Fallout 3 isn‘t even a good game on the surface and I doubt anyone actually wants a UE5 slop version of it but people will buy it anyway not knowing they actually won‘t enjoy it because they haven‘t touched it since release if they ever even played it. It‘s success was entirely carried by hype but was ultimately already outdated when it came out. There is no logical reason to revive it because there are endless better alternatives out there but luckily for Todd Howard Bethesda fans aren‘t logical creatures and will buy that shit and proceed to not beat it and forget about it within a week.
I get hating Fallout 3. I hate how it (and every subsequent Bethesda Fallout game) has done irreparable damage to the Fallout lore. I think its main story is pretty shit and the only reason it's not a steaming pile of shit is because somehow Fallout 4 was able to surpass Fallout 3 in shittiness.
But you have to have your head pretty far up your ass if you think people wouldn't actually enjoy it. It's a good game (a bit dated by today's standards), it's just not a good Fallout game. And the people who love Fallout 3 don't care about the reasons that make it a bad Fallout game.
I would argue that Fallout 3 is a good game, but it is not a good Fallout game. It is fun to play, and has all the other hallmarks of a good Bethesda game, but the vibe is wrong. It feels like something ripping off Fallout (because, it kinda is?) and misses the beats of the originals. It’s more than likely just cultural differences between the developers. Black Isle was Californian, Bethesda is somewhere on the East coast. And 4 managed to bring that OG vibe to the series, even if it absolutely fucking sucks as an RPG (great FPS tho).
That said, the Oblivion remake showed me that just updating the graphics but keeping the original jank was not a good thing. Fallout 3 now would not hold up the same way it did back in 2008.
FO3 was my first fallout experience, and I loved it. Currently playing 4, and it’s not as engaging. Some elements are cool (building), but the stories seem flat.
Can you expand on the idea that it’s not a good fallout game? What does that mean? What makes a good fallout game.
My first one was the first one, and what sets it (and 2) apart from 3 other than literally the entire game (1 and 2 were 2D isometric, dialogue and choice heavy, CRPGs with turn-based tactical combat) was as I said the general vibe.
It didn’t take itself too seriously and the humor was incredibly seated in pop culture references. Bethesda’s brand of humor is more muted and generic, and their writing is incredibly dry sometimes (the best writing they’ve ever seen is in Elder Scrolls 3).
4 has the same kind of silliness as the originals, the visuals also fit a lot better IMO. But the CRPG elements are almost entirely gone at this point, which is why I regard it as a fun shooter and not an RPG.
New Vegas, however, is still the GOAT among the 3D Fallout games. Not only does it have actual RPG elements that I expect from something calling itself an RPG, it has the exact same tone and vibe as the first two games mainly because it had Brian Fargo and one of the other original writers working on it.
Ff16 combat is fun as hell. And FF7 remake/rebirth too. I’m sure I still would have enjoyed both games if they were turn based, as I enjoyed the original FF7 and FF8 back in the day, but I really don’t get the hate for the realtime combat. It’s tight and polished and fun.
I don’t think anybody hates real-time combat. That feels like a strawman.
I think when it comes down to it though, there are huge demographics in the gaming community that are underserved and craving something that the industry has turned its back on because of loud people hating on turn-based combat.
Expedition 33’s success is simply a validation to the gamers left waiting, and to the developers that indicates that not all gamers hate turn-based combat, and maybe it isn’t an age thing.
In a different perspective, though, I hate the executives and studios who rely on others to lead, and I see it as spineless. If you were a developer afraid to make what you thought was fun because you thought you couldn’t maximize your sales around a combat system (cough cough square enix cough), you’re chicken shit.
I don’t think anybody hates real-time combat. That feels like a strawman.
I do, but just because I have a disability that makes more button presses painful and turn-based tends to have fewer per hour. I also know others who dislike real-time because they’re bad at it. I agree with your sentiment completely, though. Liking real-time isn’t exclusive of also enjoying turn-based.
When all the decisions have to come rapid-pace, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything notable. It feels like mashing out light or strong attacks and maybe some block/dodges.
I’ll admit that there have been some action JRPGs where I just didn’t understand how the mechanics worked together, even after some explanations, because I had to play it out so quickly in combat. Those games ended up having low difficulty so that people that “weren’t getting it” could still see the story.
I’m still okay at Soulslike games where there’s not quite as many meters and illogical systems. And of course I’m okay with turn-based games having those weird systems because I can process things slowly until I get it, and am taking my turns at full speed.
