It's been a whole dang decade since Fallout 4 launched, so long that the world has slipped significantly closer to nuclear Armageddon than was the case when Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG stepped out from Vault 111. The anniversary has got Bethesda creative chief Todd Howard in a reflective mood, and he's revealed some interesting details about the creation of the game and what the RPG maestros learned from it.
One of the main things Bethesda learned is that cinematic, Mass Effect-style dialogue systems are a bad fit for Bethesda games. In an interview with GQ, Howard was asked what he thought the best game he'd worked on is. Responding diplomatically, Howard pointed to several features of multiple games, while also mentioning that some things "didn't resonate" with players. After a bit of coaxing, Howard revealed that Fallout 4's dialogue system was one of them.
This was something PCG alumnus Andy Kelly noticed at the time. Shortly after Fallout 4 launched, Kelly noted that Fallout 4 was a good game but a bad RPG, highlighting the limitations of the dialogue system in particular. "The restrictions of the new dialogue wheel and the addition of a voiced protagonist have stripped away any chance to give your character a distinct personality," he wrote back in 2015. "The single voice on offer is so obviously tailored to fit a generic-looking white guy—like the one they used in the E3 demo—that it sounds weird coming out of anyone else."
This is likely why Bethesda swapped back to a more traditional dialogue system for Starfield, though as has been discussed frequently, Bethesda's latest RPG has its own array of issues. Hopefully Bethesda has learned as many lessons from that development as it works on its next game—The Elder Scrolls 6—which Howard mentioned that Bethesda "did a big play test" for only yesterday in the same interview.
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