Nah, it's straight up dumbing down. Beth's motto post Morrowind.

Well, to be fair, before Microsoft bought up Bungie so they could have a system-seller for the first XBox, Halo was being developed for Mac & PC (it was actually introduced by Steve Jobs during a big Mac conference....)

But yeah - I've done PC and consoles since the 80's. They both have their place, and their plusses & minuses.

edit: and yeah.... "dumbed down" (along with "streamlining" said as if it's a curse-word) just gets thrown around on game forums waaaaaay too much.

You ARE aware of the sales figures for, say, Skyrim for PC vs console, right? Without consoles generally, you probably wouldn't be getting most of the PC games you get now.

I don't see why skill checks in dialogues should be discarded with a four choice maximum. You can always have all dialogue choices available, and if the player character fails a skill check (or gender check, or faction affiliation check, or available funds check, or any other check you care to think of) then selecting that dialogue option just has a fail result.

Sure, the NPC has to have some additional dialogue like "Sorry, I don't think you're up to it" or "I said 100 caps, are you taking the [censored]", or "You're not in our gang. I don't trust you that much". But those fail dialogues would be fairly generic, and could be shared among all the NPCs voiced by one voice-actor, so you'd only be looking at a bit of extra recording for the unique actors and the distinct voice-styles.

It would be do-able.

[edit]

And of course, four choices at once still allows for a lot in total. Just one of them has to be "Tell me more..." or "I've got another idea..." or something, leading to a further set of choices. A bit clunky and slow, perhaps, but not choice or roleplay limiting necessarily.

If you are stupid enough to call this dumbing down, you are the dumb consumer Bethesda is catering too.

So I guess they've got that going for them at least.

So, I guess the consensus is that BGS should have designed the game to run on a PC sporting 64GB system ram, 4 Titan X's in SLI, 8 core CPU, pushing a 5k monitor?

I am not sure about anyone else, but I don't think I can afford to play a game like that even if Todd Howard showed up at my house in person and gave me a free copy of the game.

I'd hardly call removing the ability to get better at lockpicking by shooting lizards "dumbing down". And as for dialogue, the old system broke the immersion. While I am a little worried that my character will say things I didn't mean for him to say, an unobtrusive dialogue system is a logical improvement.

This is the first thing I thought of too. But I guess it's simpler to point at one thing and blame it for all perceived flaws.

It's not only developers/publishers who benefit from console sales. Any of us who want AAA production values need console sales to help pay for our hobby. If the revenue weren't there, neither would the sophisticated sound and graphics be there. Or it would be there at a price that many of us couldn't afford. During the development of Project Eternity it amazed me how many folks had difficulty understanding that you can get a nice game on a tighter budget, but you don't get all the bells and whistles.

As a PC player I also have to say that the "dumbing down" that removed the need to grind multiplyers and which forces me to specialize my characters rather than have them be good at everything has made Skyrim much more fun. Sometimes additions are good. Sometimes getting rid of the "noise" in your system is what's needed. If you experiment you're going to make missteps. If you don't, you miss out on opportunities.

It's not dumbing down but it's ruins leveling for me. My problem with the Skyrim system is that it got tedious to increase skills that wasn't used in combat without some kind of exploit or making trillions of enchanted daggers. I understand it's more realistic to get better at something as you do it but I rather be traveling the world(doing quest) instead of spending 50% of my time crafting daggers for 10 hours just so I can make a Ebony helmat

At one time it was true. The first, and to a lesser extent extent second, generation consoles had limitations the average PC didn't. I played many a game where levels were shrunk, items limited, graphics and physics watered down to accommodate the limitations of the console. There was also a time when most consoles were hooked up to a crt television necessitating large fonts that could be easily seen on those things from the family room couch.
All that has of course changed, but there is a reason the term came into vogue

For PC gaming that whole "Consoles are ruining everything!* is kind of like a meme by now. its the same with that PC Gaming Master Race subreddit, I know that when I say stuff like "The chosen race of the GabeN, thou art in Seattle." its all a giant joke. Some people seem to take it seriously though and think that people who play games in different ways are stupid inferiors. And frankly, they seem to be missing the point of gaming in the first place. This is one of the few mediums where I can say without a doubt it has something for everyone, with so many decades of gaming advancement and trends there's a near infinite variety to find something that will suit anyone. When people talk about how people playing games different from their games means that those people are inferior and dumb, it just makes me think that they don't understand gaming in the first place. That they would rather use gaming to put themselves above others rather than enjoying what is great about the ultimate evolution of our technology to allow us to enjoy fictional worlds.

And that's why skills may have been removed.

Now that you bring up Skyrim, skills were pretty pointless there. Their only purpose was to increase them high enough so that you could unlock the perks you wanted. It was the perks, and not the skills, that gave both power and customization to your character.

