Fallout 4 Is Better Than You Think? Part 2

good afternoon L je I'm John trer welcome to Fallout 4 is well let's see if we can figure that one out you see there's so much I love in Fallout 4 but there's also plenty that doesn't work and to properly evaluate the game we have to acknowledge both and this time we actually are starting at the beginning because at the risk of showing my hand a bit early I think I've figured out one of the key reasons that so many folks have a negative view of the game you only get one chance to first impression and the opening of Fallout 4 is a bit of a mess so let's start there shall [Music] we the opening to a Fallout game has a lot of heavy lifting to do you've got an alternate universe full of huge amount of backstory covering centuries of fictional US History which has a massive impact on the game's world so you've got to get some of that over without getting bogged down with info dumps and that's just setting up the world then there's whatever you want as your new plot the focus of the main quest plus you've got a game that's both very complex in terms of its mechanics and changing a lot next to its predecessor so there's a lot of practical mechanical things that need to be tutorial ised though as for what order of things ought to be introduced to the player well in a game with building looting Gunplay exploration trading crafting and more that's a difficult thing to answer the point I'm making here is that the more complicated the game is in terms of both narrative and mechanics the more crucial it is that the opening of The Game Works giving the right information in the right order so that both experience Fallout fans and newcomers can get into the meat of the game as fast as possible and I think Fallout 4 does really drop the ball on this just a quick reminder here's literally the first information that the game gives you about the world you're going to start the game in but then in the 21st century people awoke from the American dream years of consumption led to shortages of every major resource the entire world unraveled peace became a distant memory it is now the year 2077 we stand on the brink of Total War and I am afraid oh okay so that's promising Bethesda isn't just treating the pre-war world as a retr future Wonderland that got bombed into being a nice Skybox we're acknowledging that things have been slowly going to healthy years they don't explicitly use the terms but fans will recognize the references to the resource Wars and the war in Anchorage the war against China is already on and the protagonist appears to be aware and concerned that the apocalypse could be any day great that's a brilliant place to start let's see how dark the final days before the bombs fell were a society breaks apart ah good morning M you're coughing 13.5 de fah BL to Perfection oh okay so um everything's fine actually plenty of food car outside every house robot servant that needs fuel to operate well thank goodness I was worried by that resource crisis you mentioned 30 seconds ago but I guess there isn't one actually so why did you just mention the resource crisis by the way salesman again I don't know why he keeps bothering you wow you're really not keen to speak to the salesman From The Underground apocalypse shelter company hey weren't you saying you were scared of the Apocalypse 30 seconds ago listen after breakfast I was thinking we could head to the park for a bit weather should hold up you know there's a plague Right started by The Accidental release of the US's own biological weapons I know Bethesda knows this because they puted in Fallout 3 and Fallout 42 mccre son has it it really does feel like the opening section was written in isol from the rest of the game why is there this sudden Whiplash between the collapse of America and no wait it's all fine actually like I don't object if you want the point of the opening to be your life was so good then the bombs fell now it's all gone that's fine but if that's your play don't start the game by telling me about crisis and War speaking of which you've got to fix character background for the first time in a Fallout game either a soldier or a lawyer depending on which gender you pick now that's actually really cool because when I heard about that for the first time I immediately thought well that's a couple of really interesting careers for people in 2077 a soldier May well have seen action in Anchorage they've been exposed to a live war and I know bethesa knows that cuz they literally just showed me a man looking really sad in Anchorage while talking about how the world unraveled and then there's um the other stuff how the US military rounded up people of Chinese origin and sent them for medical experimentation the fev experiments that the army oversaw how literally the first thing you see in the entire franchise is US soldiers laughing as they execute a Canadian prisoner of war in the street and then wave to the camera because this was public knowledge I'm so proud of him but I guess everybody's fine with that I suppose the lawyer is super interesting too of course the world of Fallout is full of political corruption government overreach and appalling mistreatment of workers so examining how hard it would be to uphold the law in a country where everyone with power and just ignores the Law at will that's a great story good old us oh okay I guess she's just fine with all of that actually the whole backstory is a bit weird because it literally never comes up again he's no better with guns she's no better at persuasion I don't think they ever mention their careers again their skills are entirely a function of character build so why do they even have careers why doesn't the game generate a career based on your character build you know like Fallout three in the goats but before you have time to think about what an odd bunch of narrative choices have just played out in front of you the bombs are dropping and it's time to run to the shelter so we can watch our partner die our baby get kidnapped and emerge into our destroyed neighborhoods and let's pause there for a second your partner about to be executed in front of you now presumably you're supposed to be sad about that so what do you actually know about your partner going into the execution let's list everything one they are either a soldier or a lawyer that's it actually hilariously you're never told their name it defaults to Nora if you're not playing as her and Nate if you're not him but if you haven't got the subtitles on the game never says this so you just have an unnamed partner who you presumably love you have no idea what their personality is but you're sad they're dead or should be I suppose and as for your neighborhood and dear neighbors well I guess you can read the mailboxes to figure out what their names were this I think is all a mistake and the issue is The Game's in a rush Fallout 3 gave itself a bit of time in the vault to set the scene to let you get to know a few folks get a feel for your dad's personality build up an idea of what your own character was like how they dealt with their problems how they would react to a former bully needing assistance whether you'd risk your own safety to help a friend tiny dilemas and choices that quietly nudge you into a Fallout way of thinking character choices consequences the basics of roleplay on a small scale but Fallout 4 doesn't have time for that because Fallout 4 wants to shove a nuk straight in our faces I don't know who made this exact Direction choice and I can't find any statements on what the intention behind Fallout fors frenetic opening was but I think it's a mistake for one simple basic storytelling reason it's very difficult to have an emotional response to character drama if you don't know the characters we're not sad Nate dies because we don't know anything about Tim we're not sad to see our home in Ruins because we only live there for a few seconds we're not sad to see our neighbors corpses because we never even knew who they were and the weird thing is somebody spent some time giving our neighbors some postwar character in death one of them built their