Fallout 4 - One Year Later

[Music] November of 2015 was an important month in my life my birthday is in November and that year I turned 30 which is too old to pretend you're not an adult anymore it was also my first birthday since becoming a father and it was the month that fallout 4 came out that last one doesn't seem like it belongs does it turning 30 birth of your child fallout 4 I know it doesn't match with these other monolithic milestones in life but it was still a very important event for me because fallout 4 was the game that I decided to take this YouTube channel seriously and to treat it like a job so despite this game being the least important of those three things it's all I really remember about November 2015 all I did was play fallout 4 that month I vaguely remember a birthday cake my son had some icing when he really shouldn't have and I know I got some sleep at some point but those are all flashes among a huge blur of the Commonwealth diamond city Piper and Nick and those infectious songs on the in-game radio [Music] I don't remember making the video I remember writing the script and recording it but the video part not even a little bit of it which is unsettlingly common when I look back at other stuff I've made for the channel when I watched that fallout 4 analysis today I can view it like someone else made it then considering how quickly I got it done after the game's release I'm happy with it mostly parts of it are a little rushed and I've learned a lot since then but that's a really good thing a year is a long time I've changed the channel has changed to fallout 4 has changed as well and I think returning to the game is long overdue this video will naturally contain major spoilers it will also build on a lot of what I said in my first video if you've played the game then you don't have to watch it to understand this video but I still highly recommend it [Music] for that first video I played fallout 4 for a hundred hours the game has since been updated with six DLC packs four of these were mostly about expanding the settlement building side of the game the other two were more traditional add-ons more in line with the DLC given to fallout 3 and new Vegas they added new areas new characters and new stories to find and complete playing the game again and all of these additions more than doubled my play time today I've spent more than 250 hours playing Fallout 4 and after all of that time I have a confession to make one that if you watched my previous video may surprise you - I like fallout 4 there's some gas left in the tank on this one if you put a gun to my head and told me to play another 50 hours of no man's sky or darkest dungeon then I might risk losing an eye if it was fallout 4 I'd be okay spending more time stomping around the Commonwealth realizing this about the game hasn't been easy for me to rationalize it's also come with a reevaluation on how I feel about Bethesda because a year ago my inclination was that todd howard and his merry band of merry men were only in it for the money there's a meme on 4chan that has taught howard often in an assortment of disguises showing up and demanding that people buy and/or pre-order Bethesda's latest game and he gets increasingly more irate as posters reply saying they pirated it or that they thought the game was bad because that's the impression I think a lot of people have gotten since fallout 3 into Skyrim and now fallout 4 which is an image that the lead designer hasn't really helped the fight and then reading the reviews and hopefully if you get lucky ignoring the reviews thank you very much guys this focus on profit might still be true but I find myself awkwardly reconsidering it as I try and weigh and measure the different parts of the game because it's equally awkward to judge which reality is worse that the terrible parts of fallout 4 exists because Bethesda doesn't care or is this honestly the best they can do and they just failed to live up to expectations after 250 hours I can say that fallout 4 feels like a game born of conflicted priorities there's the open-world shooter game and then there's the RPG and maybe initially these two were meant to be well integrated as time went on a divide formed and split them down the as even more development time passed once I grew and pushed the other away and I'm left wondering if the game's title and the expectations that came with it are the worst parts about it because this would be a much better game if it wasn't fallout I returned to fallout 4 with one of my old characters in order to do the big DLC packs for Harbor and Nuka world then I restarted with a fresh guide Walt Tec salesman bomb drop dead wife kidnapped baby we still have the backup and decided to ignore all of it I left culligan his box I left the kidnapping and started wandering the Commonwealth with the radio on full volume I saw another side of the game by doing this one that I had caught glimpses of in 2015 but didn't fully understand until this recent playthrough the way I see it there's a cycle to gameplay in fallout 4 one that must be deliberate in my opinion because it feels like the game is constantly pushing you toward it even when you pull on your knee high boots and weight into the [ __ ] on the RPG side of the line the game shows you back go kill this go fetch that another settlement needs our help Edward from a settlement asking for help the cycle goes like this exploration combat gathering in more detail you explore the world and discover know where the area these places are almost always marked on your compass when you're nearby to act as a guide to find them they then fill in your map when you get close enough and are introduced with a discovery title on your screen more often than not there's something to fight in these locations or in the surrounding area that leads to them you defeat however many enemies there might be and then move on to the final phase you loot the location and the bodies of your opponents you gather resources for yourself ammunition chemists impacts and maybe even upgrades for your equipment and scavenge supplies for your settlements it's also common to find some sort of story in the environment whether that's a subtle placement of objects and corpses or something told a little more directly with audio logs journals or computer terminals [Applause] now my guess is that right now people watching this are going to be in two groups they're going to be thinking in reaction to what I just said one of the following there's so much more to the game than that Joe what the hell are you talking about or this is really simple of course this is the core of the game why are you wasting my time in short both of these reactions are correct but sometimes you can learn quite a lot about something by boiling it down to simple terms and I have to wonder if there really is so much more to Fallout 4 that this central three-phase cycle is shrouded from the view of some people you have story character progress in levels perks skill books and bobbleheads there's quests and the dialogue system that comes along with it which leads to characters companions interactions with them the settlement system building and maintaining it social perks that unlock options outside of combat is another avenue of progression weapon crafting legendary enemies upgrading armor and even more of this stuff added in the DLC that layer over these three key points but this is just one way of looking at it it also happens to be how I looked at the game when I first played it today I see all of these things is like the surface of a wheel the three phases at the heart of the game or what keeps it all connected you can't do anything in Fallout 4 without going out to explore finding things to kill and then acquiring resources after claiming these areas you spin through each phase able to feed into the other parts of the game as you do I view this as fallout for his greatest strength and its most glaring flaw it's a weakness that could have been avoided if the game had been in a different series if it had been called anything except fallout I know that sounds so stupid and simple like I'm saying if the game had been called Boston after Trump with no other changes than it would miraculously become a masterpiece I'm not saying that the name changes a bit more complex because it's not just player expectations that you have to weigh here it's also the obligation the developers clearly felt as well it's the developer expectations along with the player ones here's where I get into murky territory surprisingly I'm not a mind reader I'll also be the first to admit that I know very little about the development process that results in a finished game and even if I did what information I do know suggests that this process is very different from company to company or an indie developer when I've spoken about developer intentions and the like in previous videos I don't think I've been as clear as I could have been insane that it's all just guesswork on my part it's informed guesswork by studying the finished product and lots of other games but this is also complicated that what looks like an intentional feature may just be a failed attempt at something else or the idea of Bethesda's bug from the previous fallout 4 video to explain that a function in the game might not be missing it might just not be working properly despite saying that I feel confident that the split I showed earlier in the video is accurate no matter where this divide was at the start of development by the end fallout 4 was meant to be an open-world exploration based shooter with the RPG stuff stuck on like someone tried gluing feathers back onto the chicken they just plucked the three main ways I can support that are quests and those three damned phases again stories and the writer behind fallout 4 and finally the dialogue system let's take these on in order this first one is the strongest piece of evidence that reveals the developers intentions because like I said going through these phases is fun it's good it's not incredible or great but it is an enjoyable part of the game many of the places are interesting the shooting is fairly standard and searching for loot and valuable items is strangely appealing especially if you're hoarding them all for crafting I'll speak more about this later but for now I just want to make it clear that not only do I think that this is the foundation of the game that I also think it's pretty good unfortunately Bethesda feels far more strongly than I do because they try to get you into this cycle at every opportunity after this most recent playthrough I have completed almost every side quest and fallout 4 I've also visited almost every area I want to say that I've done everything but it's possible I might have missed something somewhere so let's just be safe and say I've done ninety five percent of the game out of all of that I can say that the overwhelming majority of the quests or even simple tasks given to the player involve exploring the world to find a location killing a bunch of enemies at that location and then finding something or someone there afterward time and time again with so few exceptions that it's difficult to even think of any this is what the game has you do here's a quest go here on your map kill a bunch of stuff bring something back for me it's a very world of warcraft' way of laying things out there are NPC hubs in the Commonwealth and they're seemingly bursting with stuff for you to do the game has radiant quests here as well as scripted ones for those unfamiliar radiant quests are continually generated by spawning enemies and an objective at some location in the world so that there are effectively unlimited quest for you to do it's the reason why characters who hand these out are vague on details these voiced instructions can't be generated like a note or a quest marker explaining what to do you can see this when a quest giver says something like a settlement needs our help instead of telling you what the problem is ahead of time my guess is that some people at Bethesda are really proud of how these radiant quests can sometimes appear like regular ones that many players might not even notice that they're doing artificially generated content when in reality I think this is viewing it backwards it's that the actual scripted quests are so dull and samey that it's that they appear like radiant ones not the other way around / boss got a task I think you might be a good fit for any chance you'd be up for some work there are technically so many quests for you to do and fallout 4 but because they all involve returning to the core cycle they all feel the same it's quantity over quality which brings us to the second point stories and that fallout 4 has no writers and I'm not being literal there of course the game has some writers but you'll see what I mean this video clip I showed earlier is from a talk given by Emil Paglia reuleaux lead designer and writer on fallout 4 thank you very much guys I'm not going to speak about much of what he says in this presentation because I already spent most of another video going through the problems in his story I do want to say that though to his credit writing for a video game must be dreadfully difficult as he says in this talk you can spend so much time writing wonderful stories and then have to watch his players tear out the pages to make paper airplanes instead of reading them will be looking primarily at the side quests for now and the issue I have with them is directly linked with that analogy he uses it seems to me that in the face of this reality of dealing with unpredictable players they decided not to even try right there has been three hours meeting jazz okay there has been 20 hours looking for bobbleheads it's tied right in with quantity over quality and some of what Pagliarulo says in this talk makes me think some of my suspicions on how bethesda creates their scripted side quests might be true basically for a while I've been wondering if there's any actual writers that come up with most of these quests instead it feels like they have a big meeting one day near the middle of the game's development cycle and asked everyone at the company to think of any cool quests idea that they think would fit in with the game they write a quick summary of that idea on a piece of paper and drop it into a box somewhere at the office after a week or so the guys that make the quests hopefully guided by Pagliarulo put all these slips of paper into a hat and choose them at random to read out loud if they like the idea then it goes into the game if they don't then it gets discarded and those be game studios they are not the only designers in fact also made by our level designers that sounds absolutely crazy but where with me here suspend your disbelief for a second there's a lot that supports this in the game especially since so many quests can be summarized like they were written on that scrap of paper a melodramatic actor is stuck on a Tower of super mutants you help repair a Chinese submarine so it can sail away there's a ghoul kid in a fridge there's a robot back in brew beer find a cat and send it home rescue some kid that ran off to become a raider you pretend to be a crime-fighting superhero and so on and so forth I think you get the idea now immediately you might think this is unfair it's easy to summarize and simplify something right well the proof that backs this up is that these quests and almost every single other quest in the game has no more depth to it other than this surface level description there are rarely ever any decisions or ways to interact with these stories but even if you excuse that you still can't ignore that there's nothing really to these quests like look at those examples fleshed out you fight your way to the top of the tower to save the after you then ride down with him to safety the end you do fetch quests to find the parts required to fix the submarine and clear out the goals for the captain that's it you can speak to him a bit and ask some questions that don't really go anywhere you also have the joke option to blow up the submarine along with you inside of it which kills you in forces or but there's nothing else no involved story about how or why the captain has never left the submarine in two hundred years or how we even survived this long no optional objectives to fix the submarine without killing the captain's gula fide crew this is a fairly interesting scenario in my opinion and instead of exploring this potential the basic idea is all there is and used as an excuse to send you back into that three-phase cycle the kid in the fridge I spoke about last time there's no way he could have survived in the fridge for that long without food and water the entire story here is to take him home his parents are still there you fight Raiders for absolutely no logical reason he just wants them the end the brew bought quest is especially egregious because this thing should be an extremely valuable machine it could have been interesting if multiple parties got wind of its existence and we're trying to get it the game sort of hints at this since you can choose to keep it for yourself but that's the end there's no wacky story about different gangs kidnapping the robot and fighting over it it could have been funny if each time you rescue it it's being modified in a new weird way each time or learn new bad habits from its Raider captors even without that really think about how rare something like this must be in the post apocalypse instead it's a glorified fetch quest because the idea wasn't explored past its simple description hey buddy involved anyone a cat escapes when you arrive you get the quest to go out and send it home that's the whole quest good job I can't believe I have to say this next sentence this isn't how cats work I can't wouldn't do this ashes go home Aaron misses you would it have been so difficult to have the player be able to pick up the cat and carry it back maybe this quest was meant to be misdirection so the bigger question involved anyone can begin while you're gone but they're not directly linked so I don't know but as does bug I'll find him for you the guy that's become a Raider is in a factory right next to the farm you used to live on you clear the place out of Raiders you have a dialogue option at the end which consistently bugged out on me you can help him reconcile with family or not with one conversation that's the whole thing pretending to be the silver shard has slightly more to it and it's this example I'll use to acknowledge that some people might think I'm cherry picking my quests to support my argument if you've played the game already then I'd urge you to look at the wiki and read through the side quests think about how many fit my criteria here how many of them are something close to a catchy concept or situation convince the guy to stop taking drugs robots need fresh water or there's a deathclaw in Salem but ultimately end up being one or two extremely simple tasks involving combat or retrieving an item it's like imagine there is a book called the dog barks at midnight and then you open it up to read and it's just one single page describing a dog barking in midnight and then 200 pages of blank missed opportunity that's virtually every single question followed for because they're thinly disguised excuses to shove you back in to explore combat gather the quests that are exceptions or almost exceptions link back to the third point on that list the dialog system and also role-playing or character building depending on what you want to call it there are a handful of quests that are more substantial the silver shroud the last voyage of the USS Constitution hole-in-the-wall the secret of the Cabot house and human error are you certain about that nevermind next question these have multiple phases characters to meet and speak to and problems to solve for them and aren't just one shot fetch quests unfortunately they're still highly linear and don't have many choices until the end they also still eventually evolve a lot of combat and clearing out an area on the world map you're sent to a sewer system or hospital or an insane asylum and have to fight through it all there's no variety or branching decisions or ways to change anything significantly with how you've leveled your character this is true for the vast majority of the game even speech checks rarely result in anything other than additional pointless lines of dialogue that don't really reveal anything important or the reward extra caps there's hardly ever an attempt at rewarding the player for choosing to approach the game in a specific way you deal but let's keep it between the two of us the last thing I want is another lecture for my mom the one exception that I found is among those five which stands out as the only question the entire game that comes close to belonging in an RPG the last voyage of the USS Constitution this is about a crew of crazy military robots that have claimed an old ship and fitted it with an advanced hardware with the intent to launch themselves into the ocean and continue the war that ruined the world now I'm not about to say this is stellar stuff but it's interesting enough to be engaging it also involves the second party you can choose the side with a group of scavengers that want the robots and all of their hardware for a valuable scrap plus I doubt this is a coincidence this is the only quest in the entire base game that I found that had stat checks you can bypass some of the quest stages if you built your character in the right way you can repair some of the ship with your own skill rather than having to go out find an area clear it out and carry something back it's also the quest that seems to have the most work put into it there's a fancy rocket launch at the end the ship flies through the air and lands in another part of the city it's the best side quests in the game and it's still only one step above decent which goes to show you how poor the RPG side of fallout 4 really is this should have been one of the middle of the line wacky scenarios in a series of great quests in the Commonwealth it even sounds similar to one of the quests in new Vegas and I consider it to be one of the weaker ones in that game so what does this have to do with dialogue well first off dialogue options would be one of the main ways that players could choose to express their character building choices conversation paths and solutions that unlock if you have the right perk or stats or something but even without these dialogue options should be exactly that an option a way to steer the conversation and influence how the quest progresses or even failing that most basic requirement you should at least be able to ask appropriate questions so you can better understand what's happening fallout 4 does not do any of this most of you watching this probably know by now how terrible the dialogue system is in this game but even I was surprised by the depth Bethesda sank when I played again with a mod that expands every choice without this mod what your character will say is labeled with a very brief hint some might think you're meant to judge which is the best option for what you want to say personally I think these options are intentionally this castrated so players are unlikely to realize they don't have