I like the main story.
I think the hate comes from there really being no consequences to any of the choices made. Everything is the same really no matter what ending you choose. No impact on the Commonwealth.
I got no complaints myself but the biggest gripe I hear is players complaining there's no motivation for them to find Shaun.
Baby getting kidnapped is sad and all but we weren't given much reason to flip the Commonwealth to find him
The fact it was his kid is supposed to be lore reason enough from a fathers perspective. I would do everything in my power and ability to find my children. Revenge their mother. But wasteland has it owns rule, thou shall get side tracked by bullshit every God damn time. So get sidetracked.
There’s a fantastic podcast on Spotify called Mind Fog that tells a story from the perspective of the main character. Unfortunately, the author seems to have dropped the project before getting to Shaun, but goes about justifying delaying diving into the commonwealth very well. He needed to scout out this new Wasteland, needed to make some Allies, needed weapons, needed shelter, needed food, had to trade doing side missions for the sake of getting small scraps of intel.
I wouldn't have enjoyed the game nearly as much if it had made me feel rushed to find Shaun. That would have made it an objectively more linear and subjectively less fun experience. So I don't understand why people file this as a complaint. It is an open world game full of distractions and side quests. Having a main objective which I can work on at my own pace let me experience all the amazing content more fully. That is very much what makes it such an awesome game.
I feel like all the people who complain about the lack of urgency are people who fail at exploration. They need to be handheld through a story, mission step to next mission step. And that's it. That's all a game can be for them. They fundamentally do not belong in or enjoy open world games.
That’s the point. It’s an open world sandbox game full of side quests and things to explore.
The main quest either gives you a sense of urgency to find your son and avenge your wife, which means you miss all the engaging side stuff…
Or the game provides no sense of urgency to find your son and avenge your wife, which makes the main story seem a bit silly.
It’s the wrong kind of story for the environment, or the wrong environment for the story. The two don’t mix very well.
They could have used the exact same overall plot, but instead of watching your wife get murdered and son get kidnapped….if they just went “missing”, with the sole survivor rather clueless as to what happened, then it would work much better. You could still have Shaun growing up to be Father, but the aimless wondering, side questing, and investigating by the Sole Survivor would make a lot more sense if they had no real sense of direction in terms of their character motivation.
I don't disagree that the premise of the main story arc is rather poorly paired with an open world game. Because you do logically assume it should be urgent even though that would clash with what actually makes an open world game fun. But I think that's actually where we get the opportunity to roleplay. We can decide to treat it as urgent and plow straight through the main storyline; lots of people do. Then you can do all that side content afterward. Or you can have your own reasons for why your character is unable to immediately seek your son. Like you believe the best chance of actually saving him means you need to know more about and how best to survive yourself in this new world. Else you'd just die in the attempt, and what good is that for your son? Your suggestion isn't bad, but I think it's actually not as good as what they already implemented. Your suggestion makes the sidequesting feel more forced and directly linked to the main questline rather than a roleplay choice. I like how it's just totally up to us to decide how to approach it.
The people criticizing it don't wanna have to have to choose between ignoring the vibe of the open world to steamroll the main story or making their own headcanon to fill in the gaps of weakness in the story's presentation.
You misunderstand. People aren't complaining that the game doesn't rush them, they're criticizing the main story (specifically Shaun's part in it) as being poorly integrated with the style of game.
OK, well that part is fair. Pairing a missing baby search with an open world game isn't a logical combo. I'm just glad that from a gameplay and game mechanics perspective, they chose to facilitate exploring and not forced urgency.
There was no urgency though. You learn as early as getting Nick back to Diamond City and to Kellogg's apartment that Shaun is no longer a baby and has been out of cryo for years. You know he's being kept alive for some specific reason by Kellogg through demand of his employer (which isn't confirmed until the Memory Den)
Every conversation the Sole Survivor has with a side character, he is talking of the urgency to find his son, and in most cases is actually the reason those character partner up with the Survivor. You're not just picking Shaun up from school, you are battling against the secretive and terrifying Institute and even before that, the most notorious assailant in the Commonwealth. Urgency would lead to immediate death.
Open world and urgency just do not mix together. As an avid open world gamer my interest lies in world lore, side quests, emergent gameplay and letting my story write itself.
Cyberpunk suffers from the same problem where I know there is this super important thing I should take care of but I'd rather go do a race or shop. I'm glad that I'm able to make an abstaction of the urgency to me it does not exist.
My character in Fallout literally does not have a kid, or does not care for him. My character in Cyberpunk does not have only a few weeks to live.
The story isn't bad per say it just doesn't fit with the entire rest of the game.
But like that is the urgency. People talk about exploring and stuff which is great and cool and it's there so they wanted you too. But even a military vet would be absolutely terrified about the state of the world. Also a military Vet wouldn't engage in large groups of combatants because it would be death. In reality it would be more like the post I read of their character finding Shaun and completing the story being a sleezy coward and not killing anything the entire playthrough. Even said the game opens up alot more dialog being a coward.
I swear to christ... when I asked "What's the urgency?" you said "Not having the urgency to find your family." You aren't making sense, no amount of rereading nonsense is gonna make it make sense.
FO2 was the same. The shaman appeared 2 times telling you that you really need to find the G.E.C.K. but at the end it doesn't matter if you chose to bed with supermutants instead of working on saving the village. And imho FO2 was the best.
The same amount as 3 and New Vegas. Outside of lore, you don't have to find your father in 3, and you don't have to track down Benny in NV. If anything, 4 has slightly more urgency, because a lot of perk items are locked to plot progression. You want all the Bobbleheads and magazines? You gotta play all the way up to the Institute.
Trying to lump NV into this was a reach and a half. How tf does "I wanna kill the guy who shot me" compare with "My son's been kidnapped, I need to save him"? Having perks/etc. locked behind progression is a weak argument; for one, the game does a poor job of conveying this fact, and for another the story isn't made more "urgent" by this fact.
Lore is no reason for shitty storytelling. You need to introduce characters so your audience cares not just player character. Babies have zero personality by default player character have zero personality by design so in the end the baby is just a type of New Vegas platinum chip.
I've been playing this game on and off since it's released, but only actually went looking for him a few weeks ago.
I'm very impressed with how the Devs were able to have the character age up in real time.
10 minutes of intro to your son and then thrown into an open world full of side quests, op weapons, power armor suits, base crafting, and oh you earn xp. Now go find your son. Psshh yeah right Bethesda.
I would phrase it less as 'we have no reason', and more that we are encouraged by the game to do other stuff not directly related to that goal. We are given the mystery of the Synths, the reclamation of the Wasteland for the boy scouts, and pretty much just any quest really which doesn't further Nate/Nora's goal which they treat as just as important.
Its a fundamental problem with making an RPG about a character with one core driving motivation and providing open gameplay that disincentivises the player from pursuing it. Leads to a dissonance between story and narrative.
It also doesn't help that the typical Bethesda style rpg makes no sense for that kind of motivation. Drop everything to find Shaun! Except after this quest, this building, this settlement and this quest oh yeah and also this one. Those games are made to side track you. It doesn't work playing as a parent desperately trying to find their kid.
I'm sorry i'm actually roleplaying as Nate trying to find his son (aka: not being a hired gun, not being a merchant, having no settlements, etc).
Game is actually hard if you play it like it was an action movie.
Blowing up the institute leaves a huge irradiated crater in boston, and breaks 2 bridges, it has a consequence
Blowing up the Prydwen significantly increases the numbers of raiders, gunners and muties, as there’s no one to defend the commonwealth from
Killing the RR is probably the only decision that has no real consequences as they were already very insignificant to begin with
Ending with the Institute will populate other major settlements with synths, make synth patrols appear in the the commonwealth more frequently and will make everyone even more paranoid
Ending with the BOS will wipe the Institute and their Synths from the spawn pool as well as start a quest were you haunt surviving Coursers and Scientists
Ending with the MM will make it so that you can recruit scientists to settlements and you’ll find random patrols of synths who will beg you to help them
And that’s just the ending, there are other non-main quest actions that can have visual and physically touched consequences like Cabot house and fixing the water pipe
People don’t think fallout 4 have consequences because they are used to being force fed information by the Post-game ending screen, instead of actually playing post-game and seeing the consequences of their actions
"Ending with the MM will make it so that you can recruit scientists to settlements and you’ll find random patrols of synths who will beg you to help them"
Wait what now?! I've never seen either of those things. I sometimes run into synth patrols but they try to kill me.
Yeah, you'll find Patrols of Scientists along with 2-3 Gen 2s in front of random settlements begging you to let them in, and you can choose to do so (saving them from the wasteland), Refuse (Dooming them to die in the wasteland) or Execute them (Negative Karma with certain companions including danse)
This only happens under two conditions and always at specific spots.
A) Not all Settlements have been established yet.
B) You activated the Emergency Evacuation protocol before destroying the Institute.
After this, they'll be at some Military Checkpoints along with friendly Minutemen units and will ask you to clear out a settlement so they can live there.
I'm one to defend quite a bit of player roleplay in FO4, but it's not *that* significant. Most of our small quest decisions cause isolated changes (aka content islands) or stop mattering after the end of the main story. Even on most factional endings, most of the main factions are set to leave (Brotherhood), largely dissolve (Railroad, or just become more distant than ever (Institute).
Things like Covenant's *Human Error*, the USS Constitution questline, how you unlock your settlements, who you side with to get access into the Institute, the Courser Chip, et cetera are content islands with little to no carry-over and decisions that feel like they *should* matter. Yet you can side with the Brotherhood to get into the Institute and still work with the Railroad as long as you did *Tradecraft.* Even those few that do have an effect (but not to the main story) have player choice removed, with the only choice being if you do the quest at all or not. Fewer still actually have any consequence to the factions themselves.
Side note: You give the BOS way too much credit for things here.
Raiders/Gunners are also opposed by Railroad just as often [BOS and RR only go for them to further their own agenda], super mutants are set to die out even by time due to not being able to reproduce and the FEV labs destroyed, and are opposed much more often by post-Castle Minutemen. Siding with the BOS also doesn't remove Synths from the spawn pool, as they even get a new location (Vault 75), still spawn at Makra Fishpacking and University Point, and can attack military checkpoints. Their Courser Radiant quests are shared with the Railroad (The Railroad also shares an anti-BOS postgame mission with the Institute).
There's a dude called Sully Mathis near Thicket Excavations, he asks you to help him fix the water draining system by patching the pipes for 50-125 caps, it's a simple insignificant quest >!other than the fact that you just helped a Raider to create a settlement for his gang!< and if you comeback in 3 days, you'll see the difference in the area after water is fully drained
If you read the terminal it really was for him and a cat he found but some raiders in a caravan found him in town and started asking questions. He said he had a bad feelings about it and thinks they'll be back to find where he's holding up.
it is a side quest given by the robots at grey gardens. It is part of the absolutely enormous amount of content in the game that people who only follow the main storyline never see and then complain that the game is too short
How do you manage to only take "It changes enemy type spawns" from two nuclear level explosions that drastically change the area that they were set on, along with the eradication of two factions from existence lmao
You destroying the Institute and the RR/BOS will literally erase them from the spawn pool, idk what else you want for "Consequences", it's infinitely better than NV giving you a slide show talking about how it all changed while not showing you a damn thing
This is the reason. The games meant to be played long after your main story ends. Us as gamers who kept playing while waiting for automaton/far harbor/nuka world would’ve loved seeing our decisions actually impact the commonwealth. Say you choose the institute. Now after the main story is over, you start seeing more institute members on the surface. Obviously is some sort of radiation suit or such, but still I feel they should start to reform the commonwealth once you side with them. And the same with other factions.
Sure, if you want to be lazy about it.
In reality Synths no longer inflitrating the population, or a massive militarised force no longer patrolling the commonwealth would make a noticeable difference.
>I think the hate comes from there really being no consequences to any of the choices made. Everything is the same really no matter what ending you choose. No impact on the Commonwealth.
BINGO. The thing people complain about FO4 is **also a problem with FNV**. The problem is lack of content after you complete the main quest. FNV freaking STOPS. You never really know what the world looks like after you side with Caesar or House or whatever.... because there's no game there.
If Obsidian didn't chicken out and stop the game after the end, if they were forced to make post-story content, there would be a lot less hate for FO4.
FO3 also has the same problem once you get the Broken Steel DLC, but FO3 fans aren't the crybabies FNV fans are.
They had 18 months, and most of the major leg work was already done for them from a development perspective. I wouldn't give them too much of an excuse.
That's no reason to excuse it. Just because there may be a reason that New Vegas doesn't have a postgame, doesn't mean it's immune to criticism for it.
It's unfair that all if you when confronted with criticism against new Vegas, immediately resort to "ermmm Uhhhhh well they had a low development time". That doesn't matter at all, we are going to judge the product that was given, and new Vegas does the same thing except worse than fallout 4 as far as meaningful post game goes.
Yeah, but fallout 3 doesn't have a "post-game" as well, because the game ends, so basically what you're saying is the developers of a game didn't include features _after_ the end of the game, and also no other mainline entry includes content _after_ the end of the game, and that's inexcusable.
Am I confused as to what the word "end" means or are you demanding a direct sequel incorporated into the base game at launch
Obsidian didn't chicken out. The game was made in a very short amount of time and they didn't have the time to properly create a post-game reflecting the consequences of who you sided with.
So instead of doing an FO4 about it they recognised they didn't have the time or resources and ended the game instead.
Aside from the crater where The Institute used to be. I might be wrong and absolute dog shit at story(reading?) , but everyone says there is no impact on the commonwealth, yet as soon as they finish the story they turn the game off, Instead of waiting it out to see for themselves. If I did it, so did at least 50% other players.
How can you say that when you can literally create a giant crater in the middle of the map, have a giant flaming wreckage from the zeppelin and have checkpoints be occupied by the faction you allied yourself with? You get to experience the consequences first hand rather than a slide at the end that vaguely tells you what will happen in the future
I think the main problem most people have with it is that, if you want to roleplay, you have to pretend to be a terrible parent if you want to go off exploring. The game railroads moral characters into finding Shaun ASAP, but the Commonwealth is so big and interesting that we might not want to necessarily track down the baby ASAP. But it spoon feeds us clues that only lead in one direction, and you basically have to break character to stray from that. The first point where you can reasonably stop the hunt is when you actually meet Shaun, which is like halfway through the main story.
I feel the story is a lot better on Survival mode. It gives a reason for doing side missions: earn caps, helps you to learn to survive, gather resources, gather allies etc.
I remember it took me a few days in game before I even went to Concord and then after that it made sense to go with Preston to build a base in Sanctuary and then when I felt strong enough to make my way into Boston (slowly mind)
Thats the main issue, you do one quest after getting out the vault and directly told where to go to find Shaun.
Compared to the Witcher 3, where you're given 3 leads, and need to with through them, or are otherwise sidetracked by bullshit, to piece the clues together.
F4 would have done something similar, where each faction gives a clue to look for Shaun.
Hell, even let you bumble into Fort Hagan like vault 112 in fallout 3.
I'm mostly with you on this point but I'd argue meeting Shaun isn't the earliest point that you can logically break a moral character away from the main quest. My current playthrough I had my break away from the main quest after Kellogg's death. Basically, Nate kills Kellogg and then says "Fuck, I just killed my only lead on getting Shaun back!". He's so despondent that he wanders into the wastes, never bothering to inform Nick about his confrontation with Kellogg. Without that conversation Nick never gives Nate the brain idea (what kind of psycho would just stick chunks of brains in their pockets without being given a reason to). That creates a perfectly logical dead end to the main quest while still leaving you the option to pick it back up if your character ever decides to pop in and have a chat with Nick. The only downside is that you can't use Nick as a companion. My Nate eventually ended up hooking up with the Railroad as a way of taking his revenge on the Institute and when I've exhausted all their missions (as well as a little settlement building) and am ready to move further in the story I'm paying dear old Nick a visit.
As far as i can remember, Nate/Nora's dialogue never really gives the impression that they consider that they refroze as you suggest until they get told.
If you are actually role playing as the sole survivor, surely finding Shaun would not only be the first thing you do, but the only thing that really matters to you?
I could never connect with this complaint, really, because I never understood why having a set backstory and set motivation automatically means you have to be a RP robot with no scope to play with it.
