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SvennoJ on 18 November 2015
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Mummelmann said:
 


It's the same story with the TES games; the more RPG elements they remove, the more popular it gets. I can understand it from a business perspective but for RPG fans, it's not really fun when games get more and more shallow. Mass Effect is another prime example, and Dragon Age as well, Diablo 3 went down the same path and the community nose-dived after only a few months where D2 remained relevant for more than a decade online.
The massive budgets force developers to aim for the lowest (or at least lower) common denominator to gain more sales from the so called "broader audience", so this is a self-preptuating cycle that will probably get worse in the coming years.

The number of good, proper RPG releases is going down and down, which is a shame since modern gaming machines have the potential to house games with both good looks and depth. Writing has taken a backseat to production value.

Heck; Fallout 4 doesn't even have skills any longer, so every character can use every armor and weapon. Some say it's appealing because you avoid missing with your build, I say it takes a lot of the point away from RPG's as a genre; custom characters with varied skills, strengths and weaknesses are a part of essential ingredients that make the meal complete. I don't care how much you can morph your characters face, which you'll only see in the (poor) dialogue sequences anyway, this is not what RPG's should be about and it doesn't add any depth to the actual game, it's just more visual filler.
Your actual stats have little bearing on the gameplay in Fallout 4 (the SPECIAL stats) and might as well be removed as well.
Fallout 4 is basically a re-skinned Skyrim and it's painstakingly obvious that these series are being developed in tandem, this takes away from them both in the end and I would like it if they tried to make them more different instead of both aiming down the middle.

Don't get me wrong, there are still good RPG's being made, but the masters of old (looking at you, Bioware and Bethesda) have lost it recently. This is one of the main reasons I loved The Witcher 3 so much; it wasn't like every other RPG, and this is, ironically, the main arguments for why a lot of people didn't like it. Yes, you're forced to play as a character the author and developer made, but you flesh him out and TW3 actually has more customization than F4 due to the system itself actually having consequences that affect gameplay a great deal.
I would much rather play an RPG with template characters from the box that can be tailor-made than make my own L'Oreal model with the exact right beard stubble and perfect ear lobes that can do what all the other L'Oreal models can right from scratch.
The "moral" or "good/bad" system in Fallout 4 and similar titles is also laughable, same with Mass Effect, yet another point where The Witcher 3 destroys the competition.

I do like Fallout 4, as I liked New Vegas, but as an RPG, it had shed weight and depth in favor of, well, pretty much tinkering with gear (which isn't nearly as fantastic as it sounded at first), terrible base building and L'Oreal model creator 1.0. Throw in more superficial things, remove depth, that's how to make an RPG today, apparently.
Luckily, games like Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher 3 show that not only are there developers that are willing to go a different path; there is also a market for these games.

I did like TW3 yet I disagree with it being better than making your own character. I didn't like Geralt much at the beginning. I wanted to play in a much more peaceful negotiator style than the game allowed me to. The game forcing me to kill everyone in the inn at the start almost had me quit. Instead I started over, redesigned my character to be a ruthless bastard which fit the style the developers expected of me a lot better. Still there were many quests where it forced me to choose between A or B, yet what I wanted was C.

The moral decisions were dressed up better yet in the end it didn't make a lot of impact. I reloaded a few savegames to see what would happen with the alternative decision. Mostly smoke and mirrors. Plus the decisions leading up to which of the 3 endings you get were unnecessarily obtuse. Long before the end I lost interest in the main story, too dumbed down from TW2. The decisions in TW2 were much more interesting leading to real differences in how the game progressed. The dumbed down open world design took all replay value away for me, while I completed every story branch in TW2.

Fallout 4 gives me more options, not that I will replay that either. I did play through Dragon Age origins 4 times with different groups of characters. That game did a lot more right. (I haven't played inquisition yet) It's different when you control a party. Controlling only 1 person I project my own values into that person, which clash when the game forces me to do things I don't want to. TW3 was pretty bad with that by locking you inside invisible walls, closed doors, untouchable or infite respawning enemies until you obeyed.

I kept playing TW3 to explore the world, hoping to find another quest line as great as the bloody baron in the beginning. Unfortunately despite it telling a lot more good stories, it never reached that height again. It was fun, but I was glad when it was over. Too long, too scatterbrained, too much padding. I liked the structure of The witcher 2 a lot better. That doesn't make it a bad game, it's actually pretty great with 60 to 80 hours of entertainment with some of the best story telling in recent years. It's just that the disconnect between the story telling and gameplay never went away.