New developer diary at Bethesda

coming to think of it, how difficult would it be to make multiple maps of states.

So lets say we were in the old area in fallout 1 then click on let say something like a caravan, vertibird (if we go that route) or some other deal and have multiple states with multiple locations to explore.

even better yet have actions in every state affect every other state.

ok am i getting out of control here?
 
No offense to the guy that did the fan art 3D model of the old laser rifle because I think he did a great job. However, after looking at the old laser rifle and looking at the new laser rifle. I really like the new one much better.

The thing that has really struck me about a lot of the bethesda designs.. (minus the nukapult, which I am sure is an "easter egg" like the alien blaster or the red ryder)... is that most of them have quite a bit of "engineering", I mean they really seem to have put a lot of thought into what the functionality, feasibility and inherent design flaws. Now I am not talking about all of their designs.. like the future chainmail.. but in the power armor and the laser rifle. I mean the laser rifle actually LOOKS like a laser in the bethesda art.

It's not all perfect but in general I think they have put a bit of industrial design effort into the style and design of a lot of the art we have seen. More quite frankly than the original games. Not that I didn't love the originals, but I think you have to have some respect for some of the designers.

I took a while and looked at the artwork that was originally created for Van Buran and I have to say.. I hadn't looked at it in a long time. I think if the same artwork came out and it was from bethesda and you had never seen it before you guys would be spouting the same shit you are on the bethesda stuff. "Blobs.. blobs ain't fallout! Gas Robot.. gas robot ain't fallout!.. etc."

Really I know the BOS is a little contrived in the "summary" that we saw.. though it is "acceptable" in my book. I really understand it is kind of a catch 22. I mean they wanted a new location that had not been done.. somewhere with some meat.. like DC.. but they also have to try to keep not only the environment and spirit of the original.. but if they don't include some of the orignal factions or characters than some (admitable less rabid) fans would be disappointed.

I honestly think that the mutants (even with a possibly different origin) and the BOS are probably only two of many factions that you will encounter, and they are brought in a way to connect to the originals without simply "giving a facelift" to the original games.

I personally am still excited to play the game. I do have worries that some of the stuff could turn out bad. I really really hope they don't go over the top on the cursing like sailors.

I just downloaded the PS3 demo of Kane and Lynch or whatever, just to see how bad it was. I think the devs on that game wanted the main characters to sound "tough" but it just comes off SO wrong. If you have a PS3 which I am sure is sacrilege in this forum, you should download the demo to see what I mean.. it really sucks.

Anyway.. I think some of you guys should maybe.. just maybe give a little slack before you die of a coronary before the game even comes out.. I mean hell if that happens.. who is going to bitch about it after it comes out?
 
A lot of us are adopting a wait and see policy. However, that doesn't stop us from commenting on whatever bethesda leaks out in their press releases.

A lot of us took a wait and see policy for FPOS and only commented on the bits and pieces Interplay released. We said what we liked (which I don't think was much) and what we disliked. After getting enough press info, we already guessed that it would suck donkey nuts and we were damn right (I mean BAWLS advertisements and BOS hooker soldiers come on). In fact, where are all the wait and see apologists for FPOS now eh?

Since we really want a good sequel, we are going to put in our two cents and hope the devs listen. Instead, bethesda followed an arrogant policy of "we do what we do best". Even worse, just because many NMA members didn't lick the beth boot, we were written off as a bunch of rabid idiots with nothing important to contribute. At this point, as with FPOS, a few members understandably got pissed and adopted a more aggressive stance towards bethesda and their "re-invention ideas" that make little or no sense.

PS: One thing I never understood was why would a company alienate their primary fan base for fallout? I mean were it not for fans, the only other target audience woul d be the masses and I am sure they would rather spend their money on much more advanced and shinier fps games.
 
I'm probably jaded enough to carry the hate torch for Fallout 3 into the next decade.

They didn't care about fresh BTW, it's simple logistics, it's CHEAPER for them to map out somewhere nearby, say DC where their actual offices are near enough that they can just send some intern out to find out how the general lay of the land is in the city without having to pay for any of the travel expenses or whatnot for the bloke to get sent to the west coast to research the original locations so that they can actually make a cohesive game there.

I bet you dollars to donuts, at least 80% of the game will be situated within the city itself, rather than the surrounding areas as well.

