It is a gaffe whenever the public relations representative of any company makes a statement in public that could be misinterpreted by the customers.

I addressed that in the post which came after. Like I said, I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to them. This is their second attempt at Fallout and I believe it's agreed upon (at least here) that Fallout 3 was Bethesda getting their cherry popped. Hopefully, they have internalized the criticisms from Fo3 and adapted them to the dialogue. They have stated as much in interviews.

Whether the voiced protagonist hinders the dialogue remains to be seen. We've had three to four encounters that showcased the character dialogue. The vault-tec guy, Codsworth, Dogmeat, and Preston (spliced and inconclusive). You're entitled to believe that it's going to be bad, but it's conjecture at the moment

It can also be a realization that after the third or fourth playthrough, player agency and the ability to walk away from dialogue you've heard before can be a relief to some.

1 I can agree with that, and I've hoped (rather quixotically) that Bethesda realized some of their errors with it being their first excursion into this universe.

But what worries me, is that Fallout 4 looks like BGS is attempting to play it safe (preponderantly across fallout 4, with the voice acted PC being one of a few exceptions).I'm not convinced Bethesda has ameliorated previous issue, or that they're prepared to take any substantive risks (bar again the voice acted PC).

2 I don't think the inclusion of a voice acted PC is a poor one, it's the dialogue system that disconcerts me (though the PC does sound a bit uninspiring/phlegmatic).

It is an issue, I believe that much. I would have preferred a system that just showed the dialogue outright or at least on hover (Deux Ex:HR style). I think each voice actor has discussed in various podcasts/interviews that Kal-El, the voice director, and other developers, had worked to ensure that the paraphrasing was accurate to what was being said.

We won't ever see a situation like LA Noire, and that was all because the "coerce" feature had been renamed from "force" because play testers never chose it, even though it was the right option.

Here is one of your arguments:

Players skip dialogue only when they believe it is bad.

Pete Hines skips dialogue in Bethesda's games.

Therefore, Pete Hines believes Bethesda's dialogue is bad.

I don't accept your major premise. People skip dialogue for many different reasons.

Here is another of your arguments:

Pete Hines doesn't believe that Bethesda's dialogue is awesome. Therefore he believes that Bethesda's dialogue is bad.

So, dialogue is either awesome or bad? I don't buy that one either.

There is nothing to defend (and maybe I do suffer from Pete's affliction).

Pete says that he lacks the attention span for long dialogue. That is a self-evaluation, not a critique of dialogue.

I don't care to listen to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, but I have heard enough of it to consider it a fine symphony. Mozart's Symphony No. 25 is awesome! I'll happily sit through that one. I do not consider Mozart's symphony to be better than Beethoven's. I just happen to enjoy it more.

In that interview, Pete explains that Bethesda plans to do dialogue Fallout's way (i.e., "very traditional" and "old school"), not to attempt something new. His response does imply that Bethesda may switch to a new system in the future (and they did with Fallout 4).

I read the interview, you know... And his response was, "Dialogue wasn't a battle we wanted to pick."; and "there were other things that were more important for us to spend time and energy on, like trying to incorporate VATS".

[Dutifully cherry picked, because those are the take-home highlighted points to distill from the interview.]

His later response [on a series that notably shocked its players who didn't consider the ramifications of their choices]: "One of the things we really tried to avoid is surprising the player with whether they've been good or bad. We wanted to be clear to you that you're making a conscious choice to be one or the other." ~Essentially neutering that aspect of the Fallout series... There were players of the original who casually condemned settlements to death or harsh fates by their deliberate (or sometimes thoughtless] actions; and come the end were so shocked that they played the game over again, to clear their conscience.

Where we see that with FO3, that it was a developer choice to baby-step the player though each decision with a forced explanation of the obvious (or what should be deducible by them); point being that they left no room for the player to be surprised by anything, nor the chance to either miss it or work it out for themselves. Instead it was an offered selection... "Do you feel like chocolate or vanilla today?"

Different games for a different audience. It means we well never see the likes of another https://youtu.be/6Ql1Dsx__6Y?t=8m1s for instance ~it's apparently against policy.

(Additional aside: Try to imagine that conversation... where you can just wander away from it at will.)

Players should be aloud to make honest mistakes without the developer's helping them along with a moral categorization or ensuring their intentions are carried out. It makes it impossible for the players to choose an outcome [to help or hinder] for their own (possibly flawed) reasons, and/or gut instinct... they can never be wrong. It's the 'everyone gets a trophy' school of RPG design.

