FO4's World Design Failure

[HeyYou]

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.

The whole idea behind collections was for someone ELSE to do the work of making sure mods play nice together. They are specifically targeted at folks that don't know how to mod, and/or don't have the time to learn. Are there some less than stellar collections out there? Yep. But, there are some less than stellar mods out there too. It's the whole 'caveat emptor' thing again. Read the comments of ANY mod/collection you are considering. Are there any glaring issues? You can bet they will be brought up in the comments. Comments closed? Don't use that mod/collection.

[showler]

I loathe the whole "you must be able to build a car to drive a car mentality". It's been limiting the modding community for years now.

 

And, funnily enough, the same people who complain about the latest version of an automated modding tool are more than happy to use all the automated modding tools that were developed in the past. Can you imagine someone complaining now about Bashed Patches, xEdit auto-clean, Bodyslide, DyndoLOD, FNIS, Nemesis, etc. etc. etc. Shouldn't y'all be learning to do all that stuff manually?

[HuemangeBeans]

I'm happy with Magnum Opus. I took the time to mod Oblivion myself, customizing everything, FCOM and OOO, it turned out really awesome. It also took about a month solid, and I got a bit carried away with changing tree meshes until my Lod trees looked different than trees with near-textures loaded in. I really appreciate Wabbajack, as it takes the guesswork out of mod conflicts, plus usually incorporates many obscure mods the author has collected over a long time. It's a great program to be able to do in one or two days what building by hand would take months or years. There's a lot of bonuses to configuring everything yourself, though.

 

 

In another direction, I have to say that I wish there was more coherency in FO4's world design. Fresh off a rage-quit where after dutifully collecting garbage for 30 minutes, I was killed by a assaultron in 'bout 2.2 seconds. Charging out of a hallway, invisible, hit me with melee, point-blank face lasered me, i hit pip-boy and ate a bunch of food and meds, even turned myself invisible, but was killed by the second melee attack. I was out of power armor, kinda running around in my skivvies, lol. A deserved death, you might say. Here's the catch: This pre-war Chinese technology Assaultron robot was inside the Children of the Atom headquarters in Far Harbor. It'd be the equivalent of Ceasar's Legion throwing a souped-up Sentry Bot into the arena with you. Forgetting the inherent unfairness of an enemy that is able to use perma-stealth while combining melee, long-range, and short-range attacks simultaneously, what is the possible explanation of superstitious cultists being able to operate and maintain Chinese pre-war tech?

 

Lore-wise, I think FO4 has effectively jumped the shark. I think the idea of synthetics that are able to perfectly impersonate humans in real-life is one of the most ridiculous ideas posited in any work of science fiction. Fallout has always been whimsical and ridiculous, but FO4's methodology behind lore is asinine. It seems like the impossibilities in FO4's world and story design, like perfect human replicants synthenoids were created specifically to push the game towards a politically-agenda driven motive to retell in a fairy-tale way a propagandistic version of real history.

 

Bethesda's games have drastically changed from being completely imaginary settings, as seen in Morrowind, and Oblivion, dealing with totally fictional storyline and characters, to basically operating as historical propaganda. It's a major shift in direction from Oblivion to Skyrim. Oblivion has no direct parallels to any real time or place in human history, whereas Skyrim definitely does try to allude to real places, settings, and people. The Roman Gaul conflict, conquest, specifically. Ulric was clearly an allegory of the real historical person, Vercingetorix, and the legion - Gaius Julius Ceasar and Rome's legions. Prince Martin wasn't a direct parallel to a real historical person, as far as I'm aware.

 

Videogames being repurposed as another method of propaganda dissemination is a bad sign for the artform. Whatever Fallout 5 turns into, it's going to have to include these synths and also pre-war Chinese assaultrons that previously only existed as part of a time-travel DLC, lore-wise, in their own previous games. With the intention of using these contrived elements (like a town of thieves, ghouls, criminals that have the convenience of a dirty-talking assaultron as their shopkeep) just to create a re-telling of history that is hackneyed and ideologically-biased to the point of absurdity. A brainwashing that's repeated throughout the entire indoctrination system controlled by the American system of propaganda, from education to entertainment, and religion, now has to be included in videogames. Every videogame made by every major publisher MUST reinforce the contrived narrative of the fishbowl known as American history, and it doesn't matter if they have to destroy the validity of their own games lore and render the setting and characters impossibly implausible in order to do it.

 

I can see why certain projects went with an entire overhaul, and replaced every single character and enemy in the entire game. Vanilla FO4 in an incoherent shambles, cannot be salvaged by any mods, is seemingly in large part generated by A.I., and the entire plot narrative and setting design is cripplingly compromised by a militant adherence to perpetuate propaganda and brainwash people through alternate and absurdly contrived rewrites of history using videogames because the entire rest of the media, education, and religious systems are not effective enough, apparently.

Edited April 9, 2023 by HuemangeBeans

[HuemangeBeans]

People mistake the perspective on why games becoming propaganda is catastrophically bad. At it's peak, videogames eclipsed what other entertainment mediums were able to convey in terms of story, setting, plot, and characters. I hold 'Deus Ex', the original, to be the model of the quintessential videogame, so I'm going to use it as an example. The first Deus Ex plotline was about the government unleashing a bio-weapon on the population, and vaccines, using A.I. It basically predicted almost exactly what would happen 20 years later, after it was released. That is the heart of good sci fi, it actually depicts the future, what is going to happen and what it will look like. Does anybody even remember the plotline of the modern Deus Ex games?

