I've been enjoying Fallout 4 from a gameplay perspective, is an excellent action-adventure rpg-ish exploration thing

However,

I find the writing extremely lazy and cartoonish to a point it has broke a lot of the enjoyment for me,

All of the factions are reductive caricatures of ideologies, none of the characters behave logically under the rules the world create for itself

I find unpleasant the way it needs to reduce everything to a stereotype-cliche, as for example the institute while having good intentions are completely oblivious to any moral-ethical consideration other than scientific progress, because Science I guess.

The railroad seem equally oblivious in their own way, they never really explain or explore their motivations other than FREEDOM! like if there was no ethical concerns or even a conflict of interest in granted the same rights to beings that are intellectually and physically superior to them.

You can draw plenty of parallelism with the Brotherhood and Fascism, but then it all looses every single opportunity to make a meaningful commentary, because again F4 writing lacks any sort of subtlety, everything is black or white.

As if in reality and humans beings were unidimensional simple being incapable of negotiation and understanding, I know war never changes and you need an excuse to kill stuff in video games, but common...

The writting is indeed teribble.

Yup the writing is bad. The game may have lost me.

When the conversation versus 3 and New Vegas comes up, this is generally the reason why I prefer New Vegas and then the older games. Bethesda does a lot of things well in the games they make, but the writing is not one of them, at least when it comes to the Fallout series.

In 3, the Brotherhood of Steel where characterized as being white knights of the wasteland and with the outcasts who went against this idea as pretty much being turbo jerks, two zero to sixty opposite ends of the spectrum. The Enclave were pretty much just government boogeyman (which to be fair, they were also dicks in Fallout 2 so that kinda checks out) with the current president of the Enclave in that game having some actual nuance to him. I would say the only character I've liked that Bethesda has done with Fallout is Ashur from The Pitt.

He is by and large a raider king who fuels his empires by slave labor, pretty bad shit. When you advance in the campaign and talk to him you learn his ideals are ruled by a "end justifies the means" type of mentality for today. The story eventually pivots to you having to steal his daughter for the slaves to make him back down. You find out his own daughter is immune to the troglodyte plague ravaging the cities inhabitants and if he could find a cure, he would give it to everyone and try to change the rule of law, he just needs time. He understands his raider army only understands force for its own sake and uses that now to keep everyone working and going along until he can discover the cure. He is still technically a bad guy and is using some ill means to accomplish his goals, but he is at the very leastt not a cartoony twirling mustache of a villain. So I would still view him as a bad guy for some of the means he employs but he had reasons to do what he did, weather you agree with him or not. It wasn't just "I'm a raider king and I kill shit, so MDK all day long!"

The writing in New Vegas was presented in a very grey way, you saw the positives and negatives of each major faction with the Legion being the hardest to forgive. Ceasar made mentions that he didn't want this to be the way of it forever but in terms of providing safety, rule of law, and a step up from just everyone being raiders was the best he saw, agree with him or not. Even Cass, a companion you can get mentions how safe Legion territory is, with all the raiders pretty much dead or in hiding. The NCR has done a lot of good, but some of it is bogged down by bureaucratic nonsense with some people trying to do the best they can,others abusing power for means either selfish or thought as the greater good. Talking with Chief Hanlon at NCR golf made for some interesting stuff. Mr.House makes some pretty compelling arguments for why he felt the way he does.

You as a player can then decide which of these three groups you think is doing the best based on the evidence you have gathered, or you can say eff it and go independent New Vegas and run these other three out. Which may seem as the "best" way to deal with things but I could be misremembering but in the end credits the game says the place is ravaged by anarchy for a good long while until order is restored, once again providing a negative for a positive. Playing through New Vegas I felt by and large most of the characters in the game had reasons or were nuanced for being the way they were. It's still why it's my favorite in the Bethesda style Fallout games and for all the improvements and fun Fallout 4 brings to the table, is why New Vegas is still my favorite. The writing is fantastic and the sense of grey it brought back to the series was fun to explore as I made my way through the Mojave talking to it's various inhabitants.

