I'm surprised that people still think "Fallout staple" means anything these days. This is Bethesda, by their own admission nothing is sacred.

For me, it's not the slide-show I care about, it's Ron Perlman doing some grim exposition. Maybe they can give us some eerie, empty corridor to explore while Perlman talks, or maybe he can do some news broadcast (how that would work in the ending is beyond me). Should be mentioned that Ron Perlman's listed as the narrator for F4 on IMDB, and he's been tweeting about it himself.

As for the slideshow itself, it seems a little dishonest to pass off interchangeable slides as "hundreds of different endings". There's lots of different permutations, sure, but you're just seeing the multiple outcomes for each quest in one slideshow.

Speaking of slides, I picked mostly good options for quest resolutions in my latest F3 play through, though my character managed to maintain a very evil karma, but the ending slides showed everybody dead in Rivet City! What the hell? Yeah sure, Pauli Cantelli ODed, and I sort of pushed Mr Gomez off the bridge tower, but seriously they were the only people I directly harmed (besides Zimmer and Armitage, but nobody gives a crap about them), so at some point my character goes on a killing rampage and wipes out the entire Rivet City population?

FONV had four endings. Legion, NCR, House, Wild Card.

Granted, that is the player idea of endings - an encompassing summary of radically different possibilities - is different to the devloper/marketing idea of endings: a total of all possible permutations of any number of endings, or even just a count of all the different ending cutscenes, even if an ending consists of playing several in sequence (lo9oking at you, ME3).

So a player may say FONV had four, because there were four factions.

But a developer might say something like 50 or 100+, because you could have the Legate or Ceaser, you could be good, evil, neutral... what did you do with BoS? What did you do with Freeside? What about individual companions?

If they're being cheeky, they can even include all the different possibilies as the interact with each other - racking up the number with 'combination' totals.

You have offered nothing substantial, only four straw men in a row. What the NPC says isn't the conclusion of his story. HIs life that follows is.

A http://genius.com/John-steinbeck-chapter-3-the-graqes-of-wrath-annotated would not seem to be the height of storytelling either, but there it is. Tastes vary.

You can also come back later as see that this is true, that is not random spawn kills them off.

Unless you went and attacked settlements, and/or significant characters mentioned in the slides. If all the game can offer the player is random respawned encounters... then what's the point? Why should it bother to allow the player to stick around for that? It's deleterious.

If they had done that in Fallout, the player could have returned the PC to Junktown and killed off Killian ~after the slide gave an account of how Junktown fares under Killian's leadership.

(Or for that matter... they could kill off the whole town.)

Considering that we have 4 male and 4 female I think it is very likely that Male A and Female A is the same ending just with some slight variation to the slide (if there are slides), if that is to be considered its very own ending then Fallout New Vegas had 6 Faction endings and 15 player endings.

Independent - No securitron upgrade.

Independent - Securitron Upgrade

House - N/A

NCR - N/A

Legion - Caesar lives

Legion - Caesar dies, Lanius assumes command.

Then there are 3 player endings for NCR, House, Yes Man, Caesar and Lanius, resulting in 15 total player endings.

And even if we discount the player endings and only go with the big ones it is still 6. Not 4. Sure, two of them are variations of previous ones but they're still their own endings.

I want to know what the long term after effects of all that has happened in the longer term. Only ending slides can do that properly.

Going back to the game world would both require a huge amount change and programming for this to actually be done right and represented within the game world.

Otherwise you just end up going back to all of the places and NPCs to get their story anyway.

OR, you rely on what they tell you after you complete their quest.
"We will be okay from now on" doesn't tell me anything at all. All it tells me is that they think they are safe after you completed a quest for them. For all we know an enclave group will go and wipe out those people not long after.

Or what about things that people can't tell you about? Where it doesn't directly involve just a NPCs life.

Not having ending sliders is a disappointment, not to mention not having the pleasure of hearing Ron Perlman narrate again.

I can only view this as being a bit lazy as it may be harder to implement all possible endings well in slides when the game keeps getting bigger and bigger.

While this is true, in the interests of pleasing people who want to know long term effects and those who want to keep playing, something has to give.

If go on a murderous rampage against everyone the game said was going to be fine, then obviously you've changed events and invalidated that outcome. I don't see that as a big deal.

Yeah I'd consider anything major after the "end" to be narratively "void." If you decide to counter what you'd done prior to what the slides show, that's player choice.

Just because a game is "open world", doesn't mean that it can't have a coherent central narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Some actions a player makes in a game will have immediate results. Some won't show their effects for months or years (i.e, long "after" the game's timeframe). Trying to relate those things via some offhand comments by in-game NPCs seems like it would be reeeeeally ineffective (and would likely be considered as even worse writing). And that's even ignoring all the results that NPCs in game at the time would have no way of knowing.

Having a "here's how it all turned out in the long run" narration & slideshow seems like a great way to do it.

(but, then, as I've said before.... I never felt the game needed to let you keep playing after. Reloading a save from just before the end worked perfectly fine. So the "OMG, the game world hasn't changed to show All The Things" thing isn't a problem for me - playing After The End is just messing around & exploring, so no big deal.)

Maybe they shouldn't have the slides after the completion of the main quest, but rather have a 'retire this character' option in the main menu that would trigger the concluding slides at any point in the game (even in the very beginning when the narration can only lament that nobody ever showed up who could help and blah blah). That way, the conclusion would be based on the state of the game when the player throws in the towel.