own bomb shelter and set up a sniper spot on the roof another set up a barricade and died behind it defending their house in unknown circumstances another was secretly a drug dealer wouldn't seeing the neighborhood destroyed the houses guttered the folks who couldn't get into the Vault left dead on the ground wouldn't that all be a lot more powerful if we just spent a few minutes with them before the bombs fell if you're feeling really fancy we could even have a super easy first quest to let you meet the neighbors you could even have an extra slot in the vault assign to your family and eror so you could pick a neighbor to come with you through the gate there's so many ways you could have given the player a bit more attachment to your partner or neighborhood before nuking it but instead it's straight into Vault 111 now my opinion on 111 is sued a bit over time it's a very small and simple Vault next to the previous generation but it's also very easy to forget how ridiculous some of the Fallout 3 in New Vegas vaults actually were these confusing mazes make no sense the vaults were originally designed to be small with a simple layout that's efficient and easy to follow I can do without Fallout 1 and 2's approach of having them all be completely uniform though that is probably the most realistic take Vault 111 is a reasonable middle ground in size and I'm not going to drag the game for having the first tutorial dungeon be fairly simple I'll even Overlook the slightly basic Vault experiment which appears to just be can you freeze people because it does at least make sense in the context of the vault's true purpose as a testing ground admittedly the exact nature of the societal preservation project was a bit vague in Old Fallout but from Van buen through New Vegas and NCA world the best bet seems to be it was a test for how people reacted to various extreme circumstances in sealed environments to see what the best way to get people off world and into extraterrestrial colonies might from that perspective testing cryogenics on some random disposables yes that makes sense I do also have my own little pet Theory but this is entirely my own reading of the text given the US government could have tested cryogenics at any point what if the actual Vault experiment wasn't whether the pods were safe what if it was actually whether a small team of scientists and security could be trusted to keep the Pod safe an experiment that yielded useful data in 111 as the scientist and security fell out and ended up killing each other leaving the residents to die an outcome that would have been a disaster if the people in the pods had actually been important there is at least enough room for interpretation and I think 111 is a solid enough if somewhat simple Vault so back outside and back to Sanctuary Hills where after tutorial iing movement sprinting and basic combat it's time for something new it's time to talk to codsworth okay let's discuss speech okay let's start with the basics here at the highest level why is speech and Fallout important simple the universe of Fallout is complicated and features centuries of law covering pre-war and post-war eras some players are going to love this level of Rich detail and want every scrap of backstory they can get their hands on some players don't they just want what they need to know for their immediate situation and of course that changes over time a player on their second playthrough might not want to hear long they're already familiar with and some areas might just naturally interest you more than others this makes a traditional Fallout speech system a solid solution that suits everybody you can either simply ask what to do next alternatively you can go down a branching Rabbit Hole of chatting about factions history in Caesar's personal philosophical framework from that exact starting point however I can see how a rework of speech might have looked like a good idea to Bethesda creating a consistent experience where one button a always moves the conversation on positively while another button why Always seeks further detail but it just doesn't work in practice and the reasons are so blatant and visible it's kind of shocking this iteration made it into the final game so in Fallout 4 you always have four options because now the UI insists you have four options and the issue is just staring you in the face what if four options isn't the right number for the conversation you're having sometimes you'll run into shops where you don't need four options you just need yes I want to buy or no I don't so there's pointless duplication where maybe just means no at The Other Extreme however when you're speaking to a faction leader important people with power and influence whose ideas are going to change the Commonwealth leaders of factions who you may or may not choose to back the interactions you can have with them are hugely limited and one of the biggest of these limitations is it made it pretty much impossible to integrate perks into speech because there simply wasn't space for them now that's a huge loss because before Fallout 4 skills had two key purposes one they represented your actual abilities in practical skills two they opened up appropriate skill-based speech options and that's really important because having skills you'd specialized in being represented in dialogue was one of the big ways you could roleplay in Fallout it gave the character you were building representation in narrative as well as gameplay a medical expert could provide advice as a doctor or a science expert could impress other researchers with their knowledge it was a lovely touch and a really important part of what made Fallout feel like an RPG at all times but when the transition to Fallout 4 came and skills were blended into perks gameplay wise I think it all works very well like we were discussing last time but the representation of skills within conversation was almost entirely lost with only a tiny handful of exceptions if you've taken the Poke ghoulish it offers literally no extra dialogue when speaking to ghouls party boy does nothing when speaking to folks in a bar science does nothing in the Institute power armor perks do nothing when speaking to a woman whose primary job is maintaining power armor it's a huge loss and one that massively undermines the sense of an RPG in narrative terms because even though you have a lot of freedom to build a character however you want in terms of game mechanics those choices are almost never represented in the narrative instead perks are now purely utilitarian they give a gameplay bonus that is precisely what they say they're going to do and nothing more but let's get back to those four buttons because it gets worse yet now that the four options are supposed to be predesignated and we do have the exact designations that Bethesda were using thanks to this document being shared in 2016 we can see that asking for information is now restricted to one option one question which the game picks for you sometimes a second question is available after the first sometimes the first question just Loops conversations in general are much shorter as a result for example consider the first time you run into Preston Garvey who want you to jump into some power armor and mow down some Raiders outside here are some things you might reasonably want to know why are these Raiders attacking you can we negotiate with the Raiders or pay them off why aren't any of you jumping into the power armor can I have any weapons or ammo or any of these civilians able to contribute to the fight are there any other Minutemen or sympathetic factions that might come and help us Plus remember this is literally the first human who's been willing to speak to you since leaving the Vault so you'd probably have a lot more things to ask as well these reasonable questions however aren't available to you because the speech options you have don't allow it now there are countless examples of situations where you can't ask logical things you might wish to know but the problem's not just the Y button oh no all four buttons have their issues like say the complete gamble of sarcasm