My opinion of why fallout 4 is a good game. [spoilers]

[zax141]

I'll start off by saying I'm not a reviewer, I simply wanted to write out why I think fallout 4 is a good game.

Even now many people still dislike fallout 4. Don't get me wrong when I first played fallout 4 I honestly hated most of it.

 

When I first played fallout 4 I rushed to the end, I was around level 27 when I finished the game.

This was stupid of me, Fallout 4 has been called many things, linear was one of the terms I agreed with.

The main story is pushed down your throat.

You want to find the man who killed your wife, you want your son back.

That is what drives the main story, and it really works.

 

This is not in the style of many standard RPGs, like fallout NV, skyrim, and fallout 3.

From the start of the game you feel like your being driven on a linear path, Ignore the main story.

Just ignore it, it is a MUCH better game if you ignore the main story.

 

If you go off, go play nuka world, do some side quests, just immerse your self in the lore.

I didn't goto diamond city until I was level 98 on this playthrough.

 

Look at the cool small details, like this one meat packing plant.

this dude was running you could find out he was using mole rats instead of the game he got brought.

You can find out by terminal entries that a company is experimenting on random kidnapped people.

There is a vault that took pre-war kids and killed their parents and used their DNA to clone more and more of them.

There is an amazingly written moment that I won't spoil, but I do recommend you watch this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsEjQC5OJR4

It made me cry, it was almost as sad as

seeing mordan die in ME3

 

 

The thing wrong with fallout 4, is the same thing that is wrong with mass effect Andromeda.

They are not in line with the originals, Though this does not make them bad games.

If fallout 4 was called anything else, I think it would have been the best game of 2015.

 

Fallout 4, is a good game.

But its not a game your should play if your expecting a main story on par with the other fallout games.

Saying that, I think the main story is on par and above many stories from triple A games released that year and 2016.

 

 

Anyway, enough of my idiotic rambling.

Would love anyones thoughts on the topic.

 

[sgtmcbiscuits]

I agree that it's a great game, and infinitely better if you just pretend you don't even have a son. Makes it so much more enjoyable. I agree that it's a great game, but it's not a great Fallout game. That's the difference. Most people that dislike it wanted another Fallout 3 or New Vegas, and I definitely did, too. Originally, I didn't like the game, because I wanted more Fallout. This doesn't feel the same as other Fallout games. I don't think that makes it bad, but it definitely does cater to a different audience. It's much less story-filled, and much more about your own creativity, with everything from the more in-depth armor and weapon modifications, to the Settlement building. It definitely could do miles better in the story, but as far as actual gameplay goes, I feel like it's never been close to this good.

 

There's cover (kind of), in depth weapon customization, much more fluid animation and dialogue, the settlement building, however finicky, is pretty much infinitely enjoyable for someone creative. If we're judging it based on story, I'd give it a very low score. If we're judging it based on traditional RPG elements, I'd give it a middling score. However, in terms of actually playing the game, combat, exploration, it's the best that Fallout has ever been. Overall, I definitely think it's a good game. It's not as good as it could have been, if they made the story easier to relate to and less forced, but all in all, I definitely love it.

[robhartman9]

its all about the sandbox. If you just run strait across its not much fun. You have to stop and build a sandcastle, dig for treasure, fling some cat poo at the other kids, you get the analogy. Nuka World has a side quest with Sierra Petrovita that I thought was the best part of Nuka World. The fallout lore is still there you just have to look for it. There are tons of hidden easter eggs as well. Like that bar near swans pond. I walked in there and when I got down to the end of the bar the recognition hit me. I laughed, I almost cried, I looked around for something to take as a memento. That's what I call immersion. Unfortunate that the younger generation wont get that easter egg or have any clue what Walden pond is all about. It seems to me a lot of the bad reviews come from young punks who just didn't get it.

[montky]

indeed,

discussions such as these by fans about Fallout lore

are partly why I'm at NMM-

it's awesome to hear ideas from folks and hone praxis and all.

 

these kinds of discussions lead to all kinds of awesome tangents,

so thanks for asking an awesome question and I look forward to what folks reflect.

 

 

 

apologies to sound a broken record;

to recap -

 

some folks disliked FO4 and will not admit it to their personal continuity.

this is for a number of reasons -

mostly to do with the lack of unique gamestates, the lack of ron perlman title cards etc,

no karma system etc. the mischaracterization of the BoS etc.

the copious homages to Futurama, etc.

the lack of 'emotional investment' opportunities.