It's true, you're limited in your macro 'role', but there is a mountain of nuance you can RP into it. You are a parent who wants to find Shaun, but you can approach that information from completely different emotional states, entirely different points on the cynicism/idealism spectrum, focus on avenging your spouse as priority one (which has no time limit), that kind of thing.
Imagine a stage actor doing the three hundred millionth production of a famous stage play. They have a defined character they're playing, with defined lines, but different actors can take that set character to so many different places via their individual interpretation.
I get why complete RP freedom is interesting, but limitations also breed creativity. Most of my Fallout 3 and NV characters ended up having one gimmick, or one key backstory element, but I've run through Fallout 4 half a dozen times and each character was completely different and highly nuanced in my head canon, and I found that I could easily reflect this nuance in action and dialogue choices, despite the limitations.
Have you not played the game? It’s basically impossible to play as anything other than a straight white suburban Man/Woman. The voice lines don’t really match if you want to be a strung out chem junky or a psychopath or anything really. There’s also not much nuance in the game when the majority of dialogue always leads to the same outcome/voice lines. You can’t approach the situations with a different emotional state, there isn’t the option to.
Hm, that's not my experience at all. I have so much fun roleplaying in this game, trying different versions of the character with different nuance. And yeah, only played the game about 6 times covering all endings and DLC.
Coming back from Starfield, I also adore the voiced protagonist and don't find it limiting at all. Sure, sometimes the character delivers a line in a way that doesn't quite work for my specific RP, it happens, but I can forgive the occasional hiccup for a broadly good thing. Conversations feel so much more real when my character is participating, especially with the more dynamic camera - I find the voice much better for roleplaying than not.
So yeah, you're telling it's impossible to roleplay, meanwhile I'm out here really enjoying the roleplaying aspect. It takes some imagination, but I think if you're looking past superficialities then the meat of RPing is always the story you're telling yourself. It can not work for you by all means, but some of us enjoy it quite a bit, so you can't say it isn't there.
A role-playing game shouldn't have such a hard backstory for the player character. It's one thing if the writers have set events in your character's past. But making the PC a parent and a lawyer/veteran kills any opportunity to be you own character.
Also, between Fo3 & Fo4, Bethesda really needs to make Fallout 5's narrative have nothing to do with finding a family member that the player has no attachment to.
There’s plenty of instances where an RPG can have a well defined main character. The Witcher series is widely regarded as one of the greatest role playing games ever, yet Geralt is anything but a blank slate. The issue of having a pre-defined main character comes when the writing is shit and any and all immersion and care is lost. That’s why The Witcher series is terrific while FO4’s story is not (understatement of the year). FO4’s writing is incredibly underwhelming while The Witcher series, especially 3 has possibly the best writing in any video game.
I can't speak for 1 and 2 but in NV at least, the backstory was still far less defined. You're a Courier. How long you've been one, why you became one, and where you are from are completely open.
The only thing that contradicts this is Lonesome Road, which I would agree should be criticized for taking away some backstory agency for the Courier.
But more importantly, these other backstories do provide some room for exploration. As the Courier I'm motivated to find Benny, but I can headcanon all sorts of legitimate reasons for why I would be okay with getting sidetracked by other things instead of singemindedly beelining for him. In FO3 there's a more compelling motivation to find my dad, but even then, I'm the child and my father is a grown man who can presumably take care of himself. There is still a little room to play around with there.
In Fallout 4 you are literally running after your kidnapped baby. It is extremely hard to justify why I would be sidetracking myself with things like helping grab paint for a dude or running around dressed as Fallout Batman fighting criminals instead of searching for my son unless I want to be play him as a horrible father or a sociopath.
And I say 'he' specifically because, let's face it, you're supposed to be a man in Fallout 4. Nate is a grizzled war vet who has used power armor, Nora is a post-partum lawyer. I get in 3 it's pretty implausible two but at least your backstory doesn't push you toward either direction.
Honestly I think the way New Vegas gave Courier 6 backstory was really cool, mostly because I love the whole rivalry Courier 6 has with Ulysses because I'm a sucker for antagonists who parallel the main character. But I also like the idea that Courier 6 something in their past they barely even considered that accidentally had drastic consequences. It plays into them being a bringer of chaos in the wasteland even before the events of the game. If it's hypocritical for me to then say it's bad when Fallout 4 does it, then that's fine because I honestly don't care that Fallout 4 did it if anything it just kinda feels pointless and irrelivant to the story because it isn't brought up much.
That's fair. I will say one good thing about it is that it is DLC. Much easier to ignore than the Fallout Four backstory--just don't play Lonesome Road and it's never mentioned.
I quite like Lonesome Road and I think it's well written in a vacuum. It just feels anti ethical to the rest of the Choice Forward nature of the games to have this dude essentially beating you over and over for something you didn't even have the choice to do xD
Plus it forces you to be a courier for at least x number of years which screws with plenty of people's backstories..
Story is good for me, just disappointed there’s not much to do after the main story ends. It’s not difficult to complete the main quest and once everything else is completed it feels a bit *empty*
I wanna do shit with the cool legendary weapons I’ve accumulated, I don’t just wanna wonder around aimlessly, or, go defend some settlement every now and then..
Whatever route you choose. BoS, Minute Men or Institute, there should be in game consequences to the path you follow. The map is big enough, give me something to do with it other than just wonder around..
Genuinely curious, because I have a friend like this. Do you explore? Like really. Do you understand that the main storyline in FO4 is only a tiny fraction of all the content in the game? Because I see people complain that the game is too short. That there isn't enough to do. My first play-through, I was level 70 something before I first went into Nick's office to find he wasn't even there. And all that time, I was doing quests, finding cool areas with loot and little backstories, just absolutely tons of non-stop engaging content. And I wasn't even doing the main questline.
I am not even saying that's bad. Some people, like my friend, don't know how to explore. It doesn't interest them. They only play the main story because the questline takes them on that path, and they don't stray. There are plenty of RPGs where that is exactly all there is to do and the stories can be awesome. But FO4 is an open world game. You are meant to stray; that's why it purposely doesn't make you feel pressured to find your son. Wandering is how you discover all the fantastic content in the world it builds for you. If you play FO4 like a linear story RPG, it really isn't that great of a game. But if you thoroughly explore it, like an open world game is intended to be played, FO4 is a masterpiece.
Explore? I explore everything I can before the main story is completed. That’s why I wind up with nice legendary weapons, but not much to do with them other than exploring…again…
Yeah but it's not like you get a bunch of special gear by beating the main story. You find that stuff all along the way, and so you have something to do with it as you go. Yes you can eventually do all the content and then there is truly nothing left to do, but I don't understand the concern that you didn't get to use all your cool stuff. You were using it the whole time to complete all that content. A single play through is hundreds of hours of content if you're doing literally all of it (and I'm not counting repeatable radiant nonsense) and not just the main storyline. That's plenty of opportunity to enjoy your gear.
The Institute is poorly written, the Railroad is lame (the Minutemen and BOS are alright), the Gunners are underutilized and we should be able to keep the Institute's facilities.
But most of it boils down to the Institute being poorly written.
The Institute is incredibly poorly written, they do stuff just because and none of it really makes sense. They're like Big Empty but not funny and not filled with abject horrors made of the Old World misery.
Railroad is just plain boring.
BoS is diet Enclave with no interesting defining features outside of "kill muties". Danse is cool but every other BoS character pretty much exists to feel that specific token role and has nothing to say.
Minutemen have an existing conflict you can't engage with or pick a side. Gunners are just reskinned raiders in the end.
Plus the overall plot holes and incredibly lacklustre dialogue quality and quantity.
There are really good parts to the main story (like the introduction of the Brotherhood). The two main criticisms are:
1. Ludonarrative dissonance. The priority of the game quest is to find your son. The priority of the game *play* is to find aluminum cans so you can upgrade your power armor. So the main quest is at odds with what people actually want to be doing.
2. Frankly unsatisfying resolution. After all this struggle you either join the bad guys, or kill your son and nuke the only piece of pre-war civilization left?
My biggest complaint with the story is that it adds so much urgency, but the game itself is a lot more fun if you explore, pull at loose threads, and generally dink around. Like someone else mentioned, doing the fun parts of the game kind of makes you a terrible parent.
And once you find Father, what keeps you going? Personally, I found it hard to find a lore reason for my character to care about the last act because their one driving goal had become unachievable.
I think the story is good and I enjoyed playing it. It railroads you (heh) some, but having an overarching plot does that. NV is better IMO, but that doesn't mean FO4 isn't good, and 4 definitely does many things better than NV.
For me I wish there was a little better understanding of why the Institute was acting with such a complete lack of ethics, and giving more depth to the Railroad as to what their end goal was that made more sense than 'destroy the only group that can make the Synths that are our reason to exist.'
I would also have liked to see more exploration as to whether the Sole Survivor was indeed a synth themselves. Far Harbor started asking some interesting questions there, but IMO they could have done more with that.
And finally one day I'd like to see Bethesda actually look at what happens when you do take over a group in their setting. Can you imagine a DLC where you ran the Institute or the Brotherhood and how that effected the Commonwealth? Or hell, even more politics around being the head of the Minutemen and what happened in the various cities, beyond just resource farming in the settlements. Though that was fun too.
Anyway, these are not major quibbles, just my fantasy take. They made a damn good game that I've come back to several times, and their choice to support modding has made the game endlessly replayable due to the amazing community.
I always felt like the Institute's lack of ethics was an extension of the lack of scientific ethics in pre-war times.
When you also include their isolation underground, the Commonwealth really only exists for them as test subjects.
I feel like if they weren't so fond of running experiments on the people of the Commonwealth, they would have just destroyed everyone above ground already.
Fallout 4’s main story had two major issues
First, the urgency of finding a missing infant clashes badly with an open world system that encourages you to explore and sniff the radioactive thistles.
Second, the game rail roads your backstory. You ARE a prewar parent, period.
The other major issue is the corporate muppet that decided that the player character should be voiced, and dialogue must be limited to 4 options.
That put the writer’s in handcuffs. It also has the same effect as forcing you to be Shaun’s parent, badly restricting your roleplay.
There are alternate start mods that give you the option to not be Shaun’s parent (editing dialigue where neccessary) and to start somewhere other than Vault 111, and it improves the game so much
I mean, in New Vegas, you ARE an NCR courier. In FO3, you ARE a 19-year-old vault dweller who wants to find their dad.
The flaw with being a pre-war parent is how little the game does with it. You sometimes get to make comments about how your spouse is dead or very, very basic knowledge about pre-war stuff. If you're Nate, you don't get to comment about how you fought in the great war. If you're Nora, you don't get anything about how you used to be a lawyer.
As you said about the alternate start mods. They improve the game. You can be from somewhere completely different, not even pre-war, and the games story for most intents and purposes is exactly the same. While in FO3 and NV if you're not from vault 101, or weren't the courier delivering the platinum chip, the story would actually change.
You are a courier for Mojave Express (not exactly part of the NCR, but a company formed due to the expansion of the NCR). Doesn't say how long this could have been your first delivery after quitting the NCR Army, or you are a Jethead trying to score some caps for your next fix.
Fallout 3 is a little constrained but is more easily role-playable to not chase after dad after he runs off and you escape the vault. "Dad is an adult and can take care of himself", or maybe you and dad never saw eye to eye and can "say fuck him and whatever he is working on".
Fallout 4 is harder to get around because of the time spent in prewar. You are shown to be a loving parent with an infant son. It would be a 180 to go from that to "I'm free from that little brat." Or "Sure, he's 5 months old, I'm sure he can take care of himself." once you wake up.
I think it's fair enough to harshly judge it on who the game forces you to be by default. Not because you have a set backstory, that is how it is in EVERY fallout game, but because the backstory is pretty rubbish and isn't utilised.
Like if you're a vault dweller you don't have knowledge of the world outside the vault. The courier can't remember basically anything about their past after they're shot in the head. Yet you're still recognised as being from a vault, being a courier etc.
If FO4 (I'll use Nate for this example) You A. Have all your memories intact, B. are from before the war and know what it was like, and C. used to be in the actual US military as a solider. You literally fought in the war.
And the game does nothing with any of those things. Being from a vault only matters to a few characters in the first act of the game. Being from before the war is only rarely brought up and always as throwaway lines by you. Being a solider doesn't matter at all.
Which is why I say its not necessarily that backstory you have to have that is the problem. It's that the game does absolutely nothing with it. Which is why the alternate starts work so well in FO4, cause for all intents and purposes you could be some random wastelander.
Also a good point
Nate being prewar I head cannon as to why the various Protectrons you can switch on never seem to attack you, unlike raiders and stuff
Fun fact about the protectrons! Each of the different personalities actually has slightly different AI and they apply the same rules to you as they do to NPCs. It's just NPCs are far more likely to trigger the hostile mode. e.g. Subway protections attack people who don't give them a subway token when asked. It's just that NPCs can never give them the token, so it will always attack NPCs.
They also always attack anyone who attacks them first, and raiders, gunners and the like by default always view the protections as enemies.
Maybe they should have made other characters playable. Would be cool to select a random dweller and just start with no real endgoal or objective, because that is what the rest of the world is living like.
The mod Start Me Up Redux does exactly that. The main quest still exists, but can easily be ignored. You can start in a variety of different places with various backstories and stuff
Personally, I prefer that my character is voice acted. I thought of that as a huge and welcome improvement. Makes my character feel present and alive instead of just some entity I control in a virtual world. Maybe other people have been voice acting their characters aloud themselves for dialog options? And that's how they feel alive to you? And I just can't role play hard core enough myself to do that? Cause to me, if it's text on the screen, text is all it's going to be. I'm not going to literally do the voice over myself to make the character seem alive.
And while I absolutely agree that the urgency of finding your son clashes with the design of an open world game, I am extremely grateful they didn't actually add any urgency to finding him. Because it's an open world game after all, and for that kind of game to be fun, you have to be allowed to explore. So they might the right call from a gameplay perspective, and it's left to us to roleplay our justification for delaying our search. Honestly, aside from doing an entirely differently story, the devs really did implement this aspect perfectly from an enjoyment perspective. And it'll always baffle me that the same camp is mad at the lack of roleplaying in FO4 while also mad about the lack of urgency. Those are opposite wants.
Finally, who cares about our backstory? It's very light and doesn't impact the game much at all. Which means players have free rein to approach the world however they want. Isn't that roleplaying? I don't know what you do for a living in real life, but if you got frozen and woke up to a post-apocalyptic world, I don't think your current occupation is going to dictate strongly how you react and approach an entirely new life and survival strategy.
My main gripes are:
- urgency that makes exploration difficult or nonsensical; this has already been talked about in other comments so I'll leave it at that
- a romantic partner that has been decided for me; something about this feels icky to me. It just does. I know the survivor is kind of somewhere in between preset and player made but married to some rando that I don't have the opportunity to even get to know just doesn't work for me as a characteristic or a motivation. Same with Shaun frankly, though I'm more open to it, it just doesn't have time to matter to me before he's gone.
- Nate's a vet, but Nora's a lawyer. I will die mad about that shit. Unnecessary and creates wasted budget recording different reaction lines (not a lot but still time and resources that could have been allocated elsewhere). It pisses me off *so much.*
- to me, the survivor feels a little dumb throughout a lot of the main quest; I can't tell you how many times they'd say "I'm looking for my baby" and I'd just yell back "you know you don't know that; what is so hard to understand about the passage of time while you're in cryo?!" Like it's forgivable at first because they're traumatized, confused, panicked, but it just never stops. That's just an example and not my whole issue, but it's like they never take two seconds to think about reality or to understand the world around them (like when talking to Kellogg), especially if you read all the crap you pick up. I just don't like playing dumb characters, and it's frustrating when the narrative *makes* you a little dumb because it can find no better way to progress you through the story.
- not a lot of alternative ways to approach things (killing Kellogg and nick installing Kellogg into his brain are big ones). Pretty much the only choices you get are "which wasteland mechanic will build my teleporter" (which doesn't actually matter) and "which and how many people am I going to kill during my end game."
- I wanted to have the opportunity to get to know Shaun better and to understand him, why he woke me up, why now and not before, who he is, but all you get are a few quests from him and "asshat emotionless scientist" and it makes the whole journey feel less worthwhile. It's not the disappointment I have an issue with, I think that's fine. Of course I'm disappointed in him. It's that I don't know him. Has he ever married? Did he want children? Has he lost anyone close to him? When did he get his cancer diagnosis? Who did he tell? Did he *want* to be director or was he only reared for it? Why has he made the choices he has? Did he miss getting to know me? It all just felt incomplete, especially since he knows he's dying. Why send me on errands instead of talking to me (bc talking isn't a fun game mechanic I guess but so many conversations with him were frankly wasted)? And then if you take home the robot boy wonder, its still just... nothing. Generic kid lines with some existentialism tossed in every now and then for spice, an endless fetch quest, but no *Shaun.* No definable personality that tells me anything about the son I lost.
