The Fallout 4 Intro Is A Mess

[Vausch]

That isn't the intro I have problems swallowing. If you get his relationship high enough you get an idea of why he acted the way he did towards you. The intro I have trouble swallowing is the moment you leave the vault and meet this world and these people. No shell shock? No taking a "me" day to curl up in a fetal position and cry? Your character should be a raving lunatic instead of the calm, cool, collected, one we get. Afterall they just went from "Leave it to Beaver" to "Mad Max" in 2.5 seconds. Even the military training I assume they had (fatigues in the closet) can't really explain how well together they are holding it.

Player Character really should have had a stronger reaction. If I woke up and saw my home, my city nuked and nothing but a wasteland crawling with giant bugs, I'd probably just fall to my knees and either cry or go catatonic for a bit. Hell, the robot had a stronger reaction than you do!

PC is honestly the biggest problem. They clearly have a story to them, they have an established back-story, but their personality is incredibly bland and the voice actors aren't helping.

 

[kenu12345]

I love this article. Its the best .3. Helps say why I don't like the first real quest

 

[Erttheking]

That isn't the intro I have problems swallowing. If you get his relationship high enough you get an idea of why he acted the way he did towards you. The intro I have trouble swallowing is the moment you leave the vault and meet this world and these people. No shell shock? No taking a "me" day to curl up in a fetal position and cry? Your character should be a raving lunatic instead of the calm, cool, collected, one we get. Afterall they just went from "Leave it to Beaver" to "Mad Max" in 2.5 seconds. Even the military training I assume they had (fatigues in the closet) can't really explain how well together they are holding it.

A popular theory that's floating around is that the MC is broken on the inside and that's why they always speak in such short brief sentences and doesn't really show any emotion outside of things that relate directly to them. Course that's just a theory and Bethesda doesn't really do anything with it. Still, food for thought.

I don't mind Mr. Minuteman that much, (Although the organization as a whole feels like it's playing the over glorifying of America that Fallout usually satirizes a little too straight. That and the Minutemen come off as a little too much Dudley Doright. I mean by all means have an organization dedicated to defending the populace but make them a little freaking rough around the edges) but the Deathclaw and Power Armor? Yeah...that should've been a mid game thing.

 

[The Harkinator]

I liked the Concord bit a lot, but that's probably because I passed the speech check with Mama Murphy and knew the Deathclaw would show up, and having played Fallout 1, 2, 3, and New Vegas I know just what I'm getting with a Deathclaw. So when I donned that Power Armour and grabbed the minigun I knew what I was getting into and the excitement built up in my head.

Of course, for a newcomer to the Fallout series I could see how the introduction to a deathclaw couldn't measure up to other games. To a player that either didn't do the speech check or doesn't approve of getting the good toys so early I can see how the scene would be a complete misstep. I thought Fallout 4 struck a good balance between giving you the cool armour and gun early on and limiting you from using them. I killed the raiders and deathclaw, accompanied the survivors back to Sanctuary Hills, and hung up the armour because it'd never last for my journey to Boston. I didn't mind that at all, I'd had a taste of Power Armour, I was impressed, but I couldn't just use it forever from that point.

Preston is completely boring though. I took Dogmeat with me after dropping everyone off at Sanctuary Hills and left Preston behind. He was never a character that particularly interested me. He suffers from Jacob Taylor (ME2) syndrome, being a strong, black, dutiful soldier whose always nice to the player character but in the most sterile way possible. Their main purpose to introduce the player to an important organisation they need to know about and provide assistance in combat in the early stages of the game before they're dropped basically forever when someone the fans much prefer comes around. See Garrus and Dogmeat for this much preferred companion.

 

[Jaeke]

I agree with the intro being shaky at best. Definitely one of the weaker, if not the weakest, starts to a Bethesda game (Morrowind's first hour, in spite of peoples' nostalgia for it was pretty rough). The first 3 or so hours of FO4 were really making me worried. It just wasn't clicking for me, and as a fan of Bethesda games for a decade now that's a problem. The beginning was far too rushed to the emotional beats the story needed at a specific rhythm for the actions happening around your character to feel like they matter and compel the player, especially with the clear focus of a more personal character based narrative with the added voice acting. The Minutemen situation feels a bit forced (but maybe that's because it was the main scenario showed off in all the prerelease gameplay) and the town-building is thrown in your face with virtually no helpful explanation on its various mechanics.

