I've always found the puritanism around fallout as a franchise to be ridiculous. The franchise has been misused, abused, mishandled and cocktailed in a blender since practically it's inception. "Bethesdas own spin on fallout" is actually what fallout is. New Vegas is 15. It was an exception, though one that I also think is mired in elitism and pearl clutching. The "true RPG" discourse has been a blight on gaming since it escaped 4chan and NMA
Chris speaks more positively about Bethesda than he does Obsidian lol. I think there is an irony here that he was the biggest advocate for “wiping the slate clean” with the west coast. Just to make it easier for future writers to do what they like with it. Which is why the fuck ass tunneler lore and self replicating spooky red cloud exist in the dlc.
If he believes that Bethesda doesn’t care about the roots and wants to do their own thing. He was the primary person to help set that up for them.
I think he's saying Bethesda doing their own thing with it isn't necessarily a bad thing and it doesn't bother him that they can now do what they want with the lore. It's not what he would probably do but it's not his baby anymore.
One thing you learn in business is if you don't personally own an IP it's not healthy to get attached to it. You can put your heart and soul into a specific project and have pride in it as part of your portfolio. But how the IP Owners choose to build on it or completely change everything about it is well in their right. If you wrote Mr. House and they are completely changing his character in ways you would never have done all you can do is take pride that you wrote him well enough that they wanted to reuse the character in the first place.
Ron Gilbert spoke for ages about how he disagreed with where the Monkey Island franchise went and how he'd love to do his own spin on post-LeChuck's Revenge.
When he finally returned with... well, Return to Monkey Island, it opens exactly where Revenge left off.
Except it was a glorious fake-out where the game really was a sequel to ALL of them and you weren't Guybrush in the intro, you were his SON with Elaine.
As I said, he is speaking positively about them. He is arguing that they are making Fallout in their own style, which is what they are best at. That is the core of his point. I am just pointing out that "Not respecting the roots" comes off as ironic, seeing as he did a lot more to remove those factions and their roots from Fallout.
The show is building to the NCR coming back, seeing as they are obviously the only good guys around so far.
It’s his signature move. He did the exact same thing with Kreia in KOTOR 2 regarding the Force. He loves deconstructing a setting until it breaks, then wanting to hit the reset button because the "building back up" part isn't as fun for him to write as the "surviving the ashes" part.
And yet, the PC in LR is allowed to comment on the gaps in Ulysses' positions and actually engage with and battle him ideologically. iirc Kreia is just Avellone's mouthpiece about a setting he couldn't have possibly consumed every little bit of in the timeframe he gives and clearly doesn't understand, no actual counterarguments allowed.
People tend to forget that Ulysses was basically just Avellone's self-insert venting about how much he hated that the NCR had become a functional civilization. He spent the entire DLC lecturing the player on why society needs to be nuked back to the stone age because he prefers the "anarchy" phase of post-apocalypse.
Not just that, he also made sure Ulysses could explain why the Legion, House, and even independent endings would all lead to the ruin of Vegas and eventual return to the wasteland. You could maybe hope he was just insane, but the point of Lonesome Road and Chris' themes is that the cycle is indefinite. Factions will rise and fall, and it is not worth putting faith in any "Flag" but instead in people and hoping they can live beyond it.
Also really long dialogue dump. Similiar to how Old World Blues is mostly gameplay and than really, really long conversations with all characters. The pacing is really weird in NV DLC except with Honest Hearts which is just more Fallout.
Fallout 3 DLC honestly has imiliar issues. So many of the NV FO3 DLC just become long dungeon crawls.
you're right. and the hilarious irony is that the one DLC where I wanted really long conversations was with Joshua Graham and that's the one DLC that didn't have it.
Reminder that Ulysses originally was going to be a companion, the only one that would be legion-aligned, and the only reason he was originally cut was that they had so much dialogue and lines written for him, that he alone couldn't fit on the disc space for the game.
He had more lines then the second most long-winded companion, Cass/Rose of Sharon Cassidy.
Both of them were just badly written, for starters. Tunnelers are particularly weak to light. Flare guns can send them into a frenzy and break their ranks. Shit, I wouldn't be surprised if a high-beam flashlight or strobe light could do that to them.
The red cloud has less obvious weaknesses, but by its very nature, it would eventually destroy the entire setting. So I much prefer it to be a retcon to just a local event, than the literal death of the Fallout setting as a whole.
Due to how they are writing the show, the tunnelers could have shown up and been a problem that got dealt with off-screen. I never cared for them to be the actual cause of the West Coast's fall from grace. The show is also seemingly building towards the renewal of the West Coast factions. Which is better than just wiping the slate clean, as Chris put it.
I usually play energy weapons, I'm now realizing why I never had issues with the tunnlers, I was shooting light at them. They were always easier to kill than deathclaws, but were supposed to be stronger. Turns out I just hard counter because I like the sound lasers make
I don’t disagree on those points, I just don’t agree that he was the person who set it up for them because they didn’t use or address those plot points along with why they wrote New Vegas in the show the way that they did. I think they would write it this way regardless and Avelone’s tunneled+red cloud idea probably didn’t factor much
"Both of them were just badly written, for starters. " I don't think either were supposed to be a world ending catastrophe. Certain characters claimed that, but the characters that claimed that are insanely unreliable wackos. Idk why everyone repeats it verbatim as established lore.
Exactly. It's pure irony. People are still complaining about Shady Sands getting nuked. Uh, it was actually gonna be destroyed (at least the Hall of Congress) in Van Buren. The world in that Fallout was gonna be ultimately fucked. The New Plague was on a legit timer to be unleashed. The Brotherhood and NCR were on its last legs.
So, yeah. It's funny how people seem to forget that. And you're absolutely right about the New Vegas DLCs. The 'Red Cloud' and Tunnelers were Chris' McGuffins to wipe the slate clean.
TBH I don't hate the NCR collapsing in itself, I think that "200 year old vault-tec guy's wife left him so he set off a nuke" is just kinda lame and has nothing to do with the NCR's pre-existing problems
Yeah I think the issue is that Bethesda had no interest in exploring why it fell, so they just said, "and rocks fall and everyone died," so they could tell the story they wanted to instead. I don't think anyone would have an issue with it if the show's story was almost exactly the same but set in a different state.
I think we're starting to see that it's a bit deeper than “200 year old vault-tec guy's wife left him so he set off a nuke”. The talk about ”Reclamation Day” makes it clear that Vault-Tec intended to, well, reclaim the former lands of the US (and possibly the world), and significant powers like the NCR are more likely to be competitors/obstacles than subjects/assets. Hank getting cucked by his wife's lesbian lover (who also somehow managed to survive 200+ years after the war) might've pushed him to pull the trigger at that specific time, but Vault-Tec eliminating its would-be competition was only a matter of time.
Which is a bit silly considering how shady sands was founded by Vault dwellers from vault 15.
Reclamation day was introduced in fallout 76, and to say it is inconsistent would be an understatement. Fallout 76 takes place mere 25 years after the great war, and they already began their own Reclamation day. Vault 15 exodus happened some 64 ish years after the great war.
This is very much a case of old lore clashing with new lore, as this either would make Reclamation day incredibly inconsistent between vaults, which would then basically self sabotage vault tech own goals.
Which is a bit silly considering how shady sands was founded by Vault dwellers from vault 15.
Yeah, but that was one of the lowly commoner vaults. Their “Reclamation Days” are, from the Vault-Tec managerial perspective, only relevant insofar as they advance Vault-Tec's interests — and creating a civilized society that's not under Vault-Tec's control is counter to those interests.
And had the 76ers mission gone off without a hitch Vault 15 would have found Vault-Tec in the form of 76ers or their descendants waiting for them, because 76’s population is basically all single-player Fallout protagonists. They were supposed to spread out and take over local factions across the country.
He didn’t want to blow up the NCR. He has explained and clarified that what he wanted to add more conflict to the west coast, wiping out the NCR like the show has for example was never his intention.
That's the thing though isn't it? Shady Sands getting nuked isn't the problem. It's how it was done.
Shady Sands get nuked and the immediate aftermath sounds like a great story. The power grabs, corruption, politicians using it for campaigning, dealing with the refugees, citizen unrest, reclamation efforts, etc. are all amazingly interesting things you could use in a story.
In practice, Shady Sands was destroyed offscreen by a brand new character with zero build up and the NCR is treated as a non-entity. It comes off as lazy, it just resets the setting back to scrap metal hovels and illiterate idiots scrounging around in the ashes, and completely sidesteps any of the intrigue.
I don't dislike the show but the writing has many problems that the fans don't want admit, and the post nuking of shady sands is the main one.
You take a region with decades of worldbuilding, the NCR has existed for almost 100 years or more at this point, inside NCR territory there's many cities: Shady Sands, Boneyard, The Hub, Adytum, Den, Klamath, Vault City, New Reno, Broken Hills, Redding, Arroyo,
organizations like Gun Runners, Followers of the apocalypse, brahmin caravans, and the likes of mojave express. Even if the ncr had fallen, they would still split into multiple factions and had somewhat of a functioning society, the direction of the show is to ignore all the worldbuilding and treat everything like a theme park: "remember the legion?", "remember the rangers?", "remember Novac?", "remember Primm?", "remember Victor?", "remember the Kings?".
The way the ncr fallen was also pretty bad, through the course of fallout 1,2 and NV it had many enemies, but they were defeated by a pre-war guy that discovered their existence 10 minutes ago and decided to nuke everything, and by nuking one city there's no traces of civilized society anywhere.
The setting is also boring, instead of the survivors trying to rebuild society in the wasteland, what we have is a bunch of pre-war people in suits that survived in a pod making decisions, I think this obsession with pre-war stuff is a bit too much.
