Skip to main content

Fallout 4 is probably the worst plot ever written by Bethesda

Ok, I have been playing Fallout 4 every day for more than a week now, until I got underrail and left it abandoned. So, I guess I have enough evidence to say that this is the worst story created by Bethesda. Fallout 3 was simple and stupid, but man...

Lets start with Minutemen. Almost in the beginning of the game, you find this people with this great idea of helping the Commonwealth. An hour later, you find out that the quests are a sort of procedurally generated, which is not bad per se. What is bad, is that the universe of possible quests is very small. So, very soon you end up saving the same settlement two of three times, from the same threats, until you decide to forget about Minutemen quests.

But hey, there is this Brotherhood guy that appears right when you are getting bored of saving villagers. I have played with the Brotherhood in every Fallout game, so I expected this time not to be different. Guess what: it was different. From the first words of Danse, I thought that this Brotherhood perhaps wasnt a good choice. They were a bunch of bigots, so I decided to delay joining them for a while.  In the end, joining them wasnt a rewarding experience, except for the armor I got from them. In FO4, BOS is no longer a group devoted to preserve knowledge, but a horde of canned intolerants devoted to erradicate synths and everything slightly apart from human.

So, after all this disappointing encounters, the only natural choice seems to be The Railroad. The Institute comes too late, with a weird and diffuse agenda and a selective blindness for the free will of their creations. And then, the only way the writers find to make the plot interesting, is to put you, the player, against your own son. Or you can also align with the Institute, whatever its plans are.

Together with a diluted RPG system, Fallout 4 has achieved to bore me a couple of times, but has also taught me a few lessons as game designer. Lessons I hope I can assimilate to avoid making the same mistakes in my upcoming project.

Well, now we have to wait until Deus Ex: Mankind divided and Cyberpunk 2077 (does somebody knows something about it?) to play a decent RPG. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Isometric camera with Godot

Took some effort and some of my sleep hours, but at last, I made it. Here is my first videotutorial: implementing an isometric camera in 3D, with Godot. Useful if you want to emulate the look of old classics like Fallout 2, but with some extra features. Considering that my voice is not so nice, and my english pronounciation is even worse, I also added texts to help you underestand what Im saying. You will also notice some background noise, but cant do anything to solve that. Any suggestion is welcome. Expect another tutorial soon.... or sor tof. This time, will be about my AI system.

Lessons about game dev

 Meet Bobby (not Kotick)! He is going to taught you a lesson about how NOT to make games. Bobby is a very sharp bussinessman, that sees everybody is playing games. More important, everybody is spending money in games. What would any smart bussinessman do? Well, get into the games bussiness, and he knows he has an advantage. See, Bobby is not going to spend hundredths of thousands dollars to make a game, when he can make it much cheaper.  And here comes the first mistake. Bobby goes to his birth city, in a shitty third class communist country, where it is easier to find a honest politician than a game developer. There, he assembles the Avengers... I mean, a team of talented guys that... never made a game in their lives. He invests in hardware, with good workstations equipped with fairly modern GPUs, pairde with the worst, cheapest 18 inches display you can get. Also, a server with a 24 VRAM GPU, because any game studio needs a server for... nobody knows exactly for what, but t...

Vulkan and open source engines

It is weird, but even when Vulkan has embraced the open source philosophy (open drivers, tools, etc), Im not seeing too much enthusiasm to adopt it in open source game engines. I have been following mostly Godot and Urho3D, yet Ogre3D and Irrlicht doesnt seems to be rushing to implement the new renderers. It is worth to mention that Godot promissed they would delay the long needed refactoring of its 3D renderer until Vulkan release, but now they say they wont be using it, favoring GL ES 3 instead. The other engines seems to be dealing with lack of man power (Urho3D leader left the work on hands of community, as he is not working on Vulkan renderer right now) and base code designed for older APIs, specifically, DirectX 9. Lot of work is required to adapt this code base, not only for Vulkan, but for DirectX 12 too. Well, nobody said that developing a game engine was easy. The advantages of Vulkan have been widely detailed. From engine point of view, it would centralize all renderers...