Yeah, I quickly learned to dislike reddit, and not just for the Fallout reddit, but for multiple ones.

I dunno what their deal is, but I think part of the problem is the downvote button has an unintentional side-effect: it's censorship. Ideally it's there to get rid of spam or ridiculous comments. In a practical sense though, people abuse it to "censor" dissenting opinion by just downvoting you so hard that your comment disappears where no one will bother to look for it.

In some sense there's nothing wrong with complaint, but you usually have to have a cause for complaint. In terms of story anybody complaining is crazy, unless they've played the game in secret.

When it releases, if the story svcks, complain all you want. It won't make a difference as the game will be out, but if it makes you feel better...

People are complaining because Bethesda hasn't written a good plot since Oblivion (and even in Oblivion it was limited to only a select few storylines) and now we have Todd basically PRing the question to say "lol screw story." The story isn't gonna be good, and if it is, it'll be a testament to the monkeys with keyboards theory.

This is simply a matter of some of the population saying "hey look at all this overwhelming evidence the story is gonna blow. Time to prepare ourselves for more disappointment" while other portions of population would rather cling to the tiny bits of hope that remain. It's fair to want to wait until you see the story yourself, but I also consider it fair to not hold your breath given all that we've seen thusfar. I mean again, they strapped rocket engines on the USS Constitution, which itself is a glorified decoration for a post-war bank. You cannot possibly explain that in a coherent way that makes sense, and I fully expect a "SOME OLD KOOKY SCIENTIST ATTACHED THEM LONG BEFORE ANYONE HERE WAS BORN, NOBODY KNOWS WHY!!!" explanation.

The cause in this case is Todd's non-statement saying "We sacrificed telling a good story when making this game." That's a red flag for people who want a good story.

Drop the interactive elements and moving around just activating quicktime events so that it is just a 3d tv-show and I'll still buy them. So no, it is not necessarily also for the interactive elements, they are a bonus, but I could really do without them to be honest. Removing them could make the cinematic experience a lot smoother too so it could even be beneficial to the story.

That's not what he said at all. He said now they're going to try to improve the story by seeing how they can make it fit better in the game they're trying to make, since normally the way they've made their games in the past has limited their storytelling abilities.

I'm not saying the story will be good. I've definitely never played the game. But seriously, you're just mangling his words.

In all fairness, if I could put rockets on a sail boat I totally would.

Here's my coherent explanation:

People want cool stuff. People in the fictional Fallout universe also want cool stuff. They want to be blown away when they see a bank. The bank, inventive as it is, moves into the USS Constitution, because it'll strike people with awe (and outfits it with rocket engines to fool everyone).

Read what he said very carefully and factually. You'll see that at no point did he use the word "improve" or anything of the sort.

This is PR, this is what they do. They spice up the statement in order to leave much of it to your imagination so that you can fill in the blanks with your own sub-concious desires.

I'm not even saying that he said "lol screw the story" either. I'm saying that this statement is absolutely worthless to us because it's designed to be interpreted however you like. It's worthless both because it's obvious PR and because it's Todd Howard. If you trust a word Todd Howard tells you before a game release, I've got a bridge leading to nowhere I'd love to sell to you.

I still like Telltale ''games''. They really make you attached to the characters and...stuff.

Also they made a Borderlands spinoff that keeps the same feeling as the original games. Awesome, is it?

I would have worded the passage about the story differently. So much emphasis on action and cool things to build and then bam! he looks embarassed when asked about the story. "Nothing" and "sacrifice" is less than flattering for the colleagues from the writing team.

Exactly, that's PR.

This is why it's worded like that: come November, people are gonna be in a big stink. They'll see the story svcks, they'll yell at Todd with their arms flailing about and their fists in the air and say "hey Todd, you said you guys were gonna improve the story!"

This is the part where Todd says "no I didn't, I said we would try and take advantage of the open world to provide a suitable storyline."

You have now forfeited your right to be outraged at Bethesda for misleading you, and it many ways, leaving the statement up to the viewer/reader's imagination let's it run wild, resulting in them imagining everything they themselves want, increasing sales.

It's also a case that when his answer is indirect and ambiguous, people - like OP and us in this thread - are likely to pick it up, disect it and attempt to understand what he meant. And you know what that provides? Free publicity. More people talking about the game, more people tuning in to the interviews, more attention.

The only time they're gonna lay all their cards out on the table for us is when they've got a feature they consider overwhelmingly positive. Anything else...? Keep a healthy dose of skepticism nearby.

Why is it a thing on the internet that:

"He raised a good point, therefore, he is an arrogant jerk and probably likes kicking puppies." What part of my post came across as arrogance?

Jesus mother Christ, how hard can it be, it's not like the writers are doing graphics and animations at the same time. Just hire competent writers who know how to write compelling [censored], and put that [censored] in the open world. Kinda like Witcher 3.

Well, looking back, I was wrong. I'm just getting pretty bitter on here because of a lot of behavior i'm seeing on "both" sides. Sorry.

But what you had in quotations was making a lot of assumptions. Just like I made assumptions. Yay!

I think I'm just gunna sit back from now on and just read, maybe make a comment here and there. This is the ~third time today it's happened. Getting annoyed over people on an internet video game forum is pretty dumb.

If you mean the part about kicking puppies, that just me with my humor. Not meant to offend either.

But yeah, that's PR for you. When you get done reading it, you often won't even process what you read. Took me a minute too to realize he never actually claimed they were improving it and to even see the "we will make that sacrifice again" line.

I wanted Starwars Ep 4 5 and 6 back without Lucases sticking his crayons in years later and trying to re-write the story while lying about Its how he wanted to do it"

I wanted someone to go back and hog tie Lucas and throw him in the trunk for inflicting JarJar and the brainless idiocy that was Ep 1 on fans. Seriously you can Write a movie thats aimed at kids that the advlts would love without crap like what he pulled in that episode.

The problem is that no matter how you try you cant get something back exactly the way they had it when you fell in love with it. Fallout 2 should have been warning enough that changes were going to happen and that you should never treat anything other than "Radiation was involved" as being true cannon.

Never mind that Interplay was so badly handled that they had to sell off all rights to Fallout to keep from being forced into a Liquidation bankruptcy. Honestly I think Fallout was lucky to not end up with EA as yet another one of there turn it into toxic waste for tax write offs but cling onto it forever so no one can ever make a laughing stock out of us by being able to actually make money with it! Properties.

Actually from listening to Tod explain things way back in Oblivion some of the stuff you see in that game was written by the people who were doing graphics gamecode and Animations.

If they can keep the main quest close to the quality in the Dawnguard and Dragonborn dlc for Skyrim, I'll probably be content. It wasn't perfect there by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't offensive either. I liked Serana, and there kinda was a cool little undercurrent story on how immortality could effect family bonds. And Neloth was definitely entertaining to be around. Good characters can go a long way for a bad story.

They also took a moment to surround us with moths. Cool moments don't all have to involve explosions.

My personal theory? Game developers are hesitant to hire people who cannot program, but programmers/writers are a rare breed.

Look at Chris Avellone. His name is synonymous with "good writing" in the video game industry. But aside from writing, he can also code and program. If he couldn't...? I have my doubts the industry would even hire him.

Dunno about you, but when I was in high school, all the people who went on to become game developers (or attempt, anyways) were nerdy kids who spent all day playing video games. Not bashing nerds here, I merely mean that if you think of the different stereotypes of high schoolers, only ONE group was interested. More types of people writing = more diversity and better writing. Here though? It's the group that's considered socially akward, who spends all their free time playing video games with cheesy storylines (many of them, anyways). I also think writing is both a talent and that good writing material comes from experiences. I've had a couple people tell me I should try writing, and when I entertain the thought of it, any theme I'd want to write about is based off my own life experiences.

But here we have a bunch of nerdy high schoolers finishing school and lining up at universities directly after to learn to code, not really getting a chance to experience much. Top that off with the fact that companies don't seem interested in hiring pure writers, and there you go: the bar is stupidly low for this industry. I mean recently (a year ago?) Bethesda advertised they wanted quest writers, but under the list on the job description, they said they wanted someone with programming experience.

I wish a day would come that the industry swallows it's pride and hires writers, but I think the practical answer is that it's views as unneccesary and won't help with profit, so they don't. Plus for the writers themselves....why write for a video game when you could make millions writing for a TV show, writing a movie script or writing a book?

I don't disagree, but If I want a good story, I'll read a book, which will be far superior to any video game.

A good story doesn't make a good game. Engaging gameplay is far more important.

Look at Steam's top 10 most played games at the moment:

CURRENT PLAYERS PEAK TODAY GAME

Again we haven't played it yet so why all the whining?

Also hasn't he said that they have to sacrifice story for open world? Meaning this is what they do. It isn't something new.

The story has improved since Oblivion. I found F3 and Skyrim to be much more interesting. If it'd as good as or better than skyrim I'm fine with it.