I don’t know what ace you’re trying to play here, people fucking hated the tunnelers when they released and still do. It doesn’t matter who destroyed Vegas/Shady Sands, it was always going to be an unpopular move. I don’t really think pointing out Chris also wanted to do it will make people go “oh, I guess that’s just how it should be then”, they’re just gonna think Chris’ ideas were also dumb.
Legit half the reason New Vegas was good was because Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone were there to argue with eachother and Chris didn't have final say. That's my opinion anyway. It helps stories to have someone who can counter certain creative decisions.
Agreed. I think it's part of where Elder Scrolls as a series started to misstep. Todd Howard tends to play it safe, he'll pare down ideas, trim away and sand down edges for a very smooth, aerodynamic idea. His protege Emil is much the same. I think the Elder Scrolls were at their best when Todd was a realistic anchor, centering more creative but out there figures; wackadoos like Kirkbride.
They also talk like Chris was the final say. The dude had a ton of ideas shot down, it's one of the things he hates Obsidian for. The Tunnelers are what happens when you throw him a bone. I like a lot of his work, but honestly his Fallout contributions are among the most mixed in his resume.
I'm liking the show well enough, but I think people are huffing pure copium if they think a big plot reveal that makes every complaint invalid is on the bingo card.
I think that wanting to deconstruct and seriously question the setting and themes of whatever world he's writing for is Avellone's hallmark and strength as a writer, but also has its flaws because it relies on tearing things down without answering what would/should come after that. He did the same thing with Kreia in KOTOR 2, who was either an incredible deconstruction of the themes of the Force, Jedi/Sith and destiny in Star Wars, spouting old coot gibberish, or both depending on where the player is standing.
To be fair, could it not be the case that in a vacuum the idea is stupid but if he had more of a say it would've made more sense with other aspects he wanted to contribute?
New Vegas is one of my favourite games and I somehow completely missed the world being doomed to tunnelers and Sierra Madre fog, the latter of which I only have a vague recollection of, so I'm clearly not the most informed
Ulysses, who isn't a perfect character or even what I'd consider a reliable narrator, concludes that the Tunnelers will eventually seek out food elsewhere and the Mojave is a particularly juicy looking mutfruit.
"Tunnelers. Predators that make their own roads beneath the ground here. Divide broke their sky, showed them the world above - and the scent of new prey. Be a slower death for the Mojave than bombs and fire... but they'll come for its people, from where they least expect - below."
The Cloud is more obscure. There's an alternate ending, where you convince Elijah to join forces with you and then you both destroy the world and take over.
"In the years that followed, the legend of the Sierra Madre faded, and there were no... new visitors to the city. Years later, when a mysterious blood red cloud began to roll across the Mojave, then West toward the Republic, no one knew where it had come from. Only that it brought death in its wake. Attempts to find the source of the toxic cloud failed. The Mojave was cut off. Through the Cloud, lights were seen from HELIOS One. There were stories of ghosts immune to gunfire, who struck down anyone they saw with rays of light. The last chapter of the Mojave came when a modified REPCONN rocket struck Hoover Dam, releasing a blood-red cloud, killing all stationed there. All attempts to penetrate the Cloud and re-take the Dam failed, and both the NCR and Legion finally turned away from it, citing the place as cursed. In the years that followed, communities across the West began to die as traces of the Cloud began to drift over lands held by the NCR¹. Only two remained alive in the depths of the Cloud, at the Sierra Madre, waiting for their new world to begin again."
Ah been a while since I played Lonesome Road tbh, and I don't think I've ever sided with Elijah aside from maybe years ago on 360. Seems a bit disingenuous for people to use one of multiple endings to criticize the game as if it's canon then.
Holy yes I thought I was the only guy who felt this. Same thing I feel about "Fallout 2 was goofy, cheesey and filled with references too!", like yeah. Everyone hated it when Fallout first came out. Wild Wasteland exists as a compromise in fnv because they don't want to repeat that.
So why the hate for the tunnelers? Is it cuz Ulysses thought they’d be a threat to the Mojave itself or they just lame to play against? Also that’s just his theory that’s all about the tunnelers .
And he was reigned in every time. Van Buren got canceled, New Vegas was guarded by Sawyer/the rest of the team, and Lonesome Road it’s only a few areas nuked if we actually nuke NCR.
Yea Tunnelers are a thing but Mojave is a big bright desert, and we kill the Queen on the way to Ulysses. He’s also on record where NCR wouldn’t be dead but kinda like being slapped. Knocks ‘em down but ready for the future
And honestly, that's kinda boring. Better to say "all factions are flawed," or even "all factions are made up of people, who are flawed." It goes both ways, too; it means you should have flawed characters within a "good" faction, but also that a faction that's all evil horrible monsterpeople is pretty dull.
Caesar's Legion - I will forever maintain - is a shitty faction. I could spend hundreds of hours roaming the Mojave, and I'll never come up with a compelling reason to side with them other than "doing an evil run." Look, though, at the Institute and the Commonwealth Brotherhood; I fundamentally disagree with their conclusions, and their answer to the central question of the game ("should a sufficiently-advanced artificial intelligence be valued and respected just as much as a human life?"), but I can understand their perspective and how they come to their ideological beliefs. They take aspects of the Legion - the Institute are essentially slavers, and the Brotherhood are genocidal murderers - but they spin them in a way that makes me think that I could actually spend a hundred hours considering the pros and cons of each argument.
Still gonna side with the Minutemen and the Railroad, obviously, but y'know.
The institute are monstrous but they have tech, so theres that hope that by leading them you could push them towards better ends. But as a group? Theyre absolutely vile.
But the Legion is abominable and doesnt really have a good side to it other than "order is superior to chaos even if its a brutal cruel order"
I am kinda joking, kinda not, but when I see people saying Far Harbor AND Point Lookout are Bethesda but good just makes me think of the stereotype that Gen X devs hate the concept of color and will always tint stuff brown / green / orange.
But really, all this discuorse about Fallout lately is just making me realize everything I enjoy in these games has been accidental and a result of the devs and writers not getting to make exactly what they wanted.
Chris mentioning point lookout actually surprised me but looking back it was a pretty experimental DLC! The Pitt and him liking it doesn’t surprise so much since it was pretty story focused
that kinda checks out. I think looking at what he said there, those are times where Bethesda restricts the player and actually has you play through a more linear story that Chris would probably prefer, which I think has to do with DLCs being more a limited capacity in general. Whereas in the main world, Bethesda would focus too much on the player experience, giving them a lot of freedom and erring towards a sandbox mode, rather than telling a story.
Anchorage is more a shooter. Zeta is probably too wild and more theme parky for him. Nuka World is literally a theme park. Broken Steel is also more of a shooter thing.
On Anchorage and Broken Steel, these are a big part of why I hope FO3 gets remastered with its gunplay replaced by that of FO4/FO76. Those DLCs probably become a lot more popular if the primary thing they are centred around (the gunplay) is actually good.
Oh I love those DLCs. I am the freak who loved all of Fallout 3 DLCs and the base game in general. Even Zeta and I got son much motion sickness from that. Anchorage is one of my favorites and not just because you get a really OP armor at the end, but i think seeing the Chinese military and tech was really cool. Like you're in a power armor and it's a power trip, but I'm ok with that. Same with Broken Steel. You walk with Liberty Prime and mow some Enclave. And then you blew up their mobile freaking crawler base. It's freaking cool
Well I think Bethesda is at its best with a linear story in an open world with lots of player freedom. Just look at the elder scrolls games. Linear story isnt necessarily bad, and fallout 3 is still my favorite despite a mostly linear main story. I think player choice in stories becomes a gimmick at a certain point as its hard to get more than a handful of meaningful branching choices, and I think it becomes a really overrated part of the player experience.
I always believe that New Vegas was a lightning in a bottle. It was the perfect storm of bad deadline and crunch hours but lead by a group of very talented writers and developers at the time.
I think part of what made it great was there wasn’t enough time for the interesting ideas to get refined and diluted into focus grouped versions of those good ideas.
Things tend to turn out better when you have limits or crazy deadlines to work within. Projects that have no deadlines or limits tend to drag on and on without focus (like Star Citizen).
If anything, Obsidian imposing such a crazy short turnaround time for New Vegas likely contributed to its greatness.
That’s true for the writing as well. As a writer I’ve seen groups languish for ages because there’s no one cracking the whip to keep things moving. Meanwhile if we have a deadline we have to meet it motivates us to make something, and any decent writer hates “good enough” and still wants to churn out the best they can even on short notice, so a time constraint just means we go for the best story we can make without second guessing or doing dozens of rewrites because it’s not quite perfect.
There's a good saying that, I think, applies to both writing and making video games. You can't finish making it, you can only stop working on it. Dropping that perfectionism is one of the most essential parts of being a creative person, in my opinion.
Honestly think it might have been the opposite. A lot of the ideas in New Vegas (Caesar’s Legion, Joshua Graham, etc.) were thought up originally as Van Buren. Obviously that game didn’t happen but when a lot of the old team came back for new Vegas they probably had that stuff in their heads for a few years and were pinpointed on what they wanted them to be.
True, but they were still limited in their time to actually make it happen. Its one thing to have a story/world conceptualized, its another thing to bring it to life in a totally different medium from what you envisioned with only two years to do that and everything else that goes into making a game.
They at least had a decent head start tho. I gotta think it’s easier going into writing a story when you go “these are the villians, how do we implement them” as opposed to “who are our villians?” I’ll admit to being naive on tight game deadlines so I apologize if im just talking out my ass.
Video games are giant group projects I'm amazed ever get finished. There's a lot of pressure and time constraints. That's not even considering all the MBAs now involved in the industry that know nothing about games that only care about money. Making games is hard and making a super great game is even harder. People are unhappy when you try something new and are unhappy when you repeat the same things.
Bethesda has made some of my favorite games that I still continue to replay. Sometimes the best part of something is an accident and art is subjective. Fighting over the best games is kind of silly because of that subjectivity.
