I need to find my son.. but later, I've got to help these complete strangers first.

[AdriRaven]

This pretty much hits the nail on the head for me as a key complaint against the majority of Bethesda's questing setup. They give you a huge open world to explore, and then they set up something of such urgency that realistically, you would never strayed from that path at all until the job was done.

 

"Dad left in the middle of the night, leaving me to deal with angry Vault 101 peoples, better get out there and find him so that I at least have some point of familiarity in this wasteland hellhole." - Fallout 3, admittedly, one of the least obnoxious examples. Even the written materials admit that you could just not give a damn about Dad. After all, he left you high and dry without considering the consequences.

 

"Hey, there, strange human/elf/orc/wabbit, you seem a bit shady, and you're clearly wearing scavenged gear, but my Imperial/True Son of Skyrim contact of personal worth says we're cool, so could you please go to the nearest castle and warn the local lord of the HUGE FREAKING DRAGON that's just hovered over our town like its a Chinese Buffet? Kthanx. Wait, what do you mean that was twenty levels ago? What fiendish sorcery are you speaking about?" - Skyrim, the first of many diversions. it is just so damn difficult to stay on task with the story.

 

I think what bothers me with Fallout 4 is something a little deeper, aside from not being as connected to the urgency. You have no opportunity to tell people that you can't help them because you have to find your son. And they never actually help you find your son, unless it's a part of the main storyline.

 

This is something I think Bethesda keeps hitting themselves in the face with, a BIG! STIRRING! PLOTLINE! That has little connection because the urgency gets killed. I think it would be better if they came up with a much more distant long-term goal for their games as something to strive for, or even, God forbid, no particular end goal.

 

Okay, sorry, that turned into a weird rambling rant. TL;DR, I agree with OP and think that the current state of affairs is not really something new.

[Talwyn224]

I agree with the OP - the main plotline/hook "got to find my son" gets completely pushed aside with everything else in the game and becomes almost irrelevant for pretty much 95% of the game.

You get distracted by settlement building and faction quests, so much so that it seems that the protagonist doesn't really care about the fact their wife/husband was murdered and child was stolen.

 

It would have been much better, narrative wise, if there was no kidnapped infant rather you're hunting down the man who murdered your spouse. That way you have a better motivation: vengeance! And you can take your time over it, much like in FO:NV, you're hunting down the guys that shot you in the head and left you for dead. That works brilliantly.

[Sanbru]

I agree with the OP - the main plotline/hook "got to find my son" gets completely pushed aside with everything else in the game and becomes almost irrelevant for pretty much 95% of the game.

You get distracted by settlement building and faction quests, so much so that it seems that the protagonist doesn't really care about the fact their wife/husband was murdered and child was stolen.

 

It would have been much better, narrative wise, if there was no kidnapped infant rather you're hunting down the man who murdered your spouse. That way you have a better motivation: vengeance! And you can take your time over it, much like in FO:NV, you're hunting down the guys that shot you in the head and left you for dead. That works brilliantly.

 

Obsidian is better than Bethesda in regards to writing be it main plot line, side quest, and dialogue. Where Bethesda shines is building beautiful, expansive, atmospheric worlds for us to explore. It took Bethesda four years to make Fallout 3, while Bethesda gave Obsidian only a year to work on New Vegas. I wish that Bethesda would work in collaboration with Obsidian, and their writing staff to make one of the best Fallout games imaginable...which will likely never happen.

 

[VaultMan1963]

Honestly, I really haven't given a damn about the main quests, or really any of the quests. I basically am doing the same thing I did in Skyrim...walking all over holy hell, fighting where it makes sense, running like hell where it doesn't, building the crap out of my settlements (I absolutely love this feature, BTW), and going back and doing a quest every now and then. I'm at level 47, and I've basically been all over the map, though I haven't explored everything there is to explore.

 

An interesting thing that I've found...just stumbling around, I'll clear out a building, loot everything in site, collect all the good junk, and leave it behind. In Pip, it shows as "Cleared". Then I'll get tasked with clearing out the same building. Suddenly, everything is back...the look, the bad guys, the junk, everything. So it's kind of 2 for 1. :-) It only happens if a quest sends you back, though.

 

Hell, I never finished the main quest in Skyrim, and am still playing and enjoying that years later. I find the same thing happens in other games as well...Borderlands, Far Cry, etc. My guess is the same will happen here.

 

"Son? I gotta son? Oh yeah, I gotta son!" :cool:

[Ethreon]

Enemies respawn automatically or because of a quest trigger. Clear a place,a wait a few days, it's back on.

[netramz]

I find the whole story kind of just lazy.

 

On one hand, I do understand that you wouldn't just hop out of a cryo pod and go straight for your husband's killer/son's kidnapper when the last thing you witnessed (before the killing + kidnapping) was the outbreak of nuclear warfare. I guess it would make total sense to take your time and try to learn your way around the wasteland and maybe get some friends. I mean he knows you're alive, and he also knows that you just watched him take your family away from him. A person like that you probably ought to be scared of.

 

But then on the other hand, the game forces you into the weirdest position and forces you to disconnect yourself from your character. The thing that pisses me off the most is, and I guess this might be a spoiler (but seriously just think about logic dude), why would your character think that not more than a year or so had passed since the time that they were first unfrozen (when they were still stuck in the cryo pod)? Your character is left to relay so little information to other NPC's or perhaps just stuck in a sense of extreme stupidity, regardless of your intelligence level (and seriously are there even int check dialogue options in this game?). It was just sad that even when I told a certain NPC that a 10-year-old boy HAD to be my son, he just was like "nah bro, you said it was an infant, that makes no sense."

