What did you think was bad about Fallout 4

yfk12

Degenerate who belongs on a cross
What, in your opinion, were some of the bigger mistakes made by Bethesda in Fallout 4? Please be specific. Also don't be lazy; vague and generic insults are not very helpful.
 
Making so many radiant quests and too few actual side quests, and of the side quests we got only a few were interesting and we got shit like Cabot and The kid in the fridge.
 
Making so many radiant quests and too few actual side quests, and of the side quests we got only a few were interesting and we got shit like Cabot and The kid in the fridge.
Agreed. It certainly didn't help that Bethesda had thrown skills away, which limited skill checks and therefore player choice in the quests. Out of curiosity, which of the few side quests did you think were actually interesting?
 
Every part of the game was constructed as a stand alone part and nothing was interconnected.

Think of building a wall with legos; you put a down line of 2x4s then you stagger the next line and continue doing so; which gives you a solid result versus only stacking 2x4s on top of each others in haphazard stacks of different heights...

Stats are only minimally connected to skills, locations are completely decoupled from skills unless there is a pre-made set piece placed in there, quests are self contained modules that are sprinkled upon the unrelated-ly generated map, Gear is down at the tobacco shop, doing it's own thing...

It's not a game; it's a hostage situation where a lot of unrelated hostages and kidnappees were thrown into a pit and were forced to have unwanted intimate relations.
 
Main Game: Diamond city Blues, Here there be monsters, Last journey of the u.s.s constitution

Far Harbor: Brain Dead(although it seems like a rip-off of autumn leaves), The main questline

I'm sure there are more but that's the majority.
 
Wasted potential. When I look at the original concept art, listen to the soundtrack, or even just roam the map on occasion I can't help but feel the premise is there for an interesting RPG but Bethesda simply can't deliver.
 
Pretty much the lack of ability to roleplay as someone i want. Instead i'm lock between male soldier and female lawyer who are married to each other and can't roleplay as nobody else.

Skill points were removed when they did the boring damage increase in previous games, meaning now perk slots need to be wasted on perks that do this boring damage increase instead of those being occupied by perks that do cool, unique stuff.

Dialogue wheel is terrible. No more and no less than 4 options.

Settlement building is stupid. Instead of being of joint effort of several groups of people, nah, it's just one dude or dudette pretty much doing all the work. Because that's how civilization is rebuilt.

No level cap meaning no need to do another playthrough. Because people bitched that you can't pick every perk in the game in a single playthrough. Meaning builds pretty much don't exist.

There's more and i'm pretty much parroting most of what Mister Caption said in his review and that's because his feelings on the game pretty much mirror mine.
 
The Plot, the Dialogue wheel and the options they give you. They took the "RP" out of the "G" and the "G" is all that's left and competent "shooty shooty bang bang."
 
You aren't wrong, but...
Sorry I just read the title of forum, I'll try not jumping the gun next time.

I'll elaborate a bit. There's quite a bit of plot holes in Fallout 4's story like how Shaun never thinks of enhancing himself with cybernetics. If that's how Kellogg stayed young the entire time without gaining cancer then why didn't Shaun do the same to some extent. It's almost as if he chose to set up his inevitable demise. That would make it so the only reason he dies is that you, the player gun him down yourself. They develop the player character's background to much for you imo. You're either a war veteran or a lawyer and they give you a spouse, a butler, and a kid, thus giving you way less ability to think up your own backstory compared to the previous games. I also do not like how they force you to be the good guy in the base game (plus far harbor) and just give you quests anyway when you try to reject them. Like when you first encounter the minute-men, they ask if you can help them with their raider problem, if you say "No" they give you the quest anyway. Bethesda is too busy trying to make you play their story that they take away the ability to formulate your own. Also, why tf can't you side with the raiders and just kill the minute men? It would add to the options of roleplaying a character. And they flip my complaint on its head in the nuka world DLC where you are FORCED to be the villain or else you miss out on the meat of the DLC which is quite absurd. I also don't like the streamlined nature of the perk system, it feels bland and uninspired. It feels like there no risks to anything and you can be super op unless you crank the difficulty to where enemies are literally bullet sponges. In New Vegas it felt like it had a high risk and reward system if you commit to a certain play style and went all out with it. I'll say I do like the gunplay, its good and fun to mess around with inhabitants but there not much to it but pointing and clicking at the moment with my save. I also like the settlement building mechanic, I just hate how they don't explain the controls and the controls they give for PC are absolute garbage. But trying to make a super fort out of the Castle is always fun. I hope that was more helpful and insightful than my initial jab at the plot and crappy leveling mechanics.
 
