Rushersauce
Banned
A pretty solid review at that.
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No Todds, No Masters: A Fallout 4 review/ critique
- Thread starter SENPAIatLARGE
- Start date
A pretty solid review at that.
The critiques are good (~30 mins in) but the entire presentation is so off-putting that I can't imagine many people sitting through all 3 hours.
TemplaerDude
Member
Rushersauce
Banned
It's not that bad. I played Isaac while the video was playing in the background (Of course, there were parts I watched, like the part were he shows how F:NV IS NOT AN EMPTY WORLD. Like some... uhm... people say)
GhostWriter24
Member
I mean, maybe the guy should play something else?
Vital Tundra
Member
Watched a bit, seems good.
JesseEwiak
Member
Is that version going to sell 10 million copies or whatever insane numbers Fallout 3 and 4 did? Then yes, it'd be a bad thing for the holders of the Fallout IP.
Fallout belongs to Zenimax, not the fans of the older versions of Fallout. That's why there are things like Wasteland out there.
But then again, I've never been the type of person who believes that I should have a say over what multinational corporations do with the things they own.
You can criticize the game fine and it's problems, but anybody who is still complaining about what Fallout is at this point is yelling into the Grand Canyon.
Rushersauce
Banned
Why? He played it so he could review it, and deconstruct it; show its flaws, and why it's a POS Fallout game.
I greatly disliked FO4 and after 20 minutes of the video I just don't see the point of this. You didn't like the game. I get it. Neither did I, but I could tell you why in way less than 3 hours.
Three hours should result in something far better than "pretty solid."
Three hours should result in something far better than "pretty solid."
Vital Tundra
Member
I don't think the complexity of the games RPG mechanics ever affected sales. Marketing did that. Skyrim would have sold just as well if they didn't strip out stat points, Fallout 3/4 wouldn't have sold any worse if they kept the stat points and choice either.
Rushersauce
Banned
Maybe he'll get better in the future. AS IT IS, it's a pretty solid and well put review (Could be better, there's no doubt)
Holundrian
Unconfirmed Member
Honestly not common place enough. I would welcome more long form reviews and analysis.
Critical games media is generally a goddamn joke. But I don't blame the writers/reviewers that's just a result of what content sells with the ad/hot topic driven revenue model having everything needing to be done on embargo lift date.
More_Badass
Member
You could say the same for any long form piece. Not doing it in 20 minutes is like the whole appeal. Like Noah Gervais's 100 minute analysis of the Mafia series
There are entire books and documentaries about movies and other books and music and whatnot
What's wrong with long form game discussion?
It doesn't fit within 140 characters obviously.
Crimsonsky
Member
Watched about 7 minutes. The guy has a serious bias for Obsidian and against Bethesda. That's fine, it's his opinion, but it slants the "critique." It also makes it not worth watching. I mean complaining that Nate is a soldier, so you can't choose his backstory and then saying F:NV is not like that is blatantly false. In F:NV you are the courier, just like Nate was a soldier. Difference is Nate's backstory does not matter in the slightest, the soldier thing is almost never brought up again. Your backstory as the courier is brought up several times in F:NV. It is inescapable. Doesn't matter if you want to be a NCR Ranger, you were the courier first, then got shot in the head. Period. That is your backstory without question, it can not be changed without mods. If that is a detriment to the game and the wrong way of making a fallout game then that same criticism needs to be levied on F:NV. Since the best Fallout(2) also has a backstory that gets chosen for you, I don't see the problem here. Isn't about who you were, the games hardly care. It's about what you want to be and how you get there. He misses the point. While exposing his hypocrisy and fanboyism in the opening minutes, making the rest of the video not worthy of being watched.
Rushersauce
Banned
Uhu.... I'll go with this. You watched only 7 minutes, therefore, making your whole stuff invalid. You also exposed you Bethesda bias withing the first 10 words. AYAY AYAY
More_Badass
Member
That...that's not how things work
What kind of black and white mindset is that? "I disagree with one point, therefore I will disagree with all points"
misses bull
Banned
Being a mail man is way more flexiable than being a combat veteran. For instance the mail man can be terrible at everything but luck his way around everything like mr magoo. Nate is always white, straight, cis, hes married, 35ish, he has a kid and hes a combat veteran. Still some gaps to fill in but not as much as "you're a mailman."