 

Your character is perpetually in pursuit of the son that they used to have. This may be realistic to an extent dependent on SOME players personalities, but why is there not even any way to hint that your character has given up hope? I mean even if they allowed your character to admit that they thought your son was already dead, there would be no reason at all to not at least keep the hope that they would at some point at least find out what happened to their son.

 

You are almost completely incapable of roleplaying as someone other than an obsessive parent. You are not allowed to be the bad guy, you're only allowed to be mean to people. I don't know if you can beat the game without speaking with the Minutemen, but it seems like you are stuck with them no matter what you do. They are a symbol of freedom and for some reason you are stuck on the same track as them, helping anyone you can in the wasteland, which is COMPLETELY the opposite of how I played Fallout 3 and Fallout NV. In both of those games, whenever I saw a settler in the wasteland, I'd kill them and loot them so that at the very least I could get some extra experience for killing them. In this game my best bet to get experience is to just help everyone I can. f*#@ dude,

even when you help No-Nose rob Hancock the dude forgives you and actually gains respect for you actions.

You literally cannot be a bad guy.

 

/rant

[mrspongeworthy]

Yeah, I had the same problem (started another thread about it a while back, not having found this one). It's just crazy to do anything other than look for your child, unless your character is a complete arse of course. It's really grating on me. I tried powering through the main quest, but as soon as you finish Reunions you get the sense that you are running at full-tilt through the game and missing a ton of content. It's disturbing. I started a new character too, but that hasn't really helped. I think I'm just going to wander about and do random stuff until modders take care of the issue one way or another and then start a proper play-through. Currently I hate my own characters anytime he/she does anything other than follow the main questline with all-consuming focus.

 

I too think this was overlooked in a way that wasn't present in FO3, FNV, or Skyrim. None of those introduced what should be an all-consuming need, a desperation, to complete one single task to the exclusion of all else. But FO4 definitely does that for me, and then screams at me that I'm missing much of the game-content if I continue along that path...

[xPrISM]

I was thinking about this recently as well and how despite the fact that i'm supposed to be searching for my kidnapped son, I just don't feel the pressure as a real parent might. It also got me thinking about the main story in FO3 and how there's already a story for you when you leave the vault. What if they did something similar to how Half-Life started where for the first 10-20 minutes of that game, there was no story? You were just starting another day at work and going through that normal routine, and THEN something happens to trigger the story. In FO4 there could be the same circumstance where you awake from he cryotubes and manage to escape the vault and then just wander for a bit, before this huge main plot begins to unfold for you.

[Moraelin]

I dunno, man, I treated the whole marriage thing as the equivalent of starting in prison in all Elder Scrolls games. It's like it's gone from being pardoned and freed from a prison ship in Morrowind, to being just in a dungeon in Oblivion, to being about to be beheaded in Skyrim. How do you go up from THAT? Right, a fate worse than death: being married alive. I was like, "I can haz beheading instead plz? Kthxbye." :wink:

 

And OMG, the kid. The kid! I figure that (after about 6 hours of futzing with the face editor) I managed to get a handsome looking character, and got Nora to look pretty cute in an anime kinda way too. But don't even ask me about what the kid ended up looking like, as a combination of the two. *shudder* And it's even worse when you see him grown up, actually. But, I mean, for example the lips... GOOD CTHULHU! He looked like you could stick him to the bathroom wall, like one of those suction cup towel-hanger :wink:

 

My only way to keep my sanity was to rationalize that he must be taking after the mailman :wink:

 

I'm telling ya, when they came and took the kid and killed Nora, I was like, "ah, so this is like when I got saved by Alduin." I even thought of the guy with the scar across the eye as Alduin for a while. (See "The Dragon" on TV Tropes, if you don't get it.) Thank goodness :wink:

 

Lemme tell you, I was in no hurry to get that kid back. In fact, by the time I grudgingly got persuaded to follow Kellofgg, it was more like to make sure he intends to keep the kid. He's out of warranty buddy. You're not giving him back. Talk about a disappointment when that and "cool story, bro, want to go out for a beer?" weren't on the menu :wink:

 

You get the gist.

 

(Also, I might be more full of it than a certain Railroad companion. Just saying. Don't trust everyone;))

[Aintiarna]

 

You are almost completely incapable of roleplaying as someone other than an obsessive parent. You are not allowed to be the bad guy, you're only allowed to be mean to people. I don't know if you can beat the game without speaking with the Minutemen, but it seems like you are stuck with them no matter what you do. They are a symbol of freedom and for some reason you are stuck on the same track as them, helping anyone you can in the wasteland, which is COMPLETELY the opposite of how I played Fallout 3 and Fallout NV. In both of those games, whenever I saw a settler in the wasteland, I'd kill them and loot them so that at the very least I could get some extra experience for killing them. In this game my best bet to get experience is to just help everyone I can. f*** dude,

even when you help No-Nose rob Hancock the dude forgives you and actually gains respect for you actions.

You literally cannot be a bad guy.

 

/rant

 

It's hard, but it is doable. Just to make some suggestions you may or may not find helpful. My current character is Director of the Institute and she has never even met Preston Garvey. I completely ignored going into the building in Concord and the main questline proceeded just fine. The only settlements I look after are the ones my character is using to serve the nefarious needs of the institute. Doing their side-quests mostly also feels quite grey if not downright evil. A lot of it is less explicit than in FO3. You have to read between the lines a bit more and you don't have the karma system telling you you're evil, but you can just look at your own actions and judge for yourself. Siding with the Institute gives you a lot of scope for RPing a fairly morally dubious character and there is no need to be particularly nice to anyone in order to get there either. I'll admit it took a bit of work to discover that though. There are are also a fair few side-quests that can be completed in "evil" ways: Cabot House and Pickman Gallery for starters.

Edited December 16, 2015 by tirnoney