How To Make The Perfect Fallout Game

good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to how to make the perfect fallout game because you know one thing i love about fallout it's constantly evolving every generation brings us huge changes to the franchise and that for me is a good thing i'd rather fallout was constantly trying new stuff rather than endlessly playing it safe and maybe eventually becoming a bit stale but the downside is that not every change is gonna be good every game has introduced something that doesn't work and would be best forgotten yes even that one and accordingly every game is introduced something really cool that we should preserve or bring back yeah even that one so that's what we're going to be doing today i'm going to explain how to make the perfect fallout game by discussing two things that worked brilliantly in every main fallout game and one thing we should throw away and never talk about again to make a sort of recipe for the perfect fallout 5. so so so let's kick off with the original fallout and i want to start off by talking about the world specifically how the world is introduced to you because the original fallout is to my mind the best example in the franchise of how to facilitate organic discovery and exploration so let me give you a simple example here by looking at how fallout games begin so in fallout 2 you're looking for vote 13 and a gek you're advised to go to the nearest town where conveniently someone has a lead for you on the guy who knows about the vault 13 flask you go where they tell you a guy there can direct you to the person who's sold in the flask and the trail continues in fallout 3 you're looking for your father you're advised to go to the nearest town where conveniently someone has a lead on where your father went you go where they tell you a guy there could direct you further and the trail continues fallout new vegas you're looking for benny you're advised to go to the nearest town where conveniently someone has a lead on where benny went you go where they tell you a guy there can direct you further the trail continues fallout 4 looking for your son advised to go to nearest town conveniently someone has a lead on where your son is go where they tell you guys there directs you further trail continues the common thread here is breadcrumbs the game tells you where to go bit by bit sure you can ignore it to just run off in any direction you choose but there is an obvious intended journey a convenient string of people who just happen to have the exact information you need to get you to the next person in a perfect unbroken chain that leads precisely where you need to go but not in fallout 1 in the original fallout you're looking for a water chip you're advised to go to the nearest vault and it's not there it's abandoned it's a dead end there's no convenient terminal or note or tape or survivor telling you where to go next what there is however is a town you pass it on the way to the vault no one tells you to go there there's no reason to believe they'd know anything about your mission and they don't they have no idea what a water chip is but there's a guy there who can point you in the direction of another town you have no reason to think they'd know anything there but they might you see the crucial difference here fallout 1 just let you loosen the world and leave you to it you can figure it out if you pay attention and ask around and put the evidence together but the convenient breadcrumb trail of helpful npcs isn't there instead you explore the world slowly learn about the universe figure out the story at your own pace meet the brotherhood early if you feel like it go exploring and you can run into a super mutant immediately after starting the game though you probably won't survive the encounter stumble across the final boss at level 1 if you want to it's all just there and i hugely respect fallout 1 for that the second good thing we're going to talk about is the master possibly my favorite antagonist in the whole franchise i love everything about this guy i love the way he looks completely alien a human face meshed into machines and architecture he's one of the strangest most interestingly designed creatures in all of fallout and then there's the amazing echoing robotic voices pieced together out of recording so the flow of his speech is all wrong i don't have to prove anything to you i love how he's unique in fallout in that he's a final boss you can defeat without ever meeting him if you just sabotage him blow up his home just like the game doesn't gift you free breadcrumbs to guide you it doesn't force you into a staged confrontation with the master if you'd rather sneak in and blow him to hell without ever seeing him you can do it fallout 1 truly just let you do it your way i love how he's not just a tough fight but also a genius who has perfectly sound reasons for what he's doing you likely won't agree with them but they do make sense you fully understand why he's doing what he's doing what his end goal is and how what he's done so far helps move him towards that end goal and that's arguably a lot better than the relatively poultry information we get about horrigan or autumn or lanius but most of all i love how the game handles the confrontation with him specifically how you can't really just talk him around and of course you can't he's a genius who's been doing this for literally decades he's mutated into a giant immovable mass there's no backing down from where he is the only way to persuade him he's wrong is to prove to him with evidence that his plan is flawed and everything he's done has been for nothing specifically by presenting him with the autopsy report that demonstrates his creations as sterile and thus his society is a dead end which is the exact thing he was trying to avoid then only then does he admit defeat and destroy himself and that is brilliant so brilliant that to my mind fallout has never again managed to do a final boss that well horrigan simply has to die one way or the other and autumn