Just started Fallout 4, What CP could have learned

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poosh

Forum regular
F4 is like Britney Spears twenty years ago: "Not an RPG, not yet a shooter". RPG elements made trivial, dialog options dumbed down to "YES/NO/SARCASM", but weapon mechanics still suck. Mods are that keep F4 alive and made be spend almost 300h in the game.
 
Fallout 4 is the most disappointing game of all time until Fallout 76 for me.

Comparing it to Cyberpunk 2077 is insane.

As bad as the bugs in this game are and some of the systems are crap. CP77 is still an awesome and fun time with incredible story and writing.

Fallout 4....is not.
 
What CP could learn from Fallout 4?

Don't put half-assed base-building in an open world rpg. That would be my lesson.
Or maybe:
Dont limit speak options to
-Yes
-Tell me more, but yes
-Give me money, but yes
-No, but still yes

Regarding the main plot, well...
Both F4 and CP use the same 'fake urgency' aproach to build suspence. In F4 ist 'You must rescue your child, hurry!'.
In CP its 'You are dying, hurry!'. In both cases its a lie (you have infinte time), in both cases its harming the open world aspect of the game.

Main difference between CP and F4 (story-wise) is that the CP story is at least interesting.
I remember, during the one F4 playthrough that I made, there was a situation were I had hunted down a guy, and now I was interrogating him. And he was like 'Don't kill me, I know where Josua is'.
And I just though "Josua? Who the hell is Josua? And why should I won't to know... Oh. OHHH! Thats my son, right?".
 
I don’t know if I agree that Fallout 4 narrative doesn’t push towards the main quest.

If I woke up in a unrecognisable world with my child kidnapped by people who also murdered my wife, I wouldn’t start chilling and building settlements with strangers.

One day an RPG will manage a motivation or main quest that doensn't do this.

For now we're perpetually stuck in;

"It's like Romance, who cares?! It's WAR! ALL OUT WAR!"
 
If were doing an apples to apples comparison here the only bits I like more about FO4 are...

The crafting system is just better implemented
Inventory management is easier
Factions fight each other
Clothes and Armor are separate

Sure I'll think of more later.​
 
I don’t know if I agree that Fallout 4 narrative doesn’t push towards the main quest.

If I woke up in a unrecognisable world with my child kidnapped by people who also murdered my wife, I wouldn’t start chilling and building settlements with strangers.
Not to mention a metric butt ton of the dialogue with NPCs had some inclusion of "a dingo ate my baby".

I would say they could have learned a bunch from New Vegas' factions and dialogue. Side quests from that game as well or even some of Fallout 4's or Skyrims (though I'm not a fan of either of those latter games).

It's crazy how after a decade I've still yet to find a game that can scratch that New Vegas itch. I sincerely hope that Bethesda gets their crap together with Starfield or TES, or even that Obsidian can replicate that masterpiece with Avowed.
 
Fallout 4 is not even remotely a better game than CP 2077. Fallout 4 wasn't even good back when it launched, let alone today. It has a pretty horrible main story, completely disjointed side quests. Not to mention absolute lack of variety in it's quests. The quests in Fallout 4 are at the level of GIGs in CP2077. The shooting mechanics are worse as well and I honestly struggle to think of anything Fallout 4 did well. It was buggy at launch too, it had only 1 good DLC too.

Fallout 4 was panned pretty hard when it launched, it's a straight downgrade compared to Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3 for that matter.

Fun fact. Fallout 4 has pretty much the same reception as CP2077. Feel free to check Metacritic or Steam.

So I would say it's more a matter of taste and clearly there tons of people happy with Fallout 4. That doesn't mean no problems exist though and that goes for both games.
 
Skyrim is a much better example of a main quest that doesn't breathe down your neck.

After the dragon attack and escape from Helgen, advancing the main quest requires you to talk to a specific person in a specific place--whom if you ignore, ensures you never need to think about the main quest again. There aren't even any dragon appearances in the open world.

Mechanically it works great because you lose access to very little content as a result of ignoring the main quest. And it works great from a roleplay perspective as well. It's easy to imagine your character is just glad to be alive and wants nothing to do with dragons. You don't even know you're dragonborn at that point. So there is no sense of urgency or ultimatum.
 
So just started Fallout 4 again for the 20s time or so, never having completed it :D

Which is no issue for me, I get easily distracted doing other things and think that is great. Now Fallout 4 is not a perfect game by any means, but especially one thing it does good, in fact Bethesda and these IP does very well is how they handle the main quest.

In Fallout 4 you have the intro and your kid is stolen, you wake up and basically have no clue how to solve it. So you leave the vault go see the robot, that tell you to go to a nearby city and find answers. Here you meet a group of people that then decide to settle where you used to live. But even here you are not really encourage to push the main quest, in fact the quest you get is to go help another settlement or you can give some drugs to that old lady, will get back to that.

What I like about this, is that it leaves the main quest fairly vague and it encourage exploration, you are instantly distracted by the whole build a settlement thing as well, which I personally enjoy a lot, especially with mods like Sim settlements 2, which allow you or your settlers to build dynamic cities very fast, and really shows how insane some of these mods are.


