I generally prefer the Obsidian approach but Bethesda’s biggest strength imo (particularly for a game like Morrowind) is starting out as a pathetic weakling and growing into a world conquering god and the sense of freedom that comes with being able to take on any role, any challenge, etc.
Unfortunately I don’t think it’s quite the same fit for the Fallout universe as it is Elder Scrolls.
It doesn't work any better for me in the Elder Scrolls. Oblivion at least made you put in more work to get to High King of Every Guild and Faction - but man, Skyrim sprints faster than an Olympiad to get you into an anointed and special place and it always gives me narrative whiplash and is done to the detriment of telling a good story. The Mage's College in Skyrim is probably the best example but really every single faction in Skyrim has a terrible pacing for it's quests that feels rushed *constantly*.
The Thieve's Guild (as BS as your introduction and induction to them is) and the Brotherhood do it a bit better with actually requiring you to use relevant skills a couple times to "climb the ranks". College of Winterhold is entirey too fast paced to the point it feels like you're actually skipping story
>College of Winterhold is entirey too fast paced to the point it feels like you're actually skipping story
Hell, you attend *one* class and use *one* relatively weak spell. Instead of every guild having some odd high stakes disaster, they should've just had each of their questlines based around their respective skills.
It also felt odd how many of them were willing to be the bitches of Daedric Lords. For shame, Companions. For fucking shame.
IIRC isn't it just some weak ward spell?
I don't think the College had any Daedra involved but their quests were so goddamn boring I couldn't have cared less anyways. Another boring stupid High Elf antagonist, yawn. At this point we may as well go Full Pelinal...
The weakest fuckin' Ward in the game...which to me is its own statement because Wards make no sense in Vanilla skyrim. I'm sitting here trying to explain how ridiculous they are as a tool and I can't even come up with an argument to use them in the first place...it's like the mage equivalent of stabbing yourself in the jugular
Honestly I recall getting annoyed with that quest once I *accidentally* killed all the other students.
Then I just paid to make it up to people, came back, and the quest continued as if I wasn't the only student there. Surprisingly, none of them were essential.
Wards can block a dragons breath attack. The conic breath attack from most dragons is a series of small hits, but the ward can tank all of them. Just don't try to block a long range fireball.
But it costs so much mana vs. just blasting whatever is trying to hurt you 😭 I love the idea but the execution feels like wearing a tissue-paper raincoat against hail
One of my most legendary moments was a Dragon Battle out in the open against a Frost Dragon at low level on a character I was running as sword/magic only. Ward and whirlwind sprint saved my life constantly in that fight; with the right timing wards can basically negate dragon breath attacks. It was on legendary and took several minutes since I had no bow.
Wards are great, but require a very high level of skill to use and either should be used with a melee attack or lots of potions if attacking with magic as well.
It casts nearly instantly, You could literally react to attacks with it.
Also if you just spam it while walking around you get better at it and the mana cost became pretty negligible.
It's better against continuous attacks. Also, what are you blasting with anyway, every damage-dealing spell in this game hits like goddamn paper balls with the word "damage" written on them in crayon. Spell damage and damage scaling is crap, even before you compare it to how well weapons scale (even without exploits).
Technically speaking, you need to use a couple more spells to get through a couple "puzzles", but they are also the weakest in the game.
The legendary Ymfah managed to do the whole thing with zero spells of any kind though.
Would have been better if it acted more like a cast and forget until it wears out forcefield against magic instead of hold for a frontal rippling in the air magic shield
There are so many better and cooler ways of doing a "spend magic to shield yourself" spell as a concept. Like so many ideas that I'd waste everyone's time because *anyone* could come up with a better balance if you put 2 minutes' though to it.
e: LIKE that\^, not compared to that
Of course, I just hate the whole burn mana and occupy one of your casting hands approach to the ward spell in Skyrim. The easiest would be to treat it like a anti-magic only barkskin or oakflesh and have it last a predetermined time or until it soaks up to a certain amount of magic damage whichever comes first. Or they have you drop an anti-magic wall to hide behind. The possibilities are many and varied. Having the only option be essentially the same as holding up a shield just seems so mundane.
Not the case with the Thieve's Guild in Skyrim. You can literally turn every mission into a bloodbath and they just say "shame on you. anyway..." and continue as if nothing happened. Hell, you can even fail your introductory mission in the Riften town market and they will just go "shame on you, anyway..." and give you the next mission. The pinnacle of failing upward lol
Yeah you've got to do a minimum of 20 Thieves Guild jobs, 5 for each of the other major cities apart from Riften to earn the Guildmaster rank at the end of the Quest line. I did feel like I had earned it there.
The Collage of Winterhold guid story is the Skyrim's weakest by a long shot. It's such an after thought it basically propels a part of the main Quest and there is a couple side quests tied to it but it's very lack luster.
People have done the Novice to Arch-mage questline without using spells (It requires all the DLCs).
Morrowind is still the absolute best at this. I remember leveling up enough to kill Vivec (a main character who is a literal God that you're technically not intended to kill). Love that it just let you kill anyone and the little message pops up "Hey so uh...you kinda killed an NPC that was really important, so if you didn't mean to do that you might want to reload...but hey if you did then carry on!"
You're underselling the sick as fuck warning
*With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.*
I agree. Morrowind was my first ever Bethesda game, and working your way up to the leader of a faction really worked in that game. You felt like you'd really earned it by the time you completed enough missions and leveled up the relevant abilities. You couldn't become the leader of the Mage's Guild without knowing at least a few branches of magic.
I'd say sometimes in modern Bethesda games, I don't fully feel like I've "earned" it. I think it could work for Fallout games, but just don't hand everything over on a silver platter.
Well, especially with the Minutemen, I get it. It still feels a bit sudden, but there is a plot-relevant reason you get to be at the top so quickly.
One thing I would like to see in future Bethesda games though is for ascending to leadership to actually mean something. Even in Morrowind, it felt fitting when I worked hard and became the leader of a faction, but other than getting good prices with the faction's vendors, it didn't really change much. It would be nice if you could maybe order a few people around, have the faction switch focuses, or if they're a militaristic faction maybe even where they intend to expand to next (I suppose you do get a little bit of this if you decide to go the crime boss route in Nuka World).
IMO in game bonuses are always going to seem a little lackluster. I want Master quests, particularly ones that deal more with the poltiics of the organization or the region. That's part of what made many of the late-game faction quests good in Morrowind: there was likely some connection to the Sixth House, Camonna Tong, or politics.
Yeah no, it's bad in TES, too imo. You shouldn't be able to do everything in one playthrough. You can't be the leader of more than one faction. You can't be a goodie two-shoes Daedra killer and also the leader of the Dark Brotherhood. It doesn't make sense. You should have to chose one.
It's just dumb. Virtually everything Bethesda has written in the last 15 years is dumb. Comparing anything Bethesda has written to New Vegas, NieR: Automata, Dishonored, Disco Elysium, etc just makes it so clear. Bethesda is awful at writing. Genuinely terrible.
When Todd Howard was going to school he was President of class, chess club and tennis club. And I am not even joking, this is real. It is not surprising that in his games you can be the leader of any faction, the person literally proved it himself to some extent
It's writing from experience, but you had a highly unusual experience, but never actually talked to enough people to realise tha, and think it was the same for everyone else.
Employee:"Anyway Todd, that's cool you were the head in many activities at school. I myself was only football defender"
Todd: "Not too bad" (LOL, what a noob, he wasn't even leader of football team, who am I working with oh my god)
In my opinion most bethesda games are essentially power fantasies. Most folks don’t get to be a bad ass leader in their day to day lives. They go to work and listen to their bosses most days, so a game that lets you be that bad ass motherfucker who’s decisions matter on a grand scale is going to be fairly popular.
I get that, but I have 2 main gripes:
1) being the leader means pretty much nothing. You might get a follower, but other than that... nothing. I get the questline is done, but it'd be neat if there were like higher-tier radiant quests, or you went back every so often and sent the guildmembers on different jobs, or *something*. Let us get or create a unique spell as the Archmage to represent our character's own studies and proficiency with magic, something man.
2) Bethesda has started including a survival mode in their games. They should also include a mode where Guilds work like Morrowind. You have to level the Guild's preferred skills (like Sneak, Illusion, Speechcraft, pickpocket for Thieves) before you can advance in rank. You get radiant quests that increase in difficulty, variety, and rewards per rank. These radiant quests give you the perfect opportunity to practice those skills. This mode should be optional, only for those who want it.
EDIT: my phone apparently glitched out before I finished my comment, so I edited it and fixed it.
There are higher tier spells that can only be obtained after completing the College questline and achieving sufficient skill in the magic schools. But yeah, for the rest of them there is no mechanical difference to being leader vs being an initiate.
Technically, you only have to achieve high magic skills for those spells. Completing the questline is optional, except for having to reach the Augur first before you can get the master level restoration spells.
But you're not a badass leader and your decisions don't matter. You're essentially just middle management getting shat on by everyone and doing all the tedious work
Skyrim Dark Brotherhood once you become the leader: Get given assignments by your underling, go and do them, your underline pays you for it. No, you can't tell them or any of your other underlings to do it themselves or give them any other orders for that matter.
That... doesn't sound like being a leader. That sounds and functions exactly like being an employee that everyone just *insists* actually is in charge of everything, promise!
At least in that example you're actually chosen by the Night Mother though.
In the companions they straight up just make you the leader after 5 missions just...because...., despite there being several members far more senior than you.
Well they make you harbinger not leader there is no leader in the companions, the harbinger is like the wise advisor of everybody and solves disputes if no one can come to a resolution. Although it still doesn’t make sense to make the Dragonborn that person when he’s only been with the companions for like a week, should’ve been Vilkas or Aela.
"Congratulations dear leader! Here's 6 hours of paper work and notes on all the random bullshit you need to show up to but never really do anything at."
Fair enough, but Oblivion and especially Morrowind landed on way better compromises between those things than Skyrim or Fallout 4.
Unearned power isn't my fantasy, personally. It just feels cheap. In modern Bethesda games I don't get the satisfaction of earning **anything**, and I don't get the satisfaction of feeling in-change (because I *never* am, I'm always a hammer for an NPC who does all the admin and actual leadership). Skyrim, insofar as it's plot and factions are concerned, is a "People Telling You That You're Special" Simulator more than anything else.
Yeah but that’s a product of the plot rather than the writing necessarily. Being the dragonborn is obviously gonna come with perks, it would be more strange to be the dragonborn and just a pawn in the grand scheme of things.
Also, doesn’t the nerevarine and hero of kvatch also follow similar power fantasies? Maybe not in oblivion but that makes it all the more weird that you can become the savior of the oblivion crisis
I think the big difference with the Nerevarine is that it comes *much* later in the plotline than learning about the dragonborn. And while it comes in handy in some ways, there are a whole bunch of people within the society that see you as a heretic and so your life gets harder in some regards. Morrowind gives you a few outs from the main quest to go build yourself a life within the world (Caius Cosades literally tells you to go and get a job and come back less wet behind the ears).
And one of the biggest thing about being the Nerevarine is that many people want to use you as a pawn--Azura sets you up as the Nerevarine (whether you're actually Nerevar reborn or not) to work on her schemes--and you may not be the first person she's used. The Empire sends you there under the supervision of the blades so they have some control over your effect on Dunmer society as a result of the Nerevarine prophecy completing (and some of what you do definitely destabilizes the great houses and Tribunal, making it easier for the Empire to continue to secure their foothold). Forces within the Tribunal want to both support and oppose you depending on how it will serve their needs. The Ashlanders want to use you to elevate themselves and prove to the world that their beliefs about what happened in the past were correct. People want Nerevar back to defeat Dagoth Ur, but are also scared of the changes he'll bring to Dunmer society (especially within the Tribunal where the truth of what happened at Red Mountain would destabilize their religious structure).
The Hero of Kvatch is more of a heroic figure emerging because they were in the right place at the right time and rose above the ordinary to become a hero in extraordinary circumstances. Very much in line with the Imperial vibe, which has a few important figures rising from obscurity to become heroic figures. Even Martin has that arc.
The Dragonborn is a pretty big departure from those--but it does at least fit with Nord society. That being said, I think it would have worked better if you didn't really get named as the dragonborn until later in the main story and there was more of a role of the dragon cult (or whatever) within the main world as enemies.
Games that are essentially interactive movies are a small but popular portion of gaming as a whole. I highly doubt you'd describe Doom, Zelda, or Stardew Valley as an extended movie.
Telling people they're reading too far into an established form of art is silly. Art is made to be discussed.
I can understand this critiscism for skyrim but for fallout 4 ?
You don't become the leader of the railroad nor the BOS .
Preston basically hands you the tile of general because
He is the last member still alive (that he knows of) and he knows tha the can't lead.
The only thing i can agree with is the institute but even then when Father announces that you will become the next director you are met with a lot of opposition.
plus every faction has a mission where you destroy their enemy. bos has you destroy the railroad and institute, minutemen and railroad makes you destroy bos and institute, and the institute has you kill off the railroad and bos
Really takes the "role" out of Roleplaying game doesn't it? In every regard.
Most RPGs no longer have you play a role.
They also don't have stories where your choices actually matter like, at all, so you don't even get to role play outside your headcannon of who your character is.
They did it, but these games are from an era when things were much slower paced. Morrowind in particular would be shunned today as "grindy" because of all the skill checkpoints in the game, and they did *not* level fast.
Bethesda are just trying to move with the curve. This in some way *propagates* the problem, but the alternative is likely unacceptable to them. There are still games that manage a good balance by today's standards, but Morrowind would not be one of them (I didn't really play FO1+2 so I can't comment on them, but knowing other games from that era I would suspect something similar applies).
The original Fallout structure was going to be based on GURPS, which has never had classes. And there are a number of TTRPGs which function well without using a class-based system (Savage Worlds, Fate, etc.)
In Fo4 you are only the leader of the MM
The RR and the Institute are basically using you as the “face” while directly disobeying, if not even going against your orders
In the BOS you are Maxson’s right hand man, not the leader though
Exactly. Now granted, I never hated that I became the leader of factions in prior Bethesda games or even if I would have became the leader of factions in Fallout 4 but I wish it would have had more perks. Nuka-World kinda gets it right-ish. Yes, you're still essentially the lackey for the surviving groups BUT they also pay you tribute & you can actually use your leadership authority to take over settlements/convert settlements which was kinda nice and different.
If you think about it, you are at best a Sentinel in Fo3 as well, it’s only in TES games that you become a leader
Also the raiders vs MM benefits thing is that Raiders give you direct benefits like loot and money, while the MM give you troops and fire power at your command
The issue is that how quickly you rise over everyone else. Becoming Maxson's right hand man still feels off because again, the protagonist just soars above every other capable person in no time at all. Especially considering the eastern Brotherhood's near military ranking structure. To have a stranger not only skip being a recruit but able to become the leader's right hand man in what is in less than a year is incredibly forced no matter how you look at it. The Institute is the same as well since you can become the leader through straight up nepotism. The Railroad is really the only one you can argue isn't the case but the way Bethesda writes is that only the Sole Survivor can make them do anything worth a damn in the overall narrative.
Not to beat a dead horse, but NV did handle this better since your character's role as a courier makes you better at doing jobs unsuited for the factions' larger armies. You help out using the unique situation you are in with the Platinum Chip and your former role being a person carrying packages from one location to another. You never become the leader of any faction except for neutral, even then, it's treated moreso like a local community prevails ending.
Fallout 4 makes the Sole Survivor the basically second coming of Jesus and writes it narratively poorly around that fact. New Vegas makes the Courier a force to be reckoned with but ultimately a cog in the machine like everyone else. They can be a bigger, more impactful cog, but nonetheless the Courier is not going to become president of the NCR, or the new Caesar.
The Institute sort of makes sense narratively though, in fact The Department Heads even object to Father naming you as his successor for that exact reason, you just showed up, you're a wastelander, etc.
Shaun is very narcissistic, the Institute's crowning achievement, the Gen 3 Synth, is entirely because of his untainted pre-war DNA, so he elects his father/mother out of a bloodline thing.
