Comparisons with Skyrim

[Boombro]

 

I've played Borderlands, I like Borderlands, but in no way is it an RPG. It has an RPG-like skill tree and that's it.

It tagged as so in steam store, classed by wiki as so and everyone expect you says it is so.

 

 

 

It has an RPG-like skill tree and that's it. RPGs have dialogue trees and different outcomes and actual character immersion, mostly through good dialogue branching and lots and lots of it.

You mean like Pokemon, persona, FF, dark souls, dragon quests, monster hunter, Mario RPG, fire emblem, rune factory and 80% of RPGs? Because man, Pokemon is deep. My pick of starter Pokemon really changed the game, I mean dame! And dat yes and no totally impacts charterer development.

 

Most RPGs hardly give you the pick of yes and no, limiting RPG to that factor is really odd. Monster hunter, an RPG action game that so hot in japan, has zero story, no level up, your only choice is your gear and what monsters to kill and still classed by everyone as an RPG still.

 

The RP in RPG is you being the PC, even one with it own personality and no choices expect in combat. Think as in cosplaying somone, it close like it.

 

Wait, are you old pc RPG player? That explains a lot.

 

 

As to why 'why would raiders go fishing?' The answer is why would PEOPLE go fishing as opposed to raiding? The reasons are very simple: fishing and trading are much safer and steadier forms of making a living than raiding, and then also, raiding is not a sustainable way to make a living. It's a short sighted, Malthusian process of being a parasite upon productive people. Historically, raiders, like say Vikings, were younger, less successful brothers of traders and fishermen who saw opportunity in raiding as opposed to little opportunity working for their chiefs/older brothers for little pay. But make no mistake, raiding was a secondary choice: trade was safer and more profitable in the long run. The more successful raiders in any era always used the loot to go legit: Francis Drake's plundering of the Spanish Mane comes to mind. Most pirates who wanted to survive long term got letters of marquis and then settled down to farming somewhere. A couple of true psychos like Blackbeard tried this but couldn't control their sociopathic impulses and were promptly killed.

The difference between Fallout 4's raiders and say any pirate of the Caribbean, is that plunder is not forthcoming in the Commonwealth. And even if you are getting protection money from Bunker Hill, it behooves you to do something productive with that time. Either doing something directly useful like fishing/trading/farming or indirectly, by becoming warlords and administering a safe haven for productive elements. This is exactly what being "The General" is for the SS, minus the command and control. Bandits, like in Skyrim make sense because while they are completely parasitic, they are active OUTLAWS and risk life and limb with every encounter centers of trade. Banditry is caused by oppression, real or perceived by a government that extracts. Bandits are opting out because there's enough surplus to be taken and they can't hope to match forces with the government, SKyrim's case, the Jarls. But the real money is always in BEING the government. Successful bandits become warlords, meaning they realize they must protect people in order to exploit them. This is, while unfair and high handed, generally beneficial to both parties.

 

 

Bethesda doesn't give a thought to it's economics, and you really need to not give a s*** about economics in order to make traditional fantasy, but at least when you crib notes from medieval Europe, you get most of the details right. But if you want to tell a post-apocalyptic story right past the initial point of collapse, understanding economics and how people organize themselves spontaneously is absolutely critical. The kind of coked up evil psychotic ISIS type of banditry is only sustainable for a couple of years. If this was 2090 in Fallout's timeline, I couldn't fault them for the short sighted stupidity of the raiders and the gunners.

I have no words for this.

I just don't.

[charwo]

The correct words are:

You have done your research Charwo. I see your bashings are well founded upon facts and historical parallels, although I being a gamer, want a good game, which involves shooting lots of people in the face until it becomes cartoonish self parody. I want my power fantasies as divorced from reality as possible, thinking about and empathizing with the struggles of NPCs and seeing the possibilities of time and place is too much for me. I want, and nay, demand a brain dead stock story that appeals to my prejudices and expectations in every way instead of something that challenges me and makes me grow.

 

Also this on the lack of RPG elements:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99kYL7JOCtE

I'm tired of having to kill people in Bethesda games. They make killing people and looting their stuff a freaking CHORE.

[Moraelin]

I suppose if nobody else is singing your praises, well, polishing your own statue is the best you can do, right? But no, trust me, those aren't the words that come to mind. More like wondering whether you even sat down and cleared your mind and figured out exactly what your actual complaint is. Doing your research to support it would be one step after that.

 

Well, maybe you did, but you're awfully bad at getting the point across. From where I stand, it sounds like just some nonsensical and contradictory ramblings that don't even make any sense. Again, that's not to say that you necessarily don't have a point, but clear your mind and style a bit if you expect anyone else to even understand what you're going on about, much less go, "You have done your research Charwo. I see your bashings are well founded upon facts and historical parallels."

