Fallout 4's new DLCs a bit lore-unfriendly?

[teamcharlie]

How is the Vault-Tec Workshop DLC stuff significantly different from the settlement system? In the base game's settlement system, you disassemble random consumer-grade crap from 200 years earlier, eat houses and poop out raw materials, and by mixing that stuff together with relatively scant and ancient tools you make a generator that lasts forever with no input of fuel and no incidental repairs (aside from occasional deathclaws smashing it). I can't imagine the Vault DLC being significantly stupider than that in terms of implementation.

On the other hand, building settlements like that is awesome IMO. I like making my own place for settlers from scratch with relative ease. Trying to build a settlement realistically would be horrifically boring and take months, just like in real life.

Maybe it would make more sense to pick this debate up in two weeks if the DLC turns out boring/terrible? If Bethesda can't even figure out how to make turning people into lab rats and building your own vault fun, I'm all for talking about whether or not the technology to make new vault suits should exist in the post-apocalyptic future.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Great examples. And keeping rigid control of internal consistency can be... good. But lets go to the Game of Thrones example of Tyrion being suddenly treated as a super-handsome sex magnet (because it made me smile.) Lets say that near the end of the next book, in the last "Tyrion" chapter, all the barmaids he's hanging around and a couple of working girls and basically any woman he passes starts to eye him and seem hypnotized and attracted. And then the chapter ends. And Tyrion won't have another chapter until the next book.

Now yes, that sucks. It's very out of character and it does look like a bad idea going forward for the character and the story. But given the quality of George R.R. Martin's work up till this point (I happen to like ASoIaF very much) I'd give him the benefit of the doubt that he may be setting something up as opposed to immediately running crying to the internet about how he "ruined" Tyrion.

Totally. But if we are to let this analogy follow the Fallout/Bethesda-line, we get the next book and Tyrion is fucking his way through Mereen, women throwing himself at his feet and all we get as acknowledgement is that Martin stops every two or three paragraphs to point out how fucking beautiful Tyrion is. No further explanation, Tyrion has just become the hottest man in Westeros despite being portrayed as an ugly dwarf, with a disfiguring scar and lacking half his nose, for the last three books.

Good writers can muck with their internal consistency, Martin is a good example of this in how he has let magic gradually take more and more place within ASoIaF, despite A Game of Thrones having very little of it apart from the White Walkers and Dany's sections at the end (the curse and hatching of the dragons), and get good results. If you ain't a good writer however, you will most likely just muck up your own story.

Not many, totally agree. But can you GUARANTEE that someone COULDN'T write something awesome with that premise. That really was my point, I value quality over nitpicking minutia. Just because I'd believe in an example like the SW: TFA 99% I'd really hate a course change like that. But I can say 100% that if (somehow) someone managed to write something brilliant with that change (even if the force itself was written out of the story entirely) I wouldn't care at all and would STILL love Star Wars.

I agree with you, but just as with the Tyrion example the problem is that it requires an exceptional writer and it would be more of a subversion then an actual Star Wars story (one might argue that KotOR 2 is actually sort of this and I loved KotOR 2 for it). The problem is still that most writers ain't good enough to pull it off.

In the case of Bethesda and Fallout the main problem seems to be that most fans of the original two games are old school roleplayers, who take their lore and internal consistency very seriously. To them a lot of Fallout 3/4 reads like the fan fiction of someone who didn't know very much about Fallout but totally loved Post-Apoc Desert and Super Mutants and those awesome dudes in Power Armor!

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip for convenience.

I see. Well, it may be that I'm getting irritable about some things, and I get a litle sensitive about complaints about fanboyism 'cause the complaints of No Mutants Allowed is legendarily bad and who wants to get even minorly associated with that? Naturally, I don' have anything against the calling out of people whose deepest thoughts are to declare that something sucks without any real explanation to back it up, but I felt that perhaps you were reaching an opposite extreme where a middle-ground would suffice. After all, it may be just a game and that its gameplay is important, but the story should also be served to a degree as well. Fallout exists in that weird hazy area where its faults can be overlooked because they're technically addressed, and I personally feel that it's a pretty good game overall.

Problems with it? Yeah, of course there are a few over the years. Fallout's controls, Fallout 2's infamous car and trunk glitch, a map glich I found in Fallout 3 where I'd always freeze out near Girdershade (due to a saving problem, apparently), New Vegas' main map freezes from (I assume) graphic/runtime dilemmas), and ummm...well, I'm not actually done with Fallout 4 yet, but I had to rollback to a previous save and lose progress from a mission issue that caused all of Goodneighbor to turn on me because I guess they somehow instantly knew I killed a gangster of impoatance out in the wastes. Not perfect, but all good.

 

[FalloutJack]

Problems with it? Yeah, of course there are a few over the years. Fallout's controls, Fallout 2's infamous car and trunk glitch, a map glich I found in Fallout 3 where I'd always freeze out near Girdershade (due to a saving problem, apparently), New Vegas' main map freezes from (I assume) graphic/runtime dilemmas), and ummm...well, I'm not actually done with Fallout 4 yet, but I had to rollback to a previous save and lose progress from a mission issue that caused all of Goodneighbor to turn on me because I guess they somehow instantly knew I killed a gangster of impoatance out in the wastes. Not perfect, but all good.

Those are all technical problems, though. The complaints about Fallout 3 and 4 are that the fundamental story and settings themselves dont make sense.

I'll do you one better. The computer technology doesn't make sense either. Same reason it doesn't in Alien movies. It was built upon the premise that things would go on the way of the vast large-scale super computer of yesteryear, but it didn't. We kind of have to accept that their world developed weirdly. There's reasons to get bothered about things, and then there's reasons not to bother with getting bothered. It should be in a middle-ground, preferrably without anybody shouting about it.

