It is a good game that could have been a great game. They lost a lot of time in development when they had to retool, and I think the uncertainty over playability added to the overall hype cycle, with the assumption that it would be a complete dud. The sales performance and fan base surprised a lot of people, but there is a lot of room between abject failure and game of the year. I still enjoy it immensely, but it isn't the masterpiece that Skyrim is.
Fuel constraints and other resource requirements would limit travel, requiring more outposts and slowing the pace of the game considerably- consider it more of a survival mode. You can still see vestiges of this like magazines that give fuel efficiency and depots with hundreds if kilos of He-3, even outposts themselves. That and other mechanics made it a grind and they didn't think the game was fun to play. I give them credit for both making changes and sticking to their new timeline.
They added a survival mode to Fallout 4 that was very successful, that's why.
The problem is that Fallout 4 at launch was probably still 100 times more popular than the survival mode. And as soon as they showed the game to people outside the company, they realized that the game was too slow and those aspects were frustrating casual gamers, so they axed them. I suspect they will bring them back in a survival mode later.
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u/IgnoreThisName72 Nov 20 '23
It is a good game that could have been a great game. They lost a lot of time in development when they had to retool, and I think the uncertainty over playability added to the overall hype cycle, with the assumption that it would be a complete dud. The sales performance and fan base surprised a lot of people, but there is a lot of room between abject failure and game of the year. I still enjoy it immensely, but it isn't the masterpiece that Skyrim is.