The building isn't the best, the economy should have been worked on me. And then it could have been great. Cause atm you can build some cool economy, drug farms, water baron type things. But the only thing you can buy is mass money. The story isn't great. It'd have been better as a settlement managment game.
Honestly the beginning would’ve been a lot better if you find codsworth all broken down and your first quest is to get him working again; scrambling to try and save the last piece of your old life.
Yeah, that's much better. Would also go along with the game's theme of rebuilding... I mean it's a mostly optional theme since you don't have to do settlements, but it's there.
@@DEBUGMODE I mean most of the main factions are attempting to rebuild in some way. BoS/MM want the institute out of the way so they can start rebuilding the commonwealth, and the institute wants to build their own future for themselves
You may not like it, but the Idea that Codsworth is doing the same thing 200 years later is at least internally consistent. You find robots all over the setting that are hanging out, doing their jobs like the war never happened. Some have developed gllitches or accumulated wear and tear, but a lot haven't they're ghosts of Pre-war america, rolling, walking, or hovering around the same as when they were first assembled. Sure, some of them have active mechanics or have been upgraded/changed by wastelanders, but again, many haven't, even in 3 and New Vegas. Why should Codsworth be any different?
I have the same problem with the other independently operated robots like the ones at Greygarden. If your setting has roving gangs of raiders and militia, it hurts credulity to have a bunch of relatively defenseless robots hanging around for 200 years with no human intervention. The USS Constitution robots are more plausible because they're heavily armed. But the quest there is explicitly about a gang of humans trying to take them out. So even those ones are targets. Again, as with all my small complaints, none of them ruin anything individually. But collectively they poke holes in the plausibility of the world.
For while I thought codsworth was fixed by the institute and left there to help protect and spy on the player before I found out the institute has spy birds
The shoot -> loot -> build triangle works really well for me. I don't even meet Preston and just destroy, then rebuild in my honor. A tier game if you see it in a different light
I can't get over the fact that they just changed it from what Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, and Skyrim was to what you described without telling the fans or even acknowledging the change. It's like being promised a vehicle from your parents when you graduate college and they get you an electric scooter because you live in the city. It's just not anything close to what was expected in the years leading up.
Role-Playing Game. Role: Survivor of a Nuclear Apocalypse. Game: Kill enemies, Complete quests, and craft for experience points, items, and currency. Everything else is your own arbitrary definitions that don't work when you apply them evenly and historically. Final Fantasy 6 is an RPG. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is an RPG. Sports games are RPGs.
I rarely comment but I just wanted to say I watched from start to finish without pause. I highly like the way you compose your essays and edit your videos.
Its so weird looking at this game without survival mode. It feels so much better paced with it on, that its suprising it was only added later on. For example, no fast travel makes base building more important. And some of the less "nice" factions become a lot more apealing, purely out of practicality considering vertibirds and the teleporter. Having a few bases where food, water, and ammo (that has weight on that difficulty) are stored is a lifesaver, especcially toward the south and east of the map, where towns are a lot less common.
I get the appeal in theory. I like the survival genre but in the case of a game as big as Fallout 4, I think a hybrid ruleset would be a little more palatable for more people.
I bought FO4 on release and bounced off it after loving 3. Last year i gave it another go on survival and i LOVED it. exploration felt so organic, and the world felt so detailed and deadly. Laying out a plan and then heading out into the wasteland really feels like a journey with no fast travel, and the need to eat, sleep etc. People criticize the graphics (even on release) but i feel they hold up quite well.
@@SloopJohnB91I only play with the Frost survival mod now. Gets rid of all the crappy dialogue, including the main quest entirely, and is just about surviving during a nuclear winter. It turns mediocre FO4 into a masterpiece.
31:45 A note. The "Scrapper" perk in the intelligence tree makes searching for whatever components you need rather easy. It highlights objects that contain your desired crafting material in the same color of your UI to make scavenging for specific things a lot more quick.
Yes, I took that at some point. It can be helpful, but it's not a complete fix by any means. And I don't love the way the item highlight looks. It's very gamey and artificial.
and bethsoft still did it wrong. It highlights multiple mats even if i have many of all but 1 of them. I dont need them all to be lit i need the 1 i dont have
@@DEBUGMODE There's a mod called 'place anywhere' that gets rid of the weird collision problems. I've spent hundreds of hours settlement building. The DLC that adds cement walls is great for building castles.
the courier does NOT have amnesia there are multiple times where dialouge options in new vegas prove the courier remembers their past for example, when speaking with bruce isaac, the courier can mention watching him perform at the shark tank, meaning if the player chooses this option the courier has visited new reno and remembers it. there's also the lady killer option in the conversation with the lonesome drifter where the courier asks his age, implying they hooked up a woman and are afraid that the lonesome drifter could be their son that they abandoned. while these dialouge choices are optional the fact that they are options implies that the courier does remember their own past.
I don't think amnesia has to be comprehensive and total loss of memory, but I'm not sure of the precise medial definition. I was using the term as shorthand for the storytelling device employed to essentially give you a clean slate to work with.
I disagree, what the player character remembers is completely up to the player. Playing with 1 int is optional is the courier brain damaged too? Optional decisions are only reflective of your own character not the courier's story.
@@Plight_ i was going to say the same just now. its specifically set up to allow you to completely ignore certain thins if you want, like how you arent forced to follow benny in the slightest. the game nudes you towards it, and its written and designed to give players a balanced experience which progressively gets more challenging, but it alllows you to do whatever you want and the story will naturally pick up steam when you enter the strip. its something that endlessly frustrates me about people who claim the game railroads you. because not only does it not do that, but if you want, you never even have to see benny ever again after the intro
@@Helperbot-2000 the only people that would make that argument are Bethesda zealots, They cannot be reasoned with. "Fallout new Vegas is empty and boring" "The map is one big railroad" I heard it all before
I had never heard of that mod when I wrote that section. I think it's just an obvious direction to take the settlement stuff if you want to marry it with a player-driven story.
One great aspect of Falllout 4 is how it proves that a good open world doesnt mean "big open spaces", it means density of content, its a shame that Bethesda forgot that aspect with the 4x times emptier FO76 and of course Starfield, Fallout 4 was the last good bethesda game when it comes to level and world design. Obs: This video is amazing :)
Yeah, for sure. I think you can have some big, open spaces to add variety to a map, but the overall quality content has to be there. I actually think Fo76 is a nice map in some ways. I like the overall flow and design. I like the regional variety. But the way almost everything in that game is geared toward linear quest lines and live service events is such a bummer.
If bethesda is the master of anything till fo4 it would be designing unique, tangible identity to each level or content zone they create on all level. Even the endless draugr dungeon in skyrim feel better to play than most other open world dungeon despite the major shortcoming in gameplay. If bethesa make those PoIs 2 time further from each other, the enjoyment wouldnt change much. It's the samey nondescript content for the sake of contents design starfield and other open world have that hamper enjoyment, not the density of a bethesda game.
Totally. The exploration is a symbiotic relationship between the unique POIs and the in between spaces. Starfield kinda flubbed both. Bethesda games are the strongest when both of those are working in tandem. It's magical when that happens.
The whole point of Bethesda games was to provide a detailed map full of interesting things for years of adventuring. That, and a "passable" engine that happens to be great for modding. You really don't want to get stuck in their awkward idea of sufficient mechanics and depth. Which is why it's awesome they also provide the best tools for creating your version of those things, freely. Morrowind still had the depth, but a whole lot of it was broken and dysfunctional anyways. So mods still had an essential part, provided you like your game to work as intended. Starfield's instance system is kind of great for modding as well. Now you can produce modded worlds to keep adding to that pool of unique things to explore. But they won't collide the same way that modded locations on a single map do. The game itself is quite lacking, though. It has the potential for great things, but it's a different matter if people care enough to dedicate to it. Because Starfield kinda sucks to begin with.
I don’t think the PCs count as vault dwellers. In every other case the term implies that they lived in a vault and have a unique perspective and history from that, while Nate/Nora basically time travelled to present day unchanged.
Of course Nate/Nora count as vault dwellers. They spend 200 years in a vault then leave it to explore the wasteland for the first time - that's a textbook vault dweller, frozen or not. Multiple characters even call you a "vault dweller" in the story. Piper and Paladin Danse are the two that come to mind. The title doesnt imply any of the things you said, that's your own headcanon.
Keep it civil, please. I don't think it does any good to get caught up in semantics. The point is Nate/Nora aren't like other vault dwellers who have been inculcated by Vault Tec's program and in insular culture from actually living in the vault. Associating that with the term "vault dweller" isn't headcanon, it's basic comprehension of the information presented.
on the settlement system, there is an unintended (i think) benefit, if you set up caravan lines, the settlers will clear out encounters along their route, if you settle the full map, it becomes much safer to travel (i enjoyed playing in survival mode in which this really really matters) and you can get fast travel in hardcore either via vertibird grenades or teleport ones depending on who you align with
@@DEBUGMODEthe one thing that's always popped off in games made by Bethesda and their subsidiaries are emergent worlds driven by interacting systems, making them feel like they could go on without you. It's a shame then that Bethesda has shied more and more away from this, because as we've seen from games like MGSV and BotW, that factor ironically makes your interactions with the world feel so much more consequential. Fallout 4 easily could have had so much going for it to result in a timeless immersive sim experience, but instead shallowed those things in favor of a broad appeal; especially ironic since the thing which put Bethsoft on the map was their application of an open world to the immersive sim formula of Ultima Underworld. It feels cut off not only from the roots of Black Isle's Fallout, but of Bethesda's own roots theirselves.
Amazing video man. Fo4 is such an equally fulfilling and unfulfilling game and you encapsulated that perfectly. Great job I’m shocked this hasn’t gotten more views.
20:17 Honestly, I kind of liked the brief moments when the player character would mention something about a location pre-war, or how their past life related to it. I guess I don't mind playing an RPG with a character that isn't 100% made up by me. I just wish the writing in FO4 had been a bit better about that.
Great video! Fallout 4 is one of my favorite games, I’ve probably put more hours into it than any other game. I just love settlement building and the world design is incredible, even today there’s things I haven’t found like all the bottle messages washed up on shore 👍
Fnv definitely has my heart but when I want to play a shooter with rpg mechanics, I play fo4. When I want to play a solid post apocalyptic rpg, I play fnv
I’m just curious what you like so much about NV? I found it to be more of a Western than post-apocalyptic, personally. And the characters were all incredibly forgettable for me. I just feel like maybe I’m missing something? I know it has a lot of fans, so surely I’m just not getting something.
@@tarabooartarmy3654it’s honestly mainly the dlcs in my opinion they add a ton of lore to the base game and just make them really replay-able new Vegas is far from a perfect game it just had really good aspects of a rpg that isn’t as dumb down as Skyrim and fallout 4
@@tarabooartarmy3654its better than 4 in literally every way. Forgettable? I cant remember a single npc in 4 cause they have no backgrounds. Its a favorite cause its good
Forgettable? Did we play the same game? I thought all the followers were pretty memorable, as are key characters in the main story, as well as the DLCs.@@tarabooartarmy3654
@@mediokay Hell no new vagas is better in every way possible. Falllout 4 has superior gunplay, enviorment, worldbuilding and adventure elements when NV has a very good story. I share the the same opinion as him, when i want a game with good gunplay, good enviorment and a ok story i play fallout 4, when i want a game with hilariously bad graphics and a good story i play fnv (i have actually played it unlike most FNV ctitics).