As someone who once worked in the game industry as a low level guy for 2-3 years, I appreciate your standpoint. So much is working against developers these days (sometimes self imposed,) that it's amazing as many of them turn out entertaining as they do.
To be fair about far harbour it one of the only things that make institutes not suck . The moral dilemma around that dlc and how you have to pick the option that the evil shadowy organisation would of done to get the ending where everybody lives actually does work with the themes that fallout 4 tried to do . Having Dima exist as a synth and not having him be a perfect replica of a human being makes for a more compelling discussion then is slavery wrong which was in the base game .
Yeah, Far Harbor is genuinely fantastic. The reveal that Dima killed someone, and having to decide whether he deserves justice for that or whether the synths are in too much danger if people find out was done very well.
(Except for the puzzle. We don’t talk about the puzzle.)
Even the children of atom have surprising depth to them where each member isn't just a reflection of the faction and everybody has a reason for staying . Ultimately it feels like this is a dlc which understand the essence of fallout while being its own original thing with factions created by bethesda and actually develops the primary themes of fallout 4 into something that if explored more could be interested
I genuinely think people consider Fallout to be happy and colorful simply because it doesnt have the late 2000s piss filter. The game is as dark, if not darker, than 3 and NV in many ways. Yet for some reason everyone acts like its a happy campy story.
76 is upbeat now since NPCs and such. On launch the story was bleak, everyone had died. It was empty, quiet and depressing. I enjoyed both versions but god those early days were tough 🤣
Yeah, Fallout 76 felt like a completely different world. It truly felt post apocalyptic post launch. And yet people complained about that!
It was a truly unique experience that no one will never get again in Fallout, it’s funny if you think about it that they will never be able to experience it. Such a unique game at the time, walking around in that world and discovering slowly what had happened. Empty cold and dark apart from all the animals and zombies that immediately wanted to kill you.
That would be hilarious and I kinda want it framed lol imagine being that petty.
I thought he wasn't capable of comedy but I guess involuntary comedy counts.
I can't remember, is Chris avellone the guy who literally has a interview where he's putting down rumers about how none of his ideas where used and that he wasn't so terrible to work with that they assigned him a minder, by in that interview admitting there was a board of people assigned to communicate why his ideas wherent being used and why they didn't have to use them?
Holy crap the outright lies being spread in the comments below.
The lore was of Dying Light 2's development. Chris Avellone was assigned the lead narrative position for the game alongside another lead who was to help him. He was new to the Dying Light franchise and when it came to DL2 he had his own style he wanted to work with. The development team didn't agree with his vision at any point of development, despite hiring for that, so they were finding any way to get rid of him. Go forward a few years, a couple of girls were pissed that he was getting so much attention after he rejected them at a bar 10 years from the event, so they proceeded to accuse him of SA allegations. Techland used that opportunity to oust him from the company on the basis of "saving PR" when in reality there was no evidence to prove him guilty, and he won the court case. Techland screwed him out of his position because their EGO was too big, now the story hits rock bottom because he was replaced with a movie writer who only has made flops in his career.
IDK where the being a terrible person in the office came from as that was never a thing. They hated him because they didn't like his work.
there was a ton of focus a few years back because on Dying Light 2 he was so fucking toxic half the staff moved to an annex just to not have to work in the same space as him
Literally making bullshit up. He was removed from the team due to false allegations of sexual misconduct. Not to mention that he never made any visits to their offices in Poland, which is where Techland is stationed. Why lie about this?
Not only that but Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 too. It was all due to the accusations about sexual misconduct and harassment back in 2020, which were withdrawn after Avellone issued a libel lawsuit against the accusers.
Accusers issued a testimony admitting that Avellone had not done anything they were claiming he had done, and that they don't know of anyone else who would have been a victim of sexual misconduct or harassment by Avellone, so based on that, yes they were lying.
He also worked on Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Prey 2017, two of my favorite games. I take it as a good sign if his name is on something.
He's supposedly working on Wolfeye's next game, which is a studio headed by the founder of Arkane. I'm really looking forward to seeing that in action.
I think Nuka-World suffered from the same issues most Bethesda content does, good ideas badly executed. The factions seem cool on paper, but in game they are just differently dressed raiders.
The word 'satire' gets overused a lot when it comes to Fallout. FO3 isn't satire by any means, it just doesn't take itself very seriously or examines its setting any deeper than the surface-level "wouldn't this be cool/funny/interesting".
Which, given Bethesda's writing track record, I'm more than fine with.
I think Avellone has made peace with the fact that his idea of what Fallout is and Bethesda's are not the same. At this point, we should all try to do the same.
Furthermore, you can still have your totally lawless wastelands. Just put them on the edges of the civilised parts. It's not like the entire continental United States has to be one or the other. There's plenty of room for relatively stable nations, savage frontiers, and the areas in between.
I agree the post-post apocalypse is more interesting. We see a good bit of that in 2, NV, and even 4. Though I do think part of the central theme is how mankind are just determined to destroy ourselves no matter how much we rebuild. Technology, civilizations, governments, and ideologies will come and go in cycles. But human nature and its propensity for war never changes.
We may have gotten to this level of society once, but it did take many centuries of warlords, slavery, and despotism to get there. Now that random bandits have access to guns, wmds, and similar weapons, resetting society might be a Herculean task.
Honestly, 76 is sorta shaping up to be somewhat post-post apocalypse ever since they've added the settlers and settlements back in, with separate factions regaining ground but not actively trying to kill each other again yet. Not to mention the somewhat thriving player-based economy.
Proper open world exploration is difficult, to then do it within a proper RPG set of systems while also providing proper story mechanics amplifies the difficulty., 3 and 4 were good attempts that modders ultimately improved as per usual.
I think I'm more concerned about how flat and tone deaf Starfield was rather than any previous issues with the Fallout series, it suggest a lack of basic game design management and completely avoidable pitfalls which will be difficult to shed for the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls
Did Chris want the West coast to be wiped clean so that people could write new stories? Yes. Did he literally write lore that suggests that regardless of what the Courier does at the end of New Vegas the Mojave will be left a wasteland due to the Sierra Madre Cloud and Tunneler infestation? Yes.
However, the purpose of these things was to give writers the ability to explore the same questions Fallout always asks (root of conflict, tribes, conflicting visions for the future). In his opinion, and one I mostly agree with, Bethesda seems to be using the opportunity to instead make interesting, yet shallow, attractions for players to engage with and then move on.
A clan of cannibals with a vampire aesthetic, a city built around an undetonated nuke, these are all interesting and engaging in the moment and something I can look back on fondly. But I'll never have a conversation with someone about the Enclave's plan for the Capital Wasteland because it's both incredibly shallow and cartoonishly evil, while I've had unending conversations about the Bitter Springs Massacre and what an independent ending for New Vegas would actually look like.
Fucking tired of the "Bethesda doesn't get Fallout" at this point there's more Good Bethesda Fallout than bad. Holy fuck people are just too goddamn precious about the franchise
My argument that Bethesda doesn’t understand fallout is the war never changes . I’m Bethesda narration it’s about the actual conflict and people killing each other and everything was great until the resource wae, whereas in fallout 1 it’s explicitly about how people will always be fighting over wealth and power . Feels like the iconography is there but not the actual themes , and when actually conveying the themes Bethesda writing really leaves a lot to be wanted.
TL;DR is Bethesda doesn't understand what "retrofuturism" is and criticism of Bethesda's cultural stagnation with the Fallout universe (i.e. Bethesda does a very poor job at portraying how humanity would actually survive after 200+ years of living after the nuclear apocalypse)
It's not a typical grifter slop, "bethesda bad" video, it's very honest criticism and I implore people to please just approach the claim with an open mind.
It means that Bethesda, from a writing perspective at least has thus far engaged with the franchise in an extremely shallow way that doesn't really go beyond the aesthetic and basic preexisting themes.
In fo4 especially, there just aren't really meaningful conversations. You almost never get to give an opinion or make a judgement, or ask more than one question. The closest you get to genuine deep conversations are with certain companions, and even then it's pretty much just the NPC monologuing at you.
I noticed this especially when playing TOTW. I enjoyed FO3, but when I got to the Mojave I really felt the difference in the kinds of and amount of conversation that was available. Like, look at the conversations you can have with Cass about the NCR, or with Veronica about the Brotherhood. Not even the main quest touchstone dialogues in FO3 or 4 have 1/10th the depth or complexity of those optional side dialogues.
From a gameplay and progression perspective, FO4 is my favorite by far. But Bethesda just does not creatively value character and dialogue, and it shows. Bethesda turned Fallout into an almost entirely frivolous theme park ride where you blast monsters to pick up their crap and actual complex society is illegal because it would ruin the vibe. And I enjoy that, but it's definitely not what I would prefer.
They've owned and worked on the franchise longer than Interplay and Obsidian ever did. People need to move on, including Avellone. You don't see Tim Cain or Josh Sawyer making melodramatic Twitter posts like these.
Tim Cain is one of the coolest Internet personalities out there. Just an old retired dude talking about games and the good old days. He’s usually super wholesome. (Please don’t tell me he did something awful that I don’t know about)
I took it to mean that for some reason the bethesda fallout games have a Speech skill, but it factors into a percentage to succeed, not in pass/fail. Which is an odd choice. You can just ignore the skill and reload a save until you pass if you chose to. All the other skill checks are still always pass/fail
I think the intention was to force every playthrough to be different like how your dice rolls can go wrong in DnD but obv. that's not how it turned out.
Yeah, I get that could make sense, but I'm baffled as to why they did it a second time with F4 and also only applied it to that one skill. It also just kinda doesn't make sense. They use the same words. The other fallout games and every other game with this kind of feature will change the words your character says to reflect their skill. "If I use these exact words in just the right way maybe it'll work".
