I find it odd that there's this reverance and respect shown for Bethesda's ability to destroy old features. To me, that's a blind belief that "old" automatically equates with "obsolete." I'd have more respect for a developer who can recognize merits of the good old features while weeding out - or much rather improving upon - the bad ones. Instead we constantly get "feature #27 had a couple flaws and only worked 85% of the time, so instead we deleted it and will never re-use it again."

Fallout 2 side quest (spoilers abound):

This is quite a long and a bit complicated quest. First you must have permission to speak with the head of the Wright family, Orville Wright. Offer to do the job for him for free, and he'll tell the player to find out who killed his son Richard by "forcing" a jet overdose on him. Orville names Jules, Jagged Jimmy J, Renesco and the Mordinos as suspects.
From this point on, talking with any of the suspects and then returning to the Wrights accomplishes the quest, but there's much more to do. Talk to Keith outside Orville's room and ask for permission to investigate Richard's room (Your characters INT has to be at least 7). Inspect one of the bookcases to find an empty jet canister. This earns the player 500 xp.
Talk with Jagged Jimmy J, ask him about Richard, then have him examine the empty jet canister. He'll tell you the jet left inside has traces of radscorpion venom in it. This discovery earns the player 500 xp. Alternatively, if you were unable to search Richard's room for the canister, you can dig up his grave at Golgotha where your character, after observing the site, will notice a smell that can be attributed to radscorpion poison. This will, however, earn you the perk "grave digger", and mentioning this little tidbit to Orville Wright will cause him to attack you.
Talk to Renesco, and mention the poisoned jet. He will remember the Salvatores coming to him one day and having him poison some jet for them. This gets the player 1000 xp.
Finally, return to Orville Wright and tell him "Renesco was hired by the Salvatores...." to have him declare Renesco a dead man, then correct him and explain that Salvatores did it, likely to provoke a war between the Wrights and the Mordinos. This earns the player some items, 500 xp for mentioning Renesco, and 2000 xp for revealing the true culprit.
The combined xp rewards for this quest is 4500 xp. The player can also leave out Renesco's involvement, and will not receive xp for mentioning it appropriately. Fingering anyone else besides the Salvatores (Renesco included) as the culprit earns the player 500 xp. Ultimately, it's worth the extra time to investigate and get more xp.
Orville tells the player not to kill the culprit if they find him. Thus, if the player kills Jagged Jimmy J, Renesco or Jules, and tells Orville they were the culprit, he will attack them once they report back, though the player still gets xp. The player can, however, kill the Salvatores and finger them without being attacked. Anyone besides the Salvatores the player names as the culprit vanish, probably killed by the Wrights, so try to avoid accusing Renesco if you plan on buying from him again.

Fallout 3 sidequest:

Talk to Hannibal Hamlin.
Retrieve the Lincoln Memorial poster for Caleb Smith.
Let Hannibal know that the memorial is clear of super mutants.
Side with the slaves and kill the slavers at the memorial.
Alternatively, side with the slavers and kill the slaves at the Temple of the Union.

This, it would have been far easier to simply made Skyrim Oblivion 2 as in used Oblivion mechanism with the needed fixes, Fallout 3 style level scaling primarily. Improved graphic and a few more features.

lol yeah clearly. They're simply good games. Maybe you don't think they're good anymore, a lot of us do.

Sure, you can 'blow up everything and start all over'. It's called "making a new franchise", they didn't have to violate a formerly great IP because of that.

in my book they tore down a great IP and made it a equally great if diffrent IP.

It's all good fun but it's important to remember that these "grumpy old timers" supported these games all of these years with their time and money. That's not to be discounted.

Even if I were to insult Fallout 2 by using the expression "equally great as Bethesda's Fallouts", it still wouldn't excuse the huge differences in the concept of the game/word/narrative. As you also said, it's different, quality of the different product isn't relevant. So it's a spin-off at best, one that should have been a completely new IP with Bethesda's own ideas and everyone would be happy.