MAIN problem with Fallout 4 is :

Weird limbo that the entire game is in when it comes to design philosophy.
Bethesda tried to ape Witcher 3 with more defined protagonist, looking for a kid etc. But they at the same time tried to keep their "free form blank protagonist open world RPG" game. Effect is know : intro that is long just enough to bore people to death BUT at the same time is waaaay too short for players to care about Nora and Shaun. In Witcher 3 we had five books to get to know Ciri, Yen and rest of the cast - hence when W3 starts we cared about what happened to her, we knew how she and Geralt interacted etc.
Nora/Nate are alive for whole 5 minutes, Shaun is a fucking prop not even a character and the entire thing is over in less than 10 minutes.
Solution would be simple : either cut the entire intro out and start with our hero waking up to Kellog killing Nate/Nora and kidnapping Shaun and then you can RP anyone you want - shellshocked parent, Vault survivor, amnesiac etc ( of course with hefty dose of dialogue and choice rewrite )
OR
Make intro even longer, get us to know N/N more, interact with them on few levels, let us go around the pre-war SH, do few quests etc.
Make Shaun 10-12yo and make player have interactions with him. Like imagine watching TV with him and some documentary comes up about PA armoured soldiers mowing down protestors and Shaun asks you why are they doing that and you have few ways to answer him ( gov is always right or they overreacted or soldiers are evil pawns etc ), teach him about treatment of people, civilians, freedoms etc. And then, depending on what you do in the meantime, you meet him as the Father and he throws stuff in your face or does the opposite - tells you that your words were an inspiration for him while running the Institute. That would have the emotional impact Bugfesta tried to generate with that set backstory.
Settlement building is the another thing that ilustrates said limbo - on one hand its clear that it was meant to be the staple and big part of your experience while dealing with Fallout 4. BUT again - you can finish the entire main quest without building single bed or wall. There is no ending where you use your pre war knowledge of law/military discipline to revive stable government, nothing changes while you build up all of those settlements, there are no ending slides, NOTHING CHANGES.
And without mods build options are pitiful - most of buildable locations are small and have shitload of unscrappable items that even further prohibit building something grand ( beside the settlement budget mechanic ), there is a small selection of items to build, settlers managment is pain in the ass etc.
Once again - either remove the settlement building and give us Skyrim homes ( i wouldnt want it because it was fun for me ) OR make the building locations big as hell, let the player go wild and make it have an impact on the game in form of more quests, special endings, various factions forming etc.

Bugfesta also tried to shift the burden of making the game fun onto a player.
What i mean about it - radiants CAN be fun, there can be interesting things happening during random shootout, trying to survive a trek to some location etc. Especially with good physics and shooting mechanics. Heck - to this point i still remember when i cleared almost entire Quincy without firing a single shot - just me, my high level character, blade and night and it was the most fun i had in F4 by far.
BUT radiants wont make a game by itself - you need actual unique NPC's with unique quests that are something more than just shooting shit just like you need locations that are hubs of quests, trade and serve as an anchor points for the player. And settlements mechanic gave the Bugfesta the excuses to completely forgo the creation of any interesting places in lieu of player built stuff...
So basically skewed proportions - instead of 50-50, we get like 95 % of quests are radiants, there are no interesting populated locations because burden of making those was shifted onto a player etc.

Tl;DR - entire game is in the massive Jean Claude Van Damme-tier split - it tried to be an story driven focused RPG and open survival sandbox with crafting and failed at both of those things
 
I think the absense of skills/karma and the small amount of perks really took that roleplaying feel with it.
And the dialog options.. they're so limited compared to previous fallouts that i felt traped as if i was playing Skyrim.
I think the idea of having voice actors isn't that bad.. but it leaves nothing for your imagination/roleplaying.
One thing i dislike about fallout 4 besides all this.. are the voice actors. In my opinion fallout NV and Fallout 3 had way more memorable and intense voice actors like.. 3dog.. moira brown.. cassidy.. Ulysses .. etc.
when i first saw fallout 4 and that old lady that has predictions about our future opend her mouth.. i was so disapointed with the lack of.. character and energy in their voices.
 
One of the biggest disappointments for me was the simplified gameplay mechanics... no level cap, no skills, lots of Skyrim style "x% better" perks, etc. No nuance whatsoever. For example, instead of implementing a stamina system to separately handle sprinting, scoped aiming, and melee/unarmed, they clumsily link everything to "AP." "AP" were a suitable abstraction that put limits on VATS, but the amount of features they govern now just shows how mindless the underlying design philosophy of this game was.