As someone with a complicated relationship with Fallout 4, I feel like you've articulated my feelings about it really well. It has glaring problems, but there is a lot to like here, and it bodes really well for the future of the franchise if Bethesda continues to refine their new style. I first played fallout 4 eight years ago, and coming back to it now, I can appreciate the love that went into crafting that piece of art and enjoy it despite it's flaws.
In simple terms it's a game where you play the extremely predefined role of Nata or Nora and collect junk in dangerous, wacky locations. That can be fun.
Damn dude, you absolutely killed it with the editing and writing for this video, I’m shocked you don’t have more subs. Hope to see more cool shit like this from you :)
What’s that quote? “Gamers will optimize the fun out of your game if you let them.” Fo4’s crafting system seems uniquely designed in that you condition yourself to stare at the floor rooting around in trash all the time, so much so that it can interfere with your enjoyment of the game.
When you contrast it with fallout new vegas's optional crafting system that can be fun to mess around with it becomes how clear how bad of an idea it was to frame a huge part of the game around base building and resource management. The crafting in vegas is very deliberate with its perk/skill investments for some of the really fun stuff you can mess around with. Like comically overpowered chems or home made nuclear landmines or incredibly strong healing items. I still remember making my first microfusion cell cluster and thinking it would be a great idea to throw them at a deathclaw directly infront of my face. Fallout 4 doesn't really have any fun stuff like this with its crafting system
I think the crafting and resource management is one of the few genuinely good parts of Fallout 4, and could have been a lot better if the settlement and faction system on top of it was meaningful. Regardless, it's an almost entirely optional system, it's up to the player how they interact with it.
This reminds me of all the Fo4 playthroughs I'd start up where the first 15-20 minutes was just me scrapping all of sanctuary and red rocket to spam shelves to level up. Boy oh boy did I know how to waste my fuckin time doing the least fun gameplay in the world 😂
i think Bethesda made a typo where the sole survivor wakes up it should say it passed 20 years instead of 200, because that's how the world looks and how they designed it or whoever wrote the story have zero idea what 200 years is for a house made out of sheet steel and plenty of cars are not even rusted and have rubber tires and interiors next to intact
They made the mistake of moving the timeline way out in Fallout 3 and the series has just had to roll with that since. Fallout 1 was set less than 100 years after the bombs and that game is more about the new societies built on the ashes than Bethesda's games where they still want to maintain the aesthetic of a bombed out world even though it's been such a long time at this point.
32:48 explains whey resident evil has the perfect inventory management system in my eyes. It's small, fun to manage, and very efficient with what you can and can't carry.
It's a great system for certain kinds of games. I especially like the RE4 grid system. That's been used very effectively in immersive sims and tactical shooters. I don't think that would work with Bethesda games though. They're not designed for a super limited inventory and they're such different kinds of games overall.
New Vegas was the tipping point for me I played fallout 4 first and had the exact same issue, the game never pulled me into it. I played New Vegas after about a year from my first fallout 4 experience and the difference was jarring. Sure the Gun play wasn't the greatest but the characters I met and the enemies I thought were awesome and felt like they actually had a purpose. Take Ghost Town Gun Fight and The Man Out of Time Quest. The Powder Gangers have a reason to both be there and attack the town, as well as the player being able to pass speech checks with people in the town before the fight begins to gear up the towns folk and prepare for battle. Man Out of Time is you just being told to go to Concord to look for people and the Minutemen have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time(had the Sole Survivor not shown up) The Raiders have no reason to be there besides the plot, and don't even get me started on the cucking of Deathclaws, from Wasteland Legend that was thought to be myth, able to chase down players in seconds, to hah minigun go brrrrrrrrrr.
I know. The difference in the writing and worldbuilding is huge. As I was wrapping this video up, I dipped back into NV to get some more footage after having not played for months and I was immediately struck by how much more I cared about what was going on in that game than in FO4.
You're right for the most part but the raiders do have a reason to be there In the mission that sends you to the corvega assembly plant your able to read to a terminal of a raider boss who was looking Mama Murphy one entries says he sent a group to concord because he saw them on their way there
@@metalpotatoe537 1 retroactive in later development terminal entry does not a story make. it takes 3 minutes to add a note in game, it doesn't show any care for the plot.
I came at it from the opposite end: I tried to play Fallout 3. I've been to Megaton half a dozen times over the years, and even went further than that on one occasion. New Vegas really sucked me in, and it's on that basis that I kept going back to try Fallout 3. Surely it can't be that different, right? After all, New Vegas is basically just a standalone expansion for Fallout 3. When they released Fallout 4, it was distinctly Fallout 3 the Second. I did get to the end, but I didn't love it like New Vegas.
Videos like this make me grateful that I am easily entertained. I've got over a thousand hours in FO4 since I started it this year and I'm still not done with it. I was looking for something that would hook me as hard as Skyrim and FO4 did that.
That’s really great ! It sucks when you start looking for more fulfilling games or forms of entertainment, I remember when that switch flipped for me 😭😭 but if you can still enjoy stuff then still do, your experience is the only one that counts anyway !
nah its not easily entertained or a switch in my opinion, i just believe that you made peace with the ‘video games will have video game-y mechanics’ and got hooked on what was there. I have a sibling who looks at games like these and see wasted potential; i see each game offering something different and unique and if its well rounded enough then it has me.
Very well put! You acknowledge the game's strengths, and weaknesses; offering comparisons to similar games from the time, and since. All of this well-organized and organic, broken up into segments for easy digestion and reference.
It's kind of a shame bethesda moved past this. Making games with good executions but glaringly unmet ambitions, games that nobody will ever stop talking about. Now they're making starfield.
The ironic thing for me is I was a junk hoarder before junk had value and would pick up fuckloads of bottles and tin cans back in Fallout 3 and New Vegas because 1 cap is 1 cap and pretty much any other game that made junk items have a value like in Elder Scrolls as I did the same with Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind. Plus it gives me more reasons to walk around to pick things up, or too go home to drop things off or to town to sell off my junk more often. Some games ill even collect things without value for the fun of it especially if I was actually in this position I would collect them either because they would have a use for me, or because I used to collect random ass things and some things gave the right kind of neuron connection go brrr to collect. To this effect it took me ages to ever learn how awful a grind people found the junk collecting because the circles I have been in either did not care like me either for one reason or another, or they just saw it as a given and did not bring up what they saw as a very, very dead horse.
7:46 there's a pretty reasonable in-game explanation for the kid in a fridge quest, which is that he was trapped in during the attack on quincy. It's definitely still bad writing, and yeah the parents living 2 blocks down the road from a massive gunner base is also bad, but it's not entirely presented as "this kid had been in this fridge for 200 years
Through modding, i've turned Fallout 4 from a RPG/FPS hybrid to a gun porn post apocalypse survival milsim / collectathon, all with every texture retextured into something more high res, with beautiful animations and much more, pretty much all from the ground up. The one good thing that i can REALLY REALLY say about fallout 4 is through modding, it can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. Its just up to you to make your own fun, and its up to you to make your own dream fallout, whatever that is.
As much i love Fallout 4, i cant help but think Bethesda just wanted it to be a "refined" Fallout 3 rather than follow the roots of NV, the story and gameplay and everything. Even if i also like FO3 on its own, its still a really basic fallout game, compared to smth like NV. NV not only has decently balanced and interesting rpg mechanics, story and choices that affect the ending, but also the additions to the gunplay, like different ammo types, modifications etc, with the only problem with NV's gunplay is just the gunplay itself. Still, alot of which NV's improvements and stuff future fallouts couldve improved upon is jsut missing in FO4. Is it any wonder people download mods to make feel like an improved Fallout NV Its even more disappointing on Bethesda's end when Obsidian was able to make NV (even in broken state) in 18 months with a terribly outdated engine while Bethesda was given 4 years to cook up smth good for 4, which they didnt. Again, there is stuff to like in FO4, the settlement system, the updated gunplay but really, i wished Bethesda just didnt have a vendetta against NV and actually improve from what Obsidian had left out to do
I wholeheartedly agree with the NV praise. I think the idea that Bethesda hates NV or Obsidian is overblown. Just because they have a different philosophy for making games doesn't mean they have animosity for the developers of NV. The fact that Obsidian made NV in 18 months is absolutely incredible. But they were only able to do that because they were building on Bethesda's FO3/Oblivion technology base and were able to reuse a lot of assets and systems. They obviously had to do some technical work, but so much more of their production time could be dedicated to content and to tweaking an existing template to suit their vision. And their vision was awesome. Big game dev in general takes much longer now. This is true pretty much across the industry. And I think it's a problem for a lot of developers because the games taking longer leads to fans expecting more and often being disappointed.
Bethesda doesn't have a "vendetta" against NV. It's a corporate videogame company, not some kind of mafia lol. To them, New Vegas is just a pretty successful spin off and they were never obligated to follow its' formula. They have their own playstyle formula, which is just as successful in terms of sales, ratings and player attraction, so they decided to stick with that in Fallout 4. Seeing how Fallout 4 is the most profitable fallout game by far, I'm sure they're okay with it.
Regarding the pre war intro pacing, when should have had at least one days length quest or cutscene to feel the passage of time. That would have made the whole vault TEC registration more believable.
Having a dream of your pre-war days each time you complete an act of the main storyline would have both made you feel closer to your spouse and Shaun, and give you more urgency, hell they could even slap a small battle scene in there. Enderal did it masterfully imho.
The only believable thing to do would have the player's family and the entire community pre-registered for Vault 111. The town is literally called Sanctuary, the experiment being that Vault-Tec has attempted to create the ideal community to transport into the future using cryogenics.
Im playing through FO4 for the first time (never played any of the others.) I personally REALLY liked how quickly the passage of time goes in the cryochamber. I'm not too far in but I seriously have no idea how much time passed in between both events. From a totally new players perspective this gives me both a reason to look for my son, maybe. Or realize he's completely dead opening me up to the roleplay of adapting to an absolutely demolished world.
Imo fallout 4 with mods is one of if not the best game ever made it’s literally whatever you want it to be and with the addition of mods this game can literally be anything you can imagine its literally the only game where you can create your own game
You forgot Skyrim. Both Skyrim and FO4 can be turned into literal masterpieces with the right modding and tweaking. The Skyrim Wabbajack pack "LoreRim" or the Skyrim mod list "Invicta" speak for themselves, I'd say. I am currently running Fallout 4 with my own mod pack and 1170 active mods. It's a gem, but I literally changed or improved every aspect of the base game, from quests, to weapons, to visuals and anything else. Took me a long time to do so.
Good video man, subscribed I’ve played a lot of FO4 but never even got into the institute. Usually what happens is I’ll be burned out and run out of steam from base building and xp grinding and I’ll stop playing
Thank you! I don't love the Institute because I don't necessarily feel like it goes with the sci-fi flavor that Fallout usually trades in, but it's worth getting there and exploring at least once. It's so different from everything else in the game and there's some neat stuff there.
The rhythm of how you read your scripts reminds me somewhat of Noah Gervais's video essay vocal delivery style. Great video man, looking forward to what you make next
I would've argued a decade ago about FC3 being good because at release it was a breath of fresh air, but in hindsight it was the beginning of the problems.