 

though, I've enjoyed FO4 and personally enjoy the modified variant of all FO titles to date.

the first fallout I played was 2, then tactics, then BoS, then 1, then 3, NV and present.

FO4 has a great potential to connect to FO3, FONV and the past continuity,

while offering some new villains too.

thats why the Enclave Returns, UnderBoston, and detente in the commonwealth

are such awesome projects.

The Posthumous Trial of The American People v Vault-Tec at V111,

that was a touching moment. the skeletons in the courtroom are posthumously tried for their

heinous experiments on people who sought shelter from the end of the world.

justice is served, when they are deposited in to V666, consigned to the long fall towards the mantle.

 

Stanislaus Braun is sentenced to a life-sentence of working to benefit humanity,

to rectify the errors of his ways.

Braun was partly involved at V111, and if you have high enough persuasion chances,

you can make Braun the Director at the Institute.

V111 is restored, and Braun genuinely turns over a new leaf.

 

I like the Everyperson Protagonists/Brady Bunch mod -

it allows you to completely customize your 'family', as in previous games.

you can have Nate + Nate, Nate + Nora, Nora + Nora, 0 through 7 descendants,

and potentially more.

the family portrait becomes very complicated in FO4,

and that theme - family etc,

that is the touchstone of the FORPG-ified FO4.

 

I'm not going to lie though;

replaying as deliberately evil Enclave/Institute is a lot of fun...

 

FO4, once appropriately modified,

has the most customization and options of an FO title to date.

some of the most complex stuff is in FO4 mods,

and it has gone from strength to strength.

 

I am in awe of the creativity and awesome of Fallout modders.

you can tell they really know their exegetical stuff,

they care about the lore, and they care about 'verisimilitude' -

its fallout that we know it when we see it.

 

 

 

@robhartman9

indeed, HD thoreau's "giftshop"

haha.

"all gifts from the kiosk are tax-deductible" whoever read that line is almost laughing.

 

 

 

that's partly the motif behind the city-state model in FO4.

and I'd like to think, a prominent recital in the "Books School of the Air of the Commonwealth".

it is part of the reading-test, a vive-voce that wastelanders at "books"

must recite to graduate.

when a "books" is attacked, or Supermutants etc, use Books or a hospital as hostages,

that emotional investment makes you care more than

"another. settlement. needs the minutemen's. help, general? let me. mark it. on. the. map.

for. you?" of base FO4 Preston Garvey.

 

the settlements form a loose federation, each with their own Regulators etc.

Non-state actors, like the Garbagemen from The Underboston or Goodneighbor etc,

they move between the outposts.

In time, the Boston Commonwealth would form a loose federation,

coming to rival and perhaps meet with, the NCR...

 

 

[ibldedibble]

As someone who started playing Fallout back in '97 (played Wasteland some time around the release of Fallout 2, but never finished it, if you want to count that as a part of the franchise as well): Fallout 4 is the first Fallout game to surpass Fallout 1 for me.

 

Now, a lot of people have been asking me how I can rate FO4 so high and it's quite easy: Replayability.

There's an insane amount of replayability in FO4, along with a fairly decent story. If we want to stick to comparing it to just the modern Fallout games, it's probably the strongest story to be honest. And it definitely has the strongest motivation for the main character to go explore and do stuff of the modern games.

Take the motivation from FO4 ('Someone stole my kid, I want revenge!') and compare it to FO3 which had the motivation 'My dad left the vault and now the leader of the vault wants to kill me, so I have to find dad so we can be a family again.' (Though at least we got a sort of decent follow-up to it with the entrance of the Enclave) and FONV which had the motivation 'I really have to hunt down the person who tried to kill me, so I can finish my job.'... I'd take FO4's narrative over the other two any day.

 

Compared to the story in FO1 and FO2? They kind of go on the same level as FO4, in fact, they are actually very similar the more I think about it. (In FO1 we have to find a waterchip to save our vault, in FO2 we have to find a GECK in order to save our village who's been suffering from a drought. Both give the same kind of (potentially stronger) urgency as 'I want to save my kid'. And once the first hurdle is done (finding a waterchip/a geck/our son) we get a mission to take care of something else that's amiss. FO1 - Super Mutants, FO2 - The Enclave, FO4 - The Institute (and/or the Railroad and the Brotherhood). The main difference being that FO4 is more railroad-y (pun not intended) on the way to the ending cutscene, but it also lets you do just about anything and everything both before and after the ending.)

