Betheseda's claims 111,000 lines of dialogue for FO4

Practicat said:
I've yet to see anything remarkably original - like the ranger combat armor, securitrons, etc. that also keeps in tone with the core spirit of Fallout.
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Synths, laser muskets and minutemen. Totally Fallout.

generalissimofurioso said:
Radiant AI, Soil Erosion, Over 200 Endings and yet, they don't demand more out of these developers?
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They don't demand more because Bethesda creates games where you turn off your brain and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. It is just the way certain games are designed to be fun for a certain target audience. Their games don't excel in anything really. Their combat is repetitive and clunky as fuck. The movement of your character feels wonky. The AI is moronic. The writing is atrocious. The quest design is laughable. The world design is silly, overstuffed and repetitive. The enemies are repetitive, the loot is repetitive, the traps are repetitive, the puzzles are repetitive and the way you even play the game becomes repetitive.

Their games aren't amazing. So why do people feel such an affinity for them? Because Bethesda creates games that are really really good at giving your distractions. They create games where the player isn't given much time to think before something new pops around the corner. And by small illusions of rewards they keep them hooked. And some people want this yknow. Some people don't want to play games that are complex or though-provoking or particularly difficult. Some people just wants to sit down after work in front of their tv and just turn off their brain and relax. That's what Bethesda games are like, games where you turn off your brain and relax.

That's why the demands they have are not the ones we here hold. The demands of Bethfans is more distractions, more fun things, more ways for them to just turn off their brains and just relax. They don't care about the integrity of the franchise or the roots or the original vision or complexity or difficulty. They care about whether or not the game will be their kind of fun. Their reaction to a cave of kids that have been around for 200 years all the while residing next to the brooding grounds of hyper-aggressive orcs is "neat!" Because they don't care that it doesn't make any sense. What they care about is that it's weird and zany and they haven't seen this before so it's neat.

And I don't really fault them for wanting this. What a gamer wants out of their gaming experience differs greatly depending on the genre and type of gamer. And I get what a lot of Bethfans want out of their gaming experience and I can't really fault them for that. What I loathe about them is that they are hijacking a franchise that is the polar opposite of what they want.

But it isn't any surprise to me that they aren't demanding "more" or "better" from Bethesda, because they are already getting the kind of ""more"" and ""better"" that they asked for.
 
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Yup, you're totally right Fish. It's the same reason you can jump into Skyrim a year after your last save and enjoy everything - because the game needs no context. You crawl through a dungeon, you stealth kill some draugr, you put the loot in your chest at home. Even if you don't remember why you're doing a quest it never matters, because the quests are so simplistic and linear that there's nothing to remember. And to an extent, there's nothing wrong with this. I've played hundreds of hours of Skyrim since its release, because the core mechanics are high reward and easy. It's immersive brain candy.

Unfortunately, Fallout was never meant as purely brain candy. They're certainly not sophisticated or inaccessibly intelligent games, but they carry a LOT of in-universe history, quests with heavy dialogue, and distinct black humour. As you said, the franchise has been hijacked to become the most mundane garbage-diving simulator possible with almost zero internal logic or consistency, purely because it's a universe Bethesda thought was suitably wacky enough. "Post-apocalyptic survival with scary green monsters and zombies? Awesome!!" FO3 as a standalone game really doesn't bother me, as stupid as it may be... it's fun! So what?! All the Bethesda fanboys hate the NMA crowd because they have this mindset, and think we're spiteful haters who ruin their fun just to be contrarian or bitter. But we're really just upset that an incredibly captivating, original franchise got steamrolled into mindless FPS crap to turn a buck.
 
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Figured I'd add this article I found on a German website: According to Bethesda, the setting alone, including the voice-acting, took four years of the seven year dev cycle.

https://translate.google.com/transl...93NewsVertonung-verschlang-vier-Jahre-1173682

Even though we know very little about the Boston Commonwealth in Bethesda's take on this series, that seems like WAY too long a time to focus on one aspect of the game. We can hope this means they actually took some time to consider how much things would change and recover after 200 years pass, but considering we saw an EMP or a nuke being set off in the E3 trailer, likely not.
 