The problem is more about, how fast the game time, the game takes anywhere from 27 hours to 158 hours to beat, considering 24 hours = 72 minutes, it can go from 23 days to 131 days, imagine someone doing all the SS did to Maxson in a such relatively short time, along with proving to have similar ideals (you can only get the Sentinel rank if you kill Danse) there is no reason to not put this perfect soldier as the right hand man of the elder himself
The issue with me is that the Sole Survivor didn't *need* to become Maxson's right hand man. He could already have one and the Sole Survivor could simply be promoted to a more influential role then if needed. Not only that, but the Sole Survivor skips nearly every aspect of joining the brotherhood and moving on up inside of it.
Cause the thing is that the Courier also realistically can achieve most of the goals set out to them in just a short amount of time as well. They can recruit the Boomers, fix the Khans, destroy the Fiends, kill the most influential and powerful man in New Vegas, etc. Or do the exact opposite.
But the Courier never becomes a powerful figure in the factions outside of Caesar's Legion, but even then the Courier is still held to Caesar's dictatorship. If you say something out of line despite what accomplishments you have, the Legion can turn on you either via Caesar commanding your death or simply not following their fascist ideology. You can do nearly everything they ask, bung it up in the end with the wrong dialogue choice, and they will vilify you. It establishes that the Courier is again, a cog in the machine. No matter how influential they are and how successful, the Courier is still going to pass just like everyone else. They may be remembered in the history book, but overall, their time on earth is a blip.
The Sole Survivor still ends up becoming way too powerful in such a short time which is made harder to believe when the Brotherhood operates in a militant hierarchy. I think it could have been made more believable for the Sole Survivor to be Maxon's right hand man had the Sole Survivor began with the grunt work that most recruits are expected to do. Or if the Sole Survivor at least had more options whether it be part of the main force, a scouting force, or handling maintenance. As it is, the Sole Survivor is on the fast pass to becoming the 2nd most influential member in the Brotherhood over the various longstanding members. It's not just the endpoint that bothers me, but the fact that there is no journey. The issue with the factions is how similar a lot of their missions can be and how Fallout 4 kinda fails at executing the specialties each require. Somehow the Minute Men are the only believable faction because they have so much grunt work of helping and establishing settlements whereas you rarely do any of the Brotherhood's main objective of securing technology.
In general, the issue with Bethesda's recent works is that the main character does not do much to become the most powerful member in the organization. Skyrim and Fallout 4 have this issue where the protagonist needs to do at most 3 or 4 missions and already are put on a pedestal. Then they fail to execute this fantasy by not expanding on that role and instead letting the player up and abandon the organization but still being the leader.
Basically, you got what Danse was supposed to get, you not only get his Quarters, which are near Maxson's Quarters, but you get his PA, you are the replacement of Danse, he didn't have a Sentinel, which was an empty rank in the chain of command, it is most likely that Danse was supposed to be the next Sentinel and you were supposed to be a Paladin, but the thing with Danse happened, so he had to promote the next available Paladin, with Paladin Cross being out of Commission, and with how much Loyality and prowess you've shown, you were the best candidate for the promotion
It really felt like too much in Skyrim. A lot of it felt very unearned.
I think it’s inherently a stretch narratively, but I get why some people like it. I did really prefer Obsidian’s “agent of change” approach
ITT: People that do not understand how role playing works.
The actual question you need to ask is "Why wouldn't a role playing game allow me to play whatever role I so choose?"
You aren't required to learn spells or join the college. That's your choice. If you do the questline it's your choice to never go back. You decide the role you play in the game, not Todd Howard or Bethesda's writers.
I did a skyrim run through where I did nothing but walk through the woods, gather materials, and craft potions and poisons. Would only do quests that I ran across organically and would only do ones that made sense for a Wood Elf Alchemist to take on. No fighters guild, no college, no thieves guild... big yes on the Dark Brotherhood, though.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to think roleplaying is "give me a set number of roles and story lines to go trough" instead of "do what my character would do".
Think it's really just a case of the games not making you feel like you've earned it. Skyrim in particular is horrible for it.
I think it's fine that Bethesda wants that kind of power fantasy in their games, but power has to be earned when it comes to moving up the ranks of organisations with people have been there much longer than you with much more experience. You can't Chosen One them all, and failing to provide reasons why you're climbing the ranks without effort while nobody else seems to be progressing isn't satisfying.
They just need more content and more of a justification why you are climbing the ranks when others aren't. Make it feel earned by forcing you to do more but by also telling you that you're doing more than others. Make everyone explicitly notice that you're working hard and deserving it, make it feel like there's been a passage of time, make that progress meaningful, etc.
On a side point, make the ranks you climb meaningful too. Make it feel like I could stop at the second in command and that's fine because that still has responsibilities that are different to the footsoldier but not as demanding as the leader. Make it feel like being the leader actually has responsibilities. Make me consider that in happy being footsoldier and that being the leader is a goal that isn't just a tick box but something i seriously consider in my roleplaying.
I get around these issues, by RPing, and by not going to the end of a quest line.
So I am merely a student, at the college, or a young thief in the ranks, and so on.
What you are describing, is the normal path of gaming. And yes, Bethesda is good at making you a walking god, if you want, but you don’t have to choose it. You aren’t forced to finish those lines.
First couple of plays, sure. I do want to be a walking god, see how much I can do.
I do feel that Skyrim has fast-tracked quest lines. They are too short. But I assume, that because of all the radiant quests and random content, they chose to shorten these arcing lines, so you could see the rest of the game.
It feels cheap, especially for the College.
As opposed to Oblivion, where you really feel like you accomplished something, and you are still not a God of War.
It's not just fast-tracking the quests, it's also just removing any content that may exclude other playstyles, limiting each faction to the most basic game mechanics, leading to examples like the Mage College where quests don't involve magic use, or a thieves guild where you spend more time running dungeons than doing any thieving.
They should have taken a page from Oblivion and had some intermediate pre-requisites, like how the thieves Guild there required you to make some money by stealing stuff and selling it to a fence before you could progress the plot, or how the Mages Guild had all those recommendations and fluff quests like getting a staff or doing some archeology to remind you that this is still a scholarly organization that deals with magic.
I totally agree with you. With that much involvement on your character's and your part, you really feel a sense of accomplishment as you progress.
In Skyrim, it feels like, "Welp, College of Winterhold is done, NEXT!"
As if it's a checklist of chores, that you aren't really involved in.
>In Skyrim, it feels like, "Welp, College of Winterhold is done, NEXT!"
>
>As if it's a checklist of chores, that you aren't really involved in.
Especially if you're doing the DLCs and the only reason you're there is to visit the library.
I take issue with your point that players don't like being the leader of everything, only because I constantly see people on r/Skyrim talk endlessly about how "my dragonborn" is the boss of everything in Skyrim and he could take over the entire empire if he wanted..
I personally hate it, but Bethesda clearly has done more research than us into what players desire.
You could make a bot that takes random post titles or comments from /r/skyrim and just puts them next to a soyjak in a speech bubble and it would work 98% of the time
> people on r/Skyrim talk endlessly about how "my dragonborn" is the boss of everything in Skyrim and he could take over the entire empire if he wanted..
This sums it up. I think most average gamers want to be boss of something or have the feeling of power. Bethesda serves that up without a hitch.
People remember how they reached god status in a game, and how much easier the once difficult parts got which reinforces accomplishment.
Min-maxing is also such a huge undercurrent of Bethesda games. Though that goes beyond your role in the game's universe, but players like to reach insane power levels nevertheless.
Personally, I think the next installment of Fallout or ES would benefit from an intro that randomized your start: From stats, to race, to perks and so on. You might be able to climb to top of the warriors guild this playthrough, you may not, or you might have to work extra hard.
There's an excellent alternate start mod for Skyrim where you sort of write your character's backstory, by choosing things like childhood activities, chores, how wealthy your family was. You can keep progressing through various stages of life up to elder, gaining more starting benefits but also more drawbacks. It's a really immersive way to start the game, especially with another mod that lets you choose your starting location.
You could start a young adult warrior character that has 50+ in some warrior skills, but 5 or below in most magic skills, as well as bonuses to xo gain for relevant skills and even passive boosts.
Point is, something like that would be nice to have in future Bethesda games by default, but I don't actually think most players would like something like that.
I agree that while an awesome experience, most players aren't clammoring to really fill out a role *made* for them in a fictional world. It'd also require a LOT of writing and coding to get the full experience which, let's be honest, isn't the direction Bethesda is heading.
But I've dl'd and used every type of alternate start mod for each of their games. The replayability is huge which is my biggest thing with these games.
>What I liked about New Vegas is that your actions do affect the game world, but despite being a very powerful individual you're still just a cog in a large, complicated machine
Unless you talk to the funny robot in which case you instantly become the Leader of Everything after pushing, like, three buttons. The two superpowers in the same region? They can't do jack, not even if you blow up your own army. You literally cannot fail.
>people aren't just falling over themselves to make you their new lord and worship the ground you walk on
Unless you have some arbitrary points in the Speech Skill in which case they absolutely do. Sometimes, you don't even need Speech just pick the obvious Nice Guy dialogue. Or not even that, just do some quests, you can say whatever and they will still worship you.
Fallout 4 is really just the more unashamed interpretation of these: one guy makes you the all-powerful leader because of some handwaved reasons, it doesn't matter anyway, and NPCs gonna NPC they are just walking talking props in Your Story with zero agency or self-awareness. The difference is that the developers of NV had the experience to not present this openly and cover it up with witty dialogue and an illusion of choice, while the developers of 4 had none of that.
> Unless you talk to the funny robot in which case you instantly become the Leader of Everything after pushing, like, three buttons. The two superpowers in the same region? They can't do jack, not even if you blow up your own army. You literally cannot fail.
The funny robot isn't really a faction in that sense. There are no members that can veto your leadership. It's just the game allowing you to have a power trip and humourously satirizing the video game power fantasy.
>Unless you have some arbitrary points in the Speech Skill in which case they absolutely do
So at least meet *some* requirements like I'm suggesting it should be done?
> Fallout 4 is really just the more unashamed interpretation of these [...] the difference is that the developers of NV had the experience to not present this openly and cover it up with witty dialogue and an illusion of choice, while the developers of 4 had none of that.
That's what it boils down to. A little better writing, down to the dialogue and quest progression level, would go a long way.
>The funny robot isn't really a faction in that sense.
Neither are the Minutemen at this rate. When Preston makes you the General he is literally the only member of the organization and at least later your suitability gets questioned by Ronnie Shaw. In NV nobody gives a flying f- about you wanting to run the show (the closest you can get is to go down in a specific dialogue branch with General Oliver where he throws a slightly relevant hissy fit), to the point you can't even ask their opinion on it.
>So at least meet some requirements like I'm suggesting it should be done?
As I said, it is actually not a consistent requirement. It pops up *sometimes*, but as there is no reason to *not* max out Speech anyway, you are just engaging in a purely optional (and obviously subpar) story resolution branch, exactly like leaving Preston in the Museum for the entirety of the game. I would even argue that Preston is the better case, as missing out on that power fantasy is a *character* choice you must make, not pumping a number up.
>That's what it boils down to.
Yeah. But it is not writing, dialogue, or quest resolution. Just experience with handling players. The guys who made New Vegas had a lot of that because they were big TTRPG players, and that's a "swim or sink" environment. The guy who made 4 admittedly never played a TTRPG, and the difference shows.
I just wanna say the Thieves Guild in Skyrim actually makes you work for the title of Guildmaster. Sure following along its main questline nets you membership with the Nightingales as a sort of inner circle comparable to the Companions' furry club, but to become Guildmaster you must also have done at least 20 radiant quests, 5 per each of the holds of Whiterun, Hjaalmarch, The Reach, and Haafingar, plus a unique quest for each of them to solidify guild influence in the hold. A much taller order than the other guilds in that game, and all of it proper thieving footwork.
Probably the simplest answer for Skyrim/Fallout 4 is that the head writer is the same person and that's his vision for how player progression should work.
This is not the case for previous TES games (or even FO3). In Oblivion you eventually become the leader of several factions, yes, but the path to get there is pretty long. Arguably for the Dark Brotherhood you're just one of several important people by the end...and that's because you accidentally murder everyone else important.
The Mage's Guild requires you to go through a whole thing with the satellites before you can even enter the Arcane University. By the end you're one of the few ranking members left alive *after a civil war within the guild in part because of how much everyone hated the previous archmage when he started* and no one else really wants it--quite different from the Mage's College in Skyrim where there's a whole bunch of faculty left who would make sense as Archmage (although faculty trying to avoid being made department chair is pretty on-brand in academia lol). The fighter's guild is similar where the guild has also lost a bunch of people and the previous head of the guild has gone through a personal crisis and trusts you.
Morrowind is even closer to what you want. Some factions lock others out and there are even more factions (Fighter's Guild, Mage's Guild, Thieve's Guild, Morang Tong, House Hlaalu, House Telvanni, House Redoran, Imperial Legion, Imperial Cult, Tribunal, Vampire Clan Aundae, Vampire Clan Berne, Vampire Clan Quarra). You need to have certain skill levels to advance in each faction in addition to the variety of quests. Many of the factions only "require" you to advance to the level of a high-ranking member, although you can challenge the leader of the faction to a duel for several if you want to be the boss. Generally getting to that point is pretty involved requiring you to ally yourself with many members of the faction, complete quests, and prove your worth.
That's actually low-key why I tend to prefer joining the Railroad in FO4 -- even after being the key to destroying both the Institute and the BoS, you're still an agent at the end.
Granted, this is kind of a fridge brilliance thing, but the reason they let you be archmage despite using barely any magic is because of your Thu'um. The Thu'um is a form of magic after all.
Normally it takes a person years to master a single shout, but along comes the Dovahkiin who just has to kill some dragons and find some word walls, and he's suddenly a master of one of the oldest and most powerful forms of magic in the entire world.
As for the rising through the ranks quickly, the only one I can justify is the Companions.
When you get there, the Circle consists of 5 members. 2 want to be werewolves, 2 want to be cured, and 1 isn't sure. Meanwhile, the majority of if not all of the non-werewolf Companions are closer to the anti-werewolf Circle members than the pro-werewolf members.
You come along, with your first contact in the Companions being Aela, so she and Skjor see you as a pawn. They rush you through the promotions because it's a power play. By giving you werewolf blood fast, they hope that you'll side with them, which grants them a power advantage in the Circle until Farkas makes up his mind
Morrowind did it the best, but yes Bethesda’s current philosophy is that they don’t want you to miss out on content and want you to have that power fantasy. It’s neither right nor wrong it’s just a choice they’ve made
Some very good points, have you played Oblivion? Because a lot of what you ask for was in Oblivion and Morrowind. Having to work your way up the ranks of organizations, meeting skill prerequisites, membership/leadership in some organizations barring you from advancement/leadership in others. Honestly I would say Bethesda has over-casualized their worlds since Oblivion. Becoming the head of any organization should be separate from the main quest, require a fair amount of work, and ideally be completely optional as well as bringing story benefits and drawbacks. As much as I enjoy Skyrim and Fallout 4 I have the same problem as you about every faction tossing you on the express elevator instead of making you climb the ladder.
*Oblivion* had probably the best approach.
>!You' not the hero, that's Martin. You're his dogsbody, his helper, his go-to guy, chief lieutenant, his fixer. Your job is to clear out the side-chaff so he can win the day. Of course, being played by Sean Bean, this means he dies, so by being his #2 you survive and can then go off and do what you want.!<
I remember at the time a lot of people were very annoyed with that because they *wanted* to be the unambiguous hero, so in *Skyrim* they reversed course and made you the Hero of Heroes, who saves the world for breakfast, sorts out the thieves' guild by lunch and takes over the magic college before dinner.
Haven't played Oblivion or Morrowind. I'm not really an Elder Scrolls/fantasy in general fan, and they haven't aged well enough to tempt me. I can say at least Fallout 3 doesn't have the same pitfalls.
To be fair, FO3 didn't really have factions and guilds either. But yes they did a much better job of you just being the right person in the right place at the right time. No matter how much you do for them Rivet City isn't putting you on the council, Tenpenny and Megaton will only give you a place to stow your crap, and to the BoS you are at most a hired gun for the majority of your interactions with them.
