Obsidian's New Fallout

I believe Obsidian's new Fallout game will suck. I'm just putting that out there. Obsidian is a game design company behind the famous Fallout New Vegas, which is considered to be one, if not the best, Fallout game in the series. My favorite is still Fallout 3 but I understand that New Vegas is the best in the series, even if it doesn't do everything that 3 did. Xbox has announced that they are laying off hundreds of employees. At least two studios, Double Fine and Compulsion Games, are going back to being indie developers. And what did Xbox expect? In the time since these studios have been purchased, they've come out with a total of less than five games over a near decade. That's not a lot of games from studios that thrive on making smaller games. It's a real bloodbath at Xbox. I've seen posts about people sad that they or their friends have been let off. The worst was perhaps Id who is behind the Doom series. The studio is less than half of what it used to be with about fifty designers left over. I don't know what Id did wrong, they've made three great games in the last decade. Perhaps the only group I'm glad to see cut down is the B team over at Bethesda, the people behind Fallout 76. I shouldn't say that, they aren't bad people, and it's not their fault they made one of the worst Fallout games. But when it lauched, 76 was a buggy, broken, mess that everyone jumped on. The developers boasted about the size of the map but in reality it was an ocean wide and an inch deep. There were no NPCs for the player to interact with meaning that everyone you met was a player. A novel idea until you realize that the world was empty. There's video lists of bugs that players have encountered on youtube that last for hours chronicling the myriad of problems. It took years for the game to become playable. And that's not including the terrors of the cash shop. Everything was overpriced and undercooked. I heard that the lead designer behind the story for the game was fired recently. I don't want to say he's a bad person, but I don't think he wrote a good story. For me, the best Fallout stories were these weird scifi quirky events that you'd stumble upon. Like in Fallout 3 where you'd come across Vault 108 where the insane clones of "Gary" awaited you. Bethesday always did have a few weak points when it came to scifi story-telling though. Take the first town you find in Fallout 3, Megaton. There's a cult of people who worship the bomb in the center of the town. They litteraly built a town around an unexploded nuke. Now, the game let's you disarm it or set it off, if you so choose. But the fact remains that no one in their right mind would build a town encircling a bomb. For all it's ups and downs, I still prefer Fallout 3 over New Vegas. When it came out, Vegas was even more buggy, likely due to the eighteen month developement period the devs had. Let's compare Vault 108 to my favorite New Vegas vault, Vault 11. It's a brilliant design where you have to piece together what happened in the vault after discovering four skeletons outside of the entrance. A collection of death and political advertisements leads you to the discovery that the dwellers used political manipulations to send one of their own to death at the hands of a machine under the threat of extermination. It all makes sense at the end and it feels like one of those sad scifi stories you'd read as a teen. You see, people at Obsidian used to work on the first two Fallout games before Bethesda bought the rights. But Obsidian understood something that Bethedsa doesn't: you need to move on. The first, third, and fourth Fallout games all start in the Vault (so does 76 but that one doesn't count.) A good start but there's more to the world of Fallout than the vaults. Both Fallout 2 and New Vegas start with a character who's accustomed to the outside world having never lived in a vault. It seems like Bethesda likes their "fresh starts" or are too scared to try anything new. It's neat the first time you exit a vault, not the second or third time. It feel like to me that Bethesda is stuck, like a record playing the same line over and over. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. But that fear of trying new things is what is killing the series.

But that was the old Obsidian. These days, the company has come out with three games ranging from mediocre, to crap. They are: The Outer Worlds, Avowed, and The Outer Worlds 2. Not terrible games, not good games. I was excited for the first Outer Worlds which was set up like Fallout in space. But it's not that at all. Some of the decisions are painful to the player or don't make sense. Like on the first planet, for the "good" ending you have to sabotage the rebel's food camp to convince them to peacefully take over the camp they split off from. Does that sound like a way to convince someone? I remember when I played the game, I balked at a choice I had to make where I either payed up a lot of cash to an enemy or ruin my reputation with them. At first you might say "To heck with them! They're the badguys anywat." But what I didn't know that by not paying up, and making them fight me, I made an enemy of someone that ruined my entire run. Sure, there are fun things to do in the game. In fact, if you want to speedrun the game, you have to commit mass genocide. A humourous end since your goal is to save your fellow colonists. Instead of rescuing them, you fly them into the sun. Funny, but not really smart. You see, with good games with choices, you have to understand the weight behind them. It goes beyond good and evil, which is something that New Vegas tried to do, and mostly succeeded. Each of the four endings had their own appeal and their own pros and cons. But at the end, you were somewhat satisfied with your choices even though you knew that you weren't going to get everything in the game on your first try. Fallout 3, for all my praise, boiled down the final act to good or evil. No room for gray. In New Vegas, even if you sided with the "good guys" a lot of people still suffered for your actions. In the end, you can't make everyone happy and have to make hard choices. There's a lot of stupid answers in Outer Worlds. Answers like paying off the bad guys without a chance to talk your way out of the issue. I've never played Avowed or Outer Worlds 2 but I wasn't truly interested in them. But, I've seen the scores and feedback on the games and they are bad. Not terrible, but not good. In this world of games copying each other like Lord of the Fallen being a clone of Dark Souls or, my favorite, Tainted Grail like Skyrim, each of these clones has brought something that was missing from their inspirational source. They had something that made them stand out and above the source in ways that made them unique. Avowed, by contrast, did less than what Skyrim, a ten year old game, did. It did less than Skyrim and has this wishy washy story without a lot of stakes in the story that made you want to explore or get on the with main plot. The same was for Outer Worlds 2. I rememer looking at the reviews for Avowed and thinking "is Obsidian really ok with making 'ok' stuff?" It's not bad, but it doesn't do anything bold enough to grab your attention. I remember when I was a kid, we used to fight over whether Pokemon or Digimon were better. Each had their own perks to them and as an adult I can appreciate them both. 

Now the Xbox ceo has ordered that Fallout be put in the hands of Obsidian. The same group who made three basic, boring games. Can they do better with a better IP? I hope so. If not, I'd hand the series over to someone else. I guess I'll find out in four or so years.