I was seven years old when I beat KOTOR.
My mind was blown.
In my rush to fill the void that my very first
RPG left, I discovered the Elder Scrolls.
Oblivion ruined my life.
I would sit at my desk in school and drift
away from the lesson, my mind occupied by
thoughts of slaying Daedra and unravelling
the mysteries of the lengthy Dark Brotherhood
questline.
I was hooked.
What I'm trying to say is, I'm a fan of these
sorts of games.
But as I've grown older, I started notice
something.
Something… controversial.
Bethesda's general design philosophy… is
insulting.
Admit it.
You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Skyrim's 'puzzles' that amount to quite literally
matching a picture of an animal on the wall
with the rotating statue beneath it.
I'd call it child's play, but I'm pretty sure
five year old me wouldn't have considered
"match the picture" a puzzle.
This doesn't make me feel like a daring adventurer,
it makes me feel like a kid that just arrived
to school on the short bus.
It's the sort of things you run across and
go wait… are you serious?
And this isn't just an issue with the Elder
Scrolls.
Bethesda has been dumbing the Fallout series
down with each release.
I mean come on, Fallout 4's ridiculous bioware-esq
dialogue system is downright disrespectful
of the player's intelligence AND is a total
regression from the titles that preceded it.
I think we could all handle having an actual
representation of dialogue options, you know
like in any other role-playing-game.
By obscuring what the player character is
actually going to say in a given interaction,
fallout 4 feels much less like the complex
western RPG that its predecessors were, instead
it feels like an action game with light RPG
elements.
On top of this, the player's ability to create
a character with unique skills is gutted in
the latest Bethesda titles.
Investing skill points feels less like building
a character unique to how I want to play the
game, and more like giving myself a few minor
statistical nudges in the right direction
in a few aspects of play.
It is no longer possible for my character
to be BAD at something.
Bethesda traded the nuanced and complex RPG
elements that require a player to actually
put thought into their character and adapt
into a detailed world, for mechanics that
are shells of their former selves, all except
for the gunplay.
I won't lie, when fallout 4 came out I was
excited, I assumed that Bethesda would take
cues from the best modern fallout game, Fallout
New Vegas, you know, the one they didn't actually
make.
That one was made by a different studio, obsidian,
and reflected the series' roots much more
than any attempt Bethesda made, in that New
Vegas placed emphasis on really feeling like
the character you were playing was your own.
It featured regular skill checks that actually
made a player's stat investment feel worth
it.
Skilled in science?
That'll come in handy when talking to a technologically-focused
faction.
This is entirely missing in Fallout 4, where
the only real skill checks in speech are for
intimidation or charisma.
New Vegas also featured diverse weapons and
interesting quest lines.
Instead, Fallout 4 featured forgettable, generic
quests that offered near instant gratification,
as well as what I can only describe as the
fast food-equivalent of weapon customization,
wherein the player can customize a bunch of
a weapon's individual components to… very
little effect.
Also, pretty much all basic enemies only use
variations of one weapon: the pipe rifle.
This comes in place of New Vegas's customization
that was sparse but powerful.
When you got a silencer, it changed the way
you played.
On top of this, Fallout 4's quests aren't
satisfying, typically because they rely on
a borderline Pavlovian cycle of get objectives,
kill enemies, reward.
[quest accept, shooting, reward]
With 133 hours played in Fallout 4 at the
time I'm writing this video, you'd think I'd
remember the events of at least something
beyond the main questline, but I don't, and
even that's kinda fuzzy.
I still vividly remember New Vegas's remarkably
creative sidequests that I played through
years ago, like raising a prewar bomber from
Lake Meade, or finding a traitor among the
ranks of the NCR and disarming a bomb.
Where Fallout New Vegas would dare to bring
players along for a lengthy adventure with
memorable characters and branching paths,
placing faith in the player to pay attention,
the typical fallout 4 quest treats the player
like a rat pressing a button for a piece of
cheese.
Objectives are never vague enough to encourage
exploration or a diversion from the most obvious
linear path.
New Vegas had the player either helping a
small town defend itself, or joining a band
of criminals to sack the town, Fallout 4 had
the player… killing roaches.
Yeah…
New Vegas gave the player choices in accomplishing
their goals that had consequences.
If the player fails to defuse that bomb, this
happens.
And the monorail is out of commission for
the rest of the game.
Fallout 4 instead has very little in the way
of branching sidequests at all.
There's very little room for the player's
character to shine through.
Speaking of choice, Fallout 4 really doesn't
let the player choose what type of character
they'd like to play.
In this game your choices of main character
are: Father and ex-Soldier, Mother and Law
school graduate.
That's it.
Part of the fun of RPGs has always been being
able to invent a backstory for your character.
The last thing that a competent RPG player
wants is to have a backstory forcibly shoved
down their throat.