and laniers can both just surrender if you're a good enough speaker which can feel a bit on the anticlimactic side after how much lannis in particular is hyped up ahead of the encounter i live in hope that this sort of thing might return at the end of fallout 5. a final boss you absolutely can be talked down but only if it takes more than speech 100 to make it happen now there was however one thing that very much didn't work in fallout 1. unfortunately everybody involved seems to have realized it and that's the time limit you see because your main objective is to acquire a new water chip the game openly says you have to do it within a certain period of time otherwise the water runs out and that's game over the time you have is 150 in-game days now there's a part of me that likes this conceptually i like that it keeps you focused on your objective for example and provides a good reason not to just routinely rest to recover health as that can use up days it's a fun way of balancing the first aid skill rest mechanic and adding to the value represented by stimpaks and doctors but the problem is that a time of its very existence runs counter to the whole point of giving the player a big open detailed interesting unique alternative universe game world in a fallout game you want to explore you want to take on submissions you want to learn about the world meet its characters and just let yourself get immersed as i was saying just a second ago the entire game seems set up to encourage exploration and let the player find their own way and for me a ticking clock ruins that because a new player has no idea how generous or not that time limit is sure you could go and explore but there was a very real possibility that by doing so you'd lock yourself into a bad ending you see aside from the time limit the game tells you about in your pip-boy there was a whole bunch of other time limits too which are completely invisible if the master was still alive on day 140 for example the hub would get a bad ending in which the settlement falls in fact every major settlement could get a bad ending even if you did all of their side quests in fact it's actually a bit worse than that because by completing side quests and trying to help towns you could accidentally doom them if completing the side's quest and associated travel and healing time happened to push them over the magic invisible number that meant they got a bad ending and these were really aggressive numbers too the followers of the apocalypse got a bad ending after 90 days my first fallout one playthrough took about 180 days in total even speedrunners who literally sprint directly to the end game and skip every town in fallout 1 take about 25 days to complete the game and perhaps worst of all if you didn't get to necropolis fast enough the locals were already dead when you got there so you just missed out on characters missions and rewards now to be clear i am not opposed to an escalating threat where bad choices or neglect on the player's part are punished with a bad ending for those they failed to help but this isn't that this wasn't a case of choice and consequence because the player couldn't make an informed choice the game very purposefully doesn't tell you that super mutants even exist until the end of the first act it's entirely feasible you could get stuck with a bad ending for a settlement before you even had the chance to learn that they were under any threat fortunately most of this has been fixed over the years the original dev teams themselves in the official patch 1.1 effectively removed the time limit from the second half of the game and the most well-known and widely used patch for fallout 1 today fallout fixed removed some of the more aggressive bad ending timers by the time fallout 2 came out while there was a time limit it was 13 years which is basically impossible to use up so hopefully we'll never have to deal with this sort of thing again okay on to fallout 2 and fallout 2 is going to be a bit of an odd one because fallout 1 and fallout 2 are really similar more so than any other pair of fallout games so picking out things that fallout 2 did well that weren't already in fallout warner is gonna be a little bit tricky but i do think there are some fun things to highlight here so i'm going to start off with the world again but with a very different focus fallout 2 to my mind has a world that more than any other doesn't feel like it's built around you now that might sound a bit odd so let me give you an example in fallout 1 in the town of shady sansa one of the big questions about how tandy has been kidnapped now i want you to consider this one question what would happen if the protagonist just hadn't passed by that day and the answer seems to be nothing aradesh openly says that his people are hopeless at tracking her down the raiders haven't issued any demands so without your involvement nothing really seems likely to happen in fallout 3 in the town of arufu they're scared of a band of raiders called the family who have repeatedly attacked them but if the lone wanderer didn't happen to show up what happens next and probably nothing they don't have any plans to counter attack and the family don't voice any plans to attack them any further so without your involvement nothing happens in new vegas in the town of novak they're scared of encroaching ghouls from the rep contest site but if the courier didn't volunteer to look into it what happens probably nothing manny's very clear that they're busy guarding the other side of town from the legion no one else seems to care about the ghoul problem as for the test site itself jason has no plan for dealing with the night kin the night kin have no plan for tracking down the stealth boys and chris has no plan for getting hold of the necessary components without you literally nothing happens but let's consider fallout 2 if the chosen one had never got involved with any of vote city's business what would happen well vault city would presumably annex gecko's power plant which the people of