options the worst and best example was this one here which is strangely in an area that's quite enjoyable apart from this this is a shopping center that was meant to be run by robots they've all gone mad in 200 years in each place you enter has some deadly trick that you can try to here you enter a diner the booths are full of skeletons which should be enough to tip you off if you accept the diner's offer to serve you then you are rudely shown how literal they mean that term when you take your seat they're going to serve you as dinner not the other way around when the robot asks you how you would like to be served your character has these dialogue options what wait what wait what which seemed innocent enough until you see the same thing with the mod installed three of these are exactly the same response just with a different label so maybe that's not a great example though it's just some funny moment right the whole game couldn't be like that well I strongly recommend you give the game a few more hours of play time with this mod so you can see how much work went into giving you the illusion of choice without actually giving you a choice it's so much worse than most people think how you can't ever really say no and that your options are just a yes yes or a sarcastic yes it's more insidious than that though when you can read every option because you can see how many dialogue choices are the same line rephrased and rewarded all too pushy toward a certain trigger question or statement so the NPC can unload the information relevant for you to go explore kill some guys then gather resources at the risk of repeating myself from the previous video I wish bethesda simply hadn't bothered there's no way to express character building or true choices in these conversations so why not make them fully script it instead I understand that having a voice protagonist makes it so much more expensive to have dialogue options but this also meant that the player character is an actual character and not an avatar for the player as shown by that characters origin story and emotions and motivations for their family it would have been a good excuse to have scripted conversations with choices if there even are any left at the end because the quality of dialogue suffers here too conversations already mostly work this way there's an intended conclusion to most of them that if you exhaust every dialogue option sits at the end of so much repeated information and awkwardly spoken lines when you consider how this back-and-forth is progressing between two people having one version would make the whole thing much smoother it also could have made the dialogue camera a reliable tool that could be allowed to function properly instead of constantly being stuck or clipping through other characters or walls or objects since the game has to account for so many different variables if you choose to wait between dialogue choices or start speaking to someone from a direction that's difficult for the camera to adjust to seriously this sort of stuff happened to me all the time while I played if each conversation was a short scripted movie then all of this could be avoided because ultimately if you're not going to make the choices meaningful then why are you bothering [Music] how'd I end up here used to run with a rate of gang a while back just didn't know any other way you know this all brings us to a difficult question and back to that conflicting feeling I spoke about at the beginning of the video whether or not this game was purely about making money or making a good game was this a cash-in or was this honestly the best they could do to address this I think it would make sense to answer question I get asked a fair amount in the comments on my videos about another Bethesda game that I've mentioned enjoying a few times why do I like Skyrim the first Elder Scrolls game that I played was Oblivion than in an order that will make sense in just a moment i played fallout3 new vegas skyrim and in fallout 4 all of these as they were released these games all share a lot in common that new vegas and fallout 4 stick out more distinctly in my mind first to answer that question about Skyrim I think the biggest reason that I'm able to like it is that I didn't play morrowind today I know quite a lot about that game just like I now know quite a lot about Fallout 1 and 2 even though I started with fallout 3 which has helped a bit by how much I played Baldur's Gate Planescape torment and a bunch of those RPGs that get the classic label from so many people ah the child of ball has awoken Skyrim for me has never been an RPG it's something else something that's half unique to Bethesda understanding this has given me both a greater appreciation for the developer and also a heightened way to be disappointed with them Skyrim has the same cycle that fallout 4 does you explore you find someplace that could be interesting you engage in combat to clear it out and then you ransack it for gold magical trinkets and resources for crafting or even for your treasure trove of a house if you're playing with the hearth fire DLC which is like an eerie prelude to the settlement stuff and fallout for now and just like fallout 4 almost all of the quests and Skyrim push you into that cycle so much more work is put into the environments you find and explore rather than the stories characters and choices that a lot of people wanted this is an important distinction because despite what the game genre tags might say I don't think these games are RPGs the best way I can describe them is to just say that they're Bethesda games which imbues a fresh layer of legitimacy to how many people said fallout 3 was just oblivion with guns and that Skyrim was fallout through with curved swords fallout 4 is skyrim with guns and so on this is a distressingly fitting way of describing these games RPG doesn't mean a leveling system or stat points it doesn't mean a specific setting or that a game has a story most games have all these nowadays and they're not called RPGs this is outside of the scope of this video but for now I think it's fair to say that there needs to be a certain level of character building and the ability to choose how you interact with the game's conflict and characters to be worthy of the RPG name otherwise it's a dead term it's something that New Vegas moderately succeeds in doing while the other games on this list barely try so why is all this a problem well most importantly Bethesda themselves haven't realized this or far more likely they're afraid to fully embrace it these expectations matter so much and although the backlash I got for it was far beyond reasonable I do understand why so many people were annoyed that I hadn't played fallout 1 and 2 before making my first fallout 4 video but I think new vegas was enough to show me how much people expect from this series and how woefully short the supply is from bethesda instead of embracing the way that they want to make the game open-world combat explore inspect and loot they have this weird half-assed token attempt that it's still in the game like they're afraid that too many people will be upset if they ignored role-playing completely the result is an unbalanced split of priorities which shouldn't really appeal to either group suddenly the really vocal angry response from fans of the RPG site of follow up makes more sense because what they wanted was given so little attention but the other side didn't get a fully fleshed experience either so why has a lot of the reception this game received being so positive or to repeat the question why do I like Skyrim and has the exact same problems even acknowledging how clearly the game was made to favor quantity over quality there's not really many games that can compare to what Skyrim provides so even though I definitely agree with the description as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle I really enjoy stomping around making splashes in this puddle put another way the idea of you can go anywhere you can do anything is an extremely powerful attractive one even if only one half of that promise is really true that doesn't entirely extinguish that experience so many adorn there's so much to do in Skyrim so many places to explore and search through gathering resources and having so many different ways to improve your character with immediate feedback as your guy gets better at that specific skill as they use it all combined to make this constant progression loop that hits me is a good time and that's without accounting for mods improving the experience although it wouldn't be fair to include them while judging it even though the combat is a full step below possible and that the animations are sort of bad and there aren't many interesting characters to find and speak to the game can still be carried by the sheer amount of content in its varied locations I like simply exploring the world in Skyrim arriving at the different towns and exploring them to finding caves and ruins tucked in the corners of mountains the quirky landmarks someone took the time to place in the world but I can't shake the feeling that if I had played morrowind first I would think very differently about it even though I hope I could see past my expectations and enjoy Bethesda's intentions I would still be disappointed that they chose to make a different game than the one I wanted to play because that's how I feel about fallout 4 because I played New Vegas first the game was rigged from the start fallout3 has never grabbed me like Skyrim or oblivion did I don't know if it's because of the setting the constant rec drew in place into the next row in place like parts that feel like a constant series of crumbling subways one after the other but out of all of these games we spoken about in this video fallout 3 is the one I've played the least or maybe it's just how combat works guns and Raiders changed too much in some way and the shooting was awful I'm not sure for Fallout 4 it was that the Bethesda game side of development got more attention to finally make it good outside of just exploration combat is dramatically improved and a lot of character progression is tied directly to finding new locations and searching them for resources before we get to that let's address something on both sides here I said earlier that the quests in this game are heavily linear and that they seldom have choices some of you might not care about that some of you might think because you love the game so much that the RPG side is perfectly fine my question the challenge that is even if you don't care about choices and think linear quests in an open world are great don't you agree that the stories themselves still aren't all that interesting that the decision to have a lot of these instead of fewer but more developed quests might have been a mistake look at how boring and uninspired the stories in fallout 4 vaults are compared to the other games is the most disappointing example of this on the flipside there's probably quite a few of you watching that thing even despite the amount of work that went into the game's exploration in combat that it still isn't all that fun the shooting is quite basic there's not enough enemy variety in the base game I think this all needs to be viewed in relation to the open world and the freedom the game comes packaged with to be fairly judged and to understand why so many people still like it but I have to agree it could be better a lot better actually because it comes back to that conflict in priorities it's not just that Bethesda should release themselves of the obligation to include minimal effort RPG elements essentially do something right or don't do it at all it's that they should also fully commit to the other side and flush out all of those mechanics so let's look at that now the three phase cycle in far more detail how it succeeds in many ways but also where it falls short of its potential let's approach these in the same order that we have throughout the video so far exploration is by far the strongest part of the game and it's clear to me that the most amount of work went into it not only that but the most amount of love and care as well I haven't played every open-world game ever made but I have played enough to know that Bethesda succeeds in making fallout 4s world an interesting place to get lost in from what I know about their two biggest series and play most of them myself I can see that they're getting better with each game this is the only part of Fallout 4 that doesn't suffer from quantity over quality its quantity and quality instead on a broad scale the commonwealth map isn't gigantic or anything but it is large enough not to feel cramped yet there aren't many empty areas either even if there's no marker for a place on a map there tends to be a lot of minor locations littered throughout the world there's a lot of variety both in setting and the types of places you'll find what impresses me the most about it all is how smooth the transitions from different biomes are in the world there's a sparse woodland and the northwest quadrant that you start in the coastal zones on the eastern part of the map the outer city areas as you start heading south than the distinctly different inner city streets farther south than that of the wetlands and of course you have the alien looking glowing sea in the southwest corner that might not seem like much when it's summarized but there's a lot of different places that suit many of these parts of the map the cabins and remote locations in your starting area then more signs of industry in the south railroads trains a garbage dump into some larger buildings that end up being tiny compared to the inner city towers there's a real sense of flow and change in the location as you encounter the placement of many factories and the like makes enough sense that it doesn't feel forced that you're finding so many places to explore which carries forward when you enter these places and have natural enough interiors to fight through sometimes the way the places are following apart inside feels sort of contrived and it's obvious they were trying to make it feel like a dungeon but more often than not these places feel authentically like a structure loss to the war add to that the amount of detail on the outside of many buildings or that some of them don't have interior levels at all and instead of spilled their contents into the street when the bombs tore them open there's a surprising amount of vertical layers that make many of city sections feel dense and rewarding to explore since you're learning the paths between the remaining pieces of a wrecked highway and the city below it sometimes even accounting for the makeshift bridges that Raiders or the Gunners have created there too it's a real shame that the game's combat is so plain then because this level of attention was also brought to the arena's in which you fight throughout the game it's easy to remember the first few battles around sanctuary with the Raiders below the electrical towers or at the satellite station to the east or patrolling the road in the forest enemies liberally use the environment for cover and fighting those Raiders hiding behind those trees is a strong memory of mine in the game for a reason I don't fully understand maybe it's something as simple as this was the first moment I noticed they could use cover back in November of 2015 and was stunned that Bethesda had bothered adding interesting AI to the game because here's the thing combat and fallout 3 is terrible it's terrible in new Vegas it's terrible in the Elder Scrolls games - I said fall at force combat was good in my first video and while I stand by that comment today I have to wonder if I was so surprised by how much work went into it that I was a little too generous with how I judged it because sure it's definitely a huge improvement from these other games but it's still well it's not exactly thrilling like I said it's easy for me to remember those first encounters but it's later areas that are far more impressive fighting Raiders and a huge quarry with cover and vertical layers spread all over the place the same can be said for the factories and their skeletal walkways that snake all over the outside of them the ones that most impressed me were the ruins of Quincy and a similar lost settlement near there that was half flooded there were so many wrecked houses and optional paths through what ended up being quite large combat arenas there were a lot of options for how you find and move from cover for flanking enemies and for them flanking you there are even more examples of this in the DLC some of the arenas in Far Harbor clearly had a lot of work put into them the Raider town built around a wreck ship is the prime example that comes to mind and the best of all would be the Galactic zone in Nuka world which feels huge even though it has so many stacked levels and different paths woven throughout it all so it's a missed opportunity that combat in fallout 4 is basically point shoot and reload even the cover mechanics are shallow the only thing the game has on top of this is the system and the variety of its enemy types which aren't that great look I understand that having a functional combat system alone is an achievement for Bethesda and that's not sarcasm either it must have been very difficult for them to get this to work in their Frankenstein engine since it took an entire new game to finally feel like a shooter instead of the gun magically spawning bullets in front of the model like you're casting a spell for each one in Oblivion I also understand that the simple version of combat also feeds into the exploration and scavenging phases there's no baseline health regen and looting specific ammo types isn't reliable essentially you have a supply of bullets and stimpaks and your task is to kill all of the enemies using as little of these resources as possible so that when you loot all of their corpses it's a net gain it's for this reason that a lot of raiders drop stimpaks as well as different kinds of ammunition so that you're incentivized to carry around multiple weapon types and switch between them there's variety to be found there in the early and mid game before you become comfortably powerful with lots of perks and levels and legendary gear but all of that doesn't change how bog-standard the minute-to-minute shooting is in this game the best argument I can make is to ask you to imagine fallout 4 exactly as it is today only the player has the Nanosuit from the crisis games so suddenly you have access to reliable stealth that depletes action points you have super strength and speed in order to navigate these really cool arenas and more creative ways all of that verticality could be incorporated into the increased jump range that these modes provide to the player and then you could use the armor function when it's time to have a direct fight as an alternative way of spending action points it's not a perfect example but I think it captures the essence of the problem I know this is also basically saying I don't like the game as it is now I wish it was something else but that's simply the reality of any solution when the issue is gameplay being too shallow you have to add something in order to fix it I also know that the power armor in the game sort of already fills this role but in my experience this is a severely limited way of playing it's slow and clunky to move with there's the constant ticking down of fusion cores that for me and many other players is enough to never use the thing ever even then it's probably going to be a fast travel jump away a lot of the time which is adding load screens to every big fight and most importantly for me the game feels fundamentally different when I'm inside the power armor it's a cool concept but I'd rather be more mobile and human-sized I like flexibility and that feels better to play for me it's the same reason why I don't use vats very much because it's slow to execute your commands and it eats away at the same resource bar that you use for sprinting it's cool to watch and if it had a separate cooldown timer and completed its queue faster I'd use it a lot more but I can't help wishing that the jet activated bullet time that's currently in the game today could be another way to use those points I'm still in control of aiming in that mode instead of relying on dice rolls to hit body parts which while we're talking about them is another cool bit of that potential that could lead to interesting gameplay Dragon's Dogma style monsters that require more careful shots on limbs or weak points aided by stuff like bullet time could be really fun the most the game does with it now is shooting the soft parts of mirelurks and blowing the legs off some enemies so they're mobile imagine using the Nano suits high jump to get above an enemy with a weak point on its back or something or shooting off buckles on a mutant behemoths armor to expose it for more damage these suggestions tie closely to the gathering part of the core gameplay so let's move on to that in the previous video I drew attention to what I thought was a cool feature the perk books you could find in addition to bobbleheads yes these things are far more rewarding than their Skyrim counterparts the removal of skills from leveling up is more like a relocation to me now they took say the hundred points you could have invested in a skill and condensed them into five or ten books and then place them in the world as fun rewards and they succeed in being great to find I was always happy when I found one of these there are a couple of problems here and admittedly they're all minor ones but when you combine them all it gets worse first off I don't think this needed to be an all-or-nothing change leveling up and follow-up for is markedly less exciting than in fallout 3 because there are no skill points only parks that are mostly just number tweaks to damage or something skills could have still existed as another avenue of progression without stripping away what could have still been significant boosts from these books on the flip side it's not good that some players may not find important books especially the stealth ones that increase your sneaking effectiveness if they're trying to play in a certain way having both could have alleviated this problem another example being finding a bunch of melee books when you want damage boosts for guns or energy weapons you get the idea I really really like how much character progression is tied to exploration and gathering but the usual leveling system needed more but then again even compared to Skyrim this exploration based system still comes up short because although I just said the skill books and bobbleheads are more substantial Skyrim had a lot more chances to find cool loot it wasn't tied to hoping a legendary enemy spawned you could find enchanted items and chests and like I know it doesn't make as much sense and fallout but the amount of cool stuff you find this far lower in one of these games that's not even the biggest difference though because Skyrim had the words of power [Applause] in case you're one of the ten people in the world that hasn't played Skyrim you find and collect these words that function as their own shout ability that's separate from what kind of character you play so even if you don't use magic these