“Speech” skills in dialogue use is almost non existent in Bethesda games. In fallout’s case, I would agree, in Elder Scrolls less so, but there still often aren’t any sort of depth in branching dialogue there either.
Completely unique branching dialogue trees is insanely hard to do. Even with Fallout New Vegas 90% of the dialogue was re-accessed via backing up to a previous dialogue branch. Even games like Telltale games still have a level of predictability as most dialogues wind up back to a pre-determined route in the end
Fuck, even BG3 with all its praise, is still just “good guy with an ego, good guy with feelings, good guy who’s a dick, kill them” in like 95% of dialogue. And all three dialogue options end up the same way, and if you choose to kill them it’s not like there’s new content to replace it. You just cut off that entire limb of the tree. No “evil branch” to take.
Honestly I think a big failure of fallout 4 is having the character talk. Being silent allowed the player to fill in gaps in the conversation and made it feel more personal. With the character who actually talks, you are just stuck with whatever the dialogue option they recorded is.
What I loved about fallout 1 and 2 was that having high speech/charisma revealed unique dialogue options without telling you that your speech/charisma revealed unique dialogue options. If your speech was too low, you simply would never know those options existed. And if your speech was already high early in the game, you'd have no way of knowing that it was your Speech that was giving you additional options.
It was a great way to implement it if you ask me, instead of these blatant "Speech 35/50 [dialogue]" that Bethesda jammed in there for fo3.
It was actually specifically Intelligence that gave you the extra dialogue options, not speech or charisma. I remember because there's a specific perk called "Smooth Talker" that has the effect of raising your Intelligence by 2 for dialogue purposes only.
It's a little bit unbalanced, though, since it means that for a talky character Intelligence is strictly better than Charisma in Fallout 1. Originally the game was going to have a "reaction" system where NPCs would have different dialogue depending on their dynamic opinion of you (as opposed to just static conditions), which was mostly governed by Charisma, but they didn't end up implementing it leaving Charisma a useless stat. It wasn't until Fallout 2 where they developed more things for Charisma to do that it started not being objectively the worst stat for every character type, and it's not until Arcanum that they actually implemented the reaction system intended for Fallout.
For some reason Todd is married to the idea of speech not being something that involves good writing in the dialogue options, but a minigame or dice roll.
Just look at Oblivion, stupid minigame. Starfield, stupid minigame. Fallout 3 AND 4, dice rolls.
New Vegas had clever things you could actually say, something someone charming (or competent in a skill) might say. They also had stupid things you could say, which was often hilarious, if you sucked and didn't make the check.
Skyrim speech checks suck though. It's just a dice roll labeled as persuasion or intimidation, and there are barely any of them.
Oblivion having the minigame means speech is something you can use when you want, rather than for specific planned narrative branches. I can chat up all the guards in a town and then get them to overlook crimes.
In Skyrim it's not a dice roll, in fact, it's just a hard pass/fail check on your Speech skill level + modifiers from perks. It says "twice as likely to succeed" in perk descriptions, which is misleading a bit - all it does is modify your Speech when checked in the formula.
New Vegas’s dialogue checks were always the right choice to make though. There was never an ill effect from choosing a dialogue option. BG3 at least had some dialogue options that would result in escalating the situation and not a constantly positive outcome
If you skill check Dean Domino it hurts his ego so badly he'll try to kill you once you're in the Casino. You can also end up killing an NCR trooper at the back of Camp McCarren if you mindlessly pick a skill check that pulls a pin on one of his grenades. I think there are one or two other "negative" skill checks in the game.
Bethsda games seem to have issue with speech checks. Starfield tried, and failed with dynamic blurbs that speech still determine if it passses or fails.
Fallout 4 just uses it as a skip fight or ask for more money button.
NV had it so you could do ALOT with it. Sometimes it was even bad to use it (Dead Money comes to mind.) You still had to make sense inbetween the checks to a degree.
Outer Worlds 2 actual has a good system: you can find info in the world and use it to talk to others, with speech being related to bullshiting people or convencing people purly based off of vibes. It was pretty fun.
I'm guessing it's because Bethesda's 'Speech' options are inconsequential and lead to the same outcome (3 flavors of yes and 1 no), instead of doing something interesting, like using perks/stats and occasionally unlocking a different story path.
Playing 1 intelligence, 10 luck and low speech in NV was an experience, lol
I don't get Chris Avellone and by extension modern Obsidian's obsession with the 'Speech' skill specifically. New Vegas and now Outer Worlds 2 (they pretty much run on the same leveling system) both suffer from the only way to get non-violet outcomes in a lot of cases is having Speech skill leveled up.
Whats the point of having all these skills, traits, backgrounds and information you can uncover prior to encounter boss scenarios when none of it matters unless you have the right speech skill.
Speech 90% of the time is just skipping busy work. It's just less fun to not have it, while games like Disco Elysium have failed skill checks that actually have content to them and where a failed check isn't just a quickload.
Only time it was done well was with Dean Domino in Dead Money, where passing a speech check actually makes him attack you later on. Makes complete sense, as a seasoned manipulator he'd realise he can't control you. But in that same dlc we had it where a speech check was a weird psychology stuff to fuse Dog and God.
The Speech skill line is kinda isane considering that Fallout New Vegas completely broke the Speech System by removing Charisma from having an effect on speech, also making Charisma a really weird stat togehter with Perception (but that one was already dumb in FO3).
Fallout 3's speech skill is better than in New Vegas, but maybe he means what dialogue options are unlocked with it? But even here it is often the same stuff in 3 and NV (Talking down the villain etc.) but in NV it is just an instant win button with a broken attribute system that leads to the fact that the most effecient way to play is 0 charisma and 100 speech.
The main thing ive come to realise: Fallout as a franchise really just has a fucking weird development history
Any franchise that has spanned that many years, developers, IP owners, and game genres - and now television - is bound to be more than a little fucky.
I have my gripes with the series, but it is legitimately amazing it's as coherent as it is.
I've always found the puritanism around fallout as a franchise to be ridiculous. The franchise has been misused, abused, mishandled and cocktailed in a blender since practically it's inception. "Bethesdas own spin on fallout" is actually what fallout is. New Vegas is 15. It was an exception, though one that I also think is mired in elitism and pearl clutching. The "true RPG" discourse has been a blight on gaming since it escaped 4chan and NMA
“Sir, the fallout subreddit is posting Chris Avellone tweets again”
Maintaining the agenda is our top priority.
Chris speaks more positively about Bethesda than he does Obsidian lol. I think there is an irony here that he was the biggest advocate for “wiping the slate clean” with the west coast. Just to make it easier for future writers to do what they like with it. Which is why the fuck ass tunneler lore and self replicating spooky red cloud exist in the dlc.
If he believes that Bethesda doesn’t care about the roots and wants to do their own thing. He was the primary person to help set that up for them.
I think he's saying Bethesda doing their own thing with it isn't necessarily a bad thing and it doesn't bother him that they can now do what they want with the lore. It's not what he would probably do but it's not his baby anymore.
One thing you learn in business is if you don't personally own an IP it's not healthy to get attached to it. You can put your heart and soul into a specific project and have pride in it as part of your portfolio. But how the IP Owners choose to build on it or completely change everything about it is well in their right. If you wrote Mr. House and they are completely changing his character in ways you would never have done all you can do is take pride that you wrote him well enough that they wanted to reuse the character in the first place.
Ron Gilbert spoke for ages about how he disagreed with where the Monkey Island franchise went and how he'd love to do his own spin on post-LeChuck's Revenge.
When he finally returned with... well, Return to Monkey Island, it opens exactly where Revenge left off.
Except it was a glorious fake-out where the game really was a sequel to ALL of them and you weren't Guybrush in the intro, you were his SON with Elaine.
Turns out he only disagreed with the good stuff in Monkey Island since he lost control.
As I said, he is speaking positively about them. He is arguing that they are making Fallout in their own style, which is what they are best at. That is the core of his point. I am just pointing out that "Not respecting the roots" comes off as ironic, seeing as he did a lot more to remove those factions and their roots from Fallout.
The show is building to the NCR coming back, seeing as they are obviously the only good guys around so far.
It’s his signature move. He did the exact same thing with Kreia in KOTOR 2 regarding the Force. He loves deconstructing a setting until it breaks, then wanting to hit the reset button because the "building back up" part isn't as fun for him to write as the "surviving the ashes" part.
The difference between Kreia and Ulysses is that I like Kreia
If Kriea went on and on about “the light, and the dark, the light, and the dark, the light and the dark” I would’ve hated the hell out of her
Yes, that is what basically her monologues amounted to, but they’re written in a way that actually makes it not nearly as blunt
Yeah, Kreia is a compelling character with flaws and gaps in her ideology that make sense
Ulysses is just Avelone throwing a temper tantrum
And Bears and Bulls.
And yet, the PC in LR is allowed to comment on the gaps in Ulysses' positions and actually engage with and battle him ideologically. iirc Kreia is just Avellone's mouthpiece about a setting he couldn't have possibly consumed every little bit of in the timeframe he gives and clearly doesn't understand, no actual counterarguments allowed.
People tend to forget that Ulysses was basically just Avellone's self-insert venting about how much he hated that the NCR had become a functional civilization. He spent the entire DLC lecturing the player on why society needs to be nuked back to the stone age because he prefers the "anarchy" phase of post-apocalypse.
Not just that, he also made sure Ulysses could explain why the Legion, House, and even independent endings would all lead to the ruin of Vegas and eventual return to the wasteland. You could maybe hope he was just insane, but the point of Lonesome Road and Chris' themes is that the cycle is indefinite. Factions will rise and fall, and it is not worth putting faith in any "Flag" but instead in people and hoping they can live beyond it.
Also really long dialogue dump. Similiar to how Old World Blues is mostly gameplay and than really, really long conversations with all characters. The pacing is really weird in NV DLC except with Honest Hearts which is just more Fallout.
