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Fallout 4 Wins Best Game At Bafta Awards (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Fallout 4 has won the best game of the year at 2016's British Academy Games Awards. It marks the first time its US-based developer Bethesda has won the prize. It did not win in any other category. Fallout 4 is an action-focused role-playing game set in Boston following a nuclear war. It contains hundreds of hours of storyline to explore. Like last year's winner -- Destiny -- it had not won a prize in any of the other categories before taking the top award. The studio's European managing director said he had not expected the result, and recalled that although Fallout is now one of gaming's biggest franchises, it too started out small. "You don't have to have the multi-million dollar budgets to make great games -- I've seen a huge amount of evidence for that tonight," said Sean Brennan.
Pillars of Eternity
... which really should have been awarded any "best game of 2015" kind of thing. Best thing I played in 2015 for sure. Beat Fallout 4, IMHO.
But to be fair games like Pillars were not exactly made on a shoe string budget. You're talking millions of dollars to make something like that, with a staff of several dozens of top-talent experienced game devs, who worked night and day on it for several years. It's not something that a 1-3 developer garage studio is going to crank out, no matter how much money they get on kickstarter. Just on sheer quantity of artwork alone, it's way beyond most small studios.
Btw, I would add the Grimrock series to your list of great indie games.
Absolutely nothing. Fallout 4 was a rip-off of its predecessors. It offered less content in parts that were liked in previous releases and offered more content in areas that nobody was interested in. They tried to make Fallout 4 the new Sims. Hell, even the soundtrack was the same as in the previous one!
I'm guessing not too many people on their judging panel actually play all that many games. I could have imagined Fallout 4 being Game of the Year material... if it had been released in 2010 or so. As it is, I found it distinctly underwhelming, and I don't seem to be even close to alone in that.
Leave aside for a moment the bugs and technical issues (serious though they are). The game itself just feels dated and not particularly interesting. After a reasonably effective opening sequence (possibly all the judges played?) the writing is generally quite stiff and sterile. There are few NPCs who display any signs of actual character. Ironically, one of the very rare exceptions is a robot.
The main plot is a by the numbers affair whose "big twist" is easily predicted within an hour or two of starting out. With one or two exceptions, the sidequests and environmental storytelling are flat. The combat is poor (immersion-breaking movements speeds and bullet-sponge enemies), the stats system is nothing to write home about and all of the best bits of the game were basically present in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
By almost any measure, there have been better games released in the last 12 months. The Witcher 3, while not without occasional technical issues (albeit much less severe than Fallout 4's) was jaw-dropping. The writing, which I would expect BAFTA to have a particular focus on, was superb. Everybody talks (quite justifiably) about the Bloody Baron questline, which remains a superb example of moral nuance in games, but that was just one of many plot-threads written with both intelligence and humanity. The world they created also did a great job of looking and feeling like a low-tech fantasy world, right down to a prevailing moral compass that is a long way from the early 21st century.
I'm not sure what their eligibility window was (so its release may have been slightly too early), but Bloodborne would also have been a strong contender. It does the "environmental storytelling" techniques developed in the Souls series and takes them close to perfection, building an incredibly rich seem of lore with only the broadest of brush-strokes (and doing the most successful evocation of the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft in a game that I've ever seen). It's also much, much better than Fallout 4 in gameplay terms, being deeper, more fluid and more satisfying.
Hell, even Metal Gear Solid 5, glorious trainwreck that it was, must surely rank above Bethesda's clunking bug-fest. Sure, the ending is clearly unfinished and it occasionally dips into the depths of Kojima-stupidity, but it's a hell of journey along the way (and, unlike the other games I've mentioned, pretty much perfect from a quality assurance and technical performance point of view).
God almighty... Fallout 4? Seriously?
How can it be Fallout when it's not top-down and turn-based? Everyone knows Wasteland 2 is the true modern Fallout.
Circumcision is child abuse.
The same issues happen on a PC.
Even with an SSD, there is way too much waiting at load screens. My PC has 32 GB of RAM sitting unused by the game as it reloads the areas from disk over and over again. If I enter, exit, then reenter the same building, the areas are reloaded from disk every time. When I'm approaching a building, there's no disk activity at all when the game should be preloading adjacent areas.
Consoles are to blame, but not in the way you're suggesting.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Absoutely this. I have 32 gigs of RAM. I currently have 22.5 gb available. I could nock that down to 26 easy by closing all of my browser windows and a few other programs.
My Fallout 4 directory is 25.9 gb. There's zero reason any asset should ever be loaded more than once, and pretty much no reason to ever release anything once it's been loaded.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.