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I don't know if I would classify any of the tech seen in Fallout as "too out there", considering that the whole point of the setting is that 50s superscience lets you pull off sci-fi poo poo like teleportation, plasma cannons, cloning, and human-equivalent AI with reel-to-reel tape computers. In terms of technology, The Institute perfectly fits in with what else we've seen Fallout science capable of. The bigger problem is that The Institute is just really not a great plot device. Unlike Fallout 3 or New Vegas, their intended goal never actually starts to bear fruit during the game. Once you get rid of their biggest competitors for power in the Commonwealth, the plot simply ends and you do some vague stuff to help them that never actually advances the game world in a meaningful way. Likewise, siding with the other factions and destroying The Institute doesn't seem to do anything to noticeably affect the rest of the Commonwealth. As a faction, they're not built up enough that you would really care if they live or die.
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Feb 14, 2018 22:25
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The Skeleton King posted:In fallout 4 it has always bothered me that after 200 years Diamond City still looks like BlightTown from Dark Souls. I'm gonna have to unironically dispute this characterization. Blighttown is designed to look as repugnant as possible; it's literally the shantytown built by the people who got thrown out of the sewer for being too gauche. Everything that blighttown is, it was carefully crafted to be, down to the repulsiveness of the name itself. Diamond city is just a mess, full stop. It's not even capable of being as offensive to look at, because it isn't trying to be. It has no greater aspirations than "quest hub," and it barely qualifies even for that.
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Feb 14, 2018 22:28
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Actually now that I've made the comparison I realize what a missed opportunity it was that they didn't make the Institute director an insane screaming brain in the vein of the Think Tank or the antagonist from Point Lookout instead of your lame son.Fintilgin posted:I'd say Big MT is fine because it's explicitly pulp. Brains in jars, robo-scorpions!, and animate corpses in spacesuits. It's easy to see it painted on the cover of AMAZING STORIES! It's also sort of isolated off in its own little DLC realm as a stand-alone story. Synths and the Institute are Blade Runner/Terminator, as the core of the story, played completely straight and completely stupid. I feel like if they'd been given the opportunity to integrate the DLC into the base game more they absolutely would have had Big MT come across as this shadowy evil that steals people away in the same vein as the Institute (up until you actually meet them). Wolfsheim fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Feb 14, 2018 |
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Feb 14, 2018 22:32
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Fallout 4 just feels rushed and unpolished. Like it'd be fine if the released version was a beta that just needed some work. Instead it's buggy and the story is stupid. The world just feels sterile and dead. It feels like what you do doesn't even really matter all that much beyond what factions you decided to murder. One of the things that made Fallout 1 and 2 so incredible is that you got to decide how you interacted with the world. You could be a complete amoral bastard, a nice guy that helped everybody, or completely indifferent. You could totally ignore the side quests if you wanted and generally speaking could beat the games with minimal to no fighting if you wanted to go that route. It was up to the player how you interacted with the world as it is presented. More importantly the world is revealed in pieces. You don't even see power armor until later in the game. The stuff that became iconic became iconic because the game plopped crazy poo poo in front of you as the game progressed and was like "yeah forget what you thought you knew poo poo is different now." Fallout 4 just drops the iconic stuff right in your face at the very beginning and does its best to railroad you into the story. You're told to go to Concord then hey there's power armor and a deathclaw! But oh gently caress you, you need fusion cores for power armor now so you barely get to use this fancy new toy and lol if you meet a deathclaw any time again soon (which you won't, by the way) because they will gently caress you right up if you don't have power armor or aren't high level. The beginning seriously reads like "by the way, in case you forgot, this is a Fallout game. Here are all the checkboxes for a Fallout game. We checked them all!" It's not long after that that you meet Danse and the Brotherhood. Then