And don't even get me started on the writing. I mean, this is Bethesda, so I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but what we were presented with was shockingly poor. The voiced protagonist made it even worse. Whereas you used to be able to rephrase some of the more poorly written dialogue options to suit whatever character you were playing as, you now have no choice but to accept what their immature chucklehead of a PC decides to say and how they decide to say it. It's freaking annoying and far too restrictive in a game that was supposed to be derived from the Elder Scrolls (to clarify, I don't believe that Bethesda ever intended to carry on the spirit of the original Fallout games, they just saw it as a malleable IP that they could use to expand their existing style to the FPS market)! Here's an example that stuck with me... when entering Covenant and taking the GOAT test, the "scientific" answer to the question about a hyped up scientist threatening you is always read as if the meathead male PC has no idea wtf he is talking about and is just making up some nonsense on the spot, regardless of INT or ranks in the Science perk. You can't even say that INT and Science are irrelevant since it is a BS response because a high CHA still gives the same utterly unconvincing delivery. Everything about this game is lazy and underdeveloped. If they had to have voiced protagonists to satisfy their next target audience, was it really necessary to also half ass it? It totally kills the replay value because no matter how you try to design your character, they are always the same dumbass with a different preference for killing implement. Bah.

And while I'm at it, why is there a total of three functionally identical towns in a game this big? The settlement system is just another example of how lazy this company is... I will admit that building houses and designing a town can be an interesting diversion, but this should not have been the default setting for nearly every pocket of civilization on the map. It doesn't even make sense the way it's designed. There are 2 women living at Oberland Station, and the Raiders and mutants don't give a damn until you start to live there and then they are consumed with an overwhelming urge to burn the place to the ground... ugh... that's enough for now.
 
I didn't like the way character relationships were managed. It's just a grind of picking locks and increasing a hidden value until they idolize you. If you do something terrible that is clearly against their moral code, they'll ignore it because you have a massive pool of positive points. Selling a kid into slavery right in front of Cait doesn't phase her at all despite being a former slave.

Polyamory is also in the game but not really, it's just an empty "feature" because there's no recognition by other NPCs that you're in a relationship with 4 other people (all in the same settlement). Jim Sterling bloviated about how great this "feature" was even though it was paper-thin and lazy writing not interested in saying "no" to the player.

Side note: This was a weaker point in Witcher 3 as well, since Geralt can just have casual sex with just about anyone so long as they don't try to get both Yennefer and Triss. It's strange that Yen / Triss end up blue balling you in the end if you try to play both sides, but don't really care if you shagged Shani, numerous prostitutes, Ves, Sylvia, et al. It's kind of funny when you help Yennefer with the Djinn and confess your love to her despite having probably had sex with 3 - 4 other members of lodge that she's part of. "Oh btw I fucked like 4 other people you have meetings with sometimes but don't worry I love you xoxo."
 
The Perk system. It's no longer an RPG just a Farcry clone with gates tht have the name of the old stats.

The writing was terrible.

While gunplay was improved, Melee and Unarmed got much much worse, specially compared to New Vegas. Even with the right perks Melee Combat never improves.

Voiced protagonist.

Dialogue Cross, can't even be called a Wheel.

New Art direction was a very mixed bag, some envirorments looked better but a lot of grit was lost, also several creatures now look terrible and combined with poor textures things like the Feral Ghouls and the Deathclaws now look like amorphous sacks of potatoes.

Music choice fo the radios was again terrible and the Radio Station host made Threedog seem charismatic in comparisson.

New Mutants, again a new faction of dumb orcs that exist there just to be dumb orcs.

Settlement building, just everything about it. It doesn't even work properly so it objectively was bad addition. And it also caused 90% of Quest givers to be nameless NPCs with randomly generated fetch and kill quests. Also resulted in the world of the game feeling desolate and boring.

AI is still terribad.

Random Raider with Fatmans, specially when they try to shoot them through walls because of poor ai and it results in random deaths.

The whole Legendary Creature system.

The whole legendary Weapon/equipment system.

The Weapon mods for Melee and Unarmed were very lacking.

The weapon selection was very lacking as a result of the Modding system.

All Armor looks ugly as shit.

Weapon and armor condition being gone.

Armor condition only being present in what is supposed to be a wearable tank.

Not being able to use Unarmed weapons while in Power Armor, The Powerfist was supposed to be Used with Power Armors.

The power fist looks like shit, no idea why they redesigned it to be some piece of crap.

Weapon aesthetics were subpar, specially on energy weapons.

