Comparisons with Skyrim

[charwo]

Let me say that I liked several things about Skyrim, although I hate the Elder Scrolls games. I could for a time, forget that Skyrim was an Elder Scrolls game. But for other fans, I wanted to compare notes. See, if there's anything I dislike about Fallout 4, before even getting mad at taking no cues from New Vegas, I feel miffed that FO4 is an inferior version of Skyrim. And I want to know if that's fair. Let's get one thing out of the way: I believe Skyrim's environmental storytelling in a way I never believe FO4, as a direct comparison, at no point did I ever feel that the world of Skyrim, 200 years after Oblivion and scantly more after Morrowind, was stuck in the shadow of Oblivion the way the Wasteland is stuck in late 2077. At no point does FO4 world seem innovate or alive or with it's own destiny, it's as though the world really did end on 2077 and history is at it's end. That's not what Fallout was ever about, but that is certainly how Bethesda posits it's environmental storytelling.

No, I have more than a few complaints that are more relevant:
1. The Commonwealth is like two Whiteruns, and that's it. The love and detail that went into Markarth and Windhelm in particular stunned me, in all the good ways. It was always a joy to go through these cities. Diamond City is a pathetic sham in comparison.

2. I enjoyed the horses, riding them, and with mods hunting from them, just to race with the animals acorss the fields of Whiterun was a joy, but we get exactly zero of that in Fallout 4 because "it would break the experience." I'd be less upset if someone had modded horses into Vegas of 3, but that never happened and probably never will.

3. The perk tree doesn't seem to easily add more spaces for user made perks, unlike in in Skyrim due to the rotating constellations it was easy to insert them.

4. No duel wielding.

5. No cool melee kill cam.

6. Bleak environments are BLAND. And this is important: I'd go on the north coast riding along the edge of the Sea of Ghosts. It was bleak and heck, and yet I was taken in at every moment for things to map, wrecked ships to find, that sort of thing. It was fun. But the Commonwealth is about as fun as strolling through a messy kid's bedroom. After 200 years, the scenery says less about human hubris than the utter laziness of people not getting their s*** together. They pissed away a perfectly good, intact city for Genre. Not even a smart or subversive take on genre.

Skyrim is a by the numbers fantasy game, but it was done so well, with such detail and love put into it that I could forgive it being Elder Scrolls. Fallout 4 is by the numbers too, but LAZY and thoughtless, not to mention truncated. I'd like less "detail" and get Western Massachusetts. I feel Skyrim got nine holds and Fallout 4 got one. So I actually feel rather shafted, beyond any arguments about Bethesda's writing (which is pretty good this time) or anything about intentional lack of realism. There's so much stuff they put into Skyrim that just isn't in Fallout 4 that could have been and should have been.

And I wonder, am I the only one who would like mods that make Fallout 4 more like Skyrim?

Edited December 28, 2015 by charwo

[gamefever]

You know I typed out a whole big response saying all sorts of stuff about how I disagree but really Im just burned out on all the bashing.

 

Fallout New Vegas is likely not cannon.

 

No Dual Wielding pls.

 

Weapons are crap, not deadly enough...Legendaries are freakin cheese.

 

Kill cams would suck.

 

Horses n vehicles would make the game small.

 

Enviroments are fine as they are.

 

What I would have liked is a better shooter...Weapons that are deadly, not the carebear crap we have.

No cheese Legends.

No cheese uniques.

A more brutal experience.

 

Ability to tell Minutemen to go handle X quest for settlements...Why should I care? I built it up but I have other things to do.........Thankfully I got a mod to shut that stuff off.

 

Bethsada needs to take more risks with the franchise and write more story and background and so what about what people think.

There just isn't enough for the franchise not like there is for TES.

 

Too many people think that things would be different cause people will work together and be happy and overcome deadly mutants and super beasts....

 

If nuclear annihilation really happened the world would be dead....sorry but it'd just be dead 200 years wouldn't be enough time to pass.

 

Fallout BSG like a fish out of water...Not enough lore or background really the IP should be dead "the end".

It would have died anyway if not for BSG so whatevers.

 

Also

 

Skyrim is nice but really the only difference is that there actually is more lore, background, and pretty much just more to base a story on.

