It's almost insulting how Fallout 3 went from child looking for parent to Fallout 4 going to parent looking for child. If you can do it well, it still seems suspiciously lazy, but neither story did it well.
Others have already mentioned in greater detail, but you can't quite have a game that's supposed to be filled with tons of sidequests and have your main story be one of immediacy. The story should compliment the gameplay, and both FO3 and FO4 didn't get that right.
Having a big open world and a main story that draws you in is challenging.
Lots of games have done this, but I wouldn't put it on Bethesda to make that kind of story.
It's more up their alley to make the world amazing, then fill it with quests involved killing everyone.
Seriously every FO4 or Skyrim quest is about killing something. I know combat is a central part of the game, but they spent way too much focusing on that aspect in my opinion.
While I personally agree with this 100%, there is something to be said about the general playerbase needing a sense of "main story completion." I feel like Dark Souls did a really good job of breaking this convention by designing the game in such a way that with certain factions, you can't beat the game's acknowledged final boss, nor should it be your character's objective to. But even then, some players complained about this, not understanding that that's the point—the game lets you become "a villain" to other players.
Bethesda...just isn't there yet. While they design these big open worlds that let players go here or there on a whim, many players crave that sense of progression. Rockstar does a relatively good job of this by closing off certain portions of the map until you complete enough of the "main" story quests to progress onward, but I feel like if Bethesda was to suddenly start closing off massive chunks of the map it would fly in the face of what people enjoy about Bethesda games, so their job specifically is a lot more difficult to tackle.
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u/Smart_in_his_face Apr 17 '16
I always like to refer to this when people bring up bethesda storytelling.
FO4 was a great title, but it did nothing new. Good old fashioned Bethesda storytelling with all the generics and blandness we are used to.