Why I Won't Be Playing Fallout 4 until 2017 (And Even Then, I'll Probably Pirate It)

I don't often write about gaming because... well, Im not really sure why I don't write about gaming more. I'm extraordinarily passionate about gaming because I feel like it's a wildly under-appreicated artistic medium. A perfect example of my video game obsession; I was personally offended (something something "triggered!" rabble rabble) by Roger Ebert's campaign to denounce video games as a valid medium for consideration of their merit as (capital "A") Art, especially when games like Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, and The Last of Us so clearly answer the question "can video games be Art?" with a resounding "Duh."

The thing about video games, even more-so than music and film, is that industry is directly tied into their production. Very few studios exist that are capable of pumping out AAA (in industry terms; top tier, professional content) titles without budgets easily rivaling some of the most expensive movies ever made. Despite genres and game types, the largest of these games generally always compete to sell as many units as possible, meaning that the bottom line is often more important than the many aspects of the game itself.

More like "wallet exsanguination" and "malnutrition after 2 days of testing mod fixes and shit that should have been in the game in the first place."

In this respect, Bethesda, current owner and developer of the Fallout franchise treads a fine line. Their games are legendary among players for their open world gameplay and the ability to enable the user to craft the kind of roleplaying experience the user would like to have. In their pursuit of massive, open ended, open world gameplay, graphical fidelty has been something of an afterthought for most modern Bethesda titles. In the past, the rhetoric from Bethesda has been that, technologically, it has previously been impossible to offer the kind of open world games they create while maintaining "bleeding edge" graphical fidelity. Okay. That's not too big of a load to swallow, I mean, not even 15 years ago, 3D video games pretty much looked like marginally more articulated Lego minifigs, stiffly bumbling around grainy textured polygons that sort of looked like the things they were supposed to represent. Even the launch titles for the last generation of consoles look seriously dated compared to what developers were able to squeeze out of them at the end of their life cycle. Compare Call of Duty 3, to The Last of Us or even 2010's Red Dead Redemption, a game that came out only 4 years after the system launched. Graphical fidelity has made leaps and bounds in terms of improvement in just the last five years alone.

And here we get into the turd on the fine china... Consoles. It is unarguable fact that they are holding gaming back in terms of what is capable, graphically, in video games. They use outdated and cheap hardware in an effort to provide customers with a “cheap” and “plug and play” video game experience. Honestly, Im not talking shit on console gamers. I own several consoles. I love all video game platforms, BUT, it is undeniable that consoles help corporate bottom lines, not gaming as a community. The games that look beautiful on consoles do so in spite of the technological limitations of consoles, not because of them.

Now, when we talk about graphical fidelity, fewer games are as graphically advanced as The Witcher 3. Gorgeous, even on consoles, one only has to play this game on any platform to come to the conclusion that we are, undoubtedly, in the age where graphical fidelity is no longer tied to game size or complexity. So why, then, does Fallout 4 look worse than current generation, and modern PC titles, yet still cost the same amount as them? The answer is the bottom line.

Suddenly, we come to a grim realisation... In a lot of cases, Ebert was actually right. Why? Because we keep defending the bottom line. Every single time a game is released unplayable without a day one patch (-cough, hack- nearly every modern title), we defend the bottom line. Every single time a PC port is locked at 30 FPS (-cough cough- Watchdogs... -cough, sputter- Arkham Knight), we defend the bottom line. Every single time a game has major, gamebreaking bugs (-cough- every open world Bethesda title ever released for the PS3, -cough, hack- these last few Assassins Creed games), we defend the bottom line, and we tell developers and publishers that we're willing to swallow their rancid, three day tequila and taco bell bender jizz. Their lowest possible effort. Their budget spent more on stupid fucking marketing gimmicks, rather than innovative gameplay and graphic fidelity.

How much money did Bethseda make off Skyrim? 1.3 BILLION fucking dollars. So tell me, why in the actual sweet mother of pigfuck does Fallout 4 look worse than titles nearly ten years its senior? Shave the .3 off that number, make that .3 the theorertical budge that Fallout 4 could have had, and shitpunting blammo, I can almost guarantee you've got a budget that can support a new engine AND YOU'VE STILL GOT NEARLY A BILLION DOLLARS PROFIT FROM YOUR PREVIOUS GAME, a game which "only" cost 90 million dollars to make, by the way. Something, my basement dwelling friends, is very rotten in Sovengaard.

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not an industry guy. I don't head a wildly successful development company. I've never produced a AAA title in my life. Obviously, every single penny of profit doesn't go back into game development, but something... something, and I just can't quite put my finger on what, tells me, instinctively, that 1.2 billion in profit is a sum of money that more than adequately covers the total cost of development of the average Bethesda game, including programmer salaries, and extraneous costs. Fuck, for that kind of money, Bethesda could probably manufacture the game disks themselves, but here we are in 2015, and Bethesda's mouth animations are literally the equivalent of badly dubbed Godzilla movies. In fact, they're worse, because even in Godzilla movies, the actors were saying real words and using real facial movements. Bethesda just had a guy program mouth animations for the song "eep, op, ork, ah, ah" and called it a day.

When Bethesda slimily teamed up with Steam to fracture the outstanding mod community that finishes their games for them by trying to monetise traditionally free content provided by people who, by and large prefer the modding community remain unmonetised, the gaming community was in an uproar. Within a weeks time, Bethesda retracted the "experiment" (unfortunately hinting that this was not the end of their bullshittery, and that they'd be back to fuck up their mod community again some day), and gamers rejoiced in the fact that they'd come together to stick up for themselves. Now, here we are at Fallout 4 launch, and every single person who speaks up and says "Hey, uh... does anyone else notice that this game looks demonstrably worse than every other quality title on the market right now? That's a concern for many of us, and we're not getting a great value here" is fucking bulldozed by a hypetrain of unbelievable fanboyism who practically deifies a developer who has religiously fucked over its customer base in the name of profit.

This shit is like punching people in the face for pointing out oil spills because you have an unreasonable love of that stupid Exxon tiger tail novelty toy. It needs to stop. If we want better quality from developers, we need to start demanding it. We've shown that we're capable of unifying and demanding better treatment from developers. We're capable of changing the tide of the industry from moneygreedy corporatism back to developers who are as passionate about developing video games as we are about playing them. We're capable of this and more, but apparently “OOH SHINY” trumps “Hey, uh... this bag of pixels and code you just sold me is bunk as shit. Im taking my money back whether you like it or not.”