It honestly baffles me how someone could play twenty hours, not even get to the second quest in the main story, and then get bored and quit.
About 60 hours here and I haven't even been to Diamond City, or whatever that big cluster fuck south of me is. I've literally crawled over the entire northern half of the map above the line it demarcates.
I've ALWAYS been a neutral in Bethesda games, every single one. It tries so hard to get you invested in their storylines and my first instinct as a player is to reject it. Imma guy who woke up hundreds of years after my life died, or who was dragged from their previous life and thrust into a new one. Me ignoring their main questline is the ultimate expression of my independence and choice as a player and as a character in the game world. From that vantage point I can take a dispassionate view of the politics and conflicts of the times, because I'm still ultimately a stranger to this world. Trying to find:
my kid in FO4 is pretty much the exact same thing as trying to find my dad in FO3. Someone the game has told me I'm supposed to care about, with about 8 minutes of introduction that is painfully obvious as a punctuated introduction. That is way, way less appealing to me as a player than "What is that over there?" just on its face.
If Bethesda really, really put the work into their quests, it would be the best position to play the game from IMO. Observing the state of a conflict and taking surgical action to resolve the conflict in the way you feel best serves your interests or the interests of the world. Instead they have hundreds of quests with an A (kill one side), B (kill the other side) and C (do nothing and/or take a specific alternative) option. Which is alright. But it doesn't motivate me to jump into their quests. The morality choices only make sense to me in Beth games if you subscribe to the one or more irrational beliefs that underpin them. "All Synths are dangerous." "The world needs order and a leader no matter the cost." "Nords 4 Life." "Imperial rule is best because Imperial rule is best." "Brotherhood of Steel is always right."
So yeah. Why would I saddle myself with an ultimately uninteresting set of choices when I can have total freedom and be constrained by no moral/political philosophy except that which I create? I have more fun effectively creating the Kingdom In the North and deciding what gets to live in my Kingdom....than I do passing moral/ethical/political judgment on the more developed parts of the world.
As an example:
It doesn't take long to figure out what Beth's game is here. "All Synths are bad, the price we pay to get rid of them is worth it." I'd almost have bought that....were it not for their entire method of discovering Synths taking the form of a battery of arbitrary psychological tests. Sure, the hatred of Synths is bad. Sure, the human cost of innocents killed by Synths and Covenant alike is bad. But what tore it for me was this slavish adherence to a stupid, fallible psychological test like from Blade Runner. If the people in Covenant had actual scientific or technological means to discover Synths, I might have walked away from the whole thing and just been like "You do what you gotta do I guess." But the belief they held was so pants on the head obviously stupid and flawed, so completely intractable and one-sided, they never rose much above the level of "bandit with a cause" for me. And so they got vaped. I personally didn't even feel the need to kill them. But the game left me no choice. They wouldn't let me leave with the girl, and so they all had to die.
As a counter-example:
I walked into this situation and observed the dynamic. The drug peddler is a businessman. The kid refuses to pay. The mom is willing to kill to protect her son. The son is a moron. The mother means well. The drug peddler is fair but, at the end of the day, a hard and ruthless man. What to do?
I decided no one needs to die here. Drugs aren't bad, but refusing to pay your debts is. I don't like executing people who can't pay their debts though. So in my kingdom, it is both ok to sell drugs and to take matters into your own hands when someone fucks you over. But that wasn't worth ruining this lady or her son's life over.
So I convince her to pay her sons debts. Because in the end only really he suffers, the one who started all this in the first place, by owing his mom. And now I have a trading post with a nefarious drug dealer (who doesn't seem interested in dong anything else besides hanging out there.....) within the boundaries of my kingdom, and the only thing it cost me is that the mom isn't my bestest friend in the whole wide world, despite the fact she still sells to me.
It's not a quest with a shitload of depth but I felt like it presented an honest conflict, based on honest, believable motivations that I could get behind. And it left me room to find a solution that felt like it fit my worldview.
It's setups like Covenant which make it hard for me to run out and do longer Beth quests, and prefer the shorter quests/events which aren't trying so hard. Sort of like how short stories are often better stories than full length ones because they're so much tighter.
Because in more important Bethesda quests, the principles are not fully fleshed-out people. The right questions are never asked of them or what they believe. The foundations on which beliefs are built are shaky at best, 100% arbitrary at worst. Thus it has always been in Beth games. The quests are acceptable if you wholesale buy into the beliefs that inhabit the world and don't question them. If you stand apart from the world and look at it with a critical eye, most of the higher order beliefs in the world just seem absurd. Kind of like how Bethesda has to throw a lot of random, generic content into their world to cover all the empty spaces, in terms of ideas and themes, they often to the same thing so that the world is covered in several very broad themes (Nord Independence.) For example, the Oblivion Gates? No one gave a shit about the Oblivion gates. But at least it was an uncomplicated and adventurous theme that provided global context. (Go through strange portals and kill demons before they destroy your world.) Since Oblivion though the big themes in the games have gotten more political. Just what the doctor ordered right? Not if they're not executed interestingly.
It's why I think Morrowind still has the superior introduction despite all the games since it. You get your Bethesda style intro and then the game just drops you in a foreign land with few to no preconceptions to motivate you. It's all discovery. No tugging at the heart strings plot. No grand plots of world-shattering importance that you inexplicably are always in at the ground floor of. I can barely recall most of the Morrowind plots at this point because they're all pretty distinct in their own way.
Author
Topic: Fallout 4: It Just Works (Read 837759 times)