 

And frankly the way you throw around "bad writing" sounds more like a meaningless buzzword than actually having any clue about writing techniques, archetypes and all. If you want to get that message across, going into a more detailed discussion of writing theory might help more than constantly going, "waah, I wanted pirates! BAD WRITING if it doesn't have robot pirate ninjas!" like a 10 year old spoiled brat.

 

Being tired of shooting people? Under what rock have you been? EVERYTHING that passes for a computer RPG involves killing stuff. Everything else is classified as an ADVENTURE game.

 

And why'd you even buy the game, then? Not only the CRPG classification should have tipped you off anyway, but so should all the promotional videos, AND that it's a Bethesda game, AND that that's what the whole frikken Fallout series was like even long before Beth bought it. From the first village you encountered to the game endings in FO1 they all NEEDED you to kill or blow up a bunch of people. And yes, I say "endings", because you could also do such stuff as join the supermutants and then lead them into your vault and murderize everyone. So WTH in all that gave you the idea that, no, see, a continuation of the series is totally not what Beth is doing and totally not what the fans of the series expect?

 

So exactly WHAT research have you done? Because it sounds more like you just pulled an assumption out of the rear end, and instead of correcting your assumption when reality doesn't match it, you went to make an endless fuss about what's wrong with reality if it doesn't match your baseless assumptions.

[charwo]

Actually, having played both the original Fallouts and New Vegas, I want to make the point that while I enjoy killing people in video games, it's that there's nothing to do BESIDES killing people. It was perfectly possible to kill no one in those games, which was not to my style, but there was more interaction with with bad guys so generally outside of overworld encounters, you got right up close to see how much people were scumbags. YOu could join them, manipulate them, kill them in gruesome and sadistic and unique ways. There was one crime boss in Reno you could steal his oxygen tank and watch him asphyxiate in front of you. It was awesome. So, don't get me wrong, it's not about killing itself, it's that THAT'S ALL YOU CAN DO.

In the original Fallout, before you almost certainly capped his ass, Don Gizmo was a well established character in Junktown: you knew his reputation, you knew how he killed people you knew how he used local thugs to do his dirty work. He wasn't a designated target that you shot at. He was a fully fleshed out, fat, slovenly scumy character. By comparison you needed to actively look for people to murderize, mostly by going on caravan runs. In small doses muderfests are fun, but it cant be all of it. And Vegas understood this: even the Fiends were a better justified, fleshed out faction than the Gunners: I knew what they wanted, why they acted the way they did, I got to liquidate their leadership on a first name basis. Why are gunners like they are. I dunno, they show up and wreck people for shits and giggles. They're supposed to be mercs, so who PAID them to liquidate Quincy? I dunno, "Gunners are evil."

Mind you I didn't say bad writing, that was Fallout 3. Here I liked the four faction setup, and note I'm not bitching about something I didn't like, say the direction the BOS went. What I'm complaining about is LAZY writing, writing that objectively did not think the situation and set up through. In any kind of storytelling, understanding antagonists is critical to telling a good story. Bethesda really sunk time into understanding the Institute so I don't complain about it even if it's not totally were I woulda gone with it. In the case of both Gunners and the Raiders, no thought was given to the socio-political-economic considerations that shape and define such groups, the most basic question being: "Do these people have enough opportunities for looting to sustain themselves" and "Where do they come from and why do they choose raiding over more productive tasks."

 

Fiends make sense because they are not native to Vegas: they are the flotsam of a civilized, highly populated society and doomed to burn themselves out on chems. They are not rational actors and thus a transitory phenomena. They can survive because they are close enough to two vastly productive societies (Vegas and NCR) that they can seize and trade for the things they cannot produce themselves, hence their trading with the Khans and presumably using Vault 3 food synthesizers. By contrast, the raiders in Fallout 3 and 4 are simply there. To be shot at. And it doesn't matter if that's an industry standard, it's it lazy writing. It is not good storytelling. And what makes it worse, as opposed to Skyrim and Far Cry is that there is no government in Fallout 4 keeping them from becoming warlords. Smugglers make make money, violence is a secondary consideration. Bandits feel so oppressed, rightly or not, that they must escape into the hinterlands and divorce themselves from the local economy except to prey upon it because other opportunities are lacking.

Art is not about doing whatever the hell you want. Art exists to for introspection, to say in other tongues what cannot be easily said. That requires introspection on the part of the artist, and great care in the art's creation. And the subject matter of any peice of art requires a certain study and commitment to tell important truths. Fallout 4 doesn't deal in that. Skyrim didn't either, but it had the loving attention to detail in it's place design, a practical notion of settlement placing, making sure there were enough of them/ Skyrim is a by the numbers production but there's real love and attention and thought put into it. Fallout 4 is ugly, lazy, thoughtless, and filled with dungeons because dungeon crawls are easy. SKyrim had them too, but I could ignore them and do other things.I enjoyed the Whitehold College missions a lot before my computer crashed and took it all with it. I've not had one quest chain I enjoyed like that in Fallout 4. It's hollow, moreso than Skyrim. It has no heart, Skyrim did. That's not a trivial criticism.

