????? What? If I like bethesda rpg's then that means I dont like "actual" rpg's?? So if I'm currently playing and greatly enjoying a game like...say.....I dont know..... balders gate 2

does that mean by my enjoyment of that game that its not an rpg? Then what is it? Action adventure? Strategy? Point and click? Boy my world is upside down now.

For one Brotherhood of Steel patrols become active even if you didn't do anything for them. Two railroad gets a bigger presence after the BoS arrive. Three ending game ends up with checkpoints that get attacked by the opposing factions or factions you pissed off. Now if we're being little nitpicks and saying "Oh we're only counting what we don't do with factions" because I know that's the bad logic you want to set up just to make Bethesda look bad but guess what! Factions getting stronger from your help is changing the game world. I know, I know it doesn't fit your little nitpicking fun but ignoring facts doesn't get you anywhere.

Again, actually play the game because I can straight up tell you didn't.

when you buy your own franchise you can do what you want with it and then when you go bankrupt and lose millions because you wanted to force some old rpg way of game developing on everyonee you can have fun with that, what you want isn't what most people want, they don't want some old grind out style low action, too much dialogue type of game, modern rpgs are a hybrid, its what sells and its what most people want, i waited for years for the games to evolve, for a long time thats what game developers did, keep shooters linear corridor, hardly any open world games unless they were some type of rpg, and finally afters many years game are evolving and in a good way, open world games are no longer just some midevil type of game, rpgs are no longer just some grind your levels too much dialogue, i like the new type of games that are combining rpgs elements with first person/action/adventure elements, there's a ton of new type of games and its making gaming very popullar, what you want isn't what is working anymore, some old fashioned grind out rpg isn't what most people want or what is gonna sell, look at the games that sell a lot of copies, games from companies like rockstar and bethesda, even witcher 3 isn't selling as well as you would think for being the goty, fallout 4 is a better selling game, lots of people are playing fallout 4 so the old way of game developing is out.

I think he was referring to my post above him, where I mentioned that I hate the RPG genre and only Bethesda (and Obsidian in NV) was able to change that.

And I think he's partly right. They may be still great RPG's, but they are way more accessible for people that don't usually play those rpg-heavy games such as Diablo.

Which is a great thing in my opinion ^^ A game that has such a rich lore, such as Fallout, really deserves as much attention as possible, as long as it doesn't become the next 'mainstream' Far Cry.

I think they're on a good way on improving their games and making them better and better.

You want to see my 344 hours screenshot before i wrote my own medium score review? Is it so unbelievable for you that someone is able to see this game from a totally opposide angle then your own one and decides totally different what weights for him or not? Be kind my friend.

I am wondering that they did it on the fact that Fallout 3 got a nice metacritics score and Fallout:NV even got the best usercritic-Score a 3d fallout ever scored before. The success (even if NV professional scoring was a tiny bit lower) pointed into the totally opposide direction of what Bethesda now created.

The question is: where all these changes REALLY required or are they just a marketing try. The only thing we know is: There was nearly nothing know about F4 before it′s release. They only showed the improved gun mechanics, the settlements and the modifications on the E3. So the giant sales on the first day have only one reason: The name fallout and the known predecessors. Not the game itself.

The result again shows a bit on F4 Metacritics userscore: the game gets a punch, a lot customers seem not to have expected these changes on the game and it′s mechanics.

I saw the same things happening a few years ago where a franchise turned into reduced quest depth, reduced/simplified rpg parts and smalltalk conversatins but lots of coloful explosions and weaponplay:

Diablo 3. Jay Wilson was taken away from the project 6 months later after the bad user scoring and tons of critics cause of turning the franchise inside out.

You still have to keep in mind: it′s only us some here discussing, there are tons of happy and tons of angry customers out there about F4 not talking/correspondenting anywhere. Nobody knows the real numbers.

And there wasn't anything much known about Skyrim before it's release, same with Fallout 3, New Vegas had that as well iirc, so did Oblivion and I'm guessing Morrowind. That's just how Bethesda does their whole thing. The announce the game a few months before release rather then a year before and they don't spoiler everything about the game.

Yes the changes were required, hell a lot of the changes they did like getting rid of karma, skills and improving gunplay were literally things people complained about on these forums. People complained that skills were to east to get to 100 and the fact that few of them did much when perks did a bulk of the work for stuff like weapons and features. Karma was heavily criticized because it was literally useless, it's been literally useless mechanic the entire series. Improving gun-play shouldn't even need to be said why that was necessary, guns felt awful to use in Fallout 3 and NV and Bethesda doesn't do isometric and isometric is only now returning to popularity in gaming but that's still in a niche crowd outside of "professional e-sports" like LoL or DOTA2

Wait, hold up. Now the faction decisions need to change the game world? Why aren't we judging all RPGs by that metric? What makes Fallout 4 that much different in this regard?

