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[SeriousConcentrate]

Speaking of Mass Effect

Talking Someone Out Of Racism In The Span Of A Single Conversation

Can't say I remember this. ME3 or Andromeda?

[AzyWng]

Was thinking of my time with GRID and Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012 version), and I just realized a simple, brief, but immensely painful peeve often occurring at the beginning of a few games:

Weird/No Control Explanations.

In GRID, I don't think the player is ever given an in-game tutorial. I think it's one of those really old games from back when computer games involved a physical disk and manual (woah, technology), but all the same...

Most Wanted has no such excuse, though - you're just dumped onto one of the game world's streets like the victim of a carjacking and asked to travel from there to Point B, and I had to look up keybindings just to accelerate and brake.

Also, Binary Domain's mouse button prompts are on keys that look the exact same as the regular keys, except they have "LMB", "MMB", or "RMB" printed on them in very blurry letters. Hooray, SEGA/whoever developed that game.

[Neonivek]

You're really straining for more reasons to hate Bethesda here, Neo.
One of Bethesda's biggest strengths in storytelling are those small visual stories scattered across the gameworld. They definitely don't make up for Fallout 4's story faults, but to say they're just people projecting story onto random things is just a falsehood looking to hate on Bethesda more.

It isn't irrational dislike.

It is that a lot of people read FAR too into them and have invented intense interconnected stories that weren't there... when a lot of it (90% of it) was just them adding props.

Which gives Bethesda too much credit (and feels apologist) and gives them a license to do less work. "Ohh no, our story is great! see there is an apple in that school house! and there is an apple bakery in town, so the apple in the school was clearly given to the teacher by the kid of the owner of the bakery"

Then again Dark Souls is starting to lose its "Immunity to criticism" due to making the bulk/majority of its story completely backstory/setting.

So I am sure in a few Fallouts... people will finally go "Yeah, staging a scene isn't on its own good story telling"

---

It is this whole "you have to piece the story together yourself" is weird in that no matter how little, limited, or even flat out bad that story is... People will eat it up!

I don't understand why.

[Chiefwaffles]

People are allowed to appreciate aspects of a game even if they or you consider the overall game to be bad.
I don't think I've ever seen people just "eating it up". Just appreciating how cool they are. No one is forgiving any flaws they would perceive in the game just because of the storylets.

[Neonivek]

I guess, as long as no one is making excuses or saying that it in anyway REPLACES a story.

Because it doesn't replace actual storytelling. They prop it up so it can soar higher. (well assuming it has no told story and instead is purely visual)

I still say people take their praise too far.

[Iceblaster]

The problem with FO4 is more that most of the quests just aren't any good (95% of all quests in FO4 are just variations on "go there, kill things, retrieve thingamajig") and that having high charisma, rather than being a testament of your character's quick wit and clever thinking was usually just "do a thing a normal person would do". The fact that instead of giving you interesting dialogue or story consequences it usually just saved you a quick firefight didn't help either.

All quests in any game can boil down to this if you don't care to look at the game. The radiant quests from the BoS, Minutemen, Railroad, and Institute aren't meant to take over the game itself. There are a ton of non-radiant quests in the game. Only thing the player has to do is find them. I agree, the speech system was weird, but I mean. The developers said they wanted to redo it for the next game, so it's not like they aren't listening :v

I guess, as long as no one is making excuses or saying that it in anyway REPLACES a story.

Because it doesn't replace actual storytelling. They prop it up so it can soar higher. (well assuming it has no told story and instead is purely visual)

I still say people take their praise too far.

h-have you been to reddit. at all. unless you're in r/fo4, mentioning fallout 4 just brings the people out of the woodworks for criticizing it.

Sure, Reddit's a small amount of people, but still :v

[Hanslanda]

Sure, Reddit's a small amount of people monument to the sins of mankind, but still :v

FTFY

[SeriousConcentrate]

Sure, Reddit Tumblr's a small amount of people monument to the sins of mankind, but still :v

FTFY

Fixed that fix for you, though you might have been at least a little right.

[wierd]

You are BOTH wrong, that trophy goes to 4chan, and always will.

[Shadowlord]

_{Yes, I have this achievement.}

[overseer05-15]

Sure, Reddit Tumblr's the Internet's a small amount of people monument to the sins of mankind, but still :v

FTFY

Fixed that fix for you, though you might have been at least a little right.

