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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.
"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.
I think that used to be true. In the 80s and 90s perhaps, you could start small.
The "evidence" we have here is if you started in the 90s and were popular, then you can have the necessary multi-million budget to make successful games now.
A quick google search places Fallout 1 estimated budget as $3M ($4.5M in current money) and Fallout 4 at anywhere between $150M and $250M (or possibly even more, this is not the highest estimate I saw).
Stuff disappears from companions inventory, guns become transparent when you crouch, scorpions walk in the sky, raiders taunt you as they patrol from the bottom of the sea, severed limbs spin forever... Special effects are amazing in Fallout 4!
And to make sure you enjoy them, especially the rotating items on display during loading, the engineers brilliantly injected a random delay of up to 1 minute each time you enter a building or fast travel.
lucm, indeed.
I love Fallout 4, and I've played all the Fallout games. People are still bitter that Bethesda got the license and are holding a grudge.
What I don't like about the reboot Fallout games is that they took a good RPG and turned it into a twitchfest FPS.
Fallout 2 is still the best in the entire series.
I have all the previous Fallout-games, including Fallout Tactics, and.. well, I was bored with Fallout 4 already before I was half-way through with the mainline story. The game is surprisingly dumb, things just keep repeating over and over and over and nothing you do really seems to have any effect on the gameworld, like e.g. you go and help a settlement, then 30 minutes later the same settlement has the exact same trouble again, and again, and again, and again... Similarly, you go and kill enemies off one area, go barely 500 meters in some direction and come back and POOF -- new ones have spawned. Also, the enemies were either god damn enormous bulletsponges that could take several nukes in the face or they were made of paper and sugar and died as soon as you looked in their general direction, never being balanced in any way or form. That dogmeat? Oh, geesh, that fucking piece of shit is in your way all the god damn time, not letting you go through doorways or getting out from behind a desk or running on top of a corpse you're trying to loot and so on.
The game is a boring mess and instead of progressing and improving from previous ones it took several steps back.
Compare to Fallout 3. More to explore (the major point of the game). More songs, and yes a few repeat from Fallout 3). More interesting combat options. Things respawn fast at times, but that happened in FO3 also. And dogmeat is actually useful unlike the one in FO3. Can't think of any way it's not improving on FO3, though the different level/stats/perks is more of a side move than improvement. The things that don't feel so great feel that way in FO3 also. Not finished with the main quest and I'm an embarrassing number of hours into it.
What do films have to do with games?
/sips cup of proper tea, not that Lipton nonsense.
Well you see the British are a progressive lot, except when it comes to naming. The BAFTA is the academy for modern art forms such as film and television and so it was natural to extend this to video games. The problem is BAFTA is a recognised name and therefore, cannot be easily changed as their role evolves. This is why the MOT is still called the Ministry of Transport instead of the Department of Vehicle Bastardry.
The introduction of video games into the BAFTAs has been a big thing in recent years and I think, better off for it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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?
I love Fallout 4, and I've played all the Fallout games. People are still bitter that Bethesda got the license and are holding a grudge.
I'm only bitter about that because Bethesda can't code their way out of a nutsack. Even their Amiga games had graphics glitches and crash bugs. Now that they are making dramatically more complex games, they are creating dramatically more complex bugs. I'd love to play F4, but I'm not dumb enough to pay Bethesda for an unfinished game any more. Now I will wait for the rest of you to jump on that grenade, and I will wait until I can get the game cheap, reasonably bugfixed... they never fixed all the bugs in New Vegas, why would I assume they would fix all the bugs in F4? shit they couldn't even make fallout shelter without an absolute shitload of bugs and that game is about as simple as it gets any more. Oh yeah, and with all the overpriced DLCs included.
I would thank the Bethesda fanboys for giving them that money early on so I don't have to, but what you dipshits are actually doing is encouraging them to produce bugfests. STOP PREORDERING FROM BETHESDA. Then MAYBE they will start to do some QA.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have played every PC Fallout game when it came out. I have finished and enjoyed every single one of them until Fallout 4. Fallout was a wonderful surprise, Fallout 2 was more of a great thing, Fallout Tactics was a interesting diversion that scratched my Jagged Alliance itch reasonably well, Fallout 3 was a mediocre transition to a new engine which grew, with the DLCs to a enjoyable game, and New Vegas was once again, pretty damn great.
I have not finished Fallout 4, I have no interest in doing so, and about every single thing about it annoyed me. By the way, I'm an MIT student, and I loved Boston (It helped that I went there from a colder climate)
That Fallout 4 can receive a game of the year award in a year that saw The Witcher 3 and Life is Strange come out? To me this simply underlines the utter irrelevance of the reviewers who awarded it.
No good deed goes unpunished...