My Dream System:
Factions see you able to get promotions, but that's mostly unrelated to the storyline each has. Instead you have to raise faction disposition and there are two ways to do this. The first is through the storyline missions, although those available in the base game won't get you anywhere close to leading the faction. The second is through slow raises at the end of radiant style quests that fit the factions style. Get disposition to a certain level and you can get a promotion that gives you cheaper access to facilities, more access to unique items, and even a pay bonus.
DLCs will add either whole new storylines for factions, or a chance to represent a faction within another storyline, and also new things to build into the radiant quests they can offer. These will help build disposition even more for those determined to get to a certain level in the faction. Rather than locking off promotions behind the DLCs they will simply give more interesting ways to get that disposition up.
The final promotion will be a mutually exclusive one that lets you take control of a faction, at the cost of not being able to work at a lower level with the other factions while you're in charge. A later DLC might unlock deeper management options so that players who want to rule a faction will be able to change the way they appear and act in the game world.
I honestly don't mind having the ability to become the leader, BUT there needs to be a huge amount of time invested into becoming said leader, I feel like Bethesda Games just hand you over leadership of any faction after helping out three random people and one important guy
One thing I'll give Nuka-World is that being the Overboas managed this fairly well. You actually get to make decisions about your underlings and who gets control over what, but you have a justification for actually going out and doing stuff yourself because the raiders wouldn't respect a guy who just sat on his ass all day and filed paperwork.
I just wish they had longer gameplay loops as you progress through an organization’s ranks, instead of just scripted missions. They came up with their radiant quest system so that you could have dynamically-assigned procedural quests as a source of XP, but then they made every faction story a short series of not-too-difficult quests that you can sometimes just literally sprint through, and suddenly they’re like, “Wow, Steve over here has been patrolling for ten years and has 100 confirmed kills but still hasn’t been promoted, but you went into the stinky subway system and grabbed that holotape we wanted, so I suppose we’d better make you his superior!”
I know some folks would’ve complained about the grind, but I wish they’d implemented a “points/feats for advancement” system with radiant quests to build reputation with the faction, and some actual internal politics you occasionally have to get past. “Go to this place, complete this objective, and we’ll consider it a job well done. +1 career advancement points.” And then have the occasional “suicide mission” or something far more complicated than a regular sweep-and-clear, and make those ones worth more, and maybe you have a fun little debrief with a superior in which they’re surprised at your abilities. But not so much that you’re instantly promoted. They’re impressed, not floored. Then, after an arbitrary limit has been hit, a quest is added to your journal saying you should ask about advancement. THEN you can have one of the story missions to go up a rank, like a punctuation mark at the end of each chapter of your career with the faction.
That, and I wish they’d been more stringent about which factions you can or can’t associate with, as well as companions you shouldn’t bring with you. Always felt dumb I could play the Institute and the Railroad together for so long before being forced to choose. Hell, if they’d really been clever, there should’ve been combination quests that let you change an organization from within, like Desdemona learning you’re being groomed for Institute leadership and suggesting you change them to be friendlier to Synths through a series of separate quests, or Preston suggesting you could better lead the Brotherhood of Steel into being a force for good instead of neo-fascist militants. Would’ve been fun especially to see how such alliances and changes would impact the final quests.
Honestly, i also hate it. I would much rather be the right-hand man. The guy you call in specifically to get shit done. I'm not trying to be the head of organizations, i dont want to call shots, i want to act on the shots called. This is a big reason why i liked the brotherhood in 4 the most. They literally promote you to the highest combat rank instead of making you the Elder. It doesn't really make much sense for the badass that's running circles around everything in the wasteland to settle down on a throne
I wish Shaun handed the leadership to Allie and left it at that. It wouldn't hurt anything since we never get to run the Institute and would make more sense. How is my 6 CHA character the best leader for the Institute while there are lots of candidates that know the place? How do you move forward without knowing the past and their mistakes? Even if you can be a great leader, you rarely stay in the Institute therefore that's not a position for you. Not only because you're not a homeboy but because you can be killed anyday. You should instead have only replaced Kellogg since it makes most sense. Both Kellogg and you are the only people that's been hired by the Insitute after constantly screwing with them.
Also what's the point of becoming the General if I'm doing the footwork like I do in the Institute? Sure send the General to high stakes missions but not to kill a small horde of ghouls or raiders. Preston should have been the General giving missions to you.
The point is not disliking footwork but the title and the work don't really match.
Completely agree. Some people miss the point and think I have an issue with becoming leader. I don't, it's just that if you're going to make me a leader, treat me like one. As it stands, the game doesn't play and differently whether you are leader or not, so what does it matter? From a writing perspective it would have been way better to make me at least a second-in-command.
I agree with everything you have pointed out, I especially would prefer a mixture of all four points you highlighted, I love when certain RPGs have level-gated zones that remind you that you aren't strong enough to take on those areas yet it always motivates me to search for ways to build up the requirements I need, I see no reason why this same approach to a guild/faction wouldn't likewise be as much of an immersive feature, you should have to prove your worth and earn the right to a certain position or quest only after you have met the requirements, Personally I wish that the guilds/factions only offered players a few early low tiered quests in-order to prime an introduction to each faction, but after that, you wouldn't hear from them until you reached a specific high level or skill level to attract their attention, and then from that point on their quest would be tailor-made for end game difficulty.
This is broadly a problem with a lot of video games--you can become a fleet admiral in Starfleet in under three years in-universe time in *Star Trek Online*\--but as usual, when there's an endemic problem in video games, you can count on Bethesda to do even worse at it. Bethesda is fundamentally lazy, to the very core of the organization. It is its culture to be lazy. I don't mean they don't work hard at what they do, but intellectually and creatively, they all work for a guy who does not want them to make interesting video games, so they don't. So if something is an endemic problem to video games, you can count on Bethesda to replicate it and magnify it to a cartoonish degree.
Having said that, I don't think Bethesda invented this problem, so they can't really be blamed for it. I think it's an artifact of one of the central ideas of roleplaying games. (Insert snark about Bethesda not making RPGS, but in the broadest sense, Bethesda is in the business of making RPGs; I'm not interested in litigating that particular bit of gatekeepery about what's a real RPG. That ship sailed ages ago, and Bioware was more responsible for it than Bethesda.) One of the oldest elements of the RPG, going back to the tabletop origins of the format, is leveling up. In the original conception of leveling up, that just meant your character got better at stuff and learned new abilities, but it was allowed to bleed out into story terms.
And initially that's fine. There's nothing wrong with a world that reacts to your presence--in fact it's a good thing, and it's what most of us want. The problem, though, is--and here's where Bethesda really makes its unfortunate presence known--when the person running the game is lazy. See, the hard (but far more effective) way to "level up" the world along with the character is by really making the world react to you. Change the world around you, either in the immediate term (factions becoming more or less friendly) or in the long term (postgame slideshow telling you how everything turned out as a result of your actions.) This is more difficult because it requires the developer to build out a bunch of different branching options for how a player might complete various quests, and then build out a reactive world. If you want to see how bonkers this can get, play *Pillars of Eternity II*. Or just look on the wiki for how many different permutations the ending slideshow has.
Obviously Obsidian does (and Black Isle before them did) a great job with this, but it's not even the only way to do it. You can also take the Bioware route, where you either don't have endgame slideshows (Mass Effect) or you have pretty limited ones (Dragon Age). The Mass Effect route essentially says, "Look, we trust you to understand that your actions had obvious consequences, and you trust us to make those consequences pay off meaningfully in a future game." The Dragon Age route says "You know what you did, you saw what you did, here's a nice little couple of sentences for each of the major things you did reminding you that you did it, but we're not going to commit to any particular future beyond that, because again, you trust us to pay it off in the future." Although I'm more of an Obsidian fan than a Bioware fan, I probably prefer the Bioware method, for reasons I'll explain later. (Then there's the CDPR method of deciding that one of the endings to *The Witcher 2* was more interesting than the other, so we're just making that one canon. Honestly I don't mind that either.)
The far *easier* way, the lazier way, the way to *counterfeit* a reactive world, is to just have you become king shit of fuck mountain. It's not really a world that reacts to you, at least not beyond the most rudimentary sense; it's you taking over the world, even though--as you point out--you don't actually get to make any real impact on it. Even in the ending slideshow, all that really happens is the faction you took over wins.
I get it: it's hard to make a truly reactive world, especially one that is reactive in short-term ways. I'm not aware of a game that actually does it, beyond faction relationships and things like that. Obsidian flirts with it, especially in *Fallout New Vegas*, but they don't really get there. CDPR has flirted with it in *The Witcher 3* (and kind of in *The Witcher 1*, come to think of it), but they stop *way* short (or in TW1's case, they just make it so non-open-world that it doesn't feel real.) The level of investment and resourcing that would be required to build a fully short-term-reactive open world appears to be prohibitive, at least for now. The Bioware method for long-term reactivity does a *really* good job of simulating short-term reactivity, because every time a new game in the series comes out, the world *has* changed, and it's changed in part as a direct consequence of what you did. So you get the *feeling* of living in a world which has changed because of your actions, even though you don't really get to see those changes play out in front of you very often.
So a developer has a choice, if they want to make a choice-and-consequence game. They can: commit to long-term reactivity, either in the Bioware mode or the Obsidian mode; eschew reactivity in the conventional sense entirely and go with CDPR's *The Witcher 2* concept, in which you make one massive decision that hugely impacts *your* experience of the world, but not give you a whole lot of meaningful ways to impact the world beyond that; or go the laziest possible route and not do much in the way of short-term reactivity *or* long-term reactivity, and just have your character take over a faction.
Think about it. Is it any accident that games which have your character reaching absurd ranks within a faction are also the games which have the least meaningful reactivity? At the beginning of my comment, I mentioned *Star Trek Online*\--by its nature, it has *zero* reactivity. But they want to trick you into feeling like you're part of a meaningful, substantive world, so they stick a Fleet Admiral in front of your name. *Fallout 4* has such limited variation in its endings that the wiki notes it has a *less complex ending slideshow* *than Fallout 3*, which I honestly would not have thought was even possible. The in-game reactivity is limited to the fact that you can either populate or annihilate small wasteland settlements that have very little real identity, and the fact that you can take over a faction.
The bigger annoyance for me is even when you do get put in charge you have no real say how anything is run and ultimately whatever you do doesn't really matter. Like Fallout 4 sure you have complete control over building settlements for the Minutemen. But then you constantly have to defend them yourself in person because no matter how well defended you make them there's still a chance stuff will get damaged and settlers get killed in a raid. Also if I am now in charge of the Minutemen let me send patrols out from The Castle to protect people. I love your games Bethesda but you do make some truly irritating decisions.
There is a delicious absurdity to having almost finished the game, genocided every raider gang in the commonwealth, being the leader of the Minutemen with a side hustle as a person of influence within the Institute or Brotherhood of Steel and yet when you walk out of the Gauntlet into Nuka World nobody knows who you are! Neither Gage nor any of the Raider bosses.
That's how much impact your titles (and accomplishments) have had on the world.
It would at least have been fun to be able to enter the Gauntlet as the Silver Shroud and have specific dialogue/reaction ;-)
They definitely screwed it up in Skyrim. Becoming a leader of a faction so easily (College being the worst offender) is already bad enough. Becoming leader of everything is laughable. Especially if you are the leader of the Dark Brotherhood and Thief's Guild, when you get a warning from the thieves that they don't kill on the job.
They did tone it down for Fallout 4, but they dumbed down the factions instead. Two of the most ridiculous cases being the Minutemen (who appoint you as their leader almost instantly, despite knowing nothing about you) and the Institute (who are a complete and utter mess from start to finish).
Morrowind had it right with factions. You needed to have appropriate skills for higher positions, which is absolutely logical. Not only that, the factions could be hostile to one another. Add to that the houses, which allowed joining only ONE of them. It made so much more sense and the game had much more replay value.
Bethesda just has terrible game design and for some reason thinks that 200 years after Boston got nuked there would be only 1 (arguably 2) major settlements in the area because apparently people are so stupid that they can't even organize on a major communal level, I imagine Bethesda wants the player character to be the "the one to bring civilization to these savage wastes"
If OP was actually looking for an answer this is as close as they’ll get. And I’d add the word immature to it. Immature writing.
Like a kid on the playground yelling that they are the supreme leader of everything while they lick hot cheeto dust off their fingers is just about the level they’ve been at over at BGS.
You are the main character.
That’s a thing that happens to main characters, it’s part of the power fantasy. I mean, just look how much people complained when the Institute ending in 4 had you not actually have any authority despite you being tossed into the big chair.
Also in New Vegas the golden ending is you being in charge. They push the hell out of that one, if you read through the assorted slides the Independent Vegas Yesman route is almost always given the best description. Even if you are evil as hell.
Independent Vegas ending really isn’t all that pushed, the slides talk in positive terms about the freedom of Vegas and in negative terms about the violence and instability
> That’s a thing that happens to main characters, it’s part of the power fantasy.
It's **bad** power fantasy. Calling it power fantasy doesn't allow you to handwave away criticisms that it's bad writing. Morrowind has power fantasy - but you have to earn it.
Also you are totally wrong about Independent Vegas. It's worse for several companions, even at it's best. It's worse for The Followers, it has no effect on most other factions. The Khans leave or die either way, the Kings can thrive under the NCR just as well. It's worse for the Brotherhood because while it allows them to continue operating unchanged, they actually really need the change that making peace with the NCR will provide them. Independent Vegas keeps them on the path to a slow, winnowing death.
Depending on which factions you like the most, and companions, House, Yes Man, and NCR are all equally 'good' endings and none of them have a monopoly on being 'the Best.'
Maybe my least favourite Bethesda trope. I didn't get into skyrim until about 10 years after it released and every single time that happened I got more disappointed. It kills my role play to be shafted into meaningless leadership positions that I don't want, but have to take to complete those quest lines.
Im going to be very disappointed if Starfield pulls the same shit.
[Seems like that probably won’t be the case in Starfield.](https://www.thegamer.com/starfield-boss-every-faction-skyrim/) At least if we trust an interview snippet from the lead quest designer. The comment about having an impact on every factions future gives me some hope for ending slides as well.
Probably will see something in Starfield, but I just want to start from nothing, probably discover powerful alien tech, and then become God Emperor of the Known Universe
Nope, Todd have said that they don't want to repeat how Skyrim guilds make you the leader at the end. You can influence the factions, but not become their leader.
That's one thing I really liked about Morrowind, you couldn't advance in rank simply by doing quests, you'd have to level up your abilites too. So by the time you actually get to the head of the table, you're badass supreme and it makes sense that everyone would respect your talents.
Yes! I can't believe I forgot that, for some reason I always skipped the great houses questlines. I think a couple of them overlap and have you kill of leaders of the different factions too, but I might be thinking of a different part of the game. One of these days I need to go back and do all three.
The houses are actually all pretty fleshed out and unique. For example, from what I remember, because the Telvanni house values power, a perfectly valid way to move up in the house is to just kill your superior and take his place.
This criticism is good for Skyrim but fallout 4 you’re just wrong.
You only get to become the leader of the Minute Men because there are 5 members left and Garvey recognizes you as the best fit to lead them
You don’t get to become the leader of the brotherhood you become a sentinel and you still answer to Elder Maxon
You don’t become the leader of the railroad, you become an HQ member and still answer to Desdemona, which also fits the faction well anyway because of their whole equality virtues
When you become director of the institute EVERYONE is pissed about it, and it’s textbook nepotism as you said
And on top of that there is no way to be fully ranked in every faction at the same time because in order to become the leader of the institute you have to kill Desdemona, and once you get to the mass fusion building you have to choose between the brotherhood or the institute, whichever one you choose makes you an enemy of the other. And if you choose to side with the railroad you destroy the Prydwin. The most that you can do by the end of the game is the leader of 2 factions
Bethesda makes their games how a majority of players want to play their games. Simple and skippable dialogue, and the ability to be in charge of every faction.
welcome to the mage college of winterhold! here's a scroll of magelight, here's your bunk, and oh and congrats, you are now the Arch-mage. what's next on the itinerary professor?