options are there for you it's not a perfect system but it does give extra rewards and a sense of excitement when you reach the end of a lot of dungeons in that game it doubles up functionality like that more player options and more rewards for playing finally let's get to that then how to realize the potential in the core Fallout 4 it doesn't have to be a Nanosuit or those specific abilities I went through just something more something the player can build on and gain extra combat options from because the current mostly number buffing perks in the game sure don't do the job there are multiple ways this could have been in the game for one closest to the Nanosuit idea the vault suit you get in 111 could have been extra sturdy to withstand being cryogenically frozen and one of the researchers in the vault could have worked on upgrading it when they saw how bad life was on the surface after the bombs fell or the pip-boy you find could have been a special stealth boy instead than using stealth in front of enemies and they act like you mysteriously vanished could finally be explained you could find technology to upgrade this thing maybe some special Institute tech or something like that it could be integrated with more vats options - the best one in my mind is to make it so the Institute now has many bases around the Commonwealth that you can find clear out and then loot there could be augmentations inside that since synths are meant to be indistinguishable from humans the player could use to upgrade themselves it could even be explained that the player is unique in their ability to use these because they share the same DNA as Sean the one the Institute used to create the most advanced line of synths and subsequently these augmentations and fits really nicely maybe they could even be rewards for rescuing or reclaiming escape since now you have exploration as it functions now only with new Institute bases that also show that they have more influence in the Commonwealth combat options are dramatically increased with these new abilities which also rewards the player for wanting to go out looking for them add skills back into the game and you have a more engaging leveling system without losing out on the skill books and bobbleheads and fighting in the already well-designed combat arenas in the game is now way more enjoyable with the mobility augment powers those are my armchair developer ideas they're not amazing and the game wouldn't be perfect with them but at the very least I hope that they can function as a demonstration of how locking the current version of the game is compared to anything like this that's my primary reason for bringing them up in any case unfortunately we're still not finished looking at gameplay in Fallout 4 because there are a bunch of balance problems tied to what we just went through the difficulty slider is the biggest culprit and sits in the middle of all of this it creates so much variance at the cycle I described just a minute ago about each encounter with enemies being a test to kill them all while using few enough resources that you end up with more ammo instant packs after you loot them all may have sounded like I was describing a different game if you played it on easy or even normal in the early parts of Fallout 4 the difficulty slider makes you receive more damage and makes the enemies have way more health this method can be used to great effect in some games but would mostly hitscan weapons and resource based health regen fallout 4 benefits of very little from this implementation of difficulty options put simply on very hard many enemies become bullet sponges that are such an ordeal to kill that it becomes boring but even on normal if you level up enough without investing heavily in combat perks you will hit the same problem eventually hopefully with enough stockpiled ammunition that you don't run into the situation that I hit a lot when playing on survival or very hard from the beginning and it means taking more bullets than I could find there's a wonderful balance to be found here which is related to that cycle players should want to carry around multiple weapons and feel happy about collecting ammo for each of them not only does it add some variety to what weapon you're using but it rewards the player for being prepared and choosing to carry options but this balance is broken and I really earnestly believe that Bethesda's intention here is for players to constantly fiddle with the difficulty slider to self adjust as they play so when they reach a level and suddenly encounter bullet sponges they go down from very hard to normal then when they spend some more perks on damage boosts they bump it back up to very hard this is a terribly lazy system and is like they wash their hands of any obligation to balance the difficulties in their it's so bad that I wish there were two perk trees one for combat and another for social and crafting there are barely any RPG options so this isn't really taking away character building anyway you get a perk in each tree for each level so you can keep up with all the damage buffs you need to match the monsters leveling in the world but still have the flexibility to take more of the fun perks or those that don't have any influence on combat whatsoever the trouble is I really do like the different versions of enemies that unlock as you level up death claws into albino death claws into matriarchs or normal ghouls into glowing ones into the bloated fungus types with staggering amounts of health it's one of the better instances of rescanned enemies since the changes feel a little more substantial but when a non legendary enemy can take multiple magazines worth of bullets to kill and there are more than one of those enemies in each fight then combat becomes more of a chore legendary enemies are also a big part of this problem because they're exciting to find and kill because of the special loot that they drop it's also a built-in solution to the bullet sponge issue because these enemies actually make sense to be really powerful so the challenge of a big struggle with a demand for a lot of damage output can still be in the game but in my experience some of these legendary enemies would sometimes have less health than the normal enemies around them probably because of the way some enemies scale at high levels or you know Bethesda's bug these legendary encounters also spawn more often on very hard which for me and I imagine many others was reason enough to stay on that difficulty this equipment is initially quite powerful and is another way the game can reward exploration you want to see if there's a legendary enemy with a legendary reward and a new place on the horizon but then you're stuck on the bullets punish it fest that comes with very hard I hate to repeat myself but these problems really show how inexperienced Bethesda are at making a real combat system and at the moderate success they reach with fallout 4 really is an achievement and I'd love to be confident enough in their ability to learn when they clearly are capable of improving you can look at the animation quality in this game compared to fallout 3 and Skyrim for proof of that but then they went and added survival mode to fallout 4 in a patch which is all about gameplay changes combat especially and it is one of the worst game modes I have ever seen added to a game it proves how they either know very little about this sort of thing or that they simply don't care maybe this was some haphazard attempt at appeasing fans of the series that wanted a hardcore mode like New Vegas had and they whipped it up real fast to win Internet brownie points for a free bit of DLC and they did earn those points even with me I always tried to think the best of people and their intentions and if you view the problems in this mode as a symptom of an experience instead of apathy then it's cool that they tried many other developers wouldn't have and I am genuinely inclined to believe this version because even though survival mode is as awkward as putting clothes on a dog they're still cool clothes they don't suit this game at all without additional changes but the ideas here are sound the minor differences here are the needs eat drink and sleep then there are new diseases to try to avoid but the really big changes come from increased damage for both of you and enemies and that you need to find a place to sleep in order to save the game No More save anywhere no more quick save and quick load there's also this really cool idea with the adrenaline system the more kills you get the more damage you can pump out but if you sleep and therefore save you lose some of that boost so hey that's a neat idea of risk vs. reward you might debate stopping to save so you can keep that extra damage it's a great idea but underneath all of this the game is still fallout 4 enemies still have ask loads of health like they do on very hard so it became incredibly frustrating to fight anything in the starting area some Raiders and even blowflies took multiple shots to kill or even entire magazines while only getting nicked a few times from their hits meant I died which would be fine if you could reliably dodge enemy fire but most enemies use hitscan weapons so you can't even enemies that are melee only are gigantic pain because they have massive health poles to accommodate that limitation I just about ran out of ammunition fighting the mirelurks by hiding them around sanctuary and the reason I forced myself to fight them was because I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for opportunities in the starting area to get experience points to progress through survival mode it really sucks because I love the idea of this difficulty setting having to play really carefully and methodically clear out a lot of areas both for experience and because resources are far more precious but the killing blow for both my character and my interest in this mode came after a few hours when I was playing really carefully and still by I got into a fight with a Raider to the east of vault 111 and as I used my pip-boy I noticed a warning icon flash that a Molotov cocktail would just throw my way when I lowered my pet boy it hit me before I had any chance to move and killed me instantly I reloaded back at a bed and lost about 30 minutes of progress it was enough to make me realize how the mode was flawed I wonder like I do about everything in life if it's about dark souls tying the ability to save two beds and sleeping bags place in the world sounds like the bonfire system having to decide to risk pushing on or to turn back and play it safe with a new save sounds like the bonfire system but Dark Souls try so hard to make it so whenever you take damage it's your fault not something that's unavoidable or even an expected part of the game like in fallout 4 it's even more of a shame because I've read that after you level up enough this mode becomes enjoyable the changes to combat damage settled to something close to very hard it's that difficulty is front loaded with a struggle at the beginning sort of like a few of the difficulty mods I've tried for Skyrim funnily enough but even with this survival mode is broken in my mind because it doesn't account for a huge part of the game gathering loop from cleared areas fighting enemies again can be enjoyable but going through chests and containers and deciding what loot to take and leave is never fun the second time it's a chore and it's something you do so much in the game and if you die and are set back by even one area that's enough to make me want to quit for a while and each time a player quits there's a chance they won't come back to the game so the best course of action is to return to a bed at one of your bases to unload your loot and save frequently which means why bother having the limitation at all in my opinion just make it so you can save after you clear out each area worse than all of this however is that the game is still buggy I only played survival mode for a few hours and it crashed on me twice once after I slept and saved which was no big deal but the other time was after I had killed a few packs of enemies looted those areas and was fighting a blowfly before heading back to save and losing all of that progress because of an unstable game coupled with a strict checkpoint safe system is one of the most thoughtless combinations I think I've ever seen in a game not to mention that some players might have enjoyed having the survival elements hunger thirst exhaustion and diseases without all of the extras bundled with it if nothing else I think the implementation of this mode proves how pathetic and have wonderful intention sometimes but then trip and impale themselves when they try to make them a reality and with that I think we're finally finished with gameplay and have dipped our toes into the new stuff that's been added to follow for we're going to return to the story in the RPG side in the base game in the final section of the video but for now it's finally time to get to the big DLC packs for harbors up next then we'll take a trip to new Co world you've entered a place of clarity understanding peace while you're here in Acadia cyntha kind welcomes you as long as you welcome us so stupidly contradictory statements about games are becoming something of a trademark of mine at this point but sometimes they're the most direct way to say something in this case it's that far Harbor and Nuka world feel like a string of missed opportunities they have stories with so much untapped potential that I'm almost angry by how great they could have been and yet the story in the base game of fallout 4 is so abysmal that I can also say that this DLC is a huge improvement wait it couldn't be it has the best writing in the entire game by a significant margin now I have a lot to say about both of these DLC packs and most of it is about specific points in the story the characters and the quests but some are more general remarks that may not make sense until I finished going through both of them remarks such as it would have made so much more sense if they released nuke or world first and Far Harbor second and that a huge feature in nuke or world would have been a much better fit if it had been included in the game at launch there are a few more things like this that I want to say so please try and keep that in mind if you think I'm glossing over something and might just be that I'm saving it for later in the video you ready to pick that for a settlement gameplay is a lot easier to deal with though because very little of it is new so let's quickly address that Far Harbor and Nuka world take place in their own mini maps separate from the Commonwealth Far Harbor is impressively large and has quite a lot of locations to fit in that same cycle explore the island clear a nest of enemies and then loot them Nuka worlds map is a lot more concentrated in a central location that titular theme park there are other locations on the map around like they're caught in some sort of orbit but it's a lot more sparse because of this high density in the middle the only other addition is enemy variety nuclear world is only okay in this category it's less creative with swarms of insects another sort of death claw monster and yet another enemy that can borrow once you notice that by the way it's hard to ignore how many enemies do that burrowing thing I used to think the game had a good amount of different enemy types until I realized they were mostly humanoids rescanned humanoids slightly larger humanoids and then a series of radioactive monsters that can burrow and then ambush you Far Harbor on the other hand feels like it has its own ecosystem they have the amphibious monsters that remind me of the geckos from new vegas but the way some of them wait in that same old ambush is a lot more amusing they're pretending to be a type of plant you can harvest there are also the larger praying mantis monsters that live in the fog at least that's what they look like to me and my personal favorite the hermit crab which is a fantastic combination of the scavenging shell idea and the gigantism brought on by radiation I wish there was more of this type of creativity in the series instead of simply making an animal grow two heads or only be bigger most of these new monsters lurk in the fog that covers most of the island and Far Harbor it's a major plot point and one we'll get to but first we have to rewind to the players journey to this place you get here by boat and it's not something you can simply stumble upon there's a new main quest that sends you here and away from the Commonwealth you're here searching for someone's missing daughter a girl named Kasumi Nakano oh thank god you have to get working right away there are two ways to begin this quest either you find in the Conner residence yourself while exploring and accept the quest directly from them or after saving Nick in the main story in reaching a high enough level the detective agency in diamond city will reach out to you over the radio for you to take the missing-persons case this is Ellie Perkins from Valentine's Detective Agency with a message for Nick's partner which gets Nick involved before sending you to the new Connor residence anyway Nick has a fairly substantial role to play during the DLC so it's not a bad idea to bring him along for the whole thing that's what I did on my first playthrough on my second playthrough however I started a new character and I confirmed that you can skip the attack the agency part more importantly even if you do save Nick first you can actually receive and accept this quest before finding Sean before finding the Institute you can actually agree to the urgent task of beginning a wholly new fresh investigation for someone else's missing child before you even finish finding your own I'll find her don't you worry this section with kasumi's parents is pretty terrible the voice acting wasn't very convincing for me and it suffers more than most conversations from all the circular options given to the player the kind of dialogue choices that have the characters repeating the same lines and information over and over whoever voice Kasumi herself did a far better job and her audio logs we find throughout the house sound far more human than the conversation with her parents which is doubly ironic because the main hook of this story is that Kasumi thinks she's a synth she believes that the Institute made her kill the real Kasumi and then replace her but the same memory erasure that triggers on every synth has sir to forget doing it all but that she's a synth on the less she cites strange dreams of something that sounds like the Institute and a feeling that she never really belongs in the house as evidence it just so happens that she's also a natural at fixing technology and with a newly repaired radio has made contact with a synth refuge in Far Harbor this is like a more isolated version of the railroad a haven for escape sense a place that also suspects Kasumi is one of them and it has invited her to join them I want to repeat my spoiler warning here because it's been about an hour since the start of the video I'm going to spoil all of the plot points in Far Harbor and a big one is coming up right now because the situation with Kasumi is a little more complex than this and the game surprisingly enough gives you some options here at the start first off kasumi's grandfather recently died the impression I get is that she was closer to him than her parents those parents also vehement Lee refused to consider that Kasumi might be a synth she's flesh and blood not a synthetic which makes a hell of a lot of sense because why would the Institute want to kill and replace a girl who lives in the middle of nowhere now this could come back to the more general plot holes in the base game of Fallout 4 or more realistically the plot Grand Canyon that is the Institute's motivations but fortunately for us I sided with the Institute on my second playthrough for exactly this reason I did everything Shawn wanted me to then I took over when he died because I was absolutely certain that the game would not have planned for this if I'm the leader of the Institute I can simply skip going too far Harbor and just go back to my home base and ask someone if they killed and replaced a girl named Kasumi right the Institute would have records of that and I'm in charge and I knew that there was no way Bethesda would have been thoughtful enough to include a way to ask that it would be yet another thing that should really be possible in the game just like dozens of other things like it that I went over in the previous video i teleported into the Institute feeling all smug that I found another discrepancy and then had to pick my jaw off my desk when there actually was a new NPC that I could ask they had thought to include it there actually was an option in my defense he bugged out so hard during this conversation that he randomly became headless so your bubble pal but I'm already disappointed oh oh dear okay well I'll try harder I'll work on it alright credit to Bethesda words do however this does lead to a much bigger problem the Institute says that if Kasumi is a synth that she isn't one of theirs Kasumi not one of ours clearly perhaps a defective unit who's been reprogrammed by someone you can go one step further than that though and confirm it for yourself later every synth in the game One Killed drops a synth component there are no exceptions for this that I've encountered even dance when you don't do any of the Brotherhood quests still drops a component when you do the Institute line and kill him during the assault for control of Liberty prime it begs the question why if he's a synth the Institute didn't assume control of him for this attack but let's not waste time digging more holes in that plot canyon he drops his own component when you kill him that's the important part so does everyone else at the synth refuge in Far Harbor if you kill them all except for Kasumi she the only one that doesn't drop one these facts are enough to conclude that she's really human the lack of a synth component may be a Bethesda's bug but that the Institute confirms they know nothing about this girl seals the deal for me on whether she's a synth Kasumi is human this is unfortunately a massive problem in the story but first let's review the situation in Far Harbor this DLC is like a miniature version of the main plot in the base game there's a location that multiple factions are fighting over these factions also mirror those in the Commonwealth the people at Far Harbor who have lived on the island for generations and want to be left in something close to peace are most similar to the Minutemen who want to band together and defend the ordinary people the children of Adam are just as fanatical and more than a bit crazy about their ideology as the Brotherhood of Steel then there's Acadia which initially feels like a much more competent version of the railroad but also has a lot of the Institut mixed in which is by far and away by light-years the most interesting detail in the DLC it's also the biggest missed opportunity that we'll be seeing shortly Captain Avery is the leader of Far Harbor but she's more of a guiding voice rather than a strict leader conversely Confessor tectus is a lot more firm in his ruling role