It's been a while, but I seem to remember them saying the exact same thing about Fallout 3. Todd says alot of things.
Fallout 4 coming out on November 10, free mobile spin-off out now
- Thread starter WorstUsernameEver
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It's been a while, but I seem to remember them saying the exact same thing about Fallout 3. Todd says alot of things.
Hardboiled Android
Vault Fossil
Eh, it did look better to me in the trailer. Still blocky and awkward, still dumb as a brick AI, but better
I'm hoping that they won't transform player into an android in vault sequence at start ( you are missing 12 special points compared to rest of the games, skills are missing though). Settlement building is a nice addon, and i hope to see more of quest that are neither fetch quests or kill everything/clear location. The things that betsheda could do better is:
-try to show a few places with quality restoration ( vault city and NCR from f2), not everything has to be a dump
-> apply that to settlements, not every single style has to be broken, bomb out type
-> NV also iritated me with that but at least they included farms
- sense of adventure
-> the biggest problem with a switch to 3d is a lack of tools to easily implement an event
-> examples are ( playing chess with scorpion, vault citizenship test, comedy routine in NR and so on, f2 again)
-> they should try to get 3d equivalent of stuff like that into f4
-try to show a few places with quality restoration ( vault city and NCR from f2), not everything has to be a dump
-> apply that to settlements, not every single style has to be broken, bomb out type
-> NV also iritated me with that but at least they included farms
- sense of adventure
-> the biggest problem with a switch to 3d is a lack of tools to easily implement an event
-> examples are ( playing chess with scorpion, vault citizenship test, comedy routine in NR and so on, f2 again)
-> they should try to get 3d equivalent of stuff like that into f4
mef
Where'd That 6th Toe Come From?
I think the bigger problem with 3D is that they took things too literally - in a small village Shady Sands there are like 30 npcs and 5 houses, but that doesn't mean there are only 30 people in the entire village. In Megaton, which is one of the biggest prospering towns in entire Capital Wasteland there are like 20 npcs and one brahmin (and an atomic bomb). It's not as easy to take it as collusive, when looking at it in first-person perspective. Also, people without armor absorbing bullets like a sponge and limbs exploding from a 9mm... maybe it's just me, but it was all better in 2D, because you knew it was just an illustration, not as literal.
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That's one of the big differences between 3D and the approach by Fallout 1/2. You don't have to render everything or show everything to the player, he can fill out the rest in his mind without any trouble. Just show him a couple of buildings and farms on the endge of the map. It's easy to imagine that it is a place with thousands of people. In game like F3, Vegas or F4 everything has to be rendered and shown to the player, and it still feels way to small sometimes. The so called tows in F3? Or even the Strip in Nev Vegas. I think NV did a better job than F3, but everything was still way to close to each other. LIke how the Boomers make this big thing out of their "journey" that took months where I am thinking to my self, yeah It's just a 5 min walk ...
And we know Todd is always correct and 100% honest with everything he's saying.
What he talked about:
What he delivered:
And we know Todd is always correct and 100% honest with everything he's saying.
What he talked about:
What he delivered:
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Size is definitely an issue with 3D games. I think Daggerfall is the only RPG that implemented a world in a realistic scale, meaning that towns are realistically sized with sizeable distances in between and so on. But it's hard to implement, and using procedural generation like Daggerfall is almost inevitable.
AnchorsAweigh
First time out of the vault
There is nothing wrong with having an old school world map to travel around on, and preferably one like in F1/F2 where you are free to travel and explore anywhere you want. All the locations of interest can still be 3D for the first person perspective, which you enter when you get there, while still having a more realistic world size. And implementing small, procedurally generated 3D environments for random encounters wouldn't be difficult. Some sort of tile system with pre-made "set pieces" could do it. I never understood why the idea of having a seamless, but tiny, world is so important to some people, when you still have loading screens and separate map areas for towns and indoor locations. I'd rather have more interesting small areas, than one big largely empty area.
As for the limited number of NPC's in Bethesda's games, that has nothing to do with how they "translated" 2D isometric games to 3D, but is a consequence of their severely limited game engine. It simply can't handle any larger numbers of people without using hardware resources weaker PC's and consoles lack.
As for the limited number of NPC's in Bethesda's games, that has nothing to do with how they "translated" 2D isometric games to 3D, but is a consequence of their severely limited game engine. It simply can't handle any larger numbers of people without using hardware resources weaker PC's and consoles lack.
The funny part is, I mean I can only talk for my self but I had always the feeling back than that we would one day get the technology which allows us to have the same size, but with better graphics and some more. Or a game like Fallout or if you want Baldurs Gate giving you real dynamic storytelling, NPCs, AI and a huge living world.
