According to Merriam Webster a pathology is the study of the essential nature of a disease, especially of the structural and functional changes produced by them. It also refers to a deviation that gives rise to social ills.

Over in the unpopular opinions thread some folks were saying they like Fallout 4, and well. They aren't wrong to like it. But they also wondered if the game wasn't perhaps getting a bit too much flak because of Fallout 76's poor release.

And this has spoilers because it is long. Like. Really long.

[spoiler=Oblivion & Fallout 3]
And well, this takes me back to my first Bethesda game, which was Oblivion. I got it from a chuckling game clerk who looked at my 6' + height, declined to ID me and sold a 16 year old an M rated game. I think I logged about 80 hours in the game and put it away because I thought it'd effect my grades negatively.

I happen to think it is a pretty damn good game. But, I never realized that the Emperor was Patrick Stewart, till years later, when someone told me. Think about that, Patrick Stewart played as John Luc Picard in Star Trek. His voice and decisive character in that role are iconic. But the entirety of his lines play out in the first twenty minutes of Oblivion in this cardboard like performance that I couldn't distinguish easily from an unpaid extra.

This is an example of a design trade off. They are natural. An engineering project cannot be all things to all people. It takes as much time to make a fighting game as it does to make one Elder Scrolls, design tradeoffs, optimizing one system at the expense of others, are what are going to make it so the overall products are successful. Voice acting in general in that game took a hit so the rest of the project could be successful.

In Fallout 3 the voice acting is just as bad. The gun mechanics are sub par, and I remember not being able to use the railway cannon because it would freeze my XBox. I was running on a 56K dialup connection at the time. So yeah... gamepatches? What were those again? VATS essentially exists as a 'fix' to allow a player to experience engaging gunplay in that universe; just based off my experience with Fallout New Vegas on PC.

The writing of the game was also interesting. Because compared to Fallout 1, and Fallout 2. It is extremely sanitized. I want to say it is at the level of "The Avengers" or a similar Marvel property, versus "A Boy and His Dog". I enjoy both, but there's a world of difference between graphic depictions of violence in the two. So sometimes design tradeoffs manifest in a narrative because, they have to sell this to an international audience, and can't get away with murdering Thom Cruz and his sex cult that definitely was lampooning the Church of Scientology.
[/spoiler]

[spoiler=New Vegas]
Now, New Vegas was done by Obsidian. And it's interesting to see where they went with the system, because they kept the content closer to in tone to Fallout and Fallout 2. They did not fix any fundamental issues, but rather focused their energy on building a content rich world with an interlocking story line that spans 5 dlcs. They extended the core game systems in those DLCs, but only to the minimum passing extent. The entire experience could easily be seen as Fallout 3.x with a different finish of writing. Someone saying the writing is better is... well comparing a beer to a scotch. One has a much rougher finish. But they both are loved and respected by their crowd.
[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Skyrim]
The next iteration of the Bethesda game pathology was Skyrim. Which is where, because I never played Morrowind, I can really see the pathology progress. Because you have this massive world, where presumably you are the dragon born and raaar. And you forge your own destiny like Conan!

But it's a world where someone can just come up to you and say you are thief. Or just say you are a cannibal. You don't have the choice of saying you are not. If you try to hide from those choices, even with a high sneak skill, the game will force you into dialogue when you come into proximity of them. It's a bit like what hypnohub would be if no one tagged any images, and nightmare fuel wasn't hidden. In comparison to Oblivion, I was stumbling on encounters or items I shouldn't have far more frequently, that would mechanically kill my character far more often. And I seem to recall cheesing my way round a few of them in some really cheap ways. If it were the only issue, you could chalk it up to a stylistic choice.

But there's also problems with the overall finish of the game. Your horses in Skyrim could infamously climb near vertical grades. The visual design of the game is bleak and gray. Look, I live in the Rocky Mountains. People come here because even if it is a bit bleak, there are also these bursts and dashes of spectacular color. Skyrim is like a gray unreal hell in comparison. And the UI is made out of mechanical despair with some sparkly stars thrown on top of it. It was very beautiful, but a usability tester should have been able to take the thing out into a field and shoot it before gamers ever go their hands on it.

