So the inimitable Hbomberguy has a new video taking on the pickup artists we here at We Hunted the Mammoth have grown to know and loathe, focusing on two of the most loathesome, Roosh V and Matt Forney.
Watch it! This is one of those very rare 30 minute YouTube videos that’s worth watching (that doesn’t involve cats, Russian drivers, or pimple popping).
Well that was creepy yet enjoyable.
@Sinkable John
Yeah, I heard you really can’t be the “bad guy” in the main game. Your choices are always “good” and you’re always the “hero” apparently; and it has the same problem as most modern Bethesda games that if you kill a bunch of people and serve your time/pay your fine, no one really cares and everything is hunky dory.
But I think that’s why they made Nuka World, where you pretty much have to be a jerk, because that’s totally what people wanted when they complained that you have no choice other than to be “good” in game: The fact that you can’t be “bad”.
May I ask about that “you can’t be bad” thing? It’s something that I’ve heard a lot around the web, in one form or another. It’s been puzzling me and I’d like to understand it better.
My current thoughts are: if I play a Fallout game then there are very limited things which I can do. I can’t pick a character backstory different from the existing one, I can’t play a person with physical disabilities, and I can’t build a ship and sail away to South Africa to see what happened there. This is because Bethesda have limited my choices in order to better tell the story they wanted to tell. I accept this when I install the game. Surely the fact that I’m constrained to being a hero is no different?
I can’t really compare 4 to the earlier games – 4’s the first one I’ve had the chance to play – but the whole “You can only be heroic” thing is wrong. (More minor story spoilers follow.) One of the three main factions is basically the Illuminati as run by Dr Mengele, and you can join up with them to become an absolute dictatorial monster, destroying the Underground Railroad expy and brainwashing the press and all that Trumpian stuff.
I guess the point is that you can’t be as villainous as in the previous games, due to the removal of the karma system, but you can still be villainous. Not that it really affects me either way; I always play chaotic good, because self-inserts. >_>
@EJ
It’s a fundamental problem with most modern Bethesda games but what I and others mean you can be “bad” is that you can kill a husband in front of his partner, pay a fine or serve jail time and no one really remembers nor really acts differently to you beyond maybe different voice lines that likely do not reference that you killed him.
And besides that, many older Fallout games do have a sort of system in which you can be the bad guy. You could kill people (and have other react to it like humans would, amazingly), steal, sell people into slavery, sell your followers–and you’d gain a bad reputation for it that people reacted to.
Even in Fallout 3, you could be bad, even if it was on a dumb sliding scale of morality where you could blow up and entire city but do a few quests and become good again.
(Although literally the only time the fact you blew up Megaton is mentioned is by your father who gently chastises you for it like you got a C on a paper instead of at least a B and one slide at the end. No one cares that you blew up a town. No one gives a shit and it’s weird.)
I think Fallout New Vegas probably has the best system out of the games where you had morality but you also have reputations with factions.
Like you can be evil and that can lower your rep with some factions but could also raise it with others. You could be hated everywhere else in the wasteland because you’re evil but in one settlement you’re in good standing because you helped them a lot BUT they still recognize you did bad and talk and act accordingly
For more information on this subject, I direct you to H. Bomberguy’s video Fallout 3 is Garbage (And Here’s Why). I imagine most if not all the problems he has with Fallout 3 could be applied to Fallout 4, minus the ones that criticize the actual plot of the game, I guess.
(Also it’s 3am and I’m on my phone so that’s why theres grammar and spelling and weird wording okay? Okay.)
Ah, I see. The game lets you be evil but doesn’t recognise your evil state. I can see how that would be jarring. That sounds a lot like Bethesda’s earlier Elder Scrolls games, where the geography was the selling point, and interacting with people was almost an afterthought.
I’d forgotten all that stuff about how being an asshole in 3 led to the world not giving a shit. Also
This. Also I’m glad karma’s gone, ’cause morality gauges seem real stupid to me. Especially since, as Jack pointed out, saving a bunch of puppies and maybe helping an old person across the street will balance out the fact that you nuked a town and I have no words to express how wrongwrongwrong that is.
