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"universally" Fallout 4 isn't anywhere close to universally reviled, it's not even the most contested in the series. Not when Brotherhood is Steel exists, which doesn't have enjoyable gameplay to fall back on.
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literally the worst take of the year so far.
I'd say it was good until like 2019, then fell hard after that minus a few exceptions.
That's probably because you're interacting with people who don't even pay attention to the world around them because they're too caught up in looking at their phones, they're watching it for noise, nothing more.
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No one remembers brother of steel. That was dogshit
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid
This will all end in tears, I just know it.
True & Honest Fan
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I didn't say 4 was the worst, I said it was reviled.
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brotherhood still has the bisexual cannibal with BOMB ASS TITTIEEEEEEEEEES. check and mate, losers
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Campbell_Trio
kiwifarms.net
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4 doesn't imply vault tec dropped nukes so no
Thats 76 and bos actually.
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There's one more aspect of the intro that I forgot to bring up. So I was watching some guy doing an in depth analysis of Fallout 4 (and by that I mean 2 hours for part 1 and an average of 4-6 in 5 part) and he noted that he really liked how in the intro, we got a glimpse of America before the bombs fell. When I first played it, I did not how to feel about it because I kinda disliked it. I much preferred the old world being left to the imagination or having unreliable accounts of the old world being the exposition given that the old world is essentially gone. But I want to hear people's thoughts. Did you like that in Fallout 4's intro?
>IMPLYING
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Fallout 4 had plenty of blandness and cringe, and had the worst Bethesda main quest until Starfield came out. Starfield is shit all the way through, 4 is decent if you just go full Brotherhood or Minutemen because as bland as Garvey is if you like the building system then 2 of the 4 routes can entertain you for a while. Like 3, 4 has its own highlights and genuinely interesting additions to explore and go through and offers the odd quest here and there that's entertaining at a bare minimum. It just dips below a 5/10 in some aspects (a quest, a location, etcetera) and in greater frequency than the other titles, and sometimes it pushes the 5 so hard you feel nothing because something was done with the bare minimum effort.
4's strengths pretty much dictated Bethesda's design philosophy for 76 and Starfield since, yeah, they can't write for shit but at least they can create decent environments to explore. They fucked up the launch of 76 and even without NPCs the writing still ends up shit because the lore gets caught up in the dumb crap it attempts to pull, though from osmosis people enjoy exploring the world. Fingers crossed it gets a server emulator or something so I can see if it's worth any degree of time at all. Meanwhile Starfield is such a monumental fuckup they even tried to half-ass the one lesson they took from Fallout 4 (exploration = fun) and created literal copy and paste dungeons and procgen planets. Horrific.
Before it's argued: I don't think people are looking on 4 with rose-tinted glasses nowadays, it's just the game was always somewhere between a 3 to a 7 or 8 depending on the person and we can just look back on it more objectively now. It's not like we got a Two Worlds II-tier piece of shit, we just a surprisingly average product from a company who has sky high expectations (justifiably) placed on its shoulders.
@Dave. I think they should've doubled down on it. Have us spend time with our neighbours for a bit to grow attached. Then the moment where some of them are trying to get into the vault but are prevented hits a little harder. Maybe if you tag speech you can get an extra 2 squeezed in. Then we wake up from cryo 2 centuries later, forced out of the Vault due to a radiation leak or the nitrogen running out and the Vault itself isn't meant to support life and so we're pushed out into the post-apocalypse with our neighbours and wife & son. This is a much more pressing situation requiring us to engage with the build mechanics as we try to make Sanctuary into an actual sanctuary than what we got, and assuming they do their job well enough, you would want to build up Sanctuary because you want to help your homies.
How/why does the institute kill Nora and kidnap your kid if they don't do it at the start? Well I don't have an original idea but combine The Pitt with The Master: the Institute need a human free of FEV (that shit's in the air) with a not fully developed immune system in order to finetune a way to make radiation a fear of the past, requiring a more sophisticated application of the FEV virus itself in order to get the positives with non of the negatives. The institute minimise risk to your son at the cost of testing trace FEV modifications on human test subjects to gauge the effects before using them on the baby, resulting in a bunch of new abominations filling out the Commonwealth around Boston's Downtown after this point in the quest ala Super Mutant Overlords in 3. Then I guess a potential choice at the end is sacrificing your son/giving a pass to the Institute's experiments for the chance to perfect the FEV virus for the benefit of the world or something.
Anyway, after Nora is killed you'll want to find out who did it and why (the only clue might be a dead synth who failed to teleport away like Kellog and co thus pointing you toward the Institute who you don't know yet + a holodisc of locations marking Vaults and other shelters - one of these shelters is in the same area you would encounter Garvey now and it can play out the same. The Minutemen now become more an extension of the player's own "faction" (Sanctuary), the reason to build them up and fix them is with the intent of creating a force capable of matching the Institute. In this context of having built up something first and then meeting Garvey is that the title of general now isn't just handed out to some random fuck Garvey was feeling zesty for, it's being bestowed to someone who has already proven themselves to be a leader in some capacity.
