All roads lead to nuke in FO, yes. Should check out Fallout 76 in that way. Nuking is the actual end game. You proceed to a week-long harvest of codes, getting a bunch of mates who did the same thing, and then go into some bunker with lots of stupid NPCs to kill that will rapidly eat away at your inventory economy so you have a new farm purpose for the next week. Then you get to nuke an area to get special ingredients for some ultra special gear upgrades you will likely never use because, guess what, you need to deploy more nukes to keep a steady income of that stuff.
Prior to that, you spend your time wandering aimlessly towards level cap, well, until the game somehow pushes you to that inevitable Enclave end game route. You can also choose NOT to nuke, but then the game simply ends in utter boredom for you, because there's nothing to find, get, or do that is even mildly interesting.
Nah, I'm good on that
Somehow I kinda knew it would be at least a little like that when I first learned that triggering a nuke was the main big thing. Basically "Oh, so anything else that's interesting is going to be for that and anything that deviates will be truncated." Maybe not in such a salty, immediate way. More like something in the back of my mind just said "EMPTY", before I realized why or saw any evidence of that.
It's like they strip it a little closer to the core each time. Though to be fair 76 is an MMO. I like to hope they gotta know that removing more things from the story and gameplay is not what people expect from a full release. Looking back though, I get a little antsy. At this point, they have a pattern of taking out more things than they add in, stretching back into pretty much a couple of decades. They get a fresh coat of paint, maybe even some big transitions... it looks and feels like a different game. But each time it feels like something new is missing.
When 76 first came around, I caught a lot of people saying that it was unfinished. That's already how I felt about 4. Even now, it just seems unfinished. In every area. But nowhere more noticeably than in the writing. The DLC's were a bit of a redemption, but none of that makes the main chunk... the heart of it, any more complete.
Shigeru Miyamoto said "A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad." Bethesda has somehow found a way to make nonsense of that foundational wisdom by making games that are ever-increasingly both more delayed and more rushed. I think they really do just conceive of their games that simplistically. Get ahead of themselves with stuff that would reveal itself to be not good after some real testing. They've gone down the route of many other companies, reaching for market share only to spite the experience. You know how they say never to trust a cook who doesn't eat their own food? Sometimes, I kind of wonder if the people there are playing their own games. Outside in, they look to have management problems, too. People overlook this, but Bethesda have expanded their teams quite a lot since the days of Oblivion and FO3. Not only is it not the same company or structure, it's not the same groups or environments. And there's more of everything. It all just reeks of things not going how they're meant to, and perhaps also of people being too high up to see through the clouds being poised to make/influence five or ten too many major decisions. Maybe some folks you can only productively say "yes" to. "Everything's great. It's gonna be great." Looking at what you get, what you see in the marketing probably reflects the internal sell. What they seem to think can work in their games reminds me of the epic things I would imagine myself doing and setting-up as a young boy. That's just kind of a vibe I get.
Overfragmentation, in a word.
When you look at games like Morrowind or Oblivion, with the sheer scope of the writing and all of the other elements built up around that, you can tell this is a super-condensed effort where it's like... sure, they're neglecting certain things but what they ARE doing, they're REALLY doing and making sure to work it all out and get it right. There's just a lot of stuff, to a ridiculous level, in the most peculiar ways. But it's a
tight experience. You just know you are in for it it. I don't get that anymore. Skyrim was the last one, and even that bares that same mark of just... scattering to the point of impotency. Past that, I've had a hard time sensing what they wanted the games to be... what experiences they wanted the player to have. It just feels very distinctly out of touch in a way that almost makes me feel suspicious. Everything winds up being very sparse. No matter how much gets tacked on, it kinda stays that way.
They've never been the best at handling the Fallout franchise. But at this point it's become more brand than game... to me, anyway. It's as though Bethesda themselves whole prospect is "Whatever, it's a Fallout game. Just give it this, this, and this. Monetize it. Bing, bang, boom." Nobody can say there were never signs of that.
Long story short, I don't know why I play this game. But I'm pretty sure that the reasons Bethesda thinks I have for playing it are very different from my own reasons for playing it. So many times I find myself thinking "Why would they think that people wanted this?" Of course the simple answer is that it still sells. But if that's the only reason, they probably could've come up with a seperate brand to put it under, rather than cashing-out on a beloved series. It just feels cheap. The way they treat Fallout is cheap. I don't totally hate FO4 for what it is. But it didn't even feel like it needed to be a Fallout game. Like there was no point in calling it that when all it resulted in was either a half-baked Fallout game or an entirely different game, held back by trying to be a full Fallout game.