I just wish there were land mines. I can practically run away from anything and never blow up unintentionally.

Blowing up unintentionally as a result of stepping on a land mine and then staggering away from a smouldering car that is about to go super critical is what RPGs need a lot more of.

That and Trashcan Karla spinoffs.

If Bethesda can manage to reshape RPGs as a whole to achieve these two glorious changes, then I believe they will become a household icon, as familiar as Nuka-Cola or Dandy Boy Apples.

Since a majority of rpgs don't do thi- actually I honestly can't think of one that DOES do this and I play almost nothing but RPGs. Maybe Warband? But like, Warband doesn't have a main story or anything, it's just "go into this world and conquer or whatever"

This again rememers me of Diablo 3, a minority of ~ 1000 players complained over some years in the Blizzard forums and started changes the majority never wanted and punished off.

Ok, this is no base for an argumentatin as we lack on any numbers, but if that is the reason why these changes have been done i can understand the confusion and sudden bad user scorings.

There's nothing RPG about Fallout 4. You just get to choose Perks and that's nothing new to shooters.

Oh no the bad user scoring on metacritic is because metacritic user reviews are a joke, metacritic doesn't do a thing to stop people spamming bad reviews and well, metacritic is a joke. Look towards people who we can prove have the game like on steam where it's 39,359 positive scores compared to only 9,302 negative reviews.


Except the perks aren't only combat related. You can play a character that usually solves problems through diplomacy and intimidation, characters who stealth it, merchants, settlement builders, I can play a character that mods out their gear or relies on removing mods from weapons and armor, you can pick what factions you want to support, you do quests that have choices, you can choose what armor and weapons you want to use, you can choose to use guns, melee or unarmed. Hmmm that sounds like I can PLAY a ROLE in fallout 4.


So yea, you're really wrong on that lol.

The thing is not that way easy on Fallout 4 as most reviewers are "gentle". If you would not just read the total numbers but about 100-200 reviews instead you will see that most people write "Is Fallout a good game" and say yes and then ask "Is it a good Fallout" and say: NO.

So user ratings on Metacritic on F3 and F:NV are ok but for F4 the critics are a joke and untrusty?

And Steam user ratings count but if you fast-read some hunderets of them most positive reviewers suggest that it′s a good shooter but not a good fallout anymore? You see some relationships there maybe?

And to the perks thing from Porscha:

Again just virtual choices. 10% of all quests offer you to use diplomacy, main story endings only offer death and destruction.

You are so stuck on your choices that you don′t see the that for beeing a choice something needs different results. And beeing able to say yes or sarcastic yes is no choice, cause the result from that is the same. Choice of weapon is none cause you will use the one that kills the enemy and not bring yourself in danger. This all is no choice in the meaning of choice, they are only multiple options leading to a pregiven result, but not a choice where each gives you a different one.

To be honest, I always thought Bethesda could use a few ideas from how M&B incorporate grand-strategy into the RPG. Bethesda games are defined by modular systems upon systems interacting with other systems - they're arguably the most well-equipped RPGs for making subtle and broad changes to the game world based on our decisions. But yeah, most RPGs lauded for their epic "choices and consequences" don't provide sweeping changes to the game world - they provide moral dilemmas in the story that the player must act on, or the game simply acknowledges that you made one choice instead of another with some kind of response. A lot of story-based RPGs don't even have "factions" in the sense that RPGs like Fallout or TES have.

User reviews on Metacritic are a joke and untrustworthy because metacritic does next to nothing to actually moderate user reviews. People have made reviews on metacritic that are 1. Not helpful. 2. Copy-pasted the same, sometimes even put on every single port of the game. also Metacritic can easily be astro-turfed because again Metacritic doesn't moderate it's user reviews nor doesn't require someone to own a copy of the game in order to write a review.

Also reading through the most helpful positive reviews I've yet to see a "good game but not good fallout game" or "good shooter, not good fallout game" in any of the reviews I'm reading. It has positive reviews, reviews that are yes saying it's a good fallout game.

I've never played a single shooter that offered 70 base perks with multiple ranks, gated by your attributes and level. Similarly, I've played a lot of RPGs that offered way fewer options in their character system, including every Elder Scrolls game. So what are you talking about?

