Fallout 4 Review - Post-Apocalyptic Warlord Simulator 2287

[Treeinthewoods]

My favorite thing with all this Fallout coverage is the impotent anger from fans of 1 and 2 about the evolution of their favorite game series. You guys lost, more people love the new direction and the game series will continue that way. Give it up, move on to something you enjoy.

It's like No Mutants Allowed actually has decided to move here for some reason, jeez.

 

[Karadalis]

What surprises me is that bethesda is cutting back on what are their games strongest assets.. big open worlds with lots of space to put stuff in by modders.

Making the map smaller seems to be a bad decision in my eyes since everything else about bethesda games is just so mediocre at best. Mediocre writing, mediocre UI, mediocre gameplay, mediocre presentation...

If you leave out the big vast open world bethesda games barely manage to scrape along the average score.

Yet they decided to cut back on the size of the map making it the "smallest" bethesda has made for one of their open world games.

Also the player character having such an established background and his own voice sits well with me. Its limiting, it takes away player choice from the get go, it makes replaying even less attractive then it was in fallout 3 with your "follow daddy" plotline. Its also disheartening that the lazyconversation wheel makes the conversations mean a whole lot less since you dont seem to influence things through talking anymore much. Not to mention these conversation wheels are simply a method on not having to hire good writers. Aparantly its easier to find voice actors then it is to find a decent writer.

Bethesdas fascination with "simplyfying" their games is worrysome because for them it seems symplyfying only means ripping stuff out and replacing it with a lazy half assed solution or outright ripping it out without putting even said half assed lazy replacements in.

As for the bugs that in the game, they sound like the good ol gambryo bugs that never have been fixed because bethesda once more cant be arsed to do so. They never got pathing down very well and from time to time the engine will simple brig itselfe leading to hilarious and sometimes outweirding results.

Whats more important with bethesda games are plot breaking bugs though. I still remember having to reload a day old savegame in skyrim because a certain plot NPC wouldnt open the plot locked door to his room because a script didnt fire correctly.

Anyways to me based on this review it seems that bethesdas mediocrety as a Game developer is showing through more and more blatantly and that it seems that this is the best they can deliver on nowadays

No one really expected a masterpiece, but it seems that bethesda is dialing down on what makes their games enjoyable and that has me worried for the future.

The next skyrim or fallout could be very well just a bioshock with a small "open" world... atleast this seems to be where we are headed.

 

[Amir Kondori]

Disappointingly high final score for a disappointingly lacking final product(I've seen the leaks).

Even on a scale from 7 to 10, Fallout 4 is a 6 at best.

Same. It's a pretty lackluster game. Map is somehow smaller than Fallout 3 and just as empty. Gunplay is rather subpar. RPG mechanics seem like last minute additions hastily shoved in there. The real dealbreaker is how awful the story and characters are. It's just so laughably bad, especially the main story's ending.

That's not even mentioning the bugs and poor performance on some platforms. And yet people will gobble it up and when confronted with something bad they'll state "mods will fix it". They better hope they don't have to pay for them too.

Oh, and just like Fallout 3 before it, the ending is only influenced by a binary choice you make at the very end of the game. No nuance, no taking accordance of your previous choices in the story, just ending A or ending B. Just as bad as Mass Effect, but at least this didn't have a whole trinity of choice-making to ignore.

Fallout 4's map is roughly twice the size of Fallout 3. Where are you getting your info?

 

[Akjosch]

I'm referring to the idea of the player performing essentially the role of a pimp by making it a commercial aspect of settlements built by the player. It's just a step I can't see any game taking.

What about Tropico 2 then?

I've not played it, so I can't speak to how it works. That said, fair enough, there are going to be some games that can get away with it. Tropico is fairly niche, though. Something in the AAA space such as Fallout represents a much more significant risk, the kind that makes satisfying the likely small user base that really wants to do that seem unappealing.

Not like that's a big deal anyway. It's a Bethesda game, we'll just mod in additional jobs for the settlers ourselves.

 

[Frankster]

Aw :/ Even though I've long maintained you gotta wait till mods are here before beth games become truly awesome... I was still bitterly disappointed to hear confirmation on the general streamlining of the game (I hadn't been keeping up with specifics of Fo4 so yes, this was new to me), as well as dialogue choices and a repeat of the meh fo3 ending style. That SPECIAL is now pointless is also meh.