gekko are extremely concerned about and hired members of vault city are discussing that would buy volt city a bit of time with no obvious long-term answer to bishop and the ncr's mercenaries they'd probably end up joining the ncr that could well lead to the ncr cracking down on the slavery that vault city relies upon to function and thus the eventual collapse of the citizen government you see the difference here and many fallout games and a huge number of games in general if you actually just step back and look at the societies that you meet they turn out to be extremely static where only the arrival of the protagonist triggers any change whatsoever scarim is another good example of a world where seemingly nothing happens unless you personally do it but the sense i get from fallout 2 is that the world is moving without me people have plans and agendas and all i'm doing is stepping into a world that's already in motion and tipping it one way or the other now to be clear i fully appreciate that really this is just a trick of good world building and script writing but the idea that you're part of a big dynamic world feels great and for me at least can give a much better sense of urgency to proceedings secondly i'd like to talk about something very obscure but i really think it was a great system and should return and that is reputational perks you see fallout 2 splits its reputation system in two there was the general reputation system which covered how much overall you were liked or disliked in a society but there were also special extra reputation perks generally these represents the major act you committed or a social status you'd acquired now this is a brilliant system because it makes so much sense sure the game needs to track whether you're generally seen positively or negatively but there are plenty of things you can do that aren't just good or bad but are still noteworthy and should reasonably impact certain social interactions it doesn't matter how many nice things you do if you're known to have sold a person into slavery and you walk into a society where slavery is illegal well that's going to count against you a champion boxer will be a local celebrity a known associate of a crime boss will be treated with respect within his territory but rival crime bosses will hate you and also there were a lot about sacks like so many about sex now new vegas did replicate this in a way plenty of npcs would acknowledge recently completed quests in background dialogue but crucially that was just for flavor the only real lever you could move in new vegas was general reputation and we'll be getting to that later and that's what made fallout 2's two-part system so very clever it allowed the game to acknowledge major feats that made you a bit of a local celebrity it was a clever system and i'd love it back now for the thing in fallout 2 we don't want to repeat i'm gonna split this one in two because my first thought was a particular area but that seemed a bit too specific to count but i also couldn't not mention it so yeah it's the temple of trials the compulsory first dungeon of fallout 2 and the problem is extremely simple fallout is an rpg where you get to build a character and give them specializations you can choose what weapons you have a natural aptitude towards it's entirely up to you unless you choose a character who was useless with melee weapons in which case fallout 2 hates you because you're stuck in a dungeon full of mutant bugs with only a melee weapon and the game's not going to be giving you a ranged weapon at all under any circumstances until you reach the first town so you know how in new vegas obsidian literally put a nine millimeter pistol a laser pistol and a knife in doc mitchell's house all available before you even leave the character build section yeah i'd like to think that's their apology for the temple of trials so that's one thing but i also have to mention tone here now fallout's always had a sense of humor specifically a very dark and sometimes slightly absurd sense of humor but in fallout 2 i've seen a lot of people agree that the game went a bit overboard with cultural references and fourth wall breaks now i'd argue that cultural references are always going to be a bad idea because they're going to date your game i can't say this is an objectively bad thing because maybe some folks really enjoy running into explicit shoutouts to star trek hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and monty python though personally i find it a bit cringey when you get as far as vault city residents literally doing skits from austin powers possibly the more clear cut issue is the number of fourth wall breaking npc lines they acknowledge xp they name the dev team they even acknowledge differences between each territory's version of fallout again this isn't an objective bad but i've heard many people say it was overdone for me it's really immersion breaking and the devs seem to have ultimately agreed with that as in new vegas this sort of thing was massively slimmed down and also locked behind the optional wild wasteland trait so you had to opt into it so on to fallout 3 one of the great controversial entries into the franchise and as you're probably you know aware i could talk for a long time on this one and have done so but let's try and focus down on the real crucial bits without going on for several hours you know hopefully so as we've heard many times in various forms in many fallout games the wasteland is an important part of the fallout universe a dangerous desolate cruel place and it's a crucial part of the world because the fear of how vicious the wider world is full of raiders and monsters that's what makes the rest of fallout civilization make sense why do we repeatedly see societies in closed bunkers and vaults or walled settlements caravan convoys with armed guards the theme of isolation versus opening up almost anywhere you look fall out of the universe only makes sense if a large part of the world remains a dangerous chaotic untamed place as a counterpoint