I would like the scrap mechanic a lot more with a few small changes. Reduce the amount of scrap categories, merge some of the categories. Copper, Steel, Lead, Aluminum, Gold and Silver into Metals. Ceramic and Concrete into Stone. Gears, Screws, Springs, circuits and military grade circuits into just Technology. 31 loot categories can be reduced so much without loosing anything just by making the similar things into the same thing, i dont care if something is made out of Aluminum or Steel, in the end they are both serving trays. I would also make all the junk items automatically be turned into their components without any jank shenanigans.
Totally agree. It's a little strange that they made so many types of resources. I understand having more and less rare materials but you don't need so many categories to do that.
All I wanted after so many hours looking for more glue was a damn horse farm to uhhm... Maybe turning raiders into glue instead would be better received..
I kind of disagree on this one. Having lots of loot categories makes the system more believable and gates higher tier items. Low grade weapons use steel, higher grade use aluminum. Electrical equipment requires copper. The key for making the system fun long term is allowing the player to "progress the tech tree" so to speak. At a certain point, the player should be able to delegate resource gathering and manufacturing to settlements and settlers and have passive income for all materials.
We Share all the same opinions of fallout and weirdly I got the urge to go back same as yourself. Always been a Fallout 3/NV guy and I was so excited for Fallout 4 and felt it just let us all down. But I'm glad to see others are making this pilgrimage to make peace with it. Also hands down one for the best video essays on Fallout I've ever watched, was searching for tips on building settlements for all things and stumbled upon this video. 1 hour later I'm so glad I watched it, to think you have under 1k subs is mind boggling to me. I was fully expecting in 300k mark and was so pleasantly surprised. You should be very proud as this was an amazing Video, thank you for taking the time to make it!
I got a love hate relationship with the encumberance system. It's necessary for a survival/apocalypse type game like fallout. 1. You will ruin the economics of the game if you can carry everything like you said. Because you have unlimited ammo, heals, junk armors and weapons to sell on whim. You Effectively have kinda a demi god mode on. You aren't invincible, but youll never be hurting for supplies. 2. I always felt the 3D fallout games have just too low of a weight limit for how much useful stuff that is around. Even with max strength, you can only carry a couple hundred pounds of equipment. While in real life you probably wouldnt be able to reliably carry that much, in a video game it's just not enough. Especially if bullets and aid items have weight ontop of armor and weapons which are super heavy by themselves. Stack misc resource items ontop of that, and you'll be struggling with carry weight the whole game. Recently with on my chars in fallout 3, NV, and 4, I just give myself alot more carryweight. It's just too tedious to be juggling the weight capacity as you explore and fight. It never really messes you up in combat, just kind of slows you down while you loot after you cleared an area. You gotta stop, fast travel or sprint to a base/house/ place to store your stuff, then travel back to that area to finish looting. It's just time consuming.
I’m replaying fallout 4 now actually and I must say I agree with mostly everything you’ve said. It is the best gameplay wise. But it was a struggle for me. The first act of the game is a slog… it’s just so slow… so much walking… then mid game happens and the more linear aspect starts to slightly fade and I can enjoy the fun combat with a leveled character and some of the side quests are genuinely really fun for me. Nicks story and personal quest plus the extra bits with the far harbor dlc make that among one of my favorite parts. The story of curie is really sweet. Paladin dance to me is a really interesting character and his synth identity reveal adds a lot to the brotherhood story for me which says a lot cuz it isn’t really much… I find the brotherhood just super boring in fallout 4 so really anything could add to it lol. Also I can’t lie… soemthing that’s helped me play this again is by kinda just going fast. I wanted to play fallout in reverse. I’ve played all of them except the OG and 2. And fallout 4 is the worst to me not bc it’s actually “the worst” but it’s just kinda boring… playing the very very first time when I was 16 in highschool was amazing. Loved this game. But I’ve been spoiled by game pass which has allowed me to play older games as well as some modern classics in the rpg category. In contrast it just makes it so so so hard to replay. I’m getting into it now. But that’s cuz I’m level 50 with cool weapons now and power armor I never leave behind lol. It’s fun… NOW lol… the first 16 hours I won’t do again tbh :/. This is my last time playing fallout 4 simply cuz the first act is just painfully slow and uneventful. Fallout new vegas even in the opening at good spring ur choices matter. Whereas in fallout 4 ur choices don’t really matter AT ALL till the end lol. Which in of itself like you said isn’t a issue. But when I think of fallout I think meaningful choices. Even if small ones. But there is just none lol… and I’m a dialogue fiend but none is present 😭
I agree somewhat. It's better to meet each game on its own terms. But I think it's fair and reasonable for fans to have certain expectations of a franchise and Fallout 4 didn't hit some crucial marks for players who wanted an RPG.
@@DEBUGMODE for sure it's still a fallout but just objectively when i go to play either one i know that im getting 2 very different games in terms of the experience, i tend to take new vegas more seriously i don't mod it and think about my choices a lot more. with 4 my game is modded out it's ass and i go in there to shoot shit tbh lol
In my opinion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas's aesthetic overall far beats Fallout 4's. There's so much grit and edge to both of those games. It almost envelopes you into a different, somewhat alien world. Fallout 4 feels more natural, yet somehow, more bleak and uninteresting. I feel like a big part of that was the art direction for the game overall. It just makes me not want to explore and engage with the world as much as I would with Fallout 3 or New Vegas.
It's speculated that Billy hid in the fridge recently from nearby explosions. He never actually says he's been in there since the war. The way he and his parents act makes sense if he's only been gone a few days.
Several others have brought this up. The game is pretty clear that he's most likely been there since the Great War. He talks about hearing sirens, he mentions how the highways are destroyed now and everything is wrecked none of which is recent. The parents also have dialog strongly suggesting that it's been 200+ years. The fan theory makes more sense, of course but I think it's just excusing dumb writing. The game is not that subtle.
Your suggestion does a lot to help connect the game to prior themes of rebuilding, renewal, changing the path humanity is on away from war or heading right towards it, all over again and in turn, would have been a great follow-up to Lonesome Road. Carrying the better part of the old world on and leaving behind what destroyed it in the past where it belongs.
I personally loved fallout 4 but as someone who got introduced to the series through fallout 3 and NV I was so taken aback by the lack of narrative character freedom In the past games I could be anything! Courier and Vault Dweller were just titles, in fallout 4 I was just a parent despite how far I strayed, my whole purpose was to find my son and be a parent, my whole character was just Nora or Nate + so I’m glad you mentioned how predetermined everything felt aside from the ending
The damage that Minecraft had on AAA game design decisions from the early/mid 2010s isn't talked about much. Fallout 4, while fun, felt like they built an entry around that trend of crafting and building sometimes. I enjoyed the game and still do, but hopefully the next entry has much less of that.
I feel as if kid in the fridge is a better example than codsworth being around after 200 years Throughout the entirety of the franchise, we've seen robots that have lasted since the bombs have fallen on nuclear batteries and reactors. Codsworth has seen some wear and tear and is no longer in his pristine condition found at the intro
My problem isn't that Codsworth is still operational. My problem is that he has no apparent history in the intervening 200 years. That feels very artificial and, perhaps more importantly, incurious.
*Fallout 4* is so far my favorite, but what it stresses me out is the fact that it looks like an incomplete game. In my first Playthrough I totally ignored the building/settler parts, because it wasn't really what I was looking for, in the game. In my second run, I instead focused on that and it was actually fun, at the point that I didn't want to go too far with the story (because it become complicated, if you pass a certain point). But... yeah... both the normal gameplay and the buildings were stressful for all the bugs and the limitations I had to face. If it wasn't for the glitches you can abuse and for the mods the players had to come out themselves to fix issues and limitations, it wouldn't be enjoyable the same. Bethesda of course doesn't care at all to fix it, not even 10 years later, when they re-selled the same game, with a new aspect ratio and more bugs, calling it *"THE NEXT GEN UPDATE".*
Dude, I had the video tabbed out while going through Nexus building my next playthrough when you put on the Tiny Fallout Tilt Shift music and I thought my game had launched for some reason. That will always be my main menu replacer.
Honestly the Fallout 4 story and the amount of player choice isn't even that bad compared to New Vegas. The biggest issue is the world building and Bethesda's obsession with having the player rebuild broken factions. None of the Fallout 4 factions have any believable in universe explanation for how, or even why, they exist. The "200 years in the fridge" is a microcosm for their inept world building. How is everything still this fucked up after 200 years?
Fantastic analysis. I'm playing this game for the first time, and while I'm enjoying it, you point out a lot of the flaws and missed opportunities. This was a very fair review of everything!
I find it interesting that the feeling of disconnected-ness is also present in Skyrim and to a massively greater extent Starfield. Emil, the lead writer for the 3 games (Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield.), doesn't believe in design documents. Design documents are supposed to help with making sure worlds feel connected, that one team working on one thing doesnt step on the toes of another team and those teams can adequately work together to make the world feel connected and believable. What im getting at is that Emil can't write worlds or stories that have layers of stories within them. Bethesda's last good story was Oblivion. Fallout 3 was ok, but Bethesdas writing has only gotten worse over time.
Emil makes it incredibly, and I do mean incredibly, difficult for me to stick to the principle of ‘you can’t just blame one person for all the problems a project has.’ I think he genuinely peaked with Oblivion, but even when I was a kid, some of the story elements (The Dark Brotherhood questline at certain points) made me scratch my head. And hearing about the ‘no design document’ approach that PatricianTV pointed it, it really clicked for me-it explains why so many parts feel disconnected and inconsistent in Skyrim, FO4 and what I've heard of Starfield. Without a cohesive plan that the team agrees on and something they can reference from, it’s like everyone on the team is adding ingredients to a cake without knowing what they were baking. If the bakers don’t even know what the cake is supposed to look like, how can you fix it once it’s already baked? I just don’t think his stance of ‘the game is the design document’ holds up; it ends up with a product feeling more like a patchwork than a solid, cohesive story. And... the way he seems to view his own writing ability? It genuinely hurts me on a metaphysical level I didn’t even know existed. TL;DR, I agree. lol
@BigVorst He really does make it hard, I do think there is a greater management issue going on in Bethesda. However, it's a running theme that Bethesda games have lacked in writing quality since Emil became the head Writer.
Thank you for not just summarizing. Too many video "essays" get bogged down over explaining each plot/game beat. For me, I stipped playing 4 halfway through and played the entirety of Fallout 1&2, twice, and the difference in roleplay variety, conversation depth, and general atmosphere cohesion, made me weirdly salty towards every bethesda game. They just dont improve their games with each entry. Each game is a masterclass in "rolling back."
For me, the biggest problem with FO4 is that it's two completely different games smashed into each other and both games suffer as a consequence. The settlement/sim stuff is great, it's fun and engaging and can be it's own reward. The "proper" Fallout game is great as well, with many of the upgrades making up for some of the RP sacrificed. But they don't work together...without mods. And when I say "don't work together" I mean they fight each other for game time AND fight the game engine itself. Really. Just having a couple of well-built settlements can tank your game because the engine can't handle it. I'd love to play a Sim Settlements (yes, I know) Fallout game where THAT is the games priority. There could be minor questing and such like in NMS or something, but you're really focused on building and survival. That would be great. But I'd also really really like another proper Fallout adventure where those things are very limited in scope and are essentially optional tools for achieving optional goals. Like an expanded Hearthfire where it's mostly player homes with maybe a couple mid-sized plots you could build little towns in if you want. But as it stands, vanilla FO4 is a real mess. And from what I understand, the next-gen update broke it. I'm currently playing a mod collection called A Storywealth that is absolutely amazing and addresses pretty much all the issues you brought up as well as implementing some kind of wizard-tier madness that beefs up the engine in incredible ways. I think I'm 30 hours in and CTD once. That's crazy. It even gives multiple alternate storylines with ways to change the ending of the game including new factions and new ways for the factions to react to/interact with the other factions. You can even join and help rebuild the Enclave. It also includes the full Sim Settlements 2 suite which is amazing all on its own and has a much better story than the actual game. Longer, too, I think. Especially if you engage with the new characters, settlers and locations. Worth it. Highly recommend giving Nexus $7 for premium Vortex and giving it a shot. It doesn't fix Bethesda, but it sure as hell fixes FO4.