However, after about 5 hours, it all started to click together with the world building, setting, and gameplay. The "this is you literal sandbox" tone that Bethesda tries to set finally came together and I started having a LOT more fun.

I guess I'm lucky because I've had no issues that were any worse on a technical level than the Witcher 3 (my GOTY) on PS4 at least. The only HARD bug I've discovered (and "fixed") was equipping the

Spoiler

Cryolator

and trying to get a facial reconstruction would hard crash every time I tried it. Unequipping it fixed the problem.

I'm absolutely loving the game though after almost 60 hours in, completed the main questline, and don't see myself stopping anytime soon. Might tie with Bloodborne as my runner-up this year, I'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Laughing Man]

In Fallout 4 everything feels... rushed.

Yup kinda the point, and what was the one thing that everyone who played Fallout 3 did, they kept a save of the moment they left the Vault so that when they came to replay the game they didn't need to replay the entire, boring Vault part of it, they could jump straight in set up a new character and get right out to the waste land.

I have no issue with the Fallout 4 start, it's quicker, than 3's it gets the player in to the meat of the game while hinging a better reason for your adventure than Fallout 3. The Deathclaw and it's removal as some mythical boogie monster to be worked up to and feared hinges on the player attaching any level of importance to the Deathclaw monster, I would imagine a lot of players are like me their first intro to Fallout was Fallout 3, which means that Deathclaws were just a tough enemy to fight once you levelled up, they were not very rare and popped up often enough to be nothing more than just another bad guy to kill.

The importance of the Power armour and the Death claw comes down to how important the player sees them. Like I said F3 was my intro which means Deathclaws were just a nuisance, nothing special just a pain to fight and the Power Armour got ignored in favour of going for Stealth based armours, infact the early intro to the Power Armour in F4 means I have used it more than I would normally.

 

[Zhukov]

I thought this was going to be about the very start of the game.

"Here is you family. You will see them for five minutes."
"You love them. Because we say you do."
"Oh no! Kidnapped! You care! Because we say you do!"
"Go fetch!"

I realise they were just trying to hurry up and get to the wasteland walkabouts that players are actually there for, but that still felt like a encapsulated sample of everything wrong with storytelling in games.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I thought this was going to be about the very start of the game.

"Here is you family. You will see them for five minutes."
"You love them. Because we say you do."
"Oh no! Kidnapped! You care! Because we say you do!"
"Go fetch!"

I realise they were just trying to hurry up and get to the wasteland walkabouts that players are actually there for, but that still felt like a encapsulated sample of everything wrong with storytelling in games.

I was a bit eh on the whole way your character had a life before you get to even make your character. Doesn't that kinda limit the whole role playing thing? Telling the story of a parent saving a son can be a perfectly solid basis for a story but uhh, say you want to play an antisocial sociopath? Well he had a happy wife and kid already, good luck fitting that into his backstory. Maybe his whole 200 years thing broke him or something, I dunno. NV's plot made the most sense, you have zero relevant backstory and it works perfectly.

I just wrote off the whole "find your son" main plot as the kinda logical opposite to Fallout 3's plot. First you find your dad, now you find your son. I mean it's not terrible and I got more into it later but... it's a problematic story for an RPG for sure.

OT: Nice article, I never noticed how cheap the Deathclaw was actually. Since i've played Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I saw the Deathclaw and I was automatically like "oh shit this is gonna be bad" but Fallout 4 itself gives you nothing. Also even as I am now at lvl 26 or so, the same thing happens. Power Armour + Minigun = dead Deathclaw. I keep the Minigun around for exclusive use on Deathclaws though, so it has that going for it maybe.

Why are there so many suits of Power Armour around anyway? I think the original Armour should just broken after you were done with the quest you get it, it was a Brotherhood model right? Make an excuse that its failsafe measure kicked in and made it unusable. You have the experience that the thing is fucking OP so when the quest for the Brotherhood says "if you do well enough we'll give you Power Armour" my response isn't "sorry I have two suits of the stuff already, top kek"

I ditched the whole Minutemen thing day one and I use only CURIE and recently Cait, since maxing out CURIE's Social Link relationship quest thing downgrades her (in my opinion.) Dunno why you're allowed only one party member though, NV gave you two. One humanoid, one robot/animal. Suppose they wanted to avoid potential problems of having three dudes in Power Armour teabagging Assaultrons and Deathclaws?

Man, Obsidian out-Fallout'd Bethesda so hard with New Vegas... I loved that game.

