NCR Correctional Facility

[Dogmeat Sandwich]

The best engine ever created would not make up for bad location design.

This. One thing Fallout 3 wins by a landslide is location design. Republic of Dave, Rivet City, Andale, Tenpenny Tower, that raider fort mill....sadly you don't see that kind of creative locations in NV.

Tenpenny Tower was probably the shittiest design in the entire FO universe. Seriously, a luxury hotel out in the middle of nowhere? It makes no sense at all. FO3 was a bunch of random shit that might be cool thrown together without much logic. FONV tried to create a coherent world in which locations had relationship to each other.




Also, I don't see why the prison needs a kitchen, seeing as most people (including the Courier) survive of stuff like junk food, cans of beans, and occasional fruit they find. The NCR could just bring a caravan full of edibles up every week and dump it in the courtyard. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that prisoners performing slave labor need fine gourmet food.

 

[KillgoreKillmore]

It has nothing to do with "fine gourmet food" and it has more to do with the fact that most government facilities have dining facilities.

Off Topic: [ When I was in the Army, there were chow halls every few blocks on post where you could go in, pay for a meal and get some food that's cooked for nutritional value and not for flavor. ]

So a Pre-war Prison facility wouldn't need a kitchen/dining facility/chow area to keep prisoners from dying from malnutrition and starvation?

[Have you ever seen somebody pass out while standing up all because they hadn't eaten and drank enough water? Because I have. I've seen soldiers hit the ground out of nowhere when I thought they were perfectly fine, and I asked them afterwards and they told me, " I'm on a diet, trying to lose some weight for the PT test. Oh they lost the weight on account I smoked the dog shit out of them for that.]

I didn't mean to get off topic, just trying to prove a point that a dining facility SHOULD be there but as has been pointed out already, the game engine prohibits them from adding all the extra non-sense.

 

[College_Fool]

I'd put a vote in for gameplay adequacy over literalism any day. You could pick on just about any location in the game for improbable logistics if you wanted. How do the hotels get supplied with food? Where are the brahmin-feed troughs? Who restocks all the stores in the game every 3 days or so, when there's no sign of traffic? Where are all the children? Why is there only one major populated farm in all of Vegas?

Etc.


As for the world design, I'd definitely put a vote in for FNV improving on FO3 by a large margin. That it's actually apparent where most settlements are is pretty good, and they also have a better feel for being, well, worth being called a town. Not perfect, by a long shot, but numbers and padding of the space within a settlement are appreciated.

Only natural it comes at a cost of the terrain, of course. You'd always have to project flex-space on everything: twenty seconds running inside a settled area has never been implied to be the same 'distance' for the same time running in the world. That sort of thing will never be able to be to scale, or else it would take us days of real time just to cross the map. Better things to do than that, really.

 

[Dogmeat Sandwich]

I'd put a vote in for gameplay adequacy over literalism any day. You could pick on just about any location in the game for improbable logistics if you wanted. How do the hotels get supplied with food? Where are the brahmin-feed troughs? Who restocks all the stores in the game every 3 days or so, when there's no sign of traffic? Where are all the children? Why is there only one major populated farm in all of Vegas?

I actually think there are pretty good answers to all of these in the game:

--the trading caravans do a good job of circulating; it's not unreasonable to think they stop by every couple days to trade with merchants (even though we never get to see this interaction)
--the NV strip hotels are likely buying direct from the NCR sharecroppers as well as wasteland merchants. Also, the Heck Gunderson side quest shows that they're getting food imported from the NCR (which presumably has much larger, more secure farms)
--there are tons of children in Westide, the BOS barracks, and other spots. My best guess is most families would try to resettle in the NCR (more peaceful) or end up in a slum (westside). Plus you can't put this all on the game- no killing children = no reason to put them in.
--there are tons of small farming operations around the wasteland. Every settlement has farms attached to it. Merchants also carry in goods from the NCR and other farms. People's main substance is likely brahmin meat and canned foods.

 

[Walpknut]

Maybe the prison was destroyed after the inmates revolted right after the Apocalypse? The fences and towers are made out of scrap metal, there is a lot of garbage, the cells have more bunk beds than they should, the toilets are rusted, there is only one infirmary, but there is a parking lot next to the prison, still not a complete justification.Towns in New Vegas tend to have crops and Brahmins, and the ones that don't (North Vegas Square) are shitholes were losers go to die.