Pretty much every RPG has this problem, so to pretend it's a failing of Bethesda is disingenuous at best.

Your alternative is to have a game that runs on rails. Boooo-ring.

You mean the same series where the devs intentionally changed the endings of Junktown on the premise that the game HAD to reward the good and punish the bad?

Fallout was never about hard decisions an unforeseen consequences, everything was as by the book and clear cut as possible in the old games.You had to be monumentally thick-headed to not see what your actions would cause in any Fallout game.

You mean a character often criticized for being unrealistically and unbelievably knee-jerky, to the point that the devs actually had to make a comment in the Fallout bible about how to get her to name you head guard, or w/e the position was, because it was so unbelievably finicky?

Good, I would rather not have a game filled with such one dimensional caricatures in the game.

He's only marginally involved with the actual development of the game but hey, yeah BURN THE WITCH!

I think he was talking about replays where you already know the dialog.

And who here hasn't zipped past dialog you have already seen a couple of times?

I'm sure others already said this, I didn't read the entire thread, but you know people like us hanging around this forum, we're a tiny minority. Most people that buy Fallout 4 and every other big game don't follow gaming news, they don't anolyze games like we do, they'll never see this article. "Get on with it!" is probably how most of the Fallout 4 players will think.

Do you know any semi-serious so to speak gamers? They tell you about a game or console they bought or plan to buy, you mention something fundamental about it, or some bit of info that has been known for ages, and they've never heard of it. They might catch a bit of news or a rumour here and there but in general they're clueless. They base their buying decisions on entirely different and less complex information. Like everyone always says, that's why they show so much action in trailers and ads regardless of what kind of game it is.

What he said sounds bad but they know the market and they design most elements of the game for that market, not for us. I'm not saying we're at a Call of Duty level here, but the truth is probably more harsh than many of us would like to believe. Gaming is big business and that's just how it is.

Totally agree.

It is obvious that they are looking at what mods people loved the most in Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and Skyrim.

It is also obvious that they are building on what they learned from Fallout 3 and Skyrim.

I'm sure mistakes have been made, but until we can actually play the game, why believe the worst?

To be fair, Bethesda's dialogue writers are kinda crap.

The danger of his quote isn't that he wrote the conversation system, but that the goal of the dialogue writers and conversation system was to cater to people with his 'get away from dialogue, damnit!' philosophy, which is why he said that. In other words, his statement is a statement of the intent of the developers.

If he was just speaking for himself, he is a terrible PR guy - which would be a bit surprising. His job isn't to talk about himself; his job is to hype the game.

Yeah, that was a pretty lame cave in too.

When the devs were posting on the FO3 forums, I posted a few times requesting they slip the original ending line for Junktown in the list of Perlman's lines; in the opes it could be released as a resource that would let modders fix the Junktown ending.

I don't know that you've played those games. (But it doesn't seem likely IMO.)

Not the point. As the PR guy, his job is to make everyone believe every facet of the game is the very best ever. That includes the dialogue. if I was his boss, I'd fire him.

Fallout 1 solved this but then people got all up in arms over it.

Either you solve the quest quick enough or you lose.

Find the water chip within X days.

You failed?

They died.

Eliminate the mutant threat within X days.

You failed?

Mutant utopia.

I wish more RPG's would do this.

It allows players the chance to do what they want in any order they want but also forces them to grab themselves by the neck and get down to business so that they don't fail the game. It's lenient, but harsh.

Several years ago I worked on a Fallout 2 mod that was basically making a whole new game and we had all sorts of fail conditions planned. One I remember off hand was if you got caught stealing in one particular town, rather than immediately start combat a dialogue window would open and they would arrest you and hold a trial (you did have the option to resist and fight your way out). You'd have the opportunity to defend yourself (some ways planned to avoid conviction) but if found guilty you'd be executed by hanging after a day or two. During that time you were to be held in a jail cell and you had a few things you could do. One was interact with the bed to sleep till the next day. Another was, if strong enough (Str 10), you could break the jail door open. You also had the option to pick the lock if your skill was high enough. There were a couple other skill based ways out of the cell as well but if you couldn't escape through any means and waited out the time, you would be hanged and it would be game over. The end game would be a looping animation of a shadow cast on a brick wall of someone hanging by the neck, gently swaying back and forth in the breeze, and the narrator saying how you died a criminal and the people that depended on you were doomed by your actions.