Last ftfy

[Krevsin]

The problem with FO4 is more that most of the quests just aren't any good (95% of all quests in FO4 are just variations on "go there, kill things, retrieve thingamajig") and that having high charisma, rather than being a testament of your character's quick wit and clever thinking was usually just "do a thing a normal person would do". The fact that instead of giving you interesting dialogue or story consequences it usually just saved you a quick firefight didn't help either.

All quests in any game can boil down to this if you don't care to look at the game. The radiant quests from the BoS, Minutemen, Railroad, and Institute aren't meant to take over the game itself. There are a ton of non-radiant quests in the game. Only thing the player has to do is find them. I agree, the speech system was weird, but I mean. The developers said they wanted to redo it for the next game, so it's not like they aren't listening :v

I wasn't even talking about the radiant quests, more about the other non-proc-gen'd quests.

The assertion that all quests in any game boil down to that is false, as there's a whole bunch of quests out there that are about investigations or entirely narrative in nature.

On further reflection, I have been wrong in my initial assertion. The problem with Fallout 4's quests isn't that they all boil down to "go there, kill people", it's that the game never really makes you care about the characters involved in them. Even when investigative and narrative quests eventually climax in shoot-outs (good examples, the search for Kellog and Travis' quest) you as a player aren't really made to give a crap about anything. You're there, the people have guns and are making shooting noises at you, you have to turn the quest in to get XP and caps. And when the game offers you non-violent conclusions, the payoff is usually terrible, making the usage of your charisma feel pointless and fails to provide the needed catharsis to really give you a sense of conclusion.

You can choose to shoot the leader and the goons threatening you or you can talk them out of it, with neither option providing a satisfying climax to the non-existent build-up. At least the firefights, repetitive though they may be offer some sort of catharsis while the conversation inevitably ends with "hey let's not kill eachother".

A good counter-example done within the same very game is Far Harbor. The quests in that (aside from the radiant ones) DLC are far better structured, with characters that, while not original or particularily deep or developed, at least have some personality (or rather character archetype) to them. Quests don't always end up in boring firefights with uninteresting badguys the game pulled out of nowhere, focusing rather on the player's interaction with the three disparate communities on the island, all of which are constructed of side characters that while not brilliant are at least memorable. Couple that with main questlines that pretty much always tie back into the three communities and you get to know the plights of the residents of the island in a way the Commonwealth never really does.

It's a much tighter narrative and that is reflected in the quests you do Except the radiant ones which are just pointless filler as per usual, even though they try to tie them in with the fog thing (which is BTW super annoying and really hamstrings my enjoyment of Far Harbour, especially on Survival).


edit:

Speaking of Mass Effect

Talking Someone Out Of Racism In The Span Of A Single Conversation

Can't say I remember this. ME3 or Andromeda?

I was mostly jokingly referring to Mass Effect since Bioware games have some of the most egregious examples of this sort of writing (talking people out of beliefs that are supposed to be a deeply entrenched part of their character in a single conversation) but if I remember correctly, there's an explicit example of it in Mass Effect 3 during one of the sidequests when trying to recruit some humans to add to your win-o-meter. I may be talking out of my arse or misremembering, so take it with a salt-licker's worth of salt.

I do understand why this sort of thing happens in RPGs when dealing with speech or the equivalent but it's often very clumsily written. Many RPGs from all sorts of developers have examples of it, but Bioware RPGs stick out for me because of the way they are structured (i.e. much more linear and narrative-heavy missions and quests).

[Iceblaster]

What I was saying is that you can boil down any quest in any game to just 'talk to this guy shoot/beat up those guys, take loot.'

No matter the game, if you remove any narrative the quest has, remove any reason to do the quest, you can boil the quests down. The Kellog quest ends in a shoot-out because, incase you hadn't played the game, he shot your spouse and stole your child. Frankly, it'd be ridiculous if you weren't able to shoot him in the face. He took everyone your character has left after the bombs fell.

The Travis quests ends in a shoot-out because Vadim has been taken captive by the guys he brought in to fake a bar fight to help make Travis more confident. You take Travis there with the assumption that after saving Vadim, he'd finally get over his perpetual fear of failure(?) and be more confident in himself. Sure, his confident persona is basically a facade, but tbh, it feels like he at least was less of a nervous wreck

So yeah. There's more to those quests than 'talk to the guys, shoot them, take loot.'

[Krevsin]

Like I elaborated in my post, the problem isn't like I initially stated that every quest is exactly that, it's more that the characters involved are so rarely engaging or interesting. Travis' quest is actually one of the better constructed ones in the game. Let's break it down.