The game has extensive mod tools that in the hands of some talented content creators fix many of these issues. That was where the design tradeoff was. Judging by how much the mods of the game are loved, it was a worthwhile choice overall.
[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Fallout 4]
In Fallout 4, you see the problems from Skyrim continue to develop. The story is derivative of Fallout 3. Your role is reversed so rather than being the son in search of the father, you are the father in search of the son. There is gobs more content because of a continued focus on ritual, modular level kits, and content creation, but that content becomes similar pretty quick. I could have enjoyed the game if the settlement system worked, but because there is a bug that sets settlement crops to zero, I was back to being that kid with dialup in 2008. To my knowledge the bug could not be fixed by mod tools and was never fixed by the game team.

These are not lethal issues to the overall success of a game. But there's a consistent pattern, where you get these ever larger worlds, filled with more content and tasks and rituals to perform. That is supported by core systems that are sometimes really badly implemented. With a writing quality of the core quests that was in continual decline. And it seems like the writing might have to decline, because of the issues involved with creating a more complex narrative structure that can support massive amounts of content to a general audience. Compare with Destiny: the writing on that game is paper thin, but it's lack of definition makes it robust enough that any 18 year old can pick it up and play it. And any 28 year old can shrug it off because, meh guns. [/spoiler]

[spoiler=Fallout 76]
I cannot accurately comment on Fallout 76 because I never played it. But it seems like, from a thousand yards, they had to reimplement a number of core systems to support networked play. And implement the networked systems themselves. And that continual focus on creating scalable, adaptable modular content creation systems (like Mod tools) at the expense of supporting systems (like, from the sounds of it, everything from the pre-release items to the networking and beyond) not only caused Fallout 76 to fail. Unlike say Battlefield 3, to Battlefield 4, there wasn't a different experience to fall back on. Even if Fallout 4 is better, the problems that caused the game to disintegrate at launch existed in that iteration of the game.

I'd be curious to see what a player of Elder Scrolls Online or Fallout 76 makes of this and I am curious if the trends are continuing through other Elder Scrolls games.
[/spoiler]

I'm curious to hear about other games that people think suffer from pathology's. One of the nails in the coffin of the Dead Space series of games was EA's obsession with microtransactions, there were an number of other factors though that made it so that series will probably not come back any time soon. I'll let someone else do a long form break down of that though, it seems like good sport. Suffering from a pathology doesn't make a game a bad game. See the Half Life series of games...

Fallout 76 is free entertainment, it's interesting to watch it just to see how it will mess up again; I'm honestly shocked they gave it an expansion

I really think a lot of bad AAA game design can come down to greed and laziness

too lazy to patch out bugs before launch or have good QA (or they're too greedy to spend money on that stuff), too greedy to avoid micro-transactions and 'surprising' gambling mechanic

Bethesda the publisher > Bethesda the developer, that is all I will say on the never ending "New Fallout Sucks" diatribe.

I'll pitch in.
[spoiler= Morrowind & Skyrim]First picked up ES with Morrowind, and lemme tell you, it's basically anti-Skyrim. If we're talking "forge your own destiny", I'd say ESIII has V beat 6-0. Even by the end of the game when you've gone and fulfilled your 'destiny' it's unclear if you're really some chosen hero of prophecy or just a pawn on a cosmic board (or both), whereas in Skyrim you're unmistakably the dragonborn from your first dragon kill alone, and by the end of the game you're basically told that you probably didn't really accomplish anything and Alduin will just nom the world some other time. Plus, the main quest in Skyrim is always in a hurry to tell you to go somewhere or fetch someone something from a dungeon post haste, the fate of the world depends on it. By comparison there really isn't a false sense of urgency in Morrowind's MQ, the bad guy's been around for centuries at this point, what's a few extra weeks or months? Heck, it on occasion literally tells you to go and level up, to actually engage with the world a bit. Personally I always found the quests in general more rewarding in MW, especially because you don't have a magic compass in your UI to tell you where to go next, you'd have to pay attention to what you're told and look around. By comparison in Skyrim the most fun I had was playing a khajiit that just literally bolted off into the woods after the tutorial and punched things to death, never actually taking any quests or "engaging" with the game proper.
On top of that there's the combat. It's not aged well, to say the least, but you feel so much more powerful at high levels, specifically with magic, which was an absolute game breaker back then. By late game you're basically a demigod, every square centimeter of your body covered in enchanted doo-dads with custom spells to murder someone, let you fly across the sky, jump over houses, turn invisible, walk on water, breathe water, teleport, buff yourself, etc, when early game you had a dinky little firebolt spell that worked 90% of 50% of the time. Being able to shout at things really doesn't compare.
While the world is mostly still shades of brown, between enormous mushrooms, alien lifeforms like the guar or silt striders, and sufficiently fleshed out cultures with strange architecture, Vvardenfel almost feels like a different planet at times, unlike 'fantasy Norway'.[/spoiler]

