phipboy
Newly elected overseer
That's your argument? For your own lack of competence you think the system in FNV/FO3 is bad?
Don't mean to sound hostile just weird to me
Don't mean to sound hostile just weird to me
Breaking Down The Fallout 4 Character Creation System
- Thread starter AgentBJ09
- Start date
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
Well, that's the modern gamer for you. Any wonder why the AAA industry is in such decline?
MercenarySnake
Kept you waiting huh?
Hell in the next game they might as well start you off with max everything with 2000 health and AP if it's so hard for Bethesda fans.
Well it looks like they took from Mass Effect so i'm sure pressing the green option turns you into the savior of the wasteland while the red option makes you a sarcastic killer that "Exits the conversation halfway through to headshot people because haha evil!".
Well it looks like they took from Mass Effect so i'm sure pressing the green option turns you into the savior of the wasteland while the red option makes you a sarcastic killer that "Exits the conversation halfway through to headshot people because haha evil!".
frajaq
It Wandered In From the Wastes
I'm not saying it's bad, just that I like the new system better. I don't want to worry around skill points so much, now in Fallout 4 when I lvl up I just worry where a single perk point is going.
I go back into the real meat of the game (shooting mutants/robots in the face!) faster
frajaq
It Wandered In From the Wastes
Well I would still need to think about my perk progression (I think i'll spend a LOT of time in the initial SPECIAL stat allocation)
Why? At the end of the day it doesn't matter, since you will max it all out sooner or later. There is no pressure to make the right choice, as there are no consequences. All you choose is not which perks you get, but in what order, as eventually you will get all the ones you want and more.
frajaq
It Wandered In From the Wastes
You'll need to play a LOT on the same character just to reach that max lvl to get it all, at that point I'll probably be trying out another character with different builds
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
Real possibility that people are just going to get bored before they max out everything. It was possible to do it in Skyrim, but it was really, really tedious to do so. It's entirely possible that despite "faster leveling" the XP requirements for levels past 100 are a bit exorbitant. Just by the logic that "by this point, players should have been able to unlock everything they really care about doing."
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
Leveling up in Skyrim was actually detrimental to the player.
AgentBJ09
Vault Dweller
Have to completely disagree there. Fallout is not just about shooting things in the face, and if that's all it is in terms of an RPG, then you're not playing a CRPG anymore, but an ARPG. And we have plenty of those already. Diablo, Victor Vran, Borderlands, etc.
As for the game mechanics, here's something to consider: If Shin Megami Tensei's designers did the same thing to their series that Bethesda Game Studios does with each new entry of TES/Fallout -- strip away certain mechanics or fuse them with others, downplay the many religious overtones of the stories and the outcomes of the decisions you make in those stories, lower the difficulty of the Normal setting with each game, and have less interesting companions -- the SMT series would not be as big as it is.
To quote Yahtzee here, "A game where the player can do anything is a game that focuses on nothing."
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
Though they actually made this less of a problem than it was in Oblivion. Oblivion had the worst leveling system of any game ever. It's ironic that Bethesda can even say "the Fallout 3 leveling system was too confusing" when they're the people who made Oblivion.
frajaq
It Wandered In From the Wastes
That's not a very fair comparison is it? Are Shin Megami Tensei's games Open world and easily modded like Bethesda games? Bethesda felt like they needed do change stuff from F3/NV to F4 and I feel these new changes are nice.
MercenarySnake
Kept you waiting huh?
I doubt they'll make you grind for copious amounts of XP since i'm sure they would get bored without being able to choose another "awesome" perk.
I could be wrong though, I still wonder if higher difficulties = bullet sponges with an overabundance of health rather then adding more enemies.
I could be wrong though, I still wonder if higher difficulties = bullet sponges with an overabundance of health rather then adding more enemies.
PossibleCabbage
Vault 22 Survivor
I'm not sure, really, Fallout 3 and New Vegas both gave out a lot of XP. If you're anything close to a completionist you'll run into the level cap well before you run out of stuff to do (after Fallout 4 was announced, I replayed Fallout 3 to try to convince myself that it wasn't all bad, and I hit the level cap right before going to Point Lookout while Dad was still alive.)
It's more likely that either you will be massively more powerful than your opponents for the majority of the game, or that the cumulative effects of all those perks and stat ups aren't going to be that dramatic anyway.
AgentBJ09
Vault Dweller
It's actually a very fair comparison, for a number of reasons.
#1 - Both series are RPGs; one being open-world doesn't lessen the comparison potential, and even if I used The Legend of Zelda instead...
#2 - The SMT games are not moddable because they don't NEED to be moddable. They're console games, working off JRPG/monster collection mechanics that have been used for just as long as TES has been around, and for longer than Fallout, in multiple series. TES, and Bethesda's Fallout, on the other hand constantly have their combat/magic/dialogue systems overhauled with each entry, and that leads to...
#3 - Most mods for Bethesda games are not content mods. They're optimization/overhaul mods. SkyUI, The Unofficial Patches, Wanderer's Edition, Skyrim Redone, Midas Magic, .ini fixes, graphical/model/mesh upgrades, etc. The SMT series, console games or not, have no need for mods like those versus, if someone did open up mod possibilities for them, new quests and dialogue because the core formula is iron-clad already. And on that note...