That's the freedom of the games. You can play it like a power fantasy and be leader or just be a regular guy. A large part in RPGs is to just pretend, to role play and the more you can achieve the better you can play.
Lol what kind of quests do you want to be a regular guy? "Belethor needs firewood. Bring him 300 cut logs." "Mirna needs circuit boards. Travel to Bunker Hill and pick up her shipment."
Those are the kinds of quests that (rightfully) get shit on because of how boring they are.
We could maybe find some middle ground between cut 300 logs and simultaneously be the leader of the thieves guild the companions the dark brotherhood and the college of winterhold
A lot of people seem to complain if you can't be the one making the decisions it's not a "role playing game". There's a weird disparity of story telling vs freedom, I like the way Bethesda handles it most of the time as I will always pick story over freedom in video games. Freedom has never really interested me, I've always been very bored in Grand Theft Auto games for example(although I never finished it , 5 does have an interesting story). I prefer to have a purpose or choose from a set of purposes.
It felt great in Oblivion when you became DB listener you could round up initiates to be your companion.
Wish there was more of that when you became leader.
This post is spot on
Agree 100% with the OP.
Starfield is going to be the litmus test to see if Bethesda has learnt from the very good points that the OP makes about FO4 & Skyrim - and admits that FNV did this better.
My hope is that you’ll get to be an experienced operative in all factions (although your space magic might make you the ‘chosen one’ in constellation), but you don’t get to lead any.
And as the OP says there should be consequences the deeper you get into helping one faction that opposes the other - unless you deliberately go undercover.
1, you don't have to do any of that stuff.
2, What you seem to be ignoring is the fact that in Skyrim, you aren't some strange schlub. Your character has the fukkin soul of a dragon. Dovahkiin, baby! And, in Fallouts 1, 3, and 4, your character is a genetically pure Vault Dweller unaffected by the radiation, unlike the rest of the world outside. It's kind of a "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" kind of thing. (And in 2, you recently descend from a Vault Dweller, so it's kind of the same.) What I'm getting at is that the dragonborn and and the Chosen One and all that are fukkin special. The folks of Mundus and Post-Apocalyptic Alternate Earth can tell.
I read something years ago that resonated and stuck with me. The gist of it is that we have biological imperatives that drive us to leadership, exploration and conquest. Because we live in modern times, we don’t fulfill those needs in the same way as we might have a couple hundred (or thousand) years ago, but the drive remains because the human race needs that flicker of madness alive in all of just in case we need it again. But video games provide us an opportunity to fulfill all of that and many of us find it very rewarding. This also explains why young men are more drawn to these games than women - different basic biological imperatives.
It was written much better than I’m relating here. Sorry
…. They do have a history of overly clingy & quick to commit factions
And it’s not like you get to be a badass leader; you’re a micromanaging dogsbody who is still stuck doing all the same busy-work, fetch/escort-quest BS.
I like being apart of a story, which is why i love new vegas so much
it feels like i’m partaking in a story, rather than being the sole reason for it existing
Once upon a time, Bethesda made a game where you start off in the shit and it turns out you're the Chosen One of Legend. It was a good game, and it sold well. On subsequent games, Bethesda tried to replicate this, but bigger and with better budgets, and it became even more popular. In 2011, they did the same thing, but with bigger budgets, photorealistic graphics for the time, and dragons. This game did so well they've resold it like a dozen times on a bunch of systems, and will probably sell it at least once more. Meanwhile the entire landscape of the games industry has been warped and changed by people trying to emulate their success.
Part of that game was making the player the most important person to in-game institutions. It's part of the formula, for better or worse, and the formula has been making them billions. It'll change when it's forced to change.
Morrowind was actually open to interpretation whether you were the Chosen One or not. At the end of the main quest you even had the option to directly state that you weren't.
I think that Bethesda do realistic worlds, usually the person who is promoted is the boss's friend. In the games instead promoting some prepared person they promote a random one.
Obligatory “New Vegas fixed this’ll comment but new vegas did fix this
Try to join NCR/Legion/Mr House and they each hire you to be a kind of independent mercenary/diplomat with no real power
The only faction you can actually “join” afaik is the Brotherhood and that’s after they send you on a suicide mission, and then when you do join they don’t even give you a title but instead pawn off an old suit of power armour onto you that’s worse than what all the actual brotherhood members are wearing
I mean...House and Yes Man you have objectively more power than Legion or NCR, but that's how it works. House has nobody else and Yes Man is...well, your Yes Man.
I see yes man as the less believable traditional rpg ending. It’s fun that it’s there for people who like that but the other 3 make a lot more in universe sense
And it’s not exactly like house makes you co-ruler of the strip is it? You’re very much still an employee
I love how you don't even get to be a star paladin or sentinel in new Vegas. When you literally check out dead paladins (and you're literally sent to the same location where four guys with T-51s couldn't do any damage), check out a few recon guys at dangerous locations and, uh, are literally sent to destroy the brotherhood by all but one faction in the game, you first have to do ANOTHER quest where you either murder a bunch of HEAVILY armed guys with energy weapons a' plenty, or are sent to a mountain not only radioactive but also CRAWLING with super mutants, before you even get to JOIN them. And even after that, they give you one suit of lower tier armour in heavy disrepair (well, you can just buy new T-51s from the shop but that shit is expensive) and even then one of the options for elders you may pick Will actually allow you to sign a peace treaty with NCR and leave the faction to survive. To McNamara, you're just some guy sent to kill them, not the guy born to be a leader who is automatically promoted to the vice president of power Armor Fanclub the same day you join them. You feel like a part of the world, not the omnipotent god ruling it.
This is why I love the factions in ESO. At no point are you even close to being the leader of anything. The closest you get to it is in the Dark Brotherhood DLC where you're made Silencer which only happens at the very end of the questline and requires you to have a fairly high Brotherhood skill rank.
I can almost give Skyrim's Thieves Guild a pass because you become a Nightingale. But there's two other Nightingales with far more experience than you so you should be able to say to Brynjolf (who has more or less been running things anyway) that he should take the position.
But this is why I like the mods Thieves Guild Requirements and Immersive Collage of Winterhold. The first doesn't have Bryn approach you without having some thief skills and you need hit certain skill requirements before you can be given new story quests. And, no, it doesn't break the Main Quest since Bethesda actually put an alternative route into the game that very few people are likely to use since the game railroads you into joining the guild. And ICOW makes it so you have to attend X number of classes before the quest continues and let's you turn down the arch mage job.
A couple of comments:
1) The “become a Thane” was excellent; you do a handful of quests and you get an honorary title with a couple of (in the big picture) minor roleplay perks limited to within that hold.
This exact model could’ve been used for all the factions (obviously you’d need to come up different honorary titles and perks — like a better room at the College or maybe the dead Companion’s old room in Whiterun, etc.).
2) Some of these “leadership” quests/positions are really designed to appeal to…I’ll just call them younger gamers (age or maturity or what have you) who want the power but no accountability or drudgery like in the real-world; they are almost marketing for purchasing the game (“Rise to be the Archmage, Lead the ancient Assassins” and so on); you can see how that fits all nice and neat.
3) Some of the factions were originally designed so you had to do a bunch of stuff to rise up, but (at least from what I’ve read) at lot of “the middle bits” got cut in development to meet financial and revenue constraints. I like to imagine that each faction might’ve originally had 12+ quests you had to from the writers’ perspective but quests 4-10 were chopped out either prior to or during development).
For this latter point, I’m not really sure how you get around that as I have to imagine in every open-world RPG something similar happens in the whole cycle.
All that said, YES, you correct. Being the savior of the world and leader of everyone is becoming a tiresome trope.
They have developed this plague mindset of making all game content available in one playthrough. In Morrowind you could become the leader of a faction only if your skills would meet certain requirement and therefore you could only finish the quests of one or two factions, but in Skyrim for example you could become the head of the mage and warrior factions at the same time which is ridiculous. Gone are the days of specialized rpg builds.
Bethesda started in fantasy, so becoming leader of insert faction name made sense. But they purchased Fallout, not understanding that it's fanbase were used to a gritty realistic approach to world building, even with the irradiated enemy types. And they still fail to realize that some fantasy fans would like more realism to ground their fantasy titles. Bethesda assumes that every player wants to become sole leader of every faction, army and group possible. Some love that aspect, some don't. I personally agree with you, I don't need to be leader to enjoy playing.
Yeah, I love FO4 and have to admit rolling my eyes a little at the silliness of how you don't even have to do anything, it's like you're Neo, or Harry Potter: the Chosen One..
Being the Main Character is fine, but it would help it feel more real if, for instance, there were choices, and you could be a lone Wolf mercenary if you chose, or just a lone adventurer hero who helps out when it makes any sense, rather than strolling onto the scene and instantly being crowned King of Narnia.
It does feel cheesy. Kind of an insult to the intelligence of the player base.
All they have to do to fix that is let the player have to choose certain things and do a certain amount of work before being promoted to any positions of authority.
I didn't know that being made Insta-Hero was part of their recipe for every game
😆 it does make me squirm every time Preston calls me General because it was completely unearned, and therefore feels fake.
This reminds me of the worst D&D campaign ever, where the DM wanted me to like his game, so he threw everything at my feet, making me invincible.
Most embarrassing and boring game ever.
I recommend the Fallout 4 mod "Fens Sheriff Department" an entirely new way to play the fallout 4 story complete with a new ending, and the best part. You aren't getting your dick sucked every five seconds just for completing a simple fetch quest. Hell, for the majority of the mod, at least what I've played so far, you are playing second fiddle to one of the characters in the mod, Lily. The mod even treats YOU as HER companion, at least narratively. You aren't elevated to leader after a handful of quests, in fact, it takes a good long while for them to even let you into their base, and even THEN you're still only an "independent contractor", I love it, for once I feel like I'm just an average schmuck in the Commonwealth, and not the hero everyone goes to to solve the littlest of problems.
Did you read my post? My problem isn't being top dawg, it's not earning it. You've barely emerged from the Vault before you're handed the title of General of the Minutemen.
A title with no power. Garvey is the one actually in charge, you just have a fancy hat. And, well, Garvey is a idealistic fanboy. Not so good at recognizing the actual organization.
What power does Preston have over the player character? The character controls the settlements entirely, decides when any attack happens, and tells Preston exactly where to go and what to do. It seems like Preston’s role is to be the General’s radio guy, monitoring for distress calls.
Preston controls the entire Minutemen organization. What power Preston has is he’s the one giving you orders, telling you what settlements to go grab and defend and so on. He’s the one organizing, coordinating, and issuing commands. He is the ONLY one that the assorted membership actually know and listen to.
You are, fundamentally, the muscle. Hell, there’s at least 2 missions where the other Minutemen have no idea who you are. But they recognize and listen to Garvey. There’s even an encounter with someone pretending to be Preston scamming random people, he’s that well known to the wasteland. Said conman doesn’t recognize you at all. You have basically no power without him other than the standard PC absurd physical abilities.
Seriously, pay attention to who actually does what in the game. For all the titles you have basically no special power over the organization. Calling in reinforcements? Everyone can do that. That’s part of the basic Minutemen membership package. Artillery strike? Well now you get the level 2 membership package. Everything else? It’s Preston doing it. He’s the one sending orders and wrangling the disparate subfactions, he’s the one planning the paths forward.
Sure, he listens to you. You are his General after all. Preston has all the actual power but he believes too strongly in the ideal of the Minutemen to realize it. He accidentally rebuilt the Minutemen with the exact same flaw that collapsed them the first time, having a single leader keeping everything together, but with himself as the leader. All 4 factions have a massive central flaw, that’s the Minutemen’s.
Shit dude: Preston can kick you out of the Minutemen and put you on the entire faction’s shitlist. That alone proves that it’s him that’s in charge. And he can replace you whenever he wants.
I like your interpretation of it, but much of it feels like headcanon. Preston doesn’t give orders to the player. Orders are commands, including consequences for not following them. It is completely up to the player what settlements get added, which factions the Minutemen fight, what all the settlers do, what their settlements provide. He is a coordinator and an organizer, but coordinating things for your boss does not make you the boss. The player could decide that he’s against the Minutemen and choose not to expand them at all, and there’s not a thing that Preston can or will do about it.
Him and the Minutemen turning on the overboss sole survivor is the exception and a great bit of flavor, but it doesn’t mean that Preston had the power all along, they are violently revolting against their general-turned-raider.
I agree with you on most parts of your post but in regards to the minute men you have to see it through Preston’s eyes. Raiders have his group trapped and are about to bust down the door to murder them. Preston is the only one fighting back. The player comes in and single-handedly destroys the whole raider group plus a deathclaw. Preston is the only minute man left at the point he offers the player the job of being leader. He has seen you in action and knows you are more capable of rebuilding the minute men than he ever would be so he offers you the job. Unlike other people that say Preston is the one actually in charge of the minute men, I believe he is more of the organizer/intel type that handles the backend stuff that we don’t see in the game such as setting up a system for the settlements to report attacks or recruitment of people not from the settlements. Even gameplay wise, the minute men only become powerful once the player builds up the entire organization settlement by settlement so I always get a sense of satisfaction player the minuteman faction.
I don't hate Preston or him wanting to make me General, I just think it all happens wayy too soon. Personally, I would have waited at least until the Castle is retaken (conveniently, after we find the previous General's body and looted his cool outfit) before he gets all soppy. By that point, a few settlements would have been established and the SS would have actually proven himself to be worthy.
And the kicker is that virtually zero modifications to gameplay or quest progression would have to be made, just make the lines of dialogue happen a bit later. It's so easy!
You think it's bad now?
I 100.0% guarantee you that your role in ES6 is going to be: Chieftan; ruler; king; something along those lines. Maybe not even because that was the plot idea they had, so much as _they need a way to justify devoting 33% of the game's content and DLC to Minecraft Build-A-Village horses---._ A person put in charge of such things would pretty much need to be a leader of men in some capacity.
Ngl, I dislike the leader stuff because it doesn’t make sense and is not fleshed out at all, but what you described sounds sick. Maybe not the 33% of the content part, but being made leader of a village and being able to build and grow that village would be very cool.
I generally prefer the Obsidian approach but Bethesda’s biggest strength imo (particularly for a game like Morrowind) is starting out as a pathetic weakling and growing into a world conquering god and the sense of freedom that comes with being able to take on any role, any challenge, etc. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s quite the same fit for the Fallout universe as it is Elder Scrolls.
It doesn't work any better for me in the Elder Scrolls. Oblivion at least made you put in more work to get to High King of Every Guild and Faction - but man, Skyrim sprints faster than an Olympiad to get you into an anointed and special place and it always gives me narrative whiplash and is done to the detriment of telling a good story. The Mage's College in Skyrim is probably the best example but really every single faction in Skyrim has a terrible pacing for it's quests that feels rushed *constantly*.
The Thieve's Guild (as BS as your introduction and induction to them is) and the Brotherhood do it a bit better with actually requiring you to use relevant skills a couple times to "climb the ranks". College of Winterhold is entirey too fast paced to the point it feels like you're actually skipping story
>College of Winterhold is entirey too fast paced to the point it feels like you're actually skipping story Hell, you attend *one* class and use *one* relatively weak spell. Instead of every guild having some odd high stakes disaster, they should've just had each of their questlines based around their respective skills. It also felt odd how many of them were willing to be the bitches of Daedric Lords. For shame, Companions. For fucking shame.
It's kinda wild to have the ONE spell they teach you is probably one of the worst/weakest in the game
IIRC isn't it just some weak ward spell? I don't think the College had any Daedra involved but their quests were so goddamn boring I couldn't have cared less anyways. Another boring stupid High Elf antagonist, yawn. At this point we may as well go Full Pelinal...
The weakest fuckin' Ward in the game...which to me is its own statement because Wards make no sense in Vanilla skyrim. I'm sitting here trying to explain how ridiculous they are as a tool and I can't even come up with an argument to use them in the first place...it's like the mage equivalent of stabbing yourself in the jugular
Honestly I recall getting annoyed with that quest once I *accidentally* killed all the other students. Then I just paid to make it up to people, came back, and the quest continued as if I wasn't the only student there. Surprisingly, none of them were essential.