over the children of adam' on the island and dima the synth leader at Acadia is somewhere in the middle he is quite clearly the boss but is more open to discussion with his followers than Texas the conflict on the island has arisen like this the fog and Far Harbor is like a supernatural force you're told that it gains and loses strength over time like the moon goes through phases some years it stays powerful and causes more of the islands monsters to attack settlements on the island other years it recedes to barely an issue at all and the people can build and live somewhat in peace you arrive at a point in time when the fog is at its most dangerous and it's been that way for longer than it should have some of the people under Avery believe that it's the fault of the children of adam' their entire belief system revolves around worshiping radiation they believe their goal in life is to divide in that radiation and somehow create multiple universes of existence when their body splits under the force it makes sense to some of the people in Far Harbor that the children have found a way to stir up the fog so that there's more radiation for them to revel in which was the reason they came to the island in the first place as far as understand it they've even set up their home in a nuclear submarine base for constant exposure to radiation tensions are running so high between these groups that shortly before you arrived a missionary from the children of Adam was shot dead when they went too far harbor to try to convert some of the people to their faith so you have the children possibly making the conditions on the island worse for the people who have been there all their lives the people of Far Harbor huddled close to death in their last settlement on the island that's safe in the monsters and Deema in Acadia elsewhere on the island trying to find a way to maintain peace between these groups so that everyone can continue to co-exist his reasons for this aren't entirely selfless however because he wants to safeguard his own home full of sentences that were liberated from the Institute so this is where you come in you get to pick sides and ultimately decide the fate of these groups on the island a favor one with your help favor all of them and try to reach a peace agreement favor two and white one of the mount or wipe all of them out there are more decisions and player involvement in quests this time around it's one of the best things that the DLC does we don't need no free loaders or more help mainlander so you can get back in your boat and leave before getting to that though let's return to Kasumi when you arrive at Acadia you have a long talk with dima and some of his people there are a lot of details here to go through but the most important one for now is that they claim to know a way to tell if someone is a synth there's Dima himself his assistant Faraday and a freed courser agent named chase while talking to these three it's clear that they must have some method of identifying sense in order to invite them to Acadia but they are very vague on details and I'm not sure what exactly Bethesda is thinking here because they're adamant that Kasumi is a synth just like everyone else in Acadia but she isn't one it gets even more complicated because dima heavily hints that you are a synth too which of the player can choose to admit their suspicions of that possibility all along but they won't confirm it for you through whatever method they have tell me are you a synth in the back of my mind I've always suspected that's what I thought if you don't mind what's the first thing you can remember either way this is terrible Acadia has too many synths living and sanctuary for them to have just gotten lucky with finding them but the way Dima presents his arguments is more like a suggestion that it doesn't matter who is or isn't a sense that anyone could be one so therefore everyone is one so then why bother having the Haven set up specifically for since then why waste resources taking care of kasumi when she isn't a sense why propose that you might be one when that's impossible the player-character is not a synth this isn't up for any level of debate outside of Bethesda's bug or plot holes Shaun's actions and decisions which directly resulted in you being freed from vault 111 to find him to begin with do not make any sense if you're a synth Sean believed that since had no free will he treated them as property he may have had some hope that eventually synths could reach parity with humans but even this is more of a plot hole than anything else his sudden change of heart at the end of the game with his orders to reprogram the younger synth version of himself to believe he's Pinocchio is one of the biggest inconsistencies in the base game you could argue that he had a change of heart on his deathbed or something it's a stretch but it almost works but he names you as his successor to take over the entire Institute long before this while giving you tasks to reclaim synths and treat them as nothing more than really advanced computer hardware he wouldn't put a synth in charge like that dmoz proposals that you've been a synth right from the start that your first memory from before the war really is your first memory that's when your synth memories begin to give you the illusion of a lived life what pisses me off is that making the player sense solve so many issues in the main story if that fact was acknowledged and used it could have led to some incredible moments when you've reached the Institute that I'll talk about later but no you're human and the reason that Cadia is vague on how they can identify sentences because Bethesda wanted this to be a tease of a question a what if I am a synth dun dun dun they thought the ambiguity was cool or interesting or something and sacrificed a larger piece of Acadia making sense in the process in its current form dima asking these questions and insisting Kasumi is a synth proves that the whole place is fraudulent which admittedly does make some sense considering what happens next but I'm inclined to think that this is a plot hole instead of being intentional also while we're griping you can't tell Kasumi that you're the leader of the Institute and know that she's not a synth the game won't let you the game will let you lead the Institute here to reclaim all of them for reprogramming but it won't let you tell Kasumi that you have evidence that she's human and that she's just a confused grieving woman that's searching for answers in the wake of her grandfather's death the game won't let you do this because she has to give you a quest to investigate Dima she suspects that he's up to no good that he's not quite the gracious benefactor that the other since believe him to be despite my earlier comments Dima is the most interesting part of Far Harbor he was built during the same prototype program that resulted in NIC so in a way the two of them are brothers bringing Nick to Acadie results in some unique dialogue and this is pretty good especially since Nick doesn't just blindly believe nema there's some debate and actual conversation about it which really drives home how [ __ ] the Companions are handled in the base game is it really possible that you wouldn't remember any of this you mean between the Institute fail-safes the beatings I've taken over the years and plain old age nothing screams quantity over quality then the broad selection of sidekicks that you can choose and fallout 4 that ultimately end up being Reese conversions a dog knee now I haven't tried traveling with all of them for hours because even I have to draw the line somewhere and live my life instead but the only ones that I thought had any effort put into them were Nick and Piper and even these two have forgettable quests and barely any worthwhile conversations about events as they unfold they never commented ever on Institute stuff when I traveled with them Kure another companion who ends up becoming a sense herself if you travel with her for long enough can end up providing some truly laughable scenarios to your thoughts Tulley so he'll go to such extremes to rescue since this is nobody yes your thoughts the hell god I really need to die Tony there were no other alternatives your thoughts this gift of life you've given me I'm so thankful the Institute just ignores your sins traveling companion during your quest to hunt down and retrieve escaped sense for reprogramming it makes me wish for only a select few companions with properly fleshed out options and reactions to things the worst of these is yet to come with Preston and nuclear world though you cross the line general there are some things I can't forgive in Far Harbor Nick gets another chance to be a proper character even if the conversations are still a little awkward with the terrible dialogue system other new characters in the DLC have had similar treatment and the quests associated with them are elevated because of it in terms of gameplay these are still the same as ever here's something for you to do or get and involves going somewhere on the island and killing a bunch of things then fetch something back or return covered in blood to prove that you did the job what's different is that many not all but enough of the quest givers are actually people instead of mission dispensers they have a background you can learn about you can have conversations there are speech checks that finally reveal a new somewhat interesting information about them the Mariner and Far Harbor wants your help reinforcing the defenses against the fog monsters but you can speak to her about her home her motivations and discover that she's slowly dying of some illness this improvement of the harbors walls is her final project before her death other characters in Far Harbor are similarly fleshed out not all of it is great but an effort was made here they also speak to each other and about each other the quests they give out have a bit more detail to them than in the base game and by doing them you are earning the respect and trust of these people which actually matters at the end it's kind of like the faction system in New Vegas the same can be said about the children of adam' but to a lesser degree some of the people who live in the irradiated submarine base aren't quite as crazy as you may first assume although some of them are even more insane than you'd expect when you speak to these people things aren't so black and white and it feels like some actual thought went into how these communities would work and the interaction citizens would have we each other the standout character here for me being someone who didn't believe in the cause whatsoever but joined for the sense of safety and community alone sure beats where I came from before joining the family I was a trapper it's a shame then that the final choices you make on the island aren't better developed or to put it another way Joyce's that actually require thought the decisions you make at the end have answers that are too obvious but we'll get to that returning to Kasumi and Nik you're given the task of making sure that Dima is who he says he is and that his aspirations for peace on the island are legitimate you can hack your way to finding out or eavesdrop on a conversation by Acadias leaders or directly confront Dima about it minor choices but welcome ones from here you're given the quest to infiltrate the children of adam' in order to retrieve some of them as memories that are stored in terminals deep in the base as an older synth model Dima has accumulated more memories and he can hold throughout his life some of them are moved to storage devices I think he used to inhabit the submarine base before the children of adam' arrived to the island and so some of those memories are still there important ones that he and Faraday believe could be useful in orchestrating peace on the island this memory problem is also something Nick suffers from when the two of them got out of the Institute Dima retained some of his memories Nick did not which is why Nick doesn't recognize him we'll talk later this is a lot to take in so this quest serves two purposes it forces you to encounter the children of Adam if you haven't already so you need every faction on the island and it's the next step in Farah harbors main questline and we're already surprisingly close to the end depending on how many of those side quests you do for each faction in order to peacefully enter the submarine base you have to pretend to be interested in their religion before that though there's a scripted event when you arrive here that shows you what kind of people they are two of their disciples are returning home and are being denied entry until they prove their commitment to the cause this is how that situation ends you need to prove your thing one of you may return to the phone the other will return to Adam Richter this is insane you can't expect us to will there be anything else for you the same guy who is pleased that one of his people just murdered another one in front of him says that you have to pass a test to gain entry you have to travel to a nearby radioactive spring drink the water and then report back on what kind of vision you have so you go and do that because why not the following problem isn't something unique to Bethesda it's something I'm noticing as an epidemic and storytelling across movies video games and even some books it goes like this have you ever gotten to some shocking detail in a story and thought oh wow that's really interesting I wonder how they're going to explain that it's such a cool detail or twist something that shines a new light on the story and you can't help wonder how it fits together with everything else you already know and the ultimate answer is that they won't bother explaining it there is no answer it was put in for shock value or a cheap way of grabbing your attention I can't imagine the balls on some of these writers it makes me anxious just thinking about it because in reality the writer is along for the ride with you in that moment when they wrote that part they were just as amazed as you were only they were thinking oh wow that's really interesting I wonder how I'm going to explain that in pharr Harbor there are two major instances of this the first is the supernatural fog it's never explained it has no source I thought it would be tied to a huge bunker and missiles underneath the submarine base something the children of adam' had tapped into and we're releasing more waste or leaking missiles or something to create more fog but no the answer is dust this island has fog the end this would be acceptable some places do have peculiar weather and foggy island settings aren't unheard of but the games specifically drew attention to how special the fog was and heavily hinted that there was some nefarious reason that it was creating such lethal monsters it's never explained likewise the vision you have here never make sense unless the game actually believes that the children of adam' have a legitimate religion on their blistered hands here you're visited by the mother of the fog which is sort of like pouring vinegar into the wound the last problem isn't it she appears and guides you through the island to a place where you can claim her idol then she vanishes you cannot interact with her in any way she is mysteriously immune to all of your weapons when you take this Idol back to the children they act like your vision wasn't meant to be surprising but that you saw the mother herself is a big deal some people inside the base are envious of the importance of your vision mist atom above you really did see her the mother of the fog not everyone saw the mother when they did this rite of passage to gain entry to the children of Adam and this is never explained it can't be a hallucination because it leads you to perfectly to the right place to prove how important you can be to the children the information you have from this vision is enough to impress confessor tectus himself and makes him trust you far more than he should so the only conclusion I can come to is that bethesda really does intend for this to be a supernatural entity that you encountered here one that favors the children and one that sits idle no matter what choices you make and something that they don't intend to elaborate on because screw you once accepted by the children you can run some quests to earn more of their trust these aren't as substantial as the ones in Far Harbor but they are generally better than the base game investigate the faith of someone track down a traitor stuff like that I think I've shown enough of them now to say that I think these are good but they're still not great they're an improvement because they aren't totally mindless fetch quests and the results of them build to something later but they're not amazing it's still important to acknowledge that Bethesda did a better job here though if I was going to speculate on why it wasn't done even better it would be that despite the size of our harbor much of it feels rushed to return to the idea of picking stories out of a hat that I spoke about earlier it's like they did that again but thought about it for a few hours instead of just going with that surface description more time and exploring more creative ways to develop these quests would have been even better maybe some of them could clash with quests given by other factions so you could experience that conflict between groups yourself instead of just being told about it let's pause the main story and go to the only other significant side quests far harbour as a perfect example of what I just said there's a vault on this island number 118 well well there's been a murder here and a robot has been sent out to find you a detective to solve the case on my first playthru I actually didn't meet this robot and stumbled on to the vault myself it was a cool surprise because it's hidden underneath a ruined hotel on my second playthrough I let the robot guide me there so here's the from a hat description of this quest there's a vault full of Robo brains one of them has been murdered then the developers sat around and thought for a while and settled on a really plain boring motive it's just about money these Robo brains are pre-war people that allowed themselves to be transplanted into these bodies to live on and they have continued doing so in the vault for over 200 years until the whole war thing blows over as they say again like I said in the previous video 200 years is a lot longer than Bethesda thinks it is this isn't really plausible the person who was murdered was done so because another citizen in the vault found out that they had cheated them out of some money 200 years earlier when the vault was first constructed why would they still care two centuries later why did this take two centuries to come out why write something that doesn't make sense like this when it's not even interesting there are also some unbelievably abrupt changes in tone that go on down here clearly the idea was for this quest to be one of those melodramatic the butler did it stories with an impassioned suave detective did you have any thoughts about so when you take that role sometimes your character acts like they normally do but then for some lines of dialogue the delivery is suddenly really really different this would be fine if the whole quest was delivered in this style but it's only some dialogue options it's like they ran out of time to record some lines with the voice actor doing the performance seriously listen to these examples you'll see what I mean it is hilariously terrible your residents are robots I found the murder weapon have you noticed Juliana acting strangely lately I think you're the real murderer there's evidence Ezra was embezzling from his investors Ezra was embezzling your money that's why you killed him and framed Keith this quest could have been great the vaults and the other games are usually so interesting that I had my attention just from that and there are multiple Robo brain characters to find them speak to each marked hilariously with some sort of decoration a hat or a bow tie or a painter's apron so you can tell them apart but that funny detail is at the heart of the problem here because apparently those accessories aren't just for the benefit of the player to tell them apart this was the only way the people in vault 118 could tell who was who for 200 years the twist in the murder mystery is that Ezra Parker the man who was murdered is actually the murderer he killed Julianna a woman in the vault who only just discovered he embezzled her money he killed her when she confronted him about it and then just swapped their accessories for everyone to think he was Juliana and that it was Ezra that died the voices the Robo brain's creator synthesized by design of course brains can't speak the computer bodies do it for them so he just switched his voice to the other one because no one could confirm that it was Ezra and just assumed it was because if it's fashion accessory that means there really was no way for them to tell who's who which is really stupid but now I view it as a way they could have made this quest infinitely more interesting in wacky if the two centuries were used as a feature in the story instead of something to be hand waved and ignored it could have been funny as hell if the robo brains had been switching identities like this for decades and decades two people decide to switch places for fun because they're bored after so many years being locked in this vault then another impersonates someone else the accessories get mixed up two centuries later it could have been this gigantic tangled web of lies and deceit that comes out when someone is murdered and it isn't even who the murderer thought they were some people could have forgotten who they were originally and the quest could have involved repairing some of the vaults computers or something to verify everyone's identity with potentially funny results instead you confront the realize ah you can pressure him for money or have him killed that's all that's it only a little bit of thought went into tapping the potential of this idea they pulled from a hat which unfortunately can also be said about far harbors conclusion returning to the submarine base you have to fight your way through some of the remnant security bots guarding the computers that store dmoz memories I must have missed the reason that explained why these security measures are still active even though Deema once lived in this place and could use the computer to store the memories in the first place when you get here you use a program to enter the computer and have to beat some hacking minigame to unlock the memories I have a feeling this may surprise some people watching who have played for harbor because this gameplay mode is admittedly sort of [ __ ] but I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected after loading into this I just stared at the screen that heavy sigh and thought I was going to hate it and then ended up having a fun time jumping around blocks and finding data to use to construct bridges and defences for my little computer bugs I'd go as far as saying that if this feature was given some more depth I would prefer it over the current hacking minigame used in the series it would have to be reserved for special terminals