to the pockets of civilization in whatever form they take and i'd argue that no game manages that better than fallout 3. it's not afraid to be empty and desolate and to create a 3d rendering of how classic fallout imagined the wasteland a place where you could travel long distances without ever seeing anything other than blasted dirt but it also captured the danger of the classic fallout's wasteland where just as you could want stumble across a random encounter so dangerous that flight was the only sensible option so too in fallout 3 the wasteland was populated by huge numbers of random encounters some of which were terrifying enough that running was the best bet for an inexperienced player but i'd argue that fallout 3's connected persistent 3d wasteland elevated the ideas of fallout 1 and 2 where random encounters simply existed in their own tiny pocket universes in fallout 3 random encounters could spawn and roam they could run into other random encounters or fixed spawns of raiders or creatures you could see robots fighting slavers scorpions versus dogs bears versus super mutants in fallout 3's wasteland you're literally walking through an anarchic battleground where everything wants to kill everything it's tense it's unpredictable and to my mind it's precisely what the wasteland should be and secondly i'd like to praise fallout 3 for being the only fallout game with a meaningful post-end game now that's not said it's the only fallout game where you can keep playing after you're done with the final boss that's true in fallout two and four as well but three is the only game that ever let you see the world that you had created and investigate the consequences of what you did down on the ground having spent the second half of the game working on the water purifier you get to visit it in full working order you get to see the water caravans that have sprung up you deal with the con artists and opportunists looking to take advantage of the new world you've created now this isn't to say i dislike the ending slides of other fallout games it's great to get a detailed long-term view of how your decisions will shake out but i do have a particular fondness for fallout 3 and broken steel as messy as it is as the only fallout game that actually lets me get down on the ground and visit the consequences of the main plot in a meaningful way now as for the bad thing yeah let's talk about quest markers now quest markers aren't a universal bad it makes perfect sense that sometimes you'll be asked to do something by a quest giver who already knows the location of what they're after but if that's the case all the time and it overwhelmingly is in the 3d fallout games then something very unfortunate happens which h bomber guy very accurately identified in his otherwise completely wrong video on fallout 3. when the compass tells you precisely where to go that's where you focus and it robs you of the joy of exploring and discovering the world by yourself a particularly bad example of this actually comes right at the start of fallout 3 when you're told to head to galaxy news radio located within the dc ruins this is your first trip to the city which is in a state of ruin so you might reasonably assume that to get there you might need to ask for directions come up with a plan decide which route looks like the best bet through a mostly collapsed urban environment filled with super mutants but no your pip boy just knows you should go to this one particular subway station and then through this particular set of tunnels and then you'll get there and this definitely isn't a well-known route because it's full of monsters and creatures and raiders no one else is using this as a way to access gnr so thinking about this i suspect the quest marker is the reason i've seen so many people who dislike the subway tunnels and isolated pockets of space in the dc ruins in fallout 3. players are going to naturally struggle to explore and navigate because the few times you visit the area for quests the quest marker tells you exactly where to go so precisely the player never needs to learn or remember which lines and which stations join which areas together now this doesn't say that the world's before quest markers a world of complex npc directions as in morrowind was perfect having to open your pip boy to double check instructions does slow down the game and having summarized instructions on screen for a tracked quest fills up a lot more space than a tick on the compass but other games and franchises are starting to experiment with interesting mechanisms such as assassin's creed odyssey's exploration system where you're given a description of where you need to go in the world and are left to locate and approach it with a more exact quest marker appearing once you get close enough this is a good system because it makes you pay attention to the world and learn how it all fits together and it also provides a compelling incentive for the world to be filled up with big distinctive landmarks so there are enough things to navigate by so it's pretty much a win-win some parts of fallout 76 actually do this in reverse where you're shown where to go immediately but once you get there you need to search within a given area to find the exact thing you're looking for both of these are a solid step forward and anything that moves fallout 5 away from walking in a straight line towards a quest marker and more towards investigating and exploring the world that'd be much better in fact if there was one thing i could urge bethesda to consider in fallout 5 it's this one please let's do something about quest markers and so on to fallout new vegas which is you know difficult because it's the best game ever made so picking just two things it does well and finding even one that it doesn't that's tricky but i'll give it a go and start off nice and broad by saying the first thing we should keep from new vegas is quest design now i know that sounds like low hanging fruit everybody knows there's lots of skill checks in new vegas and that's good