Fallout 1 spanned several metropolitan areas and almost covered the entire western seaboard of the United States, but I guess it's more immersive to be stuck in one city and 'pretend' it's an expanding world that your choices actually effect.

And what's so great about the plumbing fixture turned laser pistol?

I hate to break it to you, but there's NOTHING Fallout about Fallout 3, it's just like the PnP game had to re-write all the names because the gits at either Bethesdia or Herve collectively ignored their agreement to make a PnP Fallout game.

Instead they could have saved 3 mil, came up with their own ideas for once, and made a game that was original for a change, or is that too tough for the Bethsoft of today?

Over 75% of FiNO 3 is Bethesdia's spin on Fallout, that has absolutely nothing to do with, or even closely resembles Fallout, instead of calling them vaults, they could have called them Immurshun Bunkers, and the pip boy could have been a pop gal and you'd have a completely separate game!

Hell the only thing they'd have to worry about is the fething Brahmn, after all that's about the only thing they've gotten right so far!
 
Mord_Sith said:
Instead they could have saved 3 mil, came up with their own ideas for once, and made a game that was original for a change, or is that too tough for the Bethsoft of today?
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I agree. If bethesda thinks "their way automatically equals success",why not just make their own game?
 
The same PnP game which also drew bile and hate from this very board.

Seriously, it is entertaining to see how petty and picky some of you guys can be. I am glad that the developers DON'T pay more attention to the majority of your whining.. "it's not purple enough... it's too purple."

This isn't directed at anyone in particular in this thread and not anyone in particular.. but it's like I don't think anyone could come up with anything that would make the majority of the people posting here happy. Sure your first answer is "make it turn-based and isometric", but really you know in your heart it would quickly devolve into some other vitriolic diatribe

I support what they have done so far.. sure I have a few reservations... but I don't know a game I haven't had reservations about when it was being developed.

I have hung around here since.. well before it got this domain (I think).. how ever long that is.. or maybe it was just the old duck and cover site.. all those years ago... who knows.. so it's not like I haven't cared about the games.. or I am some jonny come lately. Sure I never posted, but then I never felt I really needed to. But hell, I see al these gems of hate and it's like.. you know somebody has to be a little positive.. because this feedback loop of whining is never going to get the large and quiet group of old old fans.. that are actually looking forward to this game to post or hang out here.

I always come back to check the news to see if there is something new, because I actually am looking forward to this new game.
 
Are you guys calling the power armor under-armor the future chainmail? 'cause I actually liked the under-armor concept. The weapons I'm iffier on, but this gives the power armor more of a "Space suit with armor plating and hydraulics" flavor I think is pretty good. Sorta http://www.astronautix.com/craft/marodiii.htm that with points to attach the armor.

'course, in game it's probably just a click and equip thing like with plate in medieval RPGs, but it makes a little more sense than the solid glob of metal FO1 suits. I still like FO1's suits mind you, this just makes more sense to me.
 
Well I personally am open to compromise.

Like why not allow for a free roaming camera? If the action junkies want their FPS, they got it. For the ISO crowd, well then switch to ISO.

As for the turn-based versus real time debate, I admit I prefer turn based. It puts more emphasis on tactics then twitch reflexes. If you need an example then look no further than mass effect. Besides the dialogue portions, the game is pretty much a shooter, or pause, use a skill that at maxed out levels has a cooldown of 40 seconds and all that time start twitch shooting again.

Lastly, the potential for better AI is easier if one set of commands is processed at a time then putting a whole group of ai under one generic set of commands. As someone with programming experience, Rosh explains it much better in his newbie guide.

xenophile said:
This isn't directed at anyone in particular in this thread and not anyone in particular.. but it's like I don't think anyone could come up with anything that would make the majority of the people posting here happy. Sure your first answer is "make it turn-based and isometric", but really you know in your heart it would quickly devolve into some other vitriolic diatribe
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Well apparently everyone focuses on two items in particular. And that is the iso turnbased discussion. Wow, two items. Tell me again how it is too difficult for bethesda to implement those two simple ideas to please, wow everyone.

Yes everyone has different opinions on armor/weapon/character designs whatnot but there are a few basics that everyone agrees on.

