{"id":34115,"date":"2016-09-01T19:22:54","date_gmt":"2016-09-01T23:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34115"},"modified":"2016-09-02T11:09:07","modified_gmt":"2016-09-02T15:09:07","slug":"fallout-4-ep35-big-mclarge-huge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=34115","title":{"rendered":"Fallout 4 EP35: Big McLarge Huge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8ZyyXhs4C_A\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8ZyyXhs4C_A'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>I know the definition of RPG is a mess. Diablo is an RPG. Borderlands is an RPG. Planescape is an RPG. Mass Effect is an RPG. To some people it means a game with leveling and looting. To some people it means a game where you think up a personality for your character and then respond to challenges as that person. To some people it&#8217;s about messing around with branching stories. To some people it&#8217;s just a game where you can drive the dialog and discover the details of the setting at your own pace. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s obviously a matter of degrees. The more of these attributes you have, the more roleplay-ish the game is. But genres are more of a Yes \/ No deal and not a measure of how high a game scores on the roleplay-o-meter. And so we have a lot of arguments about where we draw the line.<\/p>\n<p>But Fallout 4 is an interesting case. If we made the attributes of an RPG into a checklist, Fallout 4 would score really high. It has a lot of roleplayish things, but they&#8217;re all really shallow, and often disconnected from each other.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>You can level up and spend skill points. (But this is neutered by the &#8220;all builds must be equally valid in the face of endless mandatory combat&#8221;.)\n<li>You have a dialog wheel. (Which is useless since conversations are linear, your choices rarely matter, and you can&#8217;t tell what you&#8217;re doing to say.)\n<li>You can loot things. (Which feeds into an amusing but shallow base-building mechanic where you build houses for inert nameless people who have no relationship with you, the world, or each other.)\n<li>There&#8217;s a story. (Which is dumb nonsense and appalling melodrama as depicted in cringe-worthy cutscenes.)\n<li>You&#8217;re given a character to play. (But then they&#8217;re never really given any personality, nor are you given the freedom to form one yourself.)\n<li>You get to make &#8220;choices&#8221;. (Most of which are shallow, meaningless, or offered without really giving you enough information to make an informed decision. Sure, choosing between Institute, Railroad, Brotherhood, or Minutemen is a BIG choice. But like the red \/ green \/ blue choice at the end of Mass Effect, it feels contrived and arbitrary. It&#8217;s like choosing to blow up Megaton in Fallout 3. It&#8217;s a choice for its own sake and not a natural, emergent part of the world. )\n<\/ol>\n<p>Fallout 4 has all the ingredients of a roleplaying game, yet it doesn&#8217;t feel like one because every element is so diluted that there&#8217;s almost nothing left. Fallout 4 is a homeopathic roleplaying game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) I know the definition of RPG is a mess. Diablo is an RPG. Borderlands is an RPG. Planescape is an RPG. Mass Effect is an RPG. To some people it means a game with leveling and looting. To some people it means a game where you think up a personality for your character [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}