and rpg-ish so i want to go a bit deeper here and examine precisely what makes the quest design so good because there's more to it than some people generally assume it's not just that obsidian added extra options for people who invested heavily in certain skills it's also that there are options for people who didn't let's give a really simple example here one of the first missions in the game is ghost town gunfight where you're tasked with saving ringo from the powder gangs you do it by using a series of skill checks to set up the fight recruiting townsfolk getting them properly armed and armored and getting hold of medicine but crucially you don't have to the quest doesn't insist that you do all of these preparations if you can't pass any of those skill checks then you ringo and sunny could just take on the powder gangers by yourself immediately you'll be outnumbered two to one but it's manageable for a decently experienced player in this instance skill checks aren't a shortcut to auto complete the quest they're entirely optional mechanisms to add more content into the game swinging the fight more in your favor making it more interesting to the extent you can very comfortably leave a fully skilled checked good springs to deal with the powder gangs themselves and avoid getting any blood on your own hands which does actually carry the advantage that if you didn't do any murder yourself your powder gang of reputation won't suffer as much allowing you to take part in i fought the law which completing ghost town gunfight would otherwise exclude you from but what if you built your character in such a ways you can't meet the skill checks but you still want to do so will the game's designed to facilitate that too you see the core checks you need to get good springs able to defend itself are trudies to get the town involved and chats to get them armor for those you need speech 25 and bat 25 so guess what's guaranteed to be available in every shop in town skill magazines to boost both of those skills but what if you can't afford them well they're both freely available in good springs in the trailer and the schoolhouse and this happens a lot by the way if there's an important skill check tied to a quest there's an excellent chance you can find a workaround nearby so just down the road in prim you have to rescue deputy beagle from some convicts but you can bypass the fight by sneaking through a back corridor that's behind a lockpick 25 door don't have lockpick 25 well there's a key in the storeroom sealed by a science 25 terminal don't have science 25 there's a science skill magazine in johnson nash's house in the very same town but back to ghost town gunfight because i forgot to mention how you can just kill joe cobb while he's alone in town and that she makes the fight significantly easier or how if you can't pass any checks at all you can just flip sides to joe cobb and work with him because he already has a gang so you get more help on his side by default which makes perfect sense or a load of other touches but the key thing is this is pretty much the first mission in the game and it has options available for characters with the right skills without the right skills for pacifists for murderers for anybody all to deal with a tiny local conflict involving six bandits fallout new vegas is just great isn't it okay on to the second thing and as i hinted at earlier let's talk about reputations now conceptually this is pretty simple reputation mechanics are important because they mean what you do has lasting consequences the way a town reacts to you shifts depending on how you've acted towards them in the past if you wronged them they remember but this is something that's been in fallout since the first game so what makes new vegas's system superior well you see back in fallout 1 and 2 reputation with a given community was represented by a number starting at zero when you first arrived in town it went up if you did good things and down if you did bad things now that sounds reasonable and yes indeed many games this day use a simple positive to negative sliding scale to represent faction reputation but there is one major problem a number is a hugely inadequate way to represent something as complex as the general opinion of a town specifically you might have reputation zero for having just arrived as a wandering stranger however you might also end up at reputation zero for helping to resolve the town's famine rescuing timmy from the well and then selling out the town to a nearby band of raiders who offered you money to steal the gate codes for them but a reputation number doesn't know that so the townsfolk would treat both people just the same new vegas introduced the vastly superior system of separately tracking positive and negative reputation and giving you one of 16 reputations dictated by your position on a 4x4 grid so in the example above the wandering stranger would be a neutral unknown but the machiavellian traitor would be a wild child someone who has done great good and great bad and this is a brilliant system not just because it leads to a more accurate depiction of how you've acted but because it makes sense in real life people don't just forget you wronged them because you did something nice afterwards people might well come to a generally positive or negative position depending on how much good or bad you do but they still remember the other stuff as well it's a great system and if there was one state with it is that it was underutilized in new vegas i live in hope will see it return and use more fully in future and so on to what fallout new vegas does wrong now my first instinct was to say bugs and it's undeniably true that new vegas launched in a shocking state just in terms of how often it crashed but that didn't seem right to race here because that was just an accident or perhaps in part the inevitable result of the fact obsidian made the greatest video game of all time in about a year and a half had they not been contractually obliged to deliver on that time scale more time