Bruh one of the only things i loved about f4 is the settlement building/management.😢 The New vegas fanboys all tell me to go play minecraft, so i had to tell them to go play Postal if they want to kill people without thinking.
I think what would have helped this game is a longer pre war section. Make it a week, and have a few things happen. One, vault tech guy, week makes it more believable they can get in the vault. Two, a small section to introduce base building as a core game mechanic, something small but enough to have players know the system is there. Three, enough interactions between Nate, Nora, and Shaun to give players a connection the game says is there. Now, it is a toss up whether this would work well. Idk for sure, but maybe it could have helped. And, for my overall thoughts on F4, I like it, in the same way I like Skyrim. I still play both games because they give me something not many other games do. In Skyrim, it’s the magic and exploring part of a fantasy setting I like. For F4, it’s partly the exploration of a post apocalyptic world, and the chance to roleplay a little with base building as trying to rebuild some part of the world. And it’s that last part I think F4 has as a strong suit, exploring pre war ruins, finding parts and supplies and old tech, so you can rebuild. At least, I feel it’s a strong part of the game. And that’s why I still play F4, at least part of why
That's a good question with many answers, I'm sure. I'd say it depends on what kind of player you are and what you're looking for out of the experience. It's a good starting point in that it's very accessible compared to the older games in terms of availability and gameplay conforming to more modern expectations. It's relatively easy to pick up and play. It's not a particularly good introduction into the Fallout universe, I don't think for reasons I mentioned in the video. And it's really lacking if you're looking for the roleplaying, player-choice-driven narrative content. Fallout 4 is kind of the pivot point between old and new Bethesda so it might be a decent introduction to Bethesda games as a whole, but again, it depends on what you're looking for and what primarily motivates you as a player. Personally I prefer Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas. But Fallout 4 has a lot of redeeming qualities and it definitely makes more of an impact than Starfield, sadly.
That's a fair point. For me, Skyrim is a pretty good balance of old and new Bethesda. But you're right that's where the traditional RPG mechanics really started to get simplified and it was the first game to have radiant (procedurally generated) quests.
I don't remember the name of the point of interest. It's the top of one of the tall buildings in the downtown area. You fight your way up and then there's a little boss fight at the top the reward is the power armor.
i try to have peace with fallout 4 four years now. I keep repeating the same patern i want to get everything and max all special stats. For years i been bussy with that like each time i reach level 60 or someting the game world just get so messy and buggy. I sweat the more you play the more fucked up the save file becomes and at some point i lost track of everything and the settlements are messy and i just stop for three months. JUST TO REPEAT IT ALL OVER AGAIN. since the release date. I only finished it once
I hate that i deleted my original character cause just like you ive only completed it once. But i have hundreds if not maybe a couple thousand hours just modding and having shootouts 😅
9:14 but also a character who didn’t leave where he was where the bombs fell. in an area filled with bandits and raiders, albeit there’s some towns. basically like billy’s parents i don’t see the problem. they went crazy never found their son and stayed put. doesn’t make sense if you don’t put yourself in their shoes
@@DEBUGMODE i can think of more ways they’re similar than different. but anyways yeah i do see a difference. but its really not that different enough to be angry about. game has a silly quest and people go rabble rabble
Yeah, we just disagree sharply on this point which is fine. The two are very superficially comparable if you ignore context. I'm not angry about the fridge kid mission. I'm disappointed by the way it harms my ability to buy into the world of the game. I think this quest would be way more forgivable if it acknowledged how goofy it was and if it was trying to be funny or silly or ironic because of course Fallout has a lot of knowingly goofy writing throughout the series.
@@DEBUGMODE i can just as well see your point and it convinced me until i thought of it positively. ghoul parents lost kid going mad. it doesn’t tell us what they did in the 200 years but “look for him” they could’ve partied and then missed him and felt all sorts of emotions. it may take you out but it takes me back in when i thought of this quest that way
38:59 It's hard to appreciate how much more effort it takes to build a game full of destroyed and broken down structures like FO4. Far, far more work spent on the models and maps.
It definitely sounds like FO4 with Sims Settlements 2-all three chapters could make it one of your favorite games, hehe. You should check it out. It adds dozens of hours of new content, quests, new workshop items and abilities, and it makes settlement building an integral part of the game! :)
Todd saw us playing Skyrim for 10 years and then interpreted that to mean that we WANT to play the same game for that long, rather than it being a simple function of Bethesda's release schedule.
I started playing around with it a little bit. I just don't think it's for me but I see the appeal. And besides, after making this video, I'm really ready to move on to something different for a while, haha.
With the billy the kid example, I just headcanon that he got stuck playing in there very recently, otherwise its too horrifying to contemplate (and also how would his parents not find him in 200 years if he was literally within a mile of them)
I initially played Fallout 3 prior to 4, but there were so many bugs + I found the graphics / third person mode so bad, I abandoned early. So, I really don’t know how good the game may have been. FO4 is the only one I played and completed, but I absolutely loved it. It’s probably one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.
34:14 genuinely, the strongest improvement bethesda has made to the looting UI is in Fallout 76, with the "Nearby Search" feature. I am admittedly a fallout 76 enjoyer, but Nearby Search takes away so much of the time and frustration of looting, and lets you do it all at once at the end of an activity. It's nice.
I think that functionality makes sense in a game that's built around repeatable "activities" but I suspect Bethesda didn't include it in Starfield because they don't think it's necessarily appropriate for a single player game. I think I agree. There's such a thing as too much abstraction and quality of life concession. It's probably not a big deal either way, I just think it's interesting they decided not to implement it in their latest game.
I remember spending the first 30 hours of my playthrough putting almost everything on hold for hours at a time to build Sanctuary up. Then I realized its all utterly pointless. I eagerly waited for the raiders to attack and for me to find out where my weaknesses were and to rebuild and all that jazz. Only for nothing to happen. Killed the game for me, it did. Killed it good. I played for another 7 hours and put down the game for 5 years until attempting it again 2 more times and never finishing the game
Great video the one thing I have to disagree with is the comment that the junk is not treasure or loot. There is a pre war version of everything in the game and I have always taken pride into finding almost all of them, including a couple of mini sized Nnukas that were scaled down to be held by teddy bears that never regain normal Size, that’s why it’s always good idea to drop all of your nukacola to check what you have I just think it’s an awesome additional thing to do for a play through is basically become a museum Director lol
Fallout 4 was my entry into the fallout series - I feel now that it's one of my least favorites mostly due to the story. Fallout 4 is at it's best when you turn your brain off and just shooty shooty; which really sucks in your RPG game. I am a person that mostly plays games for the stories. I can do bad game play/bugs for a good story but not verse versa. Anyway, Love your essay !! Your edits and composition is really cool :)
I'm with you to a certain extent but there are games where I'm okay with minimal story and awesome gameplay. Depends on the franchise or developer and my expectations for them. With Fallout it's definitely the former.
Fallout 4 is an extremely insecure game too, within the first 30 minutes of the game you are given dogmeat, power armor, a minigun, and a fight with a Deathclaw. It's like the game is screaming "look, I'm a Fallout game! Just like before! Please don't leave!"
i couldnt care less about being able to kill a deathclaw or getting power armor within the first hour of the game , by the time i got around playing fo4 i have killed many dozens of deathclaws and have seen what power armor and miniguns can do in the previous games , to me it was just another deathclaw
Adding to your thoughts on rebuilding settlements, I would have loved to see the settlers repairing any existing structures over time but letting you build new structures as you like. I totally agree that nation building would have been fantastic. Personally, I'd like to see games that drop the old "chosen one" trope and let you uncover stories in your own time and decide how they apply to you.
i dont understands peoples complaints about cities and urban areas being made of facades, under no reasonable circumstance should any videogame protagonist be able to break into anyones house, i am constantly being told to lock my door at night lest i get robbed, killed or wake up with some drunk stranger either on my couch or in my bed because they dont realise they are in the wrong house. an open world game neccesitates realistic closed civilized areas.
![[Mr Caption] No Todds, No Masters critique Fallout 4 (reupload)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zbaa2P9qL40/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Mr Caption] No Todds, No Masters critique Fallout 4 (reupload)](/img/tr.png)
Hey babe, sorry I can’t go out tonight. A 1-hour video about a 9 year old game from a youtuber I’ve never heard about just dropped
Just turn on debug mode :)
Fallout 4
Look for son
Become Land Developer
Nukes son.
It just works.
It just works.
It just works.
Plagiarist!
The building isn't the best, the economy should have been worked on me. And then it could have been great. Cause atm you can build some cool economy, drug farms, water baron type things. But the only thing you can buy is mass money.
The story isn't great. It'd have been better as a settlement managment game.
Honestly the beginning would’ve been a lot better if you find codsworth all broken down and your first quest is to get him working again; scrambling to try and save the last piece of your old life.
Yeah, that's much better. Would also go along with the game's theme of rebuilding... I mean it's a mostly optional theme since you don't have to do settlements, but it's there.
@@DEBUGMODE I mean most of the main factions are attempting to rebuild in some way. BoS/MM want the institute out of the way so they can start rebuilding the commonwealth, and the institute wants to build their own future for themselves
You may not like it, but the Idea that Codsworth is doing the same thing 200 years later is at least internally consistent. You find robots all over the setting that are hanging out, doing their jobs like the war never happened. Some have developed gllitches or accumulated wear and tear, but a lot haven't they're ghosts of Pre-war america, rolling, walking, or hovering around the same as when they were first assembled. Sure, some of them have active mechanics or have been upgraded/changed by wastelanders, but again, many haven't, even in 3 and New Vegas. Why should Codsworth be any different?
I have the same problem with the other independently operated robots like the ones at Greygarden. If your setting has roving gangs of raiders and militia, it hurts credulity to have a bunch of relatively defenseless robots hanging around for 200 years with no human intervention. The USS Constitution robots are more plausible because they're heavily armed. But the quest there is explicitly about a gang of humans trying to take them out. So even those ones are targets.
Again, as with all my small complaints, none of them ruin anything individually. But collectively they poke holes in the plausibility of the world.
For while I thought codsworth was fixed by the institute and left there to help protect and spy on the player before I found out the institute has spy birds
I've learned to love Fallout 4 as a FPS adventure game with RPG elements and base building as oppose to a RPG.
The shoot -> loot -> build triangle works really well for me. I don't even meet Preston and just destroy, then rebuild in my honor. A tier game if you see it in a different light
@@DS-ej7zt Absolutely. Agree. :)
Yup
I can't get over the fact that they just changed it from what Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, and Skyrim was to what you described without telling the fans or even acknowledging the change. It's like being promised a vehicle from your parents when you graduate college and they get you an electric scooter because you live in the city. It's just not anything close to what was expected in the years leading up.
Role-Playing Game. Role: Survivor of a Nuclear Apocalypse. Game: Kill enemies, Complete quests, and craft for experience points, items, and currency.
