Wow. Fallout Sucked.

[Minty]

Alright, let me begin by issuing a disclaimer. This is my opinion based on several observations and an interpretation thereof. I just really wanted to post something about how I now believe that I have been categorically wrong about the direction of Fallout's writing under Bethesda. Not entirely, of course. There is some laziness in Fallouts 3 and 4 that is simply indicative of this being a game about wasteland monsters, crazy cults and, of course, the Space Wolves, and is therefore bad, but I would like to take the opportunity to address something that seems to affect our perception of newer games.

Rose-coloured glasses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iuqh_uMjY0&t=752s
So, I watched this YouTube clip the other day. Someone went and attempted to recreate Fallout as a first person mod using New Vegas as a platform. The result was a revelation for me. Holy ****, Fallout sucked. I mean, it was a vacuous, highly basic game in almost every way imaginable, especially when it came to the writing. Bland, curt, expositional dialogue. Cumbersome duelling interfaces. Boring, listless environments. Making a 3D mod must have seemed like a great idea until the team realized that they were remaking quite possibly the most boring game ever made.

And this wasn't indicative of the era, either. There were some exceptionally well-written games around at that time. Fallout was not one of them. Neither was Fallout 2. So, I feel like I've been on a bandwagon for a while that I'm going to hop off of. Because compared to the humble origins of this series, the writing in Fallout 4 might as well have been Shakespeare. That game may have been something that some of us enjoyed at the time, like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter (yes, I know, that one was a full 6 years later), but I don't think it was anywhere near as good as those games. In any way, really. And people wanted to complain about the respective greenness and brownness of later entries in the series? Sweet baby Jesus that was a brown game!

But the ArcJet holotape. The one that sounds like two amateur adult film stars reading lines off of stained napkins into an iPhone. I will never forgive Fallout 4 for that abomination.

[DouglasGrave]

Hmm, kind of gotten a ways off-topic here what with jumping from New Vegas having illogical factions to "society has some illogical ideals" and on from there.

The earlier Fallout games were a product of their time. I don't think they really need a lot of comparison to the ones know, except in establishing what people liked about them in general comparison to other games of their time (and what more recent games might lack in comparison).

[Grendalcat]

Isn't the reason that gold has been valued for millennia is that, short of throwing it into an active volcano, it is virtually indestructible?

Also I really enjoyed Fallout and F2 when they came out, but they have tarnished over time.
More like silver than gold.

[Minty]

Publicado originalmente por danconnors:

What are the "global measurements"? Last I've read the Earth appears to have been cooling off the last decade or so.

I never deal in climate science, because I don't know enough about it to have an informed opinion. I'm trying, but there's a lot of information to process. I do, however, know for a fact that NASA says the global temperature has risen 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880.

I prefer instead to deal with "pollution". The way I see it, if you inject more of something that has a net negative effect into something else at a quicker rate than it can be processed, converted or expelled, you're poisoning it. The trash we generate, the carbon we expell, the grime we produce, is turning this planet into a dump. The future of Little Chiba, one in which we subsist rather than thrive in concert with nature, is a real possibility. And it makes me sad, because we can't seem to stop choosing what's cheaper over what's sustainable.

[Chashmodai]

Publicado originalmente por Grendalcat:

Isn't the reason that gold has been valued for millennia is that, short of throwing it into an active volcano, it is virtually indestructible?

Also I really enjoyed Fallout and F2 when they came out, but they have tarnished over time.
More like silver than gold.

It's not exactly indestructible.. There are far more durable metals, such as titanium. Gold is just not very interesting. It does not react with many other substances. It stays the same. If you find a 500 year old gold object, it will likely look largely as it did when it was manufactured. It does not rust like iron does with water and oxygen or become discolored like silver does with sulphur.

[danconnors]

The US is no longer capable of "crash programs" like the Manhattan Project. This is what building 5 Orions and putting them into high orbit would be. We would need at least 5 or 6 years to do it with unlimited funding. And 5 or 6 years is optimistic in my opinion. For them to be built at all they would need to be under international control or their building would be considered an act of war by the builder. They are the ONLY thing I would trust to be able to stop an oncoming asteroid.

When Fallout first came out I was crazy about it. What happened was that later games spoiled me rotten. Gradually game after great old game has fallen by the wayside. My ability to forgive the many weaknesses they came out with has disappeared as I've gotten more and more spoiled.

[Minty]

Publicado originalmente por danconnors:

My ability to forgive the many weaknesses they came out with has disappeared as I've gotten more and more spoiled.

Are you spoiled, or have your expectations simply increased relative to what you know to be possible now?

I mean, even back in the day, some games smacked of effort and the maximization of available resources for development, and some were lazy garbage. The same can be said for the current era, but our expectations have risen as a result of all the great games that have come along, and I don't really see how that's bad.

Should we accept mediocrity and even praise it, because if we don't we're just being greedy brats who expect too much and should be happy with whatever we get?

[Bored Peon]

Publicado originalmente por Good Whiskey:

Are you spoiled, or have your expectations simply increased relative to what you know to be possible now?

I say both. Think about it 40 years ago we paid $30 on average for Atari games. Compare that side by side with what you have these days.

On top of that an Atari game took a very minimal crew to create. While these days you have like a hundred of people that work on a big title.

Look at Kenshi for example, it has sorta low end graphics and had a production team of like six people or less for the majority of it. Imagine what they could have done with a bigger team and a better engine (they like used a 4 cylinder engine to haul a tractor trailer.)