The Grenade Throw and the Power bash being mapped to the same action even on PC.

The Pip boy games.

T-60 Power armor being pre war and "Better than t-51 ORIGINAL ARMOR DON'T STEAL".

Level scaled enemies.

The way Synths were used in the story.

The story was shit.

The factions were retarded, except for the BOS.

Pick locks until you can pick the lock to her pants.

Companions sucked.

Dogmeat was too forced on you.

Essential NPCs everywhere.

No multiple endings.
 
A lot of things about Fallout 4 I hate but the one thing I hate more is the gun mechanics after going back and replaying Fallout: New Vegas after Fallout 4 I love the gun mechanics in Fallout: New Vegas way more. Than I ever did playing Fallout 4 I don't know if it's just me that thinks this I have looked around and found nothing about liking the gun mechanics more in Fallout: New Vegas than Fallout 4. Also the fact that a lot of the guns in Fallout 4 take up half the screen and made me feel nauseous and changing the FOV did not fix that problem for me.
 
The protagonist in Fallout 4 apparently shoots all of their guns 2 centimeters away from their eyes or they are horribly nearsighted.
 
The Perk system. It's no longer an RPG just a Farcry clone with gates tht have the name of the old stats.

The writing was terrible.

While gunplay was improved, Melee and Unarmed got much much worse, specially compared to New Vegas. Even with the right perks Melee Combat never improves.

Voiced protagonist.

Dialogue Cross, can't even be called a Wheel.

New Art direction was a very mixed bag, some envirorments looked better but a lot of grit was lost, also several creatures now look terrible and combined with poor textures things like the Feral Ghouls and the Deathclaws now look like amorphous sacks of potatoes.

Music choice fo the radios was again terrible and the Radio Station host made Threedog seem charismatic in comparisson.

New Mutants, again a new faction of dumb orcs that exist there just to be dumb orcs.

Settlement building, just everything about it. It doesn't even work properly so it objectively was bad addition. And it also caused 90% of Quest givers to be nameless NPCs with randomly generated fetch and kill quests. Also resulted in the world of the game feeling desolate and boring.

AI is still terribad.

Random Raider with Fatmans, specially when they try to shoot them through walls because of poor ai and it results in random deaths.

The whole Legendary Creature system.

The whole legendary Weapon/equipment system.

The Weapon mods for Melee and Unarmed were very lacking.

The weapon selection was very lacking as a result of the Modding system.

All Armor looks ugly as shit.

Weapon and armor condition being gone.

Armor condition only being present in what is supposed to be a wearable tank.

Not being able to use Unarmed weapons while in Power Armor, The Powerfist was supposed to be Used with Power Armors.

The power fist looks like shit, no idea why they redesigned it to be some piece of crap.

Weapon aesthetics were subpar, specially on energy weapons.

The Grenade Throw and the Power bash being mapped to the same action even on PC.

The Pip boy games.

T-60 Power armor being pre war and "Better than t-51 ORIGINAL ARMOR DON'T STEAL".

Level scaled enemies.

The way Synths were used in the story.

The story was shit.

The factions were retarded, except for the BOS.

Pick locks until you can pick the lock to her pants.

Companions sucked.

Dogmeat was too forced on you.

Essential NPCs everywhere.

No multiple endings.
This might be the most concise and accurate description of why Fallout 4 was bad that I've ever read.
 
Conflicting ideas and a management model that leaves an unpleasant stain on the game. Lack of humour, lack of difficulty, lack of integrated writing and a lack of individual identity. Failure to utilize an otherwise very well developed sand box into the main story. EXTREMELY WEAK factions. Not enough science fiction.

I actually think that Fallout 3 is the worst game in the series, because with Fallout 4, at least, Beth realized what games they REALLY want to make, or rather, the way they REALLY want to develop games. IF they become more open and transparent about it I will respect them a lot more. With Fallout 76 there is a bit more transparency. Hopefully Godd will realize that not everybody likes a streamlined piece of good looking scenery that has most of it's 'superfluous' stuff cut out.
 
Dialogue wheel is terrible. No more and no less than 4 options.

Seconding the fuck out of this and adding the additional caveat that even though you're dumbed down to 4 "choices" of tone they basically might as well have given you ONE response a fair amount of the time for all the difference they tend to make. This is actually a fairly common flaw in a lot of CRPGs with "dialogue trees" (looking right at you, NWN) - you get to say "Yes", "Yes but in an assholish way", "Maybe but it's really yes" and "No but it's really yes because choice is an illusion lol" but it seems MAGNIFIED by Fallout 4's dumbing down of dialogue.
 
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