Everything else is your own arbitrary definitions that don't work when you apply them evenly and historically. Final Fantasy 6 is an RPG. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is an RPG. Sports games are RPGs.
I rarely comment but I just wanted to say I watched from start to finish without pause. I highly like the way you compose your essays and edit your videos.
Thank you! That's very kind. I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Paid glazer
Its so weird looking at this game without survival mode. It feels so much better paced with it on, that its suprising it was only added later on.
For example, no fast travel makes base building more important. And some of the less "nice" factions become a lot more apealing, purely out of practicality considering vertibirds and the teleporter.
Having a few bases where food, water, and ammo (that has weight on that difficulty) are stored is a lifesaver, especcially toward the south and east of the map, where towns are a lot less common.
I get the appeal in theory. I like the survival genre but in the case of a game as big as Fallout 4, I think a hybrid ruleset would be a little more palatable for more people.
I bought FO4 on release and bounced off it after loving 3. Last year i gave it another go on survival and i LOVED it. exploration felt so organic, and the world felt so detailed and deadly. Laying out a plan and then heading out into the wasteland really feels like a journey with no fast travel, and the need to eat, sleep etc. People criticize the graphics (even on release) but i feel they hold up quite well.
My only issue with survival was no saving. The game crashed far too much or was too buggy at times
@@SloopJohnB91I only play with the Frost survival mod now. Gets rid of all the crappy dialogue, including the main quest entirely, and is just about surviving during a nuclear winter. It turns mediocre FO4 into a masterpiece.
31:45
A note.
The "Scrapper" perk in the intelligence tree makes searching for whatever components you need rather easy. It highlights objects that contain your desired crafting material in the same color of your UI to make scavenging for specific things a lot more quick.
Yes, I took that at some point. It can be helpful, but it's not a complete fix by any means. And I don't love the way the item highlight looks. It's very gamey and artificial.
and bethsoft still did it wrong. It highlights multiple mats even if i have many of all but 1 of them. I dont need them all to be lit i need the 1 i dont have
Settlement building is my favorite way to turn off my brain and relax
Really? I always found it too fiddly to be relaxing in that way. You must be really good at it.
@@DEBUGMODE i don't think I'm any good at it lol. I just like making stuffs lol
the better version is the original mod for FNV called Real Time Settler
@@DEBUGMODE There's a mod called 'place anywhere' that gets rid of the weird collision problems. I've spent hundreds of hours settlement building. The DLC that adds cement walls is great for building castles.
Try satisfactory
the courier does NOT have amnesia
there are multiple times where dialouge options in new vegas prove the courier remembers their past
for example, when speaking with bruce isaac, the courier can mention watching him perform at the shark tank, meaning if the player chooses this option the courier has visited new reno and remembers it.
there's also the lady killer option in the conversation with the lonesome drifter where the courier asks his age, implying they hooked up a woman and are afraid that the lonesome drifter could be their son that they abandoned.
while these dialouge choices are optional the fact that they are options implies that the courier does remember their own past.
I don't think amnesia has to be comprehensive and total loss of memory, but I'm not sure of the precise medial definition. I was using the term as shorthand for the storytelling device employed to essentially give you a clean slate to work with.
I disagree, what the player character remembers is completely up to the player.
Playing with 1 int is optional is the courier brain damaged too?
Optional decisions are only reflective of your own character not the courier's story.
@@Plight_ i was going to say the same just now. its specifically set up to allow you to completely ignore certain thins if you want, like how you arent forced to follow benny in the slightest. the game nudes you towards it, and its written and designed to give players a balanced experience which progressively gets more challenging, but it alllows you to do whatever you want and the story will naturally pick up steam when you enter the strip. its something that endlessly frustrates me about people who claim the game railroads you. because not only does it not do that, but if you want, you never even have to see benny ever again after the intro
@@Helperbot-2000 the only people that would make that argument are Bethesda zealots, They cannot be reasoned with.
"Fallout new Vegas is empty and boring"
"The map is one big railroad"
I heard it all before
@@Plight_ yeah, exactly
Pretty much everything you described in the “fixing fallout 4” chapter is in the mod Sim Settlements 2. uncannily so lmao
I had never heard of that mod when I wrote that section. I think it's just an obvious direction to take the settlement stuff if you want to marry it with a player-driven story.
I refuse to play this game without it, it really is a gamechanger in the best way possible.
One great aspect of Falllout 4 is how it proves that a good open world doesnt mean "big open spaces", it means density of content, its a shame that Bethesda forgot that aspect with the 4x times emptier FO76 and of course Starfield, Fallout 4 was the last good bethesda game when it comes to level and world design.
Obs: This video is amazing :)
Yeah, for sure. I think you can have some big, open spaces to add variety to a map, but the overall quality content has to be there. I actually think Fo76 is a nice map in some ways. I like the overall flow and design. I like the regional variety. But the way almost everything in that game is geared toward linear quest lines and live service events is such a bummer.
If bethesda is the master of anything till fo4 it would be designing unique, tangible identity to each level or content zone they create on all level. Even the endless draugr dungeon in skyrim feel better to play than most other open world dungeon despite the major shortcoming in gameplay. If bethesa make those PoIs 2 time further from each other, the enjoyment wouldnt change much. It's the samey nondescript content for the sake of contents design starfield and other open world have that hamper enjoyment, not the density of a bethesda game.
Totally. The exploration is a symbiotic relationship between the unique POIs and the in between spaces. Starfield kinda flubbed both. Bethesda games are the strongest when both of those are working in tandem. It's magical when that happens.
The whole point of Bethesda games was to provide a detailed map full of interesting things for years of adventuring. That, and a "passable" engine that happens to be great for modding. You really don't want to get stuck in their awkward idea of sufficient mechanics and depth. Which is why it's awesome they also provide the best tools for creating your version of those things, freely.
Morrowind still had the depth, but a whole lot of it was broken and dysfunctional anyways. So mods still had an essential part, provided you like your game to work as intended.
Starfield's instance system is kind of great for modding as well. Now you can produce modded worlds to keep adding to that pool of unique things to explore. But they won't collide the same way that modded locations on a single map do. The game itself is quite lacking, though. It has the potential for great things, but it's a different matter if people care enough to dedicate to it. Because Starfield kinda sucks to begin with.
I don’t think the PCs count as vault dwellers. In every other case the term implies that they lived in a vault and have a unique perspective and history from that, while Nate/Nora basically time travelled to present day unchanged.
Good point. They're vault dwellers only in the sense that they're wearing the jumpsuit and don't know anything of the wasteland to start with.
Of course Nate/Nora count as vault dwellers. They spend 200 years in a vault then leave it to explore the wasteland for the first time - that's a textbook vault dweller, frozen or not. Multiple characters even call you a "vault dweller" in the story. Piper and Paladin Danse are the two that come to mind. The title doesnt imply any of the things you said, that's your own headcanon.
@ no, they didn’t live in the vault. They were frozen there. Nate had spent less than a day conscious in the vault. Go be a jackass somewhere else
Keep it civil, please.
I don't think it does any good to get caught up in semantics. The point is Nate/Nora aren't like other vault dwellers who have been inculcated by Vault Tec's program and in insular culture from actually living in the vault. Associating that with the term "vault dweller" isn't headcanon, it's basic comprehension of the information presented.
on the settlement system, there is an unintended (i think) benefit, if you set up caravan lines, the settlers will clear out encounters along their route, if you settle the full map, it becomes much safer to travel (i enjoyed playing in survival mode in which this really really matters) and you can get fast travel in hardcore either via vertibird grenades or teleport ones depending on who you align with
That's cool. Probably unintended, as you said, but it's a benefit of the semi-simulational approach Bethesda games take.
@@DEBUGMODEthe one thing that's always popped off in games made by Bethesda and their subsidiaries are emergent worlds driven by interacting systems, making them feel like they could go on without you. It's a shame then that Bethesda has shied more and more away from this, because as we've seen from games like MGSV and BotW, that factor ironically makes your interactions with the world feel so much more consequential. Fallout 4 easily could have had so much going for it to result in a timeless immersive sim experience, but instead shallowed those things in favor of a broad appeal; especially ironic since the thing which put Bethsoft on the map was their application of an open world to the immersive sim formula of Ultima Underworld. It feels cut off not only from the roots of Black Isle's Fallout, but of Bethesda's own roots theirselves.
Amazing video man. Fo4 is such an equally fulfilling and unfulfilling game and you encapsulated that perfectly. Great job I’m shocked this hasn’t gotten more views.
Thank you so much!
Equally fulfilling and unfulfilling is a really good way of putting it!
20:17 Honestly, I kind of liked the brief moments when the player character would mention something about a location pre-war, or how their past life related to it. I guess I don't mind playing an RPG with a character that isn't 100% made up by me. I just wish the writing in FO4 had been a bit better about that.
Great video! Fallout 4 is one of my favorite games, I’ve probably put more hours into it than any other game. I just love settlement building and the world design is incredible, even today there’s things I haven’t found like all the bottle messages washed up on shore 👍
5:38 "...like Philip Fry's dog..."
Me: erupts in sobbing
That episode of Futurama. It just HITS.
Fnv definitely has my heart but when I want to play a shooter with rpg mechanics, I play fo4. When I want to play a solid post apocalyptic rpg, I play fnv
I’m just curious what you like so much about NV? I found it to be more of a Western than post-apocalyptic, personally. And the characters were all incredibly forgettable for me. I just feel like maybe I’m missing something? I know it has a lot of fans, so surely I’m just not getting something.
@@tarabooartarmy3654it’s honestly mainly the dlcs in my opinion they add a ton of lore to the base game and just make them really replay-able new Vegas is far from a perfect game it just had really good aspects of a rpg that isn’t as dumb down as Skyrim and fallout 4
@@tarabooartarmy3654its better than 4 in literally every way. Forgettable? I cant remember a single npc in 4 cause they have no backgrounds. Its a favorite cause its good
Forgettable? Did we play the same game? I thought all the followers were pretty memorable, as are key characters in the main story, as well as the DLCs.@@tarabooartarmy3654
@@mediokay Hell no new vagas is better in every way possible. Falllout 4 has superior gunplay, enviorment, worldbuilding and adventure elements when NV has a very good story. I share the the same opinion as him, when i want a game with good gunplay, good enviorment and a ok story i play fallout 4, when i want a game with hilariously bad graphics and a good story i play fnv (i have actually played it unlike most FNV ctitics).
As someone with a complicated relationship with Fallout 4, I feel like you've articulated my feelings about it really well. It has glaring problems, but there is a lot to like here, and it bodes really well for the future of the franchise if Bethesda continues to refine their new style. I first played fallout 4 eight years ago, and coming back to it now, I can appreciate the love that went into crafting that piece of art and enjoy it despite it's flaws.
In simple terms it's a game where you play the extremely predefined role of Nata or Nora and collect junk in dangerous, wacky locations. That can be fun.
Damn dude, you absolutely killed it with the editing and writing for this video, I’m shocked you don’t have more subs. Hope to see more cool shit like this from you :)
I subbed for this video!
What’s that quote? “Gamers will optimize the fun out of your game if you let them.” Fo4’s crafting system seems uniquely designed in that you condition yourself to stare at the floor rooting around in trash all the time, so much so that it can interfere with your enjoyment of the game.
So true, Fo4 got me memorising each junk item and what their scrap materials are.
When you contrast it with fallout new vegas's optional crafting system that can be fun to mess around with it becomes how clear how bad of an idea it was to frame a huge part of the game around base building and resource management.