Unless they consciously decided to market the game to people who don't like dialogue.

But yes, if I were his boss I'd still fire him because making the decision to deliberately market the game to people who hate dialogue instead actually trying to write good dialogue isn't a decision that I'd support.

You know the range of folk who post here, so you know that's an impossibility.

They've said they are not going to stress if someone doesn't like their game, which is the right answer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEg1VXzV4Rs&t=1m20s

I believe that someone must have gotten overruled... I think they eliminated that one in the official patch.

*I also wish more developers would include common sense timers on various events in the games.

Honestly I find the trend for disposable dialog (that you can walk away from), to be very disturbing, and a harbinger of bad times to come in game design.

(I suppose the real harbinger is the deteriorated attention span of the mass audience. They design their games for the market they want, and the market clicks through the dialog. Todd Howard mentioned the same thing in his George Mason speech; Pete is possibly just echoing the corporate consensus as his own, and so relating an opinion the masses can identify with.)

That was terrifying lol.

I feel that this is a much more innocent comment than many people are making it out to be (yes I did read the interview). I feel it was more a comment about how, at times Pete didn't feel like listening to a whole convo about something that didn't matter to what he was doing in-game or it was something he's already heard during his play-through (which was probably in the hundreds of hours). I also feel his comment about Naughty Dog was based off his, probably, single play-through and single interaction (how many times did you play through Uncharted1, 2, or 3?). He is probably talking about going to people he already talked to or not being as interested in a line of dialogue due to who-knows-what reason. There are literally (a correct usage here), many reasons that he was happy to skip dialogue in FO4, and only a handful mean that the dialogue is bad. In any shape, I feel that the way you react to this interview is more a rorschach test of your current happiness with the game, than any kind of definitive commentary on the dialogue. It's just people jumping at the ghosts that they want to see, nothing more, as pretty much every one else that has worked on the game has praised the writing (and listening to Brian, Courtenay, and Kal-El, I get the impression that the dialogue is going to be much better than some of the previous games).

You did more than dutifully pick those points. You surgically removed them from their context, which comes from the interviewer's question: "You've gone for a very traditional dialogue system. Did you consider trying something new?"

Pete replies that they decided not to try a new dialogue system, that attempting a new dialogue system "wasn't a battle we wanted to pick." There were things "more important to us" than trying something new in a dialogue system.

Pete's meaning becomes even clearer when you consider that the folk responsible for writing the dialogue are not the ones who would design tne system for dialogue. Pete would not present writing as being compromised by activities that don't involve writers.

As Pete explains, the decision to go with first-person, action combat demanded a lot from the developers, because Bethesda meant to retain the importance of the PCs stats in combat, and they meant to retain aimed shots. If they had diverted developers from those goals so they could also try something new in a dialogue system, you could expect to get worse than we got from Fallout 3's combat (and the writing still wouldn't have been any better).

I think that Pete means surprises that the player cannot anticipate, not surprises that come from the player's failing to consider the ramifications of his actions. Regardless, if Bethesda doesn't turn out the difficult choices, it doesn't matter what Pete means. I guess the same can be said for the dialogue too.

It's my opinion that Bethesda earnestly tries to make a proper Fallout game, that they did not decide "Who needs Fallout? We'll make Oblivion with Guns!" I know that you and others feel differently, and I have nothing to say to change your minds. I've got some virtual ice cream, though.

'New' meaning what exactly? A new https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wf_2V7wLkI interaction? I don't think so; new scope is more likely IMO. So they downgraded the series' dialog by sticking to familiar TES.

Infinite monkeys remember? The comment sure seems to be about the caliber of the script not being their main focus.

Even in 2008, I would have been more than content with a Diablo 2 clone set in the Fallout universe, if their primary focus was on the depth and complexity of the script and its options to affect the character and the narrative. I couldn't care less (than I do) about their integration of VATS.

Is that not the self same thing?

No.

Surprise:

Player goes into a quest knowing that either A or B will occur. C occurs instead. Basically Tenpenny Tower "good" resolution.

Failure to anticipate:

Player goes into a quest ignoring that either A, B, or C can occur. Either outcome occurs

The former example is essentially a [censored] plot twist that occurs at the end of the story.