It’s no secret that Fallout 4 left some fans of the series disappointed, and with The Elder Scrolls 6 likely still a way off, there’s many lessons to be learned from Bethesda’s last RPG outing. Bethesda has been consistently praised for the breadth of its open worlds, the sheer number of side-quests in the sandboxes it creates, and the amount of unique environments to explore.
The developer’s stories, however, have also been criticized as consistently lacking. Fallout 4 saw Bethesda’s first foray into a more personalized, BioWare-esque style of storytelling with an intense personal plot hook and a voiced player character. There’s one big lesson Bethesda will need to learn from that experiment if it wants The Elder Scrolls 6 to have a more compelling narrative than the previous games.
Fallout 4’s Hook
Fallout 4 starts with the player character losing everything – they are thawed out in the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon to find their spouse has been murdered and their child abducted. Compared to other Bethesda games, it is an extremely personal plot hook. While Fallout 3 had a similar opening in theory, with the vault-dweller leaving their home to look for their missing father, the unique all-consuming horror of a child being abducted adds a level of urgency to Fallout 4’s hook which the rest of the game’s open world is at odds with.
Fallout: New Vegas begins with the Courier being shot in the head and buried alive. It’s also a strong hook, but it provides far more unique role-playing opportunities in the open world of the Mojave. If one player wants to pursue their assailant to the ends of the earth, heading straight to the New Vegas strip for a showdown, that makes complete sense. If another player chooses to role-play as a character who heads straight in the opposite direction, that’s equally justifiable if not moreso, allowing a far greater breadth of character which players can imagine exploring the game world.
The degree to which the player character’s personality is left up to the player is particularly important in RPGs, because their typically large open worlds tend to be shallow enough that immersion relies more upon the player singularly identifying with their character. Compare this to a character like Shepherd in BioWare’s Mass Effect, whose story has enough depth for a player to be invested in that character even though that character exists more independently of them and has less variety in terms of potential role-playing.
Fallout 4’s plot hook makes enjoying the strengths of the game – the great environments, the goofy side quests and the indulgent chaos of the Fallout world - seem almost inappropriate from an immersion perspective. It’s harder for players to immerse themselves in the satirical pulp of the Silver Shroud quest-line, for example, without the nagging feeling that their character would probably have the abduction of their child on the forefront of their mind, but are instead spending their time dressed as a Shadow-style vigilante.
This isn’t helped by Bethesda’s choice to hire voice actors for Fallout 4’s player character. While the Courier in New Vegas could be anyone from a old-timey prospector to a fresh-faced young delivery boy, the player character voice in Fallout 4 greatly limits the imagination of the player and the range of Sole Survivors that they can role-play as while still playing the game as intended.
How This Applies to The Elder Scrolls
The Elder Scrolls 6 is unlikely to have a voiced protagonist – there are far too many playable races in The Elder Scrolls games for unique male and female recordings to be done to account for all the different types of voice Bethesda has established in the world.
Nonetheless, The Elder Scrolls 6 will need to learn to lean into the strengths of the best Bethesda-style RPGs instead of emulating the golden age of BioWare RPGs in an attempt to strengthen the story. While Mass Effect has the player take on the role of either male or female Shepherd, a comparatively fixed character, Skyrim really does let them role-play as anyone the play can imagine, regardless of that character’s race, age, gender, and their disposition in the mind of the player.
What Fallout 4 showed compared to Skyrim was the degree to which the success of Bethesda RPGs relies upon the player inserting themself directly into the world rather than doing so through the intermediary of a pre-determined player character, and that by having the motivations of the player character be too specific in the story, the freedom of the player to explore all that world has to offer while still having the story make sense and remain immersive is extremely limited.
Part of Skyrim’s replay value comes from being able to start the story again as someone completely new in a way that Fallout 4 – which establishes right away that the player character is a former soldier in a heterosexual relationship, recently had a child, lost their spouse, and speaks a certain way – simply doesn’t allow room for.
The world of Skyrim doesn’t even react very much to the different races the player choose – one of the most immersion-breaking parts of Skyrim is how little impact player race appears to have in the otherwise extremely xenophobic province. Nonetheless by not shoehorning the player into any specific role, Skyrim leaves far more to the imagination of the player, and it is that level of freedom that is able to pick up the story’s slack, while Fallout 4’s approach only draws player attention to this style of game’s narrative deficits.
The Future of Bethesda RPGs
If both The Elder Scrolls 6 and the next installment of the Fallout series are to achieve the critical success of a game like Skyrim, despite it flaws, Bethesda will need to consider some of the risky moves made with Fallout 4’s story and player character as an ultimately failed experiment.
There are certainly big improvements which can be made to Bethesda’s narratives. The stories the developer tells could feel far more reactive to player choices, the world could feel more dynamic and lived-in, and the depth of the relationships the PC can have with NPCs could certainly be improved, though some of Bethesda’s most interesting companions appear in Fallout 4.
However, by raising the personal stakes of the main story too much and making the player character far less customizable in an attempt to tell a more character-driven story, Bethesda cut players off from the aspect of its RPGs that works the best. A sandbox story needs a sandbox protagonist, one flexible enough to fit into the world in a multitude of different ways as per the player’s imagination. Only if this is achieved in tandem with addressing some of the genuine flaws RPGs like Skyrim have will The Elder Scrolls 6 have the longevity and critical success of its predecessor.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.