the game vomits a bunch of hamfisted, badly written nonsense all over everything. Even the foreshadowing Danse does feels stupid. "We're detecting signals! They require technology! WE MUST KNOW WHAT THAT IS!!!" Then he just hangs around the police station until the rest of the Brotherhood shows up doing crap all. The settlement building also makes no drat sense because without the Vault-Tec DLC all you can build is a bunch of dingy, leaky shacks. Because it's the apocalypse!!! It's like come on folks humans are pretty clever and can get past leaky shacks. We figured that poo poo out before we figured out writing. I'm pretty sure some power armored junk farmers can figure out how to slap together a roof that doesn't leak. Bricks aren't actually all that hard to make and you can even make them out of mud, straw, and sunlight. Of course you also can't equip the settlers to deal with raiders themselves. Even if you have a settlement with 40 people all in power armor they'll still claim they can't do anything about six raiders with pipe rifles dressed in rusty scrap metal. "We can't stand up to those raiders!!!" Yes you can you dumb rear end. All of you are armed to the teeth and you outnumber that band of raiders 5:1. Just go gently caress them up. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Feb 14, 2018 |
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Feb 14, 2018 22:34
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Keeshhound posted:Diamond city is just a mess, full stop. It's not even capable of being as offensive to look at, because it isn't trying to be. It has no greater aspirations than "quest hub," and it barely qualifies even for that. It's weird, because even New Vegas did this, where people in the Mojave were still living in trash filled quasi-ruins, and had yet to master broom technology. Which is weird, because even in Fallout 1 there were a bunch of settlements of what was pretty clearly post-war adobe construction that looked clean and livable. Vault City had a pretty slick post-war construction setup too, and was set like 40 years before New Vegas. Odd that this aesthetic was totally dropped for New Vegas. Was there any post-war construction in the game that wasn't rusty corrugated metal huts? I wonder if this was an art direction flop, lack of resources to make a whole new tile set, or sort of on purpose with the 'ruins of the old world' theme? ToxicSlurpee posted:Fallout 4 just drops the iconic stuff right in your face at the very beginning and does its best to railroad you into the story. You're told to go to Concord then hey there's power armor and a deathclaw! But oh gently caress you, you need fusion cores for power armor now so you barely get to use this fancy new toy and lol if you meet a deathclaw any time again soon (which you won't, by the way) because they will gently caress you right up if you don't have power armor or aren't high level. The beginning seriously reads like "by the way, in case you forgot, this is a Fallout game. Here are all the checkboxes for a Fallout game. We checked them all!" It's really super obvious that the start of the game is built as a press showbox. They did the same thing with Skyrim and the setpiece dungeon which makes you look at the 3d model of the claw in your inventory to solve a puzzle, and then that mechanic is never used again for the rest of the game without being explicitly recycled. Fintilgin fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Feb 14, 2018 |
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Feb 14, 2018 22:39
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Also if FO3 and FO4 is any metric to gauge by, stay tuned for Fallout 5: Liberty Prime - Prime Harder.
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Feb 14, 2018 22:45
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Fintilgin posted:It's weird, because even New Vegas did this, where people in the Mojave were still living in trash filled quasi-ruins, and had yet to master broom technology. Which is weird, because even in Fallout 1 there were a bunch of settlements of what was pretty clearly post-war adobe construction that looked clean and livable. Vault City had a pretty slick post-war construction setup too, and was set like 40 years before New Vegas. Odd that this aesthetic was totally dropped for New Vegas. Was there any post-war construction in the game that wasn't rusty corrugated metal huts? I'm going to guess lack of time and resources, since so much of it was old Fallout 3 assets. They made the game in something like 18 months, which is an incredibly short time for a game of such scale and complexity, so they probably budgeted their time to reuse as many assets as possible and only make new stuff when necessary. They didn't even do things like shorten the front sight on the 10mm Pistol, causing it to appear too tall when using iron sights because Bethesda just fudged the model.