for qa and bug fixing could well have eased the issues there but instead i feel it's more appropriate to focus on something that was an intentional design choice now that's difficult in new vegas because it's great but i think there is one thing we should definitely not revisit and that's the companions now don't get me wrong the companions themselves are great a varied bunch of interesting characters who supply some of the most interesting and in-depth quests in the game the problem isn't narrative it's mechanical up to this point in fallout history companions have always been mortal when they've run out of health they die this is an important part of the game balance and risk versus reward companions provide extra firepower which is good but you also need to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't get into trouble potentially having to expose yourself to save a companion who's low on health which is part of the downside as soon as the companion is at no risk whatsoever well there's very little reason not to just travel with companions at all times and just throw them at the enemy naturally this ought to be balanced by examining their damage output health etc but something seems to have gone wrong here because if we take say basic low-level boon with just his starting weapons and armor and throw him into a legion occupied town by himself yeah he can just um he can just handle that boon is kind of an auto win button for 99 of the game but you know what maybe i'm being unfair boone is a trained sniper he's supposed to be tough if we were traveling around with a young scribe dressed in a robe oh no she's just killed that whole gang by herself i appreciate companions being useful guys but maybe tone them down a bit from weapon of mass destruction and so on to fallout 4 and let's start off with weapons and specifically modular weapons the way weapons work in fallout 4 was one of the biggest changes in the game and i love it and it's not because i think modular weapon crafting is an inherently great idea so much as how it changes the flow of weapon usage compared to every previous fallout game you see in fallout 1 and 2 weapon progression is very much linear so in fallout 2 say the first gun you have access to is the pipe rifle and it's great when you find it because you know it's a gun but very soon afterwards you'll find the 10 millimeter pistol and you will then immediately go over to that forever and never use the pipe rifle again why because the 10 millimeter pistol does the exact same damage at the exact same range for the exact same action point cost with the exact same ammo type but you don't have to reload every shot it weighs 7 pounds less and the strength requirement is lower so the 10 millimeter pistol is either the same or superior in every way there is no downside to consider there are no trade-offs it's just better so the pipe rifle goes in the bin and the 10 millimeter pistol becomes your new best friend until you find a better gun at which point the 10 millimeter goes in the bin forever too and this happened a lot in old fallout because the damage output of every gun in the game was fixed weapon skill effective accuracy but never power and there was no way to just boost the damage output of exclusively pistols or just energy weapons no matter what perks or skills you took some weapons just did more damage than others and as a result of that in fallout warner once you had the turboplasma rifle there was almost no reason to ever use anything else ever again fallout 4 change that now guns could be modified with more options becoming available with level locked crafting perks and as a result of that a gun you happen to like could stay relevant as time went by in fact even the objectively weakest guns the pipe weaponry had a point as they tended to unlock advanced components very early on such as picking up the valuable recon scope and only gun nut rank 2. this meant that choosing a low down was a lot more interesting as a basic weapon that had been heavily modified often had the edge in some ways over a more advanced weapon that you might not be able to modify yet it also let you turn a weapon into something that suited your playstyle automatic or bolt action higher base damage or higher critical hit damage a long barrel for better range or a lighter barrel to reduce the ap of that shots and then of course there's the legendary system handing out randomized wild card special bonus effects on weapons you come across in the wasteland and i love this system okay it's not perfect but it does two things brilliantly it adds to replayability as a really strong legendary weapon you weren't expecting can be strong enough to make you rethink aspects of your build on the fly and it reinforces the non-linearity of weapon progression a basic weapon with a strong legendary effect a crippling automatic say or an explosive double-barreled shotgun can easily stay in your regular rotation into the mid game and beyond it's a fun system that's helped keep fallout 4 fresh for me and i hope an iteration of it does return in fallout 5. okay next up a bit of an odd pick because you could say this belongs in fallout 76's section but on reflection i think it deserves to be here more what i'm talking about of course is building now this one is far from perfect the ability to build anywhere in fallout 76 is an improvement and the building process can be frustrating at times as items sometimes just refuse to click together and behave as you want them to but i still think there's a lot of unrealised promise in this idea so i hope it doesn't get abandoned in the next generation now to my mind the holy grail is to be able to build your own town if that's what you want to do fallout 76's camps felt too much like well camps where you and your astronaut girlfriend can hang out but there's no way to start building a real settlement fallout 4 did try to facilitate this with some really big build areas together with lots of interesting structures to build around which helped give your settlements