#4 - Most of us know, from a decade of watching Bethesda, that their way of approaching mechanics of new entries is counter to the goal of improving what came before. Howard has even said this himself, that their games are not iterative but new creations. If they stuck with proven designs, it would lessen their need to make the new stuff so appealing to an audience that only comes because mods and other shallow reasons like those.
MercenarySnake
Kept you waiting huh?
They might be necessary in order to keep up with the enemy scaling like Skyrim or else you feel overwhelmed since they love those 25% damage increase perks as we can already see with Bloody Mess.
frajaq
It Wandered In From the Wastes
Pretty sure the games being open world change a LOT of stuff about how you develop it. Also I kinda like how Bethesda always tries out new things with each new game but I know that not everyone likes that.
It's really not so much about if we like or don't like it.
We, or at least I, have absolutely zero issues with developers who are experimenting, trying new things and coming up with new systems. However this is certainly ONE way to develope games, but it is not necessarily always the best approach. It might be alright if you have always a new game with completely different targets, going from Sci-Fi-First-Person-Shootes to some top-down Fantasy RPG. This is what Obsidian is doing as well, and it works, see the difference from Kotor, to New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, all are vastly different in their gameplay and mechanics. And I am pretty sure that the people at Obsidian didn't treat the development of Kotor the same way as like Vegas or Pillars of Eternity. But do you have to do this, always trying to redefine the wheel with each new game? With the same franchise? Which also follows more or less the same kind of gameplay, like playing always in first/third person?. Particularly when you already have foundation to work with, namely Fallout 1/2s system.
I mean if you have issues with your roof, do you always start the improvement with building a whole new basement? You probably could, and sometimes it is even necessary, if the damage is to big. But it would be very uneconomic approach if you do it all the time no matter how severe the damage to the roof is. You're not tearing down the building just because of a broken shingle.
And some of us feel that Beth could eventually achieve a lot more in terms of quality if they focused less on such things or if they would eventually change some of their design plans. Like going straight from brain-storming to the production phase - which I think was the real reason why no one actually steped up for a min and saying, wait a min? Isnt Fawkes immune to radiation? What if the player drags him along and asks him to start the purifier? THose kind of things can be easily avoided by a correct foundation in pre-production and save you time and head aches later in development.
But that is the difference between Obsidian and Bethesda. Obsidian is a company which can follow a lot of different approaches and work with many different gameplay ideas creating spiritual successors. Bethesda is more less a one-trick ponny that will use one, and only one, approach for all of their projects. You could probably give them Need for Speed or Dawn of War game and they would find a way to turn it in to a game that fitts first and foremost their TES/First-Person/Open-world formula rather than to find a way to actually make a successor to the previous titles.
We, or at least I, have absolutely zero issues with developers who are experimenting, trying new things and coming up with new systems. However this is certainly ONE way to develope games, but it is not necessarily always the best approach. It might be alright if you have always a new game with completely different targets, going from Sci-Fi-First-Person-Shootes to some top-down Fantasy RPG. This is what Obsidian is doing as well, and it works, see the difference from Kotor, to New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, all are vastly different in their gameplay and mechanics. And I am pretty sure that the people at Obsidian didn't treat the development of Kotor the same way as like Vegas or Pillars of Eternity. But do you have to do this, always trying to redefine the wheel with each new game? With the same franchise? Which also follows more or less the same kind of gameplay, like playing always in first/third person?. Particularly when you already have foundation to work with, namely Fallout 1/2s system.
I mean if you have issues with your roof, do you always start the improvement with building a whole new basement? You probably could, and sometimes it is even necessary, if the damage is to big. But it would be very uneconomic approach if you do it all the time no matter how severe the damage to the roof is. You're not tearing down the building just because of a broken shingle.
And some of us feel that Beth could eventually achieve a lot more in terms of quality if they focused less on such things or if they would eventually change some of their design plans. Like going straight from brain-storming to the production phase - which I think was the real reason why no one actually steped up for a min and saying, wait a min? Isnt Fawkes immune to radiation? What if the player drags him along and asks him to start the purifier? THose kind of things can be easily avoided by a correct foundation in pre-production and save you time and head aches later in development.
But that is the difference between Obsidian and Bethesda. Obsidian is a company which can follow a lot of different approaches and work with many different gameplay ideas creating spiritual successors. Bethesda is more less a one-trick ponny that will use one, and only one, approach for all of their projects. You could probably give them Need for Speed or Dawn of War game and they would find a way to turn it in to a game that fitts first and foremost their TES/First-Person/Open-world formula rather than to find a way to actually make a successor to the previous titles.
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AgentBJ09
Vault Dweller
No, being open world simply means there's more of an emphasis on making the world worth exploring. SMT does this well enough with demon fusion, the dialogue you read from them, and good story that has you making tough choices. Bethesda does this by the promise of loot with which you'll take on higher level enemies and get more loot.
Again, to quote Yahtzee: "I asked a WoW player once, "Why do you raid?" "To get the best items," they would say. "What do you use the best items for?" to which they replied, "To raid with.""