Well of COURSE the Fallout 3 sidequest is shorter. First, you leave out the XP and karma awards. Then there's the Linoln memorabilia you can gather for either the slavers or the slaves. Or to sell over to the Rivet History museum. And the rewards are based on your barter skill. Then, of course, you forgot to mention that the Lincoln exhibit is filled with feral ghouls, and if you completed the Tenpenny Tower sidequest, you get a nice item that makes the feral Ghouls nonhostile to you. Or that you can start with the Temple if the Union... or from the Slavers.

As a person who is used to Dragon Warrior/Quest, Final Fantasy, and general table-top games, I feel change can be good and bad, but I don't see any reason that the changes with Fallout 4 are bad or 'dumbed-down'. Some people equate simplified or streamlining to casualization and stupider, but it doesn't. Sometimes the systems are too clunky to easily alter and still keep the game balanced or fair. I see some of the changes, like the skill system, as potentially beneficial to the game, as with many table-top rpgs actually try to simplify systems so that character developing is less complicated and therefore less 'gated'. I can understand the uncertainty that some feel, but going from a 'build system' concept of D&D to a 'character build' systems like Shadowrun, Whitewolf, BESM, and Unknown Armies, I welcome less 'upgrading' as that lets me get back t the game sooner.

not everyone, Im a fan of the classics but honestly I find that Beth take on the IP is a refreshing step. If you wanna trample around in the past thats your choice. But I rather see Faklout in the hands of beth, then gatheribg dust as nothing.

Well, I don't understand that logic. If someone took Planescape Torment or Icewind Dale or I don't know, StarCraft, and turned it into a linear FPS with racing minigame (something like RAGE), you'd also be happy just because the brand would be re-used, even if something totally different? (assuming you are/were a fan of course )

I don't know why you bring up things that aren't in Fallout 3/NV (like linear gameplay, pure FPS, or any real racing). These things don't advance the conversation in any way. Many people who like the BGS Fallouts, like me, enjoy some FPS elements, but an RPG heart. This is something I have noticed many 'old schoolers' espouse, but the game still retains an RPG heart and while it may be less RNG based, that doesn't actually diminish the game's rpg elements, as I have played 4+ RPGs that use very limited stats, rolls, or leveling. Many are great and some of the best experiences in an RPG I've had.

as long as they respect the previous core themes, why not, to me a franchise is not defined by gameplay, but themes and concept, so for example to me Fallout is not defined by the isonetric view or the turn based combat, its defined by thingss like the 1950 sci-fi tone, the post apoc setting, etc. Beyond this a dev should be free to make there own interptation.

Tabletop games has to use simple systems or it would be too much bookkeeping to keep track of it all, on computers this is not an issue so you can run complex systems up to the TES skills who improves on each use.

However its easy to make systems very complex just because its cheap.

Now like lots of other stuff an more complex system tend to have more bugs and be harder to balance. this is not only an game thing.

Other software tend to be more and more complex, also making it less stable. Probably main reason for IE to be replaced in WIndows 10.

Tax systems get more and more complex to try to be more fair and to close loopholes. However more complex systems generates more exploits.

Violate sounds so eww. I feel like they could have made a new IP, but then again doing a whole new Lore system with the same team would have been way to much back and forth. This is why Bioware has more than one team doing Dragon Age and Mass Effect seperately. With Fallout they could keep the original lore and still make it their own by setting the game on the East Coast, not having to step on toes and deal directly with the other games in the series. Is it perfectly done? No, because nothing is perfect. I am glad that we got more of Fallout because it is a franchise that actually has potential lore for many stories to be told about it. And if Bethesda had not bought the IP, then who would have? EA games? Activision? It could have been much worse than people claim it to be now.

Yes because its a Fallout 3 sidequest which means it invariably boils down to going on a dungeon crawl and then maybe getting to make a choice between good or evil options if its one of the complex ones as seen here. Some just have you go on the dungeon crawl and then return to the NPC. Some just have you open a dialogue box with a bomb and return to an NPC. I guess later you have to go to a location and press a button if you take the evil path on that one. The Lincoln memorabilia can be collected at any time and has nothing to do with the quest. A piece of equipment making the fetch item portion of the quest easier is not complexity anymore than having power armor and a minigun instead of a vault suit and a 10m pistol would count as quest design. Starting an identical quest from two separate NPCs is not a sign of complexity.