 

[IceForce]

I hate Preston Garvey. Anytime I go anywhere near him he dumps a bunch of boring and mundane quests in my journal. (Some of them are repeats of quests I already did for him, just in a different location.)

I hate the radiant quest system with a passion.

 

[Karadalis]

I keep hearing that people have problems finding fusion cores for their power armor.

Im running around with 30+ fusion cores on me and pretty much wear the power armor all the time... i find fusion cores everywhere. Be it in generators or vendors or ammo boxes.

And thanks to grab n deliver quests that you get from the brotherhood (blood samples and technical manuals) you have more then enough cash to buy them. Just go out into the wasteland and kill a bunch of critters... deliver and buy a fusion core or two from the BOS merchant.

I have more problems getting enough alunimum to upgrade my power armor then anything else.

Also the power armor you can find in the game is tiered in nature wich is another missed oportunity. Your starting power armor is better then raider power armor (wich is just metal welded onto a frame) wich then gets trumped by the BOS power armor or other PA armor parts you can find randomly... not only better in some statistics but completly outranking.

This makes mixing the parts up rather useless and the variety only seems interesting till you got the "best" parts

 

[Rattja]

I'm just curious here as to what difficulty yall are playing at, because I do not recognize these complaints from my own experience on survival.

The way I experienced this whole start was more along the lines of the game showing you what you could expect later on. Like "here is a power armor, it is very powerful with a minigun but you have to fuel it, repair it and have enough ammo to use it so you can't use it all the time or at all until later." And the Deathclaw fight was actually quite scary as I was not prepared for it and it took just about everything I had to bring it down. After that all I could think was "Oh shit, if I meet one of these in the whid I'm fucked." as it tore through the power armor with ease and laughed at my minigun.

 

[Vault101]

it's funny I probably would have preferred the game be more like the intro...ie: tighter narrative and more linear but....well that's me I'm a story nut

my issue with Preston was similar, but more for the fact that I've never liked the way Bethesda approaches story...in that its all just window dressing to serve a function

preston was [HELLO I AM GENERIC GOOD GUY] that you'll inevitably find in every game like this, and another situation is [HELLO I AM UNSURPSING MORAL CHOICE] ect ect

that said though while Fallout 4 is no Bioware game it certainly improves on quite a few things (THUS FAR, not far no spoilers), I would like to be able to just kick back and have back and fourth conversations with my companions (ie Piper the ship that shipped itself before I even knew she existed) but you know this will have to do

though it does reminds me of how New Vegas just BEGGED to have a system like this...give Obsidian a go and it would be perfect

I was a bit eh on the whole way your character had a life before you get to even make your character. Doesn't that kinda limit the whole role playing thing? Telling the story of a parent saving a son can be a perfectly solid basis for a story but uhh, say you want to play an antisocial sociopath?.

I think its entirely plausible you could go Mad after everything that happens...particually if you were the husband, a weary veteran

I thought this was going to be about the very start of the game.

"Here is you family. You will see them for five minutes."
"You love them. Because we say you do."
"Oh no! Kidnapped! You care! Because we say you do!"
"Go fetch!"

I realise they were just trying to hurry up and get to the wasteland walkabouts that players are actually there for, but that still felt like a encapsulated sample of everything wrong with storytelling in games.

that's probably true for most part, but I can work with it because I care for my charachter, so therefore that's what motivates me in the story because SHE is sad cause her baby is gone...hell I can even work around the hetero marrage

head-cannon is one hell of a drug

 

[JemothSkarii]

Having finished the story, I can say it was really disappointing. More disappointing than what I expected.

Spoiler: FO4 Story end spoilers

Basically 3 factions end the same way in a ME3-esque 'pick a colour' style, and the institute gets a different ending... all followed by a cutscene with one or two lines different. Not to mention Act 3 is rushed as all hell.

I can't even really remember any side quests. Nothing that really gripped me at any rate. Suffered from the Skyrim Radiant Quest issue. Thanks to the dialogue wheel, bland writing and the SHEER DIFFICULTY OF ACTUALLY TRIGGERING DIALOGUE, for me the game just went downhill from the opening. When a Fallout game makes me not want to talk to people, something went terribly wrong.

I think the most fun I had was going into random places and looking around.

 

[IceForce]

that's probably true for most part, but I can work with it because I care for my charachter, so therefore that's what motivates me in the story because SHE is sad cause her baby is gone...hell I can even work around the hetero marrage

head-cannon is one hell of a drug

Yeah, I must say I don't really 'get' it when people say they're having difficulty RP-ing in FO4, due to the established back-story.

