The BIG Fallout 4 Retrospective

24 Comments

1. If you yell at me, I'm legally allowed to cry in a corner.

2. Waiting for a particular youtuber to say "No, I do not accept the Fallout 4 BIG retrospective."

3. 8 hrs?? Can I come work for you?

4. I played 100 hours of fo4 the week it came out and not much of it since then. I exhausted the game to its full extent then. And now, i only played Starfailed for like, maybe 10 hours max? because they learned literally NOTHING aside from "don't voice the mc in big RPG". like its LITERALLY the same game, 10 years later. its tragic and embarrassing. Especially next to BG3, which proves that if your game is GOOD people will turn up for it, you don't need to dumb down a game to appeal to the widest audience.

5. So when is part 2 of the video dropping? 8 hours is kinda on the shorter side after all

6. Good, I needed an excuse to finish my settlement. It got all the 4-star merchants and a hotel too. Speaking of which:
   
   The problem with the settlement system is that it needed to be the main mechanic of the game for it to work. And it's a good pitch too, getting to build your own town. It's just that Bethesda is best on exploration, while town building demands character writing.
   A thing I hate in the Travis questline is that the player can't be the one that goes on a date with Travis.

7. Fallout 4 is a fun sandbox to mess around in, but it's not a great narrative or a fleshed out world in which to become immersed. Approaching it the same way you approach other RPGs or even older Bethesda titles is a way to set yourself up for disappointment.

   My personal favourite way to revisit it is to completely ignore the main story and treat the game as a settlement building and logistics simulator, with amazing mods like Sim Settlements. I'll come back, set up a few huge settlements and ensure they have solid supply lines, not even get to the point where you confront Kellogg, and then all the scripts running for the settlement side tank the game but I'm satisfied.

   Someone described Starfield as a game for time-poor parents, something that people pop into to relax for an hour here or there but not something so deep that you have to get invested in the story or develop an emotional attachment to experiencing everything the game has to offer. With that framing, it's hard to be as critical of what the game is – you're just not the real target audience. This hurts a bit more with established IPs like Fallout, but with games like Baldur's Gate, current state CyberPunk 77, and the Witcher, we're still eating well.

8. this game always felt like when youre eating a bowl of cheap cereal, only to realise that its going soggy and gross too fast, so you barely have any chance to appreciate what is actually enjoyable about it before being left with an unappealing, disappointing slurry.

9. Sorry bud, synths are not people. If you want to keep your synth Mrs Nanny as a pet that's fine, but a military organization in direct opposition to the institute can not allow one to remain in rank just because they were fooled by it's infiltration.

10. Just a quick video before I go to bed

11. btw you can skip to the end of the memory den sequence by just running past everything

12. May I just point out why the solider is wearing what looks like T-60? Isn't that armor a post war armor made by the brotherhood?

13. I know you refer to Bethesda as this massive corp like Sony or Microsoft, but Skyrim and Fallout4 were made with really really small teams compared to other AAA studios, (around 100 people) and Bethesda game studios is one of the only studios that doesn’t force crunch time on their employees. (This is from someone in college about to enter the game industry) They aren’t the corpo greed monsters some people project them to be. Even after the Microsoft acquisition, there’s a lot of heart and experimentation in starfield, even though it too has its flaws

14. Wouldn't the easy option to finding out if someone is a synth is just to wait? They don't age right?

15. this vid's going to take a few sessions to get through but i just wanted to give my thoughts on FO4 before i go through this. I do love Fallout 4, for what it is, it's a genuinely incredibly well build map with a great sandbox & a building system that very few games of it's style have, let alone given how surprisingly decently built the system is given it was BGS's first go at it, pair that with with survival mode & the game becomes one of the best survival sandboxes to play in. Fallout 4's big issue is it's not an RPG, or atleast is _barely_ an RPG, roleplaying is heavily nurtured due to the restrictive dialog system, perks playing zero role in dialog, having a voiced protagonist, already having a clearly defined backstory (Ex war criminal military vet/Ex Lawyer), the leveling system being changed mostly for the worst, choices either being rare or meaningless, choices you _do_ get generally boiling down to "be nice"/"be sarcastic" (leads nowhere/back to the nice option)/"be cartoonishly evil", generally poor writing (sorry Emil you just kinda suck at writing anything nuanced), etc. Fallout 4 is a great sandbox survival game, i'm not even saying the old "it's a good game but bad __Fallout Game__, i really believe it just fails as an RPG full stop.