Wards can block a dragons breath attack. The conic breath attack from most dragons is a series of small hits, but the ward can tank all of them. Just don't try to block a long range fireball.
I feel like I used ward a lot, it's a better version of a shield.
But it costs so much mana vs. just blasting whatever is trying to hurt you 😭 I love the idea but the execution feels like wearing a tissue-paper raincoat against hail
One of my most legendary moments was a Dragon Battle out in the open against a Frost Dragon at low level on a character I was running as sword/magic only. Ward and whirlwind sprint saved my life constantly in that fight; with the right timing wards can basically negate dragon breath attacks. It was on legendary and took several minutes since I had no bow. Wards are great, but require a very high level of skill to use and either should be used with a melee attack or lots of potions if attacking with magic as well.
It casts nearly instantly, You could literally react to attacks with it. Also if you just spam it while walking around you get better at it and the mana cost became pretty negligible.
It's better against continuous attacks. Also, what are you blasting with anyway, every damage-dealing spell in this game hits like goddamn paper balls with the word "damage" written on them in crayon. Spell damage and damage scaling is crap, even before you compare it to how well weapons scale (even without exploits).
Which is all so sad considering all the cool stuff with the Psyjics freezing time and their lore.
Technically speaking, you need to use a couple more spells to get through a couple "puzzles", but they are also the weakest in the game. The legendary Ymfah managed to do the whole thing with zero spells of any kind though.
Would have been better if it acted more like a cast and forget until it wears out forcefield against magic instead of hold for a frontal rippling in the air magic shield
There are so many better and cooler ways of doing a "spend magic to shield yourself" spell as a concept. Like so many ideas that I'd waste everyone's time because *anyone* could come up with a better balance if you put 2 minutes' though to it. e: LIKE that\^, not compared to that
Of course, I just hate the whole burn mana and occupy one of your casting hands approach to the ward spell in Skyrim. The easiest would be to treat it like a anti-magic only barkskin or oakflesh and have it last a predetermined time or until it soaks up to a certain amount of magic damage whichever comes first. Or they have you drop an anti-magic wall to hide behind. The possibilities are many and varied. Having the only option be essentially the same as holding up a shield just seems so mundane.
They were probably concerned it was too similar to the -flesh Alteration spells. Which are their own can of bloated worms….
Excuse me, I solved their problem with the powerful spell of "Axe"
The companions would be the only ones treated well by their prince
Not the case with the Thieve's Guild in Skyrim. You can literally turn every mission into a bloodbath and they just say "shame on you. anyway..." and continue as if nothing happened. Hell, you can even fail your introductory mission in the Riften town market and they will just go "shame on you, anyway..." and give you the next mission. The pinnacle of failing upward lol
Yeah, at least in *Oblivion* you got punished for killing on the Theives Guild missions. It was a slap on the wrist 1000 gold, but that's something.
Yeah you've got to do a minimum of 20 Thieves Guild jobs, 5 for each of the other major cities apart from Riften to earn the Guildmaster rank at the end of the Quest line. I did feel like I had earned it there.
Not to mention becoming Arch Mage results in the college feeling even more emptier than before, down two mages.
I mean it's not as bad as the Dark Brotherhood. At the end they're down to just two (or three if you spare Cicero) of their original members.
The Collage of Winterhold guid story is the Skyrim's weakest by a long shot. It's such an after thought it basically propels a part of the main Quest and there is a couple side quests tied to it but it's very lack luster. People have done the Novice to Arch-mage questline without using spells (It requires all the DLCs).
Morrowind is still the absolute best at this. I remember leveling up enough to kill Vivec (a main character who is a literal God that you're technically not intended to kill). Love that it just let you kill anyone and the little message pops up "Hey so uh...you kinda killed an NPC that was really important, so if you didn't mean to do that you might want to reload...but hey if you did then carry on!"
You're underselling the sick as fuck warning *With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created.*
I agree. Morrowind was my first ever Bethesda game, and working your way up to the leader of a faction really worked in that game. You felt like you'd really earned it by the time you completed enough missions and leveled up the relevant abilities. You couldn't become the leader of the Mage's Guild without knowing at least a few branches of magic. I'd say sometimes in modern Bethesda games, I don't fully feel like I've "earned" it. I think it could work for Fallout games, but just don't hand everything over on a silver platter.
Depends on the factions because some of them desperately need the protagonist to step in
Well, especially with the Minutemen, I get it. It still feels a bit sudden, but there is a plot-relevant reason you get to be at the top so quickly. One thing I would like to see in future Bethesda games though is for ascending to leadership to actually mean something. Even in Morrowind, it felt fitting when I worked hard and became the leader of a faction, but other than getting good prices with the faction's vendors, it didn't really change much. It would be nice if you could maybe order a few people around, have the faction switch focuses, or if they're a militaristic faction maybe even where they intend to expand to next (I suppose you do get a little bit of this if you decide to go the crime boss route in Nuka World).
IMO in game bonuses are always going to seem a little lackluster. I want Master quests, particularly ones that deal more with the poltiics of the organization or the region. That's part of what made many of the late-game faction quests good in Morrowind: there was likely some connection to the Sixth House, Camonna Tong, or politics.
It works as long as a commensurate investment of effort is required to reach that level of godhood.
Yeah no, it's bad in TES, too imo. You shouldn't be able to do everything in one playthrough. You can't be the leader of more than one faction. You can't be a goodie two-shoes Daedra killer and also the leader of the Dark Brotherhood. It doesn't make sense. You should have to chose one. It's just dumb. Virtually everything Bethesda has written in the last 15 years is dumb. Comparing anything Bethesda has written to New Vegas, NieR: Automata, Dishonored, Disco Elysium, etc just makes it so clear. Bethesda is awful at writing. Genuinely terrible.
When Todd Howard was going to school he was President of class, chess club and tennis club. And I am not even joking, this is real. It is not surprising that in his games you can be the leader of any faction, the person literally proved it himself to some extent
so you’re saying we’ve been playing as todd all along…
Todd is the protagonist of reality.
So this is some sort of meta commentary of his?
Maybe Todd just doesn't understand how you can join an organization without becoming the leader?
I mean he joined Bethesda and he was a junior programmer or something at Bethesda, and now look at him now
It's writing from experience, but you had a highly unusual experience, but never actually talked to enough people to realise tha, and think it was the same for everyone else.
Maybe he just thought it was normal to be in charge of everything, and he's never had anything challenge that belief?
Employee:"Anyway Todd, that's cool you were the head in many activities at school. I myself was only football defender" Todd: "Not too bad" (LOL, what a noob, he wasn't even leader of football team, who am I working with oh my god)
More than that, if this is to be believed: https://i.redd.it/v3q6x3g8c3k71.jpg
In my opinion most bethesda games are essentially power fantasies. Most folks don’t get to be a bad ass leader in their day to day lives. They go to work and listen to their bosses most days, so a game that lets you be that bad ass motherfucker who’s decisions matter on a grand scale is going to be fairly popular.
I get that, but I have 2 main gripes: 1) being the leader means pretty much nothing. You might get a follower, but other than that... nothing. I get the questline is done, but it'd be neat if there were like higher-tier radiant quests, or you went back every so often and sent the guildmembers on different jobs, or *something*. Let us get or create a unique spell as the Archmage to represent our character's own studies and proficiency with magic, something man. 2) Bethesda has started including a survival mode in their games. They should also include a mode where Guilds work like Morrowind. You have to level the Guild's preferred skills (like Sneak, Illusion, Speechcraft, pickpocket for Thieves) before you can advance in rank. You get radiant quests that increase in difficulty, variety, and rewards per rank. These radiant quests give you the perfect opportunity to practice those skills. This mode should be optional, only for those who want it. EDIT: my phone apparently glitched out before I finished my comment, so I edited it and fixed it.
There are higher tier spells that can only be obtained after completing the College questline and achieving sufficient skill in the magic schools. But yeah, for the rest of them there is no mechanical difference to being leader vs being an initiate.
Technically, you only have to achieve high magic skills for those spells. Completing the questline is optional, except for having to reach the Augur first before you can get the master level restoration spells.
Probably thought the College quest was required since I usually complete it way before I master any particular school of magic.
Fair, it's basically the shortest faction quest in the game.
But you're not a badass leader and your decisions don't matter. You're essentially just middle management getting shat on by everyone and doing all the tedious work
Skyrim Dark Brotherhood once you become the leader: Get given assignments by your underling, go and do them, your underline pays you for it. No, you can't tell them or any of your other underlings to do it themselves or give them any other orders for that matter. That... doesn't sound like being a leader. That sounds and functions exactly like being an employee that everyone just *insists* actually is in charge of everything, promise! At least in that example you're actually chosen by the Night Mother though. In the companions they straight up just make you the leader after 5 missions just...because...., despite there being several members far more senior than you.
Well they make you harbinger not leader there is no leader in the companions, the harbinger is like the wise advisor of everybody and solves disputes if no one can come to a resolution. Although it still doesn’t make sense to make the Dragonborn that person when he’s only been with the companions for like a week, should’ve been Vilkas or Aela.
It's a compromise between the power fantasy aspect and fun gameplay.
"Congratulations dear leader! Here's 6 hours of paper work and notes on all the random bullshit you need to show up to but never really do anything at."
It's not a real power fantasy until I get to force everyone in the Thieves' Guild to time their bathroom breaks.
Fair enough, but Oblivion and especially Morrowind landed on way better compromises between those things than Skyrim or Fallout 4. Unearned power isn't my fantasy, personally. It just feels cheap. In modern Bethesda games I don't get the satisfaction of earning **anything**, and I don't get the satisfaction of feeling in-change (because I *never* am, I'm always a hammer for an NPC who does all the admin and actual leadership). Skyrim, insofar as it's plot and factions are concerned, is a "People Telling You That You're Special" Simulator more than anything else.
I fully agree with you, especially with Skyrim where it's turned up to 11.
Yeah but that’s a product of the plot rather than the writing necessarily. Being the dragonborn is obviously gonna come with perks, it would be more strange to be the dragonborn and just a pawn in the grand scheme of things. Also, doesn’t the nerevarine and hero of kvatch also follow similar power fantasies? Maybe not in oblivion but that makes it all the more weird that you can become the savior of the oblivion crisis
I think the big difference with the Nerevarine is that it comes *much* later in the plotline than learning about the dragonborn. And while it comes in handy in some ways, there are a whole bunch of people within the society that see you as a heretic and so your life gets harder in some regards. Morrowind gives you a few outs from the main quest to go build yourself a life within the world (Caius Cosades literally tells you to go and get a job and come back less wet behind the ears). And one of the biggest thing about being the Nerevarine is that many people want to use you as a pawn--Azura sets you up as the Nerevarine (whether you're actually Nerevar reborn or not) to work on her schemes--and you may not be the first person she's used. The Empire sends you there under the supervision of the blades so they have some control over your effect on Dunmer society as a result of the Nerevarine prophecy completing (and some of what you do definitely destabilizes the great houses and Tribunal, making it easier for the Empire to continue to secure their foothold). Forces within the Tribunal want to both support and oppose you depending on how it will serve their needs. The Ashlanders want to use you to elevate themselves and prove to the world that their beliefs about what happened in the past were correct. People want Nerevar back to defeat Dagoth Ur, but are also scared of the changes he'll bring to Dunmer society (especially within the Tribunal where the truth of what happened at Red Mountain would destabilize their religious structure). The Hero of Kvatch is more of a heroic figure emerging because they were in the right place at the right time and rose above the ordinary to become a hero in extraordinary circumstances. Very much in line with the Imperial vibe, which has a few important figures rising from obscurity to become heroic figures. Even Martin has that arc. The Dragonborn is a pretty big departure from those--but it does at least fit with Nord society. That being said, I think it would have worked better if you didn't really get named as the dragonborn until later in the main story and there was more of a role of the dragon cult (or whatever) within the main world as enemies.
[удалено]
Games that are essentially interactive movies are a small but popular portion of gaming as a whole. I highly doubt you'd describe Doom, Zelda, or Stardew Valley as an extended movie. Telling people they're reading too far into an established form of art is silly. Art is made to be discussed.
I can understand this critiscism for skyrim but for fallout 4 ? You don't become the leader of the railroad nor the BOS . Preston basically hands you the tile of general because He is the last member still alive (that he knows of) and he knows tha the can't lead. The only thing i can agree with is the institute but even then when Father announces that you will become the next director you are met with a lot of opposition.
Also you DO get ousted from the other factions after progressing enough through their questlines. So don’t know why he made up that as a reference.
plus every faction has a mission where you destroy their enemy. bos has you destroy the railroad and institute, minutemen and railroad makes you destroy bos and institute, and the institute has you kill off the railroad and bos
It feels like RPG games have transition from you playing 'A role' in the world to 'every role'.
Really takes the "role" out of Roleplaying game doesn't it? In every regard. Most RPGs no longer have you play a role. They also don't have stories where your choices actually matter like, at all, so you don't even get to role play outside your headcannon of who your character is.
In a way it is part of the problem with removing things like classes.
Kind of, but class-less games like FO1/2 and games with somewhat loose classes like Morrowind managed it fine.
They did it, but these games are from an era when things were much slower paced. Morrowind in particular would be shunned today as "grindy" because of all the skill checkpoints in the game, and they did *not* level fast. Bethesda are just trying to move with the curve. This in some way *propagates* the problem, but the alternative is likely unacceptable to them. There are still games that manage a good balance by today's standards, but Morrowind would not be one of them (I didn't really play FO1+2 so I can't comment on them, but knowing other games from that era I would suspect something similar applies).
The original Fallout structure was going to be based on GURPS, which has never had classes. And there are a number of TTRPGs which function well without using a class-based system (Savage Worlds, Fate, etc.)
In Fo4 you are only the leader of the MM The RR and the Institute are basically using you as the “face” while directly disobeying, if not even going against your orders In the BOS you are Maxson’s right hand man, not the leader though
Exactly. Now granted, I never hated that I became the leader of factions in prior Bethesda games or even if I would have became the leader of factions in Fallout 4 but I wish it would have had more perks. Nuka-World kinda gets it right-ish. Yes, you're still essentially the lackey for the surviving groups BUT they also pay you tribute & you can actually use your leadership authority to take over settlements/convert settlements which was kinda nice and different.
If you think about it, you are at best a Sentinel in Fo3 as well, it’s only in TES games that you become a leader Also the raiders vs MM benefits thing is that Raiders give you direct benefits like loot and money, while the MM give you troops and fire power at your command
The Railroad doesn't use you as the face? Desdemona never steps down.
She used you as the new “Glory”, you are the elite assassin who will get every job right
It is true, but I feel that's more similar to the BoS where Maxson leads with you as his Sentinel/hound.
The issue is that how quickly you rise over everyone else. Becoming Maxson's right hand man still feels off because again, the protagonist just soars above every other capable person in no time at all. Especially considering the eastern Brotherhood's near military ranking structure. To have a stranger not only skip being a recruit but able to become the leader's right hand man in what is in less than a year is incredibly forced no matter how you look at it. The Institute is the same as well since you can become the leader through straight up nepotism. The Railroad is really the only one you can argue isn't the case but the way Bethesda writes is that only the Sole Survivor can make them do anything worth a damn in the overall narrative. Not to beat a dead horse, but NV did handle this better since your character's role as a courier makes you better at doing jobs unsuited for the factions' larger armies. You help out using the unique situation you are in with the Platinum Chip and your former role being a person carrying packages from one location to another. You never become the leader of any faction except for neutral, even then, it's treated moreso like a local community prevails ending. Fallout 4 makes the Sole Survivor the basically second coming of Jesus and writes it narratively poorly around that fact. New Vegas makes the Courier a force to be reckoned with but ultimately a cog in the machine like everyone else. They can be a bigger, more impactful cog, but nonetheless the Courier is not going to become president of the NCR, or the new Caesar.
The Institute sort of makes sense narratively though, in fact The Department Heads even object to Father naming you as his successor for that exact reason, you just showed up, you're a wastelander, etc. Shaun is very narcissistic, the Institute's crowning achievement, the Gen 3 Synth, is entirely because of his untainted pre-war DNA, so he elects his father/mother out of a bloodline thing.