My character was a bored 1950's housewife who longed to get out and do something with her life. Now she can actually live out her fantasies, of popping raider heads, lording over settlements, and having same-sex relationships.

Her shackles have finally come off.

 

[Gorrath]

Quite! When I got the fat man in NV, the only thing I ever used it for was quicksaving at the strip and using it to see how far I could make all the bodies fly before I got bored and reloaded my save. There is enough of a drawback to teh fatman where, even if you had it early, you couldn't just lob rounds at every radroach you stumble across. Which ironically, is pretty much exactly what you end up doing with it late game anyway since you don't actually need it to kill anything.

I think Fallout 4 has solved this issue rather well! I get the cool stuff, can actually make use of it and can keep it upgraded so it remains useful throughout but can't overuse it because of its inherent limitations. I'm not sure a better solution could have been had.

Maybe I'll have to wait and play it for myself, Warmaster, but it just seems like a re-naming of the whole thing; I mean, is there anything to use the endgame PA upgrades on?

I no where near endgame myself so I can't say for certain but some of the upgrades are useful in their own right, like the jet pack and auto-stimpack. Even if I can murder everything in two seconds by end game, not having to go to my inventory to use stimpacks and beng able to fly around while I melt faces is going to be fun regardless. The radiation resistance and jetpack will help with exploration later on as well.

 

[Synigma]

Okay, I just bought the game yesterday so I'm only a few hours in... and probably more importantly this is the FIRST fallout game I've ever played. That being said I liked the early powerarmour thing, I took it as "here's a taste of being badass." BUT immediately throwing the Deathclaw thing in ruined the impact of that.

My thoughts as I got the armour:
"Oh, look at those guys down there taunting me... should I jump off the roof? Will it kill me to fall that far? This armour is suppose to be good right... let's do it!"
- running jump off and slam into the ground
"Oh yeah! I'm a badass, I'm going to mow these scrubs down"
- mow scrubs down
- surprise buttsecks Deathclaw
"wait, what can this thing do? it's not dying to my big bad gun... ummm... time to backup... argh too slow! awwww my badass armour is broken and sucks."

And it would have been totally different if they just broke that up... let the player own the bandits then in the scene where everyone comes outside anyway THEN throw the deathclaw, have everyone freak out (thus building up this supposedly dangerous creature) and it would actually feel like a proper tutorial style boss fight, I would have respected the armour for being broken fighting against something everyone is afraid of. Instead I just feel like the armour is yet ANOTHER thing I have to learn to get into this game. I actually love that they aren't holding my hand with everything... but I have 2 broken pieces of the armour and honestly I don't care enough to learn how to repair them; frankly why should I waste my precious resources on something that breaks so easily? Probably breaks some fans hearts to hear this but the Power Armour and Deathclaw come off as... meh.

 

[Vrach]

Article is spot on, though I will say, the Deathclaw gets its proper introduction at another point in the game.

Spoiler: Location

Museum of Witchcraft

I was amazed by how much Fallout 4 turned better on me. When I started playing the game, I thought it was a mess undeserving of any real time, but the game just gets better and better almost constantly (there are a few fumbled things though of course).

 

[pookie101]

the goody goody preston actually gets addressed later on. during a conversation he explains what has happened and actually comments that it makes him naive to still believe in good in this world. hes definitely tryuing to live up to the ideal he saw of the minutemen not the reality

 

[Zhukov]

[snip]

...hell I can even work around the hetero marrage

head-cannon is one hell of a drug

Y'know what's funny? When I realised during character creation that the player character is married somewhere in the back of my head I was thinking, "Oh man, Vault101 from the Escapist forums is going to hate that."

that said though while Fallout 4 is no Bioware game it certainly improves on quite a few things (THUS FAR, not far no spoilers), I would like to be able to just kick back and have back and fourth conversations with my companions (ie Piper the ship that shipped itself before I even knew she existed) but you know this will have to do

Yeah, I've actually been pleasantly surprised by some of the writing.

It's not good exactly, this is still Bethesda we're talking about after all, but I can see that they're making an effort this time around. Every now and again I stumble across some actually pretty good bits of dialogue.

Love the talking player character too. So much better than controlling a silent, expressionless, heavily armed fence post. And the female player is voiced by Courtney Taylor! I don't recognise the male voice actor, but he does a decent job too.