• The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Although Larian and Black Isle have both excelled at novelistic (as opposed to Bethesda’s simulationist) games, what a lot of people loved about Fallout 1+2 was how the storytelling was regional, factional, and political. The payoff was how the denouement responded to your in game choices, and how your story could be contextualized in a larger living world.

    The Larian house style is great, but more focused on characters, interpersonal storytelling, dialogue and forensically detailed narrative exception handling. There are voiced lines and detailed writing intended for even the most abstrusely sequenced playthroughs that few players will ever see. Black Isle did something similar, but with less graphical acumen and in more factional terms.

    It would be interesting and likely profitable to see how Larian’s style came across in a Fallout game, but I’m not sure it’s a perfect fit for a story that’s at its best when it’s critiquing society and human nature at large.