Still it's not all bad news, the crafting system looks pretty sweet, and even though I've already done settlement building in fo3/NV via mods it seems the system in Fo4 is pretty robust enough not to be a disposable gimmick which was something I initially feared.

Anyways dunno if Ill be picking this up yet, feel Id be much better off waiting for modders to work their magic, with a mod to enhance the "rpgness" and another mod like new vegas nevada nights on top of it... Fo4 could be a totally different game to its vanilla form, like other beth games before it. Yeah if my willpower doesn't buckle, Ill try to hold my horses on this one.

Edit: My willpower buckled, ended up getting it. What pushed it for me is that apparently bolt actions are awesome and have bayonets. Fuckin' bayonets!
Downloading atm, will see how it goes.

 

[ShakerSilver]

Fallout 4's map is roughly twice the size of Fallout 3. Where are you getting your info?

Last week some leaked footage came out that had a player starting from the Northwest corner of the map and sprinting towards the Southeast corner. It took them 11 minutes without any stops and little harm befalling them (mostly because they passed through a lot of nothing). I'm not exactly sure about Fallout 3, but I know that another person attempted the same with New Vegas (installing a sprinting mod and putting on god mode so they didn't die) and it took them 23 minutes. I also recall that Skyrim takes about 30 mins to cross the map.

I know it's not a completely accurate metric, but after seeing a lot of its gameplay I can say that it does give the impression of being rather smaller than Bethesda's previous games.

 

[urishima]

Aparantly its easier to find voice actors then it is to find a decent writer.

You DO realize that the VAs are just saying what the writers tell them to... right? Even with a conversation wheel, you still have writers writing the lines that the VAs say.

 

[DayDark]

Fallout 4 Review - Post-Apocalyptic Warlord Simulator 2287

Fallout 4 has some concessions to make a more accessible game, but the wasteland is as alluring as ever.

Read Full Article

Thanks for the review, I can't wait to play it!

 

[Broslinger]

So this is worse than Dragon Age 2? Because that got 5 out of 5 stars.

 

[Lazule]

I was disappointed. They rushed it... Unlike Fallout 3.

Power Armor feels great through.

Still the best Fallout story wise is New Vegas, seriously but the full version of that one, play on Hardcore mode and mod it a little you won't be disappointed.

 

[Amir Kondori]

Fallout 4's map is roughly twice the size of Fallout 3. Where are you getting your info?

Last week some leaked footage came out that had a player starting from the Northwest corner of the map and sprinting towards the Southeast corner. It took them 11 minutes without any stops and little harm befalling them (mostly because they passed through a lot of nothing). I'm not exactly sure about Fallout 3, but I know that another person attempted the same with New Vegas (installing a sprinting mod and putting on god mode so they didn't die) and it took them 23 minutes. I also recall that Skyrim takes about 30 mins to cross the map.

I know it's not a completely accurate metric, but after seeing a lot of its gameplay I can say that it does give the impression of being rather smaller than Bethesda's previous games.

This is my source:

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/104775/20151109/how-big-is-fallout-4s-map-we-walk-from-one-end-to-the-other.htm

I've been playing it myself but haven't explored it enough to judge for myself.

BTW, I'm not super happy with a lot of it now that I'm playing and the graphics really are below average as people have been saying. Most of all I hate the new dialogue option. I kind of regret buying it.

 

[RedRockRun]

It's a game for casuals, and I've never been more sincere.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I bought this game as a physical copy, because the area I am in has extremely restrictive Internet access. Imagine my horror to find out I had to download approx. 19gb. For a physical copy of the game. I can't believe they Konami'd us like this. What happened to you Bethesda? You used to be cool.

 

[urishima]

Still the best Fallout story wise is New Vegas, seriously but the full version of that one, play on Hardcore mode and mod it a little you won't be disappointed.

Yep, still getting some serious mileage out of that one.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Yep, still getting some serious mileage out of that one.

Install the Tale of Two Wastelands mod (it'll require a little tweaking). It allows you to play Fallout 3, it's DLC, and then continue in to New Vegas with the same character. The bonus being, Fallout 3 is a lot more stable running in New Vegas. I was level 47 by the time I went in to NV proper.

 

[King_Julian]

I'm hearing that both console versions are suffering from pretty bad framerate issues. Even the PC version isn't doing to well.