Interesting that the "technology" they use today doesn't allow them really to make worlds bigger than one of Daggerfalls towns ... and probably with much less NPCs as well.
Infact beacause most of the stuff has to fitt on the "TV" and more importantly also requires voice acting the writting has to be as short as possible as well.
Pretty much everything is taking a step back in favour of "visual" fluffs ...
mef
Where'd That 6th Toe Come From?
I am aware of this, that's why New Vegas locations are so small and have so few npcs running around. But it's still switching to 3D's fault. And of course there are other problems, for example big locations would be a pain to go through - running back and forth in Freeside is already tiresome.
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Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
Was Gamebryo even meantto be used for Open World games? Does anyone else use it for such a game? I mean people say it looks ugly but Catherine ran on Gamebryo and it was a beautiful game (on account of it being smaller scale).
There is a ton of MMOs that use Gamebryo. So yeah, I think so. Gamebryo isn't bad per se, it's mostly what Bethesda did to and with it.
RangerBoo
Resident Schizo Poster
Its because they think the audience is stupid. Look at all the pre-orders for Fallout 4 and how many people watched the trailer(in two weeks it was watched more then the trailer for Arkham Knight, Witcher 3 and Mad Max!
). We live in the "Avatar Generation" and what I mean by that is that devs, publishers and marketing big wigs think that the audience don't like story telling or are incapable of thought and all they want today is to look at pretty things, gimmicks, explosions, guns, tits and ass and feel like they are riding a roller coaster. I for one am tried of being treated like an immature child and wish that these types of games will fail hard. That way these idiots will have to actually put effort into their work and hire real writers.
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I think they do putt effort in to their work. They are not stupid after all, Todd and his fellow developers know pretty well what sells, and more importantly how to sell it. That's the point. I would guess that they spend a lot of time and money on marketing, research and such. And it turns out, Fallout 3, Skyrim, Oblivion etc. offer to a lot of people exactly what they want. Mindless fun with a sandbox experience. I mean thinking about it, there is no surprise that *THIS is a very big selling point of F4. Playing your male character in a red female dress fucking things up with his teddy-bear luncher ... that's really what it is at it's core. Compared to a game like The Witcher 3 where you simply can't harm an NPCs, because for a Witcher, for Gerald in particular, it doesn't make sense from a role playing persepctive. - This is also a difference between Fallout in general and a game like The Witcher, Fallout offers you a lot more freedom here. But the issue is that Fallout 3 and most probably 4 concentrate way to much on the "whacky" part of it rather than offering people actually a great way to role play in different ways. The sad thing is that you can't probably even play a psychopath because the "important" characters will be immortan again and forget all your crimes after 2-3 days ...
*I love it how he says "How fun and special a Fallout game can be ..." because we all know that Fallout 1 and 2 are of course solely remembered for the kind of violence they offered and in how many ways you can incapacitate the bad guys.
You can pretty much do almost everything with every game engine, really. The question is more about how much time and resources you have. Some people in their free time modified Duke Nukem 3D so heavily that it looks pretty amazing, when you consider how old it is.
Certain engines can do things better than others, of course, but it is all more or less math really, vectors and such. With new engines the algorythms and code can work very often more efficiently, like when you consider a jump from HTML to HTML with CSS and such where things simply become more efficient and that efficency allows you to do more eventually. I am by no means an expert. But what it really boils down to is how much time they spend to modify the engine to their needs.
It seems that Bethesda, most of the time, isn ot very keen on quality testing in that regard. They either do a bad job of modifying the engine, or they simply don't spend enough time on doing it.
*I love it how he says "How fun and special a Fallout game can be ..." because we all know that Fallout 1 and 2 are of course solely remembered for the kind of violence they offered and in how many ways you can incapacitate the bad guys.
You can pretty much do almost everything with every game engine, really. The question is more about how much time and resources you have. Some people in their free time modified Duke Nukem 3D so heavily that it looks pretty amazing, when you consider how old it is.
Certain engines can do things better than others, of course, but it is all more or less math really, vectors and such. With new engines the algorythms and code can work very often more efficiently, like when you consider a jump from HTML to HTML with CSS and such where things simply become more efficient and that efficency allows you to do more eventually. I am by no means an expert. But what it really boils down to is how much time they spend to modify the engine to their needs.
It seems that Bethesda, most of the time, isn ot very keen on quality testing in that regard. They either do a bad job of modifying the engine, or they simply don't spend enough time on doing it.
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Kind of ironic, is'nt it? The company that made that game, makes some of the most cramped games I've ever encountered. I really wish they'd use the real worldspace to actually make some interesting locations and use a travelmap to move between locations like the classics.
