Has Bethesda ruined the Fallout series (and my big rant!)?

[Chazore]

mountaindewslave said:

the AI communities are really dumb.

In fact the community and building system I think damages Fallout dramatically. the pay off is not worth it. its okay to screw around with a bit to kill some time but it gets boring quickly unless you have some sort of obsessive goal in terms of a massive monument to build.

there's an issue when in a matter of a few hours time you can make a community of NPC's that are bigger than any other community/town in the game. It just really pulls you out of the immersion.

It also doesn't help that literally zero of the NPC's in your own small set up communities have any personality, choices, quests. its just like "oh here you go, here are 15 random generic programs living in your old town". blagh. 

the community building is also distracting in the sense of how absurd it really is that you can just pick up random things and put together structures like magic. I know its a game and they are going for the popular Minecraft esque stuff, but Fallout in the past has done a pretty good job at immersion and believability in terms of its own world. When you can replicate practically any other community in a matter of minutes or hours its like :/ also one thing I always felt made Fallout awesome was the concept that you ARE sort of a vague 'wanderer' entering a dangerous world. It felt like both the player themselves AND the character could sort of automatically connect relate because the game literally has you wake up in a vault, come out of a vault, wake up from being half dead, etc. 

like you're wandering this weird world and interacting and becoming a part of it. but a wanderer doesn't build giant structures and tons of communities with generic lifeless NPC's populating them that in no time can rival the biggest game settlements out there.

I don't know. I just find it all very frustrating. Bethesda seemed to realize that throwing in like mulitplayer would kill the immersion factor within the world yet they seem to fail to recognize that the settlement building platform, especially how they went about it, probably kills the immersion much worse than playing with friends would have

I like the idea of building my own home like I did in Skyrim, but the idea of building settlements still hasn't "settled" with me yet (sorry for the bad pun), I mean the idea of tossing up some old rusty fences and a few turrets doesn't really make me feel like it's my home nor does it feel logically secure against monsters like Deathclaws or Synths who clearly do not give two fucks about who is who or what stands in their way.

Also I had to install some mods to both make junk I collected weightless (seriously to build your own settlement you would have to carry so much junk that in turn would slow you down) and the ability to recycle it into base components to craft with. The idea of collecting some keeltes, pots , plates and coffee cups along with srpings and the like never did give me that feeling that collecting them meant I could errect my own cities, all from a few scraps here and there, all of that still feels silly to me now, like you don't really scrap all the cars and melt them down to makenew materials to craft with, you don't tear down random apartments in any of the cities in order to break them down to materials you could build a new home with, instead we toss together a few nuts and screws to make some shoddy wall coverings. You'd think that after 200 years, with some actual tech left behind that we would be ablke to cover the basics of breaking down damaged goods and making them into new tools/materials to build with.

Another thing that I loved about Skyrim's home building was the fact that it was mine and mine alone and it was unique. Building around other spots of the wasteland makes visiting other towns rather pointless since I can start my own robot slave town with NPC's that stand there lifeless and emotionless, none of that feels real to me and serves as a disconnect, at least with my player home or two in Skyrim, they had me, my servent/follower and the child I adopted, that to me felt like a small family and a place I could actually call home. Places in the wasteland?, not a chance. Though I still prefer visiting towns more often, buying supplies, talking to some NPC's and moving on. I;d rather buy a home within the city and call that home than muck around building a shack of a home that shouldn't be able to stand up against super mutants and Deathclaws. 

The thing with bethesda that I have come to know over the eyars is that they love to hype you up, the fans have also made many great mods over those years as well but Bethesda in turn has relied on that community to a point where the majority of Fallout 4 is composed entirely from past mods and mods that are a part of it from the game's community, it hardly feels like it's own game and feels more like a shooting game that lives because mods exist, not because it exists on it's own merits (which it doesn't have much of these days). That said I do like to shoot things in Bethesda games and I want that aspect to feel like I am shooting something (rather than realistically shooting someone point blank with a boomstick and it doing nothing because the dice roll said so, don't put guns in if we are going full DND since that really does break immersion). Also their AI is dumb as bricks and a majority of the time feels lifeless with the few duties they are programmed to do,. I hope that these few more years they plan of making a new ES game that they end up going with a new engine which could also give way to improved AI.