which can mean anything between enthusiastic ascent and the odd needlessly cruel remark look at me I'm a G A Freak don't take this the wrong way but you were pretty ugly before and that's also part of the Wier issue where the brief summaries on each button make it very difficult to know what you're about to say always believed in freedom of the press and naturally it's much harder to roleplay when you can never be sure what tone you're character is about to use itself an issue of having a voice protagonist now the lines are only read how one voice artist chose to read them not how you choose to interpret them but now we're starting to home in on the real issue the buttons lie yes no and neutral are completely demonstrably untrue when somebody asks you to do something in Fallout 4 Yes means yes neutral also means yes and no means yes but not right now and you can tell this is the case because if you actively say no and walk away from a character sometimes the game just updates the quest as if you said yes anyway plenty of the time you'll pick up miscellaneous tasks without even speaking to anybody just getting close enough to overhear that something needs to be done is enough for Fallout 4 to add it to your to-do list now this is a huge deal because it completely changes what speech means in Fallout traditionally when you spoke to a quest Giver you were using the information they gave you to inform a handful of key decisions you have to make do I want to help this person would I rather help somebody else instead how precisely might I be able to help them and is this an appropriate thing for my character to get involved with Fallout 4 doesn't think about quests in the same way quests are just a thing that needs to be done why because they yield rewards in terms of caps and XP rewards are good so here are a bunch of speech checks to negotiate the exact reward and then off you go and I think it is very telling that there are more lines of dialogue dedicated to the exact cap reward you're asking for than about asking for the full context of what you're doing in Fallout 4 the questgiver is not trying to persuade you of the Practical factional or moral benefits of you helping them they offering you a contract you're pretty consistently treated like a low rent mercenary go here kill everything and I will give you money and XP as a result plenty of quests in the absence of a meaningful reputational Karma system lack any narrative consequence but why does Fallout 4 work this way why is it the quests are just assumed to be positive things you should do without asking questions as opposed to the result of careful consideration about what your character wants to achieve well the tragic thing is I suspect none of this was just an unfortunate mistake you see shortly after the game came out we had some great opportunities to hear about some of the thinking behind the game in particular Fallout Force lead designer and writer Emil paglio gave the Keynotes spee of the story conference just after Fallout 4 came out the whole thing is really fascinating but let's focus on a couple of key design decisions that were highlighted there one particularly fascinating statement he made was that while they could have filled every quest with huge amounts of narrative detail something he refers to in his talk with the shander the Great American novel he made the active decision to not do this because players are going to rip out every page and make paper airlanes out of them and they're going to throw them around the room and they're never going to to see your story because they're going to spend 30 hours making shacks and 20 hours looking for bobbleheads that's the jagged pill we swallow when we do this so as best as I can tell what he's saying is that many players won't engage with every bit of law you put into an open world game so therefore there's no point putting in that much law instead narrative and conversations should be streamlined a point reinforced by another design principle he stresses in the same session keep it simple stupid and I can't help but feel this is a pretty serious misreading of large parts of the Fallout Community as it was in 2015 between the huge lava for New Vegas the long-standing fans of Fallout 1 and 2 and as we pointed out last time the huge success of various old school RPG Kickstarter campaigns that led to a Resurgence in low heavy traditional RPGs in the Years leading up to Fallout Force release it is to my mind a very confusing statement especially when every previous Fallout game already had a dialogue system that was well suited to containing large amounts of optional law that you could dig into if you wanted but also skip if you didn't but again why what's the point of consciously choosing to cut down on the volume of narrative and streamline conversations well to answer that we're going to need to have a wider discussion about quests and [Music] factions for 4's opening is really kind of bananas the idea that 1 hour in you'd be wearing power armor and fighting a death Claw is pretty much Unthinkable in any other Fallout game after all these are Big important iconic parts of the franchise that deserve to be treated with respect and clearly somebody in Bethesda agrees because a lot of work has gone into reworking the power armor how it feels like a walking tank a vehicle you're driving rather than a slightly better version of combat armor I like that it has its own specialized perks its own cra able parts that Grant unique bonuses its size and design there's a lot here that's really nice but as soon as you give it to a level two character the Genie's out of the lamp there's enough Fusion cores around that I've seen plenty of folks saying they pretty much wore power armor the whole game and as soon as that's the case well you've got a game balance issue so Bethesda had to create a weird diminishing return damage resistance Cur so that power armor wasn't too overpowered in the early game meaning that actual damage reduction in Fallout 4's power armor is often less than a decent set of everyday armor in Fallout New vages Plus handing it over so soon does rather steal some excitement that could have been saved for later in the game like seeing power armor for the first time when you meet the Brotherhood or doing a quest to build your first set by yourself that could have been a really fun and thematically appropriate Brotherhood quest for example and then there's the death claw which was done Dirty by Fallout H's introduction which again is a shame because as I discussed last time its design and movement is beautiful it's a really cool enemy but just remember how death claws were introduced in Fallout 1 in The Hub most people don't even believe they exist and the few people that do are terrified of them a single one has been destroying entire Caravans and after speaking to a series of locals you finally find someone willing to take you to the creatures Lair an ominous dark cave with a monster hiding within the point I'm making is there's a lot of buildup it's a big deal death claws were so rare in Fallout 3 you could complete the entire base game without ever seeing one in New Vegas they're treated as an impenetrable natural barrier forcing The Courier to make a massive detour to get to the strip and here's where we can start putting together a coherent theory about why all of this is as it is because this feeds into what we were discussing before just like the introduction of the game rushing you to the Vault instead of giving you time to explore and understand the pre-war world you came from Fallout 4 is often in a hurry to get you in the action fight bugs fight mole rats fight these other bugs fight ragers fight more ragers finally get to a conversation with a faction leader which pushes you as fast as possible to doing even more fighting so you can get to the deathclaw power armor minigun Showdown the whole intro seems to be built around a rapid series of escalating fights to form an exciting action-packed opening this isn't just wild speculation this is something we do actually have some insight it in in 2018 character artist Jonah L provided a