Doubtfull. Or well I don't believe they focused more on the world and everything. IF anything it might be even LESS focus on a coherent and well done world in the end. Voice acting is still pretty expensive, and I cringe when I imagine that most of their voice acting was probably just thousands of names for your shitty child and recording the same lines two times, one for the male and the other for the female protagonist. So is really NEW content in the end? Or just more fluff. And that is what Bethesda is doing most of the time, adding new fluff that has no real meaning to the gameplay. I mean the amount of voiced dialog for the protagonist already doubles when you have to give him two voices.
 
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I believe it. Fallout: New Vegas had like 65,000 lines of dialogue right? So if you simply take the number of things uttered by the protagonist and double it (as there's two VAs for the protagonist, and each need to record each line) you're pretty much already there.
 
Again, this is the biggest head scratcher.

In all of Beth games, they often have a rich literary universe. I mean the books in TES alone, are friggin cool. So if they have time to write in game fiction, why not use some of that talent to create dialogue?

My only answer is that they want to keep their games as profitable as possible. Or their writing team is chained to a dungeon like basement and only allowed to work on the meager scraps that get slid under the prison door.
 
DarkCorp said:
Again, this is the biggest head scratcher.

In all of Beth games, they often have a rich literary universe. I mean the books in TES alone, are friggin cool. So if they have time to write in game fiction, why not use some of that talent to create dialogue?

My only answer is that they want to keep their games as profitable as possible. Or their writing team is chained to a dungeon like basement and only allowed to work on the meager scraps that get slid under the prison door.
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Keep in mind, Bethesda needed Morrowind to sell well to stay afloat financially past the first years of the new millennium. As such, they put more effort into their writing. Now that they're selling on name alone like Apple, the need for quality, optional reading material is no longer essential.

Speaking of, I have to question the idea of exporting a selection of the stories from the Skyrim game into an actual physical product.
 
PossibleCabbage said:
Walpknut said:
"Fallout 3 will have over 200 endings"
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This is quite possibly true for the same reason. I mean, if you have to record a line twice to use different gendered pronouns because the protagonist can be male or female, that's two lines. If you have to record it with gendered language *and* to reflect the choice of three potential outcomes of a quest, that's six lines!

I mean, the 200 endings thing was technically true in the most meaningless sense, so this might be as well.
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I don't think Fallout 3 even had 200 possible combinations.

I think there were at most, what? 9?
 
FedoricRhetoric said:
PossibleCabbage said:
Walpknut said:
"Fallout 3 will have over 200 endings"
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This is quite possibly true for the same reason. I mean, if you have to record a line twice to use different gendered pronouns because the protagonist can be male or female, that's two lines. If you have to record it with gendered language *and* to reflect the choice of three potential outcomes of a quest, that's six lines!

I mean, the 200 endings thing was technically true in the most meaningless sense, so this might be as well.
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I don't think Fallout 3 even had 200 possible combinations.

I think there were at most, what? 9?
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I think there was only 4: You're evil and you're dead(or not) you're good and you're dead(or not) :V

About 110.000 lines: i'm guessing 2/3 of it are player lines so it wouldn't suprise me if it had less actual dialog than New Vegas
 
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PossibleCabbage said:
I believe it. Fallout: New Vegas had like 65,000 lines of dialogue right? So if you simply take the number of things uttered by the protagonist and double it (as there's two VAs for the protagonist, and each need to record each line) you're pretty much already there.
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"Hate newspaper! >:I"
 
I think it was dead or not dead, karma/morality, the sacrifice at the end and the fate of the water.
 
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They will probably be the most poorly written lines of any video game in the next millennium, too. Not to mention that they will probably all be voiced by under 6 people.
 
Walpknut said:
Maybe they will just roll a Blooper reel on the credits and all the fucked up lines in the blooper reel together with the one used in game will count to 111.000 lines.
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You're implying the in-game dialogue won't be blooper reel worthy in and of itself, then?

Yeah yeah, cheap shot at the game, I know. I couldn't resist.
 
Just imagine, if those are the takes they left on the finished game.... How absolutely terrible are the outakes?
 
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