@Moggie
I didn’t think fallout 3 was garbage, but it was just a huge disappointment in so many ways. Black Isle, you’ll be missed. Obsidian just doesn’t quite make the grade.
@Sinkable John
Fallout 2 had some special reputation traits that would stick with you forever regardless of your karma, which was a nice idea. You could be as angelic as all fuck, but the game remembers all those graves you looted, and it reminded you that you’re a graverobber whenever you visited your character screen. Some of these traits would have additional special effects in certain towns. Some of the old FO2 crew were involved in new vegas, which is why that game had a slightly more elaborate reputation system.
Anyway, morality gauges aren’t intrinsically bad, but actually writing morality points system that avoids the whole maim-puppy-cancelled-out-by-help-granny-across-road thing requires far more thought that most game devs are prepared to put into the issue. And also researching utilitarianism is too much like hard work, or something.
You folks reminded me of another Fallout obsessed youtuber I really like. His channel is called Oxhorn and he is quite family friendly I’d say. He does a lot of back story stuff and mod reviews that aren’t all titties titties and more titties, which is refreshing.
Also, the nthapple does much the same thing minus mods. He has lots of NV and 3 content as well as 4. Skyrim too now that I think about it. He has a delightful accent and the only downside is he uses the C word more than I’d like. Other than that he seems decent.
I really wish I could find a lady youtuber that did lots of Fallout stuff. Everyone I can think of is a guy.
I absolutely adore Fallout: New Vegas! I’ve been playing the series since Fallout 2 (bought the first game later), and New Vegas really captures the tone and style of the earlier parts in the series without losing anything in the way of story or innovation. I like all the little nods to the originals, but they come about in such an organic manner that it’s still a fresh experience.
I especially love Hardcore Mode, where the character needs to eat, drink and sleep to stay alive. This is something that I feel the original games lacked, a chance to actually experience the hardships of the wasteland aside from just radiation and stuff like that. Granted, I would have preferred the mode to be a bit more challenging; As it is now, you only experience a tiny inconvenience at the very beginning, but after exploring for a little while, food and drink rarely become an issue anymore. Maybe in a future game they could implement a food rotting mechanic and/or an activity mechanic that would simulate an active lifestyle burning more calories than just sitting around. That way, you could never really get too stocked up on food on your travels.
I guess the one thing I’m rather unsure of in the game is the Caesar’s Legion. On the one hand, they are a ridiculously, almost cartoonishly evil faction with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, which lends itself badly to nuanced role-playing. On the other hand, their racism and misogyny seems like something out of the fever dream of MGTOWs, so I can’t call that unrealistic per se, but rather a thought experiment on taking those ideas to their logical conclusion.
Then again, the faction just seems way too functional for a group that operates on a strict hierarchy and openly embraces unambiguously evil values that prevent them from forming meaningful alliances with non-shitty people. I mean, slaver groups have been a staple of the series from the very beginning, but the idea of one growing so powerful without some level of ambiguity and compromise on the pure malice they radiate is pretty far-fetched even for a rather tongue-in-cheek series like Fallout, at least in my opinion. It would be far more realistic to have such groups either be small and disjointed or let them be hiding their evil behind a facade of “protecting traditional values” or “making America great again” to let less terrible members think they’re part of something noble and good. Still, I found my first encounter with the Legion in the town of Nipton pretty unsettling, which counts for something.
And, as Handsome Jack said, I really like that my actions in the game seem to have actual consequences with my reputation and all that. Although I rarely play bad characters, it’s nice that the choice to play one is there. I dunno, I can’t bring myself to play a shithead, no matter how hard I try. Too easily immersed in the world, I suppose? It’s why I’ve never been able to complete a GTA game either.
I do have Fallout 3, but aside from the nice intro sequence, I found it pretty forgettable. Maybe I should try completing it even once one of these days.
Haven’t got the money to afford a PS4 with Fallout 4, but I kinda imagine I would be spending most of my time just building up my settlements, managing them and protecting them from raids. Even though I find the lack of a survival mode a drawback (I love those types of games), I’ve understood that the crafting system in the game is pretty awesome, which would totally make up for it. Just chilling out, decorating my home, tending to crops, crafting weaponry, and living the peaceful life out in the wasteland, occasionally shooting the crap out of super mutants attacking my village sounds like a pretty good time to me.