The crafting in vegas is very deliberate with its perk/skill investments for some of the really fun stuff you can mess around with. Like comically overpowered chems or home made nuclear landmines or incredibly strong healing items. I still remember making my first microfusion cell cluster and thinking it would be a great idea to throw them at a deathclaw directly infront of my face. Fallout 4 doesn't really have any fun stuff like this with its crafting system
@@burdenofexisting6886 honestly it’s impressive how the core loop of fo4 pushes you to play in such a tedious and unfun style
I think the crafting and resource management is one of the few genuinely good parts of Fallout 4, and could have been a lot better if the settlement and faction system on top of it was meaningful. Regardless, it's an almost entirely optional system, it's up to the player how they interact with it.
This reminds me of all the Fo4 playthroughs I'd start up where the first 15-20 minutes was just me scrapping all of sanctuary and red rocket to spam shelves to level up. Boy oh boy did I know how to waste my fuckin time doing the least fun gameplay in the world 😂
i think Bethesda made a typo where the sole survivor wakes up it should say it passed 20 years instead of 200, because that's how the world looks and how they designed it or whoever wrote the story have zero idea what 200 years is for a house made out of sheet steel and plenty of cars are not even rusted and have rubber tires and interiors next to intact
They made the mistake of moving the timeline way out in Fallout 3 and the series has just had to roll with that since.
Fallout 1 was set less than 100 years after the bombs and that game is more about the new societies built on the ashes than Bethesda's games where they still want to maintain the aesthetic of a bombed out world even though it's been such a long time at this point.
32:48 explains whey resident evil has the perfect inventory management system in my eyes. It's small, fun to manage, and very efficient with what you can and can't carry.
It's a great system for certain kinds of games. I especially like the RE4 grid system. That's been used very effectively in immersive sims and tactical shooters. I don't think that would work with Bethesda games though. They're not designed for a super limited inventory and they're such different kinds of games overall.
New Vegas was the tipping point for me I played fallout 4 first and had the exact same issue, the game never pulled me into it. I played New Vegas after about a year from my first fallout 4 experience and the difference was jarring. Sure the Gun play wasn't the greatest but the characters I met and the enemies I thought were awesome and felt like they actually had a purpose. Take Ghost Town Gun Fight and The Man Out of Time Quest. The Powder Gangers have a reason to both be there and attack the town, as well as the player being able to pass speech checks with people in the town before the fight begins to gear up the towns folk and prepare for battle. Man Out of Time is you just being told to go to Concord to look for people and the Minutemen have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time(had the Sole Survivor not shown up) The Raiders have no reason to be there besides the plot, and don't even get me started on the cucking of Deathclaws, from Wasteland Legend that was thought to be myth, able to chase down players in seconds, to hah minigun go brrrrrrrrrr.
I know. The difference in the writing and worldbuilding is huge.
As I was wrapping this video up, I dipped back into NV to get some more footage after having not played for months and I was immediately struck by how much more I cared about what was going on in that game than in FO4.
Honestly FO3 and NV were the peak 2d to 3d
4 and 76 just didnt capture that feel
1 through tactics 2d had their own charms.
You're right for the most part but the raiders do have a reason to be there
In the mission that sends you to the corvega assembly plant your able to read to a terminal of a raider boss who was looking Mama Murphy one entries says he sent a group to concord because he saw them on their way there
@@metalpotatoe537 1 retroactive in later development terminal entry does not a story make. it takes 3 minutes to add a note in game, it doesn't show any care for the plot.
I came at it from the opposite end: I tried to play Fallout 3. I've been to Megaton half a dozen times over the years, and even went further than that on one occasion. New Vegas really sucked me in, and it's on that basis that I kept going back to try Fallout 3. Surely it can't be that different, right? After all, New Vegas is basically just a standalone expansion for Fallout 3. When they released Fallout 4, it was distinctly Fallout 3 the Second. I did get to the end, but I didn't love it like New Vegas.
Loving how indi my algorithm has been keep it up hopefully I'll be manipulated back for your next video
Videos like this make me grateful that I am easily entertained. I've got over a thousand hours in FO4 since I started it this year and I'm still not done with it. I was looking for something that would hook me as hard as Skyrim and FO4 did that.
That’s really great ! It sucks when you start looking for more fulfilling games or forms of entertainment, I remember when that switch flipped for me 😭😭
but if you can still enjoy stuff then still do, your experience is the only one that counts anyway !
nah its not easily entertained or a switch in my opinion, i just believe that you made peace with the ‘video games will have video game-y mechanics’ and got hooked on what was there. I have a sibling who looks at games like these and see wasted potential; i see each game offering something different and unique and if its well rounded enough then it has me.
Very well put! You acknowledge the game's strengths, and weaknesses; offering comparisons to similar games from the time, and since.
All of this well-organized and organic, broken up into segments for easy digestion and reference.
It's kind of a shame bethesda moved past this. Making games with good executions but glaringly unmet ambitions, games that nobody will ever stop talking about. Now they're making starfield.
Yeah. We'll see how long they stick with Starfield and what lessons they take from its reception. Shattered Space isn't turning it around for them.
The ironic thing for me is I was a junk hoarder before junk had value and would pick up fuckloads of bottles and tin cans back in Fallout 3 and New Vegas because 1 cap is 1 cap and pretty much any other game that made junk items have a value like in Elder Scrolls as I did the same with Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind. Plus it gives me more reasons to walk around to pick things up, or too go home to drop things off or to town to sell off my junk more often. Some games ill even collect things without value for the fun of it especially if I was actually in this position I would collect them either because they would have a use for me, or because I used to collect random ass things and some things gave the right kind of neuron connection go brrr to collect. To this effect it took me ages to ever learn how awful a grind people found the junk collecting because the circles I have been in either did not care like me either for one reason or another, or they just saw it as a given and did not bring up what they saw as a very, very dead horse.
7:46 there's a pretty reasonable in-game explanation for the kid in a fridge quest, which is that he was trapped in during the attack on quincy. It's definitely still bad writing, and yeah the parents living 2 blocks down the road from a massive gunner base is also bad, but it's not entirely presented as "this kid had been in this fridge for 200 years
Through modding, i've turned Fallout 4 from a RPG/FPS hybrid to a gun porn post apocalypse survival milsim / collectathon, all with every texture retextured into something more high res, with beautiful animations and much more, pretty much all from the ground up.
The one good thing that i can REALLY REALLY say about fallout 4 is through modding, it can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. Its just up to you to make your own fun, and its up to you to make your own dream fallout, whatever that is.
As much i love Fallout 4, i cant help but think Bethesda just wanted it to be a "refined" Fallout 3 rather than follow the roots of NV, the story and gameplay and everything. Even if i also like FO3 on its own, its still a really basic fallout game, compared to smth like NV. NV not only has decently balanced and interesting rpg mechanics, story and choices that affect the ending, but also the additions to the gunplay, like different ammo types, modifications etc, with the only problem with NV's gunplay is just the gunplay itself. Still, alot of which NV's improvements and stuff future fallouts couldve improved upon is jsut missing in FO4. Is it any wonder people download mods to make feel like an improved Fallout NV
Its even more disappointing on Bethesda's end when Obsidian was able to make NV (even in broken state) in 18 months with a terribly outdated engine while Bethesda was given 4 years to cook up smth good for 4, which they didnt.
Again, there is stuff to like in FO4, the settlement system, the updated gunplay but really, i wished Bethesda just didnt have a vendetta against NV and actually improve from what Obsidian had left out to do
I wholeheartedly agree with the NV praise.
I think the idea that Bethesda hates NV or Obsidian is overblown. Just because they have a different philosophy for making games doesn't mean they have animosity for the developers of NV.
The fact that Obsidian made NV in 18 months is absolutely incredible. But they were only able to do that because they were building on Bethesda's FO3/Oblivion technology base and were able to reuse a lot of assets and systems. They obviously had to do some technical work, but so much more of their production time could be dedicated to content and to tweaking an existing template to suit their vision. And their vision was awesome.
Big game dev in general takes much longer now. This is true pretty much across the industry. And I think it's a problem for a lot of developers because the games taking longer leads to fans expecting more and often being disappointed.
Bethesda doesn't have a "vendetta" against NV. It's a corporate videogame company, not some kind of mafia lol.
To them, New Vegas is just a pretty successful spin off and they were never obligated to follow its' formula. They have their own playstyle formula, which is just as successful in terms of sales, ratings and player attraction, so they decided to stick with that in Fallout 4. Seeing how Fallout 4 is the most profitable fallout game by far, I'm sure they're okay with it.
Regarding the pre war intro pacing, when should have had at least one days length quest or cutscene to feel the passage of time. That would have made the whole vault TEC registration more believable.
I agree. There could have been some creatively designed tasks for us to do to learn certain mechanics.
Having a dream of your pre-war days each time you complete an act of the main storyline would have both made you feel closer to your spouse and Shaun, and give you more urgency, hell they could even slap a small battle scene in there.
Enderal did it masterfully imho.
The only believable thing to do would have the player's family and the entire community pre-registered for Vault 111. The town is literally called Sanctuary, the experiment being that Vault-Tec has attempted to create the ideal community to transport into the future using cryogenics.
Im playing through FO4 for the first time (never played any of the others.) I personally REALLY liked how quickly the passage of time goes in the cryochamber. I'm not too far in but I seriously have no idea how much time passed in between both events. From a totally new players perspective this gives me both a reason to look for my son, maybe. Or realize he's completely dead opening me up to the roleplay of adapting to an absolutely demolished world.
Imo fallout 4 with mods is one of if not the best game ever made it’s literally whatever you want it to be and with the addition of mods this game can literally be anything you can imagine its literally the only game where you can create your own game
It's whatever you want it to be, but you'll always be funneled to being a mother/father looking for a baby
Facts
What you're actually praising is the creation engine, and the modding communities' ability to manipulate and refine it
minecraft still beats fallouut 4
You forgot Skyrim. Both Skyrim and FO4 can be turned into literal masterpieces with the right modding and tweaking. The Skyrim Wabbajack pack "LoreRim" or the Skyrim mod list "Invicta" speak for themselves, I'd say. I am currently running Fallout 4 with my own mod pack and 1170 active mods. It's a gem, but I literally changed or improved every aspect of the base game, from quests, to weapons, to visuals and anything else. Took me a long time to do so.
Good video man, subscribed
I’ve played a lot of FO4 but never even got into the institute. Usually what happens is I’ll be burned out and run out of steam from base building and xp grinding and I’ll stop playing
Thank you!
I don't love the Institute because I don't necessarily feel like it goes with the sci-fi flavor that Fallout usually trades in, but it's worth getting there and exploring at least once. It's so different from everything else in the game and there's some neat stuff there.
Thanks for all the hard work that you clearly put into this! 👍
EDIT: Subbed
This was an absolutely wonderful video. I hope to see more videos like this!
I love fallout 4 so much, I’m heavily bias, it was my first game, but I have thousands of hours in it, most of that settlement building
Here to boost the algorithm. Thanks for making long form content bro, hope you blow up.
Thanks for watching long form content!
Hey buddy, amazing analysis and channel, don’t give up, it will pick up, just be patient, you doing an awesome job! Keep it up!
algortihm has worked wonders here. congratulations on blowing up
The rhythm of how you read your scripts reminds me somewhat of Noah Gervais's video essay vocal delivery style. Great video man, looking forward to what you make next
Thank you! I take that as a huge complement. Noah Gervais is my favorite games essayist. He's a big inspiration.