Fallout 3 DLC honestly has imiliar issues. So many of the NV FO3 DLC just become long dungeon crawls.
you're right. and the hilarious irony is that the one DLC where I wanted really long conversations was with Joshua Graham and that's the one DLC that didn't have it.
"people tend to forget this extremely well known cliched/overwrought fact that everyone repeats constantly"
And as a matter of fact... Ulysses was wrong.
The most annoying and cringe character in the series. I almost always let him live tho.
Reminder that Ulysses originally was going to be a companion, the only one that would be legion-aligned, and the only reason he was originally cut was that they had so much dialogue and lines written for him, that he alone couldn't fit on the disc space for the game.
He had more lines then the second most long-winded companion, Cass/Rose of Sharon Cassidy.
Thusly a whole DLC just for him.
>If he believes that Bethesda doesn’t care about the roots and wants to do their own thing. He was the primary person to help set that up for them.
Tbf they haven't used either of those plot points
Both of them were just badly written, for starters. Tunnelers are particularly weak to light. Flare guns can send them into a frenzy and break their ranks. Shit, I wouldn't be surprised if a high-beam flashlight or strobe light could do that to them.
The red cloud has less obvious weaknesses, but by its very nature, it would eventually destroy the entire setting. So I much prefer it to be a retcon to just a local event, than the literal death of the Fallout setting as a whole.
Due to how they are writing the show, the tunnelers could have shown up and been a problem that got dealt with off-screen. I never cared for them to be the actual cause of the West Coast's fall from grace. The show is also seemingly building towards the renewal of the West Coast factions. Which is better than just wiping the slate clean, as Chris put it.
I usually play energy weapons, I'm now realizing why I never had issues with the tunnlers, I was shooting light at them. They were always easier to kill than deathclaws, but were supposed to be stronger. Turns out I just hard counter because I like the sound lasers make
I don’t disagree on those points, I just don’t agree that he was the person who set it up for them because they didn’t use or address those plot points along with why they wrote New Vegas in the show the way that they did. I think they would write it this way regardless and Avelone’s tunneled+red cloud idea probably didn’t factor much
"Both of them were just badly written, for starters. " I don't think either were supposed to be a world ending catastrophe. Certain characters claimed that, but the characters that claimed that are insanely unreliable wackos. Idk why everyone repeats it verbatim as established lore.
Exactly. It's pure irony. People are still complaining about Shady Sands getting nuked. Uh, it was actually gonna be destroyed (at least the Hall of Congress) in Van Buren. The world in that Fallout was gonna be ultimately fucked. The New Plague was on a legit timer to be unleashed. The Brotherhood and NCR were on its last legs.
So, yeah. It's funny how people seem to forget that. And you're absolutely right about the New Vegas DLCs. The 'Red Cloud' and Tunnelers were Chris' McGuffins to wipe the slate clean.
TBH I don't hate the NCR collapsing in itself, I think that "200 year old vault-tec guy's wife left him so he set off a nuke" is just kinda lame and has nothing to do with the NCR's pre-existing problems
Yeah I think the issue is that Bethesda had no interest in exploring why it fell, so they just said, "and rocks fall and everyone died," so they could tell the story they wanted to instead. I don't think anyone would have an issue with it if the show's story was almost exactly the same but set in a different state.
I think we're starting to see that it's a bit deeper than “200 year old vault-tec guy's wife left him so he set off a nuke”. The talk about ”Reclamation Day” makes it clear that Vault-Tec intended to, well, reclaim the former lands of the US (and possibly the world), and significant powers like the NCR are more likely to be competitors/obstacles than subjects/assets. Hank getting cucked by his wife's lesbian lover (who also somehow managed to survive 200+ years after the war) might've pushed him to pull the trigger at that specific time, but Vault-Tec eliminating its would-be competition was only a matter of time.
Which is a bit silly considering how shady sands was founded by Vault dwellers from vault 15.
Reclamation day was introduced in fallout 76, and to say it is inconsistent would be an understatement. Fallout 76 takes place mere 25 years after the great war, and they already began their own Reclamation day. Vault 15 exodus happened some 64 ish years after the great war.
This is very much a case of old lore clashing with new lore, as this either would make Reclamation day incredibly inconsistent between vaults, which would then basically self sabotage vault tech own goals.
Yeah, but that was one of the lowly commoner vaults. Their “Reclamation Days” are, from the Vault-Tec managerial perspective, only relevant insofar as they advance Vault-Tec's interests — and creating a civilized society that's not under Vault-Tec's control is counter to those interests.
And had the 76ers mission gone off without a hitch Vault 15 would have found Vault-Tec in the form of 76ers or their descendants waiting for them, because 76’s population is basically all single-player Fallout protagonists. They were supposed to spread out and take over local factions across the country.
I've known about Chris wanting to blow up the NCR for years, and I didn't like it back then either.
Besides, Chris is the sole arbiter of what is good or not. If he had done it, we'd have hated it there too.
He didn’t want to blow up the NCR. He has explained and clarified that what he wanted to add more conflict to the west coast, wiping out the NCR like the show has for example was never his intention.
That's the thing though isn't it? Shady Sands getting nuked isn't the problem. It's how it was done.
Shady Sands get nuked and the immediate aftermath sounds like a great story. The power grabs, corruption, politicians using it for campaigning, dealing with the refugees, citizen unrest, reclamation efforts, etc. are all amazingly interesting things you could use in a story.
In practice, Shady Sands was destroyed offscreen by a brand new character with zero build up and the NCR is treated as a non-entity. It comes off as lazy, it just resets the setting back to scrap metal hovels and illiterate idiots scrounging around in the ashes, and completely sidesteps any of the intrigue.
I don't dislike the show but the writing has many problems that the fans don't want admit, and the post nuking of shady sands is the main one.
You take a region with decades of worldbuilding, the NCR has existed for almost 100 years or more at this point, inside NCR territory there's many cities: Shady Sands, Boneyard, The Hub, Adytum, Den, Klamath, Vault City, New Reno, Broken Hills, Redding, Arroyo, organizations like Gun Runners, Followers of the apocalypse, brahmin caravans, and the likes of mojave express. Even if the ncr had fallen, they would still split into multiple factions and had somewhat of a functioning society, the direction of the show is to ignore all the worldbuilding and treat everything like a theme park: "remember the legion?", "remember the rangers?", "remember Novac?", "remember Primm?", "remember Victor?", "remember the Kings?".
The way the ncr fallen was also pretty bad, through the course of fallout 1,2 and NV it had many enemies, but they were defeated by a pre-war guy that discovered their existence 10 minutes ago and decided to nuke everything, and by nuking one city there's no traces of civilized society anywhere.
The setting is also boring, instead of the survivors trying to rebuild society in the wasteland, what we have is a bunch of pre-war people in suits that survived in a pod making decisions, I think this obsession with pre-war stuff is a bit too much.
I don’t know what ace you’re trying to play here, people fucking hated the tunnelers when they released and still do. It doesn’t matter who destroyed Vegas/Shady Sands, it was always going to be an unpopular move. I don’t really think pointing out Chris also wanted to do it will make people go “oh, I guess that’s just how it should be then”, they’re just gonna think Chris’ ideas were also dumb.
Legit half the reason New Vegas was good was because Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone were there to argue with eachother and Chris didn't have final say. That's my opinion anyway. It helps stories to have someone who can counter certain creative decisions.
100%. The reason Star Wars went off the deep end is because nobody wanted to argue with George Lucas during the making of the prequels.
Jar Jar Binks? Sounds swell George, you created Star Wars, how could you go wrong?
Somewhat fittingly, Yes Men lead to ruin.
Balance is key! Centering! Though I usually get a Reddit cares when I mention this lol. But all things in balance.
Agreed. I think it's part of where Elder Scrolls as a series started to misstep. Todd Howard tends to play it safe, he'll pare down ideas, trim away and sand down edges for a very smooth, aerodynamic idea. His protege Emil is much the same. I think the Elder Scrolls were at their best when Todd was a realistic anchor, centering more creative but out there figures; wackadoos like Kirkbride.
They also talk like Chris was the final say. The dude had a ton of ideas shot down, it's one of the things he hates Obsidian for. The Tunnelers are what happens when you throw him a bone. I like a lot of his work, but honestly his Fallout contributions are among the most mixed in his resume.
I'm liking the show well enough, but I think people are huffing pure copium if they think a big plot reveal that makes every complaint invalid is on the bingo card.
I think that wanting to deconstruct and seriously question the setting and themes of whatever world he's writing for is Avellone's hallmark and strength as a writer, but also has its flaws because it relies on tearing things down without answering what would/should come after that. He did the same thing with Kreia in KOTOR 2, who was either an incredible deconstruction of the themes of the Force, Jedi/Sith and destiny in Star Wars, spouting old coot gibberish, or both depending on where the player is standing.
He did writing for Planescape: Torment didn't he?
He was the lead writer. The man can cook.
To be fair, could it not be the case that in a vacuum the idea is stupid but if he had more of a say it would've made more sense with other aspects he wanted to contribute?
New Vegas is one of my favourite games and I somehow completely missed the world being doomed to tunnelers and Sierra Madre fog, the latter of which I only have a vague recollection of, so I'm clearly not the most informed
Neither are concrete or definitive.
Ulysses, who isn't a perfect character or even what I'd consider a reliable narrator, concludes that the Tunnelers will eventually seek out food elsewhere and the Mojave is a particularly juicy looking mutfruit.
"Tunnelers. Predators that make their own roads beneath the ground here. Divide broke their sky, showed them the world above - and the scent of new prey. Be a slower death for the Mojave than bombs and fire... but they'll come for its people, from where they least expect - below."
The Cloud is more obscure. There's an alternate ending, where you convince Elijah to join forces with you and then you both destroy the world and take over.
