'we should team up with a mortuary, you know where i'm going with this?'

[DOZAH]

This line delivered by Deacon is worthy of a Seinfeld-esque comedy episode where the short, fat, bald guy laments how corny he sounded saying 'the jerk store called, and it's running out of you!'. It is one more indication that something went drastically wrong during the development of Fallout 4. Since whatever occurred happened completely internally at Bethesda, and we will never hear the truth of the matter, I would like to use this thread to speculate why Bethesda's games are no longer reaching the quality standard met by the studio's previous titles. Bethesda didn't have deadlines like Obsidian, they didn't have another developer paying reviewers to sabotage their game's Metacritic score, but nevertheless something clearly went wrong during the development of Fallout 4.

It almost feels like there's an internal war happening within the company; the board members vs beth's executive class vs the coders vs the testers. The impression that there is great animosity and resentment between the coders and the testers actually exists within the game, if one looks close enough. I'm trying to figure out the reason why. The best answer I can come up with is that the studio itself uses a bullet-point list development design strategy which totally crushes all the creativity and personal joy an employee can get working on one of these projects. If you look at a modern AAA game's bulletpoints, this is what it includes:

-all women must be incredibly ugly, and/or have blue tentacles on their heads.
-all men must be portrayed as homosexuals (even the male ghouls and robots), and their lips have to be so shiny that just offscreen there must be an ocean-sized tub of the world's largest container of vaseline.
-should include cross-dressing, transvestite, transgendered ROBOT MERCHANTS.
-NPC companions wage a psychological assault of constant dialogue on your character. A character sleeping on the other side of a building will shout out how great your craft skills are for the millionth time because you swapped a scope. Deacon says something every time an enemy dies, every time you pick up an item, and every time you were just shot by an enemy he offers 'i think i hear something'.
-I don't know how many google searches you had to do to play through Fallout 4, but i've done at least a dozen. So much of the game world is designed totally illogically, and if you don't find the one 'secret prize' key or password the developers wanted to hide from the player because they prefer being sadistic rather than designing good games, then you can't progress forward.

I don't know about you, but as a player these things totally suck the will out of me to continue playing this game. Now, I have to then ask myself, what if i were on the development team? What if I were personally responsible for making sure that all the homosexual male's lips had enough vaseline coating? Something like this is happening within Bethesda, it seems to me. Board members are handing down decisions executives don't like, which then becomes like a telephone tag game of passing on the bad news, down to through the designers, to the coders, until it reaches the testers. It feels like Bethesda is internally at war with itself, and Fallout 4 feels like the output of a game studio that has set it's priorities upside down. Instead of using the ideas of it's employees, it degrades them and tells it's talent what creativity is supposed to be. This contempt within their studio for each other comes across very strongly in the themes of their games in ways that I don't think they quite realize.

The only reason they've gotten a free pass is because the audience for gaming tends to be younger, and doesn't concern itself with details that the conscious mind is more likely to gloss over than confront. They just want to play a game, the thought-process which builds a logical world for the game to exist in was supposed to be done for them. Fallout 4 totally falls apart as a logical world to the point that it cannot exist as culture commentary, because it exists as part of culture to be commented on. You can't think about the game's themes outside of it's world, because they are so shallow and trite that it's embarrassing to the player. The player most likely skips over those very things that were bulletin-pointed by the investing, board-class members of the company, which they told the entire rest of the development team was crucial to the creation of the game.

If you as a player are encountering things in games that feel so awkward that you're continually spamming the 'skip dialogue' button, how would it feel if you actually had to create that character and dialogue out of scratch from nothing? Obviously, whoever is pulling the strings and calling the shots behind the scenes of video games doesn't care if they make good products, don't care if their employees have license for creative freedom, they don't care if they destroy the lore of the world and turn a decades-old franchise into a bad joke of parody on itself. I feel bad for the idealists who go into this industry thinking it's a good future, I can only imagine how shredded that worldview becomes by the time companies like yours chew them up and regurgitate them. The turnover rate in the video game profession must just be fantastic.