 

Fallout 4 is bad sci fi. Straight out, doesn't make any reasonable kinds of predictions, and the actual story-line plot is a retelling of events that happened almost 200 years ago, not what would happen in the future or even allegorical to what is happening today. it's totally irrelevant to anything that is occurring or anything that will happen eventually, it's totally detached itself from what sci fi even is, at a basic conceptual level. Advertisement and propaganda that exists to influence the thinking of others cannot possibly exist as a form of art, no music or movies or television shows and now videogames produced by this society qualify as art, which must exist and account for it's own existence entirely on it's own merits.

 

It's just depressing, like watching the movie idiocrasy happen irl, where a game about a cat gets nominated for GOTY, 10 years running. The bar has been lowered, that's for sure.

Edited April 10, 2023 by HuemangeBeans

[HeyYou]

I think you folks are reading way too much into it. It's a game. Entertainment. That's it.

[HuemangeBeans]

Sure, it's just my own personal critique. It's the best fps engine in a fallout game, but imo the design of the game is easily the worst. Incoherency in game design is everywhere. Plywood super-structures. Assaultron monster closets. Enemies that are standing in place, in a hallway, waiting for eternity on the player's arrival to ambush them. Synth colonies, synth armies, so commonplace it'd seem like all that's required is to ducktape a couple tin cans together in order to make them. You have assaultron robots literally everywhere, when before they were located to one single instance found through a simulated time travel sequence. Synths everywhere, where previously there was one single character, Harken. You have what was, lore-wise, an incredible feat of science requiring the resources of an entire country to create one of them just being scattered throughout the world as if they are literally created on an assembly line, mass-produced in never-ending amounts.

 

All to tell this goofy plotline that defies the idea of what sci-fi is, while it destroys the lore established by the entire rest of the franchise. 3 and NV did a decent job of creating believable world-spaces, levels that looked like the interior matches up with the exterior, populated by enemies in a way that made sense for them to be there. 4 doesn't, and I just can't, can't get through it. Idk if it's because the main quest is shoved off to the side, as if somebody realized the main plot wasn't that great and made the main point of the game to just wander around, or if it's more because every part of the game just feels 'off', not put together with any concern for whether it made sense or not. I've tried 4 or 5 times to get to the end of FO4, but more than any other beth game, it feels about as well constructed as one of the old Hitman PS2 games. The most fun I've had playing it was with the Whispering Chills modlist, and that's def. what I'll do next time I play. I had the VR version all modded and ready to go, also, but I'm gonna give up before I even start on it.

 

I mean, they put (two of) the strongest enemy in the game, in level-design wise, what's a utility closet for superstitious and primitive cultists. To create the situation where, an american-slang dirty-talking robot from the pre-war era of tech found only in the Chinese Invasion of Alaska, can pop out of a closet right next to you, knocking aside the lightbulbs and screwdrivers scattered around the toolboxes in what is, in terms of aesthetics, a freakin' broomcloset with actual brooms in it, built off a plywood shanty inhabited by mad people. What sense does that make? Minute by minute, in terms of gameplay, even if I do everything I can to totally deactivate my brain and any logical thinking, it's just too much inanity. The entire world being overrun by ghouls makes more sense. FO4 is not consistent with it's own lore.

[HuemangeBeans]

Isn't the tagline of Fallout 'A Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi RPG'? That's not what the franchise is. Assaultrons, androids with fluid and fast movement that require no upkeep, Synthenoids that are able to exactly impersonate people, that's the stuff of fantasy. There was a lot of thought and care into the explanation behind the creation of super mutants, factions like the brotherhood, the foundations of what made fallout lore what it is, that are simply not present for elements introduced in FO4. The portals from Oblivion that teleport you into other worlds, are more sci fi than what Fallout's robo-themes have morphed into.

[showler]

Harness literally had the job of hunting down other rogue synths. It was never just one.

[HuemangeBeans]

Harkness was the only one you encountered, though. The idea there were armies of them running amok would have been real strange in the setting established by FO3. It's real strange in any setting, but I'll admit that I'm being overly critical, and most players will not even think to care about this subject.

 

But...if I am not correct in saying Fallout is no longer a sci fi series, explain to me what is the functional difference between an assaultron from Fallout and a dwemer guardian from TES? What is the difference between them at all, besides a mesh/texture swap? At this point, they're both depicted as golems that live forever, require no maintenance, and are magically-powered creations of a lost civilization of beings. Does it make any sense that one is from a sci fi world and the other a fantasy world, when they are the exact same thing?

 

I'm not a rube, I know robotics and A.I. tech are at the point where androids like that are possible, now. I'm aware chat GPT exists. Fallout is supposed to be a world preserved, frozen in the technological era of pre-WW2, it's not a world-lore that's supposed to keep pace with modern advances in technology. Would you expect there to be self-driving electric cars in Fallout 5 simply because 'the agenda' wants to push people away from having vehicles that operate under their own control? Would you accept the lore of Fallout 5 being mangled beyond recognition, just to promote the electric self-driving car? That is exactly what FO4 does with it's synths, androids, and hamfisted politically biased plot.

Edited April 11, 2023 by HuemangeBeans

[showler]

It's not pre WW2. It's 2077 with a post-war aesthetic. Nuclear cars, wars on the moon, advanced AI, power armour, laser guns...all because they are 54 years further advanced then us (and had alien tech to study).

And the Institute has a further 210 undisturbed years to advance that tech further.

As for your other point, what's the difference between an Orc and a super mutant? Between a sword and a machete? Between a stimpack and a healing spell? It's the origins of these things that define the genre, not the functionality of them.