"In the years that followed, the legend of the Sierra Madre faded, and there were no... new visitors to the city. Years later, when a mysterious blood red cloud began to roll across the Mojave, then West toward the Republic, no one knew where it had come from. Only that it brought death in its wake. Attempts to find the source of the toxic cloud failed. The Mojave was cut off. Through the Cloud, lights were seen from HELIOS One. There were stories of ghosts immune to gunfire, who struck down anyone they saw with rays of light. The last chapter of the Mojave came when a modified REPCONN rocket struck Hoover Dam, releasing a blood-red cloud, killing all stationed there. All attempts to penetrate the Cloud and re-take the Dam failed, and both the NCR and Legion finally turned away from it, citing the place as cursed. In the years that followed, communities across the West began to die as traces of the Cloud began to drift over lands held by the NCR¹. Only two remained alive in the depths of the Cloud, at the Sierra Madre, waiting for their new world to begin again."
Ah been a while since I played Lonesome Road tbh, and I don't think I've ever sided with Elijah aside from maybe years ago on 360. Seems a bit disingenuous for people to use one of multiple endings to criticize the game as if it's canon then.
Thanks for the info
I'm pretty sure its not doomed to the fog and only is if you choose to. Basically, if you commit to the being an evil person ending.
Tunnelers were going to NV either way though.
Didn't we nip the Tunnelers in the bud by killing the mom?
I dont think that ended them. Ulysses said they were gonna make it to Vegas eventually.
Holy yes I thought I was the only guy who felt this. Same thing I feel about "Fallout 2 was goofy, cheesey and filled with references too!", like yeah. Everyone hated it when Fallout first came out. Wild Wasteland exists as a compromise in fnv because they don't want to repeat that.
Yeah, people here pull this line out all the time, as if the only reason people liked New Vegas was because it had Chris's name on it
Actually, I liked it because it was good!
So why the hate for the tunnelers? Is it cuz Ulysses thought they’d be a threat to the Mojave itself or they just lame to play against? Also that’s just his theory that’s all about the tunnelers .
And he was reigned in every time. Van Buren got canceled, New Vegas was guarded by Sawyer/the rest of the team, and Lonesome Road it’s only a few areas nuked if we actually nuke NCR.
Yea Tunnelers are a thing but Mojave is a big bright desert, and we kill the Queen on the way to Ulysses. He’s also on record where NCR wouldn’t be dead but kinda like being slapped. Knocks ‘em down but ready for the future
Don't forget the "but all factions are bad" philosophy he insists on pushing.
And honestly, that's kinda boring. Better to say "all factions are flawed," or even "all factions are made up of people, who are flawed." It goes both ways, too; it means you should have flawed characters within a "good" faction, but also that a faction that's all evil horrible monsterpeople is pretty dull.
Caesar's Legion - I will forever maintain - is a shitty faction. I could spend hundreds of hours roaming the Mojave, and I'll never come up with a compelling reason to side with them other than "doing an evil run." Look, though, at the Institute and the Commonwealth Brotherhood; I fundamentally disagree with their conclusions, and their answer to the central question of the game ("should a sufficiently-advanced artificial intelligence be valued and respected just as much as a human life?"), but I can understand their perspective and how they come to their ideological beliefs. They take aspects of the Legion - the Institute are essentially slavers, and the Brotherhood are genocidal murderers - but they spin them in a way that makes me think that I could actually spend a hundred hours considering the pros and cons of each argument.
Still gonna side with the Minutemen and the Railroad, obviously, but y'know.
The institute are monstrous but they have tech, so theres that hope that by leading them you could push them towards better ends. But as a group? Theyre absolutely vile.
But the Legion is abominable and doesnt really have a good side to it other than "order is superior to chaos even if its a brutal cruel order"
Which is stupid. The NCR isn't perfect. They have flaws. But they are so much better than other factions that theyre the good guys by default.
I am kinda joking, kinda not, but when I see people saying Far Harbor AND Point Lookout are Bethesda but good just makes me think of the stereotype that Gen X devs hate the concept of color and will always tint stuff brown / green / orange.
But really, all this discuorse about Fallout lately is just making me realize everything I enjoy in these games has been accidental and a result of the devs and writers not getting to make exactly what they wanted.
Chris mentioning point lookout actually surprised me but looking back it was a pretty experimental DLC! The Pitt and him liking it doesn’t surprise so much since it was pretty story focused
that kinda checks out. I think looking at what he said there, those are times where Bethesda restricts the player and actually has you play through a more linear story that Chris would probably prefer, which I think has to do with DLCs being more a limited capacity in general. Whereas in the main world, Bethesda would focus too much on the player experience, giving them a lot of freedom and erring towards a sandbox mode, rather than telling a story.
Anchorage is more a shooter. Zeta is probably too wild and more theme parky for him. Nuka World is literally a theme park. Broken Steel is also more of a shooter thing.
On Anchorage and Broken Steel, these are a big part of why I hope FO3 gets remastered with its gunplay replaced by that of FO4/FO76. Those DLCs probably become a lot more popular if the primary thing they are centred around (the gunplay) is actually good.
Oh I love those DLCs. I am the freak who loved all of Fallout 3 DLCs and the base game in general. Even Zeta and I got son much motion sickness from that. Anchorage is one of my favorites and not just because you get a really OP armor at the end, but i think seeing the Chinese military and tech was really cool. Like you're in a power armor and it's a power trip, but I'm ok with that. Same with Broken Steel. You walk with Liberty Prime and mow some Enclave. And then you blew up their mobile freaking crawler base. It's freaking cool
Well I think Bethesda is at its best with a linear story in an open world with lots of player freedom. Just look at the elder scrolls games. Linear story isnt necessarily bad, and fallout 3 is still my favorite despite a mostly linear main story. I think player choice in stories becomes a gimmick at a certain point as its hard to get more than a handful of meaningful branching choices, and I think it becomes a really overrated part of the player experience.
I always believe that New Vegas was a lightning in a bottle. It was the perfect storm of bad deadline and crunch hours but lead by a group of very talented writers and developers at the time.
I think part of what made it great was there wasn’t enough time for the interesting ideas to get refined and diluted into focus grouped versions of those good ideas.
As the saying goes, limitations breed innovation.
Things tend to turn out better when you have limits or crazy deadlines to work within. Projects that have no deadlines or limits tend to drag on and on without focus (like Star Citizen).
If anything, Obsidian imposing such a crazy short turnaround time for New Vegas likely contributed to its greatness.
That’s true for the writing as well. As a writer I’ve seen groups languish for ages because there’s no one cracking the whip to keep things moving. Meanwhile if we have a deadline we have to meet it motivates us to make something, and any decent writer hates “good enough” and still wants to churn out the best they can even on short notice, so a time constraint just means we go for the best story we can make without second guessing or doing dozens of rewrites because it’s not quite perfect.
Explains stranger things gap to qaulity ratio lmao
There's a good saying that, I think, applies to both writing and making video games. You can't finish making it, you can only stop working on it. Dropping that perfectionism is one of the most essential parts of being a creative person, in my opinion.
Honestly think it might have been the opposite. A lot of the ideas in New Vegas (Caesar’s Legion, Joshua Graham, etc.) were thought up originally as Van Buren. Obviously that game didn’t happen but when a lot of the old team came back for new Vegas they probably had that stuff in their heads for a few years and were pinpointed on what they wanted them to be.
True, but they were still limited in their time to actually make it happen. Its one thing to have a story/world conceptualized, its another thing to bring it to life in a totally different medium from what you envisioned with only two years to do that and everything else that goes into making a game.
They at least had a decent head start tho. I gotta think it’s easier going into writing a story when you go “these are the villians, how do we implement them” as opposed to “who are our villians?” I’ll admit to being naive on tight game deadlines so I apologize if im just talking out my ass.
Video games are giant group projects I'm amazed ever get finished. There's a lot of pressure and time constraints. That's not even considering all the MBAs now involved in the industry that know nothing about games that only care about money. Making games is hard and making a super great game is even harder. People are unhappy when you try something new and are unhappy when you repeat the same things.
Bethesda has made some of my favorite games that I still continue to replay. Sometimes the best part of something is an accident and art is subjective. Fighting over the best games is kind of silly because of that subjectivity.
Gamers are a varied bunch. You can’t please em all at once.
As someone who once worked in the game industry as a low level guy for 2-3 years, I appreciate your standpoint. So much is working against developers these days (sometimes self imposed,) that it's amazing as many of them turn out entertaining as they do.
To be fair about far harbour it one of the only things that make institutes not suck . The moral dilemma around that dlc and how you have to pick the option that the evil shadowy organisation would of done to get the ending where everybody lives actually does work with the themes that fallout 4 tried to do . Having Dima exist as a synth and not having him be a perfect replica of a human being makes for a more compelling discussion then is slavery wrong which was in the base game .
Yeah, Far Harbor is genuinely fantastic. The reveal that Dima killed someone, and having to decide whether he deserves justice for that or whether the synths are in too much danger if people find out was done very well.
(Except for the puzzle. We don’t talk about the puzzle.)
Even the children of atom have surprising depth to them where each member isn't just a reflection of the faction and everybody has a reason for staying . Ultimately it feels like this is a dlc which understand the essence of fallout while being its own original thing with factions created by bethesda and actually develops the primary themes of fallout 4 into something that if explored more could be interested
It's annoying because it shows that Bethesda can lock in if they want to.
And then they turn around and spit out the mechanist and nuka world.
Why is Automatron catching strays?
The writing was ass but I loved that I got to see fallout theme park. Glad they can’t put it back in the bottle.
That does seem to be pretty common. I loved Nuka World, which is literally a bright and colorful amusement park
I genuinely think people consider Fallout to be happy and colorful simply because it doesnt have the late 2000s piss filter. The game is as dark, if not darker, than 3 and NV in many ways. Yet for some reason everyone acts like its a happy campy story.
