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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It just seems really clear the thing they are selling is 100% designed from the ground up as "we have a bunch of randomly scattered open world stuff" and not "we made a linear narrative" and it doesn't seem like some craaaazy mistake they are making over and over that the game has a weak central narrative that encourages you to largely ignore it. I don't know how you can play Fallout 4 and not see that they clearly really wanted a strong central narrative here. There's a prologue with a revenge and kidnapping setup. They tie it in closely with the rest of the main plot. They hired voice actors for the main character because having a voiced protagonist can help sell dramatic moments. (I'm assuming here that they didn't just do it because everyone else is--I'm assuming they had a good reason.) Their whole reveal trailer focused on the family and the contrast between pre- and post-apocalypse. That the narrative falls flat is a mistake because they clearly really wanted it not to. You point out that they designed it as a bunch of randomly scattered open world stuff, and that's true--but it also has a central narrative that has quite a bit of effort and budget put into it. It can be both things. I recognize that, again, I am clearly in the minority in preferring New Vegas to Fallout 4, as evidenced by the sales of both games. I'm a nerdy RPG fan who wants his nerdy RPG roleplaying, even if it comes at the cost of having a "just gently caress around and do whatever you want" world design. My criticisms probably make no sense to people with different priorities, but I don't think that means they're invalid or that Bethesda can't be criticized for having a weak story because "most players ignore it anyway." Harrow fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 21:39
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RBA Starblade posted:I really hosed up hard making my SPECIAL stats average all around instead of a few standouts, I really should have gone heavy into INT/CHA for what I want. Heavy INT/CHA worked well for me. Tons of crafting, effectively unlimited fusion cores, supply lines and overpowered companions. I had just enough PER to get Lockpick, increased AGI because I wanted Action Boy, got enough STR for Armorer, and I ended up spending some perk points later on increasing END (more HP per point in the long run than Life Giver, hilariously). But it worked out pretty nice.
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Nov 30, 2015 21:45
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Just, like, make the story and side quests interactive enough that they respond to player choice, and have interesting and cool characters and factions, and you'll have all the player story investment you need. Players can swap stories about how they solved that quest that would be different from how another player did, at least within a realistic amount of permutations, and would be motivated to seek an ending that benefits the characters and factions they came to care about. When it comes to an open-world RPG, we don't need to be pulled along on a hero's journey. We need numerous hooks in the world to pull players into the world's story from one angle or another, and then give them enough agency that they feel like they have some stake in how that story plays out. Then you get to have it both ways: you get to have a big open world that rewards you for just going out and loving around, and you also have a story and quest structure that supports the idea that the player is probably going to go out and gently caress around. You don't need to just say, "Well, lots of players are going to ignore the main story to gently caress around"--make the main story adapt to that loving around and it's all the better. The difference is that you have to think of it as the setting's story, not the story of a small set of characters, so it's not going to be a character-driven, emotional tale. And that's fine!
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Nov 30, 2015 22:57
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MisterBibs posted:I completely agree. Fortunately, we're talking about a series (modern Fallout) in which I'm not the outlier. How many times in the New Vegas thread had people struggling to fathom their friends finding 3 and (its story about seeking out your father) a lot better than NV's "please please please care about this city" one? I just didn't get "please please please care about this city" from New Vegas at all. In fact, you're allowed to tell the Strip to gently caress right off and screw over all of its factions. You can bring in Caesar's Legion to enslave and subjugate the Mojave. You're asked to care about the Mojave Wasteland on a macro level, I guess, but the game does so by letting you go out and play and affect it, so you get a chance to organically form connections to factions, characters, and towns in the setting. It'd be one thing if the game had some central story about the player being the only one who can save New Vegas from certain doom and assumed that every player would be motivated to do so. New Vegas is a story about a war over territory, not about caring about the fate of a specific city, and your character is free to affect the outcome of that war. That's neat, and it fits with open-world quest design rather than clashing with it.
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Nov 30, 2015 23:02
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:Replace "mojave wasteland" with "commonwealth" and "being shot in the head" with "having son stolen and spouse killed" and you've arrived at the reason why this entire discussion is stupid. They're the same game. Except that ignores the execution entirely in favor of focusing on the setup. But whatever, clearly I'm in the extreme minority for wanting quests and the main story to react to my choices beyond "choose which faction(s) to explode at the end," so I'll drop it.
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Nov 30, 2015 23:38
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At this point it's probably safe to leave this thread to rot with insufferable nerds like me and just discuss the game in this one.Pellisworth posted:One of the ways that NV really stands out from F4 is in the faction reactivity and choices you can make. Yep, it really does come down to reactivity. Focusing on the "WHERE IS MY SON" stuff is getting into strawman territory at this point (almost to the degree that "THE ELEVATOR" does when you talk about Dark Souls II's world design). Harrow fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 23:42
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coyo7e posted:Now I really want to restart the game and do this, and see how many times it breaks. I'm getting pretty tired of following quest markers anyway You can't break New Vegas by killing NPCs. You'll fail a ton of quests, but there's always, always a path to winning. There's one NPC you can't kill, and the only reason you can't is because he's a robot who can just upload a backup of himself to another identical robot body, and the only reason he exists is that he offers an ending path that works even if you kill literally every other NPC.
