What did you think was bad about Fallout 4

[SiriusShenanigans]

Alright, while I have a lot to say, let me focus on how fallout 4 fails in its writing. Its not even that Fallout 4 has bad content, but rather that it just doesn't care about its presentation or how things flow together.

Let's look at Diamond City. When you get there its closed off, there is some mystery about it. Its not letting in new people. Piper convinces the man at the gate to open the doors for you with her terrible voice acting and showing off all her 10000 disgusting teeth. That's not why its bad. They have this intrigue about people disappearing and the mayor doesn't trust the rail road, there is something there. They have this nice little witch hunting scene, BUT BEFORE YOU GET TO IT- there is a little girl on a soap box. This girl tells you LITERALLY everything you need to know about the whole conflict. She's like "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE SYNTHS! They are creepy, and look like people, and people think they are inside the town so most folk aren't going to be friendly to you. They come from this magical place called the institute and if somebody goes missing its because the institute took them away to do creepy experiments with them." This one little girl destroys any semblance of intrigue or mystery about anything that goes on in this town, and its given to you right before it can make its first real appeal to intrigue. Also, that whole "if somebody disappears its probably the institute" thing should be enough for you to go "I should investigate the institute" and that would be an accurate lead, speaking that it is where your son is.

Also, I think the beauty of old fallout quests was the way they made the side quests into the main quest. Fallout 2 starts you with "Go look for the geck." which is so nebulous that its impossible to focus on. You start by going to klamath, looking for vic, kill a rat god, go to the den, make an unsavory deal with metzger, hear about vault city and modoc to the east, go to modoc, get tricked into doing the slag quest because they say they have a geck, go to vault city and gecko, do the reactor quest to get citizenship find out about the vault locations down south or ask the ghouls about broken hills. It gives you so many different places to pick up the story and lose the story but it makes the story of fallout 2 the story of the world. You don't really have to spend any time in Diamond city at all. You can just skip directly to the nick quest and go investigate kellog.

I think a better presentation would feature you being the target of the witchhunt. Let yourself find that everyone in town is very tense and doesn't want to offer business. Don't let the town open up for anybody, so you can't leave. Funnel the player to a place to stay the night, but have them get dragged out of bed to the middle of town. Have people question where you are from and if the institute sent you. Show that the town is losing its mind. Get the player imprisoned in the town itself, and then have a railroad agent, an actual synth, rescue you, but in the process have them get caught. Have the synth urge you not to be mad at the town and tell you about how good those people are and how they are just scared. Turn it into a thrilling quest to prove your own innocence and the innocence of the synths, and make that be key to making the town open up to you. It introduces the problems of the town and the actors and gets the player engaged. Fallout 4 is just too wimpy to try to force the player into those sorts of positions. Diamond city is supposed to be the heart of the commonwealth, so let it have some core aspect to the experience of playing. Fallout 4 would rather give you a demonstration of a town than have you interact with it. In general the story is given only skin depth, which is unfortunate given how many quests it has over all.

 

[cronicler]

Heh...
Sirius, Can you tell me why the player abandons the remains of Vault 111 which provides an actual working power plant (and another one that is on the fritz and should be shutdown and possibly fixed), extremely defensible access points, quite a bit of technological salvage and camouflage and goes to build his first camp in the ruins of a pre-war suburban block?

Also speaking of Sanctuary hills, that place is a prime location to build something similar to Bodiam Castle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodiam_Castle ) so why isn't the buildable area cover the whole island?

In a similar vein, Red Rocket Truck Stop is in a very good position to act as a / the main outer bastion for Sanctuary Hills, being on top of the main "invasion" route to the place? Why wasn't anything done with it?

Why can't the player utilize the high voltage power line towers to set up a limited power grid to tying places like Abernathy farm and so on to the large amounts of available and unused power generation in certain other locations (like the previously mentioned V111) together to create a "bigger than it's parts" iinterlinked "county"?

Why are the Graygarden "farms" above ground instead of being an automated (mostly) underground greenhouse?








As you might have started to guess, the truth is, none of the Bethesada's work has anything that ties individual parts together other than a veeeeeeeeeeery loose and thin string of a story thrown on at the last moment.
It's not a game, it's loosely similar shaped boxes stacked haphazardly in a pile, tied together with silly string.

 

[TorontoReign]

Separately designed areas with a Todd Howard walking by saying "We need a fun zone here."

 

[SiriusShenanigans]

I would say because vaults are dumb and I can't fit a reactor in my pocket. I ain't going to be a homebody with a bunch of tasty ice pops. I'm single and ready mingle, taking the commonwealth dating scene by storm. To be honest, I never cared about the building aspects. Vault 111 was nightmare design-wise. Like the vertical lift is cool, but if you actually want to save people and bring them into the vault during an emergency, you don't want to be limited to like 10 or 20 people on each trip. Not to mention if something put itself on top of the vault, you might be screwed.

