Fallout 4: This time it's not Fallout 3 (and other excellent uses of time and money)

Greetings, denizens of the wasteland. Have you been collecting your scrap in order to make a sweet scope for that hunting rifle? Did you see that guy walking into a wall trying to initiate a scripted event? What a charmer. Did I mention that Fallout 4 is a video game people seem to be playing and talking about on the world wide web? Oh, I did? Well, I guess I could tell you what I think about it. I haven’t had work for the past week, and while in the throes of (temporary) unemployment I played a shitload of that game. But what fun would it be if I started with that?

Some other things!

Since my last blog, I finished Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn again, and honestly I think I like that game a bit less since the last time I took a look at it. Most of that comes down to the multi-act structure, which never really gives you enough time to train up any one group of characters until the middle part, which is unsurprisingly the best part. The story goes in some weird directions, even as a direct sequel to Path of Radiance, before going full anime and having you kill a god at the end. That’s the tl;dr version of how my latest playthrough went, and I’m tempted to go into detail, but I totally wrote something about it like 4 years ago which already covers a lot of the same ground: The Dawn Brigade chapters are terrible, Biorhythm is a dumb mechanic, Laguz units aren’t very useful, Act 2 seems unnecessary, Ike’s team is great etc etc. Suffice it to say, it stays where it is on my Super Legitimate Fire Emblem Tier List. Not the worst game in the series by any means (it’s better than Shadow Dragon by a mile), but it makes me want February to come already so I can play the new one and get TRIPLE the Fire Emblem directly into my veins. One of those 3 campaigns should be what I’m looking for, right? Okay. Fire Emblem minute over. You can stop skimming the text now.

If you’ve spent any sort of time on this website over the past few months, you may have noticed that the staff members of Giant Bomb dot com think Super Mario Maker is a great game. I can now confirm this. While the actual quality of the levels I encounter on the 100 Mario Challenge ranges significantly between stupid auto-play stuff, sadistic garbage and genuine quality level design, it’s such a cool thing. For my part, I’ve split my time between creating and playing levels pretty evenly thus far. I’ve been a little conservative with my design, opting for “normal-ish” Mario levels over gimmicks or sadism, but who knows what’s in store for the future! Here are the two that I’ve uploaded thus far:

Walljumping Piranha Pipes: 79FB-0000-00E6-11A0

Airship Blockade Breaker: B7D0-0000-00EF-5AF0

In addition to all those hijinks, I played a lot of Destiny over the last month. It’s mindless enough that I can catch up on podcasts while I play it, but engaging enough that I don’t feel like I’m on a horrible endless treadmill. Speaking of horrible endless treadmills, I may be over 290 light and have the Sleeper Simulant. I should find a group to do the raid with, but the idea of coordinating with 5 other strangers on the internet sounds like a potential nightmare. But hey, if you are over 290 light and like crazy exotic fusion rifles that shoot ricocheting death lasers, we should meet up and kill that Oryx dude. I’d really like to see the raid.

Fallout 4

I think I’m done with Fallout 4, at least for a while. It was probably telling that my initial opinion of that game was “This is exactly what I expected it to be” and some 45-ish hours later it was still exactly what I expected it to be. That’s not a bad thing, on its head. There’s a certain “comfort food” to be found in games and series that give you exactly what you expect, be it King’s Bounty, annualized sports franchises, Call of Duty, or Pokemon. After playing almost two days worth of this game over the course of a week and a half, I think I’ve concluded that Fallout 4 doesn’t quite earn that level of oversight. It’s not that I’m done with Bethesda Softworks’ brand of open-world RPG quite yet (I wouldn’t have purchased this game in the first place if I was), but that I’m done with this particular Bethesda Softworks open-world RPG. That’s not to say that Fallout 4 is a bad game; I mostly enjoyed my time with it. My problems with it are as much philosophical as they are mechanical, so let me tell you about them!