Have you played 76? Wayy too upbeat. That being said I have 1500 hours in it.
76 is upbeat now since NPCs and such. On launch the story was bleak, everyone had died. It was empty, quiet and depressing. I enjoyed both versions but god those early days were tough 🤣
Yeah, Fallout 76 felt like a completely different world. It truly felt post apocalyptic post launch. And yet people complained about that!
It was a truly unique experience that no one will never get again in Fallout, it’s funny if you think about it that they will never be able to experience it. Such a unique game at the time, walking around in that world and discovering slowly what had happened. Empty cold and dark apart from all the animals and zombies that immediately wanted to kill you.
Reminder that this is Reddit and loud minority
Your message will fall on deaf ears.
Didn't he beg Elon Musk to buy the franchise?
Holy shit, he did lmao
With how much of an attention whore he is and his desire to be seen as a hardcore gamer, I’m surprised he didn’t take Chris up.
Honestly, if I had that money, I would buy up so many studios and just have them make my dream games. Why don’t multi-billionaires do stuff like that?
In fairness, Elon is spending billions of dollars to make fallout happen in real life. Who needs Fallout 5 when we can drop the bomb ourselves?
God damnit, you know he has a vault suit and pip boy in his bunker too
Oh my god what a fucking schmuck
Bless you
Well his credibility is as good as a dirty wet trash bag then
What Fallout needs is an emerald mine DLC
Elon would try to make a self insert as a Robert House style industrialist.
Hell House is pretty much what Elon Musk pretends to be.
That would be hilarious and I kinda want it framed lol imagine being that petty. I thought he wasn't capable of comedy but I guess involuntary comedy counts.
I can't remember, is Chris avellone the guy who literally has a interview where he's putting down rumers about how none of his ideas where used and that he wasn't so terrible to work with that they assigned him a minder, by in that interview admitting there was a board of people assigned to communicate why his ideas wherent being used and why they didn't have to use them?
Please link to this interview. I've read his interviews and have never seen anything like that.
Holy crap the outright lies being spread in the comments below.
The lore was of Dying Light 2's development. Chris Avellone was assigned the lead narrative position for the game alongside another lead who was to help him. He was new to the Dying Light franchise and when it came to DL2 he had his own style he wanted to work with. The development team didn't agree with his vision at any point of development, despite hiring for that, so they were finding any way to get rid of him. Go forward a few years, a couple of girls were pissed that he was getting so much attention after he rejected them at a bar 10 years from the event, so they proceeded to accuse him of SA allegations. Techland used that opportunity to oust him from the company on the basis of "saving PR" when in reality there was no evidence to prove him guilty, and he won the court case. Techland screwed him out of his position because their EGO was too big, now the story hits rock bottom because he was replaced with a movie writer who only has made flops in his career.
IDK where the being a terrible person in the office came from as that was never a thing. They hated him because they didn't like his work.
His accurser also recanted and admitted they made it up I think
YES!
there was a ton of focus a few years back because on Dying Light 2 he was so fucking toxic half the staff moved to an annex just to not have to work in the same space as him
How did you even invent this? He was working on Dying Light 2 from home, in California, while Techland was working on it from their offices in Poland.
Wow they moved all the way to Poland to get away from him. Crazy.
Literally making bullshit up. He was removed from the team due to false allegations of sexual misconduct. Not to mention that he never made any visits to their offices in Poland, which is where Techland is stationed. Why lie about this?
And dying light 2 SUCKED and shat all over the brilliant first one
Didn't the studio say they removed his contributions after he was removed from the team?
Not only that but Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 too. It was all due to the accusations about sexual misconduct and harassment back in 2020, which were withdrawn after Avellone issued a libel lawsuit against the accusers.
> which were withdrawn after Avellone issued a libel lawsuit against the accusers.
So... they were lying?
Accusers issued a testimony admitting that Avellone had not done anything they were claiming he had done, and that they don't know of anyone else who would have been a victim of sexual misconduct or harassment by Avellone, so based on that, yes they were lying.
Yeah based on them confessing that they lied it sounds like they were lying
It's more accurate to say they were withdrawn after the witnesses sided with Chris.
They didn’t use his ideas they fired him over false allegations
All his stuff was removed except for the stuff advertised. What was left had to be heavily edited, from the original plan
Does this guy make games anymore?
Supposedly signed on with the founder of disco elysium's development company's new studio but i think he mostly provides aid to random games
"Another
SettlementGame needs your help, General."Yes.
He's right now working on Ken Levine's new game Judas
EDIT:Since Judas is stinky,he also worked on the most recent Wasteland,Pathfinder and Weird West
That game’s been stuck in development hell for years, Kevin Levine’s been talking about it since he left Irrational in 2014.
An that's coming any decade now ...
I really enjoyed pathfinder and weird west.
He also worked on Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Prey 2017, two of my favorite games. I take it as a good sign if his name is on something.
He's supposedly working on Wolfeye's next game, which is a studio headed by the founder of Arkane. I'm really looking forward to seeing that in action.
To be fair him working on DOS2 was just a Kickstarter goal, they took him like fans and he probably wrote one quest or a charcter.
But it is a good sign that Larian knows who is good.
Full time writer at Republic Games and Wolfeye Studios. One is a dark fantasy RPG and the other, a sci-fi immersive simulator from ex-Dishonored devs.
What’s the name of the upcoming Dishonored-like immerse sim? One of my favorite genres
Was The Pitt not generally liked? I fucking loved the Pitt it was one of my favorites in 3.
The Pitt was good though...
"can't tell a linear story and hates speech checks" is a fair hit in Bethesda, yeah.
I like nuka world
I think Nuka-World suffered from the same issues most Bethesda content does, good ideas badly executed. The factions seem cool on paper, but in game they are just differently dressed raiders.
To be fair, if you play 3 and New Vegas back to back it’s very clear how completely different they approach the games.
New Vegas while comedic is incredibly serious about its subject matter, whereas 3 is written like a satire of the post-apocalyptic genre itself.
Both work, and neither are wrong in how they’re written, but interesting to look at nonetheless in how different people take on the franchise.
Can you expand a little on 3 being a satire of the genre? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just not having any examples come to mind.
The word 'satire' gets overused a lot when it comes to Fallout. FO3 isn't satire by any means, it just doesn't take itself very seriously or examines its setting any deeper than the surface-level "wouldn't this be cool/funny/interesting".
Which, given Bethesda's writing track record, I'm more than fine with.
The guy who wanted to blow up the ncr first is mad that Bethesda did it lol
I think Avellone has made peace with the fact that his idea of what Fallout is and Bethesda's are not the same. At this point, we should all try to do the same.
Has he really made peace if he won't stop whining about it lmao
Fallout is more interesting as a post-post-apocalyptic franchise in my opinion.
Still entertaining to keep the wasteland a wasteland, but we really don't have much post-post media and the questions it raises.
"Are we going to do the whole genocide thing again, or maybe we could have learned something from heart of our civilization being destroyed?"
Furthermore, you can still have your totally lawless wastelands. Just put them on the edges of the civilised parts. It's not like the entire continental United States has to be one or the other. There's plenty of room for relatively stable nations, savage frontiers, and the areas in between.
I agree the post-post apocalypse is more interesting. We see a good bit of that in 2, NV, and even 4. Though I do think part of the central theme is how mankind are just determined to destroy ourselves no matter how much we rebuild. Technology, civilizations, governments, and ideologies will come and go in cycles. But human nature and its propensity for war never changes.
We may have gotten to this level of society once, but it did take many centuries of warlords, slavery, and despotism to get there. Now that random bandits have access to guns, wmds, and similar weapons, resetting society might be a Herculean task.
Honestly, 76 is sorta shaping up to be somewhat post-post apocalypse ever since they've added the settlers and settlements back in, with separate factions regaining ground but not actively trying to kill each other again yet. Not to mention the somewhat thriving player-based economy.
Which is funny since timeline wise that should be regular post apocalypse
Proper open world exploration is difficult, to then do it within a proper RPG set of systems while also providing proper story mechanics amplifies the difficulty., 3 and 4 were good attempts that modders ultimately improved as per usual.
I think I'm more concerned about how flat and tone deaf Starfield was rather than any previous issues with the Fallout series, it suggest a lack of basic game design management and completely avoidable pitfalls which will be difficult to shed for the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls
People in the comments are missing Chris's point.
Did Chris want the West coast to be wiped clean so that people could write new stories? Yes. Did he literally write lore that suggests that regardless of what the Courier does at the end of New Vegas the Mojave will be left a wasteland due to the Sierra Madre Cloud and Tunneler infestation? Yes.
However, the purpose of these things was to give writers the ability to explore the same questions Fallout always asks (root of conflict, tribes, conflicting visions for the future). In his opinion, and one I mostly agree with, Bethesda seems to be using the opportunity to instead make interesting, yet shallow, attractions for players to engage with and then move on.
A clan of cannibals with a vampire aesthetic, a city built around an undetonated nuke, these are all interesting and engaging in the moment and something I can look back on fondly. But I'll never have a conversation with someone about the Enclave's plan for the Capital Wasteland because it's both incredibly shallow and cartoonishly evil, while I've had unending conversations about the Bitter Springs Massacre and what an independent ending for New Vegas would actually look like.
He's 100% correct. I agree with this completely.
i hate this stupid community, didn't this dude beg musk to buy fallout or something?
Fucking tired of the "Bethesda doesn't get Fallout" at this point there's more Good Bethesda Fallout than bad. Holy fuck people are just too goddamn precious about the franchise
[deleted]
My argument that Bethesda doesn’t understand fallout is the war never changes . I’m Bethesda narration it’s about the actual conflict and people killing each other and everything was great until the resource wae, whereas in fallout 1 it’s explicitly about how people will always be fighting over wealth and power . Feels like the iconography is there but not the actual themes , and when actually conveying the themes Bethesda writing really leaves a lot to be wanted.