That’s likely because the studio that made it, Obsidian, had a lot of members who were Black isle Studio which was a part of Interplay Entertainment which were the two studios that worked on the original Fallout 1 and 2; and they used a lot of major plot points from their canceled version of Fallout 3 (a project called Van Buren) before the companies went under and Bethesda got the rights.
I’m glad they never used the “born ghoul” thing which was stupid as fuck for a ton of different reasons. Maybe if they change it up a bit, it could work and could be interesting in the possible sequel Obsidian/Black Isle may be working on but otherwise it’s dumb and it’s the one good reason I’m happy the original Fallout 3 never got published.
And I think the big thing of Caesar’s Legion is that Caesar is the only one keeping it together and it will all fall apart when he’s gone. (And he fucked over a bunch of people, erasing their cultures and way of life for it too.) He made an empire with no staying power just for the sake of his ego and everyone knows it. Best part is that he’s got a tumor on the brain that’s been fucking him up so the end may come sooner than he thinks.
Especially by a knife for the achievement.
@Anarchonist
FO4 does have a survival mode, actually. I think they added it in a quiet post-release patch.
I totally hear you about living the everyday life, too. I’m currently taking a sore-hands break from working on my character and her wife’s little house on the coast.
Bethesda did FO3 and published it. Obsidian did FNV and Bethesda published it. The only way Obsidian touched FO3 was when they used the assets to make FNV in 11 months and made it with a more compelling story line and deeper morality systems than Bethesda could in the five years they worked on FO3.
So don’t you blame Obsidian for FO3. That is all Todd Howard’s little grubby hands all over my videos games and ruining them. You can tell because there’s no gay people anywhere in FO3 and I require this much gay *holds hand up near hips* for a game to be good.
Sarcasm for the last two sentences.
(EDIT: Okay, mostly sarcasm for the last sentence. Bethesda has a problem with not putting gay characters in their games–and I mean characters not just followers you can romance not matter your gender.)
@Handsome Jack
So, yeah, I perhaps phrased the starts of that post a bit badly. I’m aware of the various guilty parties behind Fallouts 2, 3, 4 and NV (and indeed mentioned them when I talked about morality systems later in that same post).
Black Isle will be missed, because not even their partial reincarnation as Obsidian has really been able to replace them. Obsidian is doubly frustrating, as they have history of planning and promising great things, and then very much failing to follow through (NWN2, KOTOR2 and Alpha Protocol should have been waaaay better than they ended up being), but at least they made a reasonable show of things with FNV which, yes, was way better than Bethesda’s efforts.
(edit: mentioned *some* of them in that last post, etc. there’s never been an edit window long enough for me 🙁 )
@Handsome Jack
Apparently Fallout 2 was the first game to include gay marriage. I had no idea. I think one of my friends had discovered that the computer-controlled spouse who couldn’t be left behind anywhere safe inevitably ended up being killed, and that sort of thing makes me sad so I avoided the possibility entirely.
@Jack
I see you’ve got this, but come get me when we’re ranting at the spiders and the language locks, ’cause I want in on that.
Oh hey, I posted a comment so poorly phrased it sounds rather assholish, and only realized it after the edit window timed out.
Totally the first time this happens to me.
So, to clear any doubts, what I meant was that I’ve got a lot of problems with Bethesda including their writing (and lack thereof) of LGBT characters, but ain’t nothing I can say about it that Jack hasn’t said better already.
On the other hand, there’s a few other things I can actually talk about with some degree of certainty that I won’t just be repeating what was said above, like the aforementioned giant fuck you’s to phobic people or people who don’t enjoy crappy half-assed voice-overs.
Go ahead! Tell us how WEAK you are because you can’t handle FAKE REALISTIC LOOKING SPIDERS getting all up FACE and CAN BE RATHER HARD TO KILL at low levels and have WEIRD SLIMY SKITTERING SOUNDS.