only or maybe if you hack one terminal in a building then you unlock all of them via this method because it would be exhausting to have to do something like this for what must be over a hundred computer terminals in the game but if pathetic could speed this up a bit especially when you're waiting for your bug buddies to scurry back home and find a way to reduce the load time going in so the computer then I'd be happy to see this become a staple I think we could agree it's more interesting than picking the right word from a list at least especially after how many times you've probably done it now over these games anyway there are five of these stages to get through and you unlock one of dmoz memories for each one you complete two of these are inconsequential for the larger story of our Harbor one reveals the location of some special armor on the island and the other is confirmation for Nick that Dima really is who he says he is the memory is when they escape the Institute together a Nick went rogue this was a painful memory for Dima so he had it removed and stored on this computer and that's something that's crucial to understand here Dima only suspected or hoped that these memories would provide options to find peace on the island or at least prevent dangerous information from falling into the wrong hands he didn't actually know what was in the memories because obviously they were removed he doesn't remember them so the other three far more important memories you uncover our secrets and regrets that end up being more than uncomfortable for Dima to relearn you have options here to return to Dima immediately and then work together to verify his memories or you can skip that part and immediately collect all the information yourself and then either act on it or confront him give me a moment I need to remember for myself these three memories are the activation code for the nuclear submarine and the children of Adam's home the existence of a kill switch that will deactivate an array of fog condensers around Far Harbor allowing the monsters to attack in full force and lastly and far more importantly that Dima had someone killed in Far Harbor a long time ago and replaced them with one of his synth followers so he could influence the people there to be sympathetic to his cause this last one functions just like the Institute works just like Kasumi suspected about herself the person is killed and the synth that replaces them wouldn't know they were a copy the person in Far Harbor ends up being captain Avery the leader and first person you met when you arrived it's been many years and she doesn't know that she's a synth you verified these memories by locating the separate codes from places around the island once again entering the travel kill and loot phases covering Dimas secret medical facility where the synth was repurposed it's also where the real captain Avery was buried armed with all this information you've returned to Dima and have the final series of choices left to make the end the DLC so this is where things get complicated for this part of the video I think all of this and the decisions that follow could have been handled way better than they currently exist however these revelations and the subsequent decisions are still the best part of the DLC this is exactly the sort of thing that fallout 4 was missing it's great to see Bethesda even attempt something like this and I view it as a much tighter far better written version than the story in the base gained and they should be commended for it Dima reacts like a genuinely disgusted person disgusted with himself he mourns the death of captain Avery but also views the synth he used to replace her as equally murdered I did I killed a woman from Far Harbor and replaced her he laments that his past self was so conniving to have the codes that could destroy both groups on the island - his reaction is very interesting and makes a lot of sense and the dialogue options here matter a lot more than in other conversations there's also a subtle twist when Dima reveals that despite being horrified with these memories that he's still the same person that he always was someone who schemes and makes sure he has contingency plans to protect himself and his people because he immediately uses these memories as inspiration to solve the current dispute on the island if Far Harbor could be made more tranquil by our intervention then perhaps the same trick will work twice his proposal is to replace another person to kill confessor tectus and have a synth step in one that's programmed to be more diplomatic and seek peace with both Acadia and Far Harbor therefore solving the conflict on the island in a peaceful way the player has many choices they can accept or reject this plan they can convince Dima to go too far Harbor and admit what he did killing one of them and replacing them you can also go to far harbour and tell them yourself instead you can deactivate the town's defences and kill them all or you can detonate the submarine around the children of adam' instead of replacing tectus there are also choices within these choices if you convince Dima to confess his crimes too far harbour you can go with him and try to control the reaction of the people Dima is executed no matter what but you can try to calm their anger so they don't raid Acadia to kill the rest of the sense after killing Dima depending on how many quests you did for Far Harbor all those characters and their problems I mentioned earlier will determine whether or not they listen to you if you've earned their trust which is demonstrated in a fairly good scene when they all recount your good deeds you're not even you dammit see the whole that's thanks to the mainlander a true friend of the harbor you going to listen to Allan's hate-mongering you even remember who did the captain's day mainlander cleared my phone then they stopped with Deemas death if not they reject your plea because they don't care enough about you to listen dammit I'm with you Alan Alan's never been afraid to do what needs doing if you choose to kill confessor Tek this and replace him there's something similar albeit to a lesser degree you have to lure him to a secluded in order to kill him if you did enough quests for the children then he will come willingly and believe you if you didn't then he'll arrive here with armed guards because he doesn't trust you you can still talk him down though which isn't possible with the Far Harbor quest line Dima sends his regards if you haven't played the game that might have been hard to follow the important thing to know is that I don't think there was a single quest in Fallout 4 that had a quarter of the decision-making and branching outcomes that I just described it's a big step up and is worthy of a ton of praise however like your mom there's a big butt in most of these cases there is a clear answer there's not much to debate there's not much to think about destroying Far Harbor makes no sense not only do they have the strongest claim of ownership on the island your boat and way back to the Commonwealth is sitting in their harbor you have no way of knowing if it'll survive the destruction of the town which of course it does because you need a way to leave but in terms of the game having a story and a decision for a character to make deactivating the fog condensers isn't a true option likewise the murder Dima commited has very flimsy motivations it seems like he jumped to this action very quickly and the game doesn't go into enough detail on why he felt so compelled to murder someone at Far Harbor like he did they were tolerating him well enough at least so it seems like a forced act to make the story have a twist rather than something he should have done or would have done this makes judging him quite easy and even Nik agrees that he should be punished for it even if he doesn't like that his brother is ultimately executed for confessing oh is that what you call justice because when I sure don't as for the children of adam' dying in a nuclear blast is what they want and if we rewind to what I pointed out a little while ago will there be anything else that'll be then it becomes clear that not only are most of these people crazy that they have very little regard for their lives of their own people never mind that of outsiders this death scene here doesn't seem to surprise or rattle anyone does it so even though there are two or three sympathetic people living in the submarine base achieving division through the submarines detonation not only removes violent people from the island it is also granting them the highest privilege of a death that they can imagine when you bring the code to them you can convince tectus to willingly do it to experience instant rebirth as incalculable new worlds well there are a few gifts greater so even though there are options they appear to me like they were the right answers that Bethesda plan for the quests and then they brainstorm some other alternatives just for the sake of them that's not awful but compared to New Vegas it's a pale comparison finally then let's talk about the misc potential in these choices let's talk about dmoz proposal to murder and replace tectus when dima embraces his heritage and for the second time in his life becomes the Institute that he tried so desperately hard to get away from even just saying it like I did there it's pretty compelling right it's so interesting to me I just wish it could have happened to the player instead of this character here's what I mean let's make one change right at the start make it so you can't receive the quest to search for Kasumi until you've finished the main story and fallout for this change will make sense in a second the rest of the DLC stays the same until you get near the end the conflict between the children and Far Harbor escalates a little bit and it's made clear to both you and acadia that they're on the brink of killing each other this would occur when you've returned to DM after finding his hidden medical facility where he turned a synth into Captain Avery at this point instead of Dima saying you should replace tectus the player has to mull it over and decide the player has to choose one person on each side of the conflict to kill and replace in order to prevent all-out war between these two factions it would have to be made clear that any attempt at diplomacy has failed this is the only option to prevent so many people from dying the lives of two people versus many more on the Island and suddenly you are the Institute you're conspiring from the shadows to try to keep the peace around you you're a murderer but you have the best intentions and maybe if you choose the wrong people to replace it doesn't work and you have to kill and replace one or two more and since you already killed some people you might feel invested enough to continue killing so those first deaths aren't wasted the player choice would matter a lot and it could succeed or fail and there's so much potential to be found in that decision if you've completed the main story before now then the Institute is either being destroyed or you are in control of it either way you have met and interacted with Sean you have either approved of his decisions or judged him to be a monster along with the rest of the Institute and here you are some time later given a whole new perspective on Sean's actions through these decisions the player might find themselves reconsidering that judgment as they struggle to make the right decision to make the best of a terrible situation and to make the deaths worth it or if they fail they might see the futility of it and better understand the stress and struggle that Sean went through even if they still do think he's a monster the player could also reject the whole thing and see the two sides destroy each other because of this inaction proving that maybe the Institute might have had the right idea about some things at least their motivations would have to be cleaned up a bit but the potential is there what if the mayor of Diamond City was killed and replaced for a reason not so different than your thought process for a replacing confessor tectus right now normally I get a little anxious when I suggest things but I don't feel that way about this one this sort of thing in the DLC would have been an incredible moment for me I know that for certain because the current way it works with dima becoming the institute is already pretty good it's just so close to great and needed that one last step that one last level of commitment and thought about their ideas that the festa consistently fails to take in their stories in gameplay lastly then let's fast-forward for a moment let's skip through nuclear world to the final scene in that dlc you've reclaimed the theme park you've appeased the Raider gangs that inhabit the place you've secured the power plant and restored electricity to the land that the lights fill up the night sky and fireworks appear like some Mario Brothers celebration of your victory you've done the DLC the last two fallout force content the order here is wrong your trip to Nuka world a literal patience pot that could be a break from fallout for a story should be first then you return to the Institute and since stuff far harbour should be second with this final reassessment of the game's main themes and concepts it would have tied it all back together not with fireworks and some foreign land that you barely care about but with thinking about what you did to the people on this island or returning by boat to the Commonwealth to bring Kasumi to her parents with some fresh perspective on what the Institute did to this place the game lets you see the family reunited and even though she is definitely not a sense you can still ruin this moment by telling her parents that she is one which for some reason Kasumi still believes is true I yes it's true I mean I I can't prove it but when I made it to Acadia I just knew I guess it can't all be an improvement right my real daughter is dead get out of here never come back [Music] the opening to nuke World has a lot in common with Far Harbor you receive a new radio signal to begin the quest there's a small staging area that leads to a vehicle sequence that's uncharacteristically dramatic for Fallout 4 and it takes place in its own isolated location with only tenuous links back to the Commonwealth there are many key differences though the biggest of them is that the first part in this DLC is good but I have to admit that a lot of my enjoyment in the early parts of Nuka world is highly subjective I really like theme parks I really like coca-cola and I really like Fallout New Vegas this DLC is a stirred mess of all three of these and that mess part isn't quite so clear until you play it for a while to reach Nuka world you have to clear a transport center of Gunners and then speak with a wounded man in front of a deactivated train line that leads to the theme park I want to slow down and focus on this guy for a minute his name is Harvey you gotta help me please this guy is a slave kept by the Raider gangs in Nuka world but he doesn't tell you that his injury is also fake it's a deception that has a lot more thought put into it than most in the game because even if you see through it there's a backup option that Harvey moves on to another lie take it look he got me I ain't injured okay just can't do this anymore if you convince him you're going to help him that he should flee to safety he's still in nuchal world later because he went back to his reign and masters safe with the knowledge that he did his job he sent you to the theme park he even has a good line about how he deactivated the trains power to make his story more believable but I shut it down to help sell my story makes it more believable if I say I'm trying to keep the Raiders at bay if the player doesn't see through his lies then they're heading into a trap a gauntlet of challenges created by the Raider gangs for their own bloodsport amusement there's a third option I found however which was not to listen to Harvey after you see through his lies you can react with self-righteous anger and kill the guy for trying to set you up and not only does the game allow you to do this there's some hidden dialogue with one of the Raider officers that plays in response over the train station speaker system Bethesda put a little bit of extra thought into this and it pays off immensely just imagine how many other quests could have benefitted from this level of detail not only that it's a hint of role-playing options that are sorely missing from the game you can choose how you think your character would react to the situation instead of just doing whatever you think is the best or right option that the game wants from you and you can still proceed with a little bit of extra story stuff for me seeing Harvey with a slave collar in Nuka world on my second playthrough because on my first one I murdered him after I saw through his lies made me realize that I had been way too quick to judge him on that first playthrough it also made me realize how hopeless the situation was for him and the other slaves in the theme park because hours earlier he didn't have a collar on and I had more or less set him free yet he still returned to be a slave because he was so scared and invested in the other people enslaved here it's all right Harvey I understand I'm not joking or exaggerating when I say this relatively brief interaction with this character is one of the most memorable moments for me not just a new cold but of all of Fallout 4 and that speaks to truths the way I see it how effective this sort of thing can be with stories and characters and how lacking the rest of the game is in this resource the rest of the dlcs introduction sort of follows this trend of standing out as different from the rest of Fallout 4 if our harbor is about becoming the Institute the nuclear world is about becoming a Raider and the game becomes quite overwhelming in this early part first we have to survive the gauntlet which is a fun section that shows how creative Bethesda's level designers can be when it comes to cramming interior locations with cool details and neat small stories about how people died or their experience and struggle when they tried to get through this thing on the train right here you're contacted by man they engage throughout the gauntlet you're continuingly taunted by another man named redeye initially I thought these were the same person and that gauge was simply adopting a performance persona that's different when he's addressing the Raider audience watching you struggle through their traps in cages gauge then contacts you again at the end of the gauntlet which goes on for way longer than I expected it to with more than one loading screen when you reach a bumper car arena to fight the end boss who also happens to be the / boss of all of the Raiders in Nuka world a guy named Colter engage contacts you as you gear up for the fight the Raiders allow you to do this so you can put on a good show at the end for them he says that the fight is rigged and that there's no way that you can win because the boss has a suit of energized power armor that is kept active through the bumper car arena I think if you look at his armor during the fight he has one of those poles with the with the wire that connects to the power on the ceiling it's kind of a neat detail gage then helps you beat him by pointing you toward a water pistol stashed in the locker room that's able to disrupt the power supply and Coulter's armor this is where the problems begin although there's a lot of great stuff in this introduction as well I don't like that you have to use the squirt gun to win this fight I've read that if you get massively lucky with crits on lower difficulty settings or something that you can beat kultur with your normal weapons but I doubt there's any dialogue after this that supports this version Bethesda's bug is more likely I don't like that my character would have died here if it wasn't for the supposed generosity of this gauge guy I've wandered the wastes killing who knows how many hundreds of ghouls Raiders super mutants and giant radioactive monsters but my story would have permanently ended here because of some bozo and a suit powered by a theme park bumper car ride there could have been an alternative solution involving telling gage to go [ __ ] himself and you win through being resourceful or finding a way to turn off the power something like that instead you have to use the water gun and then damage him when his electrical armor is offline probably because Bethesda wanted you to feel in some way indebted to gage enough to listen to him after this fight because after Colter is dead Neko world becomes a drastic departure from the base game and fallout 4 in fact this change in tone character and story is so dramatically different than I'm having trouble thinking of any other game that is on the same level of change as what occurs here and this carries with it some major problems do we expect you to show a little appreciation by killing Coulter you have become the new over boss you're in charge of Nuka world and with that responsibility comes three large Raider gangs the operators the disciples and the pack the game finally lets you be evil and make evil choices you can become a Raider and claim locations for your gang which is something many people thought was strangely absent in the original version of the game myself included I actually kind of called this DLC in my previous video the massive 400-pound western lowland gorilla of a problem here is that look it's like Bethesda listen to all of this criticism and was like oh they want to be evil do they want to be Raiders how will find here's your [ __ ] theme park full of Raiders and murderers and there's going to be slaves and corpses everywhere in caged animals some people who fight and kill and act like crazed lunatics and you're in charge and you can be one of them and you want to be evil so bad here are you [ __ ] happy now later on you can lead these Raiders back to the Commonwealth which has its own gigantic issues but for now this concept doesn't make sense you can't have virtually no option to be a bad person until this moment and then suddenly think it's okay to become the leader of three separate Hitler Youth camps you could make some questionable choices until now sure but nothing that comes close to the depravity that these people are up to they literally decorate their home with blood and corpses for [ __ ] sake however let's put these issues on pause for a moment especially considering there's a minor solution to this problem that we should look at right now on my first playthru I was true to my character who hated Raiders I spoke to gage and told him what he wanted to hear so he would open the door and I could kill him and all of his Raider buddies that just ran me through their gauntlet of fun this decision was very much like the one I made in the base game when I first arrived at the Institute there was no messing around with these people kill them all and get out so that's what I did and if you've played the game yourself then you know that I made a terrible mistake here and that it's really funny in a way because the man I just shot in the head here is actually my son and the boy in the cell is a synth