Mike Deneen from GamesAreEvil writes:
"Music and sounds have always been an integral part of video games. Whether it was the 8-bit bleeps and bloops of the NES, all the way to the crisp, HD orchestrated music featured in modern games, I have always taken an interest to the sounds and scores of my favorite games. Halo, for instance, while not totally being my cup of tea, features some of the most beautiful ambient songs I have ever heard in a game, or anywhere else for that matter.
While countless other examples of great music made specifically for games exist, sometimes I don’t think the use of great licensed songs are given enough credit. Much like in movies, the perfect song at the perfect moment can make the difference between a generic experience and an unforgettable sequence. As someone who is obsessed with music, I take a great deal of interest in songs within games. Though I do enjoy the great original soundtracks many games have to offer, when it fits a scene perfectly, previously recorded tunes from established artists hold a special place in my heart."
The artist behind Fallout 4’s Deathclaw reveals just how bad things got back when Bethesda took over the series
People are stupid I get it. No one should feel unsafe,
But I think they need to talk about why they cut so many corners during the development process and why none of their games ever look current. And why they think all of this is okay while they charge full price.
Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG remains an unabashed classic, more than a decade and a half on from its launch.
For me its the fact that I could put hundreds of hours into it and still find areas I missed in my earlier runs. It was also my first FO and despite what I had to put up with at times such as overall crashs and killing my orginal PS3 with the YLOD it's still my favorite entry to this day.
Tons of reasons
But my silly little one…hunting for unique weapons and armour
Something Fallout 4 just didn’t really have as much because they replaced most of it with randomly generated customised weapons. Even Elder Scrolla doesn't do it as well.
Sense of exploration. That was why older Bethesda games were so good. They might have had glitches, broken mechanics, meh visuals, etc., but they were some of the best around when it came down to the sense of exploration. You could go wherever you wanted and you would find something cool; it might have been a faction, a weapon, an enemy and much more. And that is what they are lacking now. Skyrim still had a lot of that, but Fallout 4 dropped it by focusing on an interconnected world and more randomly generated rewards. Fallout 76 just kept that trend and added multiplayer, and Starfield went even further in killing it by creating a whole universe with parts completely isolated from each other.
I think the retrospective of Fallout: New Vegas' existence has somewhat diminished the view of Fallout 3 in the eyes of many, but it getting out of the vault in Fallout 3 was, for me, the most remarkable experience I've had in a videogame.
I was 12 when it came out, and I remember I just saw the score it got in Gamemaster magazine (remember those!? 😅), and I just went to the shop and bought it with my pocket money.
Not knowing anything about the game, I thought the whole thing was going to be about growing up in a vault, especially given that I'd spent about 2 hours in it....I literally could.not.believe it when you got out and it was just this wasteland on every direction. Amazing.
Probably because these Bethesda games were hand crafted so that exploration meant something. Unlike Starfield where this sense of exploration is replaced with the illusion of scope and procedurally generated worlds. A player can always appreciate when they wonder into an unforgettable new encounter by accident or stumble across a new questline that becomes their favourite. Just like a player can always tell when they're ploughing through filler on auto pilot, that they'll forget the moment some resource numbers go up and nothing worth remembering occurred.
I mean, in Fallout 3 you could nuke an entire town as a SIDE QUEST. In The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, the Dark Brotherhood questlines were my favourite in any RPGs and you could completely avoid them if you didn't care for them. In The Witcher 3 side quests take you on ridiculously dark and mysterious storylines that are some of the best I've played in RPG history. There's a reason why people still talk about KOTOR to this day. Difference between a developer creating something or just padding a game world with stuff.
The Fallout Anthology Edition is coming to PC very soon, and is packaged with some very S.P.E.C.I.A.L. bonuses.
It’s an awful downgrade to the last one they did
They included physical disc back then
I would love the classic fallout games on console. Closest I could find was atom rpg, I liked that one a lot
Great article! Music definitely sets the tone for gaming- I couldn't imagine a game like Dead Space without the musical score it received.
Licensed music can be hit or miss (hello, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within). When it's good, though, it can absolutely enhance the experience.