If I wanted to be more belligerent, I would’ve started my assessment with “I liked this game just as much when I played it 7 years ago and it was called Fallout 3”, an oversimplification, but not too far from where I fall. The fundamental truism with the games that Bethesda makes is that no one else makes games like Bethesda. This makes direct comparisons to other RPGs a little more difficult, but means the differences between every game that they make are far more clear than they otherwise would be. So, by that metric, I can say that Fallout 4 isn’t a leap from Fallout 3 the same way Skyrim was a progression of Oblivion. The shooting has moved from the realm of “comically terrible” to ”okay but you won’t mistake it for Destiny”, but that’s the biggest improvement that comes to mind. There are also some neat ideas with the weapon crafting system (though said ideas just made me want to play Dead Space 3, since the crafting was that game’s one shining star) but many of the other weaknesses of Bethesda RPGs past haven’t been addressed. I’ll touch on the writing in a second and the RPG mechanics a second after that, but I’m further talking about quest design (a lot of generic, infinitely repeatable quests like Skyrim had), environment design (Still a lot of ruined cityscapes and dilapidated countrysides) and yes, that iconic signature jank. I think I speak for more than a few people when I say that those problems are a little harder to ignore this time around. When Oblivion came out almost a decade ago I had never seen anything like it (because I had no idea what Morrowind was). I have now seen 3 games using the same blueprint as Oblivion, 4 if you count New Vegas. The novelty, the experience I get from these games is still unique, but it’s lost a bit of that dazzle for me with this new one. That’s as much the passage of time as it is that I think they’ve done better before.

Writing is and was never one of Bethesda’s strong suits. Their worlds are places to be inhabited and explored. Sometimes you’ll run into something cool, something that feels “lived-in” in one of the random dungeons you’ll explore and it’ll remind you one of the reasons why people love these games in the first place. But writing? Sometimes you’ll get the Dark Brotherhood. Sometimes you’ll get Little Lamplight. Yeah, remember how dumb that was? They’ve always been inconsistent, but I think the addition of a voiced protagonist and everything surrounding that fell flat for me almost immediately. I get it, Mass Effect is hot with the kids. But your character who has been frozen for the past 200 years is far less incredulous and curious than they should be about the whole world being nuked. Mostly they just want to find their son, who I guess you’re supposed to care about because the game tells you you’re supposed to. I like having a blank slate character and I don’t mind if they’re silent either. Giving my dude a predefined background and motivation makes it harder for me to try to role-play with them, and voiced dialogue options significantly reduces the range of responses you can give. It works alright for some stuff, Mass Effect and Alpha Protocol included, but for a game this open I find it detrimental here. Some of the quests I encountered were really good (there’s one with a boat and robots and I highly recommend it), though a lot of the faction-specific ones only show up once you’ve locked yourself in for said faction as part of the Main Quest. Speaking of main quests, I’m not gonna spoil how that turned out for me, but… let’s just say the trend of main questlines in Bethesda games not being amazing continues. I found the ending unsatisfying in the way that Fallout 3’s ending was unsatisfying, even if it still lets you out into the world after the conclusion.