made to look like him alright seriously now but as this should be given some credit for this because history doesn't repeat here despite my stupid jokes the game is prepared for the player making this choice you're given a new quest when you kill gauge to go and clear a Nuka world of all of the Raiders and free the slaves it's not quite as fleshed out as I would like because when you're done it sends you to speak to one of the slave leaders and the conversation heavily implies that this isn't the first time you've spoken and that you should have probably interacted once already before murdering all the Raiders but it's a big step up that the game doesn't outright break if you decide to react like this even though you've never met this person before Raiders steal and kill without remorse they don't deserve to live can't argue with that you do obliterate a lot of the quest content by doing this though which is fine decisions should have consequences but a big part of the DLC is clearing out five sections of the theme park for the Raiders to claim as new territory this could have easily been transferred over to the freed slaves instead so there's a story here for more good characters but hey it's good that there's an option at all and you can still go exploring and do some of the side quests even though there's no main story to follow with all of the writers dead on my second playthrough I went along with gages proposal to see the rest of that content and it's here that you can see what I meant earlier that Nuka world has something in common with New Vegas it isn't just the obvious though the casinos and hotels in that game are in the same blazing visual space as many of the rides and attractions in a theme park new vegas being like a theme park for adults and catering for more mature indulgences but their similarities to be found in the story as well without spoiling much a man named house maintained the central city in new vegas and is using it as a source of income while the nearby hoover dam is the real prize in the region new vegas itself is not without its appeal to the NCR the largest and most stable society that i know of in the Fallout universe many soldiers and tourists from the NCR visit the city and bring money with them money that fuels houses plans in many ways Nuka world shares this quality but not just in how the attractions and location make it appeal to traders and visitors it's also naturally fortified and can be protected against outside invasions which is exactly why a bunch of traders had claimed the entrance to the place and set up a trading hub complete with mercenary guards this is where Coulter enters the story with gages plans behind him Colter founded a fragile alliance between those three Raider gangs I mentioned earlier the operators the disciples and the pack led by Coulter they launched an assault on Nuka world and killed the mercenary guards and enslaved the traders their end goals were to then use this foothold as a base to move through the rest of nuke world's main areas both for more land and to restore the park to attract more visitors and traders and then run the place just like the traders were before they've already started doing some of this by the time you arrive outside traders are allowed to come in exchange goods and caps with the slaves which makes the Raider gangs rich so in concept this is already pretty good at the very least it's interesting far more interesting than many of the locations you visit in the base game which feel like they're stagnant and not doing anything really but we also can't ignore that big gorilla problem appears again because unfortunately nothing about Neko world really makes any sense and I do mean that without any exaggeration almost nothing makes sense here for starters Raiders claiming this place to then use it as a trading hub is about the least Raider thing you could possibly do who in their right mind would visit here to do business with people who have explosive collars strapped to their necks on top of that you have the dead bodies to use as decoration that I mentioned earlier in the cage people everywhere if the goal is to make the place attractive for traders and passing people with money seriously do you already see what I mean Raiders raid not trade this story in situation is interesting but it shouldn't have been done with an unstable alliance of Raider gangs it's like Bethesda had this story already cooked up and then changed it to be Raiders partway through development to appease people who wanted to have their own rating group unfortunately this just keeps going with many of the minor and major details of this place apparently the power plant that ran Nuka World is offline but the place still has power more of it is functional than it isn't it's just a selective problem so that some areas can be closed off or something it's really weird you're also not really in charge which almost makes sense but the more you play the more you realize how nonsensical it is when gage told you about the water gun he wasn't doing it out of charity Coulter's murder was planned from the beginning you're just the weapon the Raider gangs chose to use Coulter had been ignoring the needs of his people for months he promised that shortly after taking Nico world he would lead everyone to clear the rest of the park these five areas you can see now on the in-game map and divide the land between the different gangs for a reason that is never explained he decided to do nothing instead the Raider gangs got tired of that nothing so gage devised a plan to replace Coulter with the next guy who entered the gauntlet who was strong enough to survive in kill Coulter which of course ends up being you bethesda has a consistent issue with making the player the leader of factions to the point that it comes across as an obsession I don't think it's ever been done successfully by them and by that I mean not only does it never make a whole lot of sense but it's not even an interesting result or a sense of accomplishment for the player they don't get to order anyone around or make decisions nor are they ever in charge and instead are only the boss in title only it makes me wonder if this is how things work at Bethesda and this is Todd Howard's way of crying for help or something no seriously though I do understand that being at the top of an organization or even a country as history as proven isn't always directly about issuing orders and bossing people around often you can feel beholden to those below you and from what I read many decisions have to be weighed carefully not just for your interests but for dozens of others but you still do have to make those decisions whereas in Bethesda games you end up doing menial busy work for people who you should be ordering around or there are no decisions at all ever there's nothing this trend holds true in Nuka world if you accept gages offer which isn't really a choice to be honest it's either join them or kill them all you can only do two things you can go to leaders of the three gangs and do those menial tasks for them which are more radiant quests that send you back to the Commonwealth and through its lovely load screens and fast travel times or you can clear the sections of the park that kultur promised the gangs the gangs that have way more manpower than you and have just been sitting around doing nothing for months you go yourself instead to do what these big gangs couldn't alone by yourself it makes no sense there's a reason for this and we'll get to that shortly but it's tied in with a lot of stuff that's wrong with this scenario that nuclear world drops you in see this is yet another tired example of quantity over quality and that Bethesda will put a tremendous amount of effort into some parts of their games and next to nothing in others in a way they're shrewd about their priorities because they focus on stuff that almost every player will see if they complete the quests instead of any divergent paths and the world reacting to your decisions that's splitting your player base and by design will make it so any work you do will only be seen by half of the players unless they do more than one playthrough it's not an economical way of doing things and if we recall something that was brought up way back at the start of this video there's a very strong possibility the only reason Bethesda still has their hat in this rodeo of game development is to make money there are more cases of things not making any sense whatsoever in these individual sections of the park but for now let's address the main quest there are five areas that are wonderfully realized Bethesda really does this stuff well and an immense amount of work went into each location I said it earlier the Galactic zone is possibly the best combat arena in the entire game it has many vertical layers winding paths and multiple routes to find and fight through there are a ton of robots here and while I still stand by my assessment that the combat is too simple this is the best case of how the environments you fight and can elevate that if only slightly for some players but there's more to do inside the buildings around here if there's an interior rollercoaster a vault like Tor this commitment to making new Co world feel like an actual theme park is continued throughout all of the areas and I don't know maybe I'm missing something about this but I am thoroughly impressed by how much detail is in these areas there's a western section with robots a tour of a Cola bottling facility with a river of Nuka Quantum a radioactive Fantasyland with castles and more interior sections to fight through the first location where the Raiders are at has an arcade and games to play for tickets and prizes individually none of this will blow you away or anything but it's clear that it was still a lot of work and my assumption is that it's work that Bethesda has gotten really efficient at doing over the years which is why they're so lacking when it comes to other parts of the game and you can see that for yourself right here because the quests in each of these locations are abysmal worse than that the main quest falls apart here - for what I suspect is one key reason they wanted to give the player a choice and didn't think it through these choices come up after you meet the leaders of each gang the operators are the most mercenary of the three and are only in the business for caps all they want is money no matter how they get it whether that's through showing their power or through trading or striking deals they're the only gang that makes sense to have set up the trading hub and Nuka world the pack is all about showing strength and respecting that display they're the most Farrell war boys from fury road of the three but they're not totally psychotic the unn standing I God is that they believe the world has gone so far to [ __ ] that they just want to get wasted party and do whatever they feel the urge to do without any inhibition yet they still respect the strength of their pack leader which transfers to you if you can show a similar quality the disciples however are truly psychopaths they want to kill and torture and are likely responsible for all of the corpses stapled to the walls in the park it makes no sense whatsoever for them to be part of this alliance not only do they get little out of the arrangement but their needs will actively damage the reputation of the place and scare traders away basically these three are some of the core qualities of Raiders in this series condense down from one thing caps Kem's and killing the player choice enters the story when you go through Nuka world and clear out one of the areas once successful you have to select which Raider gang you want to gift the area to the more you favor one gang the more the others will dislike you there are five areas to distribute in Nuka world and then another three settlements in the Commonwealth afterward that makes eight so you can't keep things fair between the three even if you wanted to the problem is that because there are five locations in Nuka world and so many possible combinations in which you can distribute them to the gangs there's no dialog associated with the choices you make nuke world has its own radio station and when you gift Outland the host does announce your choice in a very general way but there's no conversation you can have with any of the leaders of each gang that work was input into the game because it would create so much hassle to make sure each combination was properly factored into those conversations it makes sense but it also doesn't because these choices aren't interesting there is some work put into this when you take an area the gang will decorate the place and inhabit it afterwards but they also don't have that much relevant dialogue the leaders never thanked you in any conversations either you're only given a chest with some caps and loot instead so the game feels lifeless in this respect because of this choice because it's a really bad system consider instead if the areas were already promised to each game by kultur before you arrived it could be another reason why they were so pissed at him so now when you go to each section you can have some backup from the gang that will eventually own it and could be involved in the quest there when you're done because it was decided ahead of time but that still could have put some work in for the gang having some dialogue and a response to you succeeding instead of it feeling like you did nothing for them when you return to the main area of the park I know this goes against what I've been saying for most of this video I want more choices not less but this kind of thing really is a poor substitute you get to decide which flag to raise yay the choice leads to one of the gangs eventually turning on you whoever gets the least amount of land so it is important since the player has to deal with the consequences of their actions that this could have also been handled better this situation in nuclear world was ripe to be the first time Bethesda nailed being a leader because there are three distinct clashing factions at work here so imagine instead of raising these flags that there were decisions and situations that come up instead problems between the gangs or dilemmas or disputes that need the attention of the over boss you get called back to the main area or hit a trigger after taking some parts of the park and have something to deal with these could be really simple like a gang member has turned traitor and you need to decide what to do with them or some other petty squabble between the gangs or someone beats the gauntlet and you have to play as the sorting hat from Hogwarts and decide which gang gets to recruit him or if you should just execute him you know stuff like that situations that require a decision let's say there's 10 or so of them by making these decisions you would be showing what sort of ideology you follow and naturally drift toward one or two of the gangs and away from one of the others you could always choose the bloodthirsty way to ally with the disciples you could show strength and amusement for the pack or you could try to proceed with the most profitable choice and diplomacy to align yourself with the operators you still get to claim territory but now certain gangs like or hate you depending on tangible decisions you make instead of being mad that one gang got one more piece of land than they did which again this doesn't make sense when you get to the end of the main questline you are starting to gift out commonwealth settlements you could easily make this even and fair for all three but the game hits a trigger point at eight pieces of land so that one gang is always going to be pissed and turned against you they were happy to for months with nothing from Coulter but they don't even give you a chance to take the next element for them that doesn't make sense but then nothing does really raiding the Commonwealth needed to be in the game from the start you can't add something like this so long after the game's release and expect it to go smoothly I already had so many settlements under my control and it's just so [ __ ] awkward there's an NPC that actually literally has to whip out a notebook when you're deciding what places to raid to make sure you're allowed to because you might already own it one of your followers might be there so you're not allowed to raid it why would they care why can't I make the decision anyway it's by far and away the worst feature in all of the DLC and I do not understand how they thought this was good enough to be put in the game no go with that one boss I'm pretty sure a companion of yours resides there I don't think they'd appreciate you hitting it [Music] another example that proves it if you do select the settlement that's yours and there's no follower there then you can insist to rate it you can go there and remember it's a Minutemen settlement all of your settlements are like that in the base game I've got that locket back for you you serious that's great news you do a favor for these people and just like that you become the ruler of the place you can destroy their homes their farms boss them around change what work they do and so on it's already a broken system just from that but then you choose to give it to a Raider and without any contact from you the settlement suddenly doesn't remember you they have no knowledge of what you did for them they don't recall that you built the place or owned it they act like you're a stranger and you have to threaten them kill them or bribe them to leave it's a place you were already in control of but all of a sudden it's something different because of the nuclear world quest having a Raider gang in the Commonwealth should have been an alternative to Preston and pals at the start of the game you could have sided with the Raiders attacking them in Concord or like I suggested in the previous video you could have taken over a gang that was already in sanctuary kill them or I'm the boss something like that Nuka world should have remained isolated in its own area to avoid these horribly awkward conflicts with what you've already done in the base game and to avoid all of the load screens as you go through it all if you play without fast travel on for this part then you have my sympathies it must be terrible there's also this weird incongruity with some of the player choices you can do almost everything for the Raiders without killing anyone you have persuade checks or like I said you can use money to bribe them to leave their land instead you can make yourself sound reasonable like you're trying to avoid violence as you do the dirty work for these vicious gangs who think it's funny to kill people and butcher them in their homes and keep slaves back at the theme park if you have nuclear world but didn't play it yet I recommend going through it all real quick on very easy just to see all of this it is so so surreal how Bethesda went about constructing this feature it's like they made a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from six separate boxes believe that spots one of yours boss still want to proceed the nonsense continues back in nuclear world though with the quests in each part of the park for starters there's the baseline lunacy in fallout 4 that almost none of this should still be standing after 200 years it's the same issue the rest of the game has robots are still active and working the rides are still functional even if you ignore that it gets worse though the zoo section has a parody version of Tarzan who is being raised by a bunch of ghoul lillas as much as I appreciate the pun this whole scenario is as stupid as it sounds I like to provide examples for most of what I say but I think this one speaks for itself like how can this guy even talk and in the game making sense their seat oh sorry Seto no talk good Seto family not talk there's another bigger problem here too each part of the park has something for you to do in the Galactic zone it's to clear all of the crazy robots that one makes sense in the Western zone you have to do some boring quests for the robots to unlock the way to the fake mines to kill the blood worm Queen not the most interesting quest but it also sort of makes sense here in the zoo you have to find the source of the Gator claw monsters and stop them Tarzan tells you that they keep coming even though he's killing them all ultimately you discover that a scientist at the park was using a cloning machine to create animals as a food source this was after the apocalypse and he wanted to use the machine to survive he was successful and then decided to create the monsters you're fighting as a weapon to protect his part of the park which obviously backfired and got him killed the biggest issue here is that the facility under the zoo is firmly locked down there's no way out of here so how were the monsters escaping to terrorize Tarzan and his ghoul rila family really there's no broken vent or any way out of here especially for how big the creatures are it's a part of the story and part of this quest getting in here is difficult it's never explained either like how do you make a quest like that and not think about the answer to that question these monsters are escaping from somewhere where they're coming from how are they getting out how does that get into the game in the kingdom section you have to fight through radioactive gas that has kept constantly pumping through the air by the ghouls that inhabit the area ghouls that were workers in the park that have lived here and somehow survived for 200 years what exactly are they eating why can't you try to reason with their leader what kind of society has emerged from this all of these questions aren't answered because it's a long combat section instead just like much of the other lazily made content in the game also and far worse than this the leader has magic actual magic I thought it would be revealed that it was all a trick because he was a magician before the war or some effect of the gas he releases but no there's actually magic and fallout now because of this quest terminals you find and read around the area reveal that radiation gave him powers not psychic ones magic maybe it's laying the groundwork for the player character and fallout 5 to have radioactive abilities or something that's the only thing I can think of that explains it you might be thinking that some of this is too nitpicky or that Bethesda clearly thinks that ghouls are closer to zombies that would explain why so many of the quests that involved them used to 200 years that passed for an exaggerated effect the kid in the fridge the guy and his crew in the submarine or the Eddie winter guy who's being locked up in a safe room since the war same goes for these ghouls they were able to survive for so long cut off from the rest of the world because Bethesda thinks they're zombies and therefore don't need to eat there are multiple examples of Google needing food and water in the series however the thing that proves Bethesda has no idea what they're doing with this stuff is right here in this DLC because back in the animal zone the zoo with the guy who is using the cloning machine to make food he was a ghoul so this isn't even internally consistent between quests that are minutes apart what makes it worse is that