You get word that one of the Bobrov brothers was asking for you. You come to the Vadim at the bar and he gives you the setup for the quest. He wants to make Travis, the neurotic radio host whom you've most likely heard on the radio already. Of course, Vadim wants to use the time-honoured method of getting Travis into a fight and needs your help. You agree to the plan and the setup is done. You know who the people involved are (Vadim, Travis and the muscle for hire he got for the fight) and why you're doing it (to give Travis some confidence and thus make his radio broadcasts better). You've also been introduced to the personalities of two of the characters. Vadim is a russian stereotype gregarious, friendly man who comes off as a bit too gregarious and friendly but genuinely wants to help Travis and is ultimately a Jolly Good Egg. Travis is neurotic and lacking in self-confidence but genuinely likes doing radio and is also ultimately a Jolly Good Egg. The plan (predictably) goes awry, but at that point you as a player are invested in these characters and the ensuing gunfight actually feels like a resolution of a quest involving people you care about. There's a gunfight, the kidnappers are dealt with, Vadim is rescued and Travis is made insufferably worse on the radio more self-confident with a cute little ending thing about him finally working out the gall to ask out the waitress at the Dugout Inn.

It's a neat little dramatic structure with a properly done setup, climax and resolution and you as a player are at all points aware of the stakes and the characters involved and their role in all this and the quest has consequences on the world around you that you can clearly see.

Compare and contrast to the mission where you have to go rescue Nick Valentine. After reaching Diamond City you go to his detective agency for reasons of him being a detective and you having a missing child. Once there you find his assistant very upset at the fact that he's gone missing while investigating a case. She directs you to his last known location where you find out he's being kept by a bunch of gangsters in an abandoned subway. The gangsters immediately open fire upon you even though you've had no interactions with them and they seem to be more organised than the raiders you've mostly been fighting up to this point. They thus become just another flavour of "thing to shoot". After shooting your way through the hallways of the unfinished Vault, you get to Nicky and only there are you given the full explanation for who the gangsters are and who their leader is and why Nick is being kept there. (Note that this in and of itself isn't bad and could potentially work but what makes the quest fall apart is what happens next.) You come back to the entrance of the Vault after more shooting where you meet the leader of the gangsters where it's explained to you that Nick and him have a shared past and that you can solve this (mostly) non-violently. The problem is that Skinny Malone is the first of these gangsters that you can talk to and choose to not kill. This only happens after you've killed an entire vault's worth of his goons.

So you as a player are only informed of this key actor in this quest at the end of it whereupon you get to choose to spare them for reasons that have only just been revealed. You can have nobody die, you can have just Skinny's psychotic girlfriend die or you can kill everyone and there isn't much difference. If you kill Skinny or if his girlfriend nothing changes, there's no consequence for it apart from Nick dropping a few dry lines. The resolution is that Nick is back and neither Skinny nor his girlfriend get referenced ever again, despite the game making a big deal of how Skinny and Nick have a shared past. It's a narrative mess.

So, the setup for this quest is all right (get there, rescue nick) but the quest stumbles when the gangsters open fire on you for no reason whatsoever (They do not know why you're here, they can't just magically know you're there to rescue Nick and the game makes it clear that they're not just random raiders hooped up on drugs and disease but instead intelligent and organised criminals but there's no mechanical difference between them and raiders. You come near them, they open fire at you) and then just collapses in on itself when you're introduced to and given a brief rundown on the history of the man who's supposed to be the main antagonist for the quest and a choice between sparing him and killing him within the timespace of a minute.



The problem is that most quests in Fallout 4 aren't like Travis' quest but rather more like the rescue Nick quest. While they all involve bloody murder, they are not set up or structured well, which makes it hard to care for the details of what's actually happening in the quest and makes it very easy to just strip the quest down to its essentials (i.e. it's just "go there, kill shit, bring a thingamajig back").

The same problem occurs in many MMOs, where the problem isn't that the player just goes around, killing shit and bringing quest items back to the storyteller but the fact that the player is never made to care for the characters involved due to the lack of a good set up and structuring of the quest. A quest should be a small story either contained within itself or connected to other stories within a questline. If the game designers screw up the story aspect of the quest, the player will not care for it and just strip away the narrative to see that they're only going around, killing things and bringing items back to the questgiver.

[itisnotlogical]

Even in MMOs I liked and played for a decent amount of time, I rarely cared for the characters or story (except STO, that game has some alright story missions). All my goals were related to improving my character, and my story revolved around my character's strengths and weaknesses. In WoW I cared a lot more for my mage than I did for all the Warcraft lore in the world.

Sometimes, the story being just set dressing isn't a bad thing.