New Vegas executed on that perfectly in how
the player character awakes with amnesia,
the only backstory forced on you is the fact
that you used to be a courier and that maybe
you should hunt down the people that shot
you, you know… if you want.
Or maybe just go the wrong way and get disemboweled
by death claws.
Or join the NCR?
New Vegas doesn't look you in the eyes and
say "find your son and avenge your wife.
That's who you are and you'll like it."
Where New Vegas feels like you're sitting
in the driver's seat, Fallout 4 feels like
you're a passenger along for a ride with a
very, very boring and or borderline incompetent
driver.
Even oblivion's contrived introductory sequence
may have been drawn out and frankly ridiculous,
like when emperor Poop Emoji said "oh gee
wouldn’t it be a shame if I died right now
lol" then blocked a dagger with his temporal
lobe, I'd still consider it superior to Fallout
4's, on the grounds that the player is still
in control of their own destiny by the end
of it.
The way Fallout 4 lays it on so thick with
the whole "you're a family guy" bit is just
so condescending, it's like I could actually
see Todd Howard talking to his team about
how players just wouldn't 'get it' unless
they were actually TOLD what they had to fight
for, instead of being shown it.
I mean, we've known this woman for less than
fifteen minutes.
So when this happened, I can't say I was too
upset.
But the player character reacted entirely
differently to how I felt.
That's the glaring problem with a fully voiced
protagonist in Fallout 4.
It's not really a step up in production value.
Where players could once fill in the blanks
with how they felt, and project their emotions
onto the empty vessel that was the player
character, now players are constantly told
how to feel based upon the performance of
the protagonist's voice actor.
This freak-out right here doesn't make me
feel… anything.
It just takes me out of the experience.
So much for being an immersive roleplaying
game, right?
But the condescension runs deeper.
It's in the gameplay too.
Think about this.
How did you feel when Fallout 4 gave you power
armor within the first hour of the game?
Did you feel like you really earned the ability
to have a game breaking piece of kit that
made you into an unstoppable killing machine?
Was it particularly… fun?
No.
I doubt it was.
Extremely powerful items and mechanics are
most fun when you earn them, and instead of
saving power armor as a late game reward for
a memorable quest, they just give it to you.
Just outside of the starting area.
Look, when I was gathering footage for this
video I had already reached the power armor
within about half an hour of starting the
game.
That's with me taking time to gather footage
in between.
And when I say that power armor makes you
into an unstoppable killing machine I'm not
kidding.
Against human enemies like raiders, I didn't
even need to use a weapon, it’s totally
broken.
The proverbial cherry on top of this botched
mechanic's introduction is what developers
clearly intended to be a tense moment to show
off the suit's abilities against a death claw,
one of the most well-known and powerful enemies
in the fallout franchise.
Remember what they did to me at around the
same point in New Vegas?
I'd like you to just watch how this encounter
plays out on "Hard" difficulty.
If holding S and left mouse button in order
to kill one of the deadliest creatures in
this fictional universe doesn't tell you that
maybe power armor is just a bit overpowered,
I don't know what will.
And this is nothing new, Fallout 3 gives the
player a literal hand held nuclear weapon
at about the same point in Fallout 3.
I find it astonishing that it seems the only
thing Bethesda learned from Obsidian's work
is to give their weapons iron sights.
Everything about Fallout 4, save for the graphics
and gunplay, is a huge step backwards for
the series.
Players aren't treated like adventurers exploring
a new, visceral, apocalyptic world.
They're treated like kids in the sandbox,
playing with toys.
If I don't have you convinced yet that this
kind of attitude towards players is insulting,
well, here's one last thing.
Bethesda now offers its audience the ability
to pay for select mods through what they call
their 'Creation Club.'
So, say I want a prototype Gauss rifle?
That's 400 Creation Club Credits.
Or a little bit under 4 US dollars.
For a single weapon.
Now free mods do still exist for Fallout 4,
but the fact that Bethesda would ever think
that is a reasonable price point for a single
in game weapon is, well, insulting.
Especially on top of what was a 60 dollar
game at launch, and a 45 dollar season pass?
So, this 105 dollar game is not quite complete.
That'll be another 4 bucks for a new Gauss
Rifle, another 2 two bucks for a backpack.
You get the idea.
What I'm trying to say is the fact that Fallout
4's aggregate review score is only two points
lower than a masterpiece like From Software's
Dark Souls, or that it is actually somehow
3 points higher than that of New Vegas, is
baffling to me.
I just… can't wrap my head around this,
how a developer could create a game that is,
at its core, almost entirely inferior to its
predecessor, and treats its playerbase like
a bunch of impatient children, yet is still
be praised as "9.5 out of 10 – Amazing"
by mainstream reviewers.
So how do you feel?
Let me know in the comments.
If you like this video, leave a like.
If you want me to jump off a bridge then,
well, leave a like.
Thanks for watching.
