(Note: This is a followup to our article from earlier this year, “What the Fallout 4 devs can learn from The Witcher 3”)

This has been a big year for Polish game studio CD Projekt RED, which finally released its flagship game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, on May 19 after multiple delays. It turned out that the game was well worth the wait, and it became an instant hit, easily outselling the previous two games in the series in a matter of weeks.

The Witcher 3 has received numerous awards since it was released, and this week it took home Best Role-Playing Game and Game of the Year from The Game Awards 2015, along with Developer of the Year for CD Projekt. The game went head to head against several high profile games, including another RPG juggernaut, the recently released Fallout 4.

While The Witcher 3 and its developer took home three awards last night, Fallout 4 took home none, and there are several things Bethesda Game Studios could have learned from The Witcher 3 that would have made Fallout 4 a better game.

Meaningful side quests

“Yet another” might as well be the name of these quests.

One of the features most commonly praised in The Witcher 3 is the game’s fantastic side quests, which offer their own interesting stories with meaningful choices and consequences. Nearly every side quest in The Witcher 3 gives players multiple possible outcomes, and each feels separate and unique.

Fallout 4 is notably lacking in the side quest department, and the game unfortunately relies quite heavily on the “radiant quest” mechanic introduced in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which involves a never ending stream of randomly generated quests with identical objectives. In Skyrim, these quests were at least limited and largely optional, but some of the radiant quests in Fallout 4 are required to progress through certain faction storylines, and there seem to be a lot more of them in general.

The problem with radiant quests is they feel like busy work. You don’t care about their outcome or their story because you have repeated the exact same quest several times, and the only difference between them is the randomized location you are sent to.

Probably the worst offenders out of all of Fallout 4’s many radiant quests are the Minutemen and settlement defense quests (the two kind of go hand in hand). These quests are forced onto players whether they want to complete them or not, and in the case of the defense missions, not participating can result in dead settlers and destroyed water pumps and generators. There is little to no story involved in these quests, which usually task the player with simply killing a few raiders or ghouls.

There are a few non-radiant side quests in Fallout 4 that have a bit more depth, but even among those, most involve little more than “Go there, kill that, return.”

Bethesda seems to have gone for quantity over quality with its side quests. Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 did both.

Choices that matter

Guess which choice changes the outcome of this quest. The answer is none of them.

TVTropes.org has an entire page dedicated to a video game trope it calls “But thou must!” This trope refers to a situation where players are given multiple choices during dialogue, but either they are eventually forced to choose the “right” answer or all of the answers result in the same outcome. The trope name comes from the original Dragon Quest game, which allowed players to respond to a yes or no question, but choosing “no” would be met with “But thou must!”, forcing players to eventually choose “yes.”

The Witcher 3 did a great job of actually giving players agency in choosing how to respond to various situations, even if those choices would result in numerous deaths or other negative consequences. Meanwhile, Fallout 4 has a tendency to keep player’s choices on tracks, and most choices (with few notable exceptions) will lead to the same outcome in one way or another.

The only real choice with major consequences given to players in Fallout 4 is which faction to side with towards the end of the main quest. Meanwhile, the Witcher 3 constantly lets you make decisions both large and small that all have their own consequences, some of which do not become apparent until much later.

One of the most frustrating things about Fallout 4’s lack of choices is the fact that Bethesda has previously handled choice well in its games. For example, 2002’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind actually allowed players to fundamentally break the game’s main quest by making the wrong choices.

While Fallout 3 ended with one of the worst examples of “But thou must!” in a game ever (until it was changed in the Broken Steel DLC), the game also gave players more dialogue choices based on their level in skills like Medicine or Science and in stats like Strength or Intelligence. All skill and stat related choices are missing from Fallout 4 however, and the game generally offers a choice between nice, mean, snarky and clueless, along with the occasional opportunity to ask for more money with a Charisma option.

Conclusion

Now, don’t get me wrong: I loved Fallout 4. Maybe a little too much…

But while Fallout 4 is an amazing game, it is not without its flaws, and after CD Projekt’s incredible accomplishment with The Witcher 3, it is hard not to compare the two.

And when you do compare them, it is pretty clear which game comes out on top.

Witcher 3 image courtesy of CD Projekt RED
Screenshots by Eric David | SiliconANGLE