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Dec 1, 2015 00:21
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McSpankWich posted:If I ever need to try to convince myself that I am a normal and well-adjusted person, I just need to take a gander into the Fallout 4 thread. Reading all you mouthbreathing sperglords gripe about not being properly motivated to play this game (while simultaneously playing it for hundreds of hours) because of some bullshit no one cares about except for you really brings up my mood. Ah, yes. Comparing one aspect of a game unfavorably to another game in the series is definitely the same as what you described. Hm, yes, I see now. Also I did burn out on Fallout 4 because it's really repetitive and there was nothing to keep me playing beyond "shoot more dudes."
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Dec 1, 2015 01:33
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^ Yeah, they did a good job making radiation actually consequential in this one.Internet Kraken posted:I'm seriously considering putting 3 levels into endurance just to get aqua girl on my new character. I went through like 20 radaway just trying to set up foundations underwater in a settlement. It is 100% worth it. Aqua Boy/Girl is maybe my favorite one-point perk investment. Plus END gets you more HP per perk point than Life Giver so you get to be a bit tankier too. Win/win.
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Dec 1, 2015 01:37
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HnK416 posted:I sometimes forget that people who don't actually give a poo poo about video games don't read backstory material. The reason for the 50's aesthetic is just that culture and fashion are cyclical, right? The US went through it's normal stuff (hippies in the 60's/70's grungy punk in the 70's/80's) and looped back to 50's Americana. If I'm wrong please correct me, but I'm pretty drat certain that's the case. I thought it was just because the alternate history branch-off point was in the 1950s, with a huge leap forward in technology brought on by a fantastic version of nuclear power. But I guess that wouldn't make culture stagnate so really I have no idea what the in-universe justification is. Although actually the real reason, I think, is because Fallout is supposed to evoke those 1950s-era "this is what life will be like in the FUTURE!" things. Sort of a, what if that really was what the future was like, and also the Cold War never ended and everything went to poo poo, that kind of thing. While it wouldn't make a ton of sense for the cultural aesthetic to stay that way for fully 120 years of alternate history, it doesn't really matter because the end result is that they wanted to take that aesthetic into the post-apocalypse. One could easily argue that Bethesda took that aesthetic a bit too literally, but I think that's a separate issue.
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Dec 8, 2015 17:32
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icantfindaname posted:backstory stuff on a wiki means absolutely, literally nothing. i could say that a paper bag of dogshit was actually worth a billion dollars on a wiki but that wouldn't make it true. you can't logic your way out of the game being bad, a detailed, rational explanation of why the game is bad doesn't actually change the fact that the game is bad The original reason for the perma-'50s aesthetic is that the first Fallout game wanted to take the aesthetic of the 1950s-era "life in the FUTURE!" media into the post-apocalypse. That aesthetic was lessened in Fallout 2 (along with a few other things that are somehow considered inextricable from Fallout, like bottlecaps as currency), but when Bethesda was making Fallout 3 they identified it as a central pillar of Fallout, so now it is. They also took it too literally and missed any chance at subtle satire. Why Fallout: New Vegas has caps as currency I don't really know, but at least it took a different 1950s-60s era pop culture approach (classic Westerns outside the Strip, old Vegas glamour inside).
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Dec 8, 2015 17:45
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Shaquin posted:New Vegas had multiple currencies with both legion and NCR denominations represented and exchangeable into caps. The reason it had caps as a currency was likely a touch of familiarity as a gameplay system and being that the new vegas area was a hotly contested frontier zone it made sense for the natives to use and rely on the "gold standard" of sorts. Yeah, I remembered being able to exchange NCR money, but I must have missed why caps had value there. But that and HnK416's post make sense and I probably knew all of this at some point. Been too long since I've played NV.
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Dec 8, 2015 17:51
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khy posted:So why can't I play New Vegas as a guy who wants to leave Benny alone? Why do I HAVE to find some guy that shot me? I mean, if he wants the chip that badly, let him have it. It was only worth 250 caps to deliver the drat thing. The guy already shot me in the head once, why the hell do I HAVE to chase him down? Why can't I tell him "Just take the chip, I don't care. Here, a package from NCR Outpost bravo. Sign for it and I'm gone." I don't think radiant quests are a selling point. But I also think it's just a difference in priorities. I played NV because I wanted to have a cool Fallout story, not because I wanted to have directionless and neverending adventures. New Vegas was good for what I wanted, and Fallout 4 isn't. Simultaneously, it sounds like Fallout 4 is good for what you want, but not New Vegas. It's fine with me that I will eventually run out of quests to do in New Vegas, because I'm not in it to endlessly play one dude, or to wander off and explore and find random stuff. I think that's really just it. I wanted a good story that I had lots of freedom to influence. Sure, NV railroaded me into giving at least a vague poo poo about Benny for the first half but I was fine with that just because it served as a decent hook to get me into the story. Though I'll acknowledge that Benny is a weak spot in NV, not least because Matthew Perry phoned in that voice performance and he's just embarrassing to listen to. The rest of it, and the reactivity of the main quest and side quests, more than makes up for an awkward beginning for me. But not for everyone. Whether one prefers FO3/4 or NV is just down to what you enjoy most in an open-world RPG.
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Dec 8, 2015 20:23
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