I just generally dislike the shallow nature of all the quests. yeah, sometimes things don't work out logistically. I'd rather have a well thought out story rather than making sure all the ballroom ghouls are trying to eat me with the right dinner forks. Bethesda just doesn't have any quests that go above just "go here, loot this, kill that." They also managed to make me hate the sarcastic dialogue options which is like... a sin. Like how do you even do that?

 

[cronicler]

Toront, mate the whole process isn't even up to that level of craftsmanship. Yes, the writing quality would still be seriously questionable but the whole thing would have been a "single" unit if Toddster was actually directing the development.
There simply isn't any "directing" beyond a preliminary rough draft of a cheat-sheet in F4.

SiriusShenanigans; then let me turn things around and ask your opinion on the reverse scenario.

Background:
The player suffers a mishap at the end of the prologue / intro and has to be interned in an experimental medical "cryodoc"

Parameters:
The players starts the game in medical wing and throughout the tutorial gains access to engineering, command and VIP wings in a dungeon crawl style section (FPS it or restart the turrets or "talk" to the AI assistant that actually runs the place into clearing various infestations for you.)
Then you discover that your wife is indeed still in cryo but the cryo module / central core is in lockdown due to [ERROR] [ERROR] [ERROR]... and the only exit you have access to (The VIP entrance / Helipad, the one in the game in other words) is basically an island in the middle of a sea of smog that covers the lowlands. With lots of hostile, high level critters blocking the way.

So for the chapter one, the player starts building and deploying "robot" scavenging parties to gather resources to get over the smog and ultimately fix the cryo-core, as if this was a rts game.

However, things get a bit complicated once you travel over the smog barrier as you discover that there are local populations and... they are under attack by the red eyed devils* from the smog...
*The sensor pods you use on your robots is... indeed red and glowing...
Oops!


So, what are you going to do now? Become a deranged mad doctor and terrorize these savages? Take over these communities by force? Also you still need some actual high tech to fix the core...




But alas, w didn't get anything interesting. Hell we weren't even provided with something marginal. Below average or worse, all the way... Sigh

 

[TorontoReign]

Toront, mate the whole process isn't even up to that level of craftsmanship. Yes, the writing quality would still be seriously questionable but the whole thing would have been a "single" unit if Toddster was actually directing the development.
There simply isn't any "directing" beyond a preliminary rough draft of a cheat-sheet in F4.

Likely because Todd Howard is more hands off now since the studios split up and are now working on several projects at once. I bet he lets Hines cut all superfluous dialog out in QA.

 

[Cliffy McEdgeface]

I bet he lets Hines cut all superfluous dialog out in QA.

HATE NEWSPAPERS

Of course Hines' definition of "superfluous" is broad enough to encompass pretty much anything I wager.

 

[The Man From Nowhere]

One thing I've noticed on another run-through is the NPC's at various settlements; even those that aren't randomly generated and have names and everything all have the same personality if you can even call it that, and no quirks or sense of motivations or reason for being at all. It's almost creepy and gives vibes of the uncanny valley or body snatchers. Any NPC that exists outside the main plot line is just kind of there to give side quests, after that they become any other nameless NPC. I had to actually research and look up names to put them to faces and learn lore after finishing. Even Fallout 3 had some memorable characters in various settlements (Sierra Petrovita, Moira, Dr. Zimmer, etc.) not that I liked them, but I can recall them and put a face to a name and such. Each and every settlement of previous Fallout's had a theme and character to them.

A few examples of NPC's and settlements with quests I had to look up the names for:

The Abernathy's - They are one of the first settlements you come across. You retrieve a locket for them. They have a cat.

Sully Mathis - An undercover raider whom you fix underwater pipes for.

Finch Farm - Retrieve son and family heirloom.

It's been a long time since I've played and the only NPC characters whom are not absolutely crucial to the plot I could still name off the top of my head were Mamma Murphy, Travis, and Marcy. I'd have to think pretty hard to come up with any more names without having to look them up.

 

[GestapoSantaClaus]

Funnily enough I actually enjoyed settlement building. I’s really just because I built a “Mega-Block” skyscraper from Judge Dredd, where every floor served a different purpose and it reached the maximum height allowed.

Had a huge “oh no” moment when I realized karma and skill points were gone.

 

[JDogindy]

Main Game: Idiotic side quests, boils down to two options (not unlike New Vegas, but in New Vegas, you get to choose which master takes over the city, meaning four different leaders with 12 moral options in total); you blow up the Institute, or you don't.
Far Harbor: Convoluted morality play, which was the exact opposite of the main story. Not even Valentine's biting commentary helps.
Nuka-World: Made specifically for evil players, good players get the shaft and ruin everything once they do the righteous thing. Basically, one-sided in the worst way.