@jimbo: I see what you did thar

Although there are interesting parts of the games (as always with Bethesda) the overall world/factions is lacking in this game in a way that I don't think they have in the other games. I pretty much agree with all your assessments of the factions. Also although there are good areas in the game world, other areas seem devoid of interesting things to see or environmental storytelling that Bethesda usually does pretty well with in their past games.

I'm someone who thinks Bethesda is usually better than some say but this game feels lacking in some ways. I have enjoyed this game but it shows flaws and wear on their engine and style (the world for example could really be more dynamic. The AI for stealth is the same poor AI as always, etc etc. Not enough core improvements).

Yes

I totally read it as tribble.

I'm coming to realize Fallout 4 mechanical backdrops is what a Minecraft adventure mode could be.

I had an audible sigh of relief to see someone not only beat me to this, but it was also the first reply.

Disregard story, acquire screws and Aluminum.

Al-oo-mini-um. Say it with me, folks. Say it right.

IMO Fallout characters work best when they are congruent with the Wasteland post-apocalyptic concept, in a sense that their only motivation is survival and domination.

They act like barbaric douches living in a wasteland because there is no law, no authority no civilization as we know it.

IMO this is the reason even though somehow overly dramatic and sometimes sloppy writiing of the Walking Dead works, it's all about survival, there are no ideology, there are no politics, there are no values... Only survival

For me the disconnect or incongruity in Fallout 4 is that Bethesda is portraying more "advance" groups if you will.

The Institute is a highly organized and civilized group of scientist, with hierarchy, ideology, research, a functional society, in the other hand The Railroad are a group motivated by sheer ideology, whiling to fight for an ideal of equality and freedom.

Yet no action in the game reflects that, is all expository dialogue with no congruence whatsoever, as for example:

- Father tells you need to destroy the Railroad because of their fanaticism you can't allow them to exist

Are you telling me video game, that this obviously smart well mannered scientist, who is intelligent enough to create artificial life can't bother to get in touch with the Railroad and teach them about the synths? Can he make a negotiation table so they can discuss WTF we gonna do with them? Why are they meaningful for the future of human race?

Call me crazy but my bet is that a man smart enough to create artificial life, has a few extra brain cells to debate the ethical dilemma of its own creation. Yet he always sounds oblivious, he keeps telling you "Synths are just tools", to immediately send you into a quest to retrieve sentient rogue synths... WTF

I know it sounds far fetch, but think about it, no one in this game behaves logically according to their own character, they all act like stubborn kids picking up a fight.

Welcome to Bethesdaland Massachusetts. It's not very different from Bethesdaland Washington D.C. or Bethesdaland Skyrim.

@donpixel: I recommend watching this analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A34poZ6paGs

It's basically if you decided to make fully exploring the awfulness of Fallout 4's writing your life mission for a month and made a video about it. In a weird way, it's cathartic.

The writing in Fallout 4 is, in my opinion, so bad as to overshadow the entirety of the game if not the IP going forward. It has gone from a potential crowning achievement, to needing damage control. Even something as simple as the 200 years in the future thing is so maddeningly stupid and ill-conceived, you wonder how the writing could be the work of professionals.

It infects every element of FO4, and once you catch the virus of noticing, there's no going back.

Game creation is pure magic, and there is so much that I will never understand. That being said, I honestly do not understand how or why the writing in FO4 is this bad. There is not a single character or story beat in the game that makes basic A to B sense. For me, I've cleaned it off my PS4s hard-drive, and I don't think I'll ever go back.

@hotspray: Man the bitterness in your post...

But to be honest, I have felt the same exact thing as you. The story to me was so bad that it really killed any type of momentum I had. If the story was at least halfway decent and Bethesda actually could learn from how other developers i.e. Bioware, Obsidian, Telltale, etc. handle choice based stories maybe just maybe I would've actually bothered to finish the game. I may have overlooked all the other deficiencies of the game. I'm with you, I don't even understand how it's so awful and it's sad because I really wanted to like the game after what they showed at E3.