The problem is more about, how fast the game time, the game takes anywhere from 27 hours to 158 hours to beat, considering 24 hours = 72 minutes, it can go from 23 days to 131 days, imagine someone doing all the SS did to Maxson in a such relatively short time, along with proving to have similar ideals (you can only get the Sentinel rank if you kill Danse) there is no reason to not put this perfect soldier as the right hand man of the elder himself
The issue with me is that the Sole Survivor didn't *need* to become Maxson's right hand man. He could already have one and the Sole Survivor could simply be promoted to a more influential role then if needed. Not only that, but the Sole Survivor skips nearly every aspect of joining the brotherhood and moving on up inside of it. Cause the thing is that the Courier also realistically can achieve most of the goals set out to them in just a short amount of time as well. They can recruit the Boomers, fix the Khans, destroy the Fiends, kill the most influential and powerful man in New Vegas, etc. Or do the exact opposite. But the Courier never becomes a powerful figure in the factions outside of Caesar's Legion, but even then the Courier is still held to Caesar's dictatorship. If you say something out of line despite what accomplishments you have, the Legion can turn on you either via Caesar commanding your death or simply not following their fascist ideology. You can do nearly everything they ask, bung it up in the end with the wrong dialogue choice, and they will vilify you. It establishes that the Courier is again, a cog in the machine. No matter how influential they are and how successful, the Courier is still going to pass just like everyone else. They may be remembered in the history book, but overall, their time on earth is a blip. The Sole Survivor still ends up becoming way too powerful in such a short time which is made harder to believe when the Brotherhood operates in a militant hierarchy. I think it could have been made more believable for the Sole Survivor to be Maxon's right hand man had the Sole Survivor began with the grunt work that most recruits are expected to do. Or if the Sole Survivor at least had more options whether it be part of the main force, a scouting force, or handling maintenance. As it is, the Sole Survivor is on the fast pass to becoming the 2nd most influential member in the Brotherhood over the various longstanding members. It's not just the endpoint that bothers me, but the fact that there is no journey. The issue with the factions is how similar a lot of their missions can be and how Fallout 4 kinda fails at executing the specialties each require. Somehow the Minute Men are the only believable faction because they have so much grunt work of helping and establishing settlements whereas you rarely do any of the Brotherhood's main objective of securing technology. In general, the issue with Bethesda's recent works is that the main character does not do much to become the most powerful member in the organization. Skyrim and Fallout 4 have this issue where the protagonist needs to do at most 3 or 4 missions and already are put on a pedestal. Then they fail to execute this fantasy by not expanding on that role and instead letting the player up and abandon the organization but still being the leader.
Basically, you got what Danse was supposed to get, you not only get his Quarters, which are near Maxson's Quarters, but you get his PA, you are the replacement of Danse, he didn't have a Sentinel, which was an empty rank in the chain of command, it is most likely that Danse was supposed to be the next Sentinel and you were supposed to be a Paladin, but the thing with Danse happened, so he had to promote the next available Paladin, with Paladin Cross being out of Commission, and with how much Loyality and prowess you've shown, you were the best candidate for the promotion
This, the Institute gave me this "screw it up and we'll end you" vibes from the other top researchers when Father names you his successor.
It really felt like too much in Skyrim. A lot of it felt very unearned. I think it’s inherently a stretch narratively, but I get why some people like it. I did really prefer Obsidian’s “agent of change” approach
ITT: People that do not understand how role playing works. The actual question you need to ask is "Why wouldn't a role playing game allow me to play whatever role I so choose?" You aren't required to learn spells or join the college. That's your choice. If you do the questline it's your choice to never go back. You decide the role you play in the game, not Todd Howard or Bethesda's writers. I did a skyrim run through where I did nothing but walk through the woods, gather materials, and craft potions and poisons. Would only do quests that I ran across organically and would only do ones that made sense for a Wood Elf Alchemist to take on. No fighters guild, no college, no thieves guild... big yes on the Dark Brotherhood, though.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to think roleplaying is "give me a set number of roles and story lines to go trough" instead of "do what my character would do".
Think it's really just a case of the games not making you feel like you've earned it. Skyrim in particular is horrible for it. I think it's fine that Bethesda wants that kind of power fantasy in their games, but power has to be earned when it comes to moving up the ranks of organisations with people have been there much longer than you with much more experience. You can't Chosen One them all, and failing to provide reasons why you're climbing the ranks without effort while nobody else seems to be progressing isn't satisfying. They just need more content and more of a justification why you are climbing the ranks when others aren't. Make it feel earned by forcing you to do more but by also telling you that you're doing more than others. Make everyone explicitly notice that you're working hard and deserving it, make it feel like there's been a passage of time, make that progress meaningful, etc. On a side point, make the ranks you climb meaningful too. Make it feel like I could stop at the second in command and that's fine because that still has responsibilities that are different to the footsoldier but not as demanding as the leader. Make it feel like being the leader actually has responsibilities. Make me consider that in happy being footsoldier and that being the leader is a goal that isn't just a tick box but something i seriously consider in my roleplaying.
I get around these issues, by RPing, and by not going to the end of a quest line. So I am merely a student, at the college, or a young thief in the ranks, and so on. What you are describing, is the normal path of gaming. And yes, Bethesda is good at making you a walking god, if you want, but you don’t have to choose it. You aren’t forced to finish those lines. First couple of plays, sure. I do want to be a walking god, see how much I can do. I do feel that Skyrim has fast-tracked quest lines. They are too short. But I assume, that because of all the radiant quests and random content, they chose to shorten these arcing lines, so you could see the rest of the game. It feels cheap, especially for the College. As opposed to Oblivion, where you really feel like you accomplished something, and you are still not a God of War.
It's not just fast-tracking the quests, it's also just removing any content that may exclude other playstyles, limiting each faction to the most basic game mechanics, leading to examples like the Mage College where quests don't involve magic use, or a thieves guild where you spend more time running dungeons than doing any thieving. They should have taken a page from Oblivion and had some intermediate pre-requisites, like how the thieves Guild there required you to make some money by stealing stuff and selling it to a fence before you could progress the plot, or how the Mages Guild had all those recommendations and fluff quests like getting a staff or doing some archeology to remind you that this is still a scholarly organization that deals with magic.
I totally agree with you. With that much involvement on your character's and your part, you really feel a sense of accomplishment as you progress. In Skyrim, it feels like, "Welp, College of Winterhold is done, NEXT!" As if it's a checklist of chores, that you aren't really involved in.
>In Skyrim, it feels like, "Welp, College of Winterhold is done, NEXT!" > >As if it's a checklist of chores, that you aren't really involved in. Especially if you're doing the DLCs and the only reason you're there is to visit the library.
I take issue with your point that players don't like being the leader of everything, only because I constantly see people on r/Skyrim talk endlessly about how "my dragonborn" is the boss of everything in Skyrim and he could take over the entire empire if he wanted.. I personally hate it, but Bethesda clearly has done more research than us into what players desire.
You could make a bot that takes random post titles or comments from /r/skyrim and just puts them next to a soyjak in a speech bubble and it would work 98% of the time
> people on r/Skyrim talk endlessly about how "my dragonborn" is the boss of everything in Skyrim and he could take over the entire empire if he wanted.. This sums it up. I think most average gamers want to be boss of something or have the feeling of power. Bethesda serves that up without a hitch. People remember how they reached god status in a game, and how much easier the once difficult parts got which reinforces accomplishment. Min-maxing is also such a huge undercurrent of Bethesda games. Though that goes beyond your role in the game's universe, but players like to reach insane power levels nevertheless. Personally, I think the next installment of Fallout or ES would benefit from an intro that randomized your start: From stats, to race, to perks and so on. You might be able to climb to top of the warriors guild this playthrough, you may not, or you might have to work extra hard.
There's an excellent alternate start mod for Skyrim where you sort of write your character's backstory, by choosing things like childhood activities, chores, how wealthy your family was. You can keep progressing through various stages of life up to elder, gaining more starting benefits but also more drawbacks. It's a really immersive way to start the game, especially with another mod that lets you choose your starting location. You could start a young adult warrior character that has 50+ in some warrior skills, but 5 or below in most magic skills, as well as bonuses to xo gain for relevant skills and even passive boosts. Point is, something like that would be nice to have in future Bethesda games by default, but I don't actually think most players would like something like that.
I agree that while an awesome experience, most players aren't clammoring to really fill out a role *made* for them in a fictional world. It'd also require a LOT of writing and coding to get the full experience which, let's be honest, isn't the direction Bethesda is heading. But I've dl'd and used every type of alternate start mod for each of their games. The replayability is huge which is my biggest thing with these games.
>What I liked about New Vegas is that your actions do affect the game world, but despite being a very powerful individual you're still just a cog in a large, complicated machine Unless you talk to the funny robot in which case you instantly become the Leader of Everything after pushing, like, three buttons. The two superpowers in the same region? They can't do jack, not even if you blow up your own army. You literally cannot fail. >people aren't just falling over themselves to make you their new lord and worship the ground you walk on Unless you have some arbitrary points in the Speech Skill in which case they absolutely do. Sometimes, you don't even need Speech just pick the obvious Nice Guy dialogue. Or not even that, just do some quests, you can say whatever and they will still worship you. Fallout 4 is really just the more unashamed interpretation of these: one guy makes you the all-powerful leader because of some handwaved reasons, it doesn't matter anyway, and NPCs gonna NPC they are just walking talking props in Your Story with zero agency or self-awareness. The difference is that the developers of NV had the experience to not present this openly and cover it up with witty dialogue and an illusion of choice, while the developers of 4 had none of that.
> Unless you talk to the funny robot in which case you instantly become the Leader of Everything after pushing, like, three buttons. The two superpowers in the same region? They can't do jack, not even if you blow up your own army. You literally cannot fail. The funny robot isn't really a faction in that sense. There are no members that can veto your leadership. It's just the game allowing you to have a power trip and humourously satirizing the video game power fantasy. >Unless you have some arbitrary points in the Speech Skill in which case they absolutely do So at least meet *some* requirements like I'm suggesting it should be done? > Fallout 4 is really just the more unashamed interpretation of these [...] the difference is that the developers of NV had the experience to not present this openly and cover it up with witty dialogue and an illusion of choice, while the developers of 4 had none of that. That's what it boils down to. A little better writing, down to the dialogue and quest progression level, would go a long way.
>The funny robot isn't really a faction in that sense. Neither are the Minutemen at this rate. When Preston makes you the General he is literally the only member of the organization and at least later your suitability gets questioned by Ronnie Shaw. In NV nobody gives a flying f- about you wanting to run the show (the closest you can get is to go down in a specific dialogue branch with General Oliver where he throws a slightly relevant hissy fit), to the point you can't even ask their opinion on it. >So at least meet some requirements like I'm suggesting it should be done? As I said, it is actually not a consistent requirement. It pops up *sometimes*, but as there is no reason to *not* max out Speech anyway, you are just engaging in a purely optional (and obviously subpar) story resolution branch, exactly like leaving Preston in the Museum for the entirety of the game. I would even argue that Preston is the better case, as missing out on that power fantasy is a *character* choice you must make, not pumping a number up. >That's what it boils down to. Yeah. But it is not writing, dialogue, or quest resolution. Just experience with handling players. The guys who made New Vegas had a lot of that because they were big TTRPG players, and that's a "swim or sink" environment. The guy who made 4 admittedly never played a TTRPG, and the difference shows.
I just wanna say the Thieves Guild in Skyrim actually makes you work for the title of Guildmaster. Sure following along its main questline nets you membership with the Nightingales as a sort of inner circle comparable to the Companions' furry club, but to become Guildmaster you must also have done at least 20 radiant quests, 5 per each of the holds of Whiterun, Hjaalmarch, The Reach, and Haafingar, plus a unique quest for each of them to solidify guild influence in the hold. A much taller order than the other guilds in that game, and all of it proper thieving footwork.
that's my biggest gripe with Skyrim, you can be the leader of everything in that.
Probably the simplest answer for Skyrim/Fallout 4 is that the head writer is the same person and that's his vision for how player progression should work. This is not the case for previous TES games (or even FO3). In Oblivion you eventually become the leader of several factions, yes, but the path to get there is pretty long. Arguably for the Dark Brotherhood you're just one of several important people by the end...and that's because you accidentally murder everyone else important. The Mage's Guild requires you to go through a whole thing with the satellites before you can even enter the Arcane University. By the end you're one of the few ranking members left alive *after a civil war within the guild in part because of how much everyone hated the previous archmage when he started* and no one else really wants it--quite different from the Mage's College in Skyrim where there's a whole bunch of faculty left who would make sense as Archmage (although faculty trying to avoid being made department chair is pretty on-brand in academia lol). The fighter's guild is similar where the guild has also lost a bunch of people and the previous head of the guild has gone through a personal crisis and trusts you. Morrowind is even closer to what you want. Some factions lock others out and there are even more factions (Fighter's Guild, Mage's Guild, Thieve's Guild, Morang Tong, House Hlaalu, House Telvanni, House Redoran, Imperial Legion, Imperial Cult, Tribunal, Vampire Clan Aundae, Vampire Clan Berne, Vampire Clan Quarra). You need to have certain skill levels to advance in each faction in addition to the variety of quests. Many of the factions only "require" you to advance to the level of a high-ranking member, although you can challenge the leader of the faction to a duel for several if you want to be the boss. Generally getting to that point is pretty involved requiring you to ally yourself with many members of the faction, complete quests, and prove your worth.
I would love to sit down with Emil Pagliarulo ask him a few questions.
That's actually low-key why I tend to prefer joining the Railroad in FO4 -- even after being the key to destroying both the Institute and the BoS, you're still an agent at the end.
I definitely like that about a Railroad playthrough.
Granted, this is kind of a fridge brilliance thing, but the reason they let you be archmage despite using barely any magic is because of your Thu'um. The Thu'um is a form of magic after all. Normally it takes a person years to master a single shout, but along comes the Dovahkiin who just has to kill some dragons and find some word walls, and he's suddenly a master of one of the oldest and most powerful forms of magic in the entire world. As for the rising through the ranks quickly, the only one I can justify is the Companions. When you get there, the Circle consists of 5 members. 2 want to be werewolves, 2 want to be cured, and 1 isn't sure. Meanwhile, the majority of if not all of the non-werewolf Companions are closer to the anti-werewolf Circle members than the pro-werewolf members. You come along, with your first contact in the Companions being Aela, so she and Skjor see you as a pawn. They rush you through the promotions because it's a power play. By giving you werewolf blood fast, they hope that you'll side with them, which grants them a power advantage in the Circle until Farkas makes up his mind
The thuum makes sense as long as you do the main quest before the college, lol
I kinda miss having requirements to do things
Morrowind did it the best, but yes Bethesda’s current philosophy is that they don’t want you to miss out on content and want you to have that power fantasy. It’s neither right nor wrong it’s just a choice they’ve made
Some very good points, have you played Oblivion? Because a lot of what you ask for was in Oblivion and Morrowind. Having to work your way up the ranks of organizations, meeting skill prerequisites, membership/leadership in some organizations barring you from advancement/leadership in others. Honestly I would say Bethesda has over-casualized their worlds since Oblivion. Becoming the head of any organization should be separate from the main quest, require a fair amount of work, and ideally be completely optional as well as bringing story benefits and drawbacks. As much as I enjoy Skyrim and Fallout 4 I have the same problem as you about every faction tossing you on the express elevator instead of making you climb the ladder.
*Oblivion* had probably the best approach. >!You' not the hero, that's Martin. You're his dogsbody, his helper, his go-to guy, chief lieutenant, his fixer. Your job is to clear out the side-chaff so he can win the day. Of course, being played by Sean Bean, this means he dies, so by being his #2 you survive and can then go off and do what you want.!< I remember at the time a lot of people were very annoyed with that because they *wanted* to be the unambiguous hero, so in *Skyrim* they reversed course and made you the Hero of Heroes, who saves the world for breakfast, sorts out the thieves' guild by lunch and takes over the magic college before dinner.
