T w e n t y S i d e d

I want to stress again how silly it is to have such flagrant and absurd plot holes in the game. It’s one thing for a player to gloss over a plot hole or two during fifteen minutes of exposition spread out over forty hours of gameplay. It’s another thing to spend months writing and recording dialog and building up a world around those plot holes. Dad is supposed to be kind, wise, and brilliant, and yet his actions indicate he’s careless, selfish, short-sighted, and stupid.

I’d be so ashamed if I was ever fortunate enough to get Liam Neeson to enact my dialog, and then I handed him something that wasn’t even consistent enough to support his character.

And as somone pointed out earlier in the series, Bethesda didn’t always behave this way. Morrowind had its flaws, but the plot was stable enough. Oblivion fell short of Morrowind, and the character motivations were a bit questionable, but the thing still managed to make some kind of sense. Now we have Fallout 3 where the premise is absurd, where the characters either have no motivations or their actions make no sense, and where you can’t say and do perfectly reasonable things because the nonsense plot says so.

These three games do seem to indicate a sort of trend. Our only hope to reverse this malignant development is for all of us to band together as gamers and complain about it. On the internet. On a blog. To each other. Long after the game has faded from the public interest.

If their games don’t improve, it means you haven’t been complaining hard enough. Do your part!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.