Fallout 4 se llevó hace muy pocos días el premio al mejor videojuego del año que entrega la Academia Británica del Cine y la Televisión (BAFTA). Pues bien, ayer apareció el análisis de la exigente web RPG Codex y, sorprendiendo a nadie, el juego de Bethesda recibe palos por todos lados, dejo algunos extractos porque la crítica es bastante larga:
There can be no question that Fallout 4 represents an important milestone in RPG history. Ask the average mainstream gamer what the best designed, most atmospheric, most memorable, best written, and overall biggest and greatest RPG of 2015 was, and they are almost certain to reply: “The Witcher 3”. However, if you ask them about the best-selling RPG of the year, they will assuredly point to Fallout 4. With a record-shattering 12 million copies shipped on launch day alone, Fallout 4 is poised to overtake Skyrim as the best-selling RPG of all time and become an important cultural touchstone for the next generation of RPG publishers, PR agencies, developers, and fans alike. In the years to come, Fallout 4 will be crucially important to everything we say and do as an RPG community, and every member of these forums should spend at least a few dozen hours of their time playing and studying the game.
For those of you who are currently unwilling or unable to invest precious leisure time in Fallout 4, I have drawn up a short list of basic facts about the game. If you wish to understand the unique combination of design elements that makes up one the most successful RPGs of our times, you should study this list closely.
...it's perfectly logical that a decent, functional dialogue system would allow for a variable number of possible dialogue choices. That's how most RPGs have implemented their dialogues, and that's a perfectly sensible way to do it. Unfortunately, Bethesda chose a different path in Fallout 4 – here, you are always presented with exactly four dialogue options, no matter what situation you are in. This kind of strict formal requirement straightjackets the entire dialogue system; every single conversation node has been twisted into a neat “pick one out of four” pattern. Like so many things about Fallout 4, it's completely unclear to me why the designers have made this choice; maybe it's because controllers have four primary action buttons. Whatever the reasoning, the end result is a broken and unnatural dialogue system that is bloated with pointless choices.
...As it is, I got the feeling that Bethesda were more concerned with making the game look fun and visceral and exciting and “Whoa!” instead of actually doing the hard work of making it play that way.
Ultimately, the environments kept me entertained for longer than anything else in the game. The game world kept showing me things I hadn't seen before, whether it was an old satellite array standing alone in the wasteland, a mysterious pyramid towering over an irradiated crater, a humorously overlit sunrise scene, a terribly low-res crawlspace texture, or simply a room with some cool looking shadows on the walls. The release reviews have pointed to weak graphics as one of the worst elements of the game; in proud Codex tradition, I've come away with the opposite impression. The visual design of Fallout 4 is far more entertaining and varied than any of its gameplay systems.
...It's no hyperbole to say that the writers at Bethesda are some of the worst storytellers in the AAA gaming segment. They are fatally attached to the idea of making a cartoon world full of cartoon characters living through Very Serious Stories. Unfortunately, this combination of narrative elements clashes rather badly, and results in a bunch of utterly idiotic stories that positively dare the player to find any sort of intelligent design behind them.
And that's where I see the fundamental problem with Bethesda's handling of the Fallout setting; they don't seem to have any real interest in clearly defining and developing their world. Combine the kidnapping plot, the synthetic conspiracy, the faction warfare, the alien menace, the eldritch horrors from beyond the veil, the various serial killers, the zany robots, the office romances, the cults, the flying sailing vessels, the kid that spends 210 years in a fridge, as well as all the other bullocks, and you're left with a totally incoherent, fundamentally meaningless unholy mess. Nothing in this setting holds up to the slightest bit of scrutiny; none of the characters, none of the factions, none of the basic elements of world design seem to have any careful thought put into them.
Fallout 4 is a bad game. Fallout 4 is a serious game full of caricatures; it's a comedy game without any funny parts; it's a 100+ hour single player shooter; it's a treadmill of linear fetch and kill quests coupled with atrocious writing. It's a shallow and simplistic game that struggles to create an illusion of depth and variety. It is a lazy, nonsensical, and fundamentally dumb piece of design that offers nothing of interest to the discerning cRPG player. I regret every minute I wasted playing this game. There is nothing more to say.
13 Shocking Facts about Fallout 4 That Will Forever Change the Way You Think about RPGs