 

As far as visuals Fallout 4 is actually good and its a decent shooter. It was fun and worth my 60 bucks.

 

Will Dlc and mods help that well most likely.

 

Will the game actually get more Lore and Story...Who knows.

Edited December 28, 2015 by gamefever

[charwo]

Let me ask you this:

Did the horses make Skyrim feel small? Were the kill cams a bad idea in Skyrim?

 

No. If the the Fallout 4 world feels small it's because it it IS small. I've walked from one end of the Commonwealth to the other, it felt small no matter how slow you walk because it IS small.

 

You're right, some, not all, but some of the unique are pure cheese, a lot of the rest could have been solved by multiple ammo loads, like in New Vegas, but that's another issue.

 

But no, there wasn't a lot of story to build upon in Skyrim, not that way. With the 200 year time gap, Bethesda had to make 200 years of history out of whole cloth, and it's something they did a great job with. Even moving the Imperial names from more Latin to Italian was a delicious decision. But you certainly don't have skeletons from the Oblivion Crisis strewn all over Skyrim. Fallout 4 is one giant apocalypse log, strangely half forgotten while still there. Skyrim's story is told in the shadow the Oblivion Crisis, but it isn't defined by it. It's just something that happened, and after a few decades that's exactly what thermonuclear warfare would be: something, one of many, that happened long ago.

[Raycheetah]

Skyrim was topographically divided by mountain ranges, which helped to foster the illusion of regional size. Remove the spaces occupied by the mountains, and things would seem much closer together. As for horses, I imagine it'd be pretty hard to ride a two-headed mount (since all the large ungulates in the Commonwealth appear to share that genetic trait). However, Bethesda has teased us mercilessly since FO3 with nearly pristine-appearing motorcycles, which should be no more difficult to maintain than power armor. I suspect that Bethesda, scale issues aside, simply can't be bothered to include the systems needed for vehicular movement. The bleak flavor of the environment, on the other hand, is simply a stylistic issue. The Capitol Wasteland was a pretty drab and dreary place, too, but then, that's Fallout.

 

I do get the impression that Bethesda is getting generally lazier, with newer iterations of their big games. The main reason we didn't see any more Skyrim DLC was that it was too much effort to shoehorn what they had made for PC into the varied console platforms, and once Dragonborn had been beaten into submission, they called it quits. Now, it seems that Bethesda is satisfied to leave a lot undone (most egregiously, leaving out critical tutorial information regarding the new settlement system), confident that what they do release will suffice to make people take what they can get, until word-of-mouth (YouTube, Wikis, et al) makes the hard-won information more readily available, and until the modding community addresses the (sometimes obvious) shortcomings in the game.

 

FO4 is a great game, but it is also flawed. Mods will eventually (post-CK release) resolve many of the issues which detract from what could be a MUCH better experience. It's just sad that the game couldn't come out of the box, as it were, that much closer to perfect. ='[.]'=

[BadReplicant]

Fallout 4 is defiinitely smaller than Skyrim. I would be okay with it if the Commenwealth felt alive but it's small AND devoid of towns, npcs, side quests. I felt like I was in Skyrim and never got bored enough to look for the edge of the map. In F4 I've already walked the entire perimeter looking for any missed locations, (it didn't take that long). The thing is people are trying to accept the game for what it is (which I understand) but Bethesda didn't have any restraints or reasons for making it smaller and altogether lackluster. They could have designed it to be sprawled out and given you a motorcycle/vehicle or something, or made the roadways still serve a purpose, or make up for it's size with more communities and influence in the world, they just didn't. It's not a good game to me. They can redeem themselves depending on what they do with it or what they make next but if it's similar to this, it'll be my last Bethesda game. I will say that Bethesda has been my favorite dev for a while but not after this.

[nonoodles]

They could have designed it to be sprawled out and given you a motorcycle/vehicle or something, or made the roadways still serve a purpose, or make up for it's size with more communities and influence in the world, they just didn't.

 

- If the map is genuinely small (haven't traversed it all, pipboy map indicates it's roughly on par with FO3) then we can't realistically expect a speedier means of transport from Bethesda. Alternatively, they could give us a vehicle but this would mean a bigger map, so they won't.

