnum Opus modlist is nice, also. It would take me 6 months to build a setup like that on my own. So I've warmed up to the game, it does even out a bit after lvl 20 or so with the difficulty balance. Wabbajack breathing new life into some of my fav ol' Beth games is really saving the day while the industry churns out awful games on an assembly line. Sure, 3 paragraphs griping about FO4, it's still a great game. I'm not even playing modern releases, they might as well be trying to sell snake venom.

[Moksha8088]

It's just a game. Real life would be nowhere near as imaginative.

 

BTW, quest and advanced companion mods are what breathes new life into Bethesda games.

[fraquar]

The best way to deal with Fallout's time problem is to imagine that there were multiple interceding incidents in the meantime that destroyed whatever they had succeeded in building. Such as when the Institute destroyed the attempt to build a proper regional government in the Commonwealth.

 

Fallout lore has many such incidents mentioned and it seems the only time progress actually sticks is when the player character is around to intervene.

Still, at the end of the day what you see is what you see - and you see no evidence whatsoever they were actually building/rebuilding anything.

It's a world space that hasn't really evolved AT ALL in 210 years.

It's what you'd see if you waltzed out of the Vault in 2079....

 

You need something to make imagination plausible. There is nothing here to even latch on to that this society was actually moving forward for an imaginary event to squash it. Even the housing construction site north of Taffington Boathouse - it's a relic of the Pre-War era.

 

That is my whole point. Until they make the effort to do something like you describe, it's pointless (other than as a money grab) to keep making iterations of this franchise even further away from the Ground Zero event in the exact same vain.

 

Added: The only thing I can see that is evidence that anyone was trying to do anything prior to your arrival is this:

a) The Railroad having a nice spread in the The Switchboard, until they got routed.

b) The Nakano residence, where they obviously fixed/maintained and likely improved on the boat - it actually is the only boat in the entire Commonwealth that works....

Edited April 1, 2023 by fraquar

[showler]

Diamond City? University Point? Quincy and the Minute Men? The Castle? That nice little town where you kill everybody because they're murdering nutjobs? Goodneighbor?

[xrayy]

my 2 cents:

- i do not recommend to use collections. simple reason you should check and test all your mods personally on your pc first. if you do not, you will end up in problems you cannot solve because you do not understand what you have modded without testing and if or why sth. acts strange.

- you can change factions behavior - please not with a collection and test! there are mods providing exactly these features. but you must understand how they work.

- this game is entertainment for most players. no sufficient enemy supply no fun. so what is you expectation? as i said you can change all that (including factions and enemies) for your need or liking. be patient and do your homework and you will love this game because you can mod it with nearly no limits. it is on you to do it and it is some work and you need to understand the game and the mods first. take your time and you can do it (without shortcuts like wabbajack). other games do not include so many options, mods and capabilities to "configure your game", but you must try one by one and understand and test them BEFORE using collections or packages.

 

just to give you a timescale how long i fiddled with fo4 until i could call it "configured as my game": 3 years. and don't forget to make always backups while your game runs stable to be able to restore your last working config! fo4 is like skyrim: no backups, no chance to play a stable game for a longer period of time. reason: interference due to updates, script extender dependencies and mods all the time! if you do not backup and know your modded game you will never really be happy with it and you will make no progress at all. and if you want to overwhelm yourself just put wabbajack and collections on top. the game will rule you and not vice versa.

 

this game has proven to work stable since 2017 due to many bug fixes, mods and updates. at least i can see no remaining major design failures for pc users but instead incredible potential to mod this game. there is this inconvenience with modding around previs/precombines and the old game engine core and DX11 limitations but i'm technically not aware of more.

the story and open world is a matter of taste, moddable and it seems most users could live with what is included. even strarfield is founded on an updated engine version of fo4 and skyrim.