[Bored Peon]

Press X to skip dialogue applys to that wall of text....

[raubrey]

It's a shame you made many assumptions and also compared the game to Obsidian, further sandwiching in references to homosexuality (not exactly the correct definition) and female looks when it is clear that you have some writing ability but have misused it. As such, I'm not compelled to take the post seriously. See where I am going with this <Deacon voice>?

Originally posted by DOZAH:

-all women must be incredibly ugly, and/or have blue tentacles on their heads.
-all men must be portrayed as homosexuals (even the male ghouls and robots), and their lips have to be so shiny that just offscreen there must be an ocean-sized tub of the world's largest container of vaseline.
-should include cross-dressing, transvestite, transgendered ROBOT MERCHANTS.
-NPC companions wage a psychological assault of constant dialogue on your character. A character sleeping on the other side of a building will shout out how great your craft skills are for the millionth time because you swapped a scope. Deacon says something every time an enemy dies, every time you pick up an item, and every time you were just shot by an enemy he offers 'i think i hear something'.
-I don't know how many google searches you had to do to play through Fallout 4, but i've done at least a dozen. So much of the game world is designed totally illogically, and if you don't find the one 'secret prize' key or password the developers wanted to hide from the player because they prefer being sadistic rather than designing good games, then you can't progress forward.

I don't know about you, but as a player these things totally suck the will out of me to continue playing this game. Now, I have to then ask myself, what if i were on the development team? What if I were personally responsible for making sure that all the homosexual male's lips had enough vaseline coating?

TL;DR - Flamebait.

[DOZAH]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Press X to skip dialogue applys to that wall of text....

the truth cannot be soundbyted.

These companies are always so quick to label any complaints as 'a vocal minority', but if they're putting transgendered transvestite robots into their games, they're obviously listening to the most vocal of minorities and ignoring everyone else, even trivializing their concerns with invalid personal criticism. That's called irony.

[bunny de fluff]

this article is like brahmin poop

[DOZAH]

Something clearly went wrong, i'm just speculating. Speculation is difficult. Observations are easy. I can easily observe that the companion AI in Fallout 4 were all given the 'Barbas Ordinance', where they follow too close, constantly block your path and get in your line of fire, and can't be pushed but will in fact push your character around. It's easy to observe that this is incredibly wrong and shouldn't be that way, it's much more difficult to understand why.

I can forgive and have a little giggle about raiders so eager to fight me that their pathfinding decides that they jump off of buildings and bridges to their deaths. Or a giant 12 foot tall beast getting stuck on a car or stairway rail. The companion AI being so bad, when clearly the companions were one of the main storytelling mechanisms of the game, is a colossal screw up that necessitates an explanation. One we'll never receive from the source, but surely exists.

[Ilja]

Originally posted by DOZAH:

transgendered transvestite robots

1. Which characte is pictured like that?
   
   
2. How the hell it is possible to determine robot's gender, let a lone it to be transgender?
   
   
3. Where did you pick up the phrase "transgendered transvestite?" Are you saying there is a transgender person/robot in the game, who now has gender identity toward his/her previous gender?

[DOZAH]

It creates a bizarre feeling to me where the main antagonist of the game seems most often to be your own follower. If it's just me, that's ok. I just wanted to collect my thoughts, see if they made sense.

[DOZAH]

Originally posted by Ilja:

• Which characte is pictured like that?
  
  
• How the hell it is possible to determine robot's gender, let a lone it to be transgender?
  
  
• Where did you pick up the phrase "transgendered transvestite?" Are you saying there is a transgender person/robot in the game, who now has gender identity toward his/her previous gender?

[/olist]

CleO, she speaks with every mannerism of a street worker. She/He is more suggestive than Fisto from NV, lol. I'm trying to discuss this sensitive topic with the least offensive verbiage possible, I don't want to start a flame war with this thread. I'm not attempting to make sociological observations about anywhere except within the headquarters of known a corporate organization.

edit: lotta robots in fallout 4

[Ilja]

ADA is suggestive?