 

When it comes to lore... if you can't find the Fallout lore in Fallout 4, then you probably haven't played Fallout 4. There's a lot of great stuff to be found. (Yes, there are some mistakes here and there, but most of it is small and innocent.)

 

As it stands, with the release of FO4, my current rating for the Fallout games go:

 

 

Fallout 4

Fallout 1

Fallout 2/3 (I prefer the story in 2, but the gameplay of 3. Can't really decide which to rate higher here.)

Fallout NV

(Watching paint dry.

Having stomach cramps.

Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel for Xbox/PS2. (Can you tell I really didn't enjoy FO:BoS? :tongue: ))

 

(Haven't replayed Fallout: Tactics recently, so I don't know where I'd put that, though I recall myself enjoying it quite a bit when it was released.)

 

 

 

Edit: Added a spoiler for the last part, since that was just something extra I added.

Edited April 19, 2017 by ibldedibble

[taryl80]

Well I have only read about f1 and 2. I had started playing the fallout series with fallout 3. And I need to say that I dislike the mainstory of f3 and f4 (sidequests are not included in this opinion).

 

I mean, the story f3... Everything you do there, just to purify water feels a bit... not heroic enough? I don´t know how to descripe it better... What f4 matters, the story is great for me until... you come to the institue. I mean, you are on rage because your wife got killed and your son kidnapped and thought already yourself "ok, let us go there and be nice and see it just as the calm before the storm" and then you learning the truth behind the mainstory...

 

That moment feels like... as someone had stolen the good moral behind your already solid conviction to destroy the institut. That is for me a mass effect ending if some understood what I like to say with that^^.

 

The best fallout for me whas fallout new vegas. Because I liked the mainstory more and the setting is for me more credible as in particular fallout 4.

 

But don´t understand me wrong. For me are all fallout games veeery good games. I would non of them call bad and I have never understood the rant about f4. The rant about f4 had I always explained to me that there maybe people out there that think on a fully modded f3 and/or new vegas and rant then about f4, forgetting the fact that a vanilla game can´t have all the features a fully modded game have.

 

Edit: Uh, yeah... "my list" :)...

 

-Fallout New Vegas

-Fallout 4

-Fallout 3

 

Every indication with dlcs counted in.

Edited April 19, 2017 by taryl80

[Lisselli]

Fallout 4 has my favorite weapon in any game involving weapons: The shotgun. That alone rates the game pretty high up for me lol.

Imo the story was the smallest part of the game, and I'd say I found it interesting up til the point where I had to choose a side.

If I wanted to go with the railroad, which I did, I couldn't finish the Minutemen, which I also wanted to do. I didn't care about the Brotherhood of Steel.

Basically, saving the synths would lock everything else up. :/

 

Edited April 19, 2017 by Lisselli

[jjb54]

My .000001 cent worth.

 

Spoiler in this post .. do NOT read as I am not going to " hide " them. It's 2017 and by now all the story lines have been given out.

 

I was let down ... oh I still play, because of Mods. :smile:

 

1 - I wished Beth had paid more attention to Quests and Character then the stupid and annoying Fallout 4 meets Sim City and the settlers add a whole new level to the term: Snowflakes. I guess we could call them Nuclear Powered Snowflakes times 10!

 

Here is where I wish they spent more time, money and such:

 

Deacon - " .. now there's a story to tell .. " He has a past and obviously a hard one.

.. It would have been fun to have the remnants of the " Deathclaws " and a Quest to help Deacon find them?

 

Nick V. - I was surprised that we got a bit more of his past in Far Harbor. But what a let down. No real move forward for Nick. It was an incomplete story, no " victory " or ' awakening ' or " I see the light ". I could have easily come up with some more Quest to help him become more " human ".

 

Danse - It would have been fun to put more of his " past " together. To find out when he really ' became ' ' alive ". Did the Railroad or similar group help him forget that he was a synth? Obviously someone - group had to give him a memory wipe ... or ... Was he a spy, with a recall code? Was he planted by the Institute to keep an eye on the BoS? See!? Quests to be had.