Leave it to Bethesda to make a poorly optimized game. For PC users, unless you have a monster rig and/or a dying need to play the game, I suggest you wait a year or two until the mods have been released so the game is playable (provided they aren't locked behind a paywall).

Im running a 4790k with a gtx 970 and ive not once seen my frames drop below 59.........maybe im lucky i guess......


anyway i think the game is a lot of fun.....no doubt it wont hold my attention for to long though because im a multiplayer kinda guy but if we could have a game almost exactly like this but with a multiplayer aspect it be hooked for life yo.

 

[urishima]

Yep, still getting some serious mileage out of that one.

Install the Tale of Two Wastelands mod (it'll require a little tweaking). It allows you to play Fallout 3, it's DLC, and then continue in to New Vegas with the same character. The bonus being, Fallout 3 is a lot more stable running in New Vegas. I was level 47 by the time I went in to NV proper.

I am not really interested in any sort of continuity between Fallout 3 and NV.

 

[ShakerSilver]

Snip

Spoiler: Some video comparisons

Here's the source for the footage I saw. It was previously used in a [a href=http://kotaku.com/player-walks-through-fallout-4-in-an-attempt-to-measur-1740596453]Kotaku article[/a] but the video has since then been taken down before resurfacing here. Skip to 6:30.
Compared to a run-across that one person that did for Skyrim which took around 15 minutes.


Another one of someone running across Fallout 3's map, taking 22 minutes. This game doesn't have a proper sprint function, so I expect the time would be around 3/4 to 2/3 the total time had there been sprinting - so somewhere between 14 to 16 minutes.

Now even with the above videos I wasn't totally sure about the exact sizes due to some other data. [a href=http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1264541-skyrimoblivionmorrowind-heightmap-comparison/]Modders have calculated and compared the size of all the TES and Fallout since Morrowind.[/a] The size of Fallout 3's map is roughly 50 sq miles while Skyrim's is 14.5 sq miles - Fallout 4 being almost 4 times as big as Skyrim. If the movement speeds are the same, it would take a person almost twice the time it takes to diagonally run across the Fallout 3 map than it takes to cross Skyrim in the same manner - the time difference of 15 minutes to 22 minutes somewhat reflects this.

Since Fallout 4 seems to be built like Skyrim and has sprinting as well, I would assume the speeds are roughly the same between the games. This would make Fallout 4 quite a bit smaller than Skyrim, which itself is smaller than Fallout 3.

 

[sataricon]

Right....game gets 9/10 from critics and 4/10 from players.

But let me tell you in a few words as possible how this game is a massive step backwards in terms of any thing actually.

-Railroaded progression through the world and map early on.

2-SPECIAL Stats are kneecapped in terms of effectiveness

3-Unkillable NPCs

4-Too much shooting, too little quality dialogue or roleplaying. AKA, Borderlands Syndrome.

5-Quests are at least 75% kill quests.

6-No Ron Perlman for the intro/outro videos.

7-Endings have been hacked down to nubs, and showcase no acknowledgement of things you've done outside of one major choice.

8-Skills are gone, which were a staple of the CRPG genre, especially Fallout.

9-Karma is also gone.

10-Dialogue is wretched, and leaves no room for nuance. Speech challenges no longer branch out from Speech alone into Skills.

11-At least 10 Perks are unlocks of things unrelated to your avatar, while the rest are blase percentage increases, sometimes with overlap in some places.

12-Getting Power Armor, something that took time and effort to get in past games, within five minutes of leaving the Vault, and a Minigun.

13-Having Sprint, Grenade and Bash mapped to one button.

14- Glitches out the ass, including installation glitches and PC crash/freeze bugs.

15- Sub-bar and in some cases very ugly textures that it's amazing how can someone say with a straight face that this game looks even ok.

 

[Kajin]

It's like saying you like Shakespeare because you like Lion King.

And yet Lion King is the overall better experience. I've read Shakespeare. While I overall enjoyed his work I think he was little more than a bawdy playwright. It utterly baffles me that people think he's the best thing since before sliced bread was even a thing.

Yet one has and will echo throughout the ages. The other... well not nearly on the same level.

Yeah, it's pretty tough to beat the raw, visceral emotion of watching Simba trying to wake up his dead father. Right in the feels...