1. When you can compare supermutants to orcs in LOTR, not good.

2. Redesigning the style of armor when Fallout 1 and 2 had it down already. Why bother wasting time creating these various mostly implausible explanations for the change when you can just stick to the source material?

3. Redesigning weapons when there already is a plethora or weapon art established from F1 and F2.

4. Completely changing the objectives of the Brotherhood. No matter how you cut it, the idea of the BOS sending a large contingent of men on a thousand something mile journey while they are already suffering shortages in man power does not make sense.

4B. The BOS apparently thought "The Glow" was not worth risking losing precious manpower and limited material resources to what they considered a snipe hunt. Now tell me how much of a better idea is it to have them go on a thousand mile cross-country trip for same said snipe hunt that would consume ten or more times the amount of material whether it be food, armor, weapons or ammunition.

4C. Because its cool to make the BOS armor look like plate to better fit their image as "noble knights of the wasteland" to me is just stupid. They were never about helping others, but mainly themselves. Remember this is Fallout, not your average medieval fantasy. Paladin is a rank because they are a techno-religious organisation, not a knight that has been blessed by the powers of god and has to follow a lawful good alignment or risk losing his powers and becoming a regular fighter.

I could think of more but I think its enough for you to understand where many of us are coming from. So explain to me again why its so difficult for bethesda to answer such basic requests as above. After all they own the rights to Fallout so its their right to use pre-established material.
 
DarkCorp said:
I agree. If bethesda thinks "their way automatically equals success",why not just make their own game?
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I think this topic has been discussed to dead, I should now as I brought it up several times myself.
I believe this is how Brother None or someone else explained it; it was easier for Zenimax to get an existing franchise that already had something of a good reputation that start completely from scratch and risk that the game fails.

Fallout has a good name amongst the hard core RPG players, the only problem was that it never scored big enough to continue the series at a pace and a format we would have enjoyed more; complete RPG.
For Zenimax it was simply an affordable franchise on which they could make a bundle of money.

They don't really care how the game is made as long as it attracts at least several hundred thousands of gamers who repay the development costs by paying for it.

All I am saying now is, why still call it Fallout 3?
It will only confuse the Xbox360 crowd who think that PCs are weak game machines.
Just call it Fallout because in essense you have already started the series over in your own vision.

Edit:

Well Xenophile, let me be blunt, and this goes to quite some of the crowd who loves Bethesda's FO3 and thinks were are a bunch of retarded fossile who's mindset is ten years in the past.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

If you are positive about the damn game, fine, but Bethesda has its own forum for Fallout too you know, and you can write about how backwards and restrained in thinking some of the NMA people are there too.

I tend to be polite for a long time but even I have my limits.

Its one thing of updating a game in order to attract more buyers but this is not an update. The concept has been simply pulled off the franchise and glued onto another series.
 
The AI thing with Turn-based isn't as critical any more I think. I am a developer (mostly high availability business apps), so I do quite a bit of multi-thread programming.

Now a days you have so many cores that you can devote independant AI code to, especially the PS3 (2 main cores, 7 co-processing cores) and XBox360 (6 main cores). Even the average desktop pc has 2 main cores that can do quite a bit of work. Of course the AI is only as good as the programmers, but the amout of power you have at "realtime" is much more than you used to have in the old turn-based games.

I just looked an old comparison from a few years ago.. just to give an idea of what we are talking about. Now I know that ther.e are different overheads and that this is a synthetic benchmark, but if you look at the performance of a system that you would have expected to run Fallout on, say a Pentium 233MMX and compare that to what I would consider an old computer in today's terms.. say an Athlon 64 3700+(single core, not even dual core).

SiSoft Sandra 2004 Pro-CPU Bench (Dhrystone)
Athlon 64 3700+: 11099
Pentium 233MMX: 292

You can see there is an order of magnitudes difference. if you look at a modern high-end processor it's even larger. An Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 outputs 52425, 5x more than the old athlon. So you can imagine the AI that used to take some time in an old 1990's game can not only be inproved.. but also done in real-time.

Now that doesn't replace the "leasuirely" pace you can take to make you're decisions. I think that can be accomplished with real-time with pause, like a Neverwinter Nights. I don't think we really ever "need" to go back to turn-based. It opens so many tactical "loop-holes" purely because of teh core mechanic that I just don't like it's lack of tactical realism.

I used to like Turn-based alot more than I do lately, I still like the tactical games.
 
