Fallout 4 is Fixable* without a total Rewrite

C

Charwo

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
Notice what I'm saying. I'm not saying Fallout 4 could ever be a worthy successor to New Vegas, but it can be a passable game. With the dialogue extender from Cascadia and the no level limit for perks. Hear me out, you might like what I have to say:

First, let's address the biggest concern in the room: Boston needs to be changed. It needs to be rebuilt and civilized like Vegas, and everything there depends on it.

Main quest changes:
Make the other stasis pods in 111 locked but it's inhabitants alive. You can't get them, but it makes the Institute less petty and stupid.
Make it possible to infiltrate Vault 14 or persuade them to let you in. Maybe find a guard, knock him out, take his clothes. Or if female, pose as the evening's entertainment. Make it so no part of the missions requires you to kill or run from anyone.
Have the Old North Church be inhabited and have the crypt locked with the Pastor having a key. You should have to do one or two local quests before he'll trust you enough to give you the key. Or you can pickpocket him. He'd have to be essential because if you killed this man realistically the Railroad would aggro to you, but them's the breaks.
Make it possible to convince Kellog to walk away. In fact, don't let him die, only once he's defeated, the player can choose the spare him, and skip the whole brain trip.
Shaun needs to be rewritten. Everything about the man is manipulative and cold. Shaun needs to be friendier, a more symapthetic, with multiple scenes of interaction
You don't have to aggro either the Brotherhood or the Institute on the Mass Fusion building. The building and interior need to look like a functional post-war office space, but none of the combat needs be changed. The city government won't dare say no to the Brotherhood and the Institute goes where it wants. Maybe add some Securitrons hostile to both parties.
Be able to convince the Railroad to go underground in both Institute and Minuteman missions.
Bluff Father into thinking you're going to blow up the Institute, then take it over and make it a base for your faction (optional)

Except for rewriting Shaun, it would be rather light work, as far as mods go. The big issue would be making Boston civilized. I think the simplest way is to make a Vegas-like wall around the upper two-thirds of Boston (Downtown, the Mass. State House, the Library, the Fens, the Commons, the Docks) and rebuild those parts, leaving the bottom third as ruins.

Then you can invent all kinds of side quests. I was thinking things involving skill checks, a questline to defeat or negotiate with the Gunners to leave Gunner's Plaza. They are upset about the city hiring them and not paying them, as agreed to. They are nasty, but it would be possible to do quests for them that would "convince them" to leave their various outposts, or you could kill them as per vanilla and be rewarded for it.

It's not a trivial amount of work, but it's a lot less work than trying to rewrite EVERYTHING.
 
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The fact i can only roleplay as a male soldier or a female lawyer that has to be married (male soldier to the female lawyer) kills this game for me. One of things i like to do in RPGs with character creation is roleplay as a character i made in my head and make my choices based on that character's personality.

I can only do that with two character archetypes in this game and no amount of rewrite in the story after that will make the game any better to me.
 
The game itself should probably renamed Fifties Post Apocalypse: The Game because aside from superficial aspects, FO4 barely counts as a Fallout game.

The story decided to tackle Blade Runner rather than exploring the ethics of a post apocalypse, wastes its setting (an unscathed wasteland ought to resemble the Mojave rather than being like FO3 and even the latter was a mistake due to the time skip between 3 and 1) and much of it feels lazy.

A rewrite is the least of what is needed to fix FO4 into a proper Fallout game. At the very least, it needs full conversions and a completely different dev.
 
Charwo said:
Have the Old North Church be inhabited and have the crypt locked with the Pastor having a key. You should have to do one or two local quests before he'll trust you enough to give you the key. Or you can pickpocket him. He'd have to be essential because if you killed this man realistically the Railroad would aggro to you, but them's the breaks.
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Essential NPCs are really poor design in a series where player freedom is a one of the core pillars of gameplay. There are many better ways to handle this. For starters, you could just let the player piss off the Railroad. That's their dumbass mistake if they kill the pastor. If you really want to discourage this, just give him a bunch of sentry bots or turrets or something so players know not to fuck around. The important part is they still can. Why are we holding people's hand and not allowing them to face consequences? This is one of the main reasons Fallout 4 sucks in the first place.

