Bethesda built up a fan base around a franchise that liked playing an immersive, story-oriented, highly-moddable game where the main character is kind of core to the story. They moved to a genre where xxPussySlayer69xx is jetpacking around, the story couldn’t matter much past the initial part of the game (since the point of the online portion is to have people replaying relatively-cheap-to-produce content), that couldn’t be modded much (to keep balance and players from cheating), and where the player’s character cannot matter much, because there are many player characters.
For real. I know every Fallout fan says this, but I don’t even need a new Fallout game-a remaster of new Vegas or even FO3 would be awesome. I know that’s not easy but it’s less work than designing a whole new game.
Sometimes devs could save themselves a lot of trouble and aggravation if they listened to the fanbase instead of trying to tell us what we want
Specifically with the Fallout series, I think that one complication is that there was a lot of unhappiness way back when with the series moving from a much-liked isometric, turn-based/real-time game to a 3D game with shooter elements. A lot of people, including myself, didn’t think that it would likely reproduce what they liked about the series. And, well, it was a change, but what ultimately came out was pretty good, and while I’m sure that it didn’t cut it for some people – you had things like the Wasteland series continuing the isometric approach – I think that it was a pretty decent transition. The same people who liked the isometric games generally liked Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. So in that case, the game series was taken through a major shift that a number of players were skeptical about, and it generally worked.
But with Fallout 76, I think that the transition caused tradeoffs that didn’t work out as well for many players.
3 and new Vegas had such effort to keep the same level of writing, and VATS was an excellent nod to to the isometric games. So while the form was different, the experience was still fallout. 76 was a copy-paste of FO4 with no story, no npcs, and the entire game revolved around the most controversial part of 4: settlements.
For real. I know every Fallout fan says this, but I don’t even need a new Fallout game-a remaster of new Vegas or even FO3 would be awesome. I know that’s not easy but it’s less work than designing a whole new game. Sometimes devs could save themselves a lot of trouble and aggravation if they listened to the fanbase instead of trying to tell us what we want
Specifically with the Fallout series, I think that one complication is that there was a lot of unhappiness way back when with the series moving from a much-liked isometric, turn-based/real-time game to a 3D game with shooter elements. A lot of people, including myself, didn’t think that it would likely reproduce what they liked about the series. And, well, it was a change, but what ultimately came out was pretty good, and while I’m sure that it didn’t cut it for some people – you had things like the Wasteland series continuing the isometric approach – I think that it was a pretty decent transition. The same people who liked the isometric games generally liked Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. So in that case, the game series was taken through a major shift that a number of players were skeptical about, and it generally worked.
But with Fallout 76, I think that the transition caused tradeoffs that didn’t work out as well for many players.
3 and new Vegas had such effort to keep the same level of writing, and VATS was an excellent nod to to the isometric games. So while the form was different, the experience was still fallout. 76 was a copy-paste of FO4 with no story, no npcs, and the entire game revolved around the most controversial part of 4: settlements.