Centurion 101
First time out of the vault
Yeah. World map travel is probably the best way to do this rather than making A) a bigass world that costs incredible man-hours to generate or fancy procedural generation or B) makes the player walk for hours. I have some insight into this, I have made some map mods for the ArmA series. My latest creation is a 30x30km map generated from high-quality material from the National Land Survey of Finland. Basically, walking around it is a pain in the butt. You need vehicles for that kind of scale, and vehciles radically change the gameplay. A world map travel system allows the player the joy of exploration and discovery without creating the need for massive worlds. Of course, the modern generation of gaming seems to prefer the microcosm style approach where everything is next door in the same worldspace because it is supposedly more realistic.
That being said, I had a lot less problems with FO3s DC wasteland than New Vegas Mojave Desert or Skyrim, because in the Mojave or Skyrim it really shatters your immersion when an entire province is an hours walk across, whereas one bombed out city and it's outskirts is a lot more plausible.
AnchorsAweigh
First time out of the vault
Yeah, the paradoxal thing with Bethesda's games is that, from a role-playing perspective, there is too much freedom, since the only way to give the player all that freedom is for it to come without any sort of consequences. As you say, Geralt can't run around murdering innocent civilians since in CDProject's games there would be severe repercussions to doing that, making the game unplayable as a witcher. In Fallout 3 you can nuke the biggest town in the Capital Wasteland and Daddy Neeson's only reaction will be expressing some disappointment with you -- he'll still love you, though, don't worry! -- even though he's spent his entire life trying to save just those people. Freedom without consequences turns a game into GTA, which can be fun and all, but it isn't (and can never be) a role-playing game. RPG's need meaningful choices.
Walpknut
This ghoul has seen it all
But seeing how people think that casualization is actually a good thing nowadays and preorder games by the boatload it's not like the yare doing bad moves.
People have just gotten dumber it seems. Man that second Videogam Crash can't come any faster? We have all the ingredients of the first one + penny pinching and predatory business models, what else do we need?
People have just gotten dumber it seems. Man that second Videogam Crash can't come any faster? We have all the ingredients of the first one + penny pinching and predatory business models, what else do we need?
Yeah, the biggest problem would probably be loading screens; I think people are more or less allergic to it. Also; Bethsofts customers are used to their special kind of cramped worlds filled with "interesting" places to discover. Having a world map system, that'd either be automatic or statbased and I doubt either would fall in favour with their customer base.
Might work if the sectioned off pieces are interesting enough though.
I'll have to have a look at that map some time...
No internet. "There's a sucker born every minute"-Barnum(IIRC Edit; Spelling) and the internet is fertile ground for suckers. The reach is amazing.
The AAA companies will be safe, no chance in hell that they can crash - their products have so much PR behind them that they're essentially assured some manner of success.
MaulYoda
NCR Diplomat
To be fair, one hour in real time is equal to 12.5 days in in-game time (one hour is about five minutes in Fallout 3, NV, and Skyrim). Maybe that's still a little short, although you can bike from NYC to LA in 10 days and I assume a bike and a horse move at about the same speed (I'm also assuming the U.S. and Skyrim are of similar size). It also only takes ten hours two walk from Las Vegas to the Hoover Dam, and New Vegas is basically centered around Vegas rather than trying to cram in huge swaths of Maryland and Virginia around D.C., so it's inevitably a little smaller.
I guess my point is that the in-game times are pretty accurate for distance. People don't just sit around all day and play video games, and having realistic distances in a 3D map would make getting anywhere take forever. If it took me a week to walk across Skyrim, I'd have to play it 24/7, and since I won't, it might take a month or two real time to get from Solitude to Riften, which is ridiculous. Fallout 1/2 had the grid-map, which let you travel larger distances in shorter times (plus Fallout 2 had the car), but that also meant there wasn't much interesting to see in between the major settlements aside from the occasional and humorous random encounter. So I much prefer the 3D world.
MaulYoda
NCR Diplomat
A proliferation of useless consoles that all play the same games? Poor critical reviews in addition to just one small Internet community complaining about how stupid everyone else is? Video games are about as healthy as they've ever been, the whole sexism issue aside. What we can hope for, more realistically, is that some developers value story and role-playing elements more than cool set pieces and action in an RPG, and Bethesda throws fans a bone by letting Obsidian either work with them on Fallout 4 (unlikely since a lot of people seem to think Fallout 3 was wholistically better for some reason) or that they can develop their own Fallout game every once in a while.
Also, I think every generation complains about how stupid every subsequent generation is. It may be true sometimes (although the rise in college education seems to suggest this next generation is smarter than their parents), but at some point, it's just a losing battle