fascinating bit of information about Concord and the game's opening as he recorded finishing work on Fallout 4's deathclaw design and showing it to Todd Howards 2 Days Later Todd returned to my Cube and let me know they were restructuring the demo to include a final power armor versus deathclaw battle now the term demo is interesting given Fallout 4 never actually had a demo so this might refer to a build that was available to some Publications around E3 2015 or it might just mean the gameplay that was shown off in the E3 presentation the important thing however is that it appears bethesda's leaders wants to have a big exciting fight between someone in power armor and a deathclaw to show off early in the game at the end of a series of escalating fights and this is really unusual for a Fallout game you see every Fallout game before Fallout 4 broadly Begins the same way you give the player a town Shady sanss clamo Megaton good Sprint why because towns are the natural environment for Fallout games to happen there's people to talk to local issues to solve shops companions all the stuff that makes up a Fallout game and like we were saying earlier a Fallout game's introduction is doing a lot of heavy lifting it sets the tone it introduces the mechanics it gives us an idea what's more or less Central to this iteration of the Fallout universe so the absence of a traditional Fallout town until you reach Diamond city is potentially a worried being signed depending on your perspective it suggests that there's a less immediate focus on NPCs on quests on conversation and World building and that supposition is backed up by the simplified and reduced dialogue system it also means that a lot of early game Focus falls on the very first faction you meet Preston Garvey and his Minutemen refugees with his Alliance building Quest being one of the first in the game and I think this is a mistake but not in the way most people think Preston's become a bit of a meme over the years so generally criticism of him is limited to him being annoying and putting things on your map I'll mark it on your map yep that's the one right there but I think his memeification unfortunately means that people miss the real issue with the Minutemen which is they were introduced far too early in the game given their mechanical and narrative function let me explain with a simple example in New Vegas you're starting good Springs in the town There's a crisis between Ringo and the town's folk and the nearby powder gangers this conflict can be solved in all sorts of ways joining either side with the potential result that there are only a handful of survivors and the reason that New Vegas can give you so much freedom to deal with this problem however you want is because neither faction really matters you may well never return to good Springs again and there's only a couple of pwy gang of camps in the entire world it's pretty much a consequence-free environment because it doesn't really matter if you completely mess up and get everybody killed next up you're introduced to the NCR and the legion mess with them and the consequences are are a bit more severe as anyone who's run into Aion hit squad to low level can tell you but New Vegas does two things to show a bit of Mercy to new players during the game's First Act no faction will ever shoot you on site no matter how much they hate you and at the end of the first act all negative reputation from the two main factions is removed in short you're given a second chance after that point if you become hated this time they will start shooting you on site and there are no more doovers you just have to accept the consequences of your actions and if you still go on to mess up everything and alienate or kill everybody well yes man there is a final backup with an in Universe explanation for his immortality so there's always going to be a way to get an ending the key thing here is the order things are introduced in begin with a low States conflict so the player can experiment see how factions and reputations work figure out how much Freedom they have and how much consequence there is and then start introducing primary factions in a controlled way with a fail safe option introduced last Fallout 4 does this literally backwards the first faction you run into is a major faction the source of one of the game's four endings but the really big issue is this Preston Garvey is Yes man he's the fail safe ending if you mess up everything else you can always finish the game with the Minutemen and that means he can't die and this has created a very unfair complaint I've seen many many times oh look it's Bethesda and their essential tag again and this is straight up factually wrong Fallout 4 is actually really happy to let you kill everybody and live with the consequences murder dance you can never Ally with them or do any of their quests again nuke the leadership of the railroad the very first time you see them that's the railroad dead you can even shoot sha in the face the moment you find him without ever finding out who he was and then just shoot your way out to The Institute the game's fine with that but most people don't realize this because perfectly naturally the first time they run into a faction they drop a save put a few bullets into Preston's head realize he can't die so they just assume everyone else is essential too it's such an awful idea to put the fail safe faction up first because it literally teaches people the wrong lesson about freedom and consequence and gives them an unrepresentative view of how the world works and speaking of unre reprentative let's talk about the Minuteman quests now as we discussed last time I conceptually like these missions because thematically they make a lot of sense solving local problems doing a bit of building putting together an alliance of independent Holdings their missions feel a lot different from the railroad or the Brotherhood and that's good the problem is you don't know that at the beginning of the game because the minute man missions are introduced within 2 hours of starting and the Brotherhood Railroad and Institute missions won't be fully available until the second act maybe 6 to 10 hours in just imagine the point of view of somebody brand new to fallout Fallout 4 their first ever experience of this universe you run you fight you fight dog you fight you fight you fight you fight brief chat you fight you fight 10 minutes of building you finally get given a proper Mission they ask you to go somewhere else and kill some Raiders that thing you've just spent the last hour doing they say thanks you go back to Preston he tells you to do it again what does that teach you well quests aren't very interesting there's almost no narrative component to them you may well spot they appear to be procedurally generated because there's no proper voice acting and the farmers you're helping don't have names or personalities as a result to that I have every sympathy for people who play the first two hours of Fallout 4 and come to the conclusion wow this isn't an RPG at all this is a competent shooter with dull procedurally generated missions unkillable NPCs and really limited Nar narrative and it doesn't feel at all like previous Fallout games that would be a perfectly Fair conclusion to draw from the evidence in front of you because the introduction just front loads the very worst bits of the game context free shooting unkillable NPCs with nothing to say and the most generic missions in the game the first mission that the minute man give you isn't even the most fleshed out of the generic settlement quests abany farmer grey Garden they both have named characters and more voice acting and contacts but the game never sends you there first even though aboni is literally the closest settlement to sanctuary and again the thing I absolutely want to stress here this is completely not representative of much of the rest of the game take Covenant for example it starts with a fun quiz there's a mystery to solve you can investigate with special checks or just searching the area picking locks hacking terminals Scavenging for passwords or pickpocketing folks