I genuinely enjoyed the Kingdom Hearts action-adventure with a couple of celebrity minions supporting your Dark Souls-style main character and the occasional Big Summons to drop a global special effect. I don’t think its bad on its face.
But they’ve invested so much time and energy into making Live Action work as a system that everything from the story to the game mechanics have suffered. Like, if you want to make a FromSoft game, then go over to FromSoft and do a business partnership to make Eldin Fantasy: The Soulslike Crystal Saga. You don’t need to keep tinkering with this engine that clearly doesn’t work.
Also, the FF7Remakes seem to have found a sweet spot. Why can’t the mainline games deliver this level of quality?
Also, also, also why have you abandoned ChronoTrigger? Twelve different DragonQuest titles but you gave up on Chrono in the mid-90s? You monsters.
It costs so much to make an AAA game these days that it must earn an enormous amount of money to be profitable, which means it needs to appeal to as broad a market as possible, which means nothing niche or unusual. I think movies are having the same problem.
The problem is that it’s actually not as expensive to make a triple ehh game as people are led to believe. What’s expensive is overpaying all the greedy executives and their unearned bonuses. More people need to be aware of this.
If it isn’t ridiculously expensive and inefficient, it doesn’t really fit the definition of a triple-a game, because it specifically is the term for games with the highest production values and costs.
Don’t forget marketing: be it movies or games, marketing likes to cost as much as the production of the media itself.
Sadly it seems to be necessary as many people just won’t know about some piece of media without it. Streamers play games they are paid to play, “reviewers” cover games they are paid to cover or know about through the hype generated by ads.
True though I can’t even begin to understand how marketing justifies its price when a common “fact” that goes around is that the marketing step accounts for 50% of the total game’s budget. Like, how does it cost that much?
Billboard ads can cost hundreds of thousands depending on the location and duration (e.g. Times Square, NY). TV ads, YT ads, streaming services ads, and search engine ads likely add up too. Big streamers will likely take quite a bit too. Maybe they’ll do a press conference to promote their game, which can be incredibly expensive location-wise.
But I agree, I can’t comprehend how it can be that expensive either.
I’m just assuming they think they’ll be able to exploit laborers by forcing them into a more gig style system. Capitalism is ass and this seems like an inevitable result especially in this industry.
I know its not so easy but I wish people would just stop working for these shitty companies under abusive conditions. I understand people have to eat but there’s gotta be sethingnthat can be done.
Can you blame them for not taking risks when these games get punished time and time again for doing so?
TLOU Part II had a mildly unlikeable character who gasp was a woman and it killed the entire franchise and sparked mass controversy so hard Naughty Dog now is making some bland and generic soulslike (but in space) GOTG ripoff slop with product placement in it.
Care to elaborate? You play as the person who killed a beloved iconic video game character and last game’s protagonist for 13 straight hours - I don’t know if it’s good but I’d hardly call it anything resembling “normie writing”.
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
To me - normie writing is something like those new switch Zelda games or Yakuza games or those Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor dark souls clone games or something like Watch_Dogs 1 or hell insert any ubisoft game apart from FC2, WD2 here
This. And none of these games with their totally predictable normie plots get any shit for that, let alone anything major.
And Watch dogs 1 was such a terrible game, it would deserve getting major shit.
TLOU2 controversy wasn’t because the unlikable character was a woman, it was because the writing was garbage. If the unlikable character was a man the reception would have been exactly the same.
Also, woman characters in games hasn’t been a risk since Metroid came out in 1986. It seems nowadays that the tables have turned and the vast majority of main characters in more than half of games from the past 5 years are women.
Whether the writing was garbage or not isn’t relevant to be honest - because controversy was spun by people who only knew the game’s story through hearsay of the leaks before the game even came out, and majorly it was to do with accusations of “wokeness” and other brainrot - so yes clearly it was an issue, of course it was an issue.
It wasn’t really the substance of the game that the usual outrage grifters latched onto so it’s not relevant to the discussion of the controversy.
As for more women being protagonists - sure, idk how you can say that so confidently, I suppose you have a convenient framing for what counts as “big games” to support your point, but I think the quantity was never really an issue.
Honestly more men being protags in games is okay, what I take issue with is that whenever something interesting happens, like oh I dunno, a game makes a woman kinda buff and mean looking, people bitch about it like no tomorrow.
So of course it’s an issue. It always has been.
In 2013-ish, Anita Sarkessian made some exceedingly light feminist critiques of video games in and it was an issue. In 2014-ish, A woman made an indie game that’s honestly really good even to this day (Depression Quest) and it was an issue. In 2020, a game came out where a fictional character (Abby) had muscles and it was an issue.