@shindig said:

As long as you agree to pronounce Nissan "knee-san" rather than "nis-an"

Heeey, welcome to Bethesda games. Have you played Fallout New Vegas? You'd like that one.

No one explains their motivations for anything in that game.

@lawgamer: What about "nii-san"?

If they didn't want this, maybe they shouldn't have built the factory on Wearside.

hey i have a lot of feelings about this

The story/writing/stuff that’s in Fallout 4 is dirt garbage. This game has no idea what it wants to be beyond a forced cishet relationship angst simulator. They force you into a cisgender, heterosexual relationship at the beginning of the game and you have no say in it whatsoever, and both of the characters have their backstories decided for them. The Guy is a military vet, and The Gal is a lawyer and they sure do love their happy little nuclear family. That’s all you get. If you’re not interested in being straight(or bisexual at most) or you have zero attachment to children or especially not the one they give you because there’s almost literally zero bonding time, then the whole story is completely worthless to you. They tell you that you HAVE to miss your spouse and your baby and you really gotta find him over and over and over and over and it’s just bad and poorly done and I don’t care about either of them but all of my ladies are forced to because they said so. With the forced backstory, the elimination of skills and limited dialogue options the only ways you can express yourself through stats or conversation choices are now just “how good are you at murder and how much do you miss your slug baby”

The whole game is a big mashup of settings, genres and ideas that don’t mesh. It’s a huge collection of popular nerd shit and I think it’s awful. The game has no cohesive style or theme. I helped a family of Immortal People kill their dad because he had literal magic powers from an old artifact that he excavated in the 1800s. You have to find this 1950s era noir detective who’s having a big struggle with a Chicago mobster gang and then you follow a dog across the wasteland tracking a cyborg(???!?!?!??) whom you defeat for revenge, then a big steampunk airship shows up(?????), then you go across the wasteland to find a memory machine(????) so you can delve into this guy’s cyborg brain and relive his memories(????!!!!!?!??!?!???) all while dealing with the current popular social trend in media of asking the hard hitting question of Are Robots That Think And Feel People

They do all of this by asking how you feel about Robots Being People through the factions, but there’s literally only one that says “Sure” and the other choices are all varying shades of “fuck ‘em”, mostly in the “They’re slaves” way or “They all deserve death” way, and every one of the factions has completely flawed logic in really bad ways that I don’t feel are intentional. There’s no moral ambiguity here and they often have incredibly contradictory opinions or morals, especially in the Brotherhood of Steel and Institute. (Brotherhood Of Steel: we need to protect humankind from weapons and technology that could bring harm to the few survivors of global warfare. also the BOS, somehow: we need you to steal ten thousand nuclear bombs so our war-robot can fling them with total abandon at anyone we don't like)

I also just have a huuuuge problem with how little faith they put into humanity in these games. My partner has been playing a little bit of Fallout 1 recently, and in that game it says in the opening it’s been ONE generation since the Vaults were locked up and the bombs fell and you go out and there’s civilizations building back up, factions in power, large trading hubs, farming communities. You leave the Vault to find a water chip and the people you find aren’t like “Chip….? Like, potato chips? The only source of food available because the only way we know how to eat anymore is to scavenge old bombed out supermarkets?”, they tell you to go to the massive trading city because they’ll probably know what technology you need. The people in Fallout aren’t idiots, but they absolutely are whenever Bethesda touches them. The intro to settlement construction has you building water pumps to get clean water from underground, so if this shit is so easy, WHY ARE YOU THE ONLY ONE DOING IT? gahhhhhh In Fallout 4 it’s been 200 years since the bombs fell and the people in Diamond City are still in the stadium proper and haven’t even checked the ruined buildings down the street. They act like the bombs JUST fell, it was the same problem in Fallout 3 and it’s even more egregious here because of the amount of time that has passed between you going into a Vault and coming out. It's terribly realized. It's lazy. It's also not a surprise, considering who made this game.

