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[Ultimuh]

...Why was there never an actual Diablo in first person. Oh my god. That'd be fucking great. Same theme, same time-period, same hilarious amount of enemies, but you're in first person.

gosh darn it i want that a lot now

So you want Skyrim with completely randomized loot?

You're implying that Skyrim is a first person Diablo though. Which in itself implies that you've either never played Skyrim or never played Diablo.

With the right mods Skyrim can indeed become almost like Diablo.
True though, Skyrim might never have radom dungeon generation, but there are plenty of other things that mods can do do emulate the Diablo experience.

[MarcAFK]

Fuckit, where's my dungeon crawl mod?

[Virtz]

If you think 0-5 (or 0-3) perks, hardlocked to level, and hardlocked to a primary stat, are the equivalent of assigning skillpoints...  Then I'm sure you loved Skyrim?  I had the impression you were more a Morrowind fan, but maybe you welcomed that convenient streamlining.

Yeah they dropped some skills between 2 and 3, because they were translating into three dimensions.  The Outdoorsman skill didn't make sense without random encounters.  And it sucks that they capped skills at 100 for some reason.  But Fallout 4 is an entirely different category of game.  Fallout or not, it's just another perk-based shooter in terms of mechanics.  They dropped or combined several more stats, even counting these ridiculous "perk" replacements.

What happened to taking mentats to solve a puzzle?  That was in 3 and NV, but now it's just a tiny temporary XP boost.  That's all intelligence does anymore!  It's gone from an optimal stat to literally useless, comparing characters of equal level.  So good luck with those level-matched enemies.

Want to solve a quest nonviolentally?  Put on your best clothes and drink some liquid confidence that you made by assigning those int-based skillpoints to Survival and crafting special concoctions- no, none of that.  Enjoy a pure CHA check to maybe get some trivial info, or occasionally avoid a firefight.

Besides, why compare it to FO3?  I loved FO3, but NV really improved the RPG mechanics (besides nerfing VATS to hell, which only seems to bother me).

As far as I remember, most of FO3's skills only really did anything meaningful in 25 point increments anyway. And while I like Morrowind more than the Action rpgs we're getting, I prefer that either part be on par with other games in the genre rather than leave both mediocre, and as such I still consider Oblivion and FO3 the low-point of modern Bethesda. Plus I don't think Bethesda has the writers and world designers to pull off a slower paced RPG like Morrowind anymore. Like they tried to reintroduce parts of Morrowind in Dragonborn, but it just wasn't good.

Between 2 and 3 they also made everything scale to your level so hard you start the game by butchering half the security team of a vault and still have enough stamina to go and butcher an entire town right outside it, along with a herd of deathclaws. And that's with a totally average build. You don't need stats for anything, you could just beat the game at level 1 if it didn't force level you whenever you earned enough XP. FO4 at least reintroduced more dangerous areas and enemy types that'll murder you at the start (or took it from NV, I suppose).

And well, what happened to taking damage some time after taking stimpacks? They weren't health potions before. Why did radiation become something that kills you after at most 1000 seconds rather than something that does it slowly over a longer period? What happened to HPs? They were in double digits throughout most of the game in 1 and 2, and now you start off with over a hundred. Why is every late game enemy a Frank Horrigan level bullet sponge? What happened to injecting enemies with meds? What happened to wrecking doors? What happened to electronic lockpicks? What happened to power armour? It could shrug off small arms fire in previous games, so why is it storm trooper armour in 3 (and thankfully restored to the walking tank it was supposed to be, in 4)? What happened to miniguns? They've been garbage since FO3. In fact, all weapon types have had this bland DPS balance applied to them.
It just goes on and on, and some of it FO4 actually undid, such as the power armour being crap, but all the worst balance changes that made everything in the game world so bland were in 3, as far as I'm concerned. And you could argue these changes didn't make it less of an RPG, but to me they made it an RPG so bland it could be an MMO.

I'll give you the lessened quest choices, but I sorta expected that after Skyrim didn't do it. They gave up on the one improvement to their RPG mechanics from FO3, even if they were poorly written. I guess it just made it harder to script quests and they didn't feel like it was worth it.

NV improved it, alright, but that was Obsidian. Doing complex questlines with decent to good writing in otherwise buggy and janky games is their thing. I don't imagine Bethesda trying to do what they do any time soon. At most we can hope for an Obsidian spin-off to a Bethesda game happening again.

[Krevsin]

I would murder, beg and steal to get an Obsidian-developed game in Fallout 4's engine.

If I repeat that sentence long enough it's bound to come true, right?

Right?

[Teneb]

I would murder, beg and steal to get an Obsidian-developed game in Fallout 4's engine.

If I repeat that sentence long enough it's bound to come true, right?

Right?

Actually, just let Bethesda do the game except for anything related to writing, and hire Obsidian for that. Sure, gameplay still won't be stellar, but it's probably the best possible situation that could maybe happen.

[Krevsin]

I would murder, beg and steal to get an Obsidian-developed game in Fallout 4's engine.

If I repeat that sentence long enough it's bound to come true, right?