…When I first joined the Dark Brotherhood, I accidentally killed Lis because I wasn’t prepared for the only pet frostbite spider in the entire game. I WAS CONDITIONED TO ATTACK THEM I’LL BUY YOU ANOTHER ONE BABETTE.
EDIT
Oh, yeah, I heard the translations are terrible. Like, the Spanish version of bards don’t even sing, they just read the songs.
And there have been mods to fix that AND replace all the spiders with bears…which honestly sounds worse to me because bears are 50x more powerful than the spiders but it’s understandable because spider are very prevalent and a very common phobia.
If there’s one thing Bethesda games do right, it’s have a very good a healthy modding community.
(On that point, any suggestions for lighting overhauls for non-SE Skyrim? Why Bethesda has to choose the most shittest lighting filters for its games are beyond me.)
I remember reading about that! It’s a shotgun wedding. The dad walks in and wants you to make an honest person out of them.
I really should get around to playing Fallout 2. I’m technically in the middle of Fallout 1 but I’m at the point where I got kicked out by the Vault and there’s technically other more pressing things happening (they aren’t time sensitive) but I’m trying to figure out how to steal shit from this rich guy for “what the bloody bloody bloody hell” dude* but I’m kinda just bumbling through at this point because getting the water chip was the easy part, it’s figuring out how everything else that’s the hard part.
*And what I mean by “how to steal shit” I mean “where the fuck is the mark the journal doesn’t say and I can’t get anyone to retell me where I’m trying to go COMPASS COMPASS BETHESDA HELP”.
@Jack
I uh felt like I had something more nuanced and elaborate to say on the matter, but fuck it, you pretty much nail it.
On spiders : fucking lazy and cowardly. Like, your go-to “scary” monster is something that relies exclusively on phobia. I don’t need to explain how that is lazy, cowardly and just plain mean. Fuck you, Bethesda.
Dawnguard, amirite ? Darkfall cave, right when you first enter and jump in the water.
Like, at Bethesda HQ, by the water cooler :
“HEY BRIAN ! Guess what ? People hate our spiders because they’re scary and totally keeping a bunch of people away from the game !”
“-Woah for real Brent ? Let’s put even more of that, even more scary, in the first expansion ! And then we’ll put some slightly-less-scary spiders in the third one, but make them explode for extra gross factor.”
On language-locks : actually I’ma sit this one out because I’ve been an unlicensed translator at some point and I don’t feel like writing a paragraph about a bunch of fucks who make 20 times what I did for the same amount of work, (and much more reliably too) while producing a job so poorly done that I would be ashamed of it, and then save on the voice-over recording budget by literally asking the first guy they see on the street while on their smoke break. Oh wait, I actually wrote that paragraph. Oh well.
That only applies to french translations, obviously. Make a note, Bethesda : you can’t exactly fix that problem, it’s kinda nation-wide. Don’t bother. Just let us have a way around it, by not language-locking your damn games.
@John
They’re good spiders, Brent
There’s a pun or a joke in there, right ? ’cause I don’t get it ._.
I’m not exactly sure if they chose spiders to be “scary” or not but then again I’m not bothered by, er, fake spiders, not to diminish arachnophobes’ feelings. Spiders seems to be just a common enemy in games, many of which are not necessarily for scares but for more enemy variety.
Of course, I might not find them as scary because it’s not a horror game–I mean, I’ve been startled by Skyrim and stuff, even by the spiders, but the environment and play style of Skyrim takes away any of its minor horror aspects of it for me, personally, and doesn’t make a lot of the crap scary. Even enemies which I would find scary in other games aren’t so much, mostly because it’s a Bethesda game and they get caught on level geometry or bug out and stand still or can’t move through narrow places so you can just shoot them from a distance because they’re dummies still trying to get at you.
Except for gargoyles. Fuck gargoyles, you beautiful creatures. Bethesda took my love of gargoyles and turned it against me! I FEEL BETRAYED.
(I should really replay Dawnguard as a vampire but I really should at least do the vampire hunter side first.)