Whilst I'm also exposing my autism, this fanfic-version of F4 can also remove the Railroad altogether with the goal of freeing synths instead being an optional thing Nate can prioritise for benevolent or pragmatic reasons. As many hands as possible to oppose the institute and whatnot. You're a general, so fucking act like it. Or maybe just have it be one of the secondary goals of the Minutemen before you meet them and their fall is due to the Institute fucking them up rather than some random mercenary faction who gets zero development. At least this way Garvey might join you if only because you're offering him the same thing you're after: revenge.
Then the Brotherhood can either become your suzerain, ally, or enemy. Non-interaction might see them become belligerent, especially if you're freeing synths, making use of automotons, energy weapons, mutants, etcetera - everything to give you an advantage in the upcoming battle. They'd effectively be a consequence for a player who stacks as much shit into their Master-tier abomination force to take on the Institute. Helping them out, doing some quests, then negotiating a deal could allow them to give you a pass on robots and energy weapons, and maybe allow synths and/or mutants if you're especially well-in with them. A reason to ally might be on the uptick of mutants emerging from somewhere in Boston and their numbers threaten to overwhelm the few pockets of civilisation that exist in the Commonwealth.
Fallout 4's plot is repairable by keeping the Institute as this nebulous enemy faction (at least then the dodging of the question, "why synths?" never arises outside of theorising by those outside the Institute), which requires re-framing the reason they kidnapped your kid to begin with. The canon reason is just as contrived and dumb so plagiarising past quests and games is basically an improvement.
What this plot does is make Nate a determined father who declares war before he even has an army and explores every crevice of the Commonwealth for his son. Hell, it still works with Nora given her being a lawyer at least lends itself to politics and shit and even the President is still the "Commander in Chief" even if they don't do any fighting themselves. Nate has to transition from soldier to leader with the Sanctuary dwellers, whilst Nora has to go from leader to soldier as she hazards the wastes to avenge her husband. A prologue of sorts with the neighbours and post-Vault societal development makes the transition for either of these people into their new roles more believable.
The worse offences of 4's main quest (Railroad + Synth question) never have to come up and the build up is entirely on taking the fight to the Institute instead of the limp diversion halfway through of having us teleport to the Institute, play patty cake with our son, before ultimately deciding whether we want to kill him with one of 3 factions or join him entirely and kill 2 other factions. If you want to do a similar reveal to the base game, maybe if you take too long by the time you're beating on the institute's door your son is such a kitchen sink of different strains of F.E.Vs trying to fit together that he's become some fucked up monstrosity or something.
TLDR: Fallout 4 could've been salvaged if they had spend more time with the pre-war intro and actually had it matter in the post-war plot. Fallout 4's plot and events therein make the intro pointless since Kellogg's reason for kidnapping your son is due to his "pure genes" which plays zero fucking relevance in the plot because Father is more or less identical in sensibilities and ethics as any other scientist in the Institute - what the fuck was the point of having pure genes if you do nothing with them? They don't even clone him or have him procreate or anything, it's just a given reason but it amounts to fuck-all. Fallout 4 makes the pre-war opening pointless by its own circumstances.
Either: make it more important to the plot, or get rid of it altogether - Nate being pre-war and Father having pure genes serves 0 purpose to the story. They could've dipped him in FEV and ended up with a hyper-intelligent Super Mutant. Imagine if that was the reunion instead of what we got. Maybe he goes fucking mad in the end, jumps into the whole vat and becomes a behemoth and fist fights Liberty Prime or some other schlocky shit.
4's strengths pretty much dictated Bethesda's design philosophy for 76 and Starfield since, yeah, they can't write for shit but at least they can create decent environments to explore. They fucked up the launch of 76 and even without NPCs the writing still ends up shit because the lore gets caught up in the dumb crap it attempts to pull, though from osmosis people enjoy exploring the world. Fingers crossed it gets a server emulator or something so I can see if it's worth any degree of time at all. Meanwhile Starfield is such a monumental fuckup they even tried to half-ass the one lesson they took from Fallout 4 (exploration = fun) and created literal copy and paste dungeons and procgen planets. Horrific.
Before it's argued: I don't think people are looking on 4 with rose-tinted glasses nowadays, it's just the game was always somewhere between a 3 to a 7 or 8 depending on the person and we can just look back on it more objectively now. It's not like we got a Two Worlds II-tier piece of shit, we just a surprisingly average product from a company who has sky high expectations (justifiably) placed on its shoulders.