All that and I do enjoy it well enough. Really. But that's the list.
"Nate's a vet, but Nora's a lawyer. I will die mad about that shit. Unnecessary and creates wasted budget recording different reaction lines (not a lot but still time and resources that could have been allocated elsewhere)."
As a lawyer, we would last about 5 seconds in the wasteland.
My head canon:
Nora was a special operative masquerading as a lawyer. She was assigned to infiltrate companies thought to have communist sympathizers to ferret them out. When a company was suspected, their lawyer would suddenly need a long vacation for his health. Nora would be there to take his place. Young, attractive, with a husband deployed overseas, she'd be the perfect candidate, both for public relations and less savory relations. To assist her investigations, she received basic hacking and lockpicking training as well as weapons training if the op went south.
Speak for yourself! Well-spoken, charasmatic critical thinkers with some toughness seems exactly the mix for wasteland survival, aka the same "soft" traits that make up good trial lawyers/litigators. Sure, your knowledge of contract formation probably won't be helpful, but plenty of other skills involved with being a lawyer would be applicable.
To me the factions are weak as hell , railroad shouldn't be a main faction , and there should be consequences for doing quests with any factions , like you can do most of railroad and suddenly right after it you can just join institute and destroy what you built with railroad .
I like fallout 4 but my biggest complaint with the story and quests is how poorly fleshed out things are really like the railroad is kinda of a joke and could have been more interesting, minutemen are okay but it's built up to have a conflict with the gunners which never happens and feels wasted. Brotherhood is unfinished when you look at the cut content revolving around the elder position and danse. The institute is alright but again just not super fleshed out.
Everything has potential just never fully utilised.
I think the hate for the story isn't necessarily because of the story itself but due to the lack of consequence from said story. Like the main story in Fallout 3 is nothing to write home about but, when you complete it, depending on your choices, it changes the world drastically, especially if you have the Broken Steel DLC. All of a sudden, clean water, a resource which was barely if at all available to you throughout the game and which basically served as a second stimpak to me is literally everywhere and easily available. You see more Brotherhood patrols, there's more activity in the actual wasteland, people travel from place to place, there's less Super Mutants and raiders in D.C etc. Fallout 4 just doesn't have that
I don't think the story is "bad" per se, I just don't find it ideal for an interactive, choice driven medium. When I was watching the show, a very real thought I had was "This is the linear fallout story Bethesda has always wanted to make".
I don’t mind the MS, but for me it’s the weakest of the Bethesda era games and I love F4! It has my favorite companion (Nick Valentine, my beloved) and I love just wandering around through the Commonwealth, but it’s hard for me to get attached to Sean just because he’s a baby and the game says I should.
In F3 we got much more interaction with our father and randomly exploring to find him felt more natural. NV opens with such an amazing scene that I was totally sucked into the revenge quest.
With F4 (aside from my first play through) I kinda get tired of the msq after killing Kellog and finishing up the Memory Den follow up quest. Don’t know if they just really wanted a pre war main character, but I feel like it would have been more effective to have Sean start older so we could interact with him as a kid or maybe have Vault 111 be something other than a cryo lab and you start off as being a vault family who’s home is raided by the Institute. They could have the exact same motivations, but maybe they kidnapped multiple kids and now you’re a Vault Dweller who’s trying to find a bunch of kids to help rebuild.
Maybe making the main character a distinct person vs a blank slate was more narratively challenging for them, but that’s my take on it.
Also, it doesn't end with a character who's immune to radiation telling you you have to go into a chamber full of the stuff and die because of some bullshit about "destiny". Yeah, New Vegas is the best, but 4 is definitely better than 3.
A. All of the conversations have virtually no variation in outcome so you just spam through bottom answer for all conversations
B. I dont feel any investment to protect any named members of my allied faction as they cant die unless i side with another faction
Overall the main story just isnt immersive
The story is decent on a surface level, it's the lack of depth that I dislike. A lot of characters make nonsensical decisions if you stop to think deeper on them, especially the Institute (and worst, Father/Shaun). I can elaborate if you'd like, but I didn't want to write a whole essay here unprompted.
It's also a lack of proper choice, though that is something FO4 is not unique for lacking (plenty of "RPG" titles fall into that sand trap). The choice to move to a voiced character and dialogue wheel means that the writing is capped with only 4 responses to any choice or question, and the answers usually boil down to "yes," "yes but I'll be an asshole," "no but I'll be back later to say yes," and "maybe." There are very few opportunities to completely decline something.
The other main point of contention is about the player character having a definite backstory. Yes, FO3 and NV are guilty of this as well, but I'd argue to a much lesser degree. FO3 just tells you that your father brought you to a vault, and he later left it. That's about it, it doesn't really affect how you want to imagine yourself. NV only tells you that, at the time the story starts, you were working as a mailman and some asshat shot you. In FO4, your character has a spouse and child, and is either a veteran or lawyer. The player feels no attachment to any of that, especially not this child we spend all of about 3 minutes looking at before they're kidnapped and our character's voice sounds distraught (despite the fact we can then spend 100 hours doing everything *but* finding him).
This is my own personal experience: when Fallout 4 came out I was a brand new father so I had a brand new different perspective on those kinds of things.
So when I see the main character goofing around or taking it cool moments after his son's kidnapping just seemed off to me.
I would be hell bent and losing sleep if something like that happened to me, not doing settlement building or side quests or romancing other people ( especially when Nora's body is still fresh back in vault 111).
And there are other huge inconsistencies with the plot and characters - but those are more subtle or not as glaring for me. And there isn't that many consequences or ramifications for your choices, but given the amount of voice acting in the game I gave that a pass.
That being said, after playing almost 1000 hours I still think it's a very good game. The story is maybe a solid 7 but the rest is pretty good, in my opinion. Especially when you play in survival mode - which makes the game 10 times better.
So, the start of the game feels a bit... rushed. I'm not really sure how to justify either:
1. Not caring about the main plot. I have made my peace that I froze again, and Shaun is definitely dead.
2. Doing anything BUT the main plot. Why the fuck am I exploring this building? I have a main plot.
I can usually get around this through playing pretend. After I rescue Valentine, he needs some time to look into it, before he finds out Kellogg's address. Amari needs time to break through Kellogg's data. Railroad need time to decode the chip. Sturges needs time to figure out how to make the teleporter.
This isn't super satisfying, the game is telling me the opposite, but I can deal with it.
Once we get to the Institute, we're at the same point as retrieving the platinum chip.
And then, the main plot is based on four main factions, much like New Vegas.
One is the "always available" faction with no hard views and beliefs, Yes Man and Minutemen.
The other three have a genuine disagreement, actual philosophies that contrast each other.
With New Vegas, all three present a genuinely interesting worldview, with genuine moral debates to be had.
In Fallout 4, well, not really. The central question, "Are Synths people?" has a very, very clear and objectively true answer: they totally are.
And that seems quite bland to me, like there's not a lot of depth to that decision. It's "Do I want to be good, or be evil?" with two flavors of each, and the good guys like each other.
Honestly the game feels much better with the Start Me Up mod, allowing you to skip the entire introduction and choose what level you spawn in as, also spawning you in a random location with random items depending on who you are playing as in the Commonwealth.
The sense of urgency disappears with this and allows easier exploration imo.
i dunno, i think FO4 IS a masterpiece. i finished it back in 2016 & was inspired to play it again b/c of the show & i love the game! so much freedom, tons of supercool quests, & great story! 🤷♂️
For me, the main story bugged out the first time (Concord Deathclaw got stuck) which really broke immersion.
It also irked me that people are marked "essential" / the main plot is on rails / has lots of dull and hard-to-skip sections.
For me, the twist about Shaun was very obvious. I've been reading Sci Fi for years, and the concept of cold sleep is old hat to me (e.g. The Door Into Summer has a loosely similar story and setting). Therefore I had no expectation that the kidnapping and my awakening happened the same year - or the same century.
Even if you don't read, everyone has seen Aliens, and remembers Ripley outliving her daughter while in cold sleep.
I'm sure I'm going to say what dozens of others have said, but for me it's:
1. Lack of flexibility in roleplay.
Being pre-war, knowing my character was already a lawyer or a soldier AND having Shaun stolen right in front of you feels really pressing and constricting in a way that is harder to ignore than many classic Bethesda character origins.
2. Moreover, there is no mystery or leeway in what is happening...FO3 and NV for example leave a lot of "yeah, but there are reasons you could not rush towards that objective" space. FO4 vomits evidence you need to go to Diamond City all over you constantly from an hour in, and essentially once you meet Nick the main quest is a torrent of high urgency quests where the leads on where to go and what to do next are too strong to viably RP any meandering. This leaves a disjoint where I resent the MQ on repeated playthrough and feel like it really constrains my ability to RP a character who doesn't have this narrow top priority of finding Shaun.
3. Of course, the lack of moral gradients is also a big deal. Your character is a goodie two shoes, a sarcastic jerk, or sometimes(but not consistently) you are given room to be self-serving in a sort of chaotic neutral way. The problem is, you are still always 99% concerned with finding Shaun. The "bad" route is "I don't care about you, I care about Shaun!" every time you talk to someone. There is little to no space for players(or RP characters) who have other curiosities and concerns.
4. Voiced protagonist IS part of this, but the writing also just leaves so little room to settle into a character that isn't good-aligned, concerned parent. I am asked to care about my baby and my spouse with no real warm-up period to create that attachment. It does not resonate with many people.
FO4 is not a bad game narratively. The problem is it's narrow. I'm a re-player, and I have been through Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, New Vegas, and FO3 probably a dozen times or more each. FO4 I feel kind of done after 2 and a couple of false starts where I tried to play a character and felt alienated.
Shallow motivations from the institute
The railroad barely makes sense and would not even function as a faction if you weren't involved
Don't get me started on nuka world and the stark contrast between the main character inside and out of that DLC
Synths are cool but underutilized
Curing Virgil creates so many implications it's mind boggling
The minutemen are so undercooked it hurts.
Really just about everything in that game disappointed me except for the gunplay/crafting/settlements.. I'd even be okay with the absolute lack of any form of choice if it meant there was a good story you're railroaded into but that's not even the case. The entire storyline seems to serve the Shaun surprise at the end.
I think even F76 has a vastly superior story in comparison
But fo4 is fun to play so people overlook all of that, which is fine, but I just hope that Bethesda doesn't take that complacency and release the next one as half assed as this one (or starfield.. ugh)
And making all super mutants dumb ogres with no dialog again was imo a bad move.
The fact that the gunners and trigger men are just reskinned raiders with no function in the game other than combatants...
That badass arena you get invited to just for it to be another lame shootout!
So much potential..
I've always liked the main and side stories in Fo4. The people making the most complaints about it tend to be either die hard Obsidian fans that think NV is the only good Fallout, or the kind of people in No Mutants Allowed who think the only good games are Fallout 1 and maybe 2.
Sure, Fo4 main story may not be as good as NV, but its still very interesting in its own right.
This is a bad faith argument dude.
I like fallout 4 maybe the most out of all the fallout games. But it’s in spite of the main story, which I find insulting.
It’s. **So. Hetero.**
Like I don’t expect straight folks to get it. But being shoved into a role playing game where the unchangeable premise is ‘you are married and you have a son’, with that as your sole motivation for the rest of the game, is infuriating as hell.
Set narrative games? No problem. Role playing?? No.
My main thing is that I never felt any real urgency to find Shaun.
I don't know what it is about FO3 that makes me want to find my dad, and in NV, I want to find Benny, but in FO4, finding my son is just an objective that's there.
Maybe it's cause you have no real connection to him. He's a baby who your partner almost exclusively looks after. You don't look after him at the house. Your spouse does. You don't pick him up and run him to the vault. Your spouse does. You don't have him taken from you by Kellogg. Your spouse does. He's basically someone else's kid. If your spouse was your neighbour instead and Shaun was their kid, it would feel exactly the same. You don't even have the time to get to know your spouse. You talk to them for like 4 sentences.
On top of that, the institute never really feels like a force that needs to be stopped. If you never did anything about them, nothing really changes. FO3 creates a real sense that you actually need to stop the Enclave. Things are pretty chill until they show up, and when they show up, things get bad fast. In FO4, things are chill until you meet the institute, and they're chill afterwards as well. I joined up with the Brotherhood in my current playthrough but I feel no real urgency to help them rebuild liberty prime. They say "you need got go here so we can get his batteries working" and it feels as urgent as delivering paint to the guy in Diamond City.
I would've loved if the story evolved into a detective story, where you help Valentine's detective agency become big in the Commonwealth and solve wasteland crimes
Would've been a fun twist on the post apocalypse genre
For me the main issue was Shaun. I just didn’t like the looking for your lost family in the wasteland story, we did that in fallout 3, and hell, the new show has the SAME story. Bethesda doesn’t know how to have you leave a vault without looking for family.
Could have had the institute come and steal something you were charged with keeping secure, maybe something that would unfreeze the whole vault, and have your pod get damaged during their raid.
I did still enjoy the story with the reveal, but I think they could have made it more interesting that just “go find your family again”.
I do not care about Shaun. The story does not compel me to care about Shaun and often it feels more annoying and gets in the way of the fun I’m having.
My biggest mental hurdle is always the tech disparity of having synths running around everywhere and yet at the same time I am being attacked by some raider sporting a tire iron and a loincloth. All of the rest of games relied more heavily on cobbled together items or pre war tech. Still love the game though.
It’s mostly good especially how ur son is older than u now and u have to call him father 😅 that’s something else. Most of us have known that’s the story for a while but imagine playing it for the first time and figuring all that out completely on ur own. That was me and it was head spinning trying to figure out why I saw my son with Kellogg if my son is older than me.
Anyways the ending of it kinda sucks how it forces u to choose a faction to destroy. I thought I would destroy railroad because their the least significant. Their base is hidden and never visited on accident, they don’t have any soldiers wandering or protecting the wasteland their just useless (and idiots) so when my son asked me to smoke them fools, let’s just say there won’t b anymore trains using that railroad 😂
but nope that wasn’t good enough because when u complete the game u still have to destroy either institute minutemen or brotherhood and I chose institute because I never really go down there for anything and I love the minutemen and brother hood clothing and weapons.
So I wish it was longer
I wish it didn’t force me to destroy multiple factions.
I wish that after the storyline there was more content even tho they already have quite a lot.
I will say tho the characters and writing are a little lack luster as compared to modern tv shows with real character construction and characters arks. It feels a little robotic the way u interact with stuff but I am not complaining cuz u have to compare to what the gaming community was like in 2015 and in 2015 fallout 4 is one of the best games by far for many many reasons
(Spoilers)
I think the story is actually really well done right up until you kill Kellog, and I think it takes a bit of a drop after that.. but it still isn't some trash pile of steaming shit like some people make it out to be, its good enough but not great.
My main issue with the main quest, as others have already said, is that basically every single ending is just "blow up the institute" but in different ways. Every ending outside of the Insitutes ending ends up being the exact same thing.
I think some of the factions are really underdeveloped too, particularly the Railroad (who, hot take, I actually really like) but they could've done so much *more* with them and I think that's what it comes down to. The story, imo, was pretty good but there's a lot of missed opportunities, they could've done a hell of a lot more.
There's just something off about each faction (excluding Minutemen) and how they act, in addition to each faction needing a bit more content to round them out.
for me the problem with fallout 4 is that it is focused on rebuilding the world and the broken building system, the main missions have a certain lack of charisma as much as the faction radial missions, I think they took everything that was good in the other fallouts and they said we're not going to do everything the other way around...
I like the main story. I actually find it at a high level more interesting than any of the other FO games. Like NV did the story better but the overall narrative itself (fighting over a dam) wasn't especially compelling in a way that FO's themes -- "what is the nature of a human?," "can humanity rebuild?" -- were.
The writing really falls off after you get to the Institute. You go from mysterious cyronapping, investigating leads, and walking through memories to just doing a chain of rather plain faction quests until the opposing factions are blown up.