Right?

Actually, just let Bethesda do the game except for anything related to writing, and hire Obsidian for that. Sure, gameplay still won't be stellar, but it's probably the best possible situation that could maybe happen.

To be fair, and this might be a controversial point, but

Bethesda never really made a game with stellar gameplay. The closest they've managed is "decent".

[symonthewise]

What is an example of stellar gameplay?

[nenjin]

Dark Souls?

I agree non of their games have ever been stellar. But Morrowind was fun. You could own that experience via enchanting.

Since then you're just plodding down the pre-decided gameplay path Bethesda has mapped out.

[Ultimuh]

You could own that experience via enchanting.

That and the ability to make your own spells, (I think? My memory is kind of vague.), spears (I miss spears), throwing weapons, ability to leap great heights and distances, a variety of daedra, non-generic enemies. And so on..

[nenjin]

Yeah, I basically was including spell creation in that. It was great in Morrowind, neutered in Oblivion and completely absent in Skyrim.

[Flying Dice]

And you could argue these changes didn't make it less of an RPG, but to me they made it an RPG so bland it could be an MMO.

And I would completely agree.

I'm just saying that it's pretty much into No True Scotsman territory when you start trying to exclude RPGs from being called RPGs because they don't adhere to the narrowly defined terms you've come up with for the sole purpose of excluding them.

[Virtz]

And you could argue these changes didn't make it less of an RPG, but to me they made it an RPG so bland it could be an MMO.

And I would completely agree.

I'm just saying that it's pretty much into No True Scotsman territory when you start trying to exclude RPGs from being called RPGs because they don't adhere to the narrowly defined terms you've come up with for the sole purpose of excluding them.

Well, that's another can of worms called the "what is an RPG?" topic. Thing is there's no official definition. People have different definitions for what constitutes an RPG, and how much something has to adhere to that definition to be a plain or "pure" RPG rather than a hybrid, a different genre with RPG elements, or just a game from an unrelated genre all together.

[Sirbug]

No, being able to defy your attributes is cool.

Being able to master any specific skill because you're intelligent is cool.

What do you even think was the god stat and the dump stat?  Because I can't think of any, except possibly dumping luck.  Which *gave a straight bonus to every single skill*

What do I mean by god stats and dump stats? Well, for example, you said yourself

Being able to master any specific skill because you're intelligent

Meanwhile Charisma is almost never checked substituted with Speech skill. Endurance was a dump stat. Agility was a god stat because 10 AG is a difference between shooting once and twice with most guns.

[KingofstarrySkies]

Speech was faaaairly broken. I still preferred it to Fallout 4's style, to be honest.

[Flying Dice]

Oh yeah, CHA was a dump stat through and through. END as well, since gameplay tended to favor the same old super-high-damage stealth alpha strikes where you instagib most of the enemies and clean up with VATS. LUK was a dump stat (especially after the level cap was raised by DLC and mods) since you'd max your skills pretty quickly anyways and it only affect regular crits, while sneak attack crits were guaranteed. STR wasn't quite a dump stat in 3, but you could safely leave it at 4-6 points, wherever you felt most comfortable having your carry weight at. It became a core stat for most characters in NV to some extent because of the return of weapon STR requirements. PER could safely be dumped unless you were doing an energy weapons build from the start or needed the crutch of the psychic compass markers.

AGI was core in 3 because it gave you your AP for VATS and applied to two of the most important skills in the game. It only became more core in NV because they added extra utility to it. INT was likewise core because it directly increased your rate of advancement, affected three key general skills, and was used in (what felt like to me) much more than 1/7th of the attribute dialogue options.

So yeah. Pretty much every character in 3 and NV would pump AGI and INT plus one or two other stats, leave STR at average (unless they pumped it), and dump the rest into the gutter. Unless you were doing a deliberately suboptimal build, that is.

4 did a very good job in that regard. CHA and LUK are both obscenely broken, PER and AGI are both very strong, and END had some additional utility added while INT was made a bit less strong, leaving us with a situation where the three weakest SPECIAL stats are still decent enough to make you regret dumping them. Moreover, the feat system Bethesda implemented and the ability to increase SPECIAL stats after character creation has resulted in a dynamic where there are fewer numbers to watch increase, but there is a much greater sense of impactfulness behind level-up decisions. It used to be that the biggest and most impressive things you could get were generally skill milestones (i.e. what are now the lockpick feats) and numerical increases to one thing or another, barring the occasional Bloody Mess and Mysterious Stranger. Moreover, most of the really interesting stuff was hard-capped by level so you couldn't get it for most of your playthrough.

In Fallout 4 you can start getting interesting abilities as early as level 1 (depending on your SPECIAL spread), a lot of the weaker feats that were kept have been bulked up or combined (Hey there, Mister Sandman), and a lot of the really mundane ones have had more interesting effects added to their higher levels.

So yeah, if you like RPGs because you like watching a bunch of largely meaningless numbers increment upwards a little bit every so often, that's probably what you're missing in FO4. But no, it's definitely more like an MMO or Diablo than it used to be.