Flame Lord
Member
Yeah, he's the fanboy. It's not about Nate being a soldier, it's about the fact that he's defined right off that bat as being middle aged, he's married to a woman, has a kid etc. etc. You don't have to be a genius to see that the Courier is far easier to craft into your own character than Nate.
Rushersauce
Banned
Meh, I'd rather not go there-.
I watched the first 30 minutes. I agree with everything he said, and it's an excellent dissection of the game and comparison against the series, but 3 hours is a bit much.
I found FO4 to be decent, if the worst of FPS FOs. Basing the game around searching for your son was the worst thing they could have done. At the very least they should have given the option to chose from a couple of back stories, and one of those should have been more of a blank slate. I think they went with the hunt for Shawn because it feels like more of a AAA story, but it clashes with how I want to play FO. As a parent and a go fan, I was extremely conflicted on how to play the game. Putting a
The second worst thing they did was making the choices so binary, esp the four bigfactions. That was a complete cluster fuck and the choices was forced to make were completely antithetical to who my character had been up until that point.
I found FO4 to be decent, if the worst of FPS FOs. Basing the game around searching for your son was the worst thing they could have done. At the very least they should have given the option to chose from a couple of back stories, and one of those should have been more of a blank slate. I think they went with the hunt for Shawn because it feels like more of a AAA story, but it clashes with how I want to play FO. As a parent and a go fan, I was extremely conflicted on how to play the game. Putting a
railroad spike into Shawn's head at the end of the game was cathartic as fuck.
The second worst thing they did was making the choices so binary, esp the four bigfactions. That was a complete cluster fuck and the choices was forced to make were completely antithetical to who my character had been up until that point.
Nah, I'd say the dialogue wheel mechanic was one of the significant flaws in Fallout 4's dialogue. Due to how they designed every dialogue encounter to always have four options to match the four buttons on the controller (or arrow keys on PC), it forced many dialogue encounters to have more dialogue options than were necessary or far too few. Reason as to why a lot of dialogue options end up unnecessarily having four different ways of saying "yes" to a simple question from an NPC.
And when it wasn't too many unnecessary dialogue options, there were too few. At the very least they could have had an option that branched to other options like Mass Effect if you had more questions, and they did in some bits of dialogue, but it was utilized far too little.
And then there is just the obscurity of some of the summarized options. It's a fucking gamble every time you choose the sarcasm option because who knows whether something playfully witty, incredibly rude, or downright absurd is going to come out of your character's mouth.
Bethesda's awful writing no doubt plays a part in the shitty dialogue but the wheel itself is just as much a problem. And it's a shame, because dialogue is one of the most essential aspects of the Fallout games, that for its time back then, made it stand out from a lot of RPGs. Seeing it get butchered the way Fallout 4 did it, it just sucks.
As for the 3 hour video, I'm sure he has plenty of good criticism. There is plenty to criticize in Fallout 4. But I know what's wrong with Fallout 4, I'm good. I'll say this though, I enjoyed Fallout 4 as a typical Bethesda game that offers an open world sandbox to explore. That just so happens to take place in the Fallout universe, so I can get some joy out of that. As a Fallout RPG? They dropped the ball hard. Some steps forward from Fallout 3 like the companions and the factions returning (not very well done, but it was an attempt at least), but the rest is just as bad as Fallout 3 or huge steps back into a far worse direction.
EDIT: After having watched a bit of the video, I'm already liking how his explanation as to why the dialogue system of Fallout 4 is awful is near exact to what I said here, before I even watched the video.
EmCeeGramr
Member
Fallout 1 and 2 actually have several pre-made characters who also have pre-written backstories, which were A) for people who didn't really care about role-playing, and B) to basically give people who were new to the idea examples of what they should be striving for.