 

- build a settlement, do radiant quests as these are what they've given us to fill the gap. Alternatively, wait patiently for quest mods. Not to toot any single project, I'm keeping an eye on the ModTec dev team's work, 'Gloria' in particular.

[Athanasa]

6. Bleak environments are BLAND. And this is important: I'd go on the north coast riding along the edge of the Sea of Ghosts. It was bleak and heck, and yet I was taken in at every moment for things to map, wrecked ships to find, that sort of thing. It was fun. But the Commonwealth is about as fun as strolling through a messy kid's bedroom. After 200 years, the scenery says less about human hubris than the utter laziness of people not getting their s*** together. They pissed away a perfectly good, intact city for Genre. Not even a smart or subversive take on genre.

Good point. The north-east Salem area (I go on about it later, because I love it) and some of the coastal areas are pretty nice. Bland, but in a realistic way - plenty of British beaches look a bit like the ones in Fallout. Grey, miserable, cold and damp.

But, there are areas that could use more flavour. The swamps, for example. I guess it wouldn't suit with the aesthetic, but screw the aesthetic (in a loving and consensual fashion), let's add some bioluminescent fungi in the swamps. Maybe even under the water, where they can glow eerily in the night. Like the glowing mushrooms you see on some of the trees, in fact. Let's face it, we've got glowing wildlife, why haven't we got more glowing plant life?

 

 

Fallout New Vegas is likely not cannon.

... well, that'd be complete bollocks. Given that it was written by some of the team from the original Fallouts, and had more personality than FO3.

 

 

 

Skyrim was topographically divided by mountain ranges, which helped to foster the illusion of regional size. Remove the spaces occupied by the mountains, and things would seem much closer together.

Exactly. New Vegas had good terrain dividing the map (and FO3? I don't remember much of 3) which helped to feel bigger. Fallout 4, on the other hand, is largely flat. I can say, without a doubt, that my favourite outdoor areas in FO4 are the north-east (around Salem) and the swamps in the south. Everything around the middle is just so flat and featureless.

I don't get to play that wonderful open-world FPS minigame of planning my assault based on the terrain, picking out before I attack the sniping points I'm going to use and where I fall back to. Why? Because there's one rock I can stand on to snipe this base, everything else is flat as an ironing board. There's very little in the way of little ridges and valleys I can drop behind to relocate.

 

 

 

 

No. If the the Fallout 4 world feels small it's because it it IS small. I've walked from one end of the Commonwealth to the other, it felt small no matter how slow you walk because it IS small.

It feels small because you didn't have to take a detour around a massive cliff / mountain / radioactive river of death, adding half the distance to your journey. It feels small because you can point yourself at a location on your map and pretty much auto-walk there, with the only thing stopping you being buildings rather than terrain features you have to navigate around.

 

There's no navigating in Fallout 4.

[Moraelin]

Fallout 3 had a huge amount of terrain that just didn't exist, hence why comparisons of just the area of a square on the map are misleading at best. You couldn't just walk on the surface from Megaton to the capitol building even if you removed the rubble, because a huge chunk of that terrain just didn't exist.

 

Most of the illusion had to do with having to go along those tunnels. The same surface amounts to a lot of length to walk, if you cut it into thin strips.

 

Also, as I keep saying, there's actually a lot to explore in FO4 in all those second and third floors, scaffolds, etc. I'll take that over a big mountain in the middle, and two big empty chunks of land to both east and west of it, like Skyrim had.

 

And New Vegas... really didn't have all that good dividing the map. There was a LOT of empty space before mods started placing things there. All those empty deserts with not much more than a few ants and the occasional old broken truck, well, didn't really add all that much.

[Athanasa]

And New Vegas... really didn't have all that good dividing the map. There was a LOT of empty space before mods started placing things there. All those empty deserts with not much more than a few ants and the occasional old broken truck, well, didn't really add all that much.

 

Was it? My memory's pretty rose-tinted for F:NV, to be honest.

[Moraelin]

Well, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't have spent so much time making mods for NV if I didn't like it. But it had, shall we say, a lot of that wild-west open space vibe, ya know? Not a bad thing, mind you, but it makes just comparing the raw surface of a rectangle not mean very much.