I feel like levelling definitely suffered for lack of a cap in Fallout 4 (beyond the OPs suggestion that things are too much of a grind - though things are definitely a grind I think that's par for the course for an RPG). In New Vegas because of the sparsity of perks (15 in the core game, 25 with all the DLC) I feel like that was a defined resource to spend, and that because that resource was finite you really felt like you were committing to a choice. Further, a lot of the perks in New Vegas were more flavour rather than function based - so if you picked something like Terrifying Presence to solidify your character's role it felt like much more of a big deal, especially when the perk itself isn't that useful just rather cool.

Even in Skyrim, you were only given 80 perks, and whilst you could respec them and level to 251 80 perks was a finite number as far as I'm aware. This still meant you had to (at least for any one given time) commit to a certain build, and most people who like role playing with this system would just stick to the one and make a new character for a different build - and for those who just like to play a single character at the very least they had to spend resources to respec (and it was nice that the devs allowed options for both end of the spectrum). Further, though in Skyrim you could make legendary level 100 skills - if you only did in specifically in the skills you used you could still keep your build specific, and you could pretty much cap your character at whatever level you chose so long as all the skills that you wanted to hit level 100 had in the end and you had no plans to further level the skills you didn't like. I thought it was a neat and clever system, and I liked the concept of level while you use as it makes sense.

In Fallout 4, any concept of a specific build is more or less shot - as so long as you level up high enough you can have multiple specializations with all weapon categories and indeed all perks. And sure, you can just not invest perk points, and I'm sure I won't after a point - but it seems like a clumsy and inelegant to not use a resource a game is providing, and isn't really rewarding to the player. I suppose you can try and stay invested in your character for the quests, but after a point they're all radiant which is pretty hollow. When you compound this with the fact most perks are just purely functional and not flavour based barring a few exceptions (invest in another level of this, and see a boring linear increase in your potential) and the fun impact of making choices with a finite resource rapidly diminishes in later levels.

Further, from what I've heard the combat at higher levels as the OP mentioned is still easy regardless of enemies scaling. Implementation of difficulty in an infinitely rolling system is always dubious as they can only give enemies more health/armour or more damage - neither one of which leads to necessarily enticing fights. It's better when higher level characters have unusual abilities, and I know some in the game can become invisible, but still to me the excitement factor of hitting those high levels doesn't seem to be there.

You would need to reach past level 250 in order to take every perk - only a few people have made it past level 100, and the game is designed for you to reach the endgame at level 50 - most enemies won't scale with you beyond that point, and you're easily a god well before you reach level 100. This is only an issue in theory, in practice it's completely irrelevant.

Whereas in Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, yeah perks were "secondary" to skills - but by the time you reached the level cap (especially with the DLC), you'd have maxed out the majority of your skills. Talk about "every character becoming the same".

Which basically means "Even the putatively 'best' RPGs, are really not very good RPGs." Moreover, Fallout 4 is far better as an RPG than any other Fallout or game ever made. Fallout 4 far surpasses every other RPG in existence.

Well here is the thing about no cap, for a lot of people it makes no sense. You don't just stop learning, while it can ruin a build that's entirely on the player. I feel like complaining about "no cap" is such a trivial issue because it's "not doing what other rpgs are doing" which is completely fine, it's fine to do something original in a genre, numerous indie companies do that.

Like, it's such the biggest non-problem problem people try to make but it's again, not a problem because it's entirely on the player to invest or not to invest and players who want to do whatever they want including the idea of having their character expand past said character's comfort zone, something people do in real life, shouldn't be punished for that because of a frankly outdated ideal that makes little sense in an open world game where the game really doesn't end.

and this


Unlike Fallout 4 where you can invest the perk or not in classic fallout games you were forced to do it. You have no choice but to invest and once you reach your build you were forced to put the points into categories that your character probably wouldn't use. You couldn't progress past the level up screen without investing skill points and getting a perk.

Thank you, now i had to take a headache pill...

Once you buy the gun that shoots the additional bullet, and the 95% headshot perk from an companion, the game gets insanely easy on very hard, i got zero perks in improved weapon dmg or dm resitance and i havent encountered an single moment where i could get an problem. Except the badd ass versions of mirelurk but they go down in the end aswell.

Most of the reviews I've read on Steam talk about how good the combat is. Not the RP elements. Also most say the MQ is weak. So great, FO4, a RPG is now known for great combat.

I'm not really sure what to call Warband. Its got some of that same Bethesda charm in it that I love so much, the open world combined with roleplaying, but then if Fallout and TES are far removed from the traditional CRPG way of doing things then Warband is the next step across.

"Nobleman simulator"? Lets go with that. Mount and Blade is probably one of the few games that can compete with Bethesda's work for me.

So an RPG can't have great combat? The RPG elements are fine, sure the MQ can be weak but it's still pretty good but I don't see the problem with the idea an RPG can't have great combat.