a fallouty feel crucially you could set up a beacon and invite people to come and live with you your townsfolk could be turned into shops if you invested in them you could run caravans that really did move around the map they even generated tiny radiant quests for you on occasion bethesda had some really fun ideas here and tried really hard but the problem and why building in fallout 4 is a great idea that still needs a bit of work no matter how big or powerful your town got it never impacted the world outside the town itself or your other towns it was like all your settlements lived together in a protagonist pocket dimension that was the missing piece a way has to be found to make the places that you build somehow interact with existing locations and i really hope this is a priority for fallout 5 because the building system was already so close to being great tossing 76's ability to build wherever you want and it could be incredible now as for the bad thing fortunately bethesda and i seem to be on the same page on this one because it's the speech system which thankfully has already been abandoned as of wastelanders so hopefully we'll never see it again but let's very quickly make sure we all understand why it was so bad so we can avoid making the same mistake again so just as a reminder in fallout 4 dialogue was handled with a four point dialogue wheel thing now the obvious problem is immediately apparent there's only four options in a franchise where you previously could have huge amounts of comments to make questions to ask all sorts of things now at any stage in the conversation you were restricted to four statements but it was much worse than that because you didn't actually have four options at all much of the time a was reserved for yes i agree well x was reserved for sarcastic which almost always moved the conversation on just as if you'd said yes and never offended anybody or made them think less of you they just sort of weirdly accepted that you made dumb remarks all the time also because you didn't see what you were about to say just the word sarcastic this was a real roller coaster sometimes you were just straight up rude sometimes it was enthusiastic ascent your character could say just about anything including a large part of the time not sarcasm let's test your math cues what is 12 times 15 it's the square root of who gives a crap about that that's not sarcasm that's just being a dick b meanwhile was often reserved for no which generally didn't mean no it just meant not right now but i may be back later so that's most of the options are already reserved for just nodding along with the conversation leaving only the y option to ask a question so in a franchise where previously just about any interaction could if you chose to descend into a detailed discussion of what somebody wanted why they wanted what options were available the background context of the mission you know important world building stuff that helped inform whether you actually want to help this person now you can ask for one single clarification that the game chooses for you it was a feeble system but i think it was a symptom of a bigger problem of how fallout 4 viewed quests in general rather than being something that you might wish to consider the merits of determining the ethical or reputational benefits of an action fallout 4 viewed a new quest as something that you would inherently do because it was a quest you do the quest because that's where xp and rewards come from what the quest is or who it's for or the context of it is irrelevant here's a quest go do it with that mindset the full choice wheel is perfectly adequate for a fallout game it is not thankfully it seems to be gone now and so we come to controversy corner because yes for all its flaws there are some good things in fallout 76 now admittedly this first one is a really small one but it's one that's really stuck with me and that's photo mode i love fallout 76's photo mode because fallout games matter to me they've matched to me a long time and it's kind of sad to my mind that i can't remember my first reactions to most of fallout 3 and new vegas it was just too long ago now i can't remember where i went first where i got lost what my favorite moments were what really made an impact on me but because of photo mode in fallout 76 i've got a record of the good times i did have in that game and i always will so there i am as an incredibly low level player having just done the army training over at camp mcclendon i was very proud of that the final robot challenge is quite tricky when you're low level that there that's the first time me and nerd cubed ever hung out together and fallout 76 building our first little test house lovely oh that's me and up is not jump when up is not john was actually recording some footage for his video on fallout 76 so i just logged on to uh to help him and he accidentally got stuck inside a trolley i remember this one that was launch day because obviously i was playing during the preview period but yeah i did that photo on launch day the next one is yes the welcome camp i set up i set up a camp on the road leading down to flatwoods just to basically give out free stuff to new players that was a really lovely day and then we got a couple of community events just before and then after the explosion that was the first time i ever found a vote out in the wild now admittedly the vault raids turned out to be total garbage but i was still really excited and that was the day i built the cap that i'm still using even now where plenty of the community came along and helped me build it so yeah you know what that's that's nice right there that was the first scorch beast i ever killed that was the first nuke i ever saw in the game this just yeah it's nice to have this so yes again i'd like to stress fallout 76 isn't the best fallout game not by a long way but i still had fun with it and now i've got a record of that and i would just love to see this return in future because presumably in a better fallout game it would