there are speech checks multiple endings moral choices it's a really solid well put together Fallout Quest or the silver shroud say which while linear has a bunch of fun writing and voice acting to give it a lot of flavor your crimes have gone unpunished for too long what the hell's wrong with you and a lot of ways to deal with the final confrontation including some fun ones you might not immediately think of like executing the hostage the boss has taken which takes everybody in the room by surprise Diamond City Blues is another great little Quest where depending on your choices you may have to split a valuable Hall of drugs between yourself and a few other people and depending on how many witnesses you leave alive and how many teammates you got involved there can be a follow-up Quest where you have to investigate a murder that you yourself may have been involved with just to make sure that somebody else takes the fall there's some fun intricate stuff here that feels very fall outy and in many cases I don't even mind some of the more linear quests as the enemy variety and level design make them a lot more fun like stor coming for Haan or fighting your way through Green Tech genetics one thing worth noting though is we often discuss Fallout games as if they're produced by a big homogeneous Bethesda creature with people talking about Bethesda Fallout games like they have a single designer behind them when we know that Bethesda actually seems to give its Quest designers a lot of autonomy like we know for example that after a few iterations of a quest set around Salem didn't work out the then Junior Quest designer Liam Collins was allowed to just have a go at making something and he created the devil's Jew and as best as I can tell from the available sources he wasn't given any direction by the lead designer he just made up something and it's in the game and just sometimes you can sense all those different hands in fact I think Fallout 4 is perhaps noteworthy for being the Bethesda game where you can most feel the influence of different Quest designers making very different Quests for example a lot of people like the USS Constitution it's a fun mission with two opposing factions some fun writing and a whole bunch of special checks that make the Thing feel a lot more RPG is than some other quests well we know that that Quest was designed by fet bodan who's a relatively rare veteran of black Isle and former developer on vum back when that was a thing who ended up at Bethesda not obsidian now I can't prove he was responsible for Covenant 2 Bethesda are a little bit Cy about who exactly worked on what but the two areas do feel somewhat similar and I think you can sense the influence of a veteran of old Fallout in these missions on the other hand some body and nobody's ever owned up to this made kid in a fridge an incredibly dumb and short Quest that makes no sense on any level overall though I think Fallout 4 does generally have a good variety of quests that are well suited to their factions or a good solid Fallout fair or feature some really fun writing it's just a shame that some of the game's least interesting stuff is right at the start to sour a bunch of First Impressions but again I think we need to take a step back here because we're getting close to the biggest most confusing problem in all of Fallout 4 and that means it's time to talk about [Music] focus in June 2015 Todd Howard walked out onto the stage E3 and chose a fascinating way to introduce Fallout 4 he showed us a generic panel on the front of a computer console and boasted that Bethesda artist have been concepting every switch and light on every console in the game and I believe him because there is a huge amount of tiny visual detail in Fallout 4 in the exellent discussion Fallout 4 VR is not an absolute nightmare up is not jump noted that in VR you're much more alert to this level of detail that the amount of pipes and wiring on the ceiling of the very first room in the game a room where you have no reason to look up and will almost certainly never visit again is kind of Matt and this sort of thing happens all over the place in Fallout 4 there are over a 100 magazines in the game all with really beautiful and unique cover art the vast majority of them will never be seen by most players and most people that do find them will see the cover for a few seconds and then never again they built planes and tankers and hid them at the bottom of the sea when no one has any reason to look for them everywhere you look there's fascinating visual detail and toow gave us the exact reason for this sort of thing as he introduced the presentation it all starts with an obsession to detail that it's all of these small details coming together that form a much much larger hole now that's admirable and I think you can see this design principle in all sorts of little things but not all of them in fact when you keep this statement in mind it ends up raising a few confusing questions about what resource was assigned where in the development of Fallout 4 and where the most Focus was being dedicated because the artists and environment designers knocked it out of the park as far as I'm concerned it's absolutely obvious the huge amounts of love and attention were put into creating a massive open colorful interesting World Boston is such a masterpiece because of the work of these folks but here's the problem and again I think this is a big Central issue to why some folks come to a negative view of Fallout 4 why does the Game feature so many areas big beautiful visually impressive areas that don't have anything going on narratively to revisit something I mentioned earlier in the speech given by a p AO he explicitly said that too much writing wasn't always productive a narrative should be kept simple focused on a Core theme but this fails completely at ODS with what Todd Howard is saying was the design principle of the game from his point of view the game director is telling the artist to focus in and get every tiny detail right even if it's something that basically no one will pay attention to while the lead designer and writer wants the quest designers to keep it simple stupid and I think this might explain the state of Summer Fallout Force location take easy City down it's an old horse racing track now used for robot Racers and a huge amount of work has been put into it the robots do actually run laps there's a commentator who does discuss the race that happens the robots have cute names the area has been populated with both triggermen and Raiders who are neutral to each other and one note hints that there's some form of scam going on done by fixing the racers so that sounds like a great setting for a quest a mystery to solve two factions who could be turned on each other so why doesn't anything like that happen you can't gamble on the racers everybody just shoots you on site why was so much effort put into this area if it doesn't do the one thing that most players will want it to do after seeing it why has so much effort been put into making an area look amazing but in Practical terms functions as just another Shooting Gallery the most egregious example of this is the combat zone of course which the game tries to steer you to you can walk past plenty of folks that mention it in passing adding in miscellaneous quest to check it out and it's very nearby to Diamond City it's supposed to be a Fight Club you see and in fact most of the work on it was done and can still be salvaged from the game files with mods you go in peacefully choose to fight Kate let her live when you win she becomes companion and you get to keep fighting in the arena for caps the club Only turns on you if you refuse to fight but in the final game nope everyone just shoots you and it's frustrating and confusing because I really have no idea what was going on with the resource within Bethesda did they just have a desperate shortage of quest designers because the number of secondary quests in Fallout 4 is really low if you exclude the main quest and those are the radiant single stage or simple fetch Quest I count 17 and I'm being very generous and including