this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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The main problem with FO4 is the voiced PC and the asinine dialogue structure. The map is amazing, I'd argue it's better than the F:NV map.
So, I get that some people don't like a voiced PC. I don't personally care about that, at least for the base game, though I agree that it makes it a pain for mods to fit in seamlessly, since absent speech synth trained on the original voice actors (which some modders have done), it makes mod stuff kind of stand out.
Some people don't like the voicing because the PC doesn't sound like them or doesn't sound like they imagine. But for those people, the voicing is really technically-easy to fix. Just...disable the voice. Heck, I bet that there's a mod for that. googles Yeah, looks like it.
Now, the dialog structure, aside from the voicing, is a pain, granted. The XDI mod has fixed the "you don't know what you're going to say when you make a dialog choice. As-is, the game only shows you a hint at what you're going to say, which I think is really obnoxious.
It doesn't fix the fact that (most) of the dialog doesn't really change game outcomes the way it did in Fallout: New Vegas, just alters relationships with the NPC one has in tow at the moment to some degree, which a lot of people don't like.
I do have the mod that cuts the PC voice lines. Essential imo, as it's very, very immersion-breaking. You chug a beer, go to a merchant and you do that drunken awkward "Helloooo" which is cool, but in the following convo, you are sobering up immediately. Makes no sense and thus doesn't work.
The problem with the dialog itself is that it's always the same for every convo: up for "More info/repeat info", right for "No/Not now", down for "Yes" and left for "Sarcastic/more money, but yes". In NV, you could get locked out of conversations if the NPC didn't like your response (like Arcade permanently leaving if you tell him "Don't like it? Leave."). No such thing in FO4. It's just too tailored to console controls to accommodate for interesting dialog trees. Dialogue options being summarized in a bad or misleading way is just one issue.
Btw, if you like settlement building and spend a lot of time there, I highly recommend a mod called Icebreaker. It adds a ton of voice lines to your settlers, so it's not the same line over and over again.
The summarizing issue is real, but I don't think that that's a requirement of optimizing for console controls (like, one face button per option). Most traditional dialog option trees in Fallout had four or fewer options, and for the few cases where that isn't true, it's not like console games haven't had to figure out how to choose from more than four choices. It'd be possible to make a game that works fine on consoles and exposes more dialog choices.
I mean, hell, the XDR mod I mentioned above does do that for Fallout 4.
I think that the Fallout 4 designers were just trying to avoid making a player sit on a wiki at each speech choice, worried that they might make the wrong speech choice, as a lot of New Vegas choices have implications for how the game plays out.
I think that (a) many players are fine with that, and (b) for those who aren't, they could have had some kind of option to enable hints or something as to long-term effects of decisions.
Cool, thanks. Yeah, more dialog recordings is something that I think that the whole series could benefit from. "Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter" got kind of old in New Vegas. And now we've got LLM speech synthesis, which isn't perfect, but is probably good enough to go back in older games and expand the spoken repertoire of characters.