Robot has a gender, that can be considered as transgender - especially when assaultron body picts female and ADA uses female voice?

I can't personally sign either of those case. I find Swan more suggestive that ADA. I guess it comes down to how you read the character.

[raubrey]

Originally posted by DOZAH:

Originally posted by Ilja:

• Which characte is pictured like that?
  
  
• How the hell it is possible to determine robot's gender, let a lone it to be transgender?
  
  
• Where did you pick up the phrase "transgendered transvestite?" Are you saying there is a transgender person/robot in the game, who now has gender identity toward his/her previous gender?

[/olist]

CleO, she speaks with every mannerism of a street worker. She/He is more suggestive than Fisto from NV, lol. I'm trying to discuss this sensitive topic with the least offensive verbiage possible, I don't want to start a flame war with this thread. I'm not attempting to make sociological observations about anywhere except within the headquarters of known a corporate organization.

edit: lotta robots in fallout 4

Kleo rocks!

You have to remember in the 50s women were women, men were men in the fullness of the word (voluptuous/ macho)...female robots followed the path. If there is transgender transvestite assimilations of metal going on it flew above my head and I missed it.

I'm sure Bethesda workers had a blast working with simultanous cultural references, both past and present.

[DOZAH]

Maybe Deacon is the main antagonist of Fallout 4. A compulsive lying synthoid replicant who, even when dressed in power armor, just likes to sit on top of your character and complain.

Swan? You'd have to explain that one to me.

I meant to type CleO, the merchant from goodneighbor. It's not a character I enjoy interacting with, and she's a main hub vendor in the game. At least I didn't have to create and code and test the character though? That's the point of this thread, why there's a strange amount of obsessive detail on certain things and others are ignored. Why is there such a tremendous emphasis on sexual innuendo between characters that are represented as male? Why does one of the (unkillable) male sidequest characters have to hit on your male character in dialogue?

That's not really what an RPG used to be about, they used to try to create believable, compelling worlds to experience. They didn't try to influence the player's minds and sexual orientations through superliminal suggestion. It represents a major change in the emphasis of video game storytelling, and there's remarkably little comment on it. Why, do you think?

[raubrey]

Originally posted by DOZAH:

It represents a major change in the emphasis of video game storytelling, and there's remarkably little comment on it. Why, do you think?

Because it doesn't exist.

You'd have to be ultra-sensitive to think there is some sexual agenda in this game. Obsidian does a far better job at agenda-pushing anyway.

[DOZAH]

I mean, if the world ever faces total nuclear annihilation, do you think our tombstones will read, 'if only we'd been more tolerant of homosexuals and multiracial people!'

Yet that's the great lesson Fallout 4 seems to want to impart. That's why it doesn't exist as culture commentary, it's too shallow to exist as other than an example of it's culture. It's too busy making a joke of everything to be taken seriously as anything other than what it is. I'm sorry, I think we should expect better.

[raubrey]

Originally posted by DOZAH:

I mean, if the world ever faces total nuclear annihilation, do you think our tombstones will read, 'if only we'd been more tolerant of homosexuals and multiracial people!'

Yet that's the great lesson Fallout 4 seems to want to impart. That's why it doesn't exist as culture commentary, it's too shallow to exist as other than an example of it's culture. It's too busy making a joke of everything to be taken seriously as anything other than what it is. I'm sorry, I think we should expect better.

This just cements my first impression. Flamebait.
I thought you might have misworded things but while it was already obvious the direction you were going, it is now doubly so.
It's too bad really as a decent cultural commentary thread would be interesting.
- phobia / hate/ pettiness is not.

I advise a life indoors, blinds drawn with a really good Hazmat suit for must-do trips outdoors. These sicko germs are everywhere and very contagious.

[ronr42]

Originally posted by Bored Peon:

Press X to skip dialogue applys to that wall of text....

THANKS! It worked. :)