"Albert" being a Vault Dweller who is charismatic and lead a faction that was pro-leaving and exploring is why that's the charisma/speech build. The Chosen One good at sneaking into enemy tents is why that's the stealth/steal build. It's meant to encourage the player to think of their built avatar as an actual character, to think of their story and who they are and how they got there, and how that translates into in-game skills and choices. You're still under some constraints (you grew up in Vault 13 and have had some unspecified past disagreements with the Overseer, you grew up in Arroyo and you're the grandchild of the Vault Dweller, you have some relatives there), but there's enough freedom to figure things out for yourself.
Now, Fallout 3 kinda attempted to do this in a very novel in-game way with the vignettes of your early life in Vault 101; it's a way to have you experience snippets of that backstory so you can organically decide what your Lone Wanderer is all about by feeling what's best and using the experience of those first choices and scenarios as a guide if you want. It goes on a long time and it's absolutely tedious on subsequent playthroughs, but I can appreciate the sentiment. That said, it also tries to force on you the family angle far harder than Fallout 2 did.
New Vegas ended up going in the exact opposite direction and ended up being even more open to player imagination than the first two games. (Notably, I think this is a holdover from Van Buren, where the player had the very Elder Scrolls-esque prisoner setup, where it was up to you to decide whether you were innocent or guilty or where you came from) The only real backstory to the Courier is that you took a job for the Mojave Express, and if you decide to pick those dialogue options, that you've wandered around America before coming to the Mojave. The closest thing to a definitive backstory is Ulysses in Lonesome Road claiming you've traveled all over and helped found the community in the Divide in some way by wandering through the area; which, given the choices for you to say you have no idea what he's talking about, mean that he could be greatly exaggerating your feats and importance, given Ulysses's tendency to place nigh mystical importance on individual persons and actions in history.
Fallout 4 goes whole hog on the family angle and abandons that feeling entirely. You have to be a moderately successful married father or mother who was either a soldier or a lawyer and you have a son and you have a butler and you have a house and by all accounts you're a stable, well adjusted human being. When the game came out I saw people trying to claim that role playing was still perfectly viable here, with extremely convoluted attempts like, "My character is an undercover Russian spy! ...very undercover!" When your attempts at roleplaying require you to seriously and not as a goof try to claim that everything the game is showing you is a lie just because, then there's something off there.
"Albert" being a Vault Dweller who is charismatic and lead a faction that was pro-leaving and exploring is why that's the charisma/speech build. The Chosen One good at sneaking into enemy tents is why that's the stealth/steal build. It's meant to encourage the player to think of their built avatar as an actual character, to think of their story and who they are and how they got there, and how that translates into in-game skills and choices. You're still under some constraints (you grew up in Vault 13 and have had some unspecified past disagreements with the Overseer, you grew up in Arroyo and you're the grandchild of the Vault Dweller, you have some relatives there), but there's enough freedom to figure things out for yourself.
Now, Fallout 3 kinda attempted to do this in a very novel in-game way with the vignettes of your early life in Vault 101; it's a way to have you experience snippets of that backstory so you can organically decide what your Lone Wanderer is all about by feeling what's best and using the experience of those first choices and scenarios as a guide if you want. It goes on a long time and it's absolutely tedious on subsequent playthroughs, but I can appreciate the sentiment. That said, it also tries to force on you the family angle far harder than Fallout 2 did.
New Vegas ended up going in the exact opposite direction and ended up being even more open to player imagination than the first two games. (Notably, I think this is a holdover from Van Buren, where the player had the very Elder Scrolls-esque prisoner setup, where it was up to you to decide whether you were innocent or guilty or where you came from) The only real backstory to the Courier is that you took a job for the Mojave Express, and if you decide to pick those dialogue options, that you've wandered around America before coming to the Mojave. The closest thing to a definitive backstory is Ulysses in Lonesome Road claiming you've traveled all over and helped found the community in the Divide in some way by wandering through the area; which, given the choices for you to say you have no idea what he's talking about, mean that he could be greatly exaggerating your feats and importance, given Ulysses's tendency to place nigh mystical importance on individual persons and actions in history.
