I mean, when the dialog options were yes, yes, yes, and sarcastic yes, and then choosing one said something entirely different sometimes, yeah it was a steaming turd. There was nothing wrong with the dialog system before. I’m glad they figured that out by 76.
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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And don't forget the "sarcastic" options that usually aren't sarcastic and it's just your character being a sudden dick for no reason.
There was that mod that changed it back to the standard style.
Absolutely, and that was such a welcome mod. Instant install as soon as I learned about it.
Huh, that is a pretty simple solution. They could've had a checkbox for that in the game settings...
and then choosing one said something entirely different sometimes
Detective Cole Phelps approves of this.
Do you fuck young boys, Valdez?
They spent forever on it because it fucking sucks. They had double the text for every single line because you had both a "summary" text for your choice and what the actual line spoken was. I bet the localization teams got a big check for that game
I actually loved that it was voiced but I did get a mod to change the one word labels to like what the dialogue actually was pretty fast
I remember all the dialog options sounding the same regardless of which of 4 options you picked. Fallout 4 looked great. But everything else was just okay.
The story boiled down to which group do you want to kill off?
which group do you want to kill off?
I don't want to discriminate, I say kill'em all.
The (main) stories of Fallout 3, Skyrim and Oblivion were comically bad as well. For me those games are about atmosphere, exploration and environmental story telling and I love them including Fallout 4 for that.
Do you folks think Bethesda is still capable of creating the type of experiences they used to?
No, and neither is Obsidian.
No. I am a huge Elder Scrolls fan but I have zero hope for 6.
As long as they don’t hamper mods or modding too much, then yes, sorta. The de facto experience for many is the modded experience. Which is often leagues above vanilla. Maybe they can’t ship a good thing out of the box, but they leave reasonable tools out for people to make the thing actually good.
But of course it shouldn’t be like that. Unfortunately it is. But if you think of the games as sandboxes for modders, and expect nothing more, then in a sense I guess, they do deliver.
But it takes years for the mods to mature and the games to reach actually reasonable prices for what they are.
Pretty sure everyone that made this experiences good is no longer at the company.
I hear that about most of legendary game companies like Blizzard, Bioware, etc. So I wonder where do those people work now?
If they are in the US, either at another game company by now or out of the biz. The gamedev industry is incestuous and unstable.
They have the potential to. But these days, I personally focus on indie, AA and large mods of older games (Morrowind, New Vegas).
CDPR is still good though.
Maybe, if they decide to ditch the janky gamebryo engine and/or stop glueing things on to see what sticks.
TES I dunno. Fallout...playing 76 now, maybe? It seems they learned what folk want. Seems.
TES has the problem of a simple fact that dumbing it down brough a lot more players that it took out.
I'm fine with it being voiced. I like mods that spell out the entire response choice, and even tag which choice will advance the game, vs just adding exposition.
I'm fine with voicing, though before generative AI voice cloning, it made life difficult for mods, because all the vanilla game menus were voiced and the mod menus silent.
There's also a mod to silence the PC voices, if one wants.
- The default options often did not match up with the simplistic descriptions provided.
- The world itself was empty and void without mods until you built out all of the settlements and had the supply line perk.
It took the sim settlements 1 mod to fix this by building out the empty settlements into places you could work with or take over.
- Too much of the game was left on the cutting room floor.
3.1 the psuedo-implemented bandit hierarchy ending with the forged that was hinted at. 3.2 Cait and the arena was criminal. 3.3 that it sets up a fairly interesting synth and human dilemma a few times but outside of the one kid/family vs Justin Ayo in the Institute it just drops it for no reason. 3.4 it likes to pretend you have choices but rarely actually did.
I wanted to customize one or two settlements. Sim Settlements reduced the drudge work of building up fleshed-out settlements, which was nice.
I still feel like the bigger changes were cosmetic, though. And while the questline (IIRC Sim Settlements 2 only) was long and good for a mod, I felt that it wasn't as good as the base game.
I still feel like the building feature went so underused. Like, they had one level, the fight wirh the Mirelurk Queen in the Castle that really let one set up defenses. Just not a lot of gameplay around it. It was mostly "shield some critical stuff in settlements and make things pretty". Every game since Fallout 4, including Starfield, has had building, and I still feel like they haven't really used the potential there for gameplay.
Cait and the arena was criminal.
https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/21498
Why did Bethesda cut this?
- Because almost nothing worked the way it was supposed to work.
Personally I would even prefer if they went all the way back to FO1/2 or Morrowind style conversations - I usually skip half of the voice acting anyway once I've read the subtitles and only needing VOs for portions of what major characters say gives the writers so much more room to go wild with everything else.
Completely agree. I’m veteran of the OG Fallout games, and I feel like I must be entirely wrong thinking how bland FO4 was based on its reception. Dialog was poor and every mission was just go there and kill that. It’s the only Fallout mainline game I never managed to finish.
I’m pretty sure in Fallout 2 one mission had my female character fuck a mob boss’s wife as a result of dialog choices. More wild variety like that and less settlements needing my help in the future please.
It’s the only Fallout mainline game I never managed to finish.
I think that my least favorite was Fallout 3.
I also really liked the Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4. If you haven't played that, I'd recommend it.
I'm not particularly familiar with Fallout 4. Is the player character being voiced really all that is described here as "cinematic"? I expected lots of cutscenes or camera fly-bys or explosions or something beyond basic voice acting...
They have camera shots and stuff.
I think that the idea is that you don't know exactly what your character is going to say in advance, just the general tone, so it's supposed to be interesting to watch still, like a movie.
It didn't work very well, in my opinion. Too frustrating when your character does something that you didn't want, and too hard to pick among the options.
Dialog was Fallout 4's major weakness, IMHO.
Honestly now that you explain it like this it makes more sense. Might even be fun in a game besides fallout.
I actually didn’t mind it too much but remembered to save often in case I disliked my choice
Ah okay, thanks, that makes some sense at least.
I can certainly see how that would feel like you're watching two strangers converse, though, rather than it being good for roleplay...
Yeah, well put. I think that that's also why many people didn't like their character to be voiced. Broke the sense of immersion where they could be the character.