Charwo said:
Except for rewriting Shaun, it would be rather light work, as far as mods go.
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While I think you might be downplaying the amount labor involved, I do agree that since some of the main issues with Fallout 4 are centered around the quest and dialogue structure, fans could in theory mod the game into something more palatable. The biggest changes would have to come in the form of overhauling the entire RPG system. Restoring and implementing mechanics like traits, skills, karma, and reputation would be as big a task as creating a new game itself. That shit isn't light work, but I know somebody could do it.
 
TerminallyChill said:
Essential NPCs are really poor design in a series where player freedom is a one of the core pillars of gameplay. There are many better ways to handle this. For starters, you could just let the player piss off the Railroad. That's their dumbass mistake if they kill the pastor. If you really want to discourage this, just give him a bunch of sentry bots or turrets or something so players know not to fuck around. The important part is they still can. Why are we holding people's hand and not allowing them to face consequences? This is one of the main reasons Fallout 4 sucks in the first place.
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Bethesda is just too lazy to come up with a failsafe plan like Yes Man if you kill too many characters with big influences on the story. Also Fallout NV was too hard so they downgraded everything to make Fallout 4 just as easy as Fallout 3.
Norzan said:
The fact i can only roleplay as a male soldier or a female lawyer that has to be married (male soldier to the female lawyer) kills this game for me. One of things i like to do in RPGs with character creation is roleplay as a character i made in my head and make my choices based on that character's personality.
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I agree. Also the whole fact that they put an accent on the protagonist's voice is absolutely outrageous. They wasted more money making the protagonist voiced and having to deal with the piss-poor 4-option choice dialogue that literally means "Yes" for every one of them. Instead of focusing on the dialogue quality and spending money on that. The voice that your character has further ruins the RPG factor here. Skill checks are completely fucking worthless and they're based on a fucking diceroll again.

To be honest, nobody should focus on Fallout 4 being remade. It's already destroyed beyond repair, all you can do is just make the situation a bit better but not change it at all with mods that add in the classic dialogue menu and the removal of the character's voice. It doesn't do much since there's still 4 options that still mean "Yes" no matter what you choose. Weapon Condition mods are okay but to be honest they don't do a great job like a built-in weapon condition system. This game focuses so much on weapon modding but not crafting new weapons and new ammo (Hand Loader in NV makes you feel REALLY good when you make a lot of 12 Gauge 4/0 Buck Magnum rounds that go perfectly with your Shotgun Perks ["And stay back!" and "Shotgun Surgeon"]. It adds more and more depth to your build. And you also have a secondary "objective" to gather the resources necessary for crafting). Speaking of ammo, the lack of many types of ammo in Fallout 4 is disappointing. You just get the standard version of a round and nothing else. The other type of rounds (like Incendiary rounds or Explosive rounds) need to be magically found on a Legendary Weapon and that's on a diceroll too. Fallout 4's big map could of had so many good hiding spots for cool unique weapons that don't do this legendary bullshit. Instead of unique and creatively made weapons with new skins and stats, you just get some effect that just adds a little "flavor" to a standard weapon. Sometimes you get a unique name but that's only in stores. And even then those weapons, aside from the name, have nothing changed. Just a little effect added to it. That's how life works, right? Some dude more buffed up than usual has a magical effect on his weapon (though he doesn't use the legendary weapon) that has the effect change to something on random once the previous owner (buffed up dude) dies. Nice job, Bethesda. Fucking imbeciles.
 
I would start with a clean slate, cut every factions, as well as super mutants and deathclaws (I think it's lazy not coming up with new apex super predators, and I don't think a giant reptile without any feathers or fur should exist in Boston. Unless my headcanon about global warming is valid...). It'd be easier to create something completely new than it would be to turn that mess into anything remotely resembling a Fallout RPG.