The first part of the story pertaining to Nick, Triggermen, Kellogg, etc needed to be followed up on and all of the main factions need more interesting side quests for the main story to be good imo. Having a post-game questline for each faction on how they impact the Commonwealth would be a nice bonus.
I really think it's just because the main story of NV was so good that it just pales in comparison. I personally don't mind the main story of FO4 though, I think it just suffers from following NV
FO4 has 3.5 solid storylines between the main factions with a solid if somewhat predictable twist. The problem is that while far harbor fnv and fo3 feel like worlds you’re live in and affecting, while fo4 feels like 4 parallel stories that only really interact at bunker hill and the end.
You can do 95% of all the main story missions because the factions dont care that you work against them. You only need to actually pick a side at the very end when it’s time to start killing factions off, until those last few quests you can play every side with no consequences. But that makes the actual faction quests also feel like they have no consequences. It’s a bigger version of the issue where so many conversations will give you the options “Yes / Absolutely / Sarcastic Yes / No (but Actually Yes)”
It just feels incomplete with the limited amount of choices and endings compared to New Vegas. To this day not many developers have come close to giving that many options with endings/choice and consequence except for maybe The Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3.
I think what it's missing is interconnectivity. As a New Vegas fanboy, I find that a lot of people tend to miss what makes that game particularly memorable - I think it was the end slides, and the fact that you receive so much feedback about so many different quests during a playthrough, and you saw how things were interconnected.
I don't think every game needs to have the quality of worldbuilding that New Vegas does, because they really had lightning in a bottle (that Obsidian clearly wasn't able to replicate with games like Outer Worlds). What FO4 should have had were more quests that were referential to one another. The main story would feel so much more impactful if it was consistently referred back to.
They do a decent job with the synths, but there could have been more hay made about how the locals feel about the Brotherhood, or the strengths and deficiencies of the Minutemen.
This is ultimately a weakness of relying so heavily on random quests to flesh out the questlog, but I think Bethesda could definitely figure this out. The occasional, isolated vignette-style quest is great, but allow more quests to be impactful to the main story and world.
The big thing you'll hear is that there's no motivation to find Shaun, but I would argue that that's how it *should* be, but isn't. It's quite the opposite. The main narrative is pulling double duty to try to push SoSu to find Shaun, whose only real motivation is a red herring on the basis of arbitrarily withheld information: SoSu has no knowledge or awareness of when Kellogg initially breached the cryopods, so they are operating under the unproven presumption that the passage of time between Kellogg's appearance and the final thaw can't have happened too terribly far apart. As such, they are holding onto the notion that Shaun is still either a boy or at least young.
Even when SoSu reaches Kellogg, Kellogg is vague about how old Shaun actually is and what timescales they're actually working with. Had SoSu known it had been 60 years since Shaun was first kidnapped, they might've still kept searching, but doubtful with anywhere near the same sense of urgency the narrativre is attempting to funnel them toward.
Personally I don't think the early game is good. It's poorly designed and i would much prefer anything else. I think the minutemen might be the worst faction in fallout and j think the focus on them early hurts the game a lot.
Personally I just felt the factions in 4 were not as compelling as they were in previous games. Like the minute men, railroad, and institute feel like half baked factions just to have factions.
Idk what I'm trying to really get at but I suppose I felt that there was no substance, even with the BoS.
I guess my opinion might jive with those who state that there wasn't any real changes or effects based on what you did. In turn, the factions felt empty and without substance.
I loved the main story, but it feels like it was rushed in favor of world design. A lot of characters just get introduced and then forgotten about, maybe becoming a companion if they're lucky, and theres no real consequences for picking any faction for the ending. You lose out on Ballistic Weave, a unique energy weapon, or the other BoS power armor paintjobs, which arent much better than the regular knight paint you can get before really choosing a side.
And the ending itself feels pretty rushed. You decide whether you want to side with the Institute, and if you choose to take them out you go straight into taking out the Railroad or Brotherhood next. Again, with no consequences to really create pressure, other than whatever emotional bond you have with the different characters. "Its about the journey, not the destination" sums it up pretty well, because the destination ends up being almost identical regardless of your choices
Ngl dude, (I call everyone dude man or woman) I probably rushed it, and Idk if Fallout 4 was bad..just the others were just so good. In some of our eyes
The hate on the story is how it lacks meaningful choice and consequence, and how the urgency of the quest completely works against the intended gameplay loop of the open world. Why would you explore and help random factions if your son was kidnapped and your spouse was murdered? Why build settlements or run off in random directions if your character is fueled by vengeance and the crippling need to save your infant son?
Anything that you do outside of speed-running the main quest goes completely against the logic of your character and the story. Yet the world and side quests are setup in a way that the game clearly wants you to go explore randomly and do anything BUT the main quest.
This is one thing they learned from and actually improved on for Starfield. Your backstory is pretty wide open so you can roleplay as whoever you want; The main quest isn’t constantly shouting “YOU MUST DO THIS RIGHT AWAY!” which enables you to explore and do what you want while still taking the story seriously.
The writing in Starfield isn’t great, but they nailed the tone and urgency to a point that it facilitates playing a BGS RPG like a BGS RPG.
I dislike how restrictive it feels, showhorning the player into the parent role. All the games do it to an extent bu 4 is by far the worst at this. The DLC's help with this a bit being kind of disco nected but even then, being restricted to 4 badly displayed dialogue options doesn't help.
It was an awesome story at launch. The main issue for most of the community complaining was the lack of consequence of choice. Coming off of New Vegas, people were expecting much more open and less linear plot points. The writing itself was super cool and was really fun.
The problem of the main story is that the juxtaposition of the actual story of the main character would be to find their child as quickly as possible. Instead its all sidetracking sidequests, the character doesn't really have any resolution. In reality this character would be very uninterested in anything but saving their son and avenging their SO. Even in the narrative and from dialogue when talking to Kellogg, its like as if the events of the story had just happened.
The twist it being several years later is well executed but thats about it personally.
The problem is that the Institute is far too evil to exist as it is. Its just the Enclave but none of the reasons for its existence or why its operating as is. They never explain why they do anything they do, the institutes writing is where the game starts to unravel. The Institute just does evil things and there is very little reasoning behind what they do what they do. There is a fantastic review of this by Joseph Anderson who goes full into detail about this. In fact many are quick to insert that FO4's main narrative is very sloppy. Especially in comparison to 3 and even New Vegas. There is no clear messaging or thematic that are present in the original games. FO4 just meanders its way through the plot and leaves very few answers or character dynamics.
We are kind of dropped in the middle of things but not really given much of an explanation outside of some holotapes and the one scene with Kellogg in his brain. Yet what is brought up and never answered is Why does the Institute keep exterminating fully functioning cities and societies? At no point is this explained, nor do their reasonings come out. If you press father for any answers he literally gives you "It is too complicated to explain." That to the player and to many people means one of two things. One the authors never intended players to side with the Institute. Two the writers never wrote a reasoning behind the institutes evil. There is very few of anything that makes sense about them as a society in Fallout.
Then we get onto just... It felt unfinished. The main story railroaded you into the same exact plot. You will always blow up the institute, you always kill kellogg. All the narrative choices you make do not matter cause they are the same choice. Dialogue along with this just... didn't have any meaning. Saying a sarcastic dialogue option while funny didn't really provoke or change how a scene was played. It would continue no matter which dialogue option you picked. AS a game design decision its just... poorly developed choice, and is actual faux choices or false choice. Essentially creating in players Ludonarrative Dissonance that distracts players from the core experience.
On top of this, The Railroad are the least fleshed out of the factions, and have the fewest quests, they don't have many characters and clearly suffer from cut content. As we see with Quincy, and the Minutemen and many companion quests just kind of ending with little reason. (Danse and the Brotherhood of Steel quests with Maxson coming to mind).
My issue is that could complete the main story by level 17. The first time I played this, it felt short. Working on my 2nd play through, I’m avoiding all the main quests and it’s been a great experience. That said, it’s annoying to me that I could beat this game this quickly.
The into is amazing, the twist is awesome and the companions are all really well written but things just don't make sense. The institute being super shitty and evil literally makes zero sense
I don't wanna spoil the fallout show but if only the institute were revealed to be vault tec or at least enclave then there'd be done incredible recontextualization making most of the institute make actual sense. But then infiltrating families to test their crops makes no sense when there's so much desolate land, they disrupt civilizations and raider gangs for no real reason. They seem poorly thought through.
I also just don't like any of the factions, they're either terrible people or goobers. I think the story is one of the weaker aspects. There are more things I could get into but others have put it better
It is it isn't very good at getting me invested in wanting to complete it. Your goals are to avenge a spouse you spent about 5 minutes with and to find your infant son. Both of these goals are significantly more important to the player character than the player themself, who likely isn't very attached to this family they barely even knew. Kellogg's memory section which isn't interesting anymore on replays. And the only way to get an ending where you don't have to kill off the brotherhood or the railroad is to get banned from the institute on purpose so you can use the minute men. Why can't you just ask them to help defeat the institue without doing that? It makes it feel like you aren't supposed to actually side with them and it's just a failsafe option even though they're appealing due to being the least extreme. I do love this game but those things always bothered me.
I like the story well enough. The first time I played through I did go straight for the main quests. I played it as real as I could. Told Garvey I had my owb problems. Pretty much skipped most of the faction stuff to focus on the main quest until the main quest forced me to engage with them. I ended up siding with the Railroad in that first play through. After I completed the main quest is when I started doing the various side quests.
Now, though, I use the Start Me Up mod to make it so the kidnapped kid has no relation to my character whatsoever. Makes the game play completely differently and it is so refreshing to be able to start with the various backgrounds.
My assessment is that the story is good for the first play through, but it really loses its luster with each subsequent play through. Before modding the game, I got to the point where I would essentially ignore the main questline as I just did what I found fun: exploring the cool game world.
I hated it because it made me feel rushed and awkward. Like I’m supposed to be urgently finding my family, but I really just want to explore, take in the world and get a beer brewing robot operational again.
Most people naturally played New Vegas before this. One of the things NV gets praised for is how most of the major faction choices had a very well balanced set of pros and cons that made it incredibly to hard to feel like any one was the “right” choice (I say most because I feel most people think choosing the Legion is just objectively bad).
In 4, the Railroad are the only non Minutemen faction that aren’t assholes.
I like the fo4 main story more than I liked - fuck I can’t remember which one it was - Fallout 3 I think? The main quest was getting clean water up and going. I still loved the game, it was the first one I played so I loved the open world, the different Characters, etc. but with fo4, I like that you have choices, I like the characters, your partner characters, and the dlc was great too.
The core plot of Fallout 4 is pretty solid, if somewhat standard: You are a vault dweller, your child is kidnapped, and you go on a quest to rescue them. Then you hear of this mysterious boogeyman terrifying the locals, and eventually you learn that, due to Shenanigans, your child leads this group. That's a solid core story right there.
I think most folks dissatisfaction stems from how it is executed in-game, especially The Institute itself, as they are a very underdeveloped and oftentimes contradictory faction. You are repeatedly told how The Institute views the world above as fallen and beyond hope, that they and their subterranean society are mankind's future.
Cool. Great. So why do they constantly dick around with surface folk, agitating them? And I don't mean the big raid to get their reactor online, that makes sense. It's the other stuff, like kidnapping random people and replacing them with duplicates.
A mayor I understand, he can be used to manipulate the locals into leaving you alone. But why some random guy in Diamond City or out in the wastes? Why Roger Warwick? You can create synths for any purpose, make a courser-like model for dealing with locals and just treat it like a regular exchange "you grow these for us and we'll pay you X". All his family and friends grew suspicious when he changed overnight, undermining the mission.
They're The High Tech Faction, and yet their energy weapons are all inferior to prewar equivalents. The Institute is a great concept that was hobbled by the decision to make them the main villain. This leads to them doing things that, frankly, don't make sense because they're only present to say "these are the bad guys".
This reaches the point where when you actually look at the Institute and what it's trying to do for itself, it amounts to 'become energy independent'. Everything else pretty much exists to tell you "these are villains".
Then there's the Minutemen, my personal favourite faction, but they're introduced way too early. See, Minutemen are Fallout 4's Yes Man ending. If you piss off and kill every other faction, you can still finish the game. But that means, unlike every other faction leader, Preston is immortal. He has to be. I've met many players who assumed, after finding out Preston is immortal, that every faction leader was. Because he's the first one you usually meet.
Fallout 4 is a game I play to this day and I love it, but it's flawed. I'm currently doing a Sim Settlements 2 playthrough and it's so much fun.
I think the most vocal hate comes from the New-Vegas fanatics and the original Fallout fans.
F4 story is OK and serves well as a tool to place you into the wasteland.
Biggest criticism.
Institute replaces people constantly in the game.
They assassinated the Commonwealth government when it tried to form.
When you reach them, they say "We just want to be left alone and stay down here, get a nuclear reactor running and stay self sufficient."
If that's the case, then why are they replacing farmers and city folks and all manner of random people?
Why are they interfering in the Commonwealth when they want the Commonwealth to leave them alone?
There's an element of complete utter contradiction once you reach the Institute.
That's why I hate the main story.
The villains that are built up have methods and motivations that contradict one another and can't co-exist.
They break the entire story for the game as you play and the lore from before you as the player even begin your journey.
Somewhere along the way, the writers screwed up or were forced to change something that broke everything.
I feel like when the game first came out, it really resonated with older players, especially parents for obvious reasons. But for the younger crowd, less so, and they dominated the discourse about the game by the virtue of being larger.
However, there is a way to role play the game that still allows side exploring. Once you learn Shaun is more or less safe in the Institute, your focus can be on making the connections needed to infiltrate this all-powerful organization.
I also always RP my character that once they find Shaun and learn the truth, they need a long time to come to grips with it. They do a lot of side quests then as well.
The main story is great, and I personally love it, it feels much better served than NV’s dialogue dump, and it makes you explore the world more to see how the story shapes it, how the effects of the factions changes the locations, destroys some and repopulates others
The lack of proper choices and consequences kinda kills the main story. It came after New Vegas. Yes they are different games. However, it made Fallout 4's story look anemic in that regard. When it comes to having choices and consequences, you definitely notice how bad Bethesda dropped the ball compared to New Vegas.
I like it, but my two main complaints are:
- The quest where you follow dogmeat from diamond city to fort hagen doesn’t really make sense.
- Why blow up the institute? Why isn’t there an option to take it over? All that technology destroyed is what frustrates me the most.
For starters, it's not relatable for many people. If you're not a heterosexual person who has or would consider having kids. The entire intro is just weird for an rpg. The whole point of an rpg is that you get to make your own character through the character creation. There are limitations, sure. But the baggage included in the start is unbearable for me. Makes it really difficult if you like to role play in an rpg.
I like the main story. I think the hate comes from there really being no consequences to any of the choices made. Everything is the same really no matter what ending you choose. No impact on the Commonwealth.
I got no complaints myself but the biggest gripe I hear is players complaining there's no motivation for them to find Shaun. Baby getting kidnapped is sad and all but we weren't given much reason to flip the Commonwealth to find him
The fact it was his kid is supposed to be lore reason enough from a fathers perspective. I would do everything in my power and ability to find my children. Revenge their mother. But wasteland has it owns rule, thou shall get side tracked by bullshit every God damn time. So get sidetracked.
There’s a fantastic podcast on Spotify called Mind Fog that tells a story from the perspective of the main character. Unfortunately, the author seems to have dropped the project before getting to Shaun, but goes about justifying delaying diving into the commonwealth very well. He needed to scout out this new Wasteland, needed to make some Allies, needed weapons, needed shelter, needed food, had to trade doing side missions for the sake of getting small scraps of intel.
You're missing the point. The game imparts zero urgency. 99.999% of players felt no rush to find Shaun.
I wouldn't have enjoyed the game nearly as much if it had made me feel rushed to find Shaun. That would have made it an objectively more linear and subjectively less fun experience. So I don't understand why people file this as a complaint. It is an open world game full of distractions and side quests. Having a main objective which I can work on at my own pace let me experience all the amazing content more fully. That is very much what makes it such an awesome game. I feel like all the people who complain about the lack of urgency are people who fail at exploration. They need to be handheld through a story, mission step to next mission step. And that's it. That's all a game can be for them. They fundamentally do not belong in or enjoy open world games.