@Dave. I think they should've doubled down on it. Have us spend time with our neighbours for a bit to grow attached. Then the moment where some of them are trying to get into the vault but are prevented hits a little harder. Maybe if you tag speech you can get an extra 2 squeezed in. Then we wake up from cryo 2 centuries later, forced out of the Vault due to a radiation leak or the nitrogen running out and the Vault itself isn't meant to support life and so we're pushed out into the post-apocalypse with our neighbours and wife & son. This is a much more pressing situation requiring us to engage with the build mechanics as we try to make Sanctuary into an actual sanctuary than what we got, and assuming they do their job well enough, you would want to build up Sanctuary because you want to help your homies.
How/why does the institute kill Nora and kidnap your kid if they don't do it at the start? Well I don't have an original idea but combine The Pitt with The Master: the Institute need a human free of FEV (that shit's in the air) with a not fully developed immune system in order to finetune a way to make radiation a fear of the past, requiring a more sophisticated application of the FEV virus itself in order to get the positives with non of the negatives. The institute minimise risk to your son at the cost of testing trace FEV modifications on human test subjects to gauge the effects before using them on the baby, resulting in a bunch of new abominations filling out the Commonwealth around Boston's Downtown after this point in the quest ala Super Mutant Overlords in 3. Then I guess a potential choice at the end is sacrificing your son/giving a pass to the Institute's experiments for the chance to perfect the FEV virus for the benefit of the world or something.
Anyway, after Nora is killed you'll want to find out who did it and why (the only clue might be a dead synth who failed to teleport away like Kellog and co thus pointing you toward the Institute who you don't know yet + a holodisc of locations marking Vaults and other shelters - one of these shelters is in the same area you would encounter Garvey now and it can play out the same. The Minutemen now become more an extension of the player's own "faction" (Sanctuary), the reason to build them up and fix them is with the intent of creating a force capable of matching the Institute. In this context of having built up something first and then meeting Garvey is that the title of general now isn't just handed out to some random fuck Garvey was feeling zesty for, it's being bestowed to someone who has already proven themselves to be a leader in some capacity.
Whilst I'm also exposing my autism, this fanfic-version of F4 can also remove the Railroad altogether with the goal of freeing synths instead being an optional thing Nate can prioritise for benevolent or pragmatic reasons. As many hands as possible to oppose the institute and whatnot. You're a general, so fucking act like it. Or maybe just have it be one of the secondary goals of the Minutemen before you meet them and their fall is due to the Institute fucking them up rather than some random mercenary faction who gets zero development. At least this way Garvey might join you if only because you're offering him the same thing you're after: revenge.
Then the Brotherhood can either become your suzerain, ally, or enemy. Non-interaction might see them become belligerent, especially if you're freeing synths, making use of automotons, energy weapons, mutants, etcetera - everything to give you an advantage in the upcoming battle. They'd effectively be a consequence for a player who stacks as much shit into their Master-tier abomination force to take on the Institute. Helping them out, doing some quests, then negotiating a deal could allow them to give you a pass on robots and energy weapons, and maybe allow synths and/or mutants if you're especially well-in with them. A reason to ally might be on the uptick of mutants emerging from somewhere in Boston and their numbers threaten to overwhelm the few pockets of civilisation that exist in the Commonwealth.
Fallout 4's plot is repairable by keeping the Institute as this nebulous enemy faction (at least then the dodging of the question, "why synths?" never arises outside of theorising by those outside the Institute), which requires re-framing the reason they kidnapped your kid to begin with. The canon reason is just as contrived and dumb so plagiarising past quests and games is basically an improvement.
What this plot does is make Nate a determined father who declares war before he even has an army and explores every crevice of the Commonwealth for his son. Hell, it still works with Nora given her being a lawyer at least lends itself to politics and shit and even the President is still the "Commander in Chief" even if they don't do any fighting themselves. Nate has to transition from soldier to leader with the Sanctuary dwellers, whilst Nora has to go from leader to soldier as she hazards the wastes to avenge her husband. A prologue of sorts with the neighbours and post-Vault societal development makes the transition for either of these people into their new roles more believable.
The worse offences of 4's main quest (Railroad + Synth question) never have to come up and the build up is entirely on taking the fight to the Institute instead of the limp diversion halfway through of having us teleport to the Institute, play patty cake with our son, before ultimately deciding whether we want to kill him with one of 3 factions or join him entirely and kill 2 other factions. If you want to do a similar reveal to the base game, maybe if you take too long by the time you're beating on the institute's door your son is such a kitchen sink of different strains of F.E.Vs trying to fit together that he's become some fucked up monstrosity or something.
