Hi,
I've been reading you guys for a while, and my complete disappointment in Fallout 4 has made me decide to register.
I warn you, it's mainly to rant and vent.
I'll just copy here the review I've posted on Metacritic - again, I pretty much registered just for that. It just needed to get out, I suppose.
It's just funny how all I can think about for the last two weeks are the great highlights from when I was playing Fallout 1 & 2. Nostalgia FTW.
---
I have restarted my game for the third time yesterday. The first time, it was because a key NPC had just disappeared, yesterday I just lost the ability to crouch. I decided to start all over again, in a kind of hopeful way - maybe if I went back to square one, I would minimize the risk of bugs or something. And then I was hit by the bug where you're stuck right out of the pod until you restart your console.
So, yeah, even by Bethesda standards, this is painful. I've had buggy saves in their RPGs before, but the worst that had happened was to have a secondary quest I couldn't finish in Skyrim. Never anything this terminal and annoying. And I'm not mentioning all the bugs I managed to work around: crash to PS4 home when changing Piper's weapon, and so on.
Then, there's what Bethesda have done with Fallout, and that's worse than any technical glitch.
I can't stand the dialog system. I used to love it in the old Fallout games, and Planescape: Torment, when you had pretty much half a screen of dialogue options to read, and in certain cases having to be real careful about what you picked. The new system is just risk-free, over simplified nonsense.
Cardboard cutout characters, complete lack of substance in their backgrounds...
It just doesn't feel like a RPG any more. I miss my drug-addicted prizefighter from Fallout 2, a guy who had amassed terrible karma before setting on the path of redemption. That guy had a story, that guy had a style of his own, that guy was FUN. He was utterly rubbish at many things, he had to give up on some parts of the game because of that, and he felt real.
This guy I'm playing in Fallout 4 can just do everything, and he can do it very well. He's neither a beacon of hope leading a rebellion, nor the scourge of the wasteland terrorizing settlements. He's just an asshat who tinkers in his shed and just happens to own 4 power armours and 3 Fat Men despite having been outside the vault for a week or so.
I miss the quests from the old Fallout games where you could kill a guy subtly by tampering with his heart medication, rather than HAVING to blow his brains out with a shotgun.
(Spoilers ahead)
The bit in the Combat Zone is, for me, very representative of the turn that Bethesda has taken. In an old Fallout game, you could have probably done any of the following:
1. Wait for a fight night to rob the betting money
2. Enter the cage yourself and become the local champion
3. Bet on any fighter to rake in some caps
4. Buy out one the fighter to have as a companion
and probably more.
In Fallout 4, well, none of that. You're in a place, where there are other people. Therefore you will fight, and kill them all, and loot them to get back to base and continue building your glorified shed. Woohoo.
It's a decent shooter, despite the glitchy stuff. The modding mechanism on weapons is rather fun, and as usual the random exploration of places is by far the most exciting element of the game.
But it's jut not a Fallout game any more, and it's not really an RPG either.
I've been reading you guys for a while, and my complete disappointment in Fallout 4 has made me decide to register.
I warn you, it's mainly to rant and vent.
I'll just copy here the review I've posted on Metacritic - again, I pretty much registered just for that. It just needed to get out, I suppose.
It's just funny how all I can think about for the last two weeks are the great highlights from when I was playing Fallout 1 & 2. Nostalgia FTW.
---
I have restarted my game for the third time yesterday. The first time, it was because a key NPC had just disappeared, yesterday I just lost the ability to crouch. I decided to start all over again, in a kind of hopeful way - maybe if I went back to square one, I would minimize the risk of bugs or something. And then I was hit by the bug where you're stuck right out of the pod until you restart your console.
So, yeah, even by Bethesda standards, this is painful. I've had buggy saves in their RPGs before, but the worst that had happened was to have a secondary quest I couldn't finish in Skyrim. Never anything this terminal and annoying. And I'm not mentioning all the bugs I managed to work around: crash to PS4 home when changing Piper's weapon, and so on.
Then, there's what Bethesda have done with Fallout, and that's worse than any technical glitch.
I can't stand the dialog system. I used to love it in the old Fallout games, and Planescape: Torment, when you had pretty much half a screen of dialogue options to read, and in certain cases having to be real careful about what you picked. The new system is just risk-free, over simplified nonsense.
Cardboard cutout characters, complete lack of substance in their backgrounds...
It just doesn't feel like a RPG any more. I miss my drug-addicted prizefighter from Fallout 2, a guy who had amassed terrible karma before setting on the path of redemption. That guy had a story, that guy had a style of his own, that guy was FUN. He was utterly rubbish at many things, he had to give up on some parts of the game because of that, and he felt real.
This guy I'm playing in Fallout 4 can just do everything, and he can do it very well. He's neither a beacon of hope leading a rebellion, nor the scourge of the wasteland terrorizing settlements. He's just an asshat who tinkers in his shed and just happens to own 4 power armours and 3 Fat Men despite having been outside the vault for a week or so.
I miss the quests from the old Fallout games where you could kill a guy subtly by tampering with his heart medication, rather than HAVING to blow his brains out with a shotgun.
(Spoilers ahead)
The bit in the Combat Zone is, for me, very representative of the turn that Bethesda has taken. In an old Fallout game, you could have probably done any of the following:
1. Wait for a fight night to rob the betting money
2. Enter the cage yourself and become the local champion
3. Bet on any fighter to rake in some caps
4. Buy out one the fighter to have as a companion
and probably more.
In Fallout 4, well, none of that. You're in a place, where there are other people. Therefore you will fight, and kill them all, and loot them to get back to base and continue building your glorified shed. Woohoo.
It's a decent shooter, despite the glitchy stuff. The modding mechanism on weapons is rather fun, and as usual the random exploration of places is by far the most exciting element of the game.
But it's jut not a Fallout game any more, and it's not really an RPG either.