But of course, I imagine more than a few of you probably won’t touch the main quest more than you need to, especially given my previous statement that I don’t think it’s very good. So what of the nuts and bolts mechanics? I can’t help but feel the RPG systems have in some ways regressed, at least in terms of building a character with any real consequence. It’s very easy to make your character an amorphous blob; a jack-of-all-trades who is good at everything and can get anywhere. Most of the truly useful perks are lower on the totem pole for any given SPECIAL stat, but of course if that’s an issue you can just raise a stat until you gain access that perk. Throw in bobbleheads and you aren’t actually speccing your character in a meaningful way outside of what sort of guns they use, (I guess you could go unarmed or melee if you like not picking up new weapons very often; they seem totally viable otherwise) if they want to be sneaky (which, to be fair, requires some investment to be useful this time around) and how reliant on Charisma checks they want to be (most of which are of dubious usefulness regardless, but you can always pop Grape Mentats and wear +CHA clothing if you want to make nailing them trivial). I don’t think most players are going to forego max lockpicking and hacking, which require a mere 4 in PER and INT respectively. You aren’t locked out of anything if you want to change your path, and new levels come frequently enough that you can afford to be scattershot with your perk points. So not much different from Fallout 3 then, which ensured that your dude or lady would be amazing at almost everything. I guess that works for the intended audience; Bethesda certainly doesn’t need old-school RPG nuts like myself complaining about “not enough numbers” when they’re selling 20 Million copies of Skyrim. The big mainstream RPG developers have long since laughed those concerns all the way to the bank, though you’ll have to excuse me when someone says with a straight face that Dragon Age Inquisition is “like those old school games” because you can pause and bring the camera out to a half-assed tactical view. I will say that Fallout 4 made me miss New Vegas, the one RPG not made by Bethesda which can be directly compared to RPGs made by Bethesda. I vicariously revisited it this summer by watching my roommate play through pretty much the entire game, so it’s quite fresh in my mind. That game wasn’t so freewheeling with skill points and did things like give skills other than speech unique dialogue options to solve quests. It had better writing and was closer in tone to the original two Fallout games, though that’s Obsidian for you. To be fair, New Vegas was also less open and egregiously broken when it came out, but it continues to stand as an interesting example of giving someone else the keys and seeing what came out.

I guess it would be unfair of me to not talk about Fallout 4 without talking about that notorious jank. In my 47 hours of play, the game never crashed and I never ran into any seriously borked scripting, though this is always the quintessential “Your Mileage May Vary” factor with these games. I’ve heard enough stories to know that those things have happened to others, so it’s always very much within the realm of reality. Animations are stiff and awkward, lipsync is bad, things will happen that make for great .gifs on the internet. It’s a Bethesda game. If I find something legitimately unacceptable, it’s that the frame-rate is not great on PS4. It’s playable until things get dense, and then it chugs spectacularly, going sub-20 at times. Other than the frame-rate stuff, I think the contingent that dislikes these games for being broken in the way these games have always been broken are barking up the wrong tree. While I fully agree that Bethesda Softworks should scrap their 10-year-old Creation Engine and build a new one from scratch for the inevitable The Elder Scrolls VI, I don’t think the bugginess and glitchiness will ever go away in the way some people want it to. Listen to Dave Lang on last week’s bombcast if you want to hear a game developer say it. Are they getting away with murder then? Well, I think you already know how you stand on that. I’d almost say it’s comparable to not liking Monster Hunter because of the way it emphasizes animation priority, but that’s a core design philosophy of those games while the jank of any given BethSoft RPG is just the unfortunate cost of making big-ass worlds to run around in within a reasonable time-frame. It’s not like Morrowind was any different 13 years ago.

I hope I don’t sound too overtly negative, but this is the first time I’ve fizzled out on one of these games before the 50 hour mark, which I guess is damning by the standards of how I’ve played past games from this developer but still generous in regards to video games in general. I don’t play games I hate or dislike for 47 hours. (I do play games I hate for 15 hours, however.) “No one else makes games like Bethesda” is still more a plus for me than a minus and I would be willing to play more Fallout 4 if I hear about an especially good quest-line or if the DLC is any good. I’m just not sure if “The Status Quo” is quite the target I want them to aim for. I’ve accepted the jank is the necessary but evil cost of doing business, but I want The Elder Scrolls VI (or whatever their next project is, but let’s be real it’s The Elder Scrolls VI) to be better written and have better systems and mechanics than what I’ve seen in Fallout 4. I don’t just want a big sandboxy world, I want a big sandboxy world with more than two interesting characters and perks that feel meaningful when I pick them. I guess that’s what mods are for after clean faces and UI tweaks, right? Well, maybe I’ll get on those the next time I have a computer capable of running modern things reliably. Until then... I'll do something or other.

Currently Playing: Super Mario Maker, Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition, Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance