New Vegas's writing quality was the best out of all the 3D Fallout games, (FO3/NV/FO4), and the writers ability to flesh out a vibrant world filled with countless factions that interact/war/etc each other, while also being an amazing follow up to Fallout 2, detailing the countless events and conflicts between the two games, as well as acknowledging the actions and fate of the previous protagonist.

In contrast, Fallout 4 feels.....weak. It's an improvement to Fallout 3 in not hamfisting an arbitrary "good guys" vs "bad guys" faction system, and I will give it that, but overall the writing is.....well it's terrible.

The settlements are just Minecraft, there's no story to them, no quests that aren't those wretched radiant quests. (I'm half expecting to see a blue exclamation mark pop up at one point.) Plus, there's no sense of permanency to the world if everything respawns and there is no way to permanantly silence the settlers randomly generated cries for help.

The main story is fine, and I appreciate the writers' willingness to force the players to commit to one route or the other, and destroy factions whose motives are in direct contradiction to the faction you support.

But the side quests? They're often watered down and diluted, and with few branching paths or intricacies to them. So many of them are shallow.

I don't understand, what happened? Why this dip in quality? It seems Bethesda is justifying lazy writing with the buzzword "environmental storytelling", at the expense of countless dialogue options and worldbuilding, which is never what Fallout was about, or should be about.

Also, I'm sure this was brought up elsewhere, but what genius thought it was a good idea to pay Brian T. Delaney to voice Nate? I'm sure Mr. Delaney is a great guy and has a lot of talent in other media, but in Fallout 4 a bag of cement has more charisma.

Fallout IMO had the best writing we've seen so far from a 3D fallout game. because atleast we didn't have a bunch of grown men wearing skirts and crucifying people.

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks?

Oh you mean the glourious New Vegas sidequest find the Teddy Bear number 1, 2, 3 or do you mean 4.

Or do you mean the big romance sidequest go here, then there, here again, there again and now back to there, go back here again, ....

Yeah big writing in NV's sidequests, very big,

This part does not have much to do with the writing. Courtenay Taylor also voiced Jack in the Mass Effect trilogy, and she is superb with Nora/F!SS. The writing is not the issue on this, but VA is the problem here.

Just ending this here.

Branching paths have nothing to do with writing nor does having branching paths necessarily add depth. To many times they give you a choice and what ever you chose had little to no impact beyond the the immediate out come to the quest or the impact was so freaking localized or just damn right stupid (IE the share cropper quest) that it felt kinda pointless. I'm not saying I don't like branching quests (and fallout 4 does have some), I just want the choices to mean something and not just be there for the sake of being there.

You're right, because an unexpected cultural development over a century after the apocalypse that is explained and written about in depth is totally lame.

But writing a grimderp STALKER clone that makes no sense being in as far down the timeline as it was, Fallout 3, or fantastical men in metal suits traversing the coastline in their nuclear/fusion powered blimps is the optimize of refinement and taste. Mark Twain himself couldn't craft a more quality filled turn of events.

But Legionaries and a developed nation state in the Core Region warring with each other, with boatloads of exposition and fleshed out factions? Preposterous!

I know, and I apologize for including it in the post. It was just bugging me. And yeah, I have no problems with Courtenay Taylor at all. She delivered a great performance, unlike the male VA.

From a role playing perspective, the branching quests in Fallout New Vegas felt noticeably more weighty.

If I'm RPing a pro-NCR Courier Six, and I'm doing the Sharecropper quests (there where actually two seperate ones, tied into the area, if I recall correctly), then I want the Sharecropper farms to suceed. I don't want to battle my way into Caesar's tent and kill the bastard only for the NCR's Mojave operations to be crippled by a logistical oversight like farming.

And in one quest I had to make the choice to effectively damn one of the few surviving independent towns to ruin and killing a petulant anarchistic Follower, and risk ruining my relations with his faction I've worked with in Freeside to improve the state of things there, if I want to correct the water shortage problem. In universe, there is no way to no kill him and fix the NCR's water shortage. So, my courier made a choice to effectively cut off Westside from a major resource, most likely killing the town in the near future.

Secondly, in Vault 34, the source of the radiation problem in the Sharecropper farms water, I fight my way through ghouls and after navigating countless locked doors and password-locked rooms, I get to the reactor. At this point I'm greeted by a family of survivors from the vault, who want to get out. But to do that I need to open the ventalation shafts, effectively flooding Sharecropper farms with radiation, once again killing it's chances. But to support that farm, I need to turn off the reactor and seal the ventilation shafts, killing 4 innocent people. From a role playing perspective, no matter what I do I will be fundamentally screwing people over, and I'm forced to make an ultimatum, and I choose to seal the ventalatin shafts, saving the Sharecropper farms.

If both quests are completed in that order, that region of the Mojave will survive, and thrive. If even one branching choice is made, that NCR set up will disband, and it will damage the faction I'm championing in the Mojave. But to ensure that future I have to do very, very morally dubious things.