As for Fallout, well, I really think that Hbomberguy just about nailed it on 3 and why it's barely worthy of the franchise title, I suggest you look his video up on YT. Never picked up 4, just knowing you get power armor 15 minutes into the game and kill a motherfucking deathclaw right after made me not want to touch it with a ten meter pole. I prefer my deathclaws an existential threat to me, thanks.

Now lemme talk about a different franchise.
[spoiler= Legend of Heroes aka 'the Trails Series']Okay, so you might have seen me gush about it before, but Trails in the Sky FC & SC are legit my favourite JRPG games. Haven't managed to play the Crossbell arc because glorious PC master race, and played Cold Steel 1. I own CS 2, but the fact I haven't so much as installed it after all this time should speak volumes about what I think of 1. Not that it's exactly bad, but it kind of felt hollow and 'animefied', and I'm still mentally bracing myself for more.

Maybe it's the fully voiced lines, maybe the writing, but the characters just don't have the charm of Estelle & gang. All of your classmates have a sob story they need to air out and fight for screentime from the beginning of the game, when Sky drip fed them to you, and some of their interactions with one another were absolute gems. CS1 forgoes a lot of that to deliver you half a dozen waifus to choose from (and yet best grill is unplayable), but none of them really feel like they're forming any meaningful bonds with each other, let alone the boys in class, lest you might feel your sweetheart tainted I guess. Oh, and everyone's the same age, give or take a few years, where Sky's party had some notably older members like Schera and Zin/Zane amongst the kids for somewhat more... 'adult' jokes and lines. Also, Rean is just not a very interesting main character, being your typical gifted dark-haired anime protagonist with a dark mysterious power and a past to go with it. Not only have we seen this in JRPGs and anime in general with minor variations a thousand times over, he's basically just Joshua by another name, and that little shit was probably the least interesting party member in Sky. Contrast Rean to Estelle, a country girl who's kind of dim-witted at times, always upbeat and fires both barrels in conversation. Plus, no special powers, no hidden past, no grand destiny or the like, just a "deadbeat" dad who's a state-saving war hero and all-around badass. Hell, even Estelle and Joshua (her adopted brother btw, because Japan) is built up from pretty much the start of FC, so the two character's existing relationship slowly takes on more romantic tones, whereas CS1 just throws us Rean's little sister halfway through the game, and she has all the subtlety of a rampaging herd of rhinos about wanting her adopted 'onii-chan' inside her.

The worldbuilding is also sort of wonky. The story of CS1 takes place a mere 3 years after Sky, but all of a sudden they've a classroom for fully functional orbal desktop PCs and USB memory big enough to hold a recording of a concert. In Sky, the only place in Liberl with a computer was the industrial heart of Zeiss Central Factory, the mostly text-based Capel units being otherwise only found aboard airships for flight control. Also, suddenly the whole class just has cell phones. Okay, it's brand new tech and they're in a military academy of the technological powerhouse that is the Erebonian Empire, but it was a big deal in Sky for a character to possess one since it was top-secret stuff, these kids just whip theirs out in the middle of the street like it's nothing! This is all a mere fifty years after the world started industrialization btw, and I just realized it was brought about by a dude called professor Epstein, who passed away shortly before he could publish his work to the world. Urge to meme, rising...

Story in CS1 is also pretty weak. To be fair, it's the first of four games in that arc, where Sky wrapped itself up in two, not counting the sidestory that is 3rd. Yet FC was a complete story on its own, and it wasn't even originally meant to be two games to begin with. FC also had a really well-written antagonist with a solid plan that you muck up fundamentally by the end of the game, and it led to the "real" plot in SC that was even fucking better (sans the villain's motivation, sadly). By comparison CS1 consists of a whole bunch of field trips to acquaint the player with the setting, but then sends you crawling in the same dungeon that has no plot relevance to the outside world in between your excursions, only to have the plot finally kick up at the very end (and introduce goddamn mechs, *sigh*).