It seems that Fallout 4 may have taken that to the next level by ditching skills altogether; it seems that perks are still what's important, and instead of using skills as perk unlockers, now that role has been passed on to attributes. Honestly that may be a good thing; skills were easily upgradable, attributes are not. This means that your choice of attributes at the beginning of the game is much more meaningful because certain perks may simple be impossible to obtain without a hefty investment in a certain attribute. Time will tell.

If it weren't for consoles, there would be a LOT fewer games on PC to play. Like it or not, console sales are what keeps the lights on at the studios. I don't have any problem with that myself.

Opinions (gotta love 'em):

Beth have been taking certain choices from their games over time, obvious to an ol'schoolRPGplayer but replacing them with more immersive(yes it's a thing)/cinematic stuff that to some of us makes the world in some ways seem better and more believable but at the same time limits your interactions with it. I felt as though there was a 'wall' in Skyrim, a clear rubbery wall between what you witnessed and heard the NPCs up to and how your character could interact with them, as though the game were saying "yeah that's really interesting; now don't you have somewhere to be, don't you have Draugr to kill?"

Maybe they just need to do a bit of this less substance more style stuff to get the sales figures needed to make not just an AAA game, but an infrequent not yer usual UBI/EAonceayearalmostthesamebutyou'llbuyitanyways game that takes the whole team years to get nearly right and will destroy the company if they have that much budget and non-stellar revenue. I reckon a few bucks less on awesome and a few more on choices/consequences and writing but that's as I say an opinion: style doesn't preclude substance.

MK stated he wanted a bug-armored hermaphrodite on the XBox: consoles don't always harm Beth games.

Really own opinion controversial you may not like it stuff: on a lot of techie forums I see people playing the peasant and master race card, and not only am amazed at how much of it boils down to FPS and resolutions (here's a hint: Fallout 1 and 2 didn't have tessellation or dynamic shadows), but also I would really love to know how many of those with ubercomputers casting disdain got their's with Daddy's money. Owning a console and not having a PC does not make you stupid, inferior or less able to appreciate anything the universe has to offer, owning a $3000 PC doesn't make you anything other than fortunate and wealthy enough to own something really cool.

Totally true. There are scads of crappy PC games that feature all of the things I talked about. As for the combat, there is plenty to be said for both sides. I just personally dislike the twitch aspect, and hope that it's not the overriding experience. Perhaps what I am really talking about is AI - an enemy that takes cover and manoeuvres makes combat interesting, with a side effect of seeming to slow the game down while you the player are busy being suppressed and outmanoeuvred, or trying to do the same to the enemy. The video, which, I fully realize, is a limited snapshot of a small part of the game, seemed to show enemies blithely charging forward into fully automatic fire, then getting shredded. And I would prefer it more tactical, that's all.

Great point. I fully admit that maybe I am behind the times; I do not have a newer console, and I freely admit that my perceptions of console rpg/action gaming is coloured by the above.

Prove me wrong, Bethesda, prove me wrong...

Some of what you say I agree with, but even the new consoles have some limitations. There are brand new games that get frame rate capped at 30FPS because the consoles can't handle any better graphics; The Order: 1886 comes to mind. As a PC gamer, I want the highest frame rate possible, not only because it looks better, but because of input lag and responsiveness.

That being said, I don't dislike game being tailored to consoles because of technical limitations (the frame rate capping being the exception): I dislike games being tailored to consoles because it inevitably results in a clumsy to terrible UI. For FO4, just look at the dialogue wheel, the Pipboy interface and the massive fonts.

This is the standard RPG mechanism, who everybody including fallout uses. Its mostly TES who have the use skill to improve them, Mount&Blades level weapon skill by use but you level up and raise other stuff with xp.

And yes its stupid, remember needing higher science in Fallout 3 to activate an computer for an quest, as i was near leveling up I went downtown to grind supermutants.

Yes its make perfectly sense and feel realistic, so is raising heavy weapons to 70 before using them.

However you should have heard all the complains if they had switched to TES leveling Skyrim system worked pretty well except the lack of attributes and all the filler perks.

Agree, one of my most memorable fights in Fallout 3 was outside the Bethesda building. One of the raiders was an sniper in an good sniping position, I could not locate him, he pinned me down while the other raiders flanked me, this put me under crossfire while they was moving in, yes this was an random even because how I came in to the area and come from an unusual direction.

Neither do I. Except if a particular platform dictates design choices (see the down grade controversy with TW3).

I don't think any of these developers want to make games on consoles. The one time I know of that the PC version outsold consoles was with XCOM and now there won't be a console version of XCOM2. If gamesas could sustain themselves on the PC alone they would probably hand the console port over to another developer or not do one at all. The problem is that PC gamers are spoiled. They will wait you out until the game is like $10-15 on STEAM.

There are people on the forums now talking about how they will "eventually" buy Fallout 4. They are getting their excuses ready not to support the game while it's still full price, lol.