Fallout 4 has flaws but it’s a very redeemable game. Better than every single Ubislop game.
I probably agree.... ? There's maybe a Far Cry or two that I would put on a similar level but they're such different things.
fc3 is right there lol
I would've argued a decade ago about FC3 being good because at release it was a breath of fresh air, but in hindsight it was the beginning of the problems.
I would like the scrap mechanic a lot more with a few small changes.
Reduce the amount of scrap categories, merge some of the categories. Copper, Steel, Lead, Aluminum, Gold and Silver into Metals. Ceramic and Concrete into Stone. Gears, Screws, Springs, circuits and military grade circuits into just Technology. 31 loot categories can be reduced so much without loosing anything just by making the similar things into the same thing, i dont care if something is made out of Aluminum or Steel, in the end they are both serving trays.
I would also make all the junk items automatically be turned into their components without any jank shenanigans.
Totally agree. It's a little strange that they made so many types of resources. I understand having more and less rare materials but you don't need so many categories to do that.
All I wanted after so many hours looking for more glue was a damn horse farm to uhhm...
Maybe turning raiders into glue instead would be better received..
I kind of disagree on this one. Having lots of loot categories makes the system more believable and gates higher tier items. Low grade weapons use steel, higher grade use aluminum. Electrical equipment requires copper. The key for making the system fun long term is allowing the player to "progress the tech tree" so to speak. At a certain point, the player should be able to delegate resource gathering and manufacturing to settlements and settlers and have passive income for all materials.
We Share all the same opinions of fallout and weirdly I got the urge to go back same as yourself. Always been a Fallout 3/NV guy and I was so excited for Fallout 4 and felt it just let us all down. But I'm glad to see others are making this pilgrimage to make peace with it.
Also hands down one for the best video essays on Fallout I've ever watched, was searching for tips on building settlements for all things and stumbled upon this video. 1 hour later I'm so glad I watched it, to think you have under 1k subs is mind boggling to me. I was fully expecting in 300k mark and was so pleasantly surprised. You should be very proud as this was an amazing Video, thank you for taking the time to make it!
Really good takes ! Diving into the rest of your videos , keep up the great work
I got a love hate relationship with the encumberance system. It's necessary for a survival/apocalypse type game like fallout.
1. You will ruin the economics of the game if you can carry everything like you said. Because you have unlimited ammo, heals, junk armors and weapons to sell on whim. You Effectively have kinda a demi god mode on. You aren't invincible, but youll never be hurting for supplies.
2. I always felt the 3D fallout games have just too low of a weight limit for how much useful stuff that is around. Even with max strength, you can only carry a couple hundred pounds of equipment. While in real life you probably wouldnt be able to reliably carry that much, in a video game it's just not enough. Especially if bullets and aid items have weight ontop of armor and weapons which are super heavy by themselves. Stack misc resource items ontop of that, and you'll be struggling with carry weight the whole game.
Recently with on my chars in fallout 3, NV, and 4, I just give myself alot more carryweight. It's just too tedious to be juggling the weight capacity as you explore and fight. It never really messes you up in combat, just kind of slows you down while you loot after you cleared an area.
You gotta stop, fast travel or sprint to a base/house/ place to store your stuff, then travel back to that area to finish looting. It's just time consuming.
This is a really excellent video. Subscribed
The best way to fix fallout 4 is to either fix the nextgen update or let you uninstall it
It's a shame they don't support their games better, yeah. My understanding is that you can downgrade on Steam but it's harder on other platforms.
Wow, this was a really good exposition on what makes Fallout, well, Fallout. I really enjoyed this! Well done.
I’m replaying fallout 4 now actually and I must say I agree with mostly everything you’ve said. It is the best gameplay wise. But it was a struggle for me. The first act of the game is a slog… it’s just so slow… so much walking… then mid game happens and the more linear aspect starts to slightly fade and I can enjoy the fun combat with a leveled character and some of the side quests are genuinely really fun for me. Nicks story and personal quest plus the extra bits with the far harbor dlc make that among one of my favorite parts. The story of curie is really sweet. Paladin dance to me is a really interesting character and his synth identity reveal adds a lot to the brotherhood story for me which says a lot cuz it isn’t really much… I find the brotherhood just super boring in fallout 4 so really anything could add to it lol. Also I can’t lie… soemthing that’s helped me play this again is by kinda just going fast. I wanted to play fallout in reverse. I’ve played all of them except the OG and 2. And fallout 4 is the worst to me not bc it’s actually “the worst” but it’s just kinda boring… playing the very very first time when I was 16 in highschool was amazing. Loved this game. But I’ve been spoiled by game pass which has allowed me to play older games as well as some modern classics in the rpg category. In contrast it just makes it so so so hard to replay. I’m getting into it now. But that’s cuz I’m level 50 with cool weapons now and power armor I never leave behind lol. It’s fun… NOW lol… the first 16 hours I won’t do again tbh :/. This is my last time playing fallout 4 simply cuz the first act is just painfully slow and uneventful. Fallout new vegas even in the opening at good spring ur choices matter. Whereas in fallout 4 ur choices don’t really matter AT ALL till the end lol. Which in of itself like you said isn’t a issue. But when I think of fallout I think meaningful choices. Even if small ones. But there is just none lol… and I’m a dialogue fiend but none is present 😭
Incredibly well made! A great listen while I farm smithing levels in Skyrim!
honestly play 4 for one experience and new vegas for its own experience feel like that aren't that comparable outside of being fallout titles
I agree somewhat. It's better to meet each game on its own terms. But I think it's fair and reasonable for fans to have certain expectations of a franchise and Fallout 4 didn't hit some crucial marks for players who wanted an RPG.
@@DEBUGMODE for sure it's still a fallout but just objectively when i go to play either one i know that im getting 2 very different games in terms of the experience, i tend to take new vegas more seriously i don't mod it and think about my choices a lot more. with 4 my game is modded out it's ass and i go in there to shoot shit tbh lol
In my opinion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas's aesthetic overall far beats Fallout 4's. There's so much grit and edge to both of those games. It almost envelopes you into a different, somewhat alien world. Fallout 4 feels more natural, yet somehow, more bleak and uninteresting. I feel like a big part of that was the art direction for the game overall. It just makes me not want to explore and engage with the world as much as I would with Fallout 3 or New Vegas.
It's speculated that Billy hid in the fridge recently from nearby explosions. He never actually says he's been in there since the war. The way he and his parents act makes sense if he's only been gone a few days.
Several others have brought this up. The game is pretty clear that he's most likely been there since the Great War. He talks about hearing sirens, he mentions how the highways are destroyed now and everything is wrecked none of which is recent. The parents also have dialog strongly suggesting that it's been 200+ years.
The fan theory makes more sense, of course but I think it's just excusing dumb writing. The game is not that subtle.
Your suggestion does a lot to help connect the game to prior themes of rebuilding, renewal, changing the path humanity is on away from war or heading right towards it, all over again and in turn, would have been a great follow-up to Lonesome Road. Carrying the better part of the old world on and leaving behind what destroyed it in the past where it belongs.
Emil needs to put his pen down
I personally loved fallout 4 but as someone who got introduced to the series through fallout 3 and NV I was so taken aback by the lack of narrative character freedom
In the past games I could be anything! Courier and Vault Dweller were just titles, in fallout 4 I was just a parent despite how far I strayed, my whole purpose was to find my son and be a parent, my whole character was just Nora or Nate + so I’m glad you mentioned how predetermined everything felt aside from the ending
Dude how do you have 932 subs. Your content is so well made. Keep ts up man
There’s a lot to dislike about fallout 4 but there’s also a lot to love
The damage that Minecraft had on AAA game design decisions from the early/mid 2010s isn't talked about much. Fallout 4, while fun, felt like they built an entry around that trend of crafting and building sometimes. I enjoyed the game and still do, but hopefully the next entry has much less of that.
I feel as if kid in the fridge is a better example than codsworth being around after 200 years
Throughout the entirety of the franchise, we've seen robots that have lasted since the bombs have fallen on nuclear batteries and reactors.
Codsworth has seen some wear and tear and is no longer in his pristine condition found at the intro
My problem isn't that Codsworth is still operational. My problem is that he has no apparent history in the intervening 200 years. That feels very artificial and, perhaps more importantly, incurious.
very nicely put together video, well done!
*Fallout 4* is so far my favorite, but what it stresses me out is the fact that it looks like an incomplete game.
In my first Playthrough I totally ignored the building/settler parts, because it wasn't really what I was looking for, in the game.
In my second run, I instead focused on that and it was actually fun, at the point that I didn't want to go too far with the story (because it become complicated, if you pass a certain point).
But... yeah... both the normal gameplay and the buildings were stressful for all the bugs and the limitations I had to face.
If it wasn't for the glitches you can abuse and for the mods the players had to come out themselves to fix issues and limitations, it wouldn't be enjoyable the same.
Bethesda of course doesn't care at all to fix it, not even 10 years later, when they re-selled the same game, with a new aspect ratio and more bugs, calling it *"THE NEXT GEN UPDATE".*
couple more years and people will start understanding the perfection of the dialogue system and how fallout for is the greatest game of all time
Dude, I had the video tabbed out while going through Nexus building my next playthrough when you put on the Tiny Fallout Tilt Shift music and I thought my game had launched for some reason. That will always be my main menu replacer.
Excellent longform video game documentaries, with only 1K subs? You bastards, I'm in!
Honestly the Fallout 4 story and the amount of player choice isn't even that bad compared to New Vegas. The biggest issue is the world building and Bethesda's obsession with having the player rebuild broken factions. None of the Fallout 4 factions have any believable in universe explanation for how, or even why, they exist. The "200 years in the fridge" is a microcosm for their inept world building. How is everything still this fucked up after 200 years?
boy you deserve so much more! very good quality keep on keeping on!!
Fantastic analysis. I'm playing this game for the first time, and while I'm enjoying it, you point out a lot of the flaws and missed opportunities. This was a very fair review of everything!
I find it interesting that the feeling of disconnected-ness is also present in Skyrim and to a massively greater extent Starfield.
Emil, the lead writer for the 3 games (Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield.), doesn't believe in design documents. Design documents are supposed to help with making sure worlds feel connected, that one team working on one thing doesnt step on the toes of another team and those teams can adequately work together to make the world feel connected and believable.
What im getting at is that Emil can't write worlds or stories that have layers of stories within them. Bethesda's last good story was Oblivion. Fallout 3 was ok, but Bethesdas writing has only gotten worse over time.
Emil makes it incredibly, and I do mean incredibly, difficult for me to stick to the principle of ‘you can’t just blame one person for all the problems a project has.’
I think he genuinely peaked with Oblivion, but even when I was a kid, some of the story elements (The Dark Brotherhood questline at certain points) made me scratch my head. And hearing about the ‘no design document’ approach that PatricianTV pointed it, it really clicked for me-it explains why so many parts feel disconnected and inconsistent in Skyrim, FO4 and what I've heard of Starfield. Without a cohesive plan that the team agrees on and something they can reference from, it’s like everyone on the team is adding ingredients to a cake without knowing what they were baking. If the bakers don’t even know what the cake is supposed to look like, how can you fix it once it’s already baked?
I just don’t think his stance of ‘the game is the design document’ holds up; it ends up with a product feeling more like a patchwork than a solid, cohesive story.