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Feb 14, 2018 22:49
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chitoryu12 posted:I'm going to guess lack of time and resources, since so much of it was old Fallout 3 assets. They made the game in something like 18 months, which is an incredibly short time for a game of such scale and complexity, so they probably budgeted their time to reuse as many assets as possible and only make new stuff when necessary. They didn't even do things like shorten the front sight on the 10mm Pistol, causing it to appear too tall when using iron sights because Bethesda just fudged the model. As much as I hate the Legion, I wonder if this wouldn't have been most appropriate for their territory, had it actually been built into the game as I understand they wanted too. Like planned settlements with straight roads and faux-Roman adobe houses built around central gardens/courtyards, surrounded by high walls. It would have set them apart from the NCR acting more as occupiers just using what they found, and the impoverished locals.
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Feb 14, 2018 22:56
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Fintilgin posted:It's weird, because even New Vegas did this, where people in the Mojave were still living in trash filled quasi-ruins, and had yet to master broom technology. Which is weird, because even in Fallout 1 there were a bunch of settlements of what was pretty clearly post-war adobe construction that looked clean and livable. Vault City had a pretty slick post-war construction setup too, and was set like 40 years before New Vegas. Odd that this aesthetic was totally dropped for New Vegas. Was there any post-war construction in the game that wasn't rusty corrugated metal huts? Well, there's Covenant. I'm pretty sure some heavy post-war refurbishing went on there. They do just throw all their trash over the wall, but I mean where else do you put it? (Whoop, thought this was a combined NV/4 question. Letting it stand anyway.)
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Feb 14, 2018 23:00
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New Vegas is also mostly on the periphery of civilization and Westside is a total slum. Army bases should be cleaned up though holy poo poo NCR get your discipline in check.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:20
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Fintilgin posted:As much as I hate the Legion, I wonder if this wouldn't have been most appropriate for their territory, had it actually been built into the game as I understand they wanted too. Like planned settlements with straight roads and faux-Roman adobe houses built around central gardens/courtyards, surrounded by high walls. If the game was made as they wanted to (with the budget and time they wanted), I think only the impoverished locals like in Novac, Goodsprings, or Freeside would have had the ramshackle huts or dirty and damaged pre-war buildings. The Strip would have been glittering and perfectly clean, basically pre-war in its opulence. The NCR would have repaired structures and built new ones from adobe, just like back in Shady Sands. This is a canon image of what Arroyo is supposed to look like around the time of New Vegas: 
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Feb 14, 2018 23:24
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As lame as THREEDOOOOG AWOOOOOO is, I like that his radio updates on your quests actually take into account what you chose during them. Diamond city radio never really seemed to do that and it was lame.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:29
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Ulysses did nothing wrong. 
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Feb 14, 2018 23:47
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Radio New Vegas did that too. This news brought to you by an old man, armed to the teeth with dynamite.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:47
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I never played the NV DLCs and I probably should install the GOTY and do it. Is there a good, like, easy-to-use ultimate bugfix, looks and gameplay mod compilation or listing? Not looking for super gameplay changeups like survival, though.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:50
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Randaconda posted:Ulysses did nothing wrong. Ulysses has severe PTSD and should seek out the followers of the apocalypse for some therapy ASAP.
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Feb 14, 2018 23:56
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Ulysses has severe PTSD and should seek out the followers of the apocalypse for some therapy ASAP. Yes.  I like Ulysses, word diarrhea and all, and his voice actor sounded cool.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:02
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Ulysses has severe PTSD and should seek out the followers of the apocalypse for some therapy ASAP. I just spent few minutes imagining how that would wind up playing out, and it's wonderful.   "OK, Mr. Ulysses, let's get started, I'm going to ask you a few questions about a bunch of topics, starting with your family. Please answer as honestly as you can, allright?" "My family? My tribe lives... its history? Died long ago, fell under the shadow of the Bull... consumed by another symbol. No, this isn't about family - or any common blood. It's blood shared by acts, not by chance." "... Well, I'm glad you're comfortable sharing so extensively, can you tell me a little more about your childhood?"