TLDR: Fallout 4 could've been salvaged if they had spend more time with the pre-war intro and actually had it matter in the post-war plot. Fallout 4's plot and events therein make the intro pointless since Kellogg's reason for kidnapping your son is due to his "pure genes" which plays zero fucking relevance in the plot because Father is more or less identical in sensibilities and ethics as any other scientist in the Institute - what the fuck was the point of having pure genes if you do nothing with them? They don't even clone him or have him procreate or anything, it's just a given reason but it amounts to fuck-all. Fallout 4 makes the pre-war opening pointless by its own circumstances.
Either: make it more important to the plot, or get rid of it altogether - Nate being pre-war and Father having pure genes serves 0 purpose to the story. They could've dipped him in FEV and ended up with a hyper-intelligent Super Mutant. Imagine if that was the reunion instead of what we got. Maybe he goes fucking mad in the end, jumps into the whole vat and becomes a behemoth and fist fights Liberty Prime or some other schlocky shit.
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God of Nothing
kiwifarms.net
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The game was popular and introduced a lot of younger players to fallout, I think that's nice. Saying it is universally reviled is like echo-chamber bluesky/reeera trannies claiming that Harry Potter as a franchise is universally reviled even though Hogwarts Legacy sold tens of millions and got good reviews.
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Given that the entire series was about letting go and moving on from the old world, having a main character who's a reversal of that theme was an interesting idea, and could've worked better had Nate been an actual character with his own goals that he sticks too in a linear setting rather than being the PC who has the choice of avoiding the story entirely. "The man out of time" is always a pretty good concept.
I think seeing the old world was also cool, but we spend too little time in it. I think FO4's whole tutorial section could've worked great if it was set more in a day in the life and then the dropping of the bombs the next morning rather than being set like 10 minutes before everything goes to crap. The Vault was also pretty underutilized, and because of that you have no care for Nora/Nates death or Shaun's kidnapping beyond the immediate first time shock because you've had no time even know about them beyond their role as being the husband/wife and son. Would've been nice if we got some character development, but given how Fo4's decimation of the dialogue system leads to having more NPC's than characters, maybe not.
Nate/Nora is so clearly devastated about the loss of their family but I couldn't really even sympathize since I knew nothing about them, and honestly they don't seem to care much either given that they can shack up with most companions literally only weeks/months after their spouses death, not to mention Bethesda's "avoid the MQ and just explore" policy doesn't work well with a story as intense as 4's. But hey, that's like the 3rd Bethesda game where that's now an issue.
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- Joined
- May 25, 2024
I suspect they were leery of doing so because F3's intro did a similar thing, but lasted so long that people endlessly bitched about it.
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- Nov 25, 2024
I forgot 3 was all vault for it's intro, which yeah that would kind of muddy the waters if 4 just copied that.
I never really understood most of the hate for the intro's of the 3d games, but at the same time I also don't understand why neither Obsidian nor Bethesda ever included a skip intro option for any of their games. Maybe I'm just built different since while they're usually the most boring part of the game, I always make a point to play through them since the game would feel incomplete with out it, and I usually play theses games at least twice a year. Meanwhile most only do like every 5 and they still have time to complain about the tutorials.
At the very least none of them are nearly as bad as the Temple of Trials.
Really? I haven't played any of the TES games beyond Morrowind, and even then I haven't finished it, but out of the 2 FO games I was gonna say 4 had the better MQ compared to 3.
Campbell_Trio
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2025
76's story starting with wastelanders is actually a massive improvement over the original and i would argue is the best written Bethesda fallout.
This i how i feel about any media that people claim is getting reevaluated or blame younger generations trying to "revise history"
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2020
4 has by far the most "well thts fucking retarded" moments. Like when the guy who registrates you to the vault is a ghoul later, even in the same costume. Or the fact tht your robot is functioning somehow. Or kid in the fridge. Or the whole synth idea, especially the fucking gorrilas, like what the fuck.
I can continue and name at least a dozen more
I can continue and name at least a dozen more
foreman 89
kiwifarms.net
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Is 30+ GameOvers thread banned here?
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- May 25, 2024
When you've been stuck underground in an arcology for your whole life, you need some way to have fun, and making some gorillas from biological soup is relatable. Who wouldn't want some funny ape androids to watch?
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- Nov 25, 2024
>4 has by far the most "well thts fucking retarded"
>names some of the cooler things in the game
Ok I'll give you the kid in the fridge but most of the other stuff was handled pretty well.
- Joined
- Dec 21, 2020
Too much backstory. Maybe i don't want play as an ex-solider or a lawyer.
Maybe i was bully in the vault.
I think its fine to give some of the background to your character, after all things you can do in vault is limited.
Skyrim for example didn't had that problem. You are just a guy who crossed the border but aside from that you can be whoever you want.
But Emil has some kind of fetish to make the player be his OC.