kid in a fridge now that's a bit odd because that's the same number of side quests as Fallout 3 and Fallout 4's map is about four times as big now to be fair there are more main missions in Fallout 4 due to the faction system but once you consider how many quests New Vegas had the whole thing becomes a bit baffling and reveals just how much Fallout 4 is leaning on radiant quests easy City Downs for example can be chosen at random as the site of no less than seven different radiant quests but this isn't to say that every area is narratively empty while there is a strange shortage of quests in Fallout 4 there's also an uptick Stories being told in random locations that have no marked Quest associated in fact some of these are my favorite stories in the whole game the goo in suffk County Charter School the long tale of University points last days as they came under Institute Siege and turned on each other the tapes left by a serial killer and the fen Street sewer menant for a detective long since dead even tiny stories like the paranoid conspiracy theorist who tried to make his own nuke in his basement or how you can get a sense of each resident's personality in the Sandy Coes retirement home but I also appreciate that it seems to be used as a crutch standing in for Quest in areas that feel like they would have benefited from active Quest design the key difference of course being interactivity no matter how well a story is told in the environment you're still mainly a passive audience member your involvement is limited to finding and interpreting evidence in a quest you're an active participant you can actively engage with what's happening around you and modify the outcome so if you wrap all of this together what does it mean for Fallout 4 well I think it leaves the map unbalanced fallout's always had a world that's a blend of structure Quest activities with unstructured exploration and Scavenging Fallout 4 I think has a lot of unstructured time plenty of areas that serve minimal narrative purpose but plenty of mechanical value as a source of junk you can visit just about anywhere in the game and gain something from your visit for some people that's going to be enough for others it's not and that's a perfectly valid position there are after all a lot of locations across this map that have literally no narrative attached to them barely around the corner from the start of the game station Olivia has nothing it's a source of Loot and a home to Raiders and radroaches you will not learn anything else there not about the current world not about pre-war either this means that the main plot of the game is doing a lot of heavy lifting as the folks who want a narrative experience are pretty much entirely dependent on these core plot quests which means it's time to discuss the [Music] story Fallout Fall's course story is built around two connected things sha and The Institute pretty much everything is tied to these two things with Shan fading out in the Institute as a whole taking Center Stage as the game progresses from the moment the introduction ends everything is about one or both of these things where do you need to go Diamond City where a reporter is investigating the Institute and a suspected synth shootout happens on your second visit on your way there you might run into a Brotherhood scout team who wants help with a job which involves a lot of Institute synths the only person who can help you with your search is a detective who happens to be a synth the person who kidnapped your child is himself an agent of The Institute though this is pretty much the point where everyone stops pretending to care about sha after Kellog dies even the main character mostly talks about infiltrating The Institute rather than specifically finding sha then the Brotherhood shows up looking to start a war with the Institute the only person who can interpret the data in Kellogg's brain is a doctor who happens to help Institute sense Escape your only lead is a former Institute scientist he can only help you if you kill an Institute corser the only person who can decode the corser chip is a member of a secret militant anti- Institute group and then you're either working for the Institute pretending to work for the Institute to help the railroad or working for the Brotherhood and assisting with preparing for war with the Institute it's absolutely everywhere no matter what faction you choose to help everything circles around the institute for the First Act of the game to work the sh plot has to work for the whole game's narrative to work the Institute has to work unfortunately both have some serious issues for Sean it's not hard to figure out the problem he's a baby he can't speak he has no personality strong writing and solid voice acting are pretty critical for making a connection with a character in a game it's why I like Nick Valentine say he's a snarky bastard who has a great line of dry comebacks when people insult him for being a synth what the hell is that doing here that what your parents used to say to you maybe this works better if you're actually a parent and thus the anxiety of something potentially going wrong with a baby in your care is more real to you but I think it's noteworthy that most games that assign you a kid that you have to protect or rescue pretty universally don't go for babies Hugo in a plagu toil innocence is five Daniel in life is strange 2 is nine Ellie is 14 in the original Last of Us most games go for an age where the child can speak and thus have have a personality and strangely enough Fallout 4 agrees cuz when you get sort of sha at the end of the game he's been aged up to around 10 so why is Shawn a baby at all because I can't see a single narrative reason if sha had just been 10 from the start everything still works the same he still grows up in the Institute the time passing plot twist still works it's just now the since sha actually looks like Shawn and you could actually give Shawn enough dialogue to try and make a stronger connection between the player and him during the intro seriously why is sha a baby especially when apparently no one at Bethesda can come up with a baby that doesn't look like this to be honest there's not really a huge amount more to say about sha because when you meet him again as an old man you don't have any meaningful relationship Beyond being a direct blood relative so he's basically a brand new character some guy who shares a dismissive disinterest in the Commonwealth with the rest of the Institute but the idea he's been indoctrinated by his upbringing can be one round your way of thinking never really comes up one thing I did find particularly disappointing was they didn't do anything with the idea of him being similar to you because he's your son my immediate reaction on seeing what they were doing with Shan was that it would make sense if his behavior changed based on your own if you were playing as a high intelligence character he would be smarter too if you resolve things more peacefully or more violently then he would be more peaceful or violent but again none of that sha and The Institute are actually part of a very linear story where you have no real agency in terms of shaping the institute around you which is especially OD given by the end of the game you're literally the boss of the place but everybody still treats you like the intern in fact let's talk about the institute in general because the Institute is weird you see as I was saying last time the factions in Fallout 4 are actually pretty elegant in so far as their missions really suit the ethos of each faction the Brotherhood and militants on Crusade so their missions are violent the railroad is secret agents so their missions features stealth and disguises and here's the big issue because the Institute are just a bit confusing like you spend the entire game up to entering the Institute hearing repeatedly about how the Institute is kidnapping people and replacing them with perfect replicas it's got people terrified it's why the Brotherhood invaded it's what the railroad wants to sort out so you'd think that their main plot thread would be something