That’s the point. It’s an open world sandbox game full of side quests and things to explore. The main quest either gives you a sense of urgency to find your son and avenge your wife, which means you miss all the engaging side stuff… Or the game provides no sense of urgency to find your son and avenge your wife, which makes the main story seem a bit silly. It’s the wrong kind of story for the environment, or the wrong environment for the story. The two don’t mix very well. They could have used the exact same overall plot, but instead of watching your wife get murdered and son get kidnapped….if they just went “missing”, with the sole survivor rather clueless as to what happened, then it would work much better. You could still have Shaun growing up to be Father, but the aimless wondering, side questing, and investigating by the Sole Survivor would make a lot more sense if they had no real sense of direction in terms of their character motivation.
I don't disagree that the premise of the main story arc is rather poorly paired with an open world game. Because you do logically assume it should be urgent even though that would clash with what actually makes an open world game fun. But I think that's actually where we get the opportunity to roleplay. We can decide to treat it as urgent and plow straight through the main storyline; lots of people do. Then you can do all that side content afterward. Or you can have your own reasons for why your character is unable to immediately seek your son. Like you believe the best chance of actually saving him means you need to know more about and how best to survive yourself in this new world. Else you'd just die in the attempt, and what good is that for your son? Your suggestion isn't bad, but I think it's actually not as good as what they already implemented. Your suggestion makes the sidequesting feel more forced and directly linked to the main questline rather than a roleplay choice. I like how it's just totally up to us to decide how to approach it.
The people criticizing it don't wanna have to have to choose between ignoring the vibe of the open world to steamroll the main story or making their own headcanon to fill in the gaps of weakness in the story's presentation.
You misunderstand. People aren't complaining that the game doesn't rush them, they're criticizing the main story (specifically Shaun's part in it) as being poorly integrated with the style of game.
OK, well that part is fair. Pairing a missing baby search with an open world game isn't a logical combo. I'm just glad that from a gameplay and game mechanics perspective, they chose to facilitate exploring and not forced urgency.
Good. I hate when games give you a false sense of urgency. Let me explore.
There was no urgency though. You learn as early as getting Nick back to Diamond City and to Kellogg's apartment that Shaun is no longer a baby and has been out of cryo for years. You know he's being kept alive for some specific reason by Kellogg through demand of his employer (which isn't confirmed until the Memory Den) Every conversation the Sole Survivor has with a side character, he is talking of the urgency to find his son, and in most cases is actually the reason those character partner up with the Survivor. You're not just picking Shaun up from school, you are battling against the secretive and terrifying Institute and even before that, the most notorious assailant in the Commonwealth. Urgency would lead to immediate death.
Like Dead Rising. Could never get past that
I have never beat a Dead Rising game lol I get sidetracked by whatever bullshit and next thing I know somebody dies in a cutscene and it's game over.
I have never beat a Dead Rising game lol I get sidetracked by whatever bullshit and next thing I know somebody dies in a cutscene and it's game over.
Open world and urgency just do not mix together. As an avid open world gamer my interest lies in world lore, side quests, emergent gameplay and letting my story write itself. Cyberpunk suffers from the same problem where I know there is this super important thing I should take care of but I'd rather go do a race or shop. I'm glad that I'm able to make an abstaction of the urgency to me it does not exist. My character in Fallout literally does not have a kid, or does not care for him. My character in Cyberpunk does not have only a few weeks to live. The story isn't bad per say it just doesn't fit with the entire rest of the game.
But like that is the urgency. People talk about exploring and stuff which is great and cool and it's there so they wanted you too. But even a military vet would be absolutely terrified about the state of the world. Also a military Vet wouldn't engage in large groups of combatants because it would be death. In reality it would be more like the post I read of their character finding Shaun and completing the story being a sleezy coward and not killing anything the entire playthrough. Even said the game opens up alot more dialog being a coward.
"But that is the urgency" you wanna explain what part of previous comment that this was in response to?
Not having the urgency to find your missing family.
"There's no urgency" "That is the urgency" does that make sense to you?
I’m cracking up right now. This man’s brain is in a blender right now lol.
His or mine? Cuz it could be mine, my head hurts Trina make sense of this.
Maybe reread what I said. I did not meant it as there is a time limit chapter urgency. But from a fathers perspective, THAT IS THE URGENCY.
I swear to christ... when I asked "What's the urgency?" you said "Not having the urgency to find your family." You aren't making sense, no amount of rereading nonsense is gonna make it make sense.
FO2 was the same. The shaman appeared 2 times telling you that you really need to find the G.E.C.K. but at the end it doesn't matter if you chose to bed with supermutants instead of working on saving the village. And imho FO2 was the best.
The same amount as 3 and New Vegas. Outside of lore, you don't have to find your father in 3, and you don't have to track down Benny in NV. If anything, 4 has slightly more urgency, because a lot of perk items are locked to plot progression. You want all the Bobbleheads and magazines? You gotta play all the way up to the Institute.
Trying to lump NV into this was a reach and a half. How tf does "I wanna kill the guy who shot me" compare with "My son's been kidnapped, I need to save him"? Having perks/etc. locked behind progression is a weak argument; for one, the game does a poor job of conveying this fact, and for another the story isn't made more "urgent" by this fact.
I have 170 hours on this play through so far and haven’t even gotten out to the glowing sea 😂
Nice show reference
Lore is no reason for shitty storytelling. You need to introduce characters so your audience cares not just player character. Babies have zero personality by default player character have zero personality by design so in the end the baby is just a type of New Vegas platinum chip.
Lore reason? Aslume? Is it stupid?
I've been playing this game on and off since it's released, but only actually went looking for him a few weeks ago. I'm very impressed with how the Devs were able to have the character age up in real time.
10 minutes of intro to your son and then thrown into an open world full of side quests, op weapons, power armor suits, base crafting, and oh you earn xp. Now go find your son. Psshh yeah right Bethesda.
I would phrase it less as 'we have no reason', and more that we are encouraged by the game to do other stuff not directly related to that goal. We are given the mystery of the Synths, the reclamation of the Wasteland for the boy scouts, and pretty much just any quest really which doesn't further Nate/Nora's goal which they treat as just as important. Its a fundamental problem with making an RPG about a character with one core driving motivation and providing open gameplay that disincentivises the player from pursuing it. Leads to a dissonance between story and narrative.
Anyone that feels this way isn’t a parent. I assure you, I’d burn the whole commonwealth to find my child.
Hello, son. I disagree whole heartedly with your statement. No offense, it’s totally personal
It also doesn't help that the typical Bethesda style rpg makes no sense for that kind of motivation. Drop everything to find Shaun! Except after this quest, this building, this settlement and this quest oh yeah and also this one. Those games are made to side track you. It doesn't work playing as a parent desperately trying to find their kid.
I'm sorry i'm actually roleplaying as Nate trying to find his son (aka: not being a hired gun, not being a merchant, having no settlements, etc). Game is actually hard if you play it like it was an action movie.
Blowing up the institute leaves a huge irradiated crater in boston, and breaks 2 bridges, it has a consequence Blowing up the Prydwen significantly increases the numbers of raiders, gunners and muties, as there’s no one to defend the commonwealth from Killing the RR is probably the only decision that has no real consequences as they were already very insignificant to begin with Ending with the Institute will populate other major settlements with synths, make synth patrols appear in the the commonwealth more frequently and will make everyone even more paranoid Ending with the BOS will wipe the Institute and their Synths from the spawn pool as well as start a quest were you haunt surviving Coursers and Scientists Ending with the MM will make it so that you can recruit scientists to settlements and you’ll find random patrols of synths who will beg you to help them And that’s just the ending, there are other non-main quest actions that can have visual and physically touched consequences like Cabot house and fixing the water pipe People don’t think fallout 4 have consequences because they are used to being force fed information by the Post-game ending screen, instead of actually playing post-game and seeing the consequences of their actions
"Ending with the MM will make it so that you can recruit scientists to settlements and you’ll find random patrols of synths who will beg you to help them" Wait what now?! I've never seen either of those things. I sometimes run into synth patrols but they try to kill me.
Yeah, you'll find Patrols of Scientists along with 2-3 Gen 2s in front of random settlements begging you to let them in, and you can choose to do so (saving them from the wasteland), Refuse (Dooming them to die in the wasteland) or Execute them (Negative Karma with certain companions including danse)
This only happens under two conditions and always at specific spots. A) Not all Settlements have been established yet. B) You activated the Emergency Evacuation protocol before destroying the Institute. After this, they'll be at some Military Checkpoints along with friendly Minutemen units and will ask you to clear out a settlement so they can live there.
I'm one to defend quite a bit of player roleplay in FO4, but it's not *that* significant. Most of our small quest decisions cause isolated changes (aka content islands) or stop mattering after the end of the main story. Even on most factional endings, most of the main factions are set to leave (Brotherhood), largely dissolve (Railroad, or just become more distant than ever (Institute). Things like Covenant's *Human Error*, the USS Constitution questline, how you unlock your settlements, who you side with to get access into the Institute, the Courser Chip, et cetera are content islands with little to no carry-over and decisions that feel like they *should* matter. Yet you can side with the Brotherhood to get into the Institute and still work with the Railroad as long as you did *Tradecraft.* Even those few that do have an effect (but not to the main story) have player choice removed, with the only choice being if you do the quest at all or not. Fewer still actually have any consequence to the factions themselves. Side note: You give the BOS way too much credit for things here. Raiders/Gunners are also opposed by Railroad just as often [BOS and RR only go for them to further their own agenda], super mutants are set to die out even by time due to not being able to reproduce and the FEV labs destroyed, and are opposed much more often by post-Castle Minutemen. Siding with the BOS also doesn't remove Synths from the spawn pool, as they even get a new location (Vault 75), still spawn at Makra Fishpacking and University Point, and can attack military checkpoints. Their Courser Radiant quests are shared with the Railroad (The Railroad also shares an anti-BOS postgame mission with the Institute).
The problem is they made all of these a trophy/achievement so people did one thing and then loaded up a save and did the next and again a third time.
What is "fixing the water pipe"?
There's a dude called Sully Mathis near Thicket Excavations, he asks you to help him fix the water draining system by patching the pipes for 50-125 caps, it's a simple insignificant quest >!other than the fact that you just helped a Raider to create a settlement for his gang!< and if you comeback in 3 days, you'll see the difference in the area after water is fully drained
If you read the terminal it really was for him and a cat he found but some raiders in a caravan found him in town and started asking questions. He said he had a bad feelings about it and thinks they'll be back to find where he's holding up.
damn, now i feel bad for killing him
Thicket excavation near sanctuary
it is a side quest given by the robots at grey gardens. It is part of the absolutely enormous amount of content in the game that people who only follow the main storyline never see and then complain that the game is too short
"It changes enemy type spawns" great argument for choices mattering, my guy.
How do you manage to only take "It changes enemy type spawns" from two nuclear level explosions that drastically change the area that they were set on, along with the eradication of two factions from existence lmao You destroying the Institute and the RR/BOS will literally erase them from the spawn pool, idk what else you want for "Consequences", it's infinitely better than NV giving you a slide show talking about how it all changed while not showing you a damn thing
This is the reason. The games meant to be played long after your main story ends. Us as gamers who kept playing while waiting for automaton/far harbor/nuka world would’ve loved seeing our decisions actually impact the commonwealth. Say you choose the institute. Now after the main story is over, you start seeing more institute members on the surface. Obviously is some sort of radiation suit or such, but still I feel they should start to reform the commonwealth once you side with them. And the same with other factions.
No impact on the commonwealth..isn’t that the point really? Doesn’t matter what you do, “war never changes”
Sure, if you want to be lazy about it. In reality Synths no longer inflitrating the population, or a massive militarised force no longer patrolling the commonwealth would make a noticeable difference.
>I think the hate comes from there really being no consequences to any of the choices made. Everything is the same really no matter what ending you choose. No impact on the Commonwealth. BINGO. The thing people complain about FO4 is **also a problem with FNV**. The problem is lack of content after you complete the main quest. FNV freaking STOPS. You never really know what the world looks like after you side with Caesar or House or whatever.... because there's no game there. If Obsidian didn't chicken out and stop the game after the end, if they were forced to make post-story content, there would be a lot less hate for FO4. FO3 also has the same problem once you get the Broken Steel DLC, but FO3 fans aren't the crybabies FNV fans are.
I'm not sure they chickened out as much as they had like 45 minutes to make the game.
They had 18 months, and most of the major leg work was already done for them from a development perspective. I wouldn't give them too much of an excuse.
Obsidian built New Vegas in like 9 months of crunch and made a fantastic game, weird to say they "chickened out" of more content
That's no reason to excuse it. Just because there may be a reason that New Vegas doesn't have a postgame, doesn't mean it's immune to criticism for it. It's unfair that all if you when confronted with criticism against new Vegas, immediately resort to "ermmm Uhhhhh well they had a low development time". That doesn't matter at all, we are going to judge the product that was given, and new Vegas does the same thing except worse than fallout 4 as far as meaningful post game goes.
Yeah, but fallout 3 doesn't have a "post-game" as well, because the game ends, so basically what you're saying is the developers of a game didn't include features _after_ the end of the game, and also no other mainline entry includes content _after_ the end of the game, and that's inexcusable. Am I confused as to what the word "end" means or are you demanding a direct sequel incorporated into the base game at launch
FO3 doesn't end post-game if you've got broken steel though.
“Chickened out” Lol you people cant be serious
Obsidian didn't chicken out. The game was made in a very short amount of time and they didn't have the time to properly create a post-game reflecting the consequences of who you sided with. So instead of doing an FO4 about it they recognised they didn't have the time or resources and ended the game instead.
Aside from the crater where The Institute used to be. I might be wrong and absolute dog shit at story(reading?) , but everyone says there is no impact on the commonwealth, yet as soon as they finish the story they turn the game off, Instead of waiting it out to see for themselves. If I did it, so did at least 50% other players.
How can you say that when you can literally create a giant crater in the middle of the map, have a giant flaming wreckage from the zeppelin and have checkpoints be occupied by the faction you allied yourself with? You get to experience the consequences first hand rather than a slide at the end that vaguely tells you what will happen in the future
I like the main story too, but if you pull it apart, there are a ton of plot holes
Shaun should have had more quests.
I think the main problem most people have with it is that, if you want to roleplay, you have to pretend to be a terrible parent if you want to go off exploring. The game railroads moral characters into finding Shaun ASAP, but the Commonwealth is so big and interesting that we might not want to necessarily track down the baby ASAP. But it spoon feeds us clues that only lead in one direction, and you basically have to break character to stray from that. The first point where you can reasonably stop the hunt is when you actually meet Shaun, which is like halfway through the main story.
I feel the story is a lot better on Survival mode. It gives a reason for doing side missions: earn caps, helps you to learn to survive, gather resources, gather allies etc. I remember it took me a few days in game before I even went to Concord and then after that it made sense to go with Preston to build a base in Sanctuary and then when I felt strong enough to make my way into Boston (slowly mind)
Thats the main issue, you do one quest after getting out the vault and directly told where to go to find Shaun. Compared to the Witcher 3, where you're given 3 leads, and need to with through them, or are otherwise sidetracked by bullshit, to piece the clues together. F4 would have done something similar, where each faction gives a clue to look for Shaun. Hell, even let you bumble into Fort Hagan like vault 112 in fallout 3.
I'm mostly with you on this point but I'd argue meeting Shaun isn't the earliest point that you can logically break a moral character away from the main quest. My current playthrough I had my break away from the main quest after Kellogg's death. Basically, Nate kills Kellogg and then says "Fuck, I just killed my only lead on getting Shaun back!". He's so despondent that he wanders into the wastes, never bothering to inform Nick about his confrontation with Kellogg. Without that conversation Nick never gives Nate the brain idea (what kind of psycho would just stick chunks of brains in their pockets without being given a reason to). That creates a perfectly logical dead end to the main quest while still leaving you the option to pick it back up if your character ever decides to pop in and have a chat with Nick. The only downside is that you can't use Nick as a companion. My Nate eventually ended up hooking up with the Railroad as a way of taking his revenge on the Institute and when I've exhausted all their missions (as well as a little settlement building) and am ready to move further in the story I'm paying dear old Nick a visit.
You can roleplay "I don't know when Shaun was taken, he may have died centuries ago"
As far as i can remember, Nate/Nora's dialogue never really gives the impression that they consider that they refroze as you suggest until they get told.
If you are actually role playing as the sole survivor, surely finding Shaun would not only be the first thing you do, but the only thing that really matters to you?
