Todd Howard isn’t a big fan of talking about his video games, but in a new interview he has discussed Fallout 4’s divisive dialogue system — and where he thinks it went wrong.
Fallout 4 — which turns 10 today, November 10, alongside the release of an Anniversary Edition — broke away from what the post-apocalyptic role-playing game franchise had done in previous entries and gave the playable character a voice.
Not only that, but Fallout 4 shifted the traditional first-person, zoomed in camera perspective for dialogue in favor of a dynamic, third-person camera perspective more in keeping with a cinematic, Mass Effect style.
Meanwhile, Fallout 4 dialogue is typically determined by a handful of short summaries, usually lining up with positive, inquisitive, sarcastic, and negative responses. It is not possible to select exact answers, and some players criticized the dialogue choices for not having a meaningful impact on the outcome of conversations, quests, or events either way.
While Fallout 4 went on to become a hugely successful release for Bethesda, with 12 million copies shipped to retailers within the first 24 hours representing $750 million in revenue, Fallout fans never really warmed to its dialogue system, and indeed there are a number of mods available that make significant changes to it.
Now, in a new interview with GQ (the one where he reveals The Elder Scrolls 6 is still some way away), Bethesda development chief Todd Howard singled out Fallout 4’s dialogue system as something from one of his games that failed to “resonate” with fans.
“We spent forever on the dialogue system in Fallout 4,” Howard said. “How do we do an interactive conversation in an interesting way? How do we make that gamey? But it really did not resonate. It was also hard on our designers to write that way. Players want to role-play more and we had a voiced protagonist. The actors were phenomenal, but a lot of players were like, ‘That's not the voice I hear in my head.’”
It was telling that for 2023’s Starfield, Bethesda reverted to a silent protagonist with lines of dialogue the player could choose from and the first-person perspective seen in The Elder Scrolls games and pre-Fallout 4 entries in the Fallout series. It seems likely that Bethesda will leave Fallout 4’s dialogue system behind, so I don't expect to see it in the upcoming The Elder Scrolls 6, for example, or indeed Fallout 5, whenever it gets around to making that game.
On a more positive note, Howard said he thinks Fallout 3 has the best opening of any game he’s worked on (I agree!), Starfield has the best gunplay and “gameplay in areas” (agree on the gunplay bit, not sure on the gameplay bit), while the varied landscape of Fallout 76 is “really good” (yep, I'll give him that). Skyrim is, “tonally and player agency-wise… really good,” Howard added, and I doubt anyone would argue with that.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