I'd still like to explore transhumanism as subject matter though. Probably something about how unequal opportunity allows privileged elitists to believe that they're better than poor people. There would be at least one Jonas Salk type, living in poverty, who shares medical schematics freely. As well as references to Ghost in the Shell, with increasingly artificial minds questioning if they're even the same person. I suppose robobrains would fit into that bit somehow.
 
TerminallyChill said:
Essential NPCs are really poor design in a series where player freedom is a one of the core pillars of gameplay. There are many better ways to handle this. For starters, you could just let the player piss off the Railroad. That's their dumbass mistake if they kill the pastor. If you really want to discourage this, just give him a bunch of sentry bots or turrets or something so players know not to fuck around. The important part is they still can. Why are we holding people's hand and not allowing them to face consequences? This is one of the main reasons Fallout 4 sucks in the first place.



While I think you might be downplaying the amount labor involved, I do agree that since some of the main issues with Fallout 4 are centered around the quest and dialogue structure, fans could in theory mod the game into something more palatable. The biggest changes would have to come in the form of overhauling the entire RPG system. Restoring and implementing mechanics like traits, skills, karma, and reputation would be as big a task as creating a new game itself. That shit isn't light work, but I know somebody could do it.
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I don't mind not building the game around murderhobos. You wanna shoot everything, play Borderlands. Player choice is ALWAYS an illusion, CRPGs run on Morton's Fork.

The thing is, though all that stuff, traits, skills, and reputation have been added back in or in reputation case is baked in (one choice but it's there). And Karma? Karma doesn't fit this rather tight narrative, but it could be added in as an afterthought.
 
CerberusGate said:
The game itself should probably renamed Fifties Post Apocalypse: The Game because aside from superficial aspects, FO4 barely counts as a Fallout game.

The story decided to tackle Blade Runner rather than exploring the ethics of a post apocalypse, wastes its setting (an unscathed wasteland ought to resemble the Mojave rather than being like FO3 and even the latter was a mistake due to the time skip between 3 and 1) and much of it feels lazy.

A rewrite is the least of what is needed to fix FO4 into a proper Fallout game. At the very least, it needs full conversions and a completely different dev.
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Why, why does it need a full conversion? The answer is, unless you're going to make a world with an overmap, it doesn't. Mechanically it's fine, if boring and it's story though is strong, if badly executed. What it needs is a few non-dialogue skill checks and a few new buffering NPCs to provide the skill checks. Whining about not giving the player choice is bullshit: to some degree you have design the character around the game premise. My Courier works well because I designed her as a Courier, made her WANT to be a Courier, my Lone Wanderer was desinged around being Jame's kid, and my Vault Dweller works because I designed her backstory around being a Vault Dweller, which for one thing meant I could never in good conscience give her the Outdoorsman skill. Playing the Chosen One I couldn't really let him gain science except through books and no repair until he meets Vic.

You have no real agency until you get the Institute. That's hardly a complain-able offense. You don't have any narrative agency in NV's story either until you get the Strip. And the fast way to get it back is to meet Yes Man, decide Benny's a cornered rat and leave OR kill Benny and take the chip into the sunset. Yes you can fuck around before then, but it doesn't make sense. Once you meet Father, it's more than possible to deice to fuck it and go to Bar Harbor or whatever. It's like in Fallout 3, if I want to do DLC and side quests in a way that makes sense, I need to assume my LW doesn't find Vault 112 (because it's description is vague at best on the holotape) OR the repairs go on for months at Project Purity (which means mechanically dropping the repair mission in Waters of Life).

And then here's the other point: in New Vegas, being a Courier is a CAREER, not a one time thing. Your character has been doing this for the better part of a decade, and a male Courier is at least in his thirties to be concerned he might be the Lonesome Drifter's father. You can't play an NCR soldier, you can't join the Fiends, you can't be a farmer. Being a solider or a lawyer is a career just like being a Courier.

If you're going to go in about making a proper Fallout game, don't even mod Fallout 4. Make it in RPG maker. Make it all of New England with lots of random dungeons to find scattered from Newport to Valleys of Vermont.
 