Fallout 4 goes whole hog on the family angle and abandons that feeling entirely. You have to be a moderately successful married father or mother who was either a soldier or a lawyer and you have a son and you have a butler and you have a house and by all accounts you're a stable, well adjusted human being. When the game came out I saw people trying to claim that role playing was still perfectly viable here, with extremely convoluted attempts like, "My character is an undercover Russian spy! ...very undercover!" When your attempts at roleplaying require you to seriously and not as a goof try to claim that everything the game is showing you is a lie just because, then there's something off there.
More_Badass
Member
Whats the time stamp for the NV part?
whalleywhat
Member
Certainly not the type of Youtuber Bethesda's gonna be sending pre-release copies to.
Rushersauce
Banned
ZombieSupaStar
Member
I noticed Fallout 4 didnt have the same impact as 3 and NV when I take a look at the mod scene. Its kind of sparse even a year later. there is no FWE/FOOK, no project nevada, hell the script extender is on hold till the skyrim special edition extender is done.
Im guessing the hardcore modders in the community never latched onto the game.
Im guessing the hardcore modders in the community never latched onto the game.
shawnbuddy
Member
I agree with that. There's a definite history of Fallout characters not being blank slates and if them having storylines dtermined by the game. In Fallout 3 your dad is James and you go look for him and get involved in his project. Can't change it. In Fallout 4 your son is Sean and you go look for him and get involved in his project. Similar broad strokes. And there are the Obsidian/Black Isle examples you pointed out.
Fallout 4 is the first game I felt compelled to sell in nearly a decade. To each their own.
packy34
Member
Joseph Anderson also made a 90 minute analysis video (https://youtu.be/A34poZ6paGs) - it was good, by the way - but even that one felt a bit long at times. I'll give this video a shot though.
starchild excalibur
Member
There might be some people who feel unduly offended by a well-reasoned critique of the game, but I think there are other people who also just endured months of "Why Fallout 4 Sucks"-type threads and articles following its initial launch that it's hard to get behind a 3-hour analysis that's inevitably going to cover a lot of things that have already been mentioned ad nauseam (I can't count the number of times people brought up that fucking New Vegas cannibal mission in their breakdown of why Fallout 4 was a step down).
I don't think the critiques I've seen so far have been poor - in fact, many of them are ones that I agree with. But I'm definitely still someone who enjoyed 4 greatly and I don't think I'm a minority when it comes to that despite the overwhelming backlash that game seems to have encountered following its initial launch. A logical argument about simplified dialogue choices and linear gameplay paths can't really compete with the emotional argument of, "Fair enough, but how does this change how much fun I still had playing it?"
I hope Bethesda improves with Fallout 5 - I really do. But at the very least, I'm hoping the sour taste that 4 at least seems to have left with many people translates into a re-establishing of expectations for the franchise. The OG fans of 1 and 2 shouldn't hold the newer iterations to the same expectations they built off 1 and 2. And while Bethesda should absolutely be considering the complaints people had about 4, the reality is still that the game sold incredibly well and there are plenty of dopes out there (like me) that solidly enjoyed it despite however many hour-long critiques YouTube personalities put out there maligning it.
shawnbuddy
Member
There's also that the
NCR sent the Courier to deliver the package that destroyed the Divide, so you've got this built-in crime/mistake in your backstory
Watched a bit from there and more on his criticisms of Fallout 4's game world. Actually pointed out something I've noticed with Skyrim and Fallout 4's dungeon level design that becomes so apparent with how "gamey" they really are.
Entrance > Enemies > Tougher enemy guarding loot chest > Music plays after you loot chest to indicate the dungeon is clear > Exit
I think I will have to watch the full thing in small increments.
Rushersauce
Banned
Aha. And the theme park world where raiders and orcs are living right next to each other or stuff like that.
shawnbuddy
Member
Wait, you don't have to be white at least. Shaun will actually adjust to your skin color choices.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/3wywlk/storyline_spoiler_the_many_faces_of_shaun/
And you can also be bisexual. At least, you can have same sex romances in the game.
Darkstorne
Member
Yeah, I got that impression as well. Annoyingly he does make some very good points, but he also makes a whole lot of awful points. One in particular is about Settlements which he openly admits he doesn't like, so then seems to go out of his way to make nonsense arguments against. He starts saying the defense system is bad because if you build a well defended fort no one will attack it anymore, which he claims is bad. He then says "I know people will say this is more realistic, and they'd be right, but I don't like it."