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Feb 15, 2018 00:29
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I could never tell if I hated the voice they gave Ulysses or if it was just the fact I always played that DLC after finishing Honest Hearts, where Joshua Graham's actor just batted that sumbitch out of the park.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:30
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Honestly the story of Honest Hearts is my favorite writing in the entire series, even if it isn't really a Fallout story.
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Feb 15, 2018 00:37
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MikeJF posted:I never played the NV DLCs and I probably should install the GOTY and do it. Is there a good, like, easy-to-use ultimate bugfix, looks and gameplay mod compilation or listing? Not looking for super gameplay changeups like survival, though. YUP fixes tons of bugs, JSawyer makes a bunch of mechanical changes and was made by the game's director so it's basically a free DLC, Project Nevada lets you fiddle with a bunch of settings and adds a sprint button. There's also a loot menu mod that ports Fallout 4's realtime looting mechanic into NV, which is very nice. For content, the New Vegas Uncut mods are pretty much essential, and some helpful soul on the NV Nexus collected them all into one file called something like NEW VEGAS UNCUT 1-2-3-4-5-7
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Feb 15, 2018 00:49
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2house2fly posted:YUP fixes tons of bugs, JSawyer makes a bunch of mechanical changes and was made by the game's director so it's basically a free DLC, Project Nevada lets you fiddle with a bunch of settings and adds a sprint button. There's also a loot menu mod that ports Fallout 4's realtime looting mechanic into NV, which is very nice. For content, the New Vegas Uncut mods are pretty much essential, and some helpful soul on the NV Nexus collected them all into one file called something like NEW VEGAS UNCUT 1-2-3-4-5-7 What about Bessie? 
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Feb 15, 2018 01:07
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The most disappointing sequel I've ever played. 
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Feb 15, 2018 01:09
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Internet Kraken posted:Honestly the story of Honest Hearts is my favorite writing in the entire series, even if it isn't really a Fallout story. to be precise, it's pretty much literally The Mission. which is good, because that movie owns
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Feb 15, 2018 01:34
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Randaconda posted:The most disappointing sequel I've ever played. It was pretty and had amazing music, though. Giving in to time constraints and replacing Magus with Guile absolutely gutted it, though, that's true.
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Feb 15, 2018 02:44
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New vegas at least had clean interiors for th lived-in buildings, as far as I can remember at least. The institute just pisses me off wi how poorly it's written. They have Snatchers but try to go for a lovely blade runner story when it should be Snatcher or Terminator. They could have a plot twist where it turns out you were killed and replaced with a synth and didn't know it. Instead of your stupid idiot son that nobody on earth has ever cared about, they could've had some mysterious illumiati guys that are just silhouettes on a tv screen. Instead of Kellogg, the least interesting character ever, have it be a terminator that nobody wants to gently caress with. Make the institute be the scary shadow society trying to control the commonwealth from the shadows with their Snatchers. Make the institute questline more about killing people and replacing them with synths than about catching runaway slaves. Anything is better than what they went with.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:16
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Wolfsheim posted:Actually now that I've made the comparison I realize what a missed opportunity it was that they didn't make the Institute director an insane screaming brain in the vein of the Think Tank or the antagonist from Point Lookout instead of your lame son. Do both. Make it turn out that everyone in the institute is a brain in a tank but you don't know that for most of the game because they all have wifi Synth bodies.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:29
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Keeshhound posted:I'm gonna have to unironically dispute this characterization. Blighttown is designed to look as repugnant as possible; it's literally the shantytown built by the people who got thrown out of the sewer for being too gauche. Everything that blighttown is, it was carefully crafted to be, down to the repulsiveness of the name itself. You know, you're right. Diamond city is so uninspired and dull that it's ugliness is just bonus shittiness.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:30
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I ironically enjoy the way they twisted the story to breaking point so your son is an old man but the guy who murdered your wife doesn't even grow a moustache in 60 years. Like it's not even important to the story that Kellogg is alive when you find him, you literally progress the main quest by looting his corpse, why did they make him some kind of cybernetically enhanced immortal
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Feb 15, 2018 05:32