Gameplay-wise the combat is solid in all the games as far as I know, though I found myself missing the way Sky handled its orbment/quartz system somewhat in CS1. The missions are typically varied enough to stay interesting, though the first quests in CS1 are practically reused wholesale from FC (I swear, they probably used the exact same passcode in that one quest, too). Find a guide to play this shit though, 100% is virtually impossible without one, and since it not only gets you useful in-game rewards, you also receive some cool shit in the next game too, it saves you a lot of running around to just have a walkthrough handy. Shame they removed shining poms from the base game (they made them a freaking DLC), so level grinding is a little more laborious than in Sky, though the experience distribution still works to discourage too much of it yet make it easy for lower levels to catch up. But, now we get to the big one that the eagled-eyed reader may have noticed come up: Remember Jenis Royal Academy from FC? Yeah, that Jenis Royal Academy? Well, welcome to Thors Military Academy, now you can get that same experience, only like 5 times over! But don't worry, we've strewn around some Persona shit all over the place so you can spend even more time running around a high school campus listening to teenage issues while looking for all the events! And there was much fucking rejoicing.

Finally visuals and music, honestly, once again Sky takes it I'd say. The portraits are pretty expressive when they want to, plus the sprites are quite adorable in their own right. Also, there's the surprisingly good fight cutscenes here and there. Not that CS1 is exactly ugly, but the handheld graphics are kinda basic on a larger screen if you wanna play it on PC. I'm having trouble remembering any tracks from CS1 where I distinctly remember a few from Sky, and <<www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHSe9goesEk|Silver Will>> is glorious enough to warrant special mention.
[/spoiler]

So in defense of Fallout 4...

Bethesda has NEVER had good main plotlines, nor have they had particularly good ways to encourage you to explore other than dumping you into the world.

I can't even REMEMBER Morrowind's story, but Fallout 3 is "Make water clean." Oblivion and New Vegas have basically the same storyline. Deliver plot macguffin then fight evil things, Skyrim is kill dragons. But like... that's it. And it may seem like I'm just boiling these down to simple parts but I'm really not. Regardless of the individual quests happening in between you are nevertheless reminded of the ultimate goal. And it's typically a lame ultimate goal with no real reason for you, the player to care other than "It's in my quest log". And 4 is the same. So while I do get that people don't like the "Find my son" line I would argue that it's basically par for the course for Bethesda.

Oh, also you never really get a choice in these games as far as main quests go. You need to do things on rails the whole time.

Yes. Preston's missions suck. But you only need to do like 2 of them to get the Castle then never have to do them again. So it's nowhere near as bad as everyone says.

HOWEVER I would argue that with these minor issues aside (Or rather, a large issue that Bethesda has ALWAYS had if you yank those rose glasses off for a moment) that Fallout 4 is the most "Alive" game Bethesda has made. A lot of the characters and quests feel unique and fun (I mean hell, Hancock is one of my favorite characters in gaming just in general), the world is full and always feels worth exploring, the combat is the best in any Bethesda game so far (As opposed to FO3 and NV which were "Just use VATS because aiming barely works", and TES which is "Mash attack to win swish swosh swong"), and the twist is actually good. It's the first time they ever really attempted a twist in these games. Most Bethesda games just have a linear, simple plot.
Also the ability to join a faction to get to endgame makes the plot a lot more unique in my eyes. It makes the last third of the story feel different and worth a replay.


Now... onto a game I DON'T like that will probably annoy a lot of people...

Saints Row.


I despise Saints 3 and 4.

A lot of people paint Saints 1 and 2 as "Just a GTA clone" but I disagree wholly. Yes, you can steal cars and shoot stuff. But it doesn't have the (and this is gonna sound weird) morality of GTA. In GTA you're usually playing a misunderstood character with deep, personal reasons for being a criminal. Usually selfish ones, sure. But the actions are typically justified in an almost Robin Hood way. "I steal from (and kill) the rich to give to me, the poor."

Saints 1 and 2 arent this. Saints 1 and 2 are games where you're a psychopathic madman who kills people and takes their territory because you're evil. That's it. It's super simple but that's why I love it. Very few games let you be a rampaging, remorseless maniac for the fun of it. And the writing and VA work is spot on.

But then we get to Saints 3 and 4... where the plot becomes more GTA, and the gameplay feels like Spaceballs to the original game's Star Wars.

It's over the top, absurd, your character has become a massive pansy, the writing isn't clever (Seriously. It's all dick jokes. Every joke. Just dicks.), and there's some weird morality to the plot. It becomes a story about friendship and revenge as opposed to "I'm a madman who kills people for fun". And 4 is SIGNIFICANTLY worse.