Charwo said:
I don't mind not building the game around murderhobos. You wanna shoot everything, play Borderlands. Player choice is ALWAYS an illusion, CRPGs run on Morton's Fork.
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It's not about shooting everything, it's about anticipating what your players are likely to do. If there is even a slim chance that somebody could shoot the pastor, then that needs to be addressed. Why would you choose to shatter the already thin illusion of choice by making what players would expect to be a mortal character unkillable? There are very simple ways around this. Invincible NPCs are just what lazy programers do. Don't be lazy.

Charwo said:
The thing is, though all that stuff, traits, skills, and reputation have been added back in or in reputation case is baked in (one choice but it's there). And Karma? Karma doesn't fit this rather tight narrative, but it could be added in as an afterthought.
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These systems have been added back to the game? How well are they actually implemented throughout the map? I agree that Karma is largely arbitrary in Fallout, but those other mechanics add a ton of depth and are extremely important to strategic gameplay.

Charwo said:
Whining about not giving the player choice is bullshit
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As a video game's primary goal is to be something interactive, I would have to disagree. Especially when the genre and previous titles in the series offered choice as a central feature. It is Fallout 4, after all. Wouldn't it be understandable if people whined about Activision removing the shooting in Call Of Duty 29 or whatever number they're up to now? If player choice isn't important, why can't it just be a movie or a book?

Charwo said:
And then here's the other point: in New Vegas, being a Courier is a CAREER, not a one time thing. Your character has been doing this for the better part of a decade, and a male Courier is at least in his thirties to be concerned he might be the Lonesome Drifter's father. You can't play an NCR soldier, you can't join the Fiends, you can't be a farmer. Being a solider or a lawyer is a career just like being a Courier.
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Are you joking? There's a very obvious difference beween starting players in a house with their fully voiced family and telling them something vague like 'you were a courier'.

Charwo said:
If you're going to go in about making a proper Fallout game, don't even mod Fallout 4. Make it in RPG maker. Make it all of New England with lots of random dungeons to find scattered from Newport to Valleys of Vermont.
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What is the point of this thread again? The one that you yourself started?
 
Charwo said:
Why, why does it need a full conversion? The answer is, unless you're going to make a world with an overmap, it doesn't. Mechanically it's fine, if boring and it's story though is strong, if badly executed. What it needs is a few non-dialogue skill checks and a few new buffering NPCs to provide the skill checks. Whining about not giving the player choice is bullshit: to some degree you have design the character around the game premise. My Courier works well because I designed her as a Courier, made her WANT to be a Courier, my Lone Wanderer was desinged around being Jame's kid, and my Vault Dweller works because I designed her backstory around being a Vault Dweller, which for one thing meant I could never in good conscience give her the Outdoorsman skill. Playing the Chosen One I couldn't really let him gain science except through books and no repair until he meets Vic.
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The mechanics don't encourage the skill-checks (in fact, IIRC I'd argue part of the appeal mods that convert 4 into something else like Cascadia and FO4:NV is that they found ways to work in features that ought to be in the base game) and the story is not a proper Fallout story, it's more akin to a Blade Runner story. On story's strength... that's subjective.

And as @TerminallyChill points out, player choice has always been an important aspect to these games. You can choose not to design the character around the game's premise or make up how such a build exists (i.e a Chosen One who knows Science & Repair due to being smarter than normal and having learnt it on their own etc.).

Charwo said:
You have no real agency until you get the Institute. That's hardly a complain-able offense. You don't have any narrative agency in NV's story either until you get the Strip. And the fast way to get it back is to meet Yes Man, decide Benny's a cornered rat and leave OR kill Benny and take the chip into the sunset. Yes you can fuck around before then, but it doesn't make sense. Once you meet Father, it's more than possible to deice to fuck it and go to Bar Harbor or whatever. It's like in Fallout 3, if I want to do DLC and side quests in a way that makes sense, I need to assume my LW doesn't find Vault 112 (because it's description is vague at best on the holotape) OR the repairs go on for months at Project Purity (which means mechanically dropping the repair mission in Waters of Life).
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On narrative agency, I'd argue that the agency is there in NV whereby the player can ignore Benny and do anything else. Especially if they choose to play their Courier as someone who let being shot in the head be water under the bridge (odd yes but that is part of being allowed to choose how your character was). Also your logic on 3 and 4 allowing you to go off to do DLCs and sidequests would apply to NV as well, the Courier could have decided to explore out of curiosity, gain profit, take a break from the politics and/or felt obliged to answer the radio transmissions (especially with regard to Ulysses).