16. When I first played the game, I was so excited to have another in the series that I just overlooked so much of what was wrong with it. Sometimes I still go back, if I wanna have some weird power fantasy moment. But most of the time I really find myself yearning for the experiences that 3 and New Vegas brought me.

17. Good gameplay, terrible story.

18. my main issue with the fo4 storyline is that no matter what, you're in a straight relationship with a baby pre-war. yes, the american ideal of a nuclear (lol) family is clearly what they were going for, but as someone who doesn't want to have kids and is queer, i feel like the storyline is so restrictive that it's not fun to play through for me. my kid this my kid that, i don't care because i saw the kid for 2 seconds as a baby and now he's an adult when i see him next!
    a more interesting plotline could be your partner was taken by the institute, you're looking for them as they were when you saw them last, following the trail of a synth version of them as with shaun, but then when you infiltrate the institute, they're the mastermind behind it all.
    i fear even with this change it would fall flat, because we don't develop a relationship as the player to our "nate" or "nora". we should have been allowed more wiggle room in the prewar world.
    imagine if we could live as nate or nora for a day, do what they do for a living? as we're traveling into boston for our job or something, we get hints through news coverage and whispered asides of how serious the war is despite the rose colored glasses of prewar america. maybe as you're going through the day, more and more things don't line up, the visuals switch occasionally to postwar rubble, and suddenly you're awake in the cryo pod. your partner is missing or dead, and you are the sole survivor. THAT would have been a much better way to get the player immersed. my only hope is that the next main title in fallout will be nothing like fallout 4.
    all that aside, amazing video as always! 💖 i love getting to know others opinions on one of my favorite video game franchises.

19. Does this mean Skyrim retrospective confirmed ? 🤯

20. i don't even like emil but its getting more and more annoying to see his quote about players not following the main story being reduced to "story doesn't matter" so they can clickbait viewers or whatever. emil is becoming todd howard 2 and its really disappointing to see people not realize that making a scapegoat like that is really stupid and immature.

    i've also noticed that bethesda actually does seem to listen to feedback from fans, but they just prioritize the wrong things or mess up the execution. an example is fallout 3 was criticized for its shit gun feel, so they ended up getting help from newly acquired id software to help them make the guns feel cool to shoot. but now the cool gun feel is being prioritized WAY before things like quests, characters and story. i've noticed similar things across their games, it almost makes me sympathize with them, like they're really trying to do better but… just have an unfortunate case of the stupid (i have terminal stupid, so i can relate.)

    also, i've never played fallout 4 because it looks really boring and shallow to me.

21. Finally, I was running low on multiple hour long video essays of Fallout ❤

22. 10:40 in fallout 1 entire town of necropolis dies from dihydration if you just take the water chip. So ghouls surviving for a month without water may be possible. 200 years though? Nah dawg

23. You know, not too long ago I was playing a modded run of the game, and when I got to Vault 88, the raiders there were non hostile. I opened the door without attacking them, and found out that the three raiders at the door are scripted to walk inside the vault, but then just hang around in the room beyond, pacing around and fighting any ghouls that they see. But nobody playing the base game would ever see this, due to raiders being hostile be default. Could be that there was supposed to be a trigger or something to let them get inside, but was switched off.

24. You probably know this, but you can actually skip some of this by walking to the next memory before you are told to. Saving some time in the process. However, you can not skip the last one.

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