 

[College_Fool]

I'd put a vote in for gameplay adequacy over literalism any day. You could pick on just about any location in the game for improbable logistics if you wanted. How do the hotels get supplied with food? Where are the brahmin-feed troughs? Who restocks all the stores in the game every 3 days or so, when there's no sign of traffic? Where are all the children? Why is there only one major populated farm in all of Vegas?

I actually think there are pretty good answers to all of these in the game:

I think you missed the word 'literalism.' None of the answers you mentioned, from what we can see in the game, could supply real-world needs of the scale we're talking about. There aren't enough caravans and pack-brahmin, not enough farms being worked producing not enough crops, and not enough just about everything in the game to actually meet needs of the scale we're told exist. It all requires projection and imagining answers and supplements to things we don't see.

Hence, a lack of literalism.

Which is good. We don't actually need the sharecropper farms to be the size needed to feed the Vegas we see: if they were, the farms alone would be the size of the entire world map in terms of the time it would take to run past them. We don't need caravans hundreds of brahmin long. We don't need towns with hundreds of houses.

Fallout is about representing things, not literally showing every detail to scale. A water pump is an adequate representation for a water source for a prison. Barracks are representation for shelter, whether the cots match the numbers of convicts or not (and the ydon't). Etc.

 

[:::SILUS:::]

Maybe the prison was destroyed after the inmates revolted right after the Apocalypse? The fences and towers are made out of scrap metal, there is a lot of garbage, the cells have more bunk beds than they should, the toilets are rusted, there is only one infirmary, but there is a parking lot next to the prison, still not a complete justification.Towns in New Vegas tend to have crops and Brahmins, and the ones that don't (North Vegas Square) are shitholes were losers go to die.

Ghettos are shitholes where losers go to die.

Nice.

 

[Nalano]

Ghettos are shitholes where losers go to die.

Nice.

Point being, they're unsustainable communities where people without means congregate.

Also, Vegas is surrounded on three sides by farms. NCR sharecroppers and Westside communes aside, the entire northern suburbs are private farms and ranches.

I for one am glad they're not to scale, because it already takes long enough to run from the entrance to Freeside to, say, the 188. Making it three times that distance would not make a better game.

 

[:::SILUS:::]

I for one am glad they're not to scale, because it already takes long enough to run from the entrance to Freeside to, say, the 188. Making it three times that distance would not make a better game.

What, it takes about 10 minutes to run from one side of the world to another. If anything, quality scaling is one thing this game needs bad.

 

[Nalano]

What, it takes about 10 minutes to run from one side of the world to another. If anything, quality scaling is one thing this game needs bad.

I seriously doubt anybody's willing to invest good money to develop a game where 80% of what you do is hump gear in a featureless desert expanse. Yeah, they could advertise that the game is "hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay" but if most of that is spending half an hour trekking to the next town, people would quickly bow out.

 

[Brother None]

There are games that have done this, or close to. Just Cause comes to mind, which advertised heavily for its huge, richely detailed island. But it ended up just being incredibly boring to trek back and forth across it.

The GTAs have always done it better, but while Bethesda is good at openworld design, they got nothing on Rockstar's skills.

Usually the best solution is to prioritize gameplay enjoyment over "sense of scale" and "realism".

 

[Lexx]

They could have made a Fallout 1 / 2 like worldmap for traveling and to balance things out, add huge empty wastelands around every priority location.


Of course, they could not, but imagine if...

 

[Crni Vuk]

well if Arma 2 can render a huge landscape almost a small nation if you want so ...

Size on one side is needed if you want to get a certain reaction or feeling from the player to simulate distance and isolation. How can you call a place "remote" or "separated" even from the rest of the world (like the capital wasteland) if anything is just a 5 min. walk from each other ? I mean why do I have to bend my imagination that heavily when there are ways how to get around it.

Obviously walking for 15 min. in a desert is no fun. Well probably today not anymore. But there are ways how to get around it and still offer a form of "size". What about ways of transportation between major settlements. Caravans for example. Or other ways to get around it. I has not to be about vehicles. But Lexx mentions the "fast travel" via map. It worked in previous Fallout games and I don't see why a first person game (lets face it ... it will probably stay in any new fallout game now) cant have something good from both worlds instead of "instant teleportation" or "nothing". There could be even quests involved in it where the player has to help to get a caravan route trough dangerous landscapes.