It feels a lot like when you have a musician you like who is doing their own, unique thing and that is why you love them... then they get big and go "I'm famous now. Time for bubblegum pop until I die because that makes me money." and they lose what made them unique.

It hurts me. And it makes me really want a Saints 1 and 2 remaster so I can just play those games with modern graphics and mechanics and pretend 3 and 4 never existed.

I think video game narratives in general are too obsessed with providing closure. I won't get into a whole David Lynch essay about it, but when a narrative gives you closure, it also gives you permission to stop thinking about it. Obviously, the general thought is that the majority of the population doesn't want to think at all, and that they will screech on metacritic if they don't get their closure. When you have these sprawling trilogies and stuff like Mass Effect, though, providing closure becomes impossible. At some point, the series has to end, and you have to leave the world. Either the world goes on without you, with questions you'll never have answered for you, or you do something to fundamentally alter the world that you love for the sake of ending the plot lines when you leave them. Turns out, people don't like that.

Then you've got Halo. Halo 1-3 didn't tell you shit. You got the basic information about the threats, the sides of a great conflict that you were pushed into - and then you played your part in that conflict. Halo 3 ends, the conflict still exists, but you did what you could and can still wonder about the world. More Halo games come out, bam, they tell you that, actually, the forerunners definitely *weren't* ancient humans, they were just some other weird aliens. And you cross that mystery off the list, along with several others, and now that you know the answers, you're not encouraged to think about them any harder. Everyone starts to dislike the narrative direction of the franchise once the mysteries got unveiled.

TES is a bit different, because you don't play the same guy. You don't even really live in the same time period as the other guys you play. I think the reason that TES continues to hold peoples attention despite mediocre main quest stories is that that world is still there, and you're always gonna want to know more about the things that remain constant between the games. All the scary gods, the magic, all that stuff - the main plots suck because they conclude in an unsatisfying way, in that the conflict is just ended, but the world itself goes on, and there are still things you don't understand about it. I gotta give it up, those games are boring as shit, but I'm gonna play the next one anyways.

Narrative-driven AAA games on the whole, though, so far, they haven't learned the lesson that Twin Peaks taught television in the 90s. The audience craves murder and mystery, and they're going to consume it faster than you can output it. The only solution, if you're going to cater to those desires, that lets you keep going without running off the rails is to leave questions open and fates uncertain. You gotta let people think about your product. Almost nobody is making narrative-driven games that make me want to think about them afterwards. Undertale kinda changed that in the indie scene, but I'd love to see it change in the big budget world someday.

David Lynch doesn't matter, this is brilliant

This take is so bad Toga offered it membership in the League of Villains

But it's true. I mean, take movies. I can't see someone watching No Country for Old Men and even another *good* modern movie, like The Dark Knight - and then going on to have The Dark Knight have more of a lasting impact on their thinking. (Unless you're @jokers_trick, in which case please come back, the internet needs you.) It's not even that I don't think stuff like The Dark Knight, where there isn't much to think about afterwards except how good it is as a film, should exist. But I think that games (where the narrative is *the* thing that separates it from the crowd) would do well to learn from Lynch, like modern TV has, and not be so eager to shoot all the wonder and mystery out of it for the sake of tying things up. (For cases where TV fails to do that, see GOT, which became the Mass Effect of television shows. Nobody's talking about it, now that it's done, because they wrapped everything up and it sucked.) Smarter people have argued the point in more detail than I'm going to, so just calling it a "bad take" isn't going to convince me it's wrong.

I have seen enough posts on Avatar, Harry Potter, Avengers, Rise of Skywalker and even Game of Thrones to know that ending a narrative does not end its life. Hell, we wouldn't have gotten to Rise of Skywalker if people weren't excited about the original Star Wars film. A storyteller who wants closure may do so to the story's detriment, but if the story resonates enough, it doesn't matter how it ends, it will remain with you. All art demands your attention, and it's up to the creator to try and keep it as long as possible.

Not only do you sound like someone who does not know what fanfiction is, you also sound like someone who is way too much into the idea of "objective criticism" even though the concept is an impossibility.