Charwo said:
And then here's the other point: in New Vegas, being a Courier is a CAREER, not a one time thing. Your character has been doing this for the better part of a decade, and a male Courier is at least in his thirties to be concerned he might be the Lonesome Drifter's father. You can't play an NCR soldier, you can't join the Fiends, you can't be a farmer. Being a solider or a lawyer is a career just like being a Courier.
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Except as pointed out, 4 locks you in as being a soldier or lawyer with a set background and family life. You will always be a soldier or lawyer who happens to be skilled with weapons with the only difference for each playthrough being your skills & SPECIAL stats that can be leveled up with perks so there isn't any point.

You could argue the same for other Fallout games except in those, SPECIAL is difficult to level up so setting certain scores in your SPECIAL would set up how your player character would be (intelligent but lacking endurance, stupid but strong, not charismatic but lucky etc.). And that's not getting into the fact that the Courier's backstory is one that the player can pick out on their own. With the age slider, the Courier's age is customizable and the player can choose what ought to be part of the Courier's backstory via dialogue conversations:
https://fallout.gamepedia.com/Courier
Below is a non-exhaustive list of elements of the character's past which can be explicitly expressed by players during gameplay:

  • During Dr. Mitchell's word association test, one of the possible responses to "mother" is "regret".
  • It can be suggested during dialogue with Veronica Santangelo that the Courier does not know where they were born.
  • The Courier can tell Cass that they do not know what a fish is. Or, on the contrary: an intelligent Courier may test her knowledge about fish, clearly aware of their nature although they are practically non-existent in California or the Mojave Wasteland and may only be found in Lake Mead or Zion Canyon.
  • Upon learning from the Lonesome Drifter that he is from Montana and looking for his disappeared father, the Courier can, if he is male and has the Lady Killer perk, ask the Drifter if he would not happen to be exactly 17 years old. When the Drifter says he is not, the Courier responds with relief.
  • Before setting off to New Canaan, the Courier can tell Jed Masterson that they have not been to Utah in some time, implying that they have been there before.[4]
  • Dialogue choices throughout Honest Hearts heavily imply that the Courier has never heard of Christianity.
  • One of the epilogues of Old World Blues states that the Courier knows very little about communism or high schools, though this is an inference from the X-13 computer system.
  • When the ED-E from the Divide plays the log of his discovery by a child and his father in Chicago, Illinois, the Courier may speak as familiar with Illinois but may ask "What's a Chicago?"
  • After hearing one of ED-E's recordings and discovers that ED-E is trying to find his way home, The Courier can remark that they feel the same way and adds "Why do you think I became a courier?"[5]
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All that can be picked or not picked by any player so there is agency in choosing your Courier's background even with the career in mind. The last one and first can even be used to craft a simple story like how the Courier had a falling out with their family and left home but now that they're older and wiser, has been trying to earn enough to be able to return home without shame though is never able to by the game's event even going so far as to say delivering the Platinum Chip would have been their last job due to the pay-out.
 
Charwo said:
Player choice is ALWAYS an illusion, CRPGs run on Morton's Fork.
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I'm pretty sure the only way that choice could be impossible in videogames is if it's impossible in real life. That IRL, the choices we make are the only ones we would make doesn't make them any less of a choice. It's just that they aren't random, superpositional, or completed by brains built out of Schrodinger cats. The results of such mental processes are just singular, because what the hell else would they be? Esoteric philosophy aside, unlike in real life, in videogames you can make different choices...by going back and doing things all over again. Which harkens back to the more classical notion of 'free will'. On the other hand I could just point out that the consequences of different choices in Fo quests are not identical, and that Morton's Fork is a false dilemma based on flawed observations...which ironically applies more to your argument than it does to the subject of choice.
 