to do with replacing people with sense given that's literally the one thing we've been repeatedly told they do but no they actually want to make a reactor work because they don't have enough power to be self-sufficient because they hate the outside world and don't want to be involved with it they just want to seal themselves off and okay I mean you have sent a lot of robots above ground for a group that doesn't have any interest in the world above ground ah but you see that's because they had to they needed to steal power and resources from above which you'd think might mean that if you just got the reactor working then they'd stop going above ground and everybody would be happy but no you still see their forces everywhere afterwards because they still need to scavenge resources so they still need to be sending teams above ground which they did previously to seize power production so their whole main story is basically pointless now you might well be asking why they needed to replace leaders in various societies around the Commonwealth right down to the smallest groups like literally the Holdings you set up the odd person who joins them a tiny farm with only 10 workers they can be infiltrators sent by the institutes in Far haras say it makes sense for a Cadia to do this because the factions are on the brink of war and pose a real threat to the safety of Acadia but Diamond City doesn't pose any threat to the Institute they're a basic Agricultural Society with big walls and a few Traders all you do by replacing people is draw attention to yourself which is why the Brotherhood attacked you don't forget of course that another reason they're kidnapping people is to turn them into super mutants which they did as part of a rather poorly explained experiment into making better sense but like after they figured out that was dumb and wasn't going to work they kept kidnapping people and turning them into super mutants for decades actually and nobody ever explains why they did they also rather than terminating the super mutants when they were done with them dumped them above ground presumably using the teleporter because that's literally the only way in or out which uses huge amounts of energy energy that they're apparently desperately short of oh but wait there's more let's talk about the third generation synthetics these are the ones indistinguishable from humans because they basically are humans down to a cellular level just built out of artificial bone muscle Etc now the game says they were developed because the old Gen 2 robots weren't sophisticated enough they needed better smarter machines hence gen 3 but the Gen 3s had a problem they they were now so human they often decided they didn't like being slaves and ran off and this happens a lot 10 years before Fallout 4 begins The Institute was tracking these runaways down as far away as Washington DC as seen in Fallout 3 there's an entire faction dedicated to helping those that escape there are s towns dotted about further up the coast like in Acadia the problem is so big that an entire Institute Department was set up to recover The Runaways and just a reminder their agents need to be teleporting in and out too so that's a lot of energy being wasted constantly and a lot of attention being drawn to the Institute too it's a lot of effort basically the third generation has been a huge source of trouble which does make it rather odd that nobody anywhere in the game ever explains what they actually need the Gen 3S to do they just sit there on occasion a couple get identified as janitors or similar that's it everything else is done by the old gen two robots every single Scavenging team gen two soldiers gen two overall at a vast cost of time energy in human life The Institute managed to find a way to make somebody who can sweep the damn floor because here's the funny thing just about any time that anything remotely difficult needs to be done they don't send a gen 3 they send Kellog they send him to University point they send him to Vault 111 they send him to Diamond City and as soon as he's dead and you're in the Institute they start asking you to do all the same sort of work because the entire senior staff of The Institute tacitly agree that they'd much rather send a person than a synth to do literally any job so why did you bother making the Gen 3es and this is pretty much in the institute's DNA they do everything in the most ludicrously unnecessary way possible for example they want to do an experiment above ground with some genetically modified seeds to see if they grow better when exposed to the radiation in the soil and the air okay so how would you put that together well you could just sell the seeds to one of the many homesteads around the Commonwealth and then monitor them or if you wanted a bit more control you could pay the farmer to exclusively handle your crops on condition they only hand the produce over to you or for complete control just go to any of the huge amounts of empty land in the Commonwealth and set up a little farm out of the way where no one would have any reason to look for it but oh no no no no no surely it would be much more efficient to find an existing Farm kidnap and murder the farmer a man with a family replace him with a perfect copy and have this guy deal with the farming and when I say perfect copy his children specifically mention he's acting differently and the foreman successfully determines he's a synth leading to an armed confrontation you could have just set up a new Farm you didn't need to infiltrate the war Homestead there's no shortage of bloody land it's post-war America it's h empty so yes the institute's a bit of a mess every other faction it's really obvious at the highest level what they want and roughly how they want to achieve it which is how you end up with missions that feel appropriate to that faction's operation but with the Institute and odd mess of isolationism and sort of slavery and constantly messing with the above ground world for no well- explained reason there's no core to build missions around so you just end up wandering all over the place One mission you're fighting Raiders to get a syn back the next you're gunning down the Brotherhood to get a technical component the one after that and this one is utterly mad you actively go out of your way to broadcast an announcement about your plans over the radio which is of course what I would do if I wanted to be a self-sufficient isolationist Science Center that didn't want anything to do with the outside world and then the final insult you take out the Brotherhood and a massive explosive assault to make their giant robot blow up their own Airship now you may currently be thinking hang on don't the railroad and the Minute Men both deal with the Brotherhood in a very facially appropriate way and wouldn't it make hugely more sense to engineer a plan to infiltrate the Brotherhood and replace Elder Max and with a synth because replacing people is literally what we spent the first two acts of the game hearing about yes yes that would have made sense but no actually basically the entire game is built around a faction that makes no bloody sense right so as you may have noticed Fallout 4 does have some problems like some fairly big problems so how do we reconcile all of this how do I evaluate this game after all the stuff I've said during this video and during the last one too well let's try and see if we can figure that [Music] out Fallout 4 is a flawed game that's absolutely clearly demonstrably true and I never went into this looking to persuade anybody otherwise but I do think it's flawed in a few interesting ways and very unfortunate ways too in ways of mean I think some folks can come to a more negative impression than Fallout 4 perhaps deserves if I had to try and estimate at the very highest level what happened that caused all of this I suspect Bethesda overcorrected knowing full well that Fallout 3's clunky shooting wouldn't hold up in 2015 they brought in expertise for Mid software to make a solid well put together shooter system and it does work very nicely and is balanced against a brilliant iteration of