Carefull with what you skip after leaving vault, first quests

[oldspice2625]

See, that's a problem with a so called "open world, do what you want be who you want Sandbox game".

 

The Stanley Parable is the kind of game that gets this idea right, and that isn't even a sandbox. I should be able to abandon the MM and have the world react to it, because it's a plausible decision to make. Why would I put myself in harm's way for a random person that can't help themselves in a WASTELAND?

 

But no, Bethesda got stuck with the writing, so they force you to be a goody two shoes good guy hero :(.

[SiNNeR]

See, that's a problem with a so called "open world, do what you want be who you want Sandbox game".

 

The Stanley Parable is the kind of game that gets this idea right, and that isn't even a sandbox. I should be able to abandon the MM and have the world react to it, because it's a plausible decision to make. Why would I put myself in harm's way for a random person that can't help themselves in a WASTELAND?

 

But no, Bethesda got stuck with the writing, so they force you to be a goody two shoes good guy hero :sad:.

 

to be fair it's not just Bethesda, the same is true of pretty much every game no matter how open ended it promises there's always some limits and very, very few have a true evil path

one of the few exceptions I can think of from the top of my head is an old game called Dark Earth where you really could do pretty much anything you like, although if you tried killing off important NPCs too early in the game you'd be killed by guards (once the story got going, your character became more powerful and the place started going to hell though, all bets were off).

[Boombro]

That true, many games limit you to a set path because they want.

[Moraelin]

*sigh* Look, let's put it like this. Let's say you had a game where everything you do, influences the world and everything afterwards.

 

Let's also say that for each of those actions you have just two choices. Like, save Preston or join the raiders and kill those idiots in the museum. Which already would get people butthurt about not having a gazillion choices. But it will serve to illustrate the problem even with that few choices.

 

After just one step, there are two outcomes: let's call them A and B. And now since we want each choice to dramatically influence the world and everything that happens after it, we have to write quests for both versions of the world ever after. That's twice as much dialogue and crap.

 

Now further down the line comes another world-affecting choice. So now if you had outcomes A and B, you can branch from A to outcomes AA and AB, and from B to outcomes BA and BB. Now you have FOUR times the work from there on.

 

By the time you have just 10 of those choices, you have 2^10 or just over A FRIKKEN THOUSAND possible paths that world took. That's for just 10 binary choices. At which point you'd still be going butthurt for not having enough choices.

 

Not only no company will ever have the manpower to write 1000 paths the world can take, but it will be stupid to, since any given player won't play 1000 times to see all possible combinations.

 

And for that matter, it would also be practically impossible to test, because even if the game took just 2 days to go down a particular path to the end, it would take a tester 6 YEARS to test all combinations. Then when a patch comes by and they have to test it again, yeah, that's 6 more years.

 

So get used to it already. You can huff and puff all you want, but it's just not going to happen, because it's not feasible. It doesn't matter if it's Bethesda or Bioware or Bungee or what, you'll still not get that kind of world-changing options. You'll still have your game converge back to the same very small number of paths, regardless of your choices.

 

And now you know a bit about game design.

[SiNNeR]

it's not always about how many paths there are though, it's also about how many you feel that there are. Dragon Age: Origins is widely praised as offering a huge variety of different choices through the game, one of the biggest reasons it's probably the most praised BioWare game since the Baldur's Gates. yet it only really offered three different endings

sacrifice yourself, sacrifice the other Warden or do the Dark Ritual

but there were a lot of other decisions through the game and even the smallest ones felt important. there were also six completely different Origin chapters to choose from which also offered decisions to make within those, the whole combining to make an overwhelming amount of replay value that few games could rival. it was expensive and time consuming to make, but I'd bet that it will be well remembered far longer than Mass Effect or even Knights of the Old Republic

 

not all decisions have to even be valid. sometimes it's enough to have the option to try something and then see it not work. what really breaks the immersion is when you feel like something should be an option, something your character absolutely would consider doing, but can't even suggest. ok so maybe trying to broker peace between the Railroad and Brotherhood of Steel, even temporarily to fight the Institute, wouldn't work. but wouldn't it be nice to at least be able to suggest it to the factions even if you can't convince them to talk to each other? that's just one example

[TheVampireDante]

 

to be fair it's not just Bethesda, the same is true of pretty much every game no matter how open ended it promises there's always some limits and very, very few have a true evil path

one of the few exceptions I can think of from the top of my head is an old game called Dark Earth where you really could do pretty much anything you like, although if you tried killing off important NPCs too early in the game you'd be killed by guards (once the story got going, your character became more powerful and the place started going to hell though, all bets were off).