What am "I" doing here? Well I have browsed this site for years. I think "I" am part of a group of people that have and continue to drive traffic to this site, but happen to normally not be driven to post on the forums here.

I just decided.. I don't agree with the level of inane negativity and I might as well start posting what I think they are doing well. So people visiting this site won't think that everyone that visits this site is a melodramatic complainer.

I "like" getting all the news of what's going on with the game, because I am looking forward to it. I also like seeing all the other post apocolyptic games and media. What amazes me is how much time the people that DON'T like the game spend complaining about it. I mean if you don't like it why get yourselves all worked up into a berserker frenzy over it?
 
Xenophile said:
You can see there is an order of magnitudes difference. if you look at a modern high-end processor it's even larger. An Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800 outputs 52425, 5x more than the old athlon. So you can imagine the AI that used to take some time in an old 1990's game can not only be inproved.. but also done in real-time.
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Improved? How much? To say the level of a 2000, 2001 game? 2003 even, as a fan of tactical games I'd prefer a 2008 game to have 2008 level AI in Turn Based rather than 2003 level AI in real time.

No matter how better pcs get, devoting that power to one unit each turn is still going to trump handling multiple units at a time.

Xenophile said:
The thing that has really struck me about a lot of the bethesda designs.. (minus the nukapult, which I am sure is an "easter egg" like the alien blaster or the red ryder)... is that most of them have quite a bit of "engineering", I mean they really seem to have put a lot of thought into what the functionality, feasibility and inherent design flaws. Now I am not talking about all of their designs.. like the future chainmail.. but in the power armor and the laser rifle. I mean the laser rifle actually LOOKS like a laser in the bethesda art.
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Does it? What does a laser look like? Fallout's designs were going for 50's Science! not industrial realism. That's like complaining that Sam & Max aren't very realistic looking animals.
 
requiem_for_a_starfury said:
Does it? What does a laser look like? Fallout's designs were going for 50's Science! not industrial realism. That's like complaining that Sam & Max aren't very realistic looking animals.
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Exactly :D ! They are should recreate and expand the Fallout setting, not turn it into something it isn't, hey but they don't seem to be interested in what Fallout is and was intended tto be in first place :D .

Xenophile said:
I "like" getting all the news of what's going on with the game, because I am looking forward to it. I also like seeing all the other post apocolyptic games and media. What amazes me is how much time the people that DON'T like the game spend complaining about it.
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That's because we love Fallout and trueform cRPGs and we don't agree with the inane level of negativity that Bethesda has towards the original Fallout's design and towards the whole subgenre of trueform cRPGs.
Every word of hate said towards the Bethesda's abomination is a word of love of our Culture and our love of Fallout.
 
This and every thread is turning to same Beta vs VHS, BluRay vs HDDVD bs. At this point I want from Beth to rename the game to Afterfall, and I'll play it to see how is it. Raping the FO franchise, because of it's own inability to produce quality content, or just follow laid out premises is a thing that will enrage all old school fans.
However accusing Bath for wanting to make money, to attract more customers, to follow capitalist way of doing business is plain ridiculous. Interplay went to bankruptcy because of it's will to please hard core game base, then tried to salvage itself with 2 follow-ups, and went belly up. So if you want to blame someone for the franchise being on its deathbed - blame them for making and people who did not want to buy the shitty FOT and FOPOS. INT tried to pull out from the brink of death with FOPOS, correctly (in business sense) targeting console market with a FPS, because twitch kiddies do not have attention span for RPG. Then you buried them and are proud for taking part in destroying FOPOS sales. Good, if you are proud of that - you killed Interplay, and directly influenced what is going on now with FO3. Had Interplay earned money from 11!!One crowd with that piece of drek FOPOS, Van Buren could have happened. Now, we only have this piece of sh.t to act as FO sequel. If you can do any better, and make a true FO sequel, by all means do, make it and I will buy and gladly play it.

-> to laser gun crowd - from looking at the model do you really think that gun from FO could stand another 70 years of use, wear and tear?
 
Briosafreak said:
Interplay went to bankruptcy because of it's will to please hard core game base
Click to expand...

That definitely isn't true. Search around a bit and you'll find out why.
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Ok

Interplay went to bankruptcy in the large part (but not only) because of it's will to please hard core game base
 
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