A reader discusses his love for the Fallout franchise and his frustration that Bethesda needs someone else to get the best of him.
Fallout has always been a popular franchise but after the success of the TV show it suddenly became one of the most famous video game franchises in the world, which is certainly not what I have on the bingo card for 2024; especially given that we haven’t had a proper new game in nine years and probably won’t get another for five years or more.
Well, I imagine Microsoft has fast-tracked some kind of play-off, but it will not be made by Bethesda because they are busy with Starfield DLC and The Elder Scrolls 6. But I’m looking for it. Many different people have worked on Fallout over the years, and I have to say that Bethesda is the worst.
Bethesda didn’t make Fallout. At the time of the purchase of the franchise, since the publisher Interplay had gone bankrupt, there were already four Fallout games: two main sequels and two spin-offs. They are all top-down games, primitive graphics, but already have all the main elements that we think of from the series, including the Brotherhood of Steel, Super Mutants, Ghouls, and Deathclaws.
I don’t want to pretend Bethesda didn’t add anything to Fallout. On a technical level there is a world of difference between Fallout 3 and everything that came before it. Since Fallout 3 came out before Skyrim most of us think about the game’s revolutionary approach to open world gaming started in Fallout 3.
Never seen such detail and level of interaction in an open world. Fallout 3 set a new standard that is still influential today, at least in Bethesda’s own games. They have improved but never passed.
Every new game, from Skyrim to the width of 76 looks the same and plays the same. Even the sci-fi style of Starfield is not, although in my opinion it is very less interesting on some levels, keeping the worst parts of the previous game and leaving out the best.
I’m trying to be fair to Bethesda here – I don’t want this to be an angry rant – but while they’re great at world building and questing and all the mechanical parts of role-playing games, I really don’t. think he is very good at other things.
This might seem strange coming from someone who calls himself a fan, but part of being a Fallout fan is the huge modding community that changes the game and adds to it in unexpected ways – see Fallout London for some fans’ ambitions. beg.
Bethesda laid the foundations for modern games, but I feel that other people are better at building them. Most obviously that means Obsidian, the creator of New Vegas, which fans love as the best in the series.
There’s been some talk about Bethesda being jealous of their reputation and I don’t know if that’s true, although I think it’s odd that they never asked Obsidian, or anyone else, to make another one.
If they were there would not be a huge gap between the canals. They also managed to get someone more experienced with online games to make Fallout 76, which although better than when it launched, I’m still very disappointed.
I just don’t think Bethesda is very good at making Fallout games beyond their own maps. The action is definitely not that great (there should be mods to make it better) and the writing isn’t as good as old 2D games or other modern game standards (that’s the harder thing to improve, of course).
Whether Bethesda is jealous of Obsidian, I don’t know, but I think they are stubborn and Starfield shows that they are slow to accept change or even admit that change is needed. We’ll see how The Elder Scrolls 6 fares first, but I’m not sure I’m convinced that Fallout 5 is an improvement. Although I’m sure modders will be able to make it better.
By reading Paulie
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