EDIT/context: Deleted comment was wondering what "Bethesda doesn't understand Fallout" means
This video and article by Shamus (RIP) sums it up very accurately.
TL;DR is Bethesda doesn't understand what "retrofuturism" is and criticism of Bethesda's cultural stagnation with the Fallout universe (i.e. Bethesda does a very poor job at portraying how humanity would actually survive after 200+ years of living after the nuclear apocalypse)
It's not a typical grifter slop, "bethesda bad" video, it's very honest criticism and I implore people to please just approach the claim with an open mind.
It means that Bethesda, from a writing perspective at least has thus far engaged with the franchise in an extremely shallow way that doesn't really go beyond the aesthetic and basic preexisting themes.
In fo4 especially, there just aren't really meaningful conversations. You almost never get to give an opinion or make a judgement, or ask more than one question. The closest you get to genuine deep conversations are with certain companions, and even then it's pretty much just the NPC monologuing at you.
I noticed this especially when playing TOTW. I enjoyed FO3, but when I got to the Mojave I really felt the difference in the kinds of and amount of conversation that was available. Like, look at the conversations you can have with Cass about the NCR, or with Veronica about the Brotherhood. Not even the main quest touchstone dialogues in FO3 or 4 have 1/10th the depth or complexity of those optional side dialogues.
From a gameplay and progression perspective, FO4 is my favorite by far. But Bethesda just does not creatively value character and dialogue, and it shows. Bethesda turned Fallout into an almost entirely frivolous theme park ride where you blast monsters to pick up their crap and actual complex society is illegal because it would ruin the vibe. And I enjoy that, but it's definitely not what I would prefer.
They've owned and worked on the franchise longer than Interplay and Obsidian ever did. People need to move on, including Avellone. You don't see Tim Cain or Josh Sawyer making melodramatic Twitter posts like these.
Tim Cain is one of the coolest Internet personalities out there. Just an old retired dude talking about games and the good old days. He’s usually super wholesome. (Please don’t tell me he did something awful that I don’t know about)
He's no longer semi-retired, he's recently moved so he could be back at Obsidian full time.
This guy just wants it all to be about him. He’s just mad they haven’t included his edgy self insert character.
I'm curious as to what they mean by "their inability to understand how to use the speech system"
lack of snazzy dialogue?
I took it to mean that for some reason the bethesda fallout games have a Speech skill, but it factors into a percentage to succeed, not in pass/fail. Which is an odd choice. You can just ignore the skill and reload a save until you pass if you chose to. All the other skill checks are still always pass/fail
I think the intention was to force every playthrough to be different like how your dice rolls can go wrong in DnD but obv. that's not how it turned out.
Yeah, I get that could make sense, but I'm baffled as to why they did it a second time with F4 and also only applied it to that one skill. It also just kinda doesn't make sense. They use the same words. The other fallout games and every other game with this kind of feature will change the words your character says to reflect their skill. "If I use these exact words in just the right way maybe it'll work".
Nah, that's dumb
“Speech” skills in dialogue use is almost non existent in Bethesda games. In fallout’s case, I would agree, in Elder Scrolls less so, but there still often aren’t any sort of depth in branching dialogue there either.
Yeah I think he's talking about non-gun/non-combat oriented ways to complete quests.
Completely unique branching dialogue trees is insanely hard to do. Even with Fallout New Vegas 90% of the dialogue was re-accessed via backing up to a previous dialogue branch. Even games like Telltale games still have a level of predictability as most dialogues wind up back to a pre-determined route in the end
Fuck, even BG3 with all its praise, is still just “good guy with an ego, good guy with feelings, good guy who’s a dick, kill them” in like 95% of dialogue. And all three dialogue options end up the same way, and if you choose to kill them it’s not like there’s new content to replace it. You just cut off that entire limb of the tree. No “evil branch” to take.
I feel like KOTOR 1 and even moreso KOTOR 2 (which Avellone had a large hand in) nail the branching dialogue.
Honestly I think a big failure of fallout 4 is having the character talk. Being silent allowed the player to fill in gaps in the conversation and made it feel more personal. With the character who actually talks, you are just stuck with whatever the dialogue option they recorded is.
What I loved about fallout 1 and 2 was that having high speech/charisma revealed unique dialogue options without telling you that your speech/charisma revealed unique dialogue options. If your speech was too low, you simply would never know those options existed. And if your speech was already high early in the game, you'd have no way of knowing that it was your Speech that was giving you additional options.
It was a great way to implement it if you ask me, instead of these blatant "Speech 35/50 [dialogue]" that Bethesda jammed in there for fo3.
It was actually specifically Intelligence that gave you the extra dialogue options, not speech or charisma. I remember because there's a specific perk called "Smooth Talker" that has the effect of raising your Intelligence by 2 for dialogue purposes only.
It's a little bit unbalanced, though, since it means that for a talky character Intelligence is strictly better than Charisma in Fallout 1. Originally the game was going to have a "reaction" system where NPCs would have different dialogue depending on their dynamic opinion of you (as opposed to just static conditions), which was mostly governed by Charisma, but they didn't end up implementing it leaving Charisma a useless stat. It wasn't until Fallout 2 where they developed more things for Charisma to do that it started not being objectively the worst stat for every character type, and it's not until Arcanum that they actually implemented the reaction system intended for Fallout.
For some reason Todd is married to the idea of speech not being something that involves good writing in the dialogue options, but a minigame or dice roll.
Just look at Oblivion, stupid minigame. Starfield, stupid minigame. Fallout 3 AND 4, dice rolls.
New Vegas had clever things you could actually say, something someone charming (or competent in a skill) might say. They also had stupid things you could say, which was often hilarious, if you sucked and didn't make the check.
Tbf, at least Starfield and Skyrim had skill checks for dialogue. Oblivion (nor the remaster) doesn’t even have that. Not sure about Fallout tho
Skyrim speech checks suck though. It's just a dice roll labeled as persuasion or intimidation, and there are barely any of them.
Oblivion having the minigame means speech is something you can use when you want, rather than for specific planned narrative branches. I can chat up all the guards in a town and then get them to overlook crimes.
In Skyrim it's not a dice roll, in fact, it's just a hard pass/fail check on your Speech skill level + modifiers from perks. It says "twice as likely to succeed" in perk descriptions, which is misleading a bit - all it does is modify your Speech when checked in the formula.
New Vegas’s dialogue checks were always the right choice to make though. There was never an ill effect from choosing a dialogue option. BG3 at least had some dialogue options that would result in escalating the situation and not a constantly positive outcome
If you skill check Dean Domino it hurts his ego so badly he'll try to kill you once you're in the Casino. You can also end up killing an NCR trooper at the back of Camp McCarren if you mindlessly pick a skill check that pulls a pin on one of his grenades. I think there are one or two other "negative" skill checks in the game.
Lack of any interesting dialogue beyond "Yes" "Yes" "Sarcastic Yes" and "No but I'll come back to say yes later."
Fallout 3 and 76 apparently count for the opposite?
Yeah the "yes, yes, yes, or yes but I'm being a dick about it" was really only an issue in 4.
Bethsda games seem to have issue with speech checks. Starfield tried, and failed with dynamic blurbs that speech still determine if it passses or fails.
Fallout 4 just uses it as a skip fight or ask for more money button.
NV had it so you could do ALOT with it. Sometimes it was even bad to use it (Dead Money comes to mind.) You still had to make sense inbetween the checks to a degree.
Outer Worlds 2 actual has a good system: you can find info in the world and use it to talk to others, with speech being related to bullshiting people or convencing people purly based off of vibes. It was pretty fun.
Now that certainly makes a lot of sense. And I completely agree.
I'm guessing it's because Bethesda's 'Speech' options are inconsequential and lead to the same outcome (3 flavors of yes and 1 no), instead of doing something interesting, like using perks/stats and occasionally unlocking a different story path.
Playing 1 intelligence, 10 luck and low speech in NV was an experience, lol
Is this the guy asking Elon Musk to buy Fallout? Yeah, I honestly don't care what this guy thinks at all
I don't get Chris Avellone and by extension modern Obsidian's obsession with the 'Speech' skill specifically. New Vegas and now Outer Worlds 2 (they pretty much run on the same leveling system) both suffer from the only way to get non-violet outcomes in a lot of cases is having Speech skill leveled up.
Whats the point of having all these skills, traits, backgrounds and information you can uncover prior to encounter boss scenarios when none of it matters unless you have the right speech skill.
Speech 90% of the time is just skipping busy work. It's just less fun to not have it, while games like Disco Elysium have failed skill checks that actually have content to them and where a failed check isn't just a quickload.
Only time it was done well was with Dean Domino in Dead Money, where passing a speech check actually makes him attack you later on. Makes complete sense, as a seasoned manipulator he'd realise he can't control you. But in that same dlc we had it where a speech check was a weird psychology stuff to fuse Dog and God.
The Speech skill line is kinda isane considering that Fallout New Vegas completely broke the Speech System by removing Charisma from having an effect on speech, also making Charisma a really weird stat togehter with Perception (but that one was already dumb in FO3).
Fallout 3's speech skill is better than in New Vegas, but maybe he means what dialogue options are unlocked with it? But even here it is often the same stuff in 3 and NV (Talking down the villain etc.) but in NV it is just an instant win button with a broken attribute system that leads to the fact that the most effecient way to play is 0 charisma and 100 speech.
Isn’t it Chris Avellone who wrote overly pretentious Ulyssys?
He also made alpha protocol, everybody has hits and misses, that doesn’t make you barred off from giving other people criticism.
Man being a Ulysses fan brings me the weirdest strays...
I'm sure he thinks he's being reasonable, but he's adding fuel to the fire here...
He's right. Not sorry.