I apply the same argument to misc. sidequests all throughout Freeside, Camp Golf, Camp Forlorn Hope, etc. Each one of those sub regions has dialogue, or epilogue detailing the lasting effects of my choices. If you ignore those optional locations, during the Second Battle of Hoover Dam you can turn on the radio and learn how each one is effectively going to [censored], in the worst possible ways.

And I guess that's what I mean. Even if the effects of my actions aren't visually immidiate, the story informs me that my actions will have lasting impacts on the world as a whole. It tells me this, the dialogue is there. Unlike Bethesda's Fallout 4 I don't need to invent headcanon to justify my actions in the greater scheme of things.

Painting the wall in Diamond City, Helping Trevor, exposing the Mayor as a synth loyal to the Institute------none of these have lasting impact outside out the isolated bubbles the scripted events/quests take place. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Minutemen story, which had the greatest potential to justify the onerous settlements ingame with a grand story, stops dead after The Castle. If I commit 100% to the Railroad and take pro-synth actions, or express pro-Railroad sentiments (like with that father and son in Bunker Hill), none of that has any lasting impact in the Commonwealth as a whole. Nothing I do matters outside of the side-quest bubble I'm completing.

I guess that's what I mean by depth, or meaningfully impacting the world. Yes, you have these grand scripted events, but when you get write down to it the world itself doesn't budge an inch the second you complete that final faction quests. Even those terrible radiant quests where I have to save a synth every 5 minutes carry no weight in the world itself.

For a game that is so ambitious to tackle McCarthy-esque speciesm and paranoia, it never felt like I was pushing the state of things one way or the other outside of the quests. There is no dialogue to reflect that, there's no passing comments to reflect that. Etc.

I hope that comparison makes sense.

While I can agree that the writing isn't a strong point I disagree wholly about NV writing being better. Out of the 3 I have played it is my leasr favorite which is one of the many reasons why I got such a small total play. time out of it.


I think the problem with 4's dialogue is the fact that they pretty much just tried to copy Mass Effect instead of doing their own thing.

the writing in NV wasn't "great" it was ok, i thought the fallout 3 story was superior to the NV story, it had all the elements, action, drama, suspense like when the enclave show up at the purifier and after the waters of life quest etc, i would call the NV quests superior to anything dude, reileys rangers was a really fun quest, same with morias quests, the biggest problem with NV wasn't the writing it was the map, an empty desert with very few human enemies and no tactical locations, you were just out in the open everywhere for the most part so the writing wasn't good enough to overcome its inherent weaknesses, fallout 4 blows away NV in every possible way 100 times over.

To me saving the people in the vault is a no brainer. The problem the sharecoppers are having has to do with radiation leaking into the water pipes and has nothing to do with ventilation shafts. So rather than just oh I don't now working on rerouting the pipes or finding another solution to the problem they just pack up and go home. This is the kinda of out come that annoys the hell out of me because there's a clear third choice but they don't put it in. Why? Because they need have these stupid grey morality quests where no matter what you do some has to get screwed.

Definitely, and I think a lot of the problems I have with Fallout 4 can be traced down to that one design choice. The dialogue system in NV, and hell even Fallout 3 (not to mention 1+2) allowed for more information to be passed to the player. It's surprising Bethesda got proper voice actors for the players yet severely limited what questions they could ask, or what NPCs could tell them.

That comparison was pretty lacking. You choose to take certain things and compare them to another like all side-quests in both games are like that. The westside part? That only effects westside, not the entirety of the Mojave same like

Painting the wall improves the mood of the people of Diamond city and it shows from their dialogue, you're choosing to ignore those small things while making small things from another game into these huge choices that impact more then the people involved, which they don't. I get it, you like New Vegas, so do I but that doesn't excuse you from ignoring effects and consequences in Fallout 4 and doesn't give you the right to massively overstate the effects of certain quests from New Vegas.

Fallout 4 has a lot of good quests, sure they aren't all on the level of some of New Vegas's quests but they're still good. Fallout 4 also has better writing especially when it comes to the factions. For instance Minutemen can be played more then one way compared to independent. Wildcard route was literally just the courier working to gain control of the Mojave whereas Minutemen can be played as the player trying to control the commonwealth, the player trying to build independent but united settlements, the player trying to build their own personal militia, the player trying to build the CPG. That's more role-playing then wildcard gives.

Fallout 4 also doesn't have a clear bad guy, while the Institute is built up like that they eventually get shown to actually have some good features. Everyone is morally ambiguous opposed to New vegas where Legion is made into the bad guys, House is the lesser evil next to the NCR but NCR can also be made into the good guys and wildcard is a big giant unknown where the only way to get the "bad" or "neutral" ending of wildcard is to randomly kill innocent people for no reason or take everything that is red until you get to the needed karma amount.

New Vegas isn't this imagine of perfect writing that should be a standard that you're trying to build it as, it has a lot of problems and yes, writing and world building are one of them.