Vats that genuinely lets players exclusively treat the game as a tactical shooter RPG if they wish they want the Looting and crafting system to form a compelling core gameplay Loop and I think they made a beautifully well integrated one that teaches you to act like a Fallout prospector they wanted a building system that let people leave their own mark on the wastelands and I've had great fun making stuff with it myself and again it's well integrated into the Fallout World allowing those prefer to build to have their own ways to make money and get hold of junk and supplies and this was all new it was exciting and I think these were strong additions to the franchise but maybe Bethesda got a bit over excited with all the new toys and took their eyes off the ball when it came to those who were Veterans of New Vegas or old Fallout who would be coming in with a very specific set of features they wanted to see towns which are not so common in Fallout 4 and introduced strangely late quests with a strong narrative Focus which do have a less prominent place in the game than Fallout 3 and much less than New Vegas and a character build system that facilitates narrative roleplay an unfortunate absence from Fallout 4 which does allow in gameplay terms perhaps the most specialized unique character builds in the history of the franchise but then bafflingly didn't allow those same specialized perks to be represented in dialogue but the biggest error and the one that I think condemned Fallout to be poorly thought of by quite a few folks is that the first couple couple of hours are a bit of a mess that feel like they were desperately trying to excite and engage those who were used to something much faster paced than a Fallout game ever should be and that decision left us with an opening which well I have every sympathy if you were an old veteran of Fallout feeling let down because that intro is specifically not made for you traditional Fallout quests are dotted around the map hugely superior to the violent rush through Concord but you wouldn't know that from the first few mission which make the strange decision to introduce you to the world with flavorless radiant quests building starts to unveil its practical utility in the world as you start running Caravans summoning reinforcements and calling down artillery but you wouldn't know that from the first Sanctuary quest which completely fails to mention any of the real benefits of towns like the production of sellable Surplus Goods once you put a bit of time into crafting learn about what components are found in what items the Looting system becomes a lot more interesting in because you can loot much more efficiently and productively but you wouldn't know that from the first few missions because the game basically never bothers to tutorial IE looting and weapon crafting which is particularly odd given it's pretty much the core gameplay Loop all the worst bits of Fallout 4 Gunplay without context mindless unproductive building essential NPCs who don't have much to say a lot of chatter about a baby I don't care about radiant quests it all comes in the first couple CP of hours and I suspect a big reason a lot of folks immediately got off on the wrong foot with Fallout 4 which is such a shame because most of that stuff Fades away over time and gives way to a much stronger mid to late game especially once you get into exploring Boston and getting to know some really interestingly put together factions just you know not the Institute if however you are one of those folks who walked away from Fallout 4 with a bad impression what would I suggest well first give the DLC campaign far Harbor try is it pretty much solves every problem in Fallout 4 and I do mean that very literally it even integrates some perks into the dialogue system the writing is much stronger there are some really interesting characters there's a very strong reputation system which feeds really nicely into a strong bunch of quests including a vault based murder mystery with almost no raging Quest and a huge number of proper sub quests with an actual narrative to them as a standalone Fallout experience it pretty much fix is everything I've been discussing this video and beyond that the survival motor which is a huge Revelation as far as I'm concerned to the extent I can't really play Fallout 4 without survival mode anymore because it doesn't feel like the complete Game you see Fallout 4 is full of stuff that feels a bit incomplete areas with no narrative to impart or dialogue with no way to represent your character choices survival mode is a feature that by contrast fills in some of these gaps the world of Fallout 4 actively Mak makes more sense with survival modee enabled to some settlement building feels a bit pointless in Fallout 4 but in survival mode having a series of outposts where you can eat drink and rest never mind the other Advanced features your Town's can unlock if you go down that route that's a lot more valuable than it is in the base game there's also the Institute teleporter which The Institute graciously lets you use to teleport around the Commonwealth as long as you work with them which is staggeringly pointless in a game with fast travel where you can just teleport anywhere but when survival mode disables fast travel the ability to teleport instantaneously from anywhere in the map back to the Institute that's a ludicrously useful benefit one strong enough that it's a compelling reason to play nice with the institute for as long as possible and then there's the Brotherhood Verte birt another thing that looked really cool in the E3 trailer but then turned out to be completely useless because you could only fly between two locations you'd already discovered so again why not just fast travel but now this is a hugely advantageous tool taking the place of fast travel in away and a solid practical reason to back the Brotherhood in the mid game these changes actively help the factions make more sense feel more distinct and provide unique practical benefits which alienating a faction will leave you without really strengthening Fallout 4's already decent faction system down on the ground meanwhile balancing Rising adrenaline versus the need to sleep and save is a really tense high-risk tradeoff the massive reduction in compass icon range makes the game much more about exploration and adding in negative consequences for the use of stimpacks and radway add a huge amount of value to towns your owner all the existing ones as doctors suddenly have a point in existing it sadly doesn't fix the intro mind but it does at least make it a bit more tense but I'd say that ladies and gentlemen is enough I'm glad I chose to look at both sides of Fallout 4 though because I feel like I've gained a renewed appreciation for the good stuff as well as a better understanding of the bad and a great deal of sympathy for those who once played a few hours of Fallout 4 and then chose to walk away it's an odd game a flawed game but in the end if you give it a chance it might just surprise you I've discovered new stuff while researching this video myself so with all of this fresh in mind I think maybe it's time for a brand new full Fallout 4 Series very very soon indeed but in the meantime I be Jonas has been many a true nerd and the Fallout 4 is better than you think thank you very much and goodbye ah we have got a gate key here and then we have got I've made a mistake I've made a mistake I've made a mistake I've made a mistake this is going to take all of my skill and cunning as a hunter to sort out die you mooving bastards die die go go away go away nobody likes you that was a good idea till it wasn't

Channel: Many A True Nerd

Views: 926,099

Keywords: Fallout 4, Fallout 4 game, Fallout 4 gameplay, let's play Fallout 4, Fallout 4 walkthrough, Fallout 4 playthrough, Fallout 4 part 1, Fallout 4 discussion, Fallout 4 good, Fallout 4 review, Fallout 4 better, Fallout 4 is better than you think, fallout 4 lore, fallout, fallout 4 essay, fallout 4 video essay, fallout is better than you think, fallout discussion

Id: 6QH2V0pRMwY

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020