Personally, I really got a kick out of just hammering together a water purifier big enough to supply my little village in five minutes when the entire plot of Fallout 3 was we're all sick because we need clean water. Fallout's still a wasteland because branding. There's no way to justify everything still being broken and crappy without sounding completely dumb and even contradicting its own setting.

But then I don't think video games are ever going to reach a point where sales decline because of shoddy writing, so I'm placing the blame squarely on you, the players.

This is something that bothers me as well, I may be far fetching much, but is one of those things I identify as 100% America, complete distrust and paranoia of everyone, the culture of fear

Most social studies actually say the basic human instinct is to help others in times of disgrace, history proof this theory, countless of heroic feats of regular dudes/gals during earthquakes, fires, tsunami you name it

Make you wonder how do we even survive the rock ages if we don't have solidarity as a basic instinct

Yet in popular media (specially american media), the break up of society automatically implies that former regular human beings turn into psychotic killers automatically, because... plot device?

I've enjoyed Fallout but, yes, the writing is very weak. Compare it to Witcher 3 and it's like poplar opposites of the spectrum.

@artelinarose: You give a perfect example for why giving the player-created character in Fallout 4 a fixed backstory (as opposed to making them more of a blank slate) is kind of a mess. Fallout 3 was at least more ambiguous in that regard, but F4 tries to have its cake and eat it too by giving the player character a very personal motivation for the story (find your son) but still sticking to the range of choices and actions present in any given Bethesda RPG (albeit hamstrung by the need to make the protagonist fully voiced).

I'm not even going to get started on some of the questionable writing in the rest of the game, because I have already done so in other topics. There are quests where the game has its moments, but I think Bethesda could do better and even has done better.

You people are fucking crazy, the writing is great

Yep, Bethesda has some pretty hack-y writers working for them. Is good writing what you're coming to this game for?

Like, I don't complain about lack of world-building in Picross.

@xdeser2: What is something you came across that struck you as great writing?

To be fair, they made a story driven action RPG. Writing is a central pillar in that.

Writing may be a pillar but there tons of pillars to choose from. What I'm getting at is you kinda know what you're getting in to if you've played their previous games. Complaining about it now doesn't make sense.

I don't play the games for their narrative, I play Bethesda games for the story in my head and the tools to help it along.

@getz:

I would argue that your experience of "making your own story" has been deeply compromised by Bethesda's decision to focus on a static backstory with a voiced protagonist. Much of Bethesda's trademark player agency has been removed, and the "clockwork sandbox" nature of Fallout 4 is significantly diminished in comparison to any of their prior releases.

In a way, the writing and design choices in FO4 are SO BAD that they've trickled down to every level, even the "make shit up yourself" group.

I think the writing and story in Fallout 4 are worthy of sharp critique precisely because it was Bethesda's CHOICE to put them at the forefront, at the expense of many other systems.

Can't really argue with that. I actually pretty much said that in my GOTY list.

I feel like I was spoiled by games like The Witcher 3. While I did like the big twist reveal regarding Shaun, the rest of it fell quite a bit flat in my view. I tend not to skip dialogue too much in games, but in Fallout 4 by the time I was 10 or so hours in I started buttoning through stuff because I just knew they were going to send me on another fetch quest or a kill quest. I was also disappointed that there is no option to create a peaceful solution between the factions in the game for an alternate ending. Everyone just hates each other, and there's no option to try to mend fences. I thought the Battle of Bunker Hill was an egregiously terrible example of this, where if you mentioned the Institute's plan to either the Brotherhood or the Railroad they'd simply demand you kill the Institute's Coursers and do what they want. They have just as a mechanical and robotic way of thinking as the Institute they're fighting. Another part about that specific quest that really bothered me is that just a few quests prior in the main story, Institute Coursers are supposed to be this mysterious and fearful thing that nobody really knows a ton about and will never even dare to fuck with, but in that quest there's probably dozens of those fuckers running around shooting lasers at shit and getting shot up just like the Brotherhood Power Armor guys. To each their own, I suppose.