 

[RonPaul08]

On top of Bethesda simply stacking more duct tape onto Gamebryo instead of switching/developing a new engine (which, let's face it folks they have a license to print money and all the time to do so), they further abstracted the skill system. As we're seeing with 76, Bethesda's goal is to push Fallout away from an RPG with shooty mechanics, to a shooter with RPG elements

 

[Hassknecht]

Fallout 4's settlements were a very mixed bag. Some locations looked pretty cool at first glance, and at least now they made an effort to show a little bit of farming, but the Radiant AI nature of most of the quests and the focus on the player building everything means that everything looks super basic.
Abernathy Farm for instance looks cool from the outside, but that's about it. There's nothing to it. Similarly, all the locations feel like they have been made with the rule of cool in mind and not much else.
On the other hand, building settlements was pretty much the most fun you can have in Fallout 4. Sim Settlements is a great mod that improves the feel of the settlement building a lot, and it's nice that you don't have to build sheds for everyone yourself. Because let's face it, after two settlements nobody builds more than just a few mattresses on the floors to keep the settlers happy, and with Sim Settlements the settlers build their own shit. Which is nice. Really should have been part of the game from the start.

 

[Walpknut]

That Sim Settlements mod does sound interesting.

 

[Megalon]

Aside from maybe the Brotherhood, the factions in Fallout 4 suffer from a combination of bad writing, bad design choices, and utter dullness. The Minutemen are bland to a hilarious extent and is based around one of the worst features in the game, the Institute is nothing more than a cheap clone of the Think Tank, and the Railroad is just weird. I mean, their goal of "Saving the Synths" makes zero sense when you look at the simple fact that the use of synth slavery isn't this widespread thing, it's pretty much restricted to a tiny underground bunker. And it makes even less since when you see that the Institute is pretty tearing the Commonwealth apart with Synths and Super Mutants.

 

[R.Graves]

literally all of it.

the settlement system was both nonsensical to have in a game set in 2287 and ate the entire map, leaving no room for proper towns and thus no room for actual characters.

the voiced protagonist and dialogue severely limited you abilitiy to explore both the player character and who the npcs are.

the creature design has gotten even worse. when they're not ripping off old monsters or just making big animals (radroach, bloatfly, yao guai, mirelurk hunter (fo4)) they are now outright plagiarizing other people's work

fo4 mirelurk:

Garthim from the dark crystal:

it is without taking or adding the same thing. so similar it couldn't possiibly be a coincidence.

especially considering bethesda's track record for ripping stuff off. the whole settlemetnt thing was taking from a mod as was an entire questline in far harbor. not to mention the entire idea of synths was taken from blade runner.

also they removed different ammo types and proper weapon mods. now instead of distinct weapons with specific uses we have the same gun just slightly different 40 different ways. in new vegas we could mod a weapons sound, weight, ammo capacity, and ammo type. and lemme tell you the ammo type system gave new vegas' weapons more variety than fallout 4's could hope to have. explosive bullets, incediary, armour piercing, hollow points... all had an actually useful function whereas in f04 you just make the weopons damage go higher or put a scope on it.

also giving you power armour and a minigun and fighting a deathclaw withing the first 20 minutes? beyond retarded. because end game equipment is now early game equipment it has to be piss weak until you or the weapon is leveled up. which means now ghouls, a race previously stated to break their legs if they run, are now more powerful than power armour. and that carries over the whole game. because they further ruined combat by having infinte leveling and making it mandatory in every quest. there is literally never a diplomatic route in this game. its embarassing.

oh then on top of ruining combat they went ahead an ripped out the special system... you know the very foundation a fallout game is built on? they didnt tweak it... no they destroyed everything but the name. kind like what they've done to the series as a whole.

also the story introduces like 10 plot holes a minute. the game manges to do that even ignoring worldbreaking contradictions like super mutants in boston, pre war vertiberds, running ghouls, aliens in the mojave, and kds in fridges.

even ignoring all of this though? the game still fails because both the gameplay and story are boring as fuck. like fallout 3 before it... this is a story driven game in which the only way to have fun is to ignore the story and just shoot shit to 50s music.

it is quite honestly one of the worst sequels in recorded history and has literally no redeeming factors... except rad roaches crawl on walls now... that was cool.

edit: it should also be noted that because the dialogue and npc interactions are now dumbed down and limited that so to is the player's ability to explore the world. or at least learn about it. even fallout 3 did this better with npcs telling the player about town history through conversation. now because the voiced protag and the dialogue wheel every conversation boils down to can you/ would/ how can you help me. all of which are answered with yes by the player or 1-3 line by an npc which equate go here/do this.