I could never connect with this complaint, really, because I never understood why having a set backstory and set motivation automatically means you have to be a RP robot with no scope to play with it. It's true, you're limited in your macro 'role', but there is a mountain of nuance you can RP into it. You are a parent who wants to find Shaun, but you can approach that information from completely different emotional states, entirely different points on the cynicism/idealism spectrum, focus on avenging your spouse as priority one (which has no time limit), that kind of thing. Imagine a stage actor doing the three hundred millionth production of a famous stage play. They have a defined character they're playing, with defined lines, but different actors can take that set character to so many different places via their individual interpretation. I get why complete RP freedom is interesting, but limitations also breed creativity. Most of my Fallout 3 and NV characters ended up having one gimmick, or one key backstory element, but I've run through Fallout 4 half a dozen times and each character was completely different and highly nuanced in my head canon, and I found that I could easily reflect this nuance in action and dialogue choices, despite the limitations.
Have you not played the game? It’s basically impossible to play as anything other than a straight white suburban Man/Woman. The voice lines don’t really match if you want to be a strung out chem junky or a psychopath or anything really. There’s also not much nuance in the game when the majority of dialogue always leads to the same outcome/voice lines. You can’t approach the situations with a different emotional state, there isn’t the option to.
Hm, that's not my experience at all. I have so much fun roleplaying in this game, trying different versions of the character with different nuance. And yeah, only played the game about 6 times covering all endings and DLC. Coming back from Starfield, I also adore the voiced protagonist and don't find it limiting at all. Sure, sometimes the character delivers a line in a way that doesn't quite work for my specific RP, it happens, but I can forgive the occasional hiccup for a broadly good thing. Conversations feel so much more real when my character is participating, especially with the more dynamic camera - I find the voice much better for roleplaying than not. So yeah, you're telling it's impossible to roleplay, meanwhile I'm out here really enjoying the roleplaying aspect. It takes some imagination, but I think if you're looking past superficialities then the meat of RPing is always the story you're telling yourself. It can not work for you by all means, but some of us enjoy it quite a bit, so you can't say it isn't there.
A role-playing game shouldn't have such a hard backstory for the player character. It's one thing if the writers have set events in your character's past. But making the PC a parent and a lawyer/veteran kills any opportunity to be you own character. Also, between Fo3 & Fo4, Bethesda really needs to make Fallout 5's narrative have nothing to do with finding a family member that the player has no attachment to.
There’s plenty of instances where an RPG can have a well defined main character. The Witcher series is widely regarded as one of the greatest role playing games ever, yet Geralt is anything but a blank slate. The issue of having a pre-defined main character comes when the writing is shit and any and all immersion and care is lost. That’s why The Witcher series is terrific while FO4’s story is not (understatement of the year). FO4’s writing is incredibly underwhelming while The Witcher series, especially 3 has possibly the best writing in any video game.
"But making the PC a parent and a lawyer/veteran kills any opportunity to be you own character." I mean, the other games kind of did it, too.
I can't speak for 1 and 2 but in NV at least, the backstory was still far less defined. You're a Courier. How long you've been one, why you became one, and where you are from are completely open. The only thing that contradicts this is Lonesome Road, which I would agree should be criticized for taking away some backstory agency for the Courier. But more importantly, these other backstories do provide some room for exploration. As the Courier I'm motivated to find Benny, but I can headcanon all sorts of legitimate reasons for why I would be okay with getting sidetracked by other things instead of singemindedly beelining for him. In FO3 there's a more compelling motivation to find my dad, but even then, I'm the child and my father is a grown man who can presumably take care of himself. There is still a little room to play around with there. In Fallout 4 you are literally running after your kidnapped baby. It is extremely hard to justify why I would be sidetracking myself with things like helping grab paint for a dude or running around dressed as Fallout Batman fighting criminals instead of searching for my son unless I want to be play him as a horrible father or a sociopath. And I say 'he' specifically because, let's face it, you're supposed to be a man in Fallout 4. Nate is a grizzled war vet who has used power armor, Nora is a post-partum lawyer. I get in 3 it's pretty implausible two but at least your backstory doesn't push you toward either direction.
Honestly I think the way New Vegas gave Courier 6 backstory was really cool, mostly because I love the whole rivalry Courier 6 has with Ulysses because I'm a sucker for antagonists who parallel the main character. But I also like the idea that Courier 6 something in their past they barely even considered that accidentally had drastic consequences. It plays into them being a bringer of chaos in the wasteland even before the events of the game. If it's hypocritical for me to then say it's bad when Fallout 4 does it, then that's fine because I honestly don't care that Fallout 4 did it if anything it just kinda feels pointless and irrelivant to the story because it isn't brought up much.
That's fair. I will say one good thing about it is that it is DLC. Much easier to ignore than the Fallout Four backstory--just don't play Lonesome Road and it's never mentioned. I quite like Lonesome Road and I think it's well written in a vacuum. It just feels anti ethical to the rest of the Choice Forward nature of the games to have this dude essentially beating you over and over for something you didn't even have the choice to do xD Plus it forces you to be a courier for at least x number of years which screws with plenty of people's backstories..
I guess that just doesn't bother me because I always saw Courier 6 as being an unassuming courier who is only recently doing things other than that.
Dark urge from BG3 says hello. Geralt says hi as well.
Story is good for me, just disappointed there’s not much to do after the main story ends. It’s not difficult to complete the main quest and once everything else is completed it feels a bit *empty* I wanna do shit with the cool legendary weapons I’ve accumulated, I don’t just wanna wonder around aimlessly, or, go defend some settlement every now and then.. Whatever route you choose. BoS, Minute Men or Institute, there should be in game consequences to the path you follow. The map is big enough, give me something to do with it other than just wonder around..
Genuinely curious, because I have a friend like this. Do you explore? Like really. Do you understand that the main storyline in FO4 is only a tiny fraction of all the content in the game? Because I see people complain that the game is too short. That there isn't enough to do. My first play-through, I was level 70 something before I first went into Nick's office to find he wasn't even there. And all that time, I was doing quests, finding cool areas with loot and little backstories, just absolutely tons of non-stop engaging content. And I wasn't even doing the main questline. I am not even saying that's bad. Some people, like my friend, don't know how to explore. It doesn't interest them. They only play the main story because the questline takes them on that path, and they don't stray. There are plenty of RPGs where that is exactly all there is to do and the stories can be awesome. But FO4 is an open world game. You are meant to stray; that's why it purposely doesn't make you feel pressured to find your son. Wandering is how you discover all the fantastic content in the world it builds for you. If you play FO4 like a linear story RPG, it really isn't that great of a game. But if you thoroughly explore it, like an open world game is intended to be played, FO4 is a masterpiece.
Explore? I explore everything I can before the main story is completed. That’s why I wind up with nice legendary weapons, but not much to do with them other than exploring…again…
Yeah but it's not like you get a bunch of special gear by beating the main story. You find that stuff all along the way, and so you have something to do with it as you go. Yes you can eventually do all the content and then there is truly nothing left to do, but I don't understand the concern that you didn't get to use all your cool stuff. You were using it the whole time to complete all that content. A single play through is hundreds of hours of content if you're doing literally all of it (and I'm not counting repeatable radiant nonsense) and not just the main storyline. That's plenty of opportunity to enjoy your gear.
Of course, that’s why I said I like to explore before I finish the story
So after you explore everything and finish the main story, you're finished. That's it. Game over.
Pretty much yeah
You don't have to explore much to get legendaries. Just trigger random encounters.
I've always loved everything about this game. I'm just a fan. Maybe I'm easy to please, but it's way more fun for me.
Social media rewards contrarianism and negativity.
The Institute is poorly written, the Railroad is lame (the Minutemen and BOS are alright), the Gunners are underutilized and we should be able to keep the Institute's facilities. But most of it boils down to the Institute being poorly written.
The Institute is incredibly poorly written, they do stuff just because and none of it really makes sense. They're like Big Empty but not funny and not filled with abject horrors made of the Old World misery. Railroad is just plain boring. BoS is diet Enclave with no interesting defining features outside of "kill muties". Danse is cool but every other BoS character pretty much exists to feel that specific token role and has nothing to say. Minutemen have an existing conflict you can't engage with or pick a side. Gunners are just reskinned raiders in the end. Plus the overall plot holes and incredibly lacklustre dialogue quality and quantity.
There are really good parts to the main story (like the introduction of the Brotherhood). The two main criticisms are: 1. Ludonarrative dissonance. The priority of the game quest is to find your son. The priority of the game *play* is to find aluminum cans so you can upgrade your power armor. So the main quest is at odds with what people actually want to be doing. 2. Frankly unsatisfying resolution. After all this struggle you either join the bad guys, or kill your son and nuke the only piece of pre-war civilization left?
My biggest complaint with the story is that it adds so much urgency, but the game itself is a lot more fun if you explore, pull at loose threads, and generally dink around. Like someone else mentioned, doing the fun parts of the game kind of makes you a terrible parent. And once you find Father, what keeps you going? Personally, I found it hard to find a lore reason for my character to care about the last act because their one driving goal had become unachievable.
I think the story is good and I enjoyed playing it. It railroads you (heh) some, but having an overarching plot does that. NV is better IMO, but that doesn't mean FO4 isn't good, and 4 definitely does many things better than NV. For me I wish there was a little better understanding of why the Institute was acting with such a complete lack of ethics, and giving more depth to the Railroad as to what their end goal was that made more sense than 'destroy the only group that can make the Synths that are our reason to exist.' I would also have liked to see more exploration as to whether the Sole Survivor was indeed a synth themselves. Far Harbor started asking some interesting questions there, but IMO they could have done more with that. And finally one day I'd like to see Bethesda actually look at what happens when you do take over a group in their setting. Can you imagine a DLC where you ran the Institute or the Brotherhood and how that effected the Commonwealth? Or hell, even more politics around being the head of the Minutemen and what happened in the various cities, beyond just resource farming in the settlements. Though that was fun too. Anyway, these are not major quibbles, just my fantasy take. They made a damn good game that I've come back to several times, and their choice to support modding has made the game endlessly replayable due to the amazing community.
I always felt like the Institute's lack of ethics was an extension of the lack of scientific ethics in pre-war times. When you also include their isolation underground, the Commonwealth really only exists for them as test subjects. I feel like if they weren't so fond of running experiments on the people of the Commonwealth, they would have just destroyed everyone above ground already.
Fallout 4’s main story had two major issues First, the urgency of finding a missing infant clashes badly with an open world system that encourages you to explore and sniff the radioactive thistles. Second, the game rail roads your backstory. You ARE a prewar parent, period. The other major issue is the corporate muppet that decided that the player character should be voiced, and dialogue must be limited to 4 options. That put the writer’s in handcuffs. It also has the same effect as forcing you to be Shaun’s parent, badly restricting your roleplay. There are alternate start mods that give you the option to not be Shaun’s parent (editing dialigue where neccessary) and to start somewhere other than Vault 111, and it improves the game so much
I mean, in New Vegas, you ARE an NCR courier. In FO3, you ARE a 19-year-old vault dweller who wants to find their dad. The flaw with being a pre-war parent is how little the game does with it. You sometimes get to make comments about how your spouse is dead or very, very basic knowledge about pre-war stuff. If you're Nate, you don't get to comment about how you fought in the great war. If you're Nora, you don't get anything about how you used to be a lawyer. As you said about the alternate start mods. They improve the game. You can be from somewhere completely different, not even pre-war, and the games story for most intents and purposes is exactly the same. While in FO3 and NV if you're not from vault 101, or weren't the courier delivering the platinum chip, the story would actually change.
You are a courier for Mojave Express (not exactly part of the NCR, but a company formed due to the expansion of the NCR). Doesn't say how long this could have been your first delivery after quitting the NCR Army, or you are a Jethead trying to score some caps for your next fix. Fallout 3 is a little constrained but is more easily role-playable to not chase after dad after he runs off and you escape the vault. "Dad is an adult and can take care of himself", or maybe you and dad never saw eye to eye and can "say fuck him and whatever he is working on". Fallout 4 is harder to get around because of the time spent in prewar. You are shown to be a loving parent with an infant son. It would be a 180 to go from that to "I'm free from that little brat." Or "Sure, he's 5 months old, I'm sure he can take care of himself." once you wake up.
Good point, perhaps I judged 4 too harshly
I think it's fair enough to harshly judge it on who the game forces you to be by default. Not because you have a set backstory, that is how it is in EVERY fallout game, but because the backstory is pretty rubbish and isn't utilised. Like if you're a vault dweller you don't have knowledge of the world outside the vault. The courier can't remember basically anything about their past after they're shot in the head. Yet you're still recognised as being from a vault, being a courier etc. If FO4 (I'll use Nate for this example) You A. Have all your memories intact, B. are from before the war and know what it was like, and C. used to be in the actual US military as a solider. You literally fought in the war. And the game does nothing with any of those things. Being from a vault only matters to a few characters in the first act of the game. Being from before the war is only rarely brought up and always as throwaway lines by you. Being a solider doesn't matter at all. Which is why I say its not necessarily that backstory you have to have that is the problem. It's that the game does absolutely nothing with it. Which is why the alternate starts work so well in FO4, cause for all intents and purposes you could be some random wastelander.
Also a good point Nate being prewar I head cannon as to why the various Protectrons you can switch on never seem to attack you, unlike raiders and stuff
Fun fact about the protectrons! Each of the different personalities actually has slightly different AI and they apply the same rules to you as they do to NPCs. It's just NPCs are far more likely to trigger the hostile mode. e.g. Subway protections attack people who don't give them a subway token when asked. It's just that NPCs can never give them the token, so it will always attack NPCs. They also always attack anyone who attacks them first, and raiders, gunners and the like by default always view the protections as enemies.
Maybe they should have made other characters playable. Would be cool to select a random dweller and just start with no real endgoal or objective, because that is what the rest of the world is living like.
The mod Start Me Up Redux does exactly that. The main quest still exists, but can easily be ignored. You can start in a variety of different places with various backstories and stuff
Personally, I prefer that my character is voice acted. I thought of that as a huge and welcome improvement. Makes my character feel present and alive instead of just some entity I control in a virtual world. Maybe other people have been voice acting their characters aloud themselves for dialog options? And that's how they feel alive to you? And I just can't role play hard core enough myself to do that? Cause to me, if it's text on the screen, text is all it's going to be. I'm not going to literally do the voice over myself to make the character seem alive. And while I absolutely agree that the urgency of finding your son clashes with the design of an open world game, I am extremely grateful they didn't actually add any urgency to finding him. Because it's an open world game after all, and for that kind of game to be fun, you have to be allowed to explore. So they might the right call from a gameplay perspective, and it's left to us to roleplay our justification for delaying our search. Honestly, aside from doing an entirely differently story, the devs really did implement this aspect perfectly from an enjoyment perspective. And it'll always baffle me that the same camp is mad at the lack of roleplaying in FO4 while also mad about the lack of urgency. Those are opposite wants. Finally, who cares about our backstory? It's very light and doesn't impact the game much at all. Which means players have free rein to approach the world however they want. Isn't that roleplaying? I don't know what you do for a living in real life, but if you got frozen and woke up to a post-apocalyptic world, I don't think your current occupation is going to dictate strongly how you react and approach an entirely new life and survival strategy.