Except that's wildly inaccurate. You can still get the same level of information with Fallout 4's dialogue system and surprise! You actually do! Not to mention not all world building and information comes from dialogue, it also comes from terminals, holotapes, notes, journals.

the NV game plays out the same no matter what or how you do the quests, there's no lasting consequences that you ever see in the game so its all just in your imagination, no matter how you do the quests the game plays the same, nothing "in game" is really different at all, so since its all just hypothetical and imagination you can just do that with any game, just imagine all the consequences, no different then fallout 3 or fallout 4, in fallout 3 you could blow up megaton, help president eden sabatoge the purifier or not, in fallout 4 you can pick the factions you want to side with, if anything there's more effects of making the factions enemies or not in FO4, in NV there weren't enough factions npcs on the map to make a difference anyway, you never ran into the boomers unless you go to their base and same with the khans, they are only in one location on the map same as the boomers and out of the way places at that, so if they are your enemies is has no effect on the game, as far as ceasers legion, they are only in a few spots and usually 2 or 3 guys with macheties standing around at a campgroud and the only time they put up a good fight when they had more real weapons at the battle at the dam, otherwise their main base is just a collection of tents, same with ncr, most of their locations were just tents, so to me these are so ovewhelmingly huge downsides to the game its not even funny, the best story in the world wouldn't make up for that snoozefest of a map.

Problem with too many branching paths is that they all has to be scripted, made, voiced and tested. Especially the later is more problematic than making a larger number of linear quests.

Fallout 3 had an linear main quest but branched side quests. Fallout 4 does this on main quest.

And yes quests in FO:NV is far better.

Secondary Fallout 4 suffer a lot for the idiot dialoge system. It require 4 options on any dialogues and they are fixed. This make it hard to tell a complex story and almost impossible to have perk or special requirements for options, something who is trivial in lists, yes you have to handle the effect of the check.

The charisma checks are just one of the 4 options color coded.

Yes they also implemented the dialogues badly

I beg to differ, altho I won't go into a long list, because the way you write about anything not to your liking, means there is no point in trying to make you see otherwise, least of all NV which I by now have found out, that you hate. Just a few pointers tho.

Yes there is a lot of tent camps, perhaps it has something to do with, that both forces are new to the area, and just about trying to establish lasting footholds (and I wouldn't exactly call Hoover Dam, Camp McCarran or Helios One tent camps, altho tents are present as well)

Secondly, side-quests all play out the same? How about first real side-quest you get, lets you decide the fate of a small town, namely the one you start in. Your course of action, will last from start to end of the whole game....There are several side-quests which have these long-lasting effects. Including some companion quests (to destroy or not destroy the Van Graff trader faction for example)

As for factions like the Boomers, Khans, The Kings, the gangster factions etc. etc. are not major factions, and never was meant to be. There are three major factions to decide on. NCR, Caesars Legion or House (or add a 4th faction, yourself!). All other factions are for flavor, and some to tip the scale in the final battle.

ps: Caesars legion no fighting power? Try piss them off enough, and get ready for high level hit squads. At later levels, they can make some real trouble for you.

This, has anybody noticed its almost impossible to know if many quests are radiant or scripted? In Skyrim this was an goal they was not able to reach.

It works well in Fallout 4 as they have cut the dialogue down to the bone, another annoying thing is that you can not ask questions about a quest after accepting it.

This would require extra dialogue pages,

I'll drop this here:

But yeah, Bethesda shot themselves in the foot when it comes to narrative with the four option dialogue wheel and the removal of skill checks bar charisma.

Not really, no. the narrative is still strong. The post talking about "illusion of choice" makes no reference or shows any evidence of said illusion, there is choice in Fallout 4, one of the main points is literally you picking your choice of faction each with different principles and views. The post can be amounted to someone just stating their view, trying to use a video unrelated to the game with no evidence and then saying "I'm right and don't need to further prove my point" by again, not showing evidence.

I think Fallout 4's story is fine and is a lot better than some people say it is.

But opinions.

i know what you're saying, the way the quests were structured in NV was well done but there's not many human enemies in NV, if you are enemies with the khans, power gangers, boomers or ceasers legions, you'll really never run into em anyway, there are all in out of the way places, on the edge of the map, NV is mostly a mental excersice in politics, in perfect world if i could have obsidians writing and quest structuring with the world building [including enemies and combat] of BGS that would be a good combo, BGS is good at world building, exploration, enemies to fight.

I think the OP should write a script for Fallout 5 as he seems to be an expert in the field

The writing is no worse than any of Bethesda's other games, and New Vegas (by Obsidian, not Bethesda) certainly isn't better by any wide margin. I feel like New Vegas tried too hard to make all of the choices and consequences balanced and represent different archetypes, that they just forgot to make it interesting. It was all so well explained and logical, but there weren't nearly as many quests that piqued my curiosity and made me want to find out what was going on, or what happens next.

New Vegas was written by the folks at Obsidian.


Fallout 4 was written by the folks at gamesas.


It's like complaining that the huge drop in quality is puzzling of Stephanie Meyer's sequel to Carrie, while ignoring the fact that Steven King wrote the first one.


I swear, it's like talking to a brick wall sometimes, having to re-explain over and over that New Vegas was Obsidian's project, gamesas just threw money at them to make it.

Writing is fine. Dialogue options svck - that's all.