Nowadays I guess the most famous example would be the “FUCKING GENDER AMBIGUITY” screaming guy who didn’t like Starfield’s pronoun selection screen or some such.
Then people went truly psychotic in a deranged hate campaign against some random inclusivity consultancy Sweet Baby Inc. over games they were reportedly never involved with because there was women, or something, somewhere.
Hopefully you get the idea.
It was precisely the issue that a woman was the main character in a video game but was not in fact “Metroid from Metroid 1986” but a buff, angry, unattractive, hateful and morally grey character who does shitty things, sorta like Joel - in other words - she was something a lot more like a real person in a mature story, not a single digit frame twist from 40 years ago that amounts to an Easter egg turned geek culture cringe factoid parroted by the kinds of people who wouldn’t understand RLM’s “Nerd Crew” show is satire.
You can see some of the worst examples here, cherry-picked as they are, juxtaposed with what actual critique is: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVQcZa4O01A
You can also visit the steam store page and look at the negative reviews, or peruse the cesspit subreddit /r/TheLastOfUs2 posts the time of the game’s leaks and release to see people bitching about everything from pride flags in Seattle(!) to Abby being made too likeable to accusations of this or that character being le ebil transgender or whatever else that sounds like it came out of a /pol/-themed magic 8 ball.
Hell, there are utterly deranged people in the steam reviews for this game now bitching about the show - about the actress that plays Ellie and one guy even implies she is “down syndrome representation”.
Like, what the actual fuck?
As for the game, the game is ok, I’m playing it right now, it’s less boring than the first so I like it a lot more, the AI actually lives up to the bullshit promised in the first game’s trailer, but it’s too long and yeah the writing is too on the nose sometimes, though I do like the characters and the atmosphere a lot. Idk if I “love” it, but I do find it way more fun as a game and far more interesting from a story perspective.
What it definitely is though is controversial as fuck and that’s just reality. People made a whole subreddit just to hate on the game that’s active to this day and most of their issues aren’t even to do with the game - they even pretend to hate the TV show they haven’t seen too.
In 2013 I was much younger and believed ahit I read, so I was swept up in the “Sarkessian wants to destroy games” crap (as if she could and/or mattered enough to actually affect change in any way).
A few years ago I looked up her videos (cudos to her that she still kept them online) and I was honestly almost disappointed in how bland and obviously true her points were. Sure, her research wasn’t perfect and she could have presented them a bit better, but what these videos deserved would have been mostly bored acknowledgement. Similar to TLOU2. It wasn’t a super exciting game. The story wasn’t great but also not terrible. The characters were adequately interesting for the most part. The gameplay was again not great but ok, and certainly not worse than part 1.
Could it have been better? Sure, no question. But it also didn’t nearly deserve the hate it got.
Same with many other similar media, like e.g. the Ghostbusters remake or Twilight.
But what happened there was that people got seriously offended by these games/shows/movies and then made it their mission to destroy it. And that’s ridiculous and pathetic, but it happens all the time.
Killed so much that the game will never get a sequel it’s clearly meant to have, yes.
The remaster of the first game came out before Part 2. The subsequent remake of the first game is made using Part 2’s assets and mechanics as well as assets from the original and had much smaller production costs, it was clearly made to recoup the loss of IP value perceived by Sony, same with the relatively low budget HBO show, compared to making a game the caliber of TLOU it costs peanuts and if at all - that will be the only way the saga will see a conclusion sadly.
So yes absolutely TLOU was killed off by the controversy and they’re now working on a new IP that looks significantly more safe and uncontroversial in every way sans maybe featuring a black lady in it.
Yeah, doesn’t change the fact though - it was Sony’s flagship from their oldest most well known first party studio and it effectively got cancelled and pawned off to HBO to be milked on a budget.
Most movie franchises wish they could be Star Wars but it doesn’t change the fact the sequel trilogy did immense and obvious damage to the brand due (primarily) to the controversy, though in that case those movies actually also sucked which I’m sure didn’t help things. TLOU Part 2 on the other hand was by no means as awful as any of the sequel trilogy SW flicks.
As much as I would love that, I think the original games being remastered to remove any bugs or maybe just having balance/difficulty changes/updates would be enough for me.
On a personal level, I would absolutely not buy a Fallout 1/2 remaster that changes how the NPC faces move when in the dialogue box thing with them. That almost uncanny valley like facial movement is something I absolutely love in older games.
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