[Minty]

Publicado originalmente por Bored Peon:

Look at Kenshi for example, it has sorta low end graphics and had a production team of like six people or less for the majority of it. Imagine what they could have done with a bigger team and a better engine (they like used a 4 cylinder engine to haul a tractor trailer.)

Oh I know. What really concerns me about Kenshi 2 is the following statement from Lo-Fi:

"Kenshi 2 will be based on the same code-base and engine."

Kenshi is brilliant for what it is, but it is crumbling under its own weight. If you tamper with it too much (and I have), issues begin to appear that are directly related to the code and the engine. Lo-Fi have resources and a lot of good will going at the moment, and I feel like they've basically crippled themselves right out of the gate with this decision.

By the way, I've started calling you "Beep", because I don't like "BP", "Bored" is inappropriate and "Peon", as you have rightly pointed out, is pretty demeaning. I figured you wouldn't mind, since Beep is "THE STRONGEST WARRIOR!" after all.

[Bored Peon]

Publicado originalmente por Good Whiskey:

By the way, I've started calling you "Beep", because I don't like "BP", "Bored" is inappropriate and "Peon", as you have rightly pointed out, is pretty demeaning. I figured you wouldn't mind, since Beep is "THE STRONGEST WARRIOR!" after all.

Beep is awesome. I actually had some solo saves where I hired him and then dismissed the original character.

Yeah I can not stress enough it is amazing how much Kenshi got out of that Ogre 2.0 engine. I mean the most complicated game prior to that was the Fate game (the Windows imitation childlike Diablo.)

Using the same engine again can be fine as long as it has been improved upon. In the end all game engines have their faults. Bethesda's main problem is they keep carrying those problems forward.

Overall I think Bethesda has done far better than their predecessors to the franchise. Interplay would have driven it into the ground anyways with their MMO version slated to release when WoW was in the Classic-Burning Crusade-Lich King era (depending when they actually finished) and that would have killed it off like many other MMOs of the time.

While Fallout 76 aint greatly successful the game mechanics and such did see a lot of great evolution steps, but they get buried in the bad press. The "area story telling" was far better because the stories were actually connected to the local area, the game story setting, and sometimes to other locations in other areas.

My favorite examples is you can find Chloe in Berkley Springs, a few mentions of her in those terminals in Berkely Springs, a note in the church, and the lore form her creator's (Betsy Spinelli's holotape.) The raider gang lore spread out all over.

[DarkEternal]

This reminds me of when I was a kid and my idiot classmate was rambling about how Super Mario World was so much better than Super Mario Bros and I had to explain to him how technology progresses and that gives us better video games over time.
Congrats, OP. You're now the idiot on the playground who doesn't understand technological innovation over time.
You simply cannot make a game better than the current technology allows. That's also why our standard for what makes a good game is constantly changing.
I can't believe that I have to explain the simple concept of change over time to humans in the 21st century. In 100 years, people will think that we were primitive and that we sucked.
Welcome to reality, sport.

[Minty]

Publicado originalmente por DarkEternal:

Congrats, OP. You're now the idiot on the playground who doesn't understand technological innovation over time.

Did you miss the whole part where I said it sucked for its time?

You clearly didn't even read my OP. If you had, you would know that my criticism of the game was not contemporary. I mean, I could not have been more direct about how there were superior games at the time and that, as a result of nostalgia, we tend to remember it as being far better than it was. It's rare that someone lets a topic go this far over their heads, but somehow you managed to.

Thanks for coming out and making a complete fool of yourself.

[=EGC= kansasterry]

You can not compare 3d live action type games to a 2d turn based RPG.

The older 2d turn based one will never be good to anyone that expected real time combat etc. from other game types that came even just a month later as they had access to better technology (AI, Textures, faster cpu and gpu speeds) and were not based on the colorless wasteland that 50s fiction has used to represent what the world would be like after a nuclear apocalypse.

To put it simply anyone who expects the original 2d turn based RPG version of fallout to be like fallout 3 or any other game with first person combat mechanics is going to think the original "sucks"

[Minty]

Publicado originalmente por =EGC= kansasterry:

To put it simply anyone who expects the original 2d turn based RPG version of fallout to be like fallout 3 or any other game with first person combat mechanics is going to think the original "sucks"

What are people not understanding about my point that, in my opinion and in retrospect, Fallout sucked in 1997? Seriously, if this is what people are getting stuck on, please, get unstuck. I'm saying that the writing was far worse back then, and that there was no excuse for it, because there were contemporaries that were far better written.

This should not be a difficult thing to grasp.

[=EGC= kansasterry]

Publicado originalmente por Good Whiskey:

Publicado originalmente por =EGC= kansasterry:

To put it simply anyone who expects the original 2d turn based RPG version of fallout to be like fallout 3 or any other game with first person combat mechanics is going to think the original "sucks"

What are people not understanding about my point that, in my opinion and in retrospect, Fallout sucked in 1997? Seriously, if this is what people are getting stuck on, please, get unstuck. I'm saying that the writing was far worse back then, and that there was no excuse for it, because there were contemporaries that were far better written.

This should not be a difficult thing to grasp.

What people are stuck on is the fact that you compared it to other games of the same time period that were not 2d turn based RPG games as the basis for your opinion.

It would be like me saying that some silent movie sucked then referring to movies that have audio as my reason for why it did.

[leem]

Everything was better twenty years ago every 20 years. After 20 years 3rd ex wife even seems better memories get rose colored the more time that passes.