Swedish PC Gamer reviews Fallout 3

I'd say the explosions in the very early beta of DoW II look better in terrain deformation than this does.

But honestly, the point about "why care about graphics" has been raised more than once now and I agree, I don't really care how pretty explosions are...unless pretty explosions are all a game has to offer. Oblivion made up for some of its suck with pretty environmentals and Fallout 3 looks to do the same, but it won't get away with horrible animations and SFX as easily as Oblivion did.
 
At the very least I would expect a burn mark decal to be overlayed on top of the rubble to indicate that it had been seared and a bit of burning plasma to be strewn through the air around the fireball to make it seem as if it had some effect other than being a bright bloom of fire.

They use a ton of shaders and such on the pip-boy so we know this isn't beyond their ability.

Plenty of games do that, even fan made mods to games, like EGL for quake 2 which was written mostly by one guy in his 20s who had no professional programming experience.

EGL adds true dynamic lighting, smoke effects, burn decals, bullet/blast holes and a decent amount of gore to a 10 year old 3d engine, and it's explosion effects are more convincing than what they've done here, in an '08 title with a full programming staff and a team of graphic artists.

http://egl.quakedev.com/shots/effects/explosion05.jpg

kinda sad..
 
myzko said:
aenemic said:
dirtbag said:
aenemic said:
in how many games do you see the ground change around an explosion? it'd be one thing if not even placeables, corpses and such moved but expecting the ground itself to change shape and all of a sudden spew out rubble and stuff is just silly. it'd be totally awesome, but as far as I know there are no games that do that.
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Do you actually mean, that you have missed RED FACTION? A game whos PR was built mostly on destruction of the environment? It was released 2001, so geographic destruction is NOT new, or unexistent.
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hm, I used to play Red Faction a lot actually. but I have no memory of that. I guess that goes to show how little I care about such things.

but ok, so it exists. it's still not a common thing.
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I seriously doubt you have ever played Red Faction if you can't even remember that.. The only thing you did in that game was blow walls and tunnels! I felt like a fricking miner on mars!
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yeah, I'm lying. it makes me look cool.

dude, I know what games I've played. I played Red Faction 2. I remember large parts of the game. I remember pretty much the entire story line. I even remember driving around a huge tank and some other vehicles. but I don't remember blowing apart the terrain. I'm not doubting you, I'm sure you could do that. it just didn't leave an impression on me because it seems like that was the first thing I forgot about the game. hell, it was like 5 years ago. and I mostly played multiplayer. and I have pretty bad memory overall actually.
 
To make a world that big fully alterable would have taken 10 disks, tons of memory goes into alteration. When you save a game it is basically a bunch of switches being saved. Did you complete this quest? Yes (switch up) and you completed it evil (switch down) and that made this faction happy (switch up) and that faction mad (switch down). Very very little space. Even decoration is like that, Gnome on floor. Saved as a gnome and a x,y area on the floor. In many games you might notice if you put an object down facing west, when you save and load it faces east.

That being said, the degree of destruction would be thousands of switches saved, and if you say "well I don't care if it is saved or not" then you would be pointing out that you blew a hole in the earth then came back and everything was OK. It also changes game play and clipping and pathing then you fall through the world. Red Faction was known for having destructible environments, but poor aiming, graphics, poor motion of characters, didn't care for the game at all.

But one of the things I have been saying for a while is that there should be interactions with environments like the guy chained in the church or swings that don't swing or shooting chains that don't break. Rocks that fly when by an explosion. Impossible to make everything alterable but obvious things should be without much memory loss, but even some memory loss here means you are giving up memory for something else.

This is why I support the multiple cd's (like FFVII) and devs are so f'ing scared of for some reason. The cd themselves are practically free so they can not use that excuse. And one thing Todd Howard did say a few times is that he wished that they had more memory to play with. Even then one save on the hard drive would become pretty sizable, and that is not an option for the smaller hard drives of the consoles, but could work on the pc if you were willing to have big saves. Which is why for the time being pc games haven't died out, gives more options easier like this.

Also I heard that FFXIII is going to be multiple disks so maybe Square will break the seal for everyone else.

Again sorry for long post but should clear things up.

PS maybe the explosion looks "off the ground" because it is the end of the explosion and the explosion is disappearing from ground up.
 
Brother None said:
Didn't anyone notice how the nuclear explosion looks like it's pasted onto the background, floating slightly above the ground? Notice how there appears to be no area effect, no damage to the ground, the rubble directly beneath the blast remains inert.
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Maybe she hit an enemy higher up so the bottom of the blast didn't reach the ground. It looks horrible but wouldn't surprise me in the least.

aenemic said:
dude, I know what games I've played. I played Red Faction 2. I remember large parts of the game. I remember pretty much the entire story line. I even remember driving around a huge tank and some other vehicles. but I don't remember blowing apart the terrain. I'm not doubting you, I'm sure you could do that. it just didn't leave an impression on me because it seems like that was the first thing I forgot about the game. hell, it was like 5 years ago. and I mostly played multiplayer. and I have pretty bad memory overall actually.
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To be fair, Red Faction 2 didn't have nearly as much as the first game but it was still very present.
 
Humpsalot said:
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This is why I support the multiple cd's (like FFVII) and devs are so f'ing scared of for some reason. The cd themselves are practically free so they can not use that excuse. And one thing Todd Howard did say a few times is that he wished that they had more memory to play with. Even then one save on the hard drive would become pretty sizable, and that is not an option for the smaller hard drives of the consoles, but could work on the pc if you were willing to have big saves. Which is why for the time being pc games haven't died out, gives more options easier like this.

...
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One reasonyou don't see a lot of multiple disks for the Xbox360 is because after the second one, Microsoft jacks up the price for the third one. Which isn't helpful for the developers on a budget.
 
Look, they have Havok built in to Fallout 3, right?
Then it should have been easy for them to assign blocks of rubble physics values so that when a large enough explosion went off, the rubble would move.
Most modern games with a physics system do this.
Half Life 2, Max Payne 2, GTA IV, etc.
Deforming the terrain itself isn't strictly speaking necessary, just having the environment react in any way whatsoever is all that's required.

Oh, and to add to the list of really old games with deformable terrain, the Myth series did it 11 years ago. In fact, Myth was released in March of 1997, while Fallout was released in November.
 
Then it should have been easy for them to assign blocks of rubble physics value
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Oh, no no.. nothing is easy for Bethesda. Then you'd have twitching rubble caught in doors and whatnot.

Also, that nuclear explosion looks like a sprite. Seriously. Wolfenstein 3D used sprites.
 
About the screenshot I am mostly wondering where the bloom went. Do the Swedes get a bloom-free version, or is this just the result of the low quality scans? I'd much prefer less bloom than what we have seen so far.
 
FeelTheRads said:
Oh, no no.. nothing is easy for Bethesda. Then you'd have twitching rubble caught in doors and whatnot.
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Damn, I'd forgotten about that, and the sad fact of the matter is that you raising this makes me realise it's not even a joke. If Bethesda did make rubble a physics object, that's exactly what would happen.
 
About the screenshot I am mostly wondering where the bloom went. Do the Swedes get a bloom-free version, or is this just the result of the low quality scans? I'd much prefer less bloom than what we have seen so far.
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It seems to not be any bloom in that picture. It may have been turned of by the reviewer, or it's just missing.

I can provide a more Hi-res scan later if you want a better view of the explosion.
 
The weird thing is the rocket (watever) launchers rocket explosions look quite good, then again it is an explosive ball rather than something designed to explode on a flat surface.
 
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