 

[FalloutJack]

Story

Ah, you mean like the super mutants? Well, I have been through discussions before on this (actually relating to the Enclave and the use of the FEV), and it seems to me that it is essentially the Enclave's fault for spreading around various iterations of their mutative wonder chemical, much the same way Vaults may or may not have a GECK. There are debates on this, differing theories, but I think it is largely due to the Enclave, or what the Enclave was before it was officially labeled as such. None of the East Coast mutants know anything of The Master, and in fact don't even look like a West Coast mutant. Possibly part of this is "It just wouldn't be Fallout without the super mutants", just the same as it wouldn't be Fallout if it didn't have the powersuits, the ghouls, the raiders, and the...the Deathclaws. Perhaps what's important is that it may be a case of pointing out in a 'show, don't tell' way that the situations of one game may not have been enirely isolated incidents, having largely to do with things that may have began before the war. It's hard to say, because certain things are definitely left to interpretation. For Fallout 3, I'm actually not going to be wholey critical because this was Bethesda's first dance and things WILL be awkward. Naturally, that does mean that things should be a little more critical for Fallout 4, but I have enjoyed the game so far, with only certain niggling issues.

 

[DoPo]

Looks like your whole argument was based upon a false premise.

Nope, yours is. Your premise is "I know exactly what entertainment people like and why". To prove it, how about you answer few simple questions:

What is the last book I read and why?
What is the last game I played and why?
What is the last movie I watched and why?
What is the last music I listened to and why?
What is the last short story I read and why?
What is the last show I watched and why?

If you are indeed correct, these must be rather simple.

But, hey - maybe I'm some sort of outlier. Can you answer the same questions targeted at, say, any two people in this thread? Surely, not all here would be out of reach of your omniscience.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

Aha, you refer to Gameplay And Story Segregation. True enough, but Fallout wouldn't be the only one with this problem. Tell me how to regulate that one with nearly all decently-developed games and then I'll get back to you on this one. The problem with something so rampant is that you kind of have to handwave it on the grounds that nobody has a real solution that everyone else will follow, or that it may be that that problem is too complex to handle on more than a case-by-case basis, but that certainly a guide could help. It's a question of if ALOT of games can be solved in this area. Although, one thought comes to mind: Isn't the actual proper struggle a bit more apparent if you have it on a higher difficulty? Perhaps the best way to know if there is a real struggle is if you're having a hard time of it on its hardest mode.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

Well now, I am curious about the instances of New Vegas. This is all rather interesting. Things I never knew the reasons for. New Vegas had alot of technical problems, as you know.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

Well now, I am curious about the instances of New Vegas. This is all rather interesting. Things I never knew the reasons for. New Vegas had alot of technical problems, as you know.

Yeah, that's the thing. Basically none of those issues exist in New Vegas because the devs at Obsidian actually know how to write RPG questlines and craft a believable world for you to interact with.

And by the way, pretty much most of the technical problems are fixed my mods, just like literally every other Bethesda game.

Was any of that available for a PS3?

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

Well now, I am curious about the instances of New Vegas. This is all rather interesting. Things I never knew the reasons for. New Vegas had alot of technical problems, as you know.

Yeah, that's the thing. Basically none of those issues exist in New Vegas because the devs at Obsidian actually know how to write RPG questlines and craft a believable world for you to interact with.

And by the way, pretty much most of the technical problems are fixed my mods, just like literally every other Bethesda game.

Was any of that available for a PS3?

The game and DLC, yes. Any mods? No.

Honestly, you shouldnt be playing any Bethesda game on console because of the fact that Bethesda always seems to rely on fans fixing their mistakes and shitty content for them.

Just check out the system requirements. I bet that if you've done any upgrades to your rig any time in the past few years probably be able to run it.

I don't like games like this on PC, man. I'm just not as good with 'em.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

Well now, I am curious about the instances of New Vegas. This is all rather interesting. Things I never knew the reasons for. New Vegas had alot of technical problems, as you know.

Yeah, that's the thing. Basically none of those issues exist in New Vegas because the devs at Obsidian actually know how to write RPG questlines and craft a believable world for you to interact with.

And by the way, pretty much most of the technical problems are fixed my mods, just like literally every other Bethesda game.

Was any of that available for a PS3?

The game and DLC, yes. Any mods? No.

Honestly, you shouldnt be playing any Bethesda game on console because of the fact that Bethesda always seems to rely on fans fixing their mistakes and shitty content for them.

Just check out the system requirements. I bet that if you've done any upgrades to your rig any time in the past few years probably be able to run it.

I don't like games like this on PC, man. I'm just not as good with 'em.

Plug a controller into your PC and play with that then.

I've had serious hang-ups with attempting to work a controller on my machine. My luck in this endeavour has not been all that great. Now, I will say that all my problems with a game running on console have been minimal. Mostly, it was New Vegas (which I finished, at last), and Fallout 3 (which turned out to be my fault). Fallout 4 gets updates that repair stuff. So, the worst may be past already.

 

[Rebel_Raven]

Near as we can tell the Sole Survivor is a master fabricator considering the ease settlements go up, and how quick things can be torn down.

Technology can be reclaimed, and re-learned. Humans can figure it out again, especially with the head start they have. No one has to rediscover vault tech from scratch.

There's probably lore surrounding vault 88, and yes, that's the official designaton fyi. Maybe it was a vault designed to build other vaults?

More than a few vaults have had to expand somehow. Maybe vaults have some tech in them allowing for the creation of vault expansions.

I'm not too stressed even though I love the Fallout lore something fierce.