TerminallyChill said:
What is the point of this thread again? The one that you yourself started?
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The point of the thread is to argue Fallout 4 can be fixed with relatively little work to the main quest ie the only thing Bethesda put any time into.

If you're talking about a "Proper Fallout Game" by my estimation you can never have one again because Fallout is expansive in scope. THere's more to do in Clark County Nevada in NV than all of Southern California in Fallout 1. A Proper Fallout Game cannot be open world because events need to be spread out over a much further area and making Clark County a warzone in and of itself runs contra to what Fallout was: there were safe, walled settlements surrounded by miles of desolate nothing where raiders could perch, and most of the raiders were trying to pick off Caravans between towns, much like actually bandits. NV did a better job but had to make the local raider faction idiots too coked up to care they had a death wish. And it falls into the FPS trap of having them be hard coded hostile instead of a faction you could get to know, work out deals with, etc etc.

Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 have the severe problem of being way too dense, and that's why there had to be a Diamond City instead of rebuilt Boston instead of say Worchester, which unlike Boston is not on the sea, and therefore much harder to defend, and has no easy source of food. If they made Boston the way logic dictates it should be, being unnuked and right by the sea for easy trade and food, you'd lose easily half of the urban battleground Bethesda was so keen to make.

Making a proper Fallout game means going back to world maps and random encounters over a large map to lend plausibility to all the battles you'll fight and bunkers you'll plunder. Of all the things I miss about Fallout 1 and 2 it's the sense regional of scale, and you'll never get that in a Bethesda engine. Ever.

I'm talking about making Fallout 4 appealing enough to take the bad taste out of people's mouth and make it work well enough in the main quest, then adding new content to attract story modders. Because even though Fallout 4's weapons SUCKED, the last thing Fallout 4 needs is another weapon or armor. It needs stories, and an environment that lends itself to stories, the way NV does.

If you want me to be honest, I want this because I make 1 character per game. That's my Vault Dweller, that's MY CHosen One. And my Courier has had so many adventures I can't stuff any more into her story. New California is going to be a separate character if I include it in headcanon and it's gonna be her sister who gets the Frontier. I'm burnt out on NV, I put in 2300 hours, and I want to make something out of Fallout 4, but it lacks the foundation for what I want to tell.

I want Belthan to finally come back and wrap up his Quo Vagis trilogy. Is Fallout 4 worth fixing on its own? Only insofar as there's no real hope Obsidian will ever get to make another Fallout. Is it worth fixing so story modders will finally feel there's something to build off of? Fuck yes it is. Is this game worthless without mods? Yeah, but EVERY BETHESDA GAME is worthless without mods.
 
Fallout 4 could have been a decent game.

It could have been patched with about another 10,000 lines of dialogue.

But they didn't.
 
CT Phipps said:
Fallout 4 could have been a decent game.

It could have been patched with about another 10,000 lines of dialogue.
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What they could of done from the start was tell the idea of a voiced protagonist to fuck right off. Now they made that mistake and they had to resort to this disappointment that is the Fallout 4 dialogue system.
 
CT Phipps said:
An unvoiced protagonist is axiomatically inferior to a voiced one.
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Not really.

Context matters, and in Fallout games, where the player character's are there to provide the player the ability to create their own characters to enter the Fallout world, a voiced protagonist is not only unnecessary but also contradictory to what the game is trying to achieve.
 
CT Phipps said:
An unvoiced protagonist is axiomatically inferior to a voiced one.
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This is where you're wrong, flat out wrong in a game that's supposed to be mod friendly. You absolutely need to make new dialogue for the player character in new quest mods, for things new companions say, etc etc. They get away with it in Mass Effect because Mass Effect isn't designed to be moded. Bethesda games are, and that's their only strength. This is something I'm grateful for because I won't play East Coast without green mods. They're not deserts: and radiation does not make deserts. It's a bad trope and needs to die. Fallout 1 looked like a desert because it takes place in the Mojave DESERT
 
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