 

McCready - Here again, we had a story within a story. A character from FO3. It would have been a great quest to ... well ... have more meat and again, there was / is a wealth of story line to be had. Did he remember the Vault Dweller from FO3?

 

Strong - what an annoying character. I still refuse to rescue him. But the " Milk of Kindness " could have been a quest to find various books that teach Strong about Human Kindness.

 

There is Mama Murphy .. there is Preston .. Piper and so on. Each has a story that could have been played on, but in closing: We got settlements with Nuclear Powered Snowflakes.

 

I am glad for the Mod Community giving us more meat to play with. :smile:

[madmongo]

I hate Fallout 4. I had to force myself to finish the main quest. I'm stuck in the middle of Far Harbor now and I can't bring myself to even finish it. I don't know if I ever will finish it.

 

I don't think Fallout 4 is a bad game. I think that it's a bad role playing game. Fallout 4 is a combat shooter and sims game, and in my opinion it does both of those fairly well. The thing is, Fallout 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas were all role playing games.

 

For a shooter, you want a stripped down conversation system, ideally with some interesting comments in there to liven things up. And that's exactly what you get with Fallout 4. For a role player, that completely ruins the game. You can't immerse yourself in the game if you can't even tell what you are going to say before you say it, and you're not role playing at all if every possible dialog option leads you to the same place. Role playing means making choices, and you only get to make one real choice in Fallout 4 - which faction you want to win. That's it. From a shooter perspective, that's great. You don't have to worry about what you click on in dialog and can focus on just getting to the next thing to shoot. But for a role player, there's nothing there. The game holds your hand all the way through the main quest. You never need to stop and think to figure out what to do next. Each step is clearly marked. For a casual gamer or for someone who just likes shooters, that's perfect. But again, for a role player, there's nothing there, nothing to think about, no choices to make, and nothing you do has any real effect on the game one way or the other. You are following a set script, not role playing.

 

Coming from a background of the previous Fallout games, I expected it to be another role playing game, and was hugely disappointed. You can't role play Fallout 4. You have to follow their narrative. A role playing game doesn't have a narrative. A role playing game has a story that evolves as you play. There's no evolving story in Fallout 4. You get to decide which faction wins, and that's it. One choice, out of the entire main quest.

 

From a role player's perspective, Fallout 4 could have been great. It has multiple factions, just like New Vegas. Unlike New Vegas, you can't independently decide each faction's fate. There were all kinds of possibilities here. You could have convinced the Minutemen to work with the Railroad, or to work against them. You could convince the Brotherhood that the Minutemen were an ally, or you could have convinced the Brotherhood that they were an enemy that needed to be wiped out. You could try to convince the Brotherhood that the synths weren't just machines, or you could reinforce their belief that they are just toasters. Even taking the institute path, you could end up in charge. You could force them to free the synths. There is so much potential here for an evolving story, and so many potential story arcs. But FO4 has none of that.

 

Would these have made FO4 more popular? I have no idea. Probably not. Casual gamers don't want all of those different things to keep track of and don't want all of those decisions to make. Casual gamers just want to follow the prompts on the screen and go through the story. For that type of gamer, a narrative is by far the best way to go.

 

Bethesda has a choice to make with the Fallout franchise. They can continue down this path, which will make their Fallout games more appealing to casual gamers, or they can return to the role playing genre. One thing they can't do is have it both ways. They can't make a game which appeals to both the casual gamer and the immersive role playing fan.

 

I'm a role player. I own every Fallout game ever made. I am a big fan of the series. I love the lore, and until FO4, I loved all of the games. But I won't be buying Fallout 5 if it's another shooter. If that's the direction they want to take, I'm done. There's nothing in a combat shooter Fallout game for me.

 

Like I said, it's not a bad game. It's just a bad role playing game.

[chucksteel]

I sort of feel that Bethesda uses FO4 as a testing ground and try to experiment with it a bit more then their baby TES. It's not their IP it's one they purchased! I don't love FO4 and I don't hate FO4.

 

I'm not going to go into all of the Pro's and Con's (My opinion only) but you can see the experimentation! It's obvious with the open world aspect and the BAD dialogue system! I will say I did LOVE not having to use any metro tunnels or load screens to get from Sanctuary Hill to Diamond City.

 

I am at least happy to see them try new things but, I would like them to do it with a franchise other then Fallout! I've played all of the fallouts and I love most of them.