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.
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