Had CP gone more into these things, obviously the main story probably couldn't have been told as well as it is, but I think it would have made for a better RPG game, had they done it, with a lot more replayability than a linear story allows for.

So at least to me, since the design of Night city is by far one of the best things about CP, they should have looked at Fallout and Skyrim and even TW3 to some degree and what makes people keep coming back to these. Had they made the main story nonlinear and instead put effort into making Night city feel like a place of opportunities, dynamic and interactive, I think it would have made for a lot better game.

Last I just want to ask a question in regards to drugs, because as I was playing Fallout 4 you are pretty much from the start of the game, given the option to get drugs for that old lady I mentioned above, and there is no doubt that these are drugs given the dialog. This was an issue in CP as far as I know in regards to releasing it certain places. Does that mean that Fallout 4 for instance is not available in Australia and such places? or if it is how did Fallout 4 manage to get around it, anyone knows?
Go play New Vegas, only true Fallout game of the three new Fallout games. 3 and 4 and good games, very good even, but not good Fallout RPG games, like 1 and 2 (New Vegas is).
 
I’m not a fan of Fallout 4, but one thing Cyberpunk could’ve taken heed of from it, due to the way CDPR decided to design in (which I’m not the biggest fan either), is crafting.

Not the way you collect materials, F4 is a trashcollector sim due to setting (Cyberpunk shouldn’t have become one in the first place), but from the way it makes sense to get certain kinds of materials from certain kinds of items, and that you need stuff that have glass to create something with glass in it and even glue or duct tape to attach things together.

Cyberpunks crafting is extremely rudimentary and senseless (boatloads of circuitboards, batteries and wires to t-shirts and bandanas to upgrade them, and even to make them) by comparison even when taking into account, that Fallout 4’s world is a sort of science fantasy and has much less to do with reality.
 
I actually feel the Fallout 4 comparisons some people here dislike are fitting.

It's of course perhaps "unfair" to compare a very moddable game that has seen all planned DLCs release be compared to a ... well, what feels like unfinished / rough product that was released a tad too early.

I refer to specific areas at least - while not everything is bad, you can see the glaring issues down the line after a bit of playing, I'd say.

But in this "finished" state, this is where Fallout 4 shines. The worlds aren't comparable, but a lot of the approach and mod-friendliness is. Base Fallout 4 was decent, but DLC and mods made it truly great. With enough time investment, CP77 can be as refined too. More or less, anyway - the engines differ and I doubt we get the same in-depth modding support kit, but we'll see.

I just feel the base game by design already gave you some more options down the line, whether consciously understood by the player or not. Both Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 kind of allowed you more choices in the main quest, while also allowing different endings. Here, it's more or less the same game and different endings that are decided relatively late in the game.

I think this is what many players don't consider as 'satisfying'. It does indeed feel a bit like "railroading" because in my views, different endings are nice and all, but it doesn't feel as unique and custom or diverse if the path up to them is relatively linear.

As player, an ending is nice but I can't "play" an ending. I can just witness it. So I'd prefer more unique gameplay or story "branching-out" because I can usually do more in them. Or in simpler terms, I'd not just like different endings decided late in the game at its core - I'd like to have different paths leading to various endings throughout the game, whether they start early or mid-game.

THIS is what adds more replayability compared to me just loading a savegame briefly before the point of no return to make another decision. Most endings I can witness by just reloading to that particular save. But there is no huge incentive to replay the whole game, other than try a new character skillset or do some side quests differently.
 
Fallout 4, I love it. Even more than I love Fallout 1 and 2, and I played both when they were released. But it's not a better RPG than Cyberpunk 2077.

Both are light-ish in the RPG department compared to what came before. Action gets a bigger part in both. Although F4 had a longer main story but less interesting than Cyberpunk 2077, imo. The best part of F4 is the modding. Just like Skyrim. I play both to this day simply because of mods.
 
I mean, there's a reason why these things are memes...

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Bethesda games for the mods and sandbox feel, mod till you break it.

CP2077 got a better combat feel and memorable characters design, and Jesus! The greatness of substance painter shown by the devs needs to be applauded. in FO4 you see half-assed 3D models here and there, even the story npc.
 
Fallout 4, I love it. Even more than I love Fallout 1 and 2, and I played both when they were released. But it's not a better RPG than Cyberpunk 2077.

Both are light-ish in the RPG department compared to what came before. Action gets a bigger part in both. Although F4 had a longer main story but less interesting than Cyberpunk 2077, imo. The best part of F4 is the modding. Just like Skyrim. I play both to this day simply because of mods.
You can get it really close in my opinion if you install a mod like Horizon, which overhaul a lot of things in Fallout 4. Worth checking out if you haven't.
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I mean, there's a reason why these things are memes...

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I don't think that is a weakness of Fallout, it is supposed to be an ruined world so stuff like this have value and almost everything you find in it is useful in some way. Picking up ashtrays in CP when you drive a car worth 175000 makes no sense, however.

If people don't like looting stuff, I can understand why the Fallout universe might not be for them. But most people like that you can customize your weapons, armors and build various things. But if there were no things to pick up this system wouldn't really work well in this universe I think.
 
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