 

 

Can confirm on that one, I still have a copy of that game. You could basically do whatever the hell you wanted and had to deal with the consequences, but it always seemed like every outcome was accounted for. That's what is missing in a lot of modern games - consequences and altered events depending on how you play.

[oldspice2625]

That's what I'm talking about, Sinner and Dante, you got what I was trying to say! :P

 

It's not about the fact that there's not 9999999 choices to make. Realistically, these people have jobs to get paid for, families to see, etc... that's what there are sequels, so that the company can get paid and have funds to make the things that they just couldn't do because of logic and resources.

 

What I meant was, there are no meaningful choices that you make in Fallout 4. Besides the poorly written ending sequence, what other "choices" can you make, that are not RPG Mechanics (skills, perks, the fact that there are missions/quests, the "numbers" tied to weapons and armor choices, etc...), and rather, RPG elements?

 

There are a very few moments where your choices are absolutely meaningful, and don't seem to be, or are not artificial and flaky. Giving me the choice to return an egg to a specific place, or to sell it, are not meaningful choices. There are more quests like that, and less quests like the Cabot House quests, where there is a tangible difference to doing one thing versus doing the other.

 

I know this, it's called offering the player the ILLUSION of choice. That's what I want. Realistically, you can't possibly account for everything the player can do, but you can design the game to allow the player limited freedom by carefully planning out what they might do in a situation, and then alter the situation to meet your resource/budget needs while still giving some freedom of choice.

 

Can you be a rockstar or epidemiologist in the Stanley Parable? NO. But you CAN choose within the limited parameters of the game world that make sense. THAT is what I was talking about!

 

The game world does NOT react to ANYTHING that you do, sans changing a little bit visually for settlements. But you can get a quest to help Sanctuary when you are IN sanctuary, and literally nothing has attacked at all.... that's what I'm talking about.

 

The problem is, that Bethesda wrote the story first, without laying out what the player could possibly what to do in the given scenarios.

 

It's the same problem that plagued Final Fantasy 13, because the player was given little freedom to form their party or explore at all, and the parts that did allow for it, it was very limited compared to the other titles. Things were forced upon you, like having Lightning in your party when you were supposed to be at the point of the game where you were "free to make choices and explore".

 

Players get used to certain things being present in games, and removing them is a cardinal sin.

 

Fallout is a franchise based upon Choices made. In fallout 1, you can decide to tell where your vault is to water caravans or not... that is a logical problem and choice that needs to be made. If you don't, you have less time to save everyone, if you do, you have more, but the Master's army finds out where your vault is quicker...

 

That didn't require programming 99999 choices like you might seem to think that I want... it was just logical as part of the basic idea of the game "Save your people from dying", and the devs focused on things related to THAT BASIC CONCEPT and wrote them into the game as choices...

 

And if you disagree with that, I'm sorry, but we'll just have to agree to disagree, because to be honest, if you write a quest and don't account for a player NOT wanting to be good or choose something else and at least offering a different choice, then, you shouldn't have written the quest to begin with if you are writing a quest for AN OPEN WORLD CHOICE BASED RPG SERIES THAT IS ADVERTISED TO BE SO.

[RelicDuDe]

 

Talk to father don't kill him!

 

 

If the game allows you to kill father, then it shouldn't break any quest-line...

 

I have advanced the MM to the point where the castle is ready.. Including the Ronnie Shaw bit.. i have followed the main quest as one should... and now i am going into the institute and kill Father.. because that's what the sob deserves...

 

Besides... If i don't, and refuse the institute, then he will send his synth's to kill me in the castle... i just got to him first...

 

Now i wonder what will happen when Father dies on our first meeting....

[Moraelin]

 

Talk to father don't kill him!

 

If the game allows you to kill father, then it shouldn't break any quest-line...

 

And it doesn't break anything. Well, you can't continue doing quests for the Institute, but I think that's kinda expected.

[RelicDuDe]

 

 

Talk to father don't kill him!

 

If the game allows you to kill father, then it shouldn't break any quest-line...

 

And it doesn't break anything. Well, you can't continue doing quests for the Institute, but I think that's kinda expected.

 

 

 

Better yet, the game continues as if you refused to join the institute, everything else is exactly the same.... After i killed Father, the doors stayed open.. so i could have killed everyone in there,.,, Found some interesting stuff on Fathers computer... Might explain a lot...