be even more welcome and the other big thing that fallout 76 gets right to my mind is world design the map is i would say one of the most interesting the bethesda have ever made which is actually kind of more frustrating in a way because i can see how it could have been the setting for an incredible fallout single-player rpg experience specifically it shares a lot of features with one of my other favorite bethesda designed maps skyrim for one thing they both have a lot of very distinct biomes from the forest the toxic valley the ash sheep the swampy maya the rocky savage divide now that's inherently good already because variety is the spice of life and it's nice to have very visually distinct areas to explore so you know roughly where you are just by looking around it helps with navigation but 76 goes a bit beyond this and gives each region its own gameplay flavor like say the filthy air and the ash heap causing a risk of disease or the huge irradiated swamps of the maya if anything i wish these distinct mechanical flavors went further but they are still welcome but the real star of the show is something i rarely see getting acknowledged you see for the most part fallout games populate their world in an extremely pragmatic way if you run into something it's going to want to fight you because it's an enemy and thus it's a fight and thus you get xp for killing it in fallout 3 for example literally every creature in the game is hostile with the exception of owned brahman and own dogs everything else will try and eat you but that doesn't really make a huge amount of sense you can't have a food chain with only predators in it to recycle a line from the well-known video the shantification of fallout what are all of these creatures and monsters eating when you're not there to be eaten fallout 76 instead took a leaf out of skyrim's book and added a huge amount of non-hostile wildlife to the world now that does serve a gameplay purpose 76 was the first game to have survival mechanics enabled under all circumstances so there needs to be stuff to kill and cook but it also made the world much richer and more believable especially if you compare it to fallout 3 where the available creatures were dogs brahmin bears mole rats bloat flies ants milos roaches and scorpions that's literally it those were the only creatures in the game toss in centaurs and death claws if you want to count abominations too but in 76 we've got a world where you can occasionally run into beavers frogs rabbits rad stags squirrels foxes chickens and fireflies and all of those are peaceful some will actually run away because they're scared of you it's a really lovely touch but it's not just the bottom of the food chain that's been fleshed out there's by far the largest cast of monsters ever featured in a fallout game that are after you two and i have a particular fondness for the addition of the cryptids rarely seen monsters that act as a sort of mini boss and of course the scorch beasts themselves and yes they're not that original they're basically just skyrim dragons but they do serve a fun purpose in 76 which is as a large flying enemy they can do occasional passes over low level areas just to mess with new players i have a very fond memory of being trapped in the entrance hall of sugar grove by a hostile scorch beast along with a handful of other low-level players in the end we tried to fight we failed miserably and the scorch beast got bored and wanted off because we weren't worth the effort and that made such an impression on me that in the end the day i took down my first scorch beast i was so happy i took a photo with it which i showed you just a second ago i do think yes the variety of enemies and the way the world is populated it's a really good thing that 76 gets right now as for the bad thing well there's plenty we could put here but let's focus on the one that's still getting worse and we don't need to uh drag this one out it's not complicated the atom store is a mess originally labeled as a cosmetic only affair the goal posts have shifted over time and it now prominently features utility items that help players among other things gather junk which is basically the most valuable commodity in the game we've seen artificial scarcity aggressively manufactured through a rotating stock of items even multiple instances of camouflage gear that you can take into a pvp battle royale mode in a heavily overgrown map there are buyable items to repair weapons there are viable items to automatically break down and teleport components to your stash at the time of recording bethesda has only just unveiled lunchboxes as part of the rewards for the new season system and you can bet those will be available in the atom store within a matter of weeks so you can buy xp boosters too the whole thing is just it's just a mess and there we go ladies and gentlemen that is how you make the perfect fallout game take all of the good stuff cut out the bad stuff and you have got a brilliant fallout 5 on your hands and i believe bethesda still have it in them to make an incredible single-player fallout rpg when you think of fallout 3 the pit far harbor even wastelanders there are folks there who know how to make a great fallout game and hopefully next time they'll get the right blend of ingredients i live in hope but in the meantime i've been john this has been many a true nerd and this has been how to make the perfect fallout game thank you very much and goodbye if we just hide the bodies nobody needs to know about this yes my stupid stupid plan has worked it turns out i'm a genius the giant rad scorpion is not gone oh hang on there's more yet though i'm still being very shocked guys where's the ncr nobody needs to know

Channel: Many A True Nerd

Views: 665,616

Keywords: fallout, fallout games, best fallout game, fallout good games, which fallout is best, fallout 1, fallout 2, fallout 3, fallout new vegas, fallout 4, fallout 76, fallout essay, fallout video essay

Id: FWhnY5EQiFQ

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020