Like I've said the side story stuff is always much more intriguing. People say the same thing about the witcher 3.

To their credit, there is plenty of terrific storytelling happening in Bethesda's games. In the lore, in-game books and notes, and as the Howard put it, "environmental storytelling". The only major gaffes I've seen in their writing are the game to lore inconsistencies within Oblivion, and scenarios in Fallout 3 that are a little hard to believe; obviously that's not counting the changes in faction characterizations and tone from the older Fallouts that people are still bitter about.

What I'd like to see in an open-world main plot:

- Nonlinearity: significant events that have to happen for the narrative, but not necessarily in any given order. But the order these events happen changes the scenarios behind other events. A laughably basic example of this is Mega Man X, where completing one stage would have an effect on a few others (Flame Mammoth's level freezing over, or Storm Eagle's airship crashing into Spark Mandrill's power plant).

- Great characters: Don Quixote isn't considered the greatest novel of all time for having a grand over-arching narrative (hell, most of it honestly plays out like an open-world game made up of side-quests), but for having great characters and using them to explore certain universal themes. (Well, and for arguably inventing character development and several archetypes still in use today. And the humorous attacks on pretentiousness, which are still relevant today. Man, I just love that book so much you guys, I'm sorry for going on like this.) Anyway, New Vegas did this really well with all of the companions, but it can be hard to do consistently in an open-world game where so many NPCs are more or less transient.

- A fluid/dynamic world: Maybe it's more of an ideal, since no one ever seems satisfied when games attempt it, but you know. A world that changes as we progress through the narrative; this is one of the areas where Fallout 3's plot is actually really successful, with how the Enclave starts appearing and spreading propaganda throughout the wasteland, and then again with Broken Steel. The overall tone of the game shifted in each of these situations, and it was awesome. Now, this also means that our own choices should have an effect on how the world changes, which is where Fallout 3 wavers.

Now, what I don't want:

- A main quest filled with "before I help you, please do this completely unrelated favor". I could call out New Vegas's main quest for this, but a better example would be almost every part of Morrowind's (or even Daggerfall's) main quest. It's an okay and believable plot device (or maybe I've just played so many video games that I don't care any more, it's so ubiquitous), since it introduces you to interesting new scenarios and familiarizes you with the setting, but it just doesn't feel like good narrative. What does fetching a Dwemer Puzzle Cube have to do with vanquishing Dagoth Ur, what does helping a bunch of Ghouls go to space have to do with the fate of New Vegas, etc.

- Urgency. All of Bethesda's main quests since Oblivion have had this sense of, wait why are you doing this little side-quest while the world is in grave danger?

- Getting locked out of significant amounts of content. In New Vegas, I believe and accept the situations where my faction affiliation or quest decisions lock me out of entire questlines and companions; I don't have a problem with it at all. But for an open-world game, I'd rather Bethesda avoid scenarios where that's the only logical outcome. This would limit their storytelling ability, yes, but there are still plenty of ways to handle this in an open-world fashion that could be just as good in terms of narrative quality. This doesn't mean I want every possible choice, path, and outcome available no matter who our character is; just that any character should be able to complete every quest somehow and reap some kind of reward for it. How they complete that quest and what they get from it is another story. I think this is the crux of what Todd Howard was getting at when he was talking about the story.

Yep, I'd be inclined to agree with you. One of the reasons I actually enjoy TF2 is because the writing is pretty good. The writing is more "flavor" since it has little impact on gameplay, but I still very much appreciate it, whether it's TF2 Comics, the videos they made, or Scout's trash-talking within gameplay.

But that's just it: it's an anomaly that Valve bothered to provide that stuff for free. And of course writers know they can make far more and say far more with less restrictions upon themselves just by writing a book or script. Very few would be like "HELL YEAH CAN'T WAIT TO BE A PART OF THE INFAMOUSLY STRENUOUS GAMING INDUSTRY AND WRITE STORIES FOR AN AUDIENCE THAT'S ACCUSTOMED TO STOIC BADASSES WALKING AWAY FROM NONSENSICAL EXPLOSIONS."

Isn't it pretty clear that quests, and the stories they tell, are the main focus in Fallout games? You get most of your experience points from quests, and that's a huge incentive to do them. But the stories are still the most important part, and they bring the wasteland to life.

The story is important to me. The gameplay is starting to be so simplified, that it can't hold my attention alone. Thought-provoking quests keep me interested. Actually, I'm ready to forgive some of Fallout 4's "streamlining", if the game has great quests.