the game breaks its own rules for really boring reasons these quests aren't worth ignoring the basic necessities of the characters in order to make them happen at this point I'd kill you just to get some peace and quiet fine the end of the DLC comes quite abruptly when you deal with whatever gang turned on you even though it makes more sense at any point to murder them all and free the slaves I'll tuck her in fried dirt not myself for my run it was the disciples that I had neglected so you fight over the power plant with the other two gangs kill the traders and then turn the power back on which was really on already but we'll ignore that fireworks are set off and you get some okay visuals as your final send-off from fallout 4 I think the context of the scene adds more weight to what I said earlier that Far Harbor should have been lost after this as a final word on Nuka world in the DLC I'd like to show how badly it was integrated into the game in another way although I found the DLC to be far more interesting than the Commonwealth stories it was still built on a rotten foundation and that rot seems to spread any time it's linked back preston garvey wanted the Minutemen to stand for the ordinary people in the world specifically it was an organization to defend settlements from Raiders Raiders that you as the general of the Minutemen led to the Commonwealth in order to raid you would think that Preston would have some strong opinions about your change of heart and he does bethesda thought to include some dialogue with him it goes like this there are some things I can't forgive I thought I knew you I trusted you and then you joined up with the scum that prey on the Commonwealth Preston thinks you're a monster I was really happy when I saw this because even though I agree with a lot of his views on the Commonwealth I've wanted to execute him ever since he told me that I had to do more work for my own faction before building the teleporter machine to save my son I was the general and he wouldn't proceed with this rescue until I added another shitty settlement on the map for him because somehow that was more important than my orders it'll have to wait until we get the Minutemen back on the brink few or any Minutemen get in my way I won't hesitate to put you down don't worry I wasn't expecting anything else from you but the game doesn't let you fight him after you become king of the Raiders because the game doesn't go all the way with judgment Preston shouts at you and even if you threaten him he backs down you're still the general you can still take settlements for him still do quests with him he goes back to his regular old self you think we're ready to retake the castle even though you're now the antithesis of everything he stands for your call just let me know when you're ready to pull the trigger I'll let you know if I hear of any settlements that need our help in the meantime make sure to offer help to anyone that needs it that can only help our cause for the last section let's return to the story in the base game which was a huge part of the previous video I did on fallout 4 we've probably spent too much time on this now but we're here and already gone over the videos estimate and for a penny and all that a few people left the comment on the first video asking how the story could be fixed at the time I answered that I didn't think it was possible not without a total overhaul of the way the game was built I've had a year to mull it over now and if the goal is to make fallout for an actual RPG then my initial reaction is still what I think today almost everything in the world and the story down to character creation and a voice protagonist would have to be altered but making changes to have a better story within a Bethesda game instead of an RPG that might be possible go on so let's identify some of the major problems before looking at potential ways to solve them character versus player motivations the Institute's goals actions and general place in the Commonwealth world building is hard and side quests depth I'm only including that last one so I can immediately remove it we already went over that in the first half of the video and I think some of the better examples in the DLC the game received add further proof that the base game did a poor job with its quests and quest givers this simply needs more thought attention and work in order to solve it for more evidence of nonsensical missions in the game you don't have to look further than Diamond City some of the stuff you do here shows an astounding lack of thought the standout example being another missing persons case for Valentine's Detective Agency you're looking for a guy who used to live in the city you visit where he worked speak to his colleagues and learn that he was having poor luck finding a girlfriend before he went missing following these Clues leads you to his home and the discovery that he underwent facial reconstruction surgery thinking that the problem he was having was that he wasn't good-looking enough to get a girl the conclusion of this quest is visiting the surgical center in Diamond City and insisting to one of the two doctors that works there that you searched the basement operating room that they have when you get down there the other doctor is standing over the corpse of the missing guy the surgery was botched the guy's mangled and dead and the surgeon has gone a bit mental over his mistake you confront him he kills himself then the other surgeon comes down to investigate because of all the shouting case closed the end I think you owe me an explanation you already might see how terrible this is if not let me make it clear that the guy was missing for a while days at least before you even took the quest so think of what that means the other doctor hasn't entered his own cellar in all of this time didn't hear anything didn't speak to his colleague for days the doctor who killed the guy didn't come out for days either or even try to find a solution this time or anything he's been standing over this corpse the whole time it makes less than zero sense it makes negative sense it's just really poor content stuffed into the game so there appears like there's a lot to do looks like it'll be a closed casket funeral for the other points on this list let's take them in order especially because the first two are tightly linked the issue with the voice protagonists is only the beginning for the problems in Fallout 4s main story the voice actor may say things in a different way than you feel about them even if you play with the mod that reveals all of the dialogue options it's a regular thing that your character will sound different than you intend or because of the cost associated with recording so many extra lines there may not be an option that you would choose at all I'm here on my own it's the biggest reason why I think they should have made the main character their own person like Joel from The Last of Us and reduced a lot of the choices to big moments instead of every step in conversation with scripted movies for these conversations as well like I said earlier it's either that or don't have a voice protagonist but even doing that you're still left with another big problem it might even be a bigger problem that the character will shout and scream about their missing baby during dialogue where is my son where is Shaun and then you decide it's time to build some houses some beds set up some farms take some settlements for Preston make sure the Minutemen are happy and entertained go on some wacky adventures singing along to the radio find another partner and practically get married again this is a pretty big conflict here [Music] the only change I can see resolving this problem without resorting to rewriting the entire background for the main character and almost all of the story of the first half is to make the main character a synth I realize this contradicts a point I made during the look we just did at Far Harbor which is why a lot of the Institute needs to be changed to make this work but this actually works in favor of this proposal to make the player a synth because it can help make the Institute a much more believable place and a more interesting one currently in the game the leader of the Institute is a dictator you can see solid proof of this in two instances the first is when Shan names you as his successor and despite some grumbling all of the other department heads accept it without having any method of debating the issue there's no discussion no appeals sean has spoken and that's how it's going to be secondly the only department head that does find a way to fight back does so by sealing their section of the Institute and basically holding all of the food hostage he'll starve out the opposition until Sean changes his mind not exactly a democratic process at this point you're functionally president-elect and you have to decide how to deal with this if you resolve the problem peacefully by talking them into unlocking the doors you can decide what sort of punishment the Institute can dispense on the temporary traders two of these options are exiling them or executing them and the guys reaction to either of these drastic judgments while not favourable isn't outright shocked these answers aren't rejected they're carried out because you're in charge the Institute is a dictatorship and this sort of thing must have happened before for this guy to react like this this ties directly into what I said in my previous video so much of this place is evil and yet you're not allowed to act on it you can launch your own investigations unprompted by anything in the game and discover the immoral experiments they're conducting or the murders they're committing on the surface and yet the happy smiling mask of this place is the only layer the game ever allows you to interact with the Institute deep down may actually make sense if you could confront Shawn about all of the things you find in its current iteration however you're left wondering what it is the Institute is even doing so here's my proposal with the intention of fixing the story while changing as little of it as possible in other words a shift of the narrative that's not only feasible but one that uses as much of the current assets in the game that exists already to start the main character is now ascent and is so from the very beginning after Kellogg left in the opening the cryogenics malfunctioned and Shawn's real father died later on after Shawn grows up and reaches a place of authority in the Institute he learns about vault 111 and launches a quiet investigation to see if anyone survived he discovers his mother was shot and his father died sometime after in stasis or that his father was shot and his mother died sometime after in stasis if you're playing a female character the other big change here is that Shawn is not in charge of the entire Institute I'd go one step further and say that no one should be in charge and it should be ruled by committee instead the same department heads already present in the game with no single member being superior to the others Shawn is part of that committee the other option is that there could be a different leader in charge who could serve as a villain but that's not really important for these changes Shawn is unhappy with how the Institute is being run there's a lot of issues he's noticed a list that matches those experiments murders and treatment of since we just went through and now he's discovered that they thoughtlessly murdered his mother and father when he was taken this takes a plot hole why on earth would Kellogg and his team not take everyone for experiments from this fall and uses it as more motivation for Shawn to devise his plan one of the high ranking researchers in the synth development department thinks that the creations they're making are closer to human than the others care to admit to be clear this isn't a change this character is already in the game today why can't it have a soul Shawn works closely with this man and perhaps a small secret faction within the Institute that sympathizes with sense which again already sort of exists in the game today to create a new synth prototype that's more advanced than any they've created so far perhaps the first synth that doesn't have a synth component no deactivation code and total free will this synth would of course be you the player character you're placed in vault 111 and Shawn releases you just like it happens in the game currently you think your baby has been kidnapped Kellogg took him cetera et cetera this part isn't changed the player character still reacts strongly and passionately in dialogue when the missing boy's brought up but you still have the freedom to ignore this search and do whatever you like that conflict between character and player is for now at least still present and apparently a problem so why would Shawn do all of this much of this would initially function in the same way Shawn is not the top dog leader but he still is in a position of power and respected he wants to meet his father and I doubt that anyone at the Institute went back to check if the cryogenics failed before now so when you release the game's story continues as it already did the people who care about Shawn in the Institute would await the arrival of his father and by extension grandfather of all of the sins that were created with his DNA with some amount of celebration meanwhile they're unaware that this is another synth coming into the Institute the bigger changes happen when you construct the teleporter and make your way inside Shawn would have cleverly ordered Kellogg to remain in the Commonwealth as a l'heure for you to find your way and also as the first level of revenge on the people who killed his parents which is exactly how it functions in the game today there's no who incidents your paths cross use it seemed a fitting way to allow you us to have some amount of revenge when you reach on he would tell you that you're a synth the double mid-story twist here would be that Shawn isn't a boy anymore but that you're not his real father either then he could ask you how compelled you were to reach him during your travels the player could be judged for how to read they followed the main storyline and came to the Institute or how long they dabbled doing other unimportant things instead of finding their missing child if the player rushed to find their child then Sean would congratulate himself on successfully simulating his father's memories with a synth body since your emotions and actions were in line with each other if not he would lament that they could have done a better job making sure your memories were better matched with your decisions because clearly you decided there were more important things to do than find your kid it solves that conflict in a way that I think could be seen as a powerful mindfuck moment how well the player integrated with this fake backstory or decided to reject it and do their own thing instead either way no matter what you do the game could toy with your actions and decisions it's some fun commentary on player agency Sean's plan here is to reform the Institute from its evil ways into something more productive for the whole Commonwealth you're instrumental in this because very few people in the Institute know your synth so you are in a perfect position to win their trust help them out and fool them into thinking you're human you are the perfect weapon Sean could wield to prove to all those in the Institute that doubt the humanity of the sins they're creating because they'll have no idea they're listening to one and treating one as an equal while you interact with them and solve problems for them from here this would be another path the story could follow the other paths brotherhood railroad Minutemen could be improved with these changes too but I don't think I could justify going through all of them for this video it's already too long the key change here is that the Institute's plans and motivations can finally be explored uncovered and addressed because you and Sean will be working together in order to gather evidence that their wrongdoing so you can take down opposing factions within the place that want to continue exploiting technology for their evil purposes murdering people on the surface abducting and replacing others genetic mutations this could lead to a truly peaceful end as well instead of the Institute either wiping everyone else out or being wiped out itself I think this would elevate much of the story in the game because the lack of rock-solid details about the main villain really the game sense of purpose I was never quite sure why I was fighting them other than a misunderstanding on whether since were human or not this confusion is also awkwardly addressed by characters in the game itself even within the Institute even with Shawn who miraculously changes his mind on his young synth replica at the end of the main story which leads us to the last point on the list that world building is hard a big part of the reason why the Institute feels like such a nebulous entity is that all of them are really the only solid one is the Brotherhood of Steel they at least have a unified purpose and a backstory that makes sense even if their appearance on the East Coast may not the railroad shouldn't exist period no one would put this amount of effort into helping sense when real humans are still living in such crushing conditions this should have been a synth created group of resistance instead all sense all about destroying the Institute it gets worse though because not even Diamond City good neighbor or Bunker Hill feel right either these are the biggest settlements in the Commonwealth they're the most successful prospering groups of people and yet they're in the most dangerous part of it they live in a place that is torn apart on a daily basis by Raiders super mutants and roaming packs of killer robots the inner city is a hotbed for violence and strife and this is where Bethesda plopped down its major gatherings of people this should be the safest part of the Commonwealth if nothing else because of the presence of civilized people in the area keeping it that way expanding on that what did these settlements even do much of fallout 4 reads like a bunch of people at Bethesda watch mr. be tongues video on the series and called a huge meeting entitled we have to make sure we know what they eat if you're unfamiliar mister B tongue goes into detail on world building in his video and then asking and answering questions like this is important places in Fallout 3 don't pass one level of inspection for the sort of stuff they shouldn't exist just from a lack of food alone Bethesda should be commended for responding to criticism like they did but what do they eat is only the first stage of the problem the next B why do they diamond City doesn't produce anything neither does Bunker Hill you could argue good neighbor is a hub for drug dealing and more questionable services so that sort of passes Bunker Hill is all about traders though but nothing is being manufactured or gathered for them maybe Bethesda thinks they're being supplied by scavengers still but that comes back to the old 200 years problem you specifically learned during your first visit to Diamond City that they rely on outside traders to survive the question from that is what exactly are they paying for these supplies with they don't produce enough things for themselves a kid owns the water supply and charges for it piper runs themselves a newspaper there are multiple shops and the like but they're selling things not making them how are the ordinary citizens here earning caps to spend at these stores or to buy water what are the city's children going to school for there's no reason for Diamond City to exist and my issue with this isn't just a nitpicky one but rather another chance to point out a lost opportunity the thing about world-building is that if you do it right you can find some surprising potential for stories and cool details to build on fallout 4 is an example of how this can happen if you give Diamond City some sort of function maybe a nearby ammunition factory or some sort of other rare resource it doesn't really matter what it is just something then you can now build on that it's not just an explanation to satisfy pedantic story nerds like me it can be used for more quests and stories within the game it can lead to problems the characters need to face or struggles over power new Vegas did this with the strip and nuclear world did it with in this game with the theme park you can keep on unravelling opportunities from these details place is still having power after 200 years isn't a plot hole to be waved away but a problem that a Commonwealth organization or game mechanic could solve a group who has the goal to reelect Rifai the wasteland or like I said in the previous video fusion cores could be used to power these places and they could change when you loot them the power goes off find another way out and that could be something another group could be producing somewhere in the Commonwealth a town that's claimed the fusion core production facility and employing people to make them an entire story and quest hub could spring around that idea see what I mean about how quickly it can interweave with other settlements and ideas addressing these difficult questions and trying to solve them leads to opportunities not plot holes that seem so scary that you don't want to fill them however this is looping us not so neatly back to the idea of role-playing in the game and the conflict between RPG and Bethesda gain having these details leads to a richer world and would accommodate more thoughtful character stories that players could think of I think that even a bethesda game would want to have as interesting a story as it could possibly have but I can't stop thinking that this RPG world building side is something that the developers have very little interest in doing anymore instead they want to stay in that three phase cycle they want you stumbling on two areas and finding cool stories there and sometimes they're successful I had a blast in the robot shopping mall it was fairly short but it was a neat wacky idea that didn't involve some terrible radiant quest or poorly fleshed out mission dispenser I simply found this place during my travels and solved the problem while I was there I wish there was more of that sort of thing if that's the sort of game Bethesda wants to make more details in the stories that happen in each area like the new squirrel tapes you find in an abandoned trailer park in the game which even had some subtle pre-war propaganda in it with the new squirrel who ends up bringing doom to the other squirrels being communist red I love stories and world building in video games I want more games to take it seriously but only if they truly want to for Bethesda and so many other developers like them it should be a case of do it right or don't do it at all don't waste time and resources on it just don't bother to vote that to other stuff instead do what you want to do and not what you feel obligated to do you could have made one incredible game with fallout 4 one wonderful incredible game but instead you chose to make two one decent one and one terrible one Wow hear from one of the other vaults [Music]