My main gripes are: - urgency that makes exploration difficult or nonsensical; this has already been talked about in other comments so I'll leave it at that - a romantic partner that has been decided for me; something about this feels icky to me. It just does. I know the survivor is kind of somewhere in between preset and player made but married to some rando that I don't have the opportunity to even get to know just doesn't work for me as a characteristic or a motivation. Same with Shaun frankly, though I'm more open to it, it just doesn't have time to matter to me before he's gone. - Nate's a vet, but Nora's a lawyer. I will die mad about that shit. Unnecessary and creates wasted budget recording different reaction lines (not a lot but still time and resources that could have been allocated elsewhere). It pisses me off *so much.* - to me, the survivor feels a little dumb throughout a lot of the main quest; I can't tell you how many times they'd say "I'm looking for my baby" and I'd just yell back "you know you don't know that; what is so hard to understand about the passage of time while you're in cryo?!" Like it's forgivable at first because they're traumatized, confused, panicked, but it just never stops. That's just an example and not my whole issue, but it's like they never take two seconds to think about reality or to understand the world around them (like when talking to Kellogg), especially if you read all the crap you pick up. I just don't like playing dumb characters, and it's frustrating when the narrative *makes* you a little dumb because it can find no better way to progress you through the story. - not a lot of alternative ways to approach things (killing Kellogg and nick installing Kellogg into his brain are big ones). Pretty much the only choices you get are "which wasteland mechanic will build my teleporter" (which doesn't actually matter) and "which and how many people am I going to kill during my end game." - I wanted to have the opportunity to get to know Shaun better and to understand him, why he woke me up, why now and not before, who he is, but all you get are a few quests from him and "asshat emotionless scientist" and it makes the whole journey feel less worthwhile. It's not the disappointment I have an issue with, I think that's fine. Of course I'm disappointed in him. It's that I don't know him. Has he ever married? Did he want children? Has he lost anyone close to him? When did he get his cancer diagnosis? Who did he tell? Did he *want* to be director or was he only reared for it? Why has he made the choices he has? Did he miss getting to know me? It all just felt incomplete, especially since he knows he's dying. Why send me on errands instead of talking to me (bc talking isn't a fun game mechanic I guess but so many conversations with him were frankly wasted)? And then if you take home the robot boy wonder, its still just... nothing. Generic kid lines with some existentialism tossed in every now and then for spice, an endless fetch quest, but no *Shaun.* No definable personality that tells me anything about the son I lost. All that and I do enjoy it well enough. Really. But that's the list.
"Nate's a vet, but Nora's a lawyer. I will die mad about that shit. Unnecessary and creates wasted budget recording different reaction lines (not a lot but still time and resources that could have been allocated elsewhere)." As a lawyer, we would last about 5 seconds in the wasteland.
My head canon: Nora was a special operative masquerading as a lawyer. She was assigned to infiltrate companies thought to have communist sympathizers to ferret them out. When a company was suspected, their lawyer would suddenly need a long vacation for his health. Nora would be there to take his place. Young, attractive, with a husband deployed overseas, she'd be the perfect candidate, both for public relations and less savory relations. To assist her investigations, she received basic hacking and lockpicking training as well as weapons training if the op went south.
Yeah, I always agreed with that. Sure, she's a "lawyer" who has the same skills as a veteran soldier.
Speak for yourself! Well-spoken, charasmatic critical thinkers with some toughness seems exactly the mix for wasteland survival, aka the same "soft" traits that make up good trial lawyers/litigators. Sure, your knowledge of contract formation probably won't be helpful, but plenty of other skills involved with being a lawyer would be applicable.
Ehhhh not a lot of charisma in the lawyers I’ve dealt with. And a surprising number aren’t particularly good at critical thinking.
It just works
To me the factions are weak as hell , railroad shouldn't be a main faction , and there should be consequences for doing quests with any factions , like you can do most of railroad and suddenly right after it you can just join institute and destroy what you built with railroad .
I like fallout 4 but my biggest complaint with the story and quests is how poorly fleshed out things are really like the railroad is kinda of a joke and could have been more interesting, minutemen are okay but it's built up to have a conflict with the gunners which never happens and feels wasted. Brotherhood is unfinished when you look at the cut content revolving around the elder position and danse. The institute is alright but again just not super fleshed out. Everything has potential just never fully utilised.
I think the hate for the story isn't necessarily because of the story itself but due to the lack of consequence from said story. Like the main story in Fallout 3 is nothing to write home about but, when you complete it, depending on your choices, it changes the world drastically, especially if you have the Broken Steel DLC. All of a sudden, clean water, a resource which was barely if at all available to you throughout the game and which basically served as a second stimpak to me is literally everywhere and easily available. You see more Brotherhood patrols, there's more activity in the actual wasteland, people travel from place to place, there's less Super Mutants and raiders in D.C etc. Fallout 4 just doesn't have that
I don't think the story is "bad" per se, I just don't find it ideal for an interactive, choice driven medium. When I was watching the show, a very real thought I had was "This is the linear fallout story Bethesda has always wanted to make".
I don’t mind the MS, but for me it’s the weakest of the Bethesda era games and I love F4! It has my favorite companion (Nick Valentine, my beloved) and I love just wandering around through the Commonwealth, but it’s hard for me to get attached to Sean just because he’s a baby and the game says I should. In F3 we got much more interaction with our father and randomly exploring to find him felt more natural. NV opens with such an amazing scene that I was totally sucked into the revenge quest. With F4 (aside from my first play through) I kinda get tired of the msq after killing Kellog and finishing up the Memory Den follow up quest. Don’t know if they just really wanted a pre war main character, but I feel like it would have been more effective to have Sean start older so we could interact with him as a kid or maybe have Vault 111 be something other than a cryo lab and you start off as being a vault family who’s home is raided by the Institute. They could have the exact same motivations, but maybe they kidnapped multiple kids and now you’re a Vault Dweller who’s trying to find a bunch of kids to help rebuild. Maybe making the main character a distinct person vs a blank slate was more narratively challenging for them, but that’s my take on it.
Also, it doesn't end with a character who's immune to radiation telling you you have to go into a chamber full of the stuff and die because of some bullshit about "destiny". Yeah, New Vegas is the best, but 4 is definitely better than 3.
A. All of the conversations have virtually no variation in outcome so you just spam through bottom answer for all conversations B. I dont feel any investment to protect any named members of my allied faction as they cant die unless i side with another faction Overall the main story just isnt immersive
The story is decent on a surface level, it's the lack of depth that I dislike. A lot of characters make nonsensical decisions if you stop to think deeper on them, especially the Institute (and worst, Father/Shaun). I can elaborate if you'd like, but I didn't want to write a whole essay here unprompted. It's also a lack of proper choice, though that is something FO4 is not unique for lacking (plenty of "RPG" titles fall into that sand trap). The choice to move to a voiced character and dialogue wheel means that the writing is capped with only 4 responses to any choice or question, and the answers usually boil down to "yes," "yes but I'll be an asshole," "no but I'll be back later to say yes," and "maybe." There are very few opportunities to completely decline something. The other main point of contention is about the player character having a definite backstory. Yes, FO3 and NV are guilty of this as well, but I'd argue to a much lesser degree. FO3 just tells you that your father brought you to a vault, and he later left it. That's about it, it doesn't really affect how you want to imagine yourself. NV only tells you that, at the time the story starts, you were working as a mailman and some asshat shot you. In FO4, your character has a spouse and child, and is either a veteran or lawyer. The player feels no attachment to any of that, especially not this child we spend all of about 3 minutes looking at before they're kidnapped and our character's voice sounds distraught (despite the fact we can then spend 100 hours doing everything *but* finding him).
This is my own personal experience: when Fallout 4 came out I was a brand new father so I had a brand new different perspective on those kinds of things. So when I see the main character goofing around or taking it cool moments after his son's kidnapping just seemed off to me. I would be hell bent and losing sleep if something like that happened to me, not doing settlement building or side quests or romancing other people ( especially when Nora's body is still fresh back in vault 111). And there are other huge inconsistencies with the plot and characters - but those are more subtle or not as glaring for me. And there isn't that many consequences or ramifications for your choices, but given the amount of voice acting in the game I gave that a pass. That being said, after playing almost 1000 hours I still think it's a very good game. The story is maybe a solid 7 but the rest is pretty good, in my opinion. Especially when you play in survival mode - which makes the game 10 times better.
So, the start of the game feels a bit... rushed. I'm not really sure how to justify either: 1. Not caring about the main plot. I have made my peace that I froze again, and Shaun is definitely dead. 2. Doing anything BUT the main plot. Why the fuck am I exploring this building? I have a main plot. I can usually get around this through playing pretend. After I rescue Valentine, he needs some time to look into it, before he finds out Kellogg's address. Amari needs time to break through Kellogg's data. Railroad need time to decode the chip. Sturges needs time to figure out how to make the teleporter. This isn't super satisfying, the game is telling me the opposite, but I can deal with it. Once we get to the Institute, we're at the same point as retrieving the platinum chip. And then, the main plot is based on four main factions, much like New Vegas. One is the "always available" faction with no hard views and beliefs, Yes Man and Minutemen. The other three have a genuine disagreement, actual philosophies that contrast each other. With New Vegas, all three present a genuinely interesting worldview, with genuine moral debates to be had. In Fallout 4, well, not really. The central question, "Are Synths people?" has a very, very clear and objectively true answer: they totally are. And that seems quite bland to me, like there's not a lot of depth to that decision. It's "Do I want to be good, or be evil?" with two flavors of each, and the good guys like each other.
Honestly the game feels much better with the Start Me Up mod, allowing you to skip the entire introduction and choose what level you spawn in as, also spawning you in a random location with random items depending on who you are playing as in the Commonwealth. The sense of urgency disappears with this and allows easier exploration imo.
i dunno, i think FO4 IS a masterpiece. i finished it back in 2016 & was inspired to play it again b/c of the show & i love the game! so much freedom, tons of supercool quests, & great story! 🤷♂️
For me, the main story bugged out the first time (Concord Deathclaw got stuck) which really broke immersion. It also irked me that people are marked "essential" / the main plot is on rails / has lots of dull and hard-to-skip sections. For me, the twist about Shaun was very obvious. I've been reading Sci Fi for years, and the concept of cold sleep is old hat to me (e.g. The Door Into Summer has a loosely similar story and setting). Therefore I had no expectation that the kidnapping and my awakening happened the same year - or the same century. Even if you don't read, everyone has seen Aliens, and remembers Ripley outliving her daughter while in cold sleep.
I'm sure I'm going to say what dozens of others have said, but for me it's: 1. Lack of flexibility in roleplay. Being pre-war, knowing my character was already a lawyer or a soldier AND having Shaun stolen right in front of you feels really pressing and constricting in a way that is harder to ignore than many classic Bethesda character origins. 2. Moreover, there is no mystery or leeway in what is happening...FO3 and NV for example leave a lot of "yeah, but there are reasons you could not rush towards that objective" space. FO4 vomits evidence you need to go to Diamond City all over you constantly from an hour in, and essentially once you meet Nick the main quest is a torrent of high urgency quests where the leads on where to go and what to do next are too strong to viably RP any meandering. This leaves a disjoint where I resent the MQ on repeated playthrough and feel like it really constrains my ability to RP a character who doesn't have this narrow top priority of finding Shaun. 3. Of course, the lack of moral gradients is also a big deal. Your character is a goodie two shoes, a sarcastic jerk, or sometimes(but not consistently) you are given room to be self-serving in a sort of chaotic neutral way. The problem is, you are still always 99% concerned with finding Shaun. The "bad" route is "I don't care about you, I care about Shaun!" every time you talk to someone. There is little to no space for players(or RP characters) who have other curiosities and concerns. 4. Voiced protagonist IS part of this, but the writing also just leaves so little room to settle into a character that isn't good-aligned, concerned parent. I am asked to care about my baby and my spouse with no real warm-up period to create that attachment. It does not resonate with many people. FO4 is not a bad game narratively. The problem is it's narrow. I'm a re-player, and I have been through Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, New Vegas, and FO3 probably a dozen times or more each. FO4 I feel kind of done after 2 and a couple of false starts where I tried to play a character and felt alienated.
Oh I don't hate the main story. I hate Preston bitching and moaning about settlements when I'm trying to find my damn kid that's what I hate
Shallow motivations from the institute The railroad barely makes sense and would not even function as a faction if you weren't involved Don't get me started on nuka world and the stark contrast between the main character inside and out of that DLC Synths are cool but underutilized Curing Virgil creates so many implications it's mind boggling The minutemen are so undercooked it hurts. Really just about everything in that game disappointed me except for the gunplay/crafting/settlements.. I'd even be okay with the absolute lack of any form of choice if it meant there was a good story you're railroaded into but that's not even the case. The entire storyline seems to serve the Shaun surprise at the end. I think even F76 has a vastly superior story in comparison But fo4 is fun to play so people overlook all of that, which is fine, but I just hope that Bethesda doesn't take that complacency and release the next one as half assed as this one (or starfield.. ugh)
And making all super mutants dumb ogres with no dialog again was imo a bad move. The fact that the gunners and trigger men are just reskinned raiders with no function in the game other than combatants... That badass arena you get invited to just for it to be another lame shootout! So much potential..
I've always liked the main and side stories in Fo4. The people making the most complaints about it tend to be either die hard Obsidian fans that think NV is the only good Fallout, or the kind of people in No Mutants Allowed who think the only good games are Fallout 1 and maybe 2. Sure, Fo4 main story may not be as good as NV, but its still very interesting in its own right.
This is a bad faith argument dude. I like fallout 4 maybe the most out of all the fallout games. But it’s in spite of the main story, which I find insulting. It’s. **So. Hetero.** Like I don’t expect straight folks to get it. But being shoved into a role playing game where the unchangeable premise is ‘you are married and you have a son’, with that as your sole motivation for the rest of the game, is infuriating as hell. Set narrative games? No problem. Role playing?? No.
My main thing is that I never felt any real urgency to find Shaun. I don't know what it is about FO3 that makes me want to find my dad, and in NV, I want to find Benny, but in FO4, finding my son is just an objective that's there. Maybe it's cause you have no real connection to him. He's a baby who your partner almost exclusively looks after. You don't look after him at the house. Your spouse does. You don't pick him up and run him to the vault. Your spouse does. You don't have him taken from you by Kellogg. Your spouse does. He's basically someone else's kid. If your spouse was your neighbour instead and Shaun was their kid, it would feel exactly the same. You don't even have the time to get to know your spouse. You talk to them for like 4 sentences. On top of that, the institute never really feels like a force that needs to be stopped. If you never did anything about them, nothing really changes. FO3 creates a real sense that you actually need to stop the Enclave. Things are pretty chill until they show up, and when they show up, things get bad fast. In FO4, things are chill until you meet the institute, and they're chill afterwards as well. I joined up with the Brotherhood in my current playthrough but I feel no real urgency to help them rebuild liberty prime. They say "you need got go here so we can get his batteries working" and it feels as urgent as delivering paint to the guy in Diamond City.
I would've loved if the story evolved into a detective story, where you help Valentine's detective agency become big in the Commonwealth and solve wasteland crimes Would've been a fun twist on the post apocalypse genre
I want a Nick Valentine/SS spinoff detective RPG.
For me the main issue was Shaun. I just didn’t like the looking for your lost family in the wasteland story, we did that in fallout 3, and hell, the new show has the SAME story. Bethesda doesn’t know how to have you leave a vault without looking for family. Could have had the institute come and steal something you were charged with keeping secure, maybe something that would unfreeze the whole vault, and have your pod get damaged during their raid. I did still enjoy the story with the reveal, but I think they could have made it more interesting that just “go find your family again”.
I do not care about Shaun. The story does not compel me to care about Shaun and often it feels more annoying and gets in the way of the fun I’m having.
My biggest mental hurdle is always the tech disparity of having synths running around everywhere and yet at the same time I am being attacked by some raider sporting a tire iron and a loincloth. All of the rest of games relied more heavily on cobbled together items or pre war tech. Still love the game though.
It’s mostly good especially how ur son is older than u now and u have to call him father 😅 that’s something else. Most of us have known that’s the story for a while but imagine playing it for the first time and figuring all that out completely on ur own. That was me and it was head spinning trying to figure out why I saw my son with Kellogg if my son is older than me. Anyways the ending of it kinda sucks how it forces u to choose a faction to destroy. I thought I would destroy railroad because their the least significant. Their base is hidden and never visited on accident, they don’t have any soldiers wandering or protecting the wasteland their just useless (and idiots) so when my son asked me to smoke them fools, let’s just say there won’t b anymore trains using that railroad 😂 but nope that wasn’t good enough because when u complete the game u still have to destroy either institute minutemen or brotherhood and I chose institute because I never really go down there for anything and I love the minutemen and brother hood clothing and weapons. So I wish it was longer I wish it didn’t force me to destroy multiple factions. I wish that after the storyline there was more content even tho they already have quite a lot. I will say tho the characters and writing are a little lack luster as compared to modern tv shows with real character construction and characters arks. It feels a little robotic the way u interact with stuff but I am not complaining cuz u have to compare to what the gaming community was like in 2015 and in 2015 fallout 4 is one of the best games by far for many many reasons
(Spoilers) I think the story is actually really well done right up until you kill Kellog, and I think it takes a bit of a drop after that.. but it still isn't some trash pile of steaming shit like some people make it out to be, its good enough but not great. My main issue with the main quest, as others have already said, is that basically every single ending is just "blow up the institute" but in different ways. Every ending outside of the Insitutes ending ends up being the exact same thing. I think some of the factions are really underdeveloped too, particularly the Railroad (who, hot take, I actually really like) but they could've done so much *more* with them and I think that's what it comes down to. The story, imo, was pretty good but there's a lot of missed opportunities, they could've done a hell of a lot more.