But back to actually addressing arachnophobia, it would be nice so people can have more accessibility to games for there to be options that replace things for people with common phobias. Sometimes you can’t change things, like the height of stuff for the acrophobic or water levels for the aquaphobic (or hydrophobic?) people, but swapping out an enemy for another enemy is pretty easy. While it may not be the one accessibility option that should be standard for all games, like color blind modes and closed captioning, it’s still at least considerate of your audience if you’re including something that can be easily done.
But, if they didn’t language-lock, then people would know it’s crappy and complain about and that may affect sales in countries they actually care about their market in, not that they actually would care anyway because when has Bethesda really cared about the quality that matters of its products when they just look so good?
@John
There’s a jokey Twitter account called WeRateDogs. People send in pics of their dog friends, and they say a nice thing about said dog and give em a rating, usually 10-13 out of 10. All in good fun, and the puppers are totes adorbs
Then, some dude named Brant comes in and tries to get all pedantic about the whole thing. From this sprang the single greatest Twitter thread of all time:
https://mobile.twitter.com/brant/status/775407594802335744
Anyway, you used the name Brent and an animal, so I had to do it. Joke splained 🙂
@Jack
Trust me, they did. Everything in how they made them screams of how it’s entirely directed at stirring up the phobia. The way they move, the way they drop from the ceilings, the way they get in your face, the way they creep up on ya in the wilds… Everything.
And yes, a lot of games (including most RPGs) have spiders as a staple enemy, which is about as original as goblins, except almost no one does goblins anymore because they’ve finally figured out that it’s getting old. And I agree, in most games they aren’t actually scary even for an arachnophobe – sometimes it even looks like they were deliberately made non-scary, which actually feels nice, but it’s still lazy and unoriginal.*
The problem with spiders and arachnophobia is that seeing them is only part of the problem, the easy part. Picture something that terrifies you. Then go play Skyrim and travel on foot a bit and imagine that the thing you’re afraid of is out there, everywhere around you, and there’s no way to know where or when it’ll jump out from behind a tree.
Now imagine you’re in a dungeon. You know that the thing you’re afraid of is present in almost all dungeons even when it’s not the primary occupant. You also know that it’s in the ceilings – you just can’t know which, because “ceilings with a hole are dangerous” is not reliable at all.
And you know that when it drops down, or leaps at you, you’re gonna catch a glimpse of that terrifying moment when it spreads its legs, and you’re gonna hit pause then reload just ’cause you can’t stand the sight anymore, and then go somewhere else and forget about that stupid quest – except pretty much every damn quest, every damn dungeon, everything has those fuckers in it.
See what I mean ? They don’t only ruin the parts of the game where they are, they ruin everything, because everything has a chance to contain them and that expectation alone makes you spend your entire playthrough with a Detect Life spell in your left hand – which gets even more annoying if you were planning on not using magic.
The worst part ? Farkas : “Hey uh, so I’m afraid of these things, I’ma let you go on ahead and take care of it without me, aight ?” in the last Companions quest. WELL OKAY THEN. I been through this whole game and had to deal with those things all the time and can’t really take anymore, especially that many at once, but you won’t come with me even though it would be an easier fight and an easier scare to cope with if there’s two of us ? Man, fuck you. And fuck you too, Bethesda. That was the cherry on top of the shit-cake.
Don’t get me started on acrophobia (I don’t have that, which is why I’m only slightly super pissed-off at what follows). I get that they can’t exactly work around that, but does Meridia absolutely have to surprise-teleport you and hold you several miles above the ground to deliver her goddamn speech, and then fucking drop you ? It was already in poor taste when it was Sheogorath doing it, but at least it was just an elaborate game over and not something that you have to go through to progress the quest.
It’s not that they don’t consider the experience of phobic players. It’s that they grossly dismiss or even outright abuse those phobias for no good reason whatsoever. That school bully throwing spiders at other kids ? That’s Bethesda.
*A few people have in fact written and designed their giant spiders in non-lazy, original ways. Those people are the best, they write and design the best spiders, and I will always find a nice quiet brain-drawer in which to stash the phobia while I enjoy their spiders.
@Axe
I get it now !
Thanks for the best thread ever.