And... the way he seems to view his own writing ability? It genuinely hurts me on a metaphysical level I didn’t even know existed.
TL;DR, I agree. lol
@BigVorst
He really does make it hard, I do think there is a greater management issue going on in Bethesda. However, it's a running theme that Bethesda games have lacked in writing quality since Emil became the head Writer.
Thank you for not just summarizing. Too many video "essays" get bogged down over explaining each plot/game beat.
For me, I stipped playing 4 halfway through and played the entirety of Fallout 1&2, twice, and the difference in roleplay variety, conversation depth, and general atmosphere cohesion, made me weirdly salty towards every bethesda game. They just dont improve their games with each entry. Each game is a masterclass in "rolling back."
This might be the video I've been looking for for 10 years.
For me, the biggest problem with FO4 is that it's two completely different games smashed into each other and both games suffer as a consequence. The settlement/sim stuff is great, it's fun and engaging and can be it's own reward. The "proper" Fallout game is great as well, with many of the upgrades making up for some of the RP sacrificed. But they don't work together...without mods. And when I say "don't work together" I mean they fight each other for game time AND fight the game engine itself. Really. Just having a couple of well-built settlements can tank your game because the engine can't handle it. I'd love to play a Sim Settlements (yes, I know) Fallout game where THAT is the games priority. There could be minor questing and such like in NMS or something, but you're really focused on building and survival. That would be great. But I'd also really really like another proper Fallout adventure where those things are very limited in scope and are essentially optional tools for achieving optional goals. Like an expanded Hearthfire where it's mostly player homes with maybe a couple mid-sized plots you could build little towns in if you want.
But as it stands, vanilla FO4 is a real mess. And from what I understand, the next-gen update broke it. I'm currently playing a mod collection called A Storywealth that is absolutely amazing and addresses pretty much all the issues you brought up as well as implementing some kind of wizard-tier madness that beefs up the engine in incredible ways. I think I'm 30 hours in and CTD once. That's crazy. It even gives multiple alternate storylines with ways to change the ending of the game including new factions and new ways for the factions to react to/interact with the other factions. You can even join and help rebuild the Enclave. It also includes the full Sim Settlements 2 suite which is amazing all on its own and has a much better story than the actual game. Longer, too, I think. Especially if you engage with the new characters, settlers and locations. Worth it. Highly recommend giving Nexus $7 for premium Vortex and giving it a shot. It doesn't fix Bethesda, but it sure as hell fixes FO4.
Bruh one of the only things i loved about f4 is the settlement building/management.😢
The New vegas fanboys all tell me to go play minecraft, so i had to tell them to go play Postal if they want to kill people without thinking.
Great essay, I'm surprised it doesn't have more views yet! Easily deserves 100k+
I think what would have helped this game is a longer pre war section. Make it a week, and have a few things happen. One, vault tech guy, week makes it more believable they can get in the vault. Two, a small section to introduce base building as a core game mechanic, something small but enough to have players know the system is there. Three, enough interactions between Nate, Nora, and Shaun to give players a connection the game says is there.
Now, it is a toss up whether this would work well. Idk for sure, but maybe it could have helped.
And, for my overall thoughts on F4, I like it, in the same way I like Skyrim. I still play both games because they give me something not many other games do. In Skyrim, it’s the magic and exploring part of a fantasy setting I like. For F4, it’s partly the exploration of a post apocalyptic world, and the chance to roleplay a little with base building as trying to rebuild some part of the world. And it’s that last part I think F4 has as a strong suit, exploring pre war ruins, finding parts and supplies and old tech, so you can rebuild. At least, I feel it’s a strong part of the game. And that’s why I still play F4, at least part of why
Would you say Fallout 4 is a good starting point into the Fallout games (and Bethesda games in general), or something to skip altogether?
That's a good question with many answers, I'm sure. I'd say it depends on what kind of player you are and what you're looking for out of the experience.
It's a good starting point in that it's very accessible compared to the older games in terms of availability and gameplay conforming to more modern expectations. It's relatively easy to pick up and play.
It's not a particularly good introduction into the Fallout universe, I don't think for reasons I mentioned in the video. And it's really lacking if you're looking for the roleplaying, player-choice-driven narrative content.
Fallout 4 is kind of the pivot point between old and new Bethesda so it might be a decent introduction to Bethesda games as a whole, but again, it depends on what you're looking for and what primarily motivates you as a player. Personally I prefer Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas. But Fallout 4 has a lot of redeeming qualities and it definitely makes more of an impact than Starfield, sadly.
That's a fair point. For me, Skyrim is a pretty good balance of old and new Bethesda. But you're right that's where the traditional RPG mechanics really started to get simplified and it was the first game to have radiant (procedurally generated) quests.
76 then 4 then 3 tactics then 1 and 2 then nv to not be disappointed on the FO game sequel.curve
At least imo
@@newturtle3I like this order because it basically only gets better with each entry
28:41 where are you at in the game?
I don't remember the name of the point of interest. It's the top of one of the tall buildings in the downtown area. You fight your way up and then there's a little boss fight at the top the reward is the power armor.
@@DEBUGMODE 35 Court
35 Court.
If you have a high enough level character then it almost always spawns an xo-1 power armor.
i try to have peace with fallout 4 four years now. I keep repeating the same patern i want to get everything and max all special stats. For years i been bussy with that like each time i reach level 60 or someting the game world just get so messy and buggy. I sweat the more you play the more fucked up the save file becomes and at some point i lost track of everything and the settlements are messy and i just stop for three months. JUST TO REPEAT IT ALL OVER AGAIN. since the release date. I only finished it once
I hate that i deleted my original character cause just like you ive only completed it once. But i have hundreds if not maybe a couple thousand hours just modding and having shootouts 😅
9:14 but also a character who didn’t leave where he was where the bombs fell. in an area filled with bandits and raiders, albeit there’s some towns. basically like billy’s parents i don’t see the problem. they went crazy never found their son and stayed put. doesn’t make sense if you don’t put yourself in their shoes
Are you seriously comparing Cooper to the fridge kid's parents? You don't understand the difference?
@@DEBUGMODE i can think of more ways they’re similar than different. but anyways yeah i do see a difference. but its really not that different enough to be angry about. game has a silly quest and people go rabble rabble
Yeah, we just disagree sharply on this point which is fine. The two are very superficially comparable if you ignore context.
I'm not angry about the fridge kid mission. I'm disappointed by the way it harms my ability to buy into the world of the game. I think this quest would be way more forgivable if it acknowledged how goofy it was and if it was trying to be funny or silly or ironic because of course Fallout has a lot of knowingly goofy writing throughout the series.
@@DEBUGMODE i can just as well see your point and it convinced me until i thought of it positively. ghoul parents lost kid going mad. it doesn’t tell us what they did in the 200 years but “look for him” they could’ve partied and then missed him and felt all sorts of emotions.
it may take you out but it takes me back in when i thought of this quest that way
“Taking the bad with the good is all you can do” you should have used roger warwick quote saying the same thing basically
38:59 It's hard to appreciate how much more effort it takes to build a game full of destroyed and broken down structures like FO4. Far, far more work spent on the models and maps.
It definitely sounds like FO4 with Sims Settlements 2-all three chapters could make it one of your favorite games, hehe. You should check it out. It adds dozens of hours of new content, quests, new workshop items and abilities, and it makes settlement building an integral part of the game! :)
Todd saw us playing Skyrim for 10 years and then interpreted that to mean that we WANT to play the same game for that long, rather than it being a simple function of Bethesda's release schedule.
Highly recommend you try survival mode again from the beginning of the game. It is the only way to play. Permadeath survival even better :)
I started playing around with it a little bit. I just don't think it's for me but I see the appeal. And besides, after making this video, I'm really ready to move on to something different for a while, haha.
New subscriber here. Fallout content is about 70% of what I watch on RUclips and this video is top tier. Great work
With the billy the kid example, I just headcanon that he got stuck playing in there very recently, otherwise its too horrifying to contemplate (and also how would his parents not find him in 200 years if he was literally within a mile of them)
I initially played Fallout 3 prior to 4, but there were so many bugs + I found the graphics / third person mode so bad, I abandoned early. So, I really don’t know how good the game may have been.
FO4 is the only one I played and completed, but I absolutely loved it. It’s probably one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played.
34:14 genuinely, the strongest improvement bethesda has made to the looting UI is in Fallout 76, with the "Nearby Search" feature. I am admittedly a fallout 76 enjoyer, but Nearby Search takes away so much of the time and frustration of looting, and lets you do it all at once at the end of an activity. It's nice.
I think that functionality makes sense in a game that's built around repeatable "activities" but I suspect Bethesda didn't include it in Starfield because they don't think it's necessarily appropriate for a single player game. I think I agree. There's such a thing as too much abstraction and quality of life concession. It's probably not a big deal either way, I just think it's interesting they decided not to implement it in their latest game.
I think this is one of the best analyses of Fallout 4 I've seen. Looking forward to more.
I remember spending the first 30 hours of my playthrough putting almost everything on hold for hours at a time to build Sanctuary up. Then I realized its all utterly pointless. I eagerly waited for the raiders to attack and for me to find out where my weaknesses were and to rebuild and all that jazz. Only for nothing to happen. Killed the game for me, it did. Killed it good. I played for another 7 hours and put down the game for 5 years until attempting it again 2 more times and never finishing the game
Great video the one thing I have to disagree with is the comment that the junk is not treasure or loot. There is a pre war version of everything in the game and I have always taken pride into finding almost all of them, including a couple of mini sized Nnukas that were scaled down to be held by teddy bears that never regain normal Size, that’s why it’s always good idea to drop all of your nukacola to check what you have I just think it’s an awesome additional thing to do for a play through is basically become a museum Director lol
Reasonable criticisms. I have only played FO4 so I dont know what im missing. I simply love the world, the loop, the escapsim.
Fallout 4 was my entry into the fallout series - I feel now that it's one of my least favorites mostly due to the story. Fallout 4 is at it's best when you turn your brain off and just shooty shooty; which really sucks in your RPG game. I am a person that mostly plays games for the stories. I can do bad game play/bugs for a good story but not verse versa.
Anyway, Love your essay !! Your edits and composition is really cool :)
I'm with you to a certain extent but there are games where I'm okay with minimal story and awesome gameplay. Depends on the franchise or developer and my expectations for them. With Fallout it's definitely the former.
13:22 It's a little more bearable if you turn off the cinematic camera.
Fallout 4 is an extremely insecure game too, within the first 30 minutes of the game you are given dogmeat, power armor, a minigun, and a fight with a Deathclaw. It's like the game is screaming "look, I'm a Fallout game! Just like before! Please don't leave!"
i couldnt care less about being able to kill a deathclaw or getting power armor within the first hour of the game , by the time i got around playing fo4 i have killed many dozens of deathclaws and have seen what power armor and miniguns can do in the previous games , to me it was just another deathclaw
Adding to your thoughts on rebuilding settlements, I would have loved to see the settlers repairing any existing structures over time but letting you build new structures as you like. I totally agree that nation building would have been fantastic. Personally, I'd like to see games that drop the old "chosen one" trope and let you uncover stories in your own time and decide how they apply to you.
i dont understands peoples complaints about cities and urban areas being made of facades, under no reasonable circumstance should any videogame protagonist be able to break into anyones house, i am constantly being told to lock my door at night lest i get robbed, killed or wake up with some drunk stranger either on my couch or in my bed because they dont realise they are in the wrong house. an open world game neccesitates realistic closed civilized areas.