Half of the video is good points about a flawed game, but the other half is refusing to admit that it's still a pretty great game and just trying too hard to find and even imagine additional problems. The video falls perfectly into the common dialogue a vocal minority have about this game: If it isn't amazing, it must be awful.
starchild excalibur
Member
His cadence and tone was insufferable to me as I watched it. It's literally the same cadence as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Again, I won't fault the points he makes, even if I disagree with some. But the manner in which the ideas are expressed is grating.
Darkstorne
Member
Exactly. And three hours? If he'd spent the time to look through his notes, worked out which of his complaints were valid and which were just rants about pet peeves of his, and then spent 30-60 mins with the great critique only in a voice that doesn't say "I hate this game and I want everyone else to hate it with me", then this would be really solid. There's genuinely some amazing critique in this video and it's such a shame that it's jumbled up in a 3 hour package of misery.
misses bull
Banned
You still have generic white guy voice so it still limits what you want your race to be. You're right about the sexuality though my mistkae
starchild excalibur
Member
I get what you're saying, but it's still kind of a shitty thing to say. Maybe it's because I'm a black person who's been told that I sound "white" by people before, but there's nothing inherent to the character's voice that "limits" his race. If you want to argue that more options would be good, then that's valid. But saying that he can't be black because he doesn't "sound" black, can't be Latino because he doesn't "sound" Latino, etc, makes me wonder what stock voice you have in mind when it comes to these other ethnicities.
Spacecowboy77
Member
Holy shit, this guy is an annoying douche
DAREALGUMMY
Member
You'd think 3 was a literal bag of waste with how people seem to hate the game on here. I personally loved it and can always go back and play it and New Vegas but I can't seem to find the strength to play 4. Sure, I've played over a hundred hours or so but I have no desire to do it all over again. Hell, I started 3 different builds in New Vegas recently and they're all fun. I find myself actively trying to stop myself from doing side quests just to finish them. But for 4 I don't do much side quests because they're not really fun or memorable. It's all just there.
I've said this here already but one of my favorite things to do when I start a new game in New Vegas is skip Goodsprings, sprint pass Rad Scorpions, try to outrun Cazadores and shoot a plasma grenade out of a Viper Leaders hand in Bonnie Springs when I'm a level one. Then take out the three bounties on Fiends by the time I'm level 3. It's fun. 4 has nothing like that for me it feels like. It all seems formulaic. Sure there's a deathclaw in the beginning but you have a Power Suit (Which is totally changed and feels odd using) and it's whatever.
Like I said before, I enjoyed my time with it but it's definitely not as fun or as memorable as 3 and New Vegas are for me.
EDIT: Tried watching and just the fact that he calls Fallout, Bethesdas most controversial release and says that statement is an absolute truth...I couldn't go further. Not to mention he has the tone of a pundit.
Fallout 4 was a weird game for me, I put a lot of hours into the game and enjoyed it immensely, the thing is that I didn't play it the way it was meant to be played. I hit the level cap even before I started to delve into the game, I was just running around exploring and for me that has always been the strength in these types of games, I see something on the horizon that looks neat and I run over and check it out.
If I had played the game doing the quests, side quests and settlement building from the start I know I would have hated the game, cause I did all those thing last, and they were so disappointing.
So I somewhat agree and at the same time disagree I guess. If there is going to be a Fallout 5 (and seeing how much money they made from 4, there is going to be one) they need to take a step back and improve on so much of the game for me to be interested at all.
If I had played the game doing the quests, side quests and settlement building from the start I know I would have hated the game, cause I did all those thing last, and they were so disappointing.
So I somewhat agree and at the same time disagree I guess. If there is going to be a Fallout 5 (and seeing how much money they made from 4, there is going to be one) they need to take a step back and improve on so much of the game for me to be interested at all.
Yup, I appreciate the effort though! But not much interest in going through this. I prefer my reviews almost 3 hours shorter. Would actually be more likely to dive into it if it was about a game I personally loved.