I really hope that Bethesda gives us comprehensive ending slides like in the older Fallouts and in New Vegas, and that the post-MQ game world reflects (at least to some degree) the consequences of your choices.

That said, because of the open end gameplay, Ron Perlman should also acknowledge that you could totally ruin the entirety of the ending slides with post-end shenanigans. Because war... War never changes.

I like the slides. I also like to be given the option the continue playing after. Another game that does this is Civilization. At the end it asks if you want to continue, and most the time I don't. I start a new game

That would be pretty cool. Probably needing more outcomes of course, but the option to see how things pan out if you ignore the main quest (or even any quest) is a good idea.

Also, I wonder if they could work your own settlements into it somehow? Maybe based on location, what factions you left in good shape and how well it's doing when you quit. Now that's a big ask.

It's going to end as a cliffhanger for Fallout 5..

That's not a bad idea...

Personally, though - I already do that in the RPGs that I play (even Bethesda's games.) When I'm done with the character and ready for their story to be complete - that's when I go and finish the Main Quest.

My feeling about the end credits sequence is that, on a very personal level, I've felt that's what set Fallout 1 and 2 apart from other games. Even now, most games don't give you much of an epilogue at all. Back then, unless you were playing a Final Fantasy game, you basically got a "Congratulations!" screen and then maybe some credits rolled (and maybe it wasn't just a splash screen with scrolling text.) Even back then, I preferred games that gave a little bit of closure at the end of the game; it was just very rare for a game to put any thought into that aspect.

So the first time I beat Fallout 1, it blew my mind. Not only were they talking about things I'd done and people I'd helped (or hindered,) and how those actions affected things decades down the road, but many of the results were surprising. I thought I was helping one town, but my choice led to the destruction of two settlements, things like that. I couldn't wait to play again a different way just to see how things played out if I made different choices. The illusion was that the game was tracking every single thing I did. It made every choice, every dialog, feel very important - I wasn't just receiving an info dump when I talked with an NPC, I could potentially be altering the course of fate.

So a good closing sequence of some sort is... kind of near and dear to me. That's always been my favorite aspect of the Fallout series, and I really do kind of judge other games I play based on how it ends, in large part (to be fair I place a lot of importance in how a book or a movie or even a TV series wraps up as well.)

I don't think it'd necessarily have to be just a series of still pictures with narration over it, either. Something that just came to mind, but I'd be totally down for it would be that after you finish the Main Quest you could walk back to these settlements or talk to these NPCs and have a narrative kick in as you play. (For example, you go back to Arroyo after beating Fallout 1 and Ron Perlman comes on in the background telling you how Tandi becomes President of the NCR, etc.) Heck, you could even make it a Side Quest that unlocks after you complete the game that sends you back to important places to hear about what you've done (and why not - maybe some graphic wizardry to show you some of this more visually, a la a "flash forward" or something.)

There's just a lot of stuff that NPCs aren't going to be able to convey to you in the scope of the game no matter how long you keep playing the game. For example, if I beat Fallout 1 and could go back to Arroyo, Tandi's dad isn't going to tell me "thanks for saving my daughter. I bet some day she's going to be President of the NCR." He doesn't know what the NCR is - it hasn't happened yet, and he can't see into the future to know what'll become of his daughter.) And it would be kind of odd to save a town and get their well working only to have the residents tell you "thanks for helping us - too bad that because of this we're going to get wiped out by raider in 10 years..."

I'm all for playing after the Main Quest is complete. When the inevitable DLC comes out I won't want to have to load up a save from prior to completing the game just to play it - much nicer to just be able to load up my game and go there. So long as I get a nice epilogue at some point I'll be happy.

GameFAQer?

I totally agree with everything you said. However, I'd like to point out that sometimes a story with an ambiguous ending (or even a completely ambiguous plot) can be a very good thing.

Sometimes it's being ambiguous about what the story meant, other times it's leaving it open about what happens next. Both can be quite powerful if done well.

I don't think that's the way Fallout should go, but wanted to mention it anyway.

I have always wanted this. "The courier after seeing what Cesar, House, and the NCR had to offer, decided to leave the Mojave and all its trappings. The battle for the Hoover Dam ended with the NCR destroying the damn and leaving the Mojave to continue abusing their citizenry with high taxes and rampant corruption back home. The Legion having suffered heavy losses at the Dam returned to Arizona where they opened up a taco stand. House having lost the income supplied by the NCR soldiers on the strip had his employees turn on him and resealed the Lucky 38 and was never heard from again. The Great Khans having been taught how to make some really great chems became the dominant group in the Mojave. They held power through a mix of brute force and chemical compliance."

I have no confidence in the endings being good due to the ability to keep playing afterwards. New Vegas showed clearly with sliders what happened, won't have the same effect if you see what happens because you won't be able to show everything due to time.

The Dragon Age series is a good example of meaningful, impactful endings with the ability to continue after. I have deep confidence.

Only in Inquisition. In Origins it ended after the credits and in 2 you were stuck in your house to do the coming dlc's.

Origins didn't do this?

Huh, Origins in fact did not do this.

That is welcome news. I'm playing Origins, and reading the earlier post caused some upset and misgivings ~at first.