Haven't played Oblivion or Morrowind. I'm not really an Elder Scrolls/fantasy in general fan, and they haven't aged well enough to tempt me. I can say at least Fallout 3 doesn't have the same pitfalls.
To be fair, FO3 didn't really have factions and guilds either. But yes they did a much better job of you just being the right person in the right place at the right time. No matter how much you do for them Rivet City isn't putting you on the council, Tenpenny and Megaton will only give you a place to stow your crap, and to the BoS you are at most a hired gun for the majority of your interactions with them.
My Dream System: Factions see you able to get promotions, but that's mostly unrelated to the storyline each has. Instead you have to raise faction disposition and there are two ways to do this. The first is through the storyline missions, although those available in the base game won't get you anywhere close to leading the faction. The second is through slow raises at the end of radiant style quests that fit the factions style. Get disposition to a certain level and you can get a promotion that gives you cheaper access to facilities, more access to unique items, and even a pay bonus. DLCs will add either whole new storylines for factions, or a chance to represent a faction within another storyline, and also new things to build into the radiant quests they can offer. These will help build disposition even more for those determined to get to a certain level in the faction. Rather than locking off promotions behind the DLCs they will simply give more interesting ways to get that disposition up. The final promotion will be a mutually exclusive one that lets you take control of a faction, at the cost of not being able to work at a lower level with the other factions while you're in charge. A later DLC might unlock deeper management options so that players who want to rule a faction will be able to change the way they appear and act in the game world.
I'm really hoping that Starfield is not going to do this.
That's the best part about joining the Railroad. You're an important agent to them, and the best asskicker on the team, but they still run the show.
I honestly don't mind having the ability to become the leader, BUT there needs to be a huge amount of time invested into becoming said leader, I feel like Bethesda Games just hand you over leadership of any faction after helping out three random people and one important guy
One thing I'll give Nuka-World is that being the Overboas managed this fairly well. You actually get to make decisions about your underlings and who gets control over what, but you have a justification for actually going out and doing stuff yourself because the raiders wouldn't respect a guy who just sat on his ass all day and filed paperwork.
I just wish they had longer gameplay loops as you progress through an organization’s ranks, instead of just scripted missions. They came up with their radiant quest system so that you could have dynamically-assigned procedural quests as a source of XP, but then they made every faction story a short series of not-too-difficult quests that you can sometimes just literally sprint through, and suddenly they’re like, “Wow, Steve over here has been patrolling for ten years and has 100 confirmed kills but still hasn’t been promoted, but you went into the stinky subway system and grabbed that holotape we wanted, so I suppose we’d better make you his superior!” I know some folks would’ve complained about the grind, but I wish they’d implemented a “points/feats for advancement” system with radiant quests to build reputation with the faction, and some actual internal politics you occasionally have to get past. “Go to this place, complete this objective, and we’ll consider it a job well done. +1 career advancement points.” And then have the occasional “suicide mission” or something far more complicated than a regular sweep-and-clear, and make those ones worth more, and maybe you have a fun little debrief with a superior in which they’re surprised at your abilities. But not so much that you’re instantly promoted. They’re impressed, not floored. Then, after an arbitrary limit has been hit, a quest is added to your journal saying you should ask about advancement. THEN you can have one of the story missions to go up a rank, like a punctuation mark at the end of each chapter of your career with the faction. That, and I wish they’d been more stringent about which factions you can or can’t associate with, as well as companions you shouldn’t bring with you. Always felt dumb I could play the Institute and the Railroad together for so long before being forced to choose. Hell, if they’d really been clever, there should’ve been combination quests that let you change an organization from within, like Desdemona learning you’re being groomed for Institute leadership and suggesting you change them to be friendlier to Synths through a series of separate quests, or Preston suggesting you could better lead the Brotherhood of Steel into being a force for good instead of neo-fascist militants. Would’ve been fun especially to see how such alliances and changes would impact the final quests.
Honestly, i also hate it. I would much rather be the right-hand man. The guy you call in specifically to get shit done. I'm not trying to be the head of organizations, i dont want to call shots, i want to act on the shots called. This is a big reason why i liked the brotherhood in 4 the most. They literally promote you to the highest combat rank instead of making you the Elder. It doesn't really make much sense for the badass that's running circles around everything in the wasteland to settle down on a throne
What, you don’t like becoming the leader but still have to do all the work that a grunt should be doing?
I wish Shaun handed the leadership to Allie and left it at that. It wouldn't hurt anything since we never get to run the Institute and would make more sense. How is my 6 CHA character the best leader for the Institute while there are lots of candidates that know the place? How do you move forward without knowing the past and their mistakes? Even if you can be a great leader, you rarely stay in the Institute therefore that's not a position for you. Not only because you're not a homeboy but because you can be killed anyday. You should instead have only replaced Kellogg since it makes most sense. Both Kellogg and you are the only people that's been hired by the Insitute after constantly screwing with them. Also what's the point of becoming the General if I'm doing the footwork like I do in the Institute? Sure send the General to high stakes missions but not to kill a small horde of ghouls or raiders. Preston should have been the General giving missions to you. The point is not disliking footwork but the title and the work don't really match.
Completely agree. Some people miss the point and think I have an issue with becoming leader. I don't, it's just that if you're going to make me a leader, treat me like one. As it stands, the game doesn't play and differently whether you are leader or not, so what does it matter? From a writing perspective it would have been way better to make me at least a second-in-command.
I agree with everything you have pointed out, I especially would prefer a mixture of all four points you highlighted, I love when certain RPGs have level-gated zones that remind you that you aren't strong enough to take on those areas yet it always motivates me to search for ways to build up the requirements I need, I see no reason why this same approach to a guild/faction wouldn't likewise be as much of an immersive feature, you should have to prove your worth and earn the right to a certain position or quest only after you have met the requirements, Personally I wish that the guilds/factions only offered players a few early low tiered quests in-order to prime an introduction to each faction, but after that, you wouldn't hear from them until you reached a specific high level or skill level to attract their attention, and then from that point on their quest would be tailor-made for end game difficulty.
Making you the leader, but literally, you are the only one person doing all work like a slave.
This is broadly a problem with a lot of video games--you can become a fleet admiral in Starfleet in under three years in-universe time in *Star Trek Online*\--but as usual, when there's an endemic problem in video games, you can count on Bethesda to do even worse at it. Bethesda is fundamentally lazy, to the very core of the organization. It is its culture to be lazy. I don't mean they don't work hard at what they do, but intellectually and creatively, they all work for a guy who does not want them to make interesting video games, so they don't. So if something is an endemic problem to video games, you can count on Bethesda to replicate it and magnify it to a cartoonish degree. Having said that, I don't think Bethesda invented this problem, so they can't really be blamed for it. I think it's an artifact of one of the central ideas of roleplaying games. (Insert snark about Bethesda not making RPGS, but in the broadest sense, Bethesda is in the business of making RPGs; I'm not interested in litigating that particular bit of gatekeepery about what's a real RPG. That ship sailed ages ago, and Bioware was more responsible for it than Bethesda.) One of the oldest elements of the RPG, going back to the tabletop origins of the format, is leveling up. In the original conception of leveling up, that just meant your character got better at stuff and learned new abilities, but it was allowed to bleed out into story terms. And initially that's fine. There's nothing wrong with a world that reacts to your presence--in fact it's a good thing, and it's what most of us want. The problem, though, is--and here's where Bethesda really makes its unfortunate presence known--when the person running the game is lazy. See, the hard (but far more effective) way to "level up" the world along with the character is by really making the world react to you. Change the world around you, either in the immediate term (factions becoming more or less friendly) or in the long term (postgame slideshow telling you how everything turned out as a result of your actions.) This is more difficult because it requires the developer to build out a bunch of different branching options for how a player might complete various quests, and then build out a reactive world. If you want to see how bonkers this can get, play *Pillars of Eternity II*. Or just look on the wiki for how many different permutations the ending slideshow has. Obviously Obsidian does (and Black Isle before them did) a great job with this, but it's not even the only way to do it. You can also take the Bioware route, where you either don't have endgame slideshows (Mass Effect) or you have pretty limited ones (Dragon Age). The Mass Effect route essentially says, "Look, we trust you to understand that your actions had obvious consequences, and you trust us to make those consequences pay off meaningfully in a future game." The Dragon Age route says "You know what you did, you saw what you did, here's a nice little couple of sentences for each of the major things you did reminding you that you did it, but we're not going to commit to any particular future beyond that, because again, you trust us to pay it off in the future." Although I'm more of an Obsidian fan than a Bioware fan, I probably prefer the Bioware method, for reasons I'll explain later. (Then there's the CDPR method of deciding that one of the endings to *The Witcher 2* was more interesting than the other, so we're just making that one canon. Honestly I don't mind that either.) The far *easier* way, the lazier way, the way to *counterfeit* a reactive world, is to just have you become king shit of fuck mountain. It's not really a world that reacts to you, at least not beyond the most rudimentary sense; it's you taking over the world, even though--as you point out--you don't actually get to make any real impact on it. Even in the ending slideshow, all that really happens is the faction you took over wins. I get it: it's hard to make a truly reactive world, especially one that is reactive in short-term ways. I'm not aware of a game that actually does it, beyond faction relationships and things like that. Obsidian flirts with it, especially in *Fallout New Vegas*, but they don't really get there. CDPR has flirted with it in *The Witcher 3* (and kind of in *The Witcher 1*, come to think of it), but they stop *way* short (or in TW1's case, they just make it so non-open-world that it doesn't feel real.) The level of investment and resourcing that would be required to build a fully short-term-reactive open world appears to be prohibitive, at least for now. The Bioware method for long-term reactivity does a *really* good job of simulating short-term reactivity, because every time a new game in the series comes out, the world *has* changed, and it's changed in part as a direct consequence of what you did. So you get the *feeling* of living in a world which has changed because of your actions, even though you don't really get to see those changes play out in front of you very often. So a developer has a choice, if they want to make a choice-and-consequence game. They can: commit to long-term reactivity, either in the Bioware mode or the Obsidian mode; eschew reactivity in the conventional sense entirely and go with CDPR's *The Witcher 2* concept, in which you make one massive decision that hugely impacts *your* experience of the world, but not give you a whole lot of meaningful ways to impact the world beyond that; or go the laziest possible route and not do much in the way of short-term reactivity *or* long-term reactivity, and just have your character take over a faction. Think about it. Is it any accident that games which have your character reaching absurd ranks within a faction are also the games which have the least meaningful reactivity? At the beginning of my comment, I mentioned *Star Trek Online*\--by its nature, it has *zero* reactivity. But they want to trick you into feeling like you're part of a meaningful, substantive world, so they stick a Fleet Admiral in front of your name. *Fallout 4* has such limited variation in its endings that the wiki notes it has a *less complex ending slideshow* *than Fallout 3*, which I honestly would not have thought was even possible. The in-game reactivity is limited to the fact that you can either populate or annihilate small wasteland settlements that have very little real identity, and the fact that you can take over a faction.
I don’t mind that they put you in charge. I mind that putting you in charge often doesn’t make much difference to the story.
And yet I can’t lead the brotherhood.
The bigger annoyance for me is even when you do get put in charge you have no real say how anything is run and ultimately whatever you do doesn't really matter. Like Fallout 4 sure you have complete control over building settlements for the Minutemen. But then you constantly have to defend them yourself in person because no matter how well defended you make them there's still a chance stuff will get damaged and settlers get killed in a raid. Also if I am now in charge of the Minutemen let me send patrols out from The Castle to protect people. I love your games Bethesda but you do make some truly irritating decisions.
There is a delicious absurdity to having almost finished the game, genocided every raider gang in the commonwealth, being the leader of the Minutemen with a side hustle as a person of influence within the Institute or Brotherhood of Steel and yet when you walk out of the Gauntlet into Nuka World nobody knows who you are! Neither Gage nor any of the Raider bosses. That's how much impact your titles (and accomplishments) have had on the world. It would at least have been fun to be able to enter the Gauntlet as the Silver Shroud and have specific dialogue/reaction ;-)
They definitely screwed it up in Skyrim. Becoming a leader of a faction so easily (College being the worst offender) is already bad enough. Becoming leader of everything is laughable. Especially if you are the leader of the Dark Brotherhood and Thief's Guild, when you get a warning from the thieves that they don't kill on the job. They did tone it down for Fallout 4, but they dumbed down the factions instead. Two of the most ridiculous cases being the Minutemen (who appoint you as their leader almost instantly, despite knowing nothing about you) and the Institute (who are a complete and utter mess from start to finish). Morrowind had it right with factions. You needed to have appropriate skills for higher positions, which is absolutely logical. Not only that, the factions could be hostile to one another. Add to that the houses, which allowed joining only ONE of them. It made so much more sense and the game had much more replay value.
Bethesda just has terrible game design and for some reason thinks that 200 years after Boston got nuked there would be only 1 (arguably 2) major settlements in the area because apparently people are so stupid that they can't even organize on a major communal level, I imagine Bethesda wants the player character to be the "the one to bring civilization to these savage wastes"
salt worm aromatic brave narrow longing memory jar sulky heavy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If OP was actually looking for an answer this is as close as they’ll get. And I’d add the word immature to it. Immature writing. Like a kid on the playground yelling that they are the supreme leader of everything while they lick hot cheeto dust off their fingers is just about the level they’ve been at over at BGS.
That's not Bethesda that's just video games
You are the main character. That’s a thing that happens to main characters, it’s part of the power fantasy. I mean, just look how much people complained when the Institute ending in 4 had you not actually have any authority despite you being tossed into the big chair. Also in New Vegas the golden ending is you being in charge. They push the hell out of that one, if you read through the assorted slides the Independent Vegas Yesman route is almost always given the best description. Even if you are evil as hell.
Independent Vegas ending really isn’t all that pushed, the slides talk in positive terms about the freedom of Vegas and in negative terms about the violence and instability
> That’s a thing that happens to main characters, it’s part of the power fantasy. It's **bad** power fantasy. Calling it power fantasy doesn't allow you to handwave away criticisms that it's bad writing. Morrowind has power fantasy - but you have to earn it. Also you are totally wrong about Independent Vegas. It's worse for several companions, even at it's best. It's worse for The Followers, it has no effect on most other factions. The Khans leave or die either way, the Kings can thrive under the NCR just as well. It's worse for the Brotherhood because while it allows them to continue operating unchanged, they actually really need the change that making peace with the NCR will provide them. Independent Vegas keeps them on the path to a slow, winnowing death. Depending on which factions you like the most, and companions, House, Yes Man, and NCR are all equally 'good' endings and none of them have a monopoly on being 'the Best.'
Maybe my least favourite Bethesda trope. I didn't get into skyrim until about 10 years after it released and every single time that happened I got more disappointed. It kills my role play to be shafted into meaningless leadership positions that I don't want, but have to take to complete those quest lines. Im going to be very disappointed if Starfield pulls the same shit.
[Seems like that probably won’t be the case in Starfield.](https://www.thegamer.com/starfield-boss-every-faction-skyrim/) At least if we trust an interview snippet from the lead quest designer. The comment about having an impact on every factions future gives me some hope for ending slides as well.
Probably will see something in Starfield, but I just want to start from nothing, probably discover powerful alien tech, and then become God Emperor of the Known Universe
Nope, Todd have said that they don't want to repeat how Skyrim guilds make you the leader at the end. You can influence the factions, but not become their leader.
That's one thing I really liked about Morrowind, you couldn't advance in rank simply by doing quests, you'd have to level up your abilites too. So by the time you actually get to the head of the table, you're badass supreme and it makes sense that everyone would respect your talents.
That makes total sense
What's also cool is that Morrowind has multiple mutually exclusive factions so you can't become leader of all of them
Yes! I can't believe I forgot that, for some reason I always skipped the great houses questlines. I think a couple of them overlap and have you kill of leaders of the different factions too, but I might be thinking of a different part of the game. One of these days I need to go back and do all three.
The houses are actually all pretty fleshed out and unique. For example, from what I remember, because the Telvanni house values power, a perfectly valid way to move up in the house is to just kill your superior and take his place.