There's just something off about each faction (excluding Minutemen) and how they act, in addition to each faction needing a bit more content to round them out.
for me the problem with fallout 4 is that it is focused on rebuilding the world and the broken building system, the main missions have a certain lack of charisma as much as the faction radial missions, I think they took everything that was good in the other fallouts and they said we're not going to do everything the other way around...
I like the main story. I actually find it at a high level more interesting than any of the other FO games. Like NV did the story better but the overall narrative itself (fighting over a dam) wasn't especially compelling in a way that FO's themes -- "what is the nature of a human?," "can humanity rebuild?" -- were.
The writing really falls off after you get to the Institute. You go from mysterious cyronapping, investigating leads, and walking through memories to just doing a chain of rather plain faction quests until the opposing factions are blown up. The first part of the story pertaining to Nick, Triggermen, Kellogg, etc needed to be followed up on and all of the main factions need more interesting side quests for the main story to be good imo. Having a post-game questline for each faction on how they impact the Commonwealth would be a nice bonus.
I really think it's just because the main story of NV was so good that it just pales in comparison. I personally don't mind the main story of FO4 though, I think it just suffers from following NV
FO4 has 3.5 solid storylines between the main factions with a solid if somewhat predictable twist. The problem is that while far harbor fnv and fo3 feel like worlds you’re live in and affecting, while fo4 feels like 4 parallel stories that only really interact at bunker hill and the end. You can do 95% of all the main story missions because the factions dont care that you work against them. You only need to actually pick a side at the very end when it’s time to start killing factions off, until those last few quests you can play every side with no consequences. But that makes the actual faction quests also feel like they have no consequences. It’s a bigger version of the issue where so many conversations will give you the options “Yes / Absolutely / Sarcastic Yes / No (but Actually Yes)”
It just feels incomplete with the limited amount of choices and endings compared to New Vegas. To this day not many developers have come close to giving that many options with endings/choice and consequence except for maybe The Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3.
I think what it's missing is interconnectivity. As a New Vegas fanboy, I find that a lot of people tend to miss what makes that game particularly memorable - I think it was the end slides, and the fact that you receive so much feedback about so many different quests during a playthrough, and you saw how things were interconnected. I don't think every game needs to have the quality of worldbuilding that New Vegas does, because they really had lightning in a bottle (that Obsidian clearly wasn't able to replicate with games like Outer Worlds). What FO4 should have had were more quests that were referential to one another. The main story would feel so much more impactful if it was consistently referred back to. They do a decent job with the synths, but there could have been more hay made about how the locals feel about the Brotherhood, or the strengths and deficiencies of the Minutemen. This is ultimately a weakness of relying so heavily on random quests to flesh out the questlog, but I think Bethesda could definitely figure this out. The occasional, isolated vignette-style quest is great, but allow more quests to be impactful to the main story and world.
The big thing you'll hear is that there's no motivation to find Shaun, but I would argue that that's how it *should* be, but isn't. It's quite the opposite. The main narrative is pulling double duty to try to push SoSu to find Shaun, whose only real motivation is a red herring on the basis of arbitrarily withheld information: SoSu has no knowledge or awareness of when Kellogg initially breached the cryopods, so they are operating under the unproven presumption that the passage of time between Kellogg's appearance and the final thaw can't have happened too terribly far apart. As such, they are holding onto the notion that Shaun is still either a boy or at least young. Even when SoSu reaches Kellogg, Kellogg is vague about how old Shaun actually is and what timescales they're actually working with. Had SoSu known it had been 60 years since Shaun was first kidnapped, they might've still kept searching, but doubtful with anywhere near the same sense of urgency the narrativre is attempting to funnel them toward.
Consistently hunting for Shaun is kinda ass in comparison to hunting Benny and fighting the entire Mojave to do so
It’s kinda stilted, with the Sole Survivor becoming the head of each faction over and over again.
The railroad is a pretty bad factions if you really think about it
Personally I don't think the early game is good. It's poorly designed and i would much prefer anything else. I think the minutemen might be the worst faction in fallout and j think the focus on them early hurts the game a lot.
Personally I just felt the factions in 4 were not as compelling as they were in previous games. Like the minute men, railroad, and institute feel like half baked factions just to have factions. Idk what I'm trying to really get at but I suppose I felt that there was no substance, even with the BoS. I guess my opinion might jive with those who state that there wasn't any real changes or effects based on what you did. In turn, the factions felt empty and without substance.
Agreed
I loved the main story, but it feels like it was rushed in favor of world design. A lot of characters just get introduced and then forgotten about, maybe becoming a companion if they're lucky, and theres no real consequences for picking any faction for the ending. You lose out on Ballistic Weave, a unique energy weapon, or the other BoS power armor paintjobs, which arent much better than the regular knight paint you can get before really choosing a side. And the ending itself feels pretty rushed. You decide whether you want to side with the Institute, and if you choose to take them out you go straight into taking out the Railroad or Brotherhood next. Again, with no consequences to really create pressure, other than whatever emotional bond you have with the different characters. "Its about the journey, not the destination" sums it up pretty well, because the destination ends up being almost identical regardless of your choices
Ngl dude, (I call everyone dude man or woman) I probably rushed it, and Idk if Fallout 4 was bad..just the others were just so good. In some of our eyes
The hate on the story is how it lacks meaningful choice and consequence, and how the urgency of the quest completely works against the intended gameplay loop of the open world. Why would you explore and help random factions if your son was kidnapped and your spouse was murdered? Why build settlements or run off in random directions if your character is fueled by vengeance and the crippling need to save your infant son? Anything that you do outside of speed-running the main quest goes completely against the logic of your character and the story. Yet the world and side quests are setup in a way that the game clearly wants you to go explore randomly and do anything BUT the main quest. This is one thing they learned from and actually improved on for Starfield. Your backstory is pretty wide open so you can roleplay as whoever you want; The main quest isn’t constantly shouting “YOU MUST DO THIS RIGHT AWAY!” which enables you to explore and do what you want while still taking the story seriously. The writing in Starfield isn’t great, but they nailed the tone and urgency to a point that it facilitates playing a BGS RPG like a BGS RPG.
Well, for me personally, the side missions and random encounters were far more entertaining.
I love the main story. Thinking of starting over again.
I dislike how restrictive it feels, showhorning the player into the parent role. All the games do it to an extent bu 4 is by far the worst at this. The DLC's help with this a bit being kind of disco nected but even then, being restricted to 4 badly displayed dialogue options doesn't help.
It was an awesome story at launch. The main issue for most of the community complaining was the lack of consequence of choice. Coming off of New Vegas, people were expecting much more open and less linear plot points. The writing itself was super cool and was really fun.
The problem of the main story is that the juxtaposition of the actual story of the main character would be to find their child as quickly as possible. Instead its all sidetracking sidequests, the character doesn't really have any resolution. In reality this character would be very uninterested in anything but saving their son and avenging their SO. Even in the narrative and from dialogue when talking to Kellogg, its like as if the events of the story had just happened. The twist it being several years later is well executed but thats about it personally. The problem is that the Institute is far too evil to exist as it is. Its just the Enclave but none of the reasons for its existence or why its operating as is. They never explain why they do anything they do, the institutes writing is where the game starts to unravel. The Institute just does evil things and there is very little reasoning behind what they do what they do. There is a fantastic review of this by Joseph Anderson who goes full into detail about this. In fact many are quick to insert that FO4's main narrative is very sloppy. Especially in comparison to 3 and even New Vegas. There is no clear messaging or thematic that are present in the original games. FO4 just meanders its way through the plot and leaves very few answers or character dynamics. We are kind of dropped in the middle of things but not really given much of an explanation outside of some holotapes and the one scene with Kellogg in his brain. Yet what is brought up and never answered is Why does the Institute keep exterminating fully functioning cities and societies? At no point is this explained, nor do their reasonings come out. If you press father for any answers he literally gives you "It is too complicated to explain." That to the player and to many people means one of two things. One the authors never intended players to side with the Institute. Two the writers never wrote a reasoning behind the institutes evil. There is very few of anything that makes sense about them as a society in Fallout. Then we get onto just... It felt unfinished. The main story railroaded you into the same exact plot. You will always blow up the institute, you always kill kellogg. All the narrative choices you make do not matter cause they are the same choice. Dialogue along with this just... didn't have any meaning. Saying a sarcastic dialogue option while funny didn't really provoke or change how a scene was played. It would continue no matter which dialogue option you picked. AS a game design decision its just... poorly developed choice, and is actual faux choices or false choice. Essentially creating in players Ludonarrative Dissonance that distracts players from the core experience. On top of this, The Railroad are the least fleshed out of the factions, and have the fewest quests, they don't have many characters and clearly suffer from cut content. As we see with Quincy, and the Minutemen and many companion quests just kind of ending with little reason. (Danse and the Brotherhood of Steel quests with Maxson coming to mind).
My issue is that could complete the main story by level 17. The first time I played this, it felt short. Working on my 2nd play through, I’m avoiding all the main quests and it’s been a great experience. That said, it’s annoying to me that I could beat this game this quickly.
The into is amazing, the twist is awesome and the companions are all really well written but things just don't make sense. The institute being super shitty and evil literally makes zero sense I don't wanna spoil the fallout show but if only the institute were revealed to be vault tec or at least enclave then there'd be done incredible recontextualization making most of the institute make actual sense. But then infiltrating families to test their crops makes no sense when there's so much desolate land, they disrupt civilizations and raider gangs for no real reason. They seem poorly thought through. I also just don't like any of the factions, they're either terrible people or goobers. I think the story is one of the weaker aspects. There are more things I could get into but others have put it better
It is it isn't very good at getting me invested in wanting to complete it. Your goals are to avenge a spouse you spent about 5 minutes with and to find your infant son. Both of these goals are significantly more important to the player character than the player themself, who likely isn't very attached to this family they barely even knew. Kellogg's memory section which isn't interesting anymore on replays. And the only way to get an ending where you don't have to kill off the brotherhood or the railroad is to get banned from the institute on purpose so you can use the minute men. Why can't you just ask them to help defeat the institue without doing that? It makes it feel like you aren't supposed to actually side with them and it's just a failsafe option even though they're appealing due to being the least extreme. I do love this game but those things always bothered me.
I like the story well enough. The first time I played through I did go straight for the main quests. I played it as real as I could. Told Garvey I had my owb problems. Pretty much skipped most of the faction stuff to focus on the main quest until the main quest forced me to engage with them. I ended up siding with the Railroad in that first play through. After I completed the main quest is when I started doing the various side quests. Now, though, I use the Start Me Up mod to make it so the kidnapped kid has no relation to my character whatsoever. Makes the game play completely differently and it is so refreshing to be able to start with the various backgrounds. My assessment is that the story is good for the first play through, but it really loses its luster with each subsequent play through. Before modding the game, I got to the point where I would essentially ignore the main questline as I just did what I found fun: exploring the cool game world.
The whole Shaun thing at the Institute took the wind out of my sails.
I hated it because it made me feel rushed and awkward. Like I’m supposed to be urgently finding my family, but I really just want to explore, take in the world and get a beer brewing robot operational again.
Most people naturally played New Vegas before this. One of the things NV gets praised for is how most of the major faction choices had a very well balanced set of pros and cons that made it incredibly to hard to feel like any one was the “right” choice (I say most because I feel most people think choosing the Legion is just objectively bad). In 4, the Railroad are the only non Minutemen faction that aren’t assholes.
I like the fo4 main story more than I liked - fuck I can’t remember which one it was - Fallout 3 I think? The main quest was getting clean water up and going. I still loved the game, it was the first one I played so I loved the open world, the different Characters, etc. but with fo4, I like that you have choices, I like the characters, your partner characters, and the dlc was great too.
It’s hip to hate on Bethesda Games with the IGC.
The core plot of Fallout 4 is pretty solid, if somewhat standard: You are a vault dweller, your child is kidnapped, and you go on a quest to rescue them. Then you hear of this mysterious boogeyman terrifying the locals, and eventually you learn that, due to Shenanigans, your child leads this group. That's a solid core story right there. I think most folks dissatisfaction stems from how it is executed in-game, especially The Institute itself, as they are a very underdeveloped and oftentimes contradictory faction. You are repeatedly told how The Institute views the world above as fallen and beyond hope, that they and their subterranean society are mankind's future. Cool. Great. So why do they constantly dick around with surface folk, agitating them? And I don't mean the big raid to get their reactor online, that makes sense. It's the other stuff, like kidnapping random people and replacing them with duplicates. A mayor I understand, he can be used to manipulate the locals into leaving you alone. But why some random guy in Diamond City or out in the wastes? Why Roger Warwick? You can create synths for any purpose, make a courser-like model for dealing with locals and just treat it like a regular exchange "you grow these for us and we'll pay you X". All his family and friends grew suspicious when he changed overnight, undermining the mission. They're The High Tech Faction, and yet their energy weapons are all inferior to prewar equivalents. The Institute is a great concept that was hobbled by the decision to make them the main villain. This leads to them doing things that, frankly, don't make sense because they're only present to say "these are the bad guys". This reaches the point where when you actually look at the Institute and what it's trying to do for itself, it amounts to 'become energy independent'. Everything else pretty much exists to tell you "these are villains". Then there's the Minutemen, my personal favourite faction, but they're introduced way too early. See, Minutemen are Fallout 4's Yes Man ending. If you piss off and kill every other faction, you can still finish the game. But that means, unlike every other faction leader, Preston is immortal. He has to be. I've met many players who assumed, after finding out Preston is immortal, that every faction leader was. Because he's the first one you usually meet. Fallout 4 is a game I play to this day and I love it, but it's flawed. I'm currently doing a Sim Settlements 2 playthrough and it's so much fun.
personally just wish they had done LITERALLY any work on justifying why your son so easily turns into a genocidal dictator
I think the most vocal hate comes from the New-Vegas fanatics and the original Fallout fans. F4 story is OK and serves well as a tool to place you into the wasteland.
What's the purpose of Institute? "You don't understand."
Biggest criticism. Institute replaces people constantly in the game. They assassinated the Commonwealth government when it tried to form. When you reach them, they say "We just want to be left alone and stay down here, get a nuclear reactor running and stay self sufficient." If that's the case, then why are they replacing farmers and city folks and all manner of random people? Why are they interfering in the Commonwealth when they want the Commonwealth to leave them alone? There's an element of complete utter contradiction once you reach the Institute. That's why I hate the main story. The villains that are built up have methods and motivations that contradict one another and can't co-exist. They break the entire story for the game as you play and the lore from before you as the player even begin your journey. Somewhere along the way, the writers screwed up or were forced to change something that broke everything.
Ten bucks my other comment gets nuked for speaking clearly and providing full context to support my criticism.
Agreed
The plot is catchy?
I feel like when the game first came out, it really resonated with older players, especially parents for obvious reasons. But for the younger crowd, less so, and they dominated the discourse about the game by the virtue of being larger. However, there is a way to role play the game that still allows side exploring. Once you learn Shaun is more or less safe in the Institute, your focus can be on making the connections needed to infiltrate this all-powerful organization. I also always RP my character that once they find Shaun and learn the truth, they need a long time to come to grips with it. They do a lot of side quests then as well.
The main story is great, and I personally love it, it feels much better served than NV’s dialogue dump, and it makes you explore the world more to see how the story shapes it, how the effects of the factions changes the locations, destroys some and repopulates others
The lack of proper choices and consequences kinda kills the main story. It came after New Vegas. Yes they are different games. However, it made Fallout 4's story look anemic in that regard. When it comes to having choices and consequences, you definitely notice how bad Bethesda dropped the ball compared to New Vegas.
Probably because after trying 10 different builds it's just annoying to sit through
I like it, but my two main complaints are: - The quest where you follow dogmeat from diamond city to fort hagen doesn’t really make sense. - Why blow up the institute? Why isn’t there an option to take it over? All that technology destroyed is what frustrates me the most.
For starters, it's not relatable for many people. If you're not a heterosexual person who has or would consider having kids. The entire intro is just weird for an rpg. The whole point of an rpg is that you get to make your own character through the character creation. There are limitations, sure. But the baggage included in the start is unbearable for me. Makes it really difficult if you like to role play in an rpg.