You can take out the XP rewards and just boil it down to the steps and you'll note that the Fallout 2 example is still more involved and both checks your character abilities and involves the player in putting things together and accurately identifying the right suspect and the real motivations. Its a good, well-designed and well-written quest that is head and shoulders above anything Fallout 3 produced (because Fallout 3 had no interest in producing a game like that) and that's whats different and interesting about the originals compared to Fallout 3. You can like or dislike what you please but that's the difference and the reason Fallout 1/2 have the reputation they do.

Yes, I've never said it was defined by isometric view or combat. But other than the universe/lore, it also is (well, was) defined by great writing, both on large and small scale, amazing worlds that make sense, maturity, absence of power-fantasy...

Heh, you almost make it sound as if they bought it only to have some basis to build their alternate Elder Scrolls on because unlike Obsidian or pre-EA Bioware they don't have enough creative power to... well, create a new universe.

As for the IP, if they can't stay true to the core values, it should have stayed dead, like PST, BG, IWD, Arcanum, and others. Nothing wrong with that. But if they let Obsidian do a proper Fallout between Bethesda's 'Fallouts', I guess it's somewhat OK. Assuming Obsidian doesn't cave in and lose their talent (MCA left, after all).

Edit: Whoops, forgot this

I bring that up to illustrate that changing core values of something and pretending like it's the same thing is never good. And for the record, I've never said F3 is not an RPG, it is.

I'm not saying they are bad. I'm just saying they weren't as amazing as everyone makes them out to be.

It's completely fallacious for Pete Hines to claim that nothing is sacred in Beth's design philosophy.

BGS has been iterating on-top of a core immutable ethos since Morrowind (if not before).

Every BGS game since Morrowind has had the sacred precepts of:

An Open world

A dialogue system

Main quests, side quests and miscellaneous quests

"Player freedom is still our absolute number one priority"

The ability to go where you want "You see that mountain? You can climb it"

First and Third person perspectives

Real-time combat

A profusion of Intractable objects

An emphasis on exploration for its own sake

Environmental storytelling (something Bethesda games rely upon quite considerably)

Considering that this development team purportedly "blows everything up" a lot of sacred pillars seem to survive the blast...

Well, the two TES Adventures games were excpetions, but they're ancient history by now.

But it's true, the core is always the same.

Well Primate, that's a hot fresh batch of subjective opinions that simply differ from mine. This isn't gonna go anywhere because you are very good at debating, so let's just agree to disagree.

As I've mentioned, my first post was just a half truth satire. We all just love Fallout here

All of which is your personal opinions, not the defintions of a franchise, all of the above for example in my mind also applies to Fallout 3 writing, the writing itself is diffrent from the old games, but I still use those words to describe it. Neither of us are right or wrong, they are just opinions and a franchise is not defined by concepts that are opinions.

Please don't do this. I know it's a favourite argument on these forums to claim that facts are opinions, but real-world argumentation doesn't work like that. I'll give you a better parallel, do you think that if Criterion bought the rFactor IP and made a game very similar to Burnout only with realistically modelled cars, everything would be OK?

Of course, they're old games. Technologically limited as they may be, they're still good games today that I play on a semi regular basis.

As for Van Buren, I don't like to think of it as a good example. As we know the company was in dire straits. I like to think the quality jump from FO1 --> FO2 is more indicative.

Regardless, I'm not attempting to turn this into a matter Bethesda v. Black Isle. I'm just as happy that Bethesda revived a comatose franchise as the next guy.

I don't know what to tell you brotha. I just really like Oblivion. When Skyrim was released I was mad that classes and attributes were gone, but since then I've changed my mind and like Skyrim quite a bit. I could never change my mind about Oblivion though, I love that game. BGS doesn't make BAD games. I play everything they've made since Morrowind frequently. If you want to count NV, I never stopped playing it.