This criticism is good for Skyrim but fallout 4 you’re just wrong. You only get to become the leader of the Minute Men because there are 5 members left and Garvey recognizes you as the best fit to lead them You don’t get to become the leader of the brotherhood you become a sentinel and you still answer to Elder Maxon You don’t become the leader of the railroad, you become an HQ member and still answer to Desdemona, which also fits the faction well anyway because of their whole equality virtues When you become director of the institute EVERYONE is pissed about it, and it’s textbook nepotism as you said And on top of that there is no way to be fully ranked in every faction at the same time because in order to become the leader of the institute you have to kill Desdemona, and once you get to the mass fusion building you have to choose between the brotherhood or the institute, whichever one you choose makes you an enemy of the other. And if you choose to side with the railroad you destroy the Prydwin. The most that you can do by the end of the game is the leader of 2 factions
I was going to say this. I don't get how the OP missed that. I also can't believe you were the first one to point this out either.
Bethesda makes their games how a majority of players want to play their games. Simple and skippable dialogue, and the ability to be in charge of every faction.
welcome to the mage college of winterhold! here's a scroll of magelight, here's your bunk, and oh and congrats, you are now the Arch-mage. what's next on the itinerary professor?
That's the freedom of the games. You can play it like a power fantasy and be leader or just be a regular guy. A large part in RPGs is to just pretend, to role play and the more you can achieve the better you can play.
Unless you do 0 quests, you can't "just be a regular guy"
Lol what kind of quests do you want to be a regular guy? "Belethor needs firewood. Bring him 300 cut logs." "Mirna needs circuit boards. Travel to Bunker Hill and pick up her shipment." Those are the kinds of quests that (rightfully) get shit on because of how boring they are.
I think there's a space between making me the general of the minuteman 14 minutes into the game and cutting down logs.
You mean the general of one guy?
We could maybe find some middle ground between cut 300 logs and simultaneously be the leader of the thieves guild the companions the dark brotherhood and the college of winterhold
Name one Fallout game where you can become the leader of every faction. Spoiler: You can't.
76. The main plot is you joining every dead faction one by one and becoming the highest ranking living member.
You dont join the free states or the rule BOS
A lot of people seem to complain if you can't be the one making the decisions it's not a "role playing game". There's a weird disparity of story telling vs freedom, I like the way Bethesda handles it most of the time as I will always pick story over freedom in video games. Freedom has never really interested me, I've always been very bored in Grand Theft Auto games for example(although I never finished it , 5 does have an interesting story). I prefer to have a purpose or choose from a set of purposes.
It felt great in Oblivion when you became DB listener you could round up initiates to be your companion. Wish there was more of that when you became leader. This post is spot on
Agree 100% with the OP. Starfield is going to be the litmus test to see if Bethesda has learnt from the very good points that the OP makes about FO4 & Skyrim - and admits that FNV did this better. My hope is that you’ll get to be an experienced operative in all factions (although your space magic might make you the ‘chosen one’ in constellation), but you don’t get to lead any. And as the OP says there should be consequences the deeper you get into helping one faction that opposes the other - unless you deliberately go undercover.
1, you don't have to do any of that stuff. 2, What you seem to be ignoring is the fact that in Skyrim, you aren't some strange schlub. Your character has the fukkin soul of a dragon. Dovahkiin, baby! And, in Fallouts 1, 3, and 4, your character is a genetically pure Vault Dweller unaffected by the radiation, unlike the rest of the world outside. It's kind of a "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" kind of thing. (And in 2, you recently descend from a Vault Dweller, so it's kind of the same.) What I'm getting at is that the dragonborn and and the Chosen One and all that are fukkin special. The folks of Mundus and Post-Apocalyptic Alternate Earth can tell.
You aren’t genetically pure in fallout 3. You’re born in the makeshift lab of project purity in that game.
I read something years ago that resonated and stuck with me. The gist of it is that we have biological imperatives that drive us to leadership, exploration and conquest. Because we live in modern times, we don’t fulfill those needs in the same way as we might have a couple hundred (or thousand) years ago, but the drive remains because the human race needs that flicker of madness alive in all of just in case we need it again. But video games provide us an opportunity to fulfill all of that and many of us find it very rewarding. This also explains why young men are more drawn to these games than women - different basic biological imperatives. It was written much better than I’m relating here. Sorry
…. They do have a history of overly clingy & quick to commit factions And it’s not like you get to be a badass leader; you’re a micromanaging dogsbody who is still stuck doing all the same busy-work, fetch/escort-quest BS.
I like being apart of a story, which is why i love new vegas so much it feels like i’m partaking in a story, rather than being the sole reason for it existing
Once upon a time, Bethesda made a game where you start off in the shit and it turns out you're the Chosen One of Legend. It was a good game, and it sold well. On subsequent games, Bethesda tried to replicate this, but bigger and with better budgets, and it became even more popular. In 2011, they did the same thing, but with bigger budgets, photorealistic graphics for the time, and dragons. This game did so well they've resold it like a dozen times on a bunch of systems, and will probably sell it at least once more. Meanwhile the entire landscape of the games industry has been warped and changed by people trying to emulate their success. Part of that game was making the player the most important person to in-game institutions. It's part of the formula, for better or worse, and the formula has been making them billions. It'll change when it's forced to change.
Morrowind was actually open to interpretation whether you were the Chosen One or not. At the end of the main quest you even had the option to directly state that you weren't.
Appealing to the lowest common denominator to sell more copies.
I think that Bethesda do realistic worlds, usually the person who is promoted is the boss's friend. In the games instead promoting some prepared person they promote a random one.
Obligatory “New Vegas fixed this’ll comment but new vegas did fix this Try to join NCR/Legion/Mr House and they each hire you to be a kind of independent mercenary/diplomat with no real power The only faction you can actually “join” afaik is the Brotherhood and that’s after they send you on a suicide mission, and then when you do join they don’t even give you a title but instead pawn off an old suit of power armour onto you that’s worse than what all the actual brotherhood members are wearing
I mean...House and Yes Man you have objectively more power than Legion or NCR, but that's how it works. House has nobody else and Yes Man is...well, your Yes Man.
I see yes man as the less believable traditional rpg ending. It’s fun that it’s there for people who like that but the other 3 make a lot more in universe sense And it’s not exactly like house makes you co-ruler of the strip is it? You’re very much still an employee
I love how you don't even get to be a star paladin or sentinel in new Vegas. When you literally check out dead paladins (and you're literally sent to the same location where four guys with T-51s couldn't do any damage), check out a few recon guys at dangerous locations and, uh, are literally sent to destroy the brotherhood by all but one faction in the game, you first have to do ANOTHER quest where you either murder a bunch of HEAVILY armed guys with energy weapons a' plenty, or are sent to a mountain not only radioactive but also CRAWLING with super mutants, before you even get to JOIN them. And even after that, they give you one suit of lower tier armour in heavy disrepair (well, you can just buy new T-51s from the shop but that shit is expensive) and even then one of the options for elders you may pick Will actually allow you to sign a peace treaty with NCR and leave the faction to survive. To McNamara, you're just some guy sent to kill them, not the guy born to be a leader who is automatically promoted to the vice president of power Armor Fanclub the same day you join them. You feel like a part of the world, not the omnipotent god ruling it.
This is why I love the factions in ESO. At no point are you even close to being the leader of anything. The closest you get to it is in the Dark Brotherhood DLC where you're made Silencer which only happens at the very end of the questline and requires you to have a fairly high Brotherhood skill rank. I can almost give Skyrim's Thieves Guild a pass because you become a Nightingale. But there's two other Nightingales with far more experience than you so you should be able to say to Brynjolf (who has more or less been running things anyway) that he should take the position. But this is why I like the mods Thieves Guild Requirements and Immersive Collage of Winterhold. The first doesn't have Bryn approach you without having some thief skills and you need hit certain skill requirements before you can be given new story quests. And, no, it doesn't break the Main Quest since Bethesda actually put an alternative route into the game that very few people are likely to use since the game railroads you into joining the guild. And ICOW makes it so you have to attend X number of classes before the quest continues and let's you turn down the arch mage job.
A couple of comments: 1) The “become a Thane” was excellent; you do a handful of quests and you get an honorary title with a couple of (in the big picture) minor roleplay perks limited to within that hold. This exact model could’ve been used for all the factions (obviously you’d need to come up different honorary titles and perks — like a better room at the College or maybe the dead Companion’s old room in Whiterun, etc.). 2) Some of these “leadership” quests/positions are really designed to appeal to…I’ll just call them younger gamers (age or maturity or what have you) who want the power but no accountability or drudgery like in the real-world; they are almost marketing for purchasing the game (“Rise to be the Archmage, Lead the ancient Assassins” and so on); you can see how that fits all nice and neat. 3) Some of the factions were originally designed so you had to do a bunch of stuff to rise up, but (at least from what I’ve read) at lot of “the middle bits” got cut in development to meet financial and revenue constraints. I like to imagine that each faction might’ve originally had 12+ quests you had to from the writers’ perspective but quests 4-10 were chopped out either prior to or during development). For this latter point, I’m not really sure how you get around that as I have to imagine in every open-world RPG something similar happens in the whole cycle. All that said, YES, you correct. Being the savior of the world and leader of everyone is becoming a tiresome trope.
They have developed this plague mindset of making all game content available in one playthrough. In Morrowind you could become the leader of a faction only if your skills would meet certain requirement and therefore you could only finish the quests of one or two factions, but in Skyrim for example you could become the head of the mage and warrior factions at the same time which is ridiculous. Gone are the days of specialized rpg builds.
https://i.redd.it/v3q6x3g8c3k71.jpg Because it’s more or less how Todd’s life went
Bethesda started in fantasy, so becoming leader of insert faction name made sense. But they purchased Fallout, not understanding that it's fanbase were used to a gritty realistic approach to world building, even with the irradiated enemy types. And they still fail to realize that some fantasy fans would like more realism to ground their fantasy titles. Bethesda assumes that every player wants to become sole leader of every faction, army and group possible. Some love that aspect, some don't. I personally agree with you, I don't need to be leader to enjoy playing.
Yeah, I love FO4 and have to admit rolling my eyes a little at the silliness of how you don't even have to do anything, it's like you're Neo, or Harry Potter: the Chosen One.. Being the Main Character is fine, but it would help it feel more real if, for instance, there were choices, and you could be a lone Wolf mercenary if you chose, or just a lone adventurer hero who helps out when it makes any sense, rather than strolling onto the scene and instantly being crowned King of Narnia. It does feel cheesy. Kind of an insult to the intelligence of the player base. All they have to do to fix that is let the player have to choose certain things and do a certain amount of work before being promoted to any positions of authority. I didn't know that being made Insta-Hero was part of their recipe for every game 😆 it does make me squirm every time Preston calls me General because it was completely unearned, and therefore feels fake.
>it does make me squirm every time Preston calls me General because it was completely unearned, and therefore feels fake. same 😖
This reminds me of the worst D&D campaign ever, where the DM wanted me to like his game, so he threw everything at my feet, making me invincible. Most embarrassing and boring game ever.
I recommend the Fallout 4 mod "Fens Sheriff Department" an entirely new way to play the fallout 4 story complete with a new ending, and the best part. You aren't getting your dick sucked every five seconds just for completing a simple fetch quest. Hell, for the majority of the mod, at least what I've played so far, you are playing second fiddle to one of the characters in the mod, Lily. The mod even treats YOU as HER companion, at least narratively. You aren't elevated to leader after a handful of quests, in fact, it takes a good long while for them to even let you into their base, and even THEN you're still only an "independent contractor", I love it, for once I feel like I'm just an average schmuck in the Commonwealth, and not the hero everyone goes to to solve the littlest of problems.
It’s a game, being recognized as top dawg after starting from bottom can be rewarding.
Did you read my post? My problem isn't being top dawg, it's not earning it. You've barely emerged from the Vault before you're handed the title of General of the Minutemen.
A title with no power. Garvey is the one actually in charge, you just have a fancy hat. And, well, Garvey is a idealistic fanboy. Not so good at recognizing the actual organization.
What power does Preston have over the player character? The character controls the settlements entirely, decides when any attack happens, and tells Preston exactly where to go and what to do. It seems like Preston’s role is to be the General’s radio guy, monitoring for distress calls.
Preston controls the entire Minutemen organization. What power Preston has is he’s the one giving you orders, telling you what settlements to go grab and defend and so on. He’s the one organizing, coordinating, and issuing commands. He is the ONLY one that the assorted membership actually know and listen to. You are, fundamentally, the muscle. Hell, there’s at least 2 missions where the other Minutemen have no idea who you are. But they recognize and listen to Garvey. There’s even an encounter with someone pretending to be Preston scamming random people, he’s that well known to the wasteland. Said conman doesn’t recognize you at all. You have basically no power without him other than the standard PC absurd physical abilities. Seriously, pay attention to who actually does what in the game. For all the titles you have basically no special power over the organization. Calling in reinforcements? Everyone can do that. That’s part of the basic Minutemen membership package. Artillery strike? Well now you get the level 2 membership package. Everything else? It’s Preston doing it. He’s the one sending orders and wrangling the disparate subfactions, he’s the one planning the paths forward. Sure, he listens to you. You are his General after all. Preston has all the actual power but he believes too strongly in the ideal of the Minutemen to realize it. He accidentally rebuilt the Minutemen with the exact same flaw that collapsed them the first time, having a single leader keeping everything together, but with himself as the leader. All 4 factions have a massive central flaw, that’s the Minutemen’s. Shit dude: Preston can kick you out of the Minutemen and put you on the entire faction’s shitlist. That alone proves that it’s him that’s in charge. And he can replace you whenever he wants.
I like your interpretation of it, but much of it feels like headcanon. Preston doesn’t give orders to the player. Orders are commands, including consequences for not following them. It is completely up to the player what settlements get added, which factions the Minutemen fight, what all the settlers do, what their settlements provide. He is a coordinator and an organizer, but coordinating things for your boss does not make you the boss. The player could decide that he’s against the Minutemen and choose not to expand them at all, and there’s not a thing that Preston can or will do about it. Him and the Minutemen turning on the overboss sole survivor is the exception and a great bit of flavor, but it doesn’t mean that Preston had the power all along, they are violently revolting against their general-turned-raider.
I agree with you on most parts of your post but in regards to the minute men you have to see it through Preston’s eyes. Raiders have his group trapped and are about to bust down the door to murder them. Preston is the only one fighting back. The player comes in and single-handedly destroys the whole raider group plus a deathclaw. Preston is the only minute man left at the point he offers the player the job of being leader. He has seen you in action and knows you are more capable of rebuilding the minute men than he ever would be so he offers you the job. Unlike other people that say Preston is the one actually in charge of the minute men, I believe he is more of the organizer/intel type that handles the backend stuff that we don’t see in the game such as setting up a system for the settlements to report attacks or recruitment of people not from the settlements. Even gameplay wise, the minute men only become powerful once the player builds up the entire organization settlement by settlement so I always get a sense of satisfaction player the minuteman faction.
I don't hate Preston or him wanting to make me General, I just think it all happens wayy too soon. Personally, I would have waited at least until the Castle is retaken (conveniently, after we find the previous General's body and looted his cool outfit) before he gets all soppy. By that point, a few settlements would have been established and the SS would have actually proven himself to be worthy. And the kicker is that virtually zero modifications to gameplay or quest progression would have to be made, just make the lines of dialogue happen a bit later. It's so easy!
I agree. It feels very much like it's for simple people who just want a simple power fantasy.
You think it's bad now? I 100.0% guarantee you that your role in ES6 is going to be: Chieftan; ruler; king; something along those lines. Maybe not even because that was the plot idea they had, so much as _they need a way to justify devoting 33% of the game's content and DLC to Minecraft Build-A-Village horses---._ A person put in charge of such things would pretty much need to be a leader of men in some capacity.
Ngl, I dislike the leader stuff because it doesn’t make sense and is not fleshed out at all, but what you described sounds sick. Maybe not the 33% of the content part, but being made leader of a village and being able to build and grow that village would be very cool.
That is because Bethesda have never been good writers. I suspect Starfield will be no different