 

[Hassknecht]

I think Daggerfall did it right.
You could walk everywhere, but since the gamemap is twice the size of England, that would be kinda silly, so you get a worldmap to travel everywhere.
And it's one of the few games that has correctly sized cities.
But I guess that translating that scale into a modern game with modern graphics is going to eat up a lot of hardware, though.

 

[:::SILUS:::]

Yeah, they could advertise that the game is "hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay" but if most of that is spending half an hour trekking to the next town, people would quickly bow out.

NWA says hell no.

 

[Crni Vuk]

well no one says it has to be a direct 1:1 recreation of the real size.

maybe it is just me though but currently both Fallout 3 and Vegas feel like the size of a shoe box within a world which tries to tell you all the time how "desolate" everything is. Maybe I simply don't have the imagination for "first person games" with their modern "imershun". To use some words from the cool kids

 

[Surf Solar]

well if Arma 2 can render a huge landscape almost a small nation if you want so ...

Size on one side is needed if you want to get a certain reaction or feeling from the player to simulate distance and isolation. How can you call a place "remote" or "separated" even from the rest of the world (like the capital wasteland) if anything is just a 5 min. walk from each other ? I mean why do I have to bend my imagination that heavily when there are ways how to get around it.

Obviously walking for 15 min. in a desert is no fun. Well probably today not anymore. But there are ways how to get around it and still offer a form of "size". What about ways of transportation between major settlements. Caravans for example. Or other ways to get around it. I has not to be about vehicles. But Lexx mentions the "fast travel" via map. It worked in previous Fallout games and I don't see why a first person game (lets face it ... it will probably stay in any new fallout game now) cant have something good from both worlds instead of "instant teleportation" or "nothing". There could be even quests involved in it where the player has to help to get a caravan route trough dangerous landscapes.

Tell me how you would do exit grids leading to the worldmap in a first person game. You'd also need to build borders all around your worldspaces (if you don't like to have magical messages like "lol you can't go on here")

 

[KillgoreKillmore]

I'm amused by the fact people are still arguing.

How come a simple game designed by one guy has a larger map area (Minecraft) than a game that was supposed to be developed by the "Pro's"?

What ruins NV in regards to size aspect ratio is the fact that New Vegas itself is only four casinos. Even if you count the area around new Vegas and Freeside and Westside all included they're not even a 1/20th the size of Las Vegas.

And regards to boring open spaces:
Simple, make lots of raiders and caravans set up along the way; and all I meant to point out about NV is the fact that nothing seems sustainable and everyone would die a horrible death of starvation on account there's hardly any caravans traveling the 15 and other routes. They could have added Toll Booths along the way to allow allow you to gather supplies and maybe some special encounters.

 

[Richwizard]

Tell me how you would do exit grids leading to the worldmap in a first person game. You'd also need to build borders all around your worldspaces (if you don't like to have magical messages like "lol you can't go on here")

In such a game, the world space between major travel points could be rendered and there to explore. Exit grids may not be necessary. There should be an option for a fast travel mode that would put you on a large scale world map showing your position as you move, similar to the old Fallout maps, but with more detail. If you encounter anything along the way, you could be kicked out of "Travel" mode and back into the landscape at the extreme range of your ability to detect the encounter. Once you resolve the encounter, or avoid it, you could continue your overland travel.

This should not apply to finding new locations, only threats. If you need to move through the landscape to find a new location, you can.

 

[Surf Solar]

Tell me how you would do exit grids leading to the worldmap in a first person game. You'd also need to build borders all around your worldspaces (if you don't like to have magical messages like "lol you can't go on here")

In such a game, the world space between major travel points could be rendered and there to explore. Exit grids may not be necessary. There should be an option for a fast travel mode that would put you on a large scale world map showing your position as you move, similar to the old Fallout maps, but with more detail. If you encounter anything along the way, you could be kicked out of "Travel" mode and back into the landscape at the extreme range of your ability to detect the encounter. Once you resolve the encounter, or avoid it, you could continue your overland travel.

This should not apply to finding new locations, only threats. If you need to move through the landscape to find a new location, you can.

=meaning all those vast spaces need to be filled up. How? Probably with random generated terrain, full of... nothing and randomness. Sorry, but I can live with smaller gameworlds, as long as it means that stuff is placed by hand and not created with a random generator.