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Vakal posted:The Institute really should have been the main entity of the the Vault-Tec Corporation. Like Vault Prime or something like that. Interesting thing is, we got the central vault before, in Tactics. Bigger, no experiments, and guarded by an army of cutting edge killbots where the low end can take on a deathclaw and the high end can take on a moderate sized country. And did I mention they're self replicating? Because they do that. It's pretty impressive. Then they cut the safety measures in favor of more executive bonuses, because of course they did, and now the killbots are rampaging all over the wasteland, and only the Brotherhood is in any position to stop them.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:39
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2house2fly posted:I ironically enjoy the way they twisted the story to breaking point so your son is an old man but the guy who murdered your wife doesn't even grow a moustache in 60 years. Like it's not even important to the story that Kellogg is alive when you find him, you literally progress the main quest by looting his corpse, why did they make him some kind of cybernetically enhanced immortal I feel like they wrote in you having a confrontation with your son’s kidnapper before they realized that he’d be over 100 years old during the confrontation, so they quickly added the cybernetics to justify it. Which is worse because making him a synth would have solved that perfectly, but I guess we really needed loving 15 monologues from Kellogg talking about his past.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:40
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In Far Harbor DIMA says maybe you're a synth too, and I remember thinking that that'd be way better and more interesting. But nope!
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Feb 15, 2018 05:44
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To be fair, everyone and their dog had called "the player character is a synth" as a twist back in 2008. I watched a youtube of the Dima conversation and it seemed like a decent way to bring up the possibility while not making a statement one way or the other
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Feb 15, 2018 05:52
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2house2fly posted:To be fair, everyone and their dog had called "the player character is a synth" as a twist back in 2008. I watched a youtube of the Dima conversation and it seemed like a decent way to bring up the possibility while not making a statement one way or the other it was the one time in the game I felt they gave you an actual choice on who your character was
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Feb 15, 2018 05:54
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2house2fly posted:To be fair, everyone and their dog had called "the player character is a synth" as a twist back in 2008. I watched a youtube of the Dima conversation and it seemed like a decent way to bring up the possibility while not making a statement one way or the other To be fair, everyone and their dog is a better writer than the Bethesda main story writing team.
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Feb 15, 2018 05:54
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There's no doubt that the whole plot was wasted opportunities. Kellogg is a big idiot who fails to be a compelling villain at every turn, and then they have the audacity to make you watch his life's story as though anyone would ever care about him. There's so many ways you could rewrite Kellogg to be interesting, and everyone can easily brainstorm something better. As for Shaun, gently caress Shaun. There's plenty of games about a parent trying to find or save their kid and all of them are able to do a decent job of getting the player to care at least somewhat about their plight, but not this one. Nobody cares to try and save Shaun. Nothing about the main character is compelling enough to make you care about their quest to find Shaun. The same problem can be applied to all of the companions too. All of their backstories and stuff fall flat.
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Feb 15, 2018 07:34
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In fallout 4, every companion is as compelling as rose of sharon
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Feb 15, 2018 07:56
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Nah, the F4 companions are pretty good other than a couple duds (Strong, Preston, that Institute guy) and it's great the way they react during various quests. Nick, Deacon and Codsworth are especially charming. They're nowhere near FNV, but I'd put them above any of the F1/F3 companions and even most of the F2 companions (the albino deathclaw suuucks).
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Feb 15, 2018 09:52
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Also Maccready is a huge rear end in a top hat and i'm surprised that they had gotten so into making him (renamed) and the anti-lamplight mercs a big part of the world before realizing "oh poo poo, none of this is compelling" Also means the gunners are mercenaries that just so happen to always be hostile to the player like every other raider group.
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Feb 15, 2018 13:13
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Cass is still better than FO4 companions because she let's you chug whiskey nonstop.
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Feb 15, 2018 20:16
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