Channel: Joseph Anderson

Views: 8,272,785

Rating: 4.5895696 out of 5

Keywords: fallout, analysis, video game, criticism, gameplay, story, bethesda, skyrim, review, critique, thorough, longform, fallout 4, new vegas

Id: jVyjRhSX92E

Length: 152min 34sec (9154 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/SageWaterDragon]

After going through every top-level comment in this thread, there are just three that suggest that they actually watched the video, and only one of them is a discussion about it. That's bad form. Regardless of your stance on the game, critique is an important and incredible field that isn't represented very often. There are other, better places to continue having the "is Fallout 4 a good game" discussion. That being said:

This is definitely Joseph Anderson's best critique to date. You can clearly see his growth as a content creator, and the depth he went into with the analysis of gameplay loops is something that I only really see mirrored in Mark Brown's work (Game Maker's Toolkit and Boss Keys, if you have missed his posts when they pop up here). The video was still a little long-winded, with a lack of focus near the middle dragging down the overall quality, but he manages to tie everything back together with the points he raised in his original video quite well. The suggestions near the end about how to improve the story are interesting, and making both general and specific claims is useful. I like to imagine that Bethesda (or another developer) is learning from criticism like this. The core gameplay loop, as described by Joseph, is compelling, with exploration being (in my eyes) the core of the game on every level. ES6 is almost assuredly beyond conceptual development at this point, so heavy-hitting and fleshed-out reviews are important.

[u/perfect_true]

I don't think I've ever seen a game have a faster drop off in interest post release. Everyone was going mental for it for years leading to its release but now I see as many people still discussing Morrowind, New Vegas and Skyrim as much as F4.

[u/CrackedSash]

I liked this quip:

"Bethesda designers are proud that people sometimes can't tell radiant quests from scripted quests, but they've got it backwards. Many of the scripted quests are so dull that they appear to be radiant quests." (not exact words)

[u/Princess_Yoloswag]

Can I just say that I consider him to be one of the best reviewers I've ever come across?

[u/cantim]

Wow people here just complaining about the length of the video is just kind of ignorant. I mean how unimaginative do you have to be to think that there's no way a person can talk about a particular topic for 2+ hours? Or that everything has ever been said about a game or topic has been said?

These videos aren't just a presentation of objective facts droning on for 2 hours. Depending on the person, it's their point of view which can offer insights not just in Fallout 4 but in other things (game development, mechanics, life in general). Idk how to explain that if you've never sat down and watched other long-form works.

Anyway, I enjoy these long-form videos. It's nice to have up before going to work or watching them before I go to bed. It's not like there's a plethora of content creators that do these kinds of videos.

[u/Typhron]

Everyone's sitting here complaining about the overly long detail that comes from Joseph Anderson's videos and I'm sitting here coming off a binge of his videos. That's kinda what he does, I guess. Then again, he is a writer. I would assume he'd have trouble keeping it brief when there's something that's caught his fancy. I guess I can make that statement now with some semblance of credibility, now.

That said, I won't be watching this one quite yet. Still haven't watched the first one. Haven't really done much with Fallout 4, but I still want to beat it and be at least mildly surprised by it eventually.

[u/CrackedSash]

Quick summary:

• Not primarily an RPG. RPG aspect is not core. It's like the feathers that have been glued back on the chicken. The chicken is Explore - Loot - Craft.
• Quests not written by writers, but by level designers, artists, etc. Quests have no depth. Just a simple idea. No consequences. No non-violent alternatives. No ties to the lore. No ties to other quests. Many quests are illogical. Bethesda doesn't explore its ideas - they're just simple fetch quests in the end.
• Some quests are more elaborate, but no branching dialogue. Rewards for dialogue options are caps. USS Constitution is the only quest with stat checks. It should have been just one of many good quests, not the only one.
• Impossible to ask clarifying questions.

• Dialogue system is pathetic. Dialogue mod shows that most answers are the same - or just the same line rewritten. At that point, why not go fully scripted? If there are no meaningful choices, why pretend?

• Skyrim: More work is put in the environments than in the stories or characters.

• None of the recent Bethesda games are really RPGs. There needs to be character building and choices about how you interact with the world. Bethesda either doesn't know this or doesn't want to admit it. Afraid that RPG fans would be angry if they dropped the pretense of being an RPG completely.

• Admits to liking it anyway. Exploring the world is fun.

• Nice vertical design in the city. Great combat arenas. Combat has been improved, but still simple and shallow. Having something like the nanosuit from Crysis would be awesome. Power armor is cool, but clunky plus ticking of fusion core means that he won't use it.

• Ideas for upgradeable options similar to the words of power from Skyrim: Could have had an upgradeable stealth Pip-Boy that explain the ridiculous stealth ability. Or upgradeable suit with cold resistance. Or augmentations that you could pick up from synths.

• On very hard, enemies are insane bullet sponges. Don't drop enough ammo. Leg enemies can have less HP than normal ones.

• Perks: Should have been separated between combat and non combat. Non-combat perks shouldn't cause enemies to level up.

• Survival mode sucks. Contrary to Dark Souls, death can feel unfair. Repetition is not fun. Also, crash bugs.

• DLCs have a ton of untapped potential. Far Harbor has creative enemies. Goes on forever about FH. Quests are deeper. Better than main story.

[u/aniforprez]

For a sub that's all about game discussion, it's appalling how many people are complaining about the length of a video that's DISCUSSING A GAME.

It may not actually be a "discussion" since it's a one-way street but whatever the length of the video, as a writer his opinion on the game's writing and story (which he talks about a lot more than it's mechanics) is at the very least interesting if not entertaining. I would recommend people either watch it or don't but please don't come here to crib about the length or why he had to make another video because he's already made one before. Even if he made one before he wants to talk about it again because he's played a lot more of it with the new expansions

EDIT: I realise that I'm being hypocritical by not actually discussing the video and the game. Quite stupid really.

I've not played Fallout 4. I LOVED Fallout 3 and Skyrim did not hook me well enough to love it the same way others do and for so long. I LOVED the E3 reveal of Fallout but when the reviews came out (I always wait for reviews) the broad consensus that story was not that great made me drop any plans of picking this up. I watched Joseph's last video on Fallout as a post-mortem on a game that while had a bombastic launch is seeing a bigger dropoff than their other games. As a guy not interested in actually playing it to find out why, the last video was a great summary on the reasons why I was right not to drop money on a game that I would not have enjoyed myself.

This video, though going through some of the same points as the first video with almost an hour of cliff-notes on the last video, again goes through some of the problems with the game in relation to their new expansions and really highlights how little thought Bethesda put into the story of the game vs how much thought the game needed to be the RPG that it used to be. I really think Bethesda should just stop making these games and hand it over to someone who can competently make good stories with the choices and writing the series truly deserves with it's wonderful, intriguing and wacky premise and put them into the game. I also wish they would just stop making games with that stupid fucking useless engine with all it's bugs and hacks. I'm sure it must be development hell making games with such an outdated piece of crap.

[u/BartKaell]

I would like to point you guys to the reason why i love JA so much, at 1:32:20

However, like your mom, there's a big but.