[Alano69]

 

FO4 is an inferior version of Skyrim.

These are two different games. Both RPG, but one is a medieval the other is sci-Fi. The story is completely different.

I played both, and both are great, amazing.

Now, skyrim got a lot of mods, but i am sure that FO4 will have a lot too.

In Skyrim you can ride a dragon, but in FO4 you can build a settlement.

You can't compare them since both shine in it's domain. You will need both and only after playing both you will see each advantages and possibilities.

[Moraelin]

Ah, looks like now we're getting some more insightful dialogue. Good.

 

Actually, if you go through all the dialogues in the game, and the terminals, and all, quite a few of your complaints are actually explained. In game.

 

The commonwealth is the way it is, in a nutshell, because it's been destabilized all the time, and even more so recently. You're not only seeing the fallout (literal as well as figurative) of the nukes 210 years ago, but of MUCH more recent events like the CPG massacre and the destruction of the Minutemen. You're seeing ANOTHER collapse into chaos.

 

Especially the Minutemen are conspicuously mentioned as being once strong enough to keep the Institute in check. Then bad stuff starts to happen to them, including an all out Gunner assault on them. Who paid for that? Hmm, I dunno, but I can venture a guess, based on whose agenda it was to keep MA fragmented and in chaos.

 

That goes for the Raiders too, btw. If you check out the information in the game, a lot of the groups are actually very recent. It doesn't have to be sustainable for 200 years. It's just a bunch of hoodlums moving in to fill the power vacuum in the short run.

 

That said, since you like to appeal to history, I'd point out that we DID have dark ages lasting for hundreds of years. More than once, in fact. See, for example, the Greek dark ages after the collapse at the end of the bronze age. Society doesn't form brand new over night.

 

That said, it's just a game. They rarely make sense to the level of detail that you seem to demand. E.g., what's with all the fortifications and the RECENTLY destroyed ones (the one where the arena champion's dad was, for example) in Oblivion, if there are no external threats until then? What's with all the walls in Morrowind, if one can fly over them or teleport right in? Etc.

[Moraelin]

That said, about art and the purpose of art... well, it's a lot more diverse than realism to the last detail, to say the least.

 

Currents include dadaism, for example, which is deliberate nonsense to make one question what is really art. At its most extreme, if this were dadaism, you'd have dialogues written literally by pulling words out of a hat.

 

Or an actual example of a seminal work of dada art is an urinal titled "fountain."

 

Really, it's literally anarchist art, and I mean the militant anarchists of the early 20'th century, the kind who didn't just want to disobey, but see the old order burn. It's revolting against every notion of what counts as art or not.

 

Is dadaism art? Well, it's generally accepted as art.

 

Then comes surrealism, which was really an evolution of dadaism, and frankly, in some cases not that much of an evolution.

 

Then you have absurdist fiction, and especially the current called the "theatre of the absurd". Where you'd have dialogues like, and I kid you not, this is from a play by Ionesco, a policeman telling a guy about a criminal who lures people by asking them if they want to see the colonel's photo, and then drowning them in a lake. So the guy asks, why didn't you send some agents to arrest him? And the answer comes, yeah, well, they too wanted to see the colonel's photo.

 

Or people talking about how the bald singer combs her hair.

 

Is that art? I'm told it is.

 

Etc.

 

Who's to say that a boat that doesn't float, being used as a fortress, doesn't count as art? Just the three currents I mentioned above could probably make a whole play in 3 acts out of that.

[BadReplicant]

Actually, having played both the original Fallouts and New Vegas, I want to make the point that while I enjoy killing people in video games, it's that there's nothing to do BESIDES killing people. It was perfectly possible to kill no one in those games, which was not to my style, but there was more interaction with with bad guys so generally outside of overworld encounters, you got right up close to see how much people were scumbags. YOu could join them, manipulate them, kill them in gruesome and sadistic and unique ways. There was one crime boss in Reno you could steal his oxygen tank and watch him asphyxiate in front of you. It was awesome. So, don't get me wrong, it's not about killing itself, it's that THAT'S ALL YOU CAN DO.