You're conflating narrative and worldbuilding/exploration, which in game design terms especially are in a lot of cases distinct. (Not so much with a game like Halo, but certainly with a game like TES.) Fanfiction exists inherently outside of the narrative of the media it's drawing from, even though it remains within the world. And when it comes to "objective criticism," I think I do moreso for games than other media. At the very least I agree (mostly) with the MDA model, which is the closest thing to an objective breakdown of "fun delivery" that exists. For TDK and No Country, like I said, those are both great movies, even though No Country obviously caters more to me personally with its narrative style. What I'm saying is that games would benefit a lot from approaching their conclusions with less focus on resolution - not every point of conflict or mystery needs to be entirely resolved, and I think it's important that the audience be left with something to think about.

So a bit about Morrowind first.

So incidentally I looked up Morrowind's opening scene. And it made me laugh a bit because you're a prisoner who gets randomly released into Morrowind. It's similar enough to Skyrim and Oblivion that I'd chalk it up to the Bethesda way.

I wouldn't say Bethesda never had good plotlines (for me, good enough isn't too far from passable, but it definitely isn't bad), but a key part of their thinking seems to lead to these situations where they clearly aren't the priority.

I have to disagree, strongly, about New Vegas. Ultimately, you are not trying to fix the world. A guy dug a shallow grave for you and shot you in the face. But you have a history. You are not a prisoner, you are a courier. You are neither a child in search of a parent or the inverse. The fact that you are a courier, born in the world, plays a pretty important role in Lonesome Road's dlc. I won't spoil the endings for the game, but you do not solve the problems of the world. But, if Benny aimed a bit to the left, New Vegas would be fine. The same cannot be said for the Lone Wanderer, or the heroes in Elder Scrolls.

Whether that presents a better structure is debatable. But you can clearly see a structural difference. I don't think Fallout 4 needs much of a defense because as I recall the game was met with acceptable reception.

To be clear, it's the long term problems... erm, I mean, strategies that persisted throughout the series that I'm interested in. The reason why I'm curious about Fallout and ES is because it is a very definite strategy.



I'm actually not sure I agree with you totally. Because I do think you are right in general. But there are exceptions. Bungie is actually one of them. Since they made Marathon in '94 they had to do the entire story in text and it is available online at marathon.bungie.org/story/ for convenient reading. And it's surprising to see what continued to manifest in their series, other than the rocket launcher. Although there is eventually an ending to the series, (and a hell of a one at that), they are very careful to leave the situation without an appropriate resolution leading up to it.

It's definitely a part of their strategy in Destiny, because you are struggling against these fundamental forces that cannot get beaten. Only shot many times while you buy funny hats.

The Call of Duty games actually function similarly, right up until they couldn't figure out how to make Captain Price look like anymore of a boss. With that being said there's a difference between earlier iterations of the story where, you simply are assuming a different view, and later ones where you are being exposed to yet another near death experience.

The Battlefield games like 3 and 4 might resolve with the death of say, a terrorist or a leader, but the international wars they depict will likely still rage on for a number of years (and this becomes the back drop for the multiplayer of the game).

Hideo Kojima is famous for bucking this trope. And I believe he's also a David Lynch fan.

And another example that is fantastic bucking of closure is the original Diablo.

It sets up these six of one and half a dozen of another situations because if you have a game like say... Black or Kill.Switch, you'll never get closure for those games, simply because they weren't finished. It also seems to happen a lot more in shooters.

And here I must ask why doesn't Morrowind meet the criteria of not everything being wrapped up. Sure, the main conflict is over, but at the same time you still have mysteries left unanswered: How did Nerevar actually die (Vivec even points out that his own version of the events could well be a lie and you should reach your own conclusions)? Are you truly the reincarnation of Nerevar? Was the prophecy real or just an instruction manual to inspire would-be assassins? Why did the dwemer disappear (you can ask certain people and collect evidence to form a pretty solid theory, but in the end still lack definitive proof)?

As for the argument for closure, it allows the message of a work to be better absorbed by the viewer, even if they stop processing it consciously. Frankly, if the message is 'there is no message', an overtly open ending will only make a work entertainment (of the ultimately 'mindless' variety unless you subscribe to death of the author), as opposed to a story. Personally I hold the craft of storytelling to a far higher esteem than something put together without a driving philosophy or lesson, no matter how inept, basic or contrary to my own worldview the results may be. After all, it's a craft older than writing, and while you may not stay and ponder a story afterwards, you'll still remember it, and likely want to pass on the ones that resonate with you to future generations.