 

In the original Fallout, before you almost certainly capped his ass, Don Gizmo was a well established character in Junktown: you knew his reputation, you knew how he killed people you knew how he used local thugs to do his dirty work. He wasn't a designated target that you shot at. He was a fully fleshed out, fat, slovenly scumy character. By comparison you needed to actively look for people to murderize, mostly by going on caravan runs. In small doses muderfests are fun, but it cant be all of it. And Vegas understood this: even the Fiends were a better justified, fleshed out faction than the Gunners: I knew what they wanted, why they acted the way they did, I got to liquidate their leadership on a first name basis. Why are gunners like they are. I dunno, they show up and wreck people for shits and giggles. They're supposed to be mercs, so who PAID them to liquidate Quincy? I dunno, "Gunners are evil."

 

Mind you I didn't say bad writing, that was Fallout 3. Here I liked the four faction setup, and note I'm not bitching about something I didn't like, say the direction the BOS went. What I'm complaining about is LAZY writing, writing that objectively did not think the situation and set up through. In any kind of storytelling, understanding antagonists is critical to telling a good story. Bethesda really sunk time into understanding the Institute so I don't complain about it even if it's not totally were I woulda gone with it. In the case of both Gunners and the Raiders, no thought was given to the socio-political-economic considerations that shape and define such groups, the most basic question being: "Do these people have enough opportunities for looting to sustain themselves" and "Where do they come from and why do they choose raiding over more productive tasks."

 

Fiends make sense because they are not native to Vegas: they are the flotsam of a civilized, highly populated society and doomed to burn themselves out on chems. They are not rational actors and thus a transitory phenomena. They can survive because they are close enough to two vastly productive societies (Vegas and NCR) that they can seize and trade for the things they cannot produce themselves, hence their trading with the Khans and presumably using Vault 3 food synthesizers. By contrast, the raiders in Fallout 3 and 4 are simply there. To be shot at. And it doesn't matter if that's an industry standard, it's it lazy writing. It is not good storytelling. And what makes it worse, as opposed to Skyrim and Far Cry is that there is no government in Fallout 4 keeping them from becoming warlords. Smugglers make make money, violence is a secondary consideration. Bandits feel so oppressed, rightly or not, that they must escape into the hinterlands and divorce themselves from the local economy except to prey upon it because other opportunities are lacking.

 

Art is not about doing whatever the hell you want. Art exists to for introspection, to say in other tongues what cannot be easily said. That requires introspection on the part of the artist, and great care in the art's creation. And the subject matter of any peice of art requires a certain study and commitment to tell important truths. Fallout 4 doesn't deal in that. Skyrim didn't either, but it had the loving attention to detail in it's place design, a practical notion of settlement placing, making sure there were enough of them/ Skyrim is a by the numbers production but there's real love and attention and thought put into it. Fallout 4 is ugly, lazy, thoughtless, and filled with dungeons because dungeon crawls are easy. SKyrim had them too, but I could ignore them and do other things.I enjoyed the Whitehold College missions a lot before my computer crashed and took it all with it. I've not had one quest chain I enjoyed like that in Fallout 4. It's hollow, moreso than Skyrim. It has no heart, Skyrim did. That's not a trivial criticism.

+1

[Boombro]

But they do take some places for reasons, you can read from PCs and notes they leave behind.

 

Ones in brewery wanted a lot of booze, another one in what seems to be a car factory took because it near trade routes, some like being close to the city and other want to raid farms. You can see some bridges took over by raiders, and facing a rider group on the road is a random.

[Athanasa]

Actually, if you go through all the dialogues in the game, and the terminals, and all, quite a few of your complaints are actually explained. In game.

But they do take some places for reasons, you can read from PCs and notes they leave behind.

 

Ones in brewery wanted a lot of booze, another one in what seems to be a car factory took because it near trade routes, some like being close to the city and other want to raid farms. You can see some bridges took over by raiders, and facing a rider group on the road is a random.

 

That just makes it worse!

 

"Right, we wrote down some of the lore about raiders in the terminals. Now we don't have to bother giving their actual UNITS flavours or different names, 'cause we've covered that lore in some .txt documents."

 

We have named raider leaders in Fallout 4. So why on earth can't we have the raiders following them tagged as such, too? There is only one 'flavoured' raider group, the Forged. Why aren't the others flavoured? Was it too much work to give them different unit names? Granted, some raider groups are too small to name (Hangman's Alley, Outpost Zimonja), but others could at least do with something.

 

Red Tourette, Federal Ration Stockpile

Red Raider

Red Psycho

Red Scavenger

Red Veteran

 

Tower Tom, Beantown Brewery

Brewer Raider

Brewer Psycho

Brewer Scavenger

Brewer Veteran

Brewer Drunk

(Sparta is part of this gang)

 

Ack Ack, USAF Station Olivia

Flak Raider

Flak Psycho

Etc

 

Sinjin, Milton General Hospital

No idea. They're drug dealers?

 

Bedlam, Dunwich Quarry

Chaos Raider

Chaos Psycho

Etc

Edited January 5, 2016 by Athanasa