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Re: Fallout 4

#226
Victor Tombs wrote:I have to say I had some deeply moving experiences in the TES games, alpan, but that may have as much to do with the in-game music as it did with the actual gameplay. :angel:
Indeed, Victor, Morrowind is one of my favourite games ever for precisely that reason -- the quality of its music, if not the quantity :)

At any rate, I have less of a problem with the gradual simplification of Elder Scrolls, because I have no problems with ES having less impactful decisions, or infinite quests, or forcing you to play a neutral or good-oriented character because the ES series have never really been about the idea of choice and consequence, unlike Fallout. I did dislike the introduction of heavier level scaling and (in particular) walled-off cities with Oblivion but these have been somewhat fixable by mods, and felt that Skyrim was generally an improvement over Oblivion.

You don't have any idea how difficult it is for me to be skeptical towards the next Elder Scrolls game, but it's just the natural result of my disappointment towards FO4.

Speaking of walled cities, I do believe Bethesda will have to think long and hard about having every city and every building have its own loading screen for the next ES game though -- The Witcher 3, in particular, makes it look particularly easy to have a technically competent open-world game, with few loading screens during actual gameplay, and certainly none during city/building transitions. :)
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Re: Fallout 4

#228
Flatfingers wrote:I'm about halfway through -- I think -- and so far it feels like a mixed bag.

Some things got "streamlined." Quests do feel a bit more fetchy (and, if you notice, fewer of them are things you can complete locally -- they want you to explore) and on rails.

On the other hand, they've clearly taken a page from Minecraft (first glimpsed, if dimly, in the Hearthfires expansion for Skyrim) in letting player go nuts crafting new things, including systems of sensors and powered switches... and they haven't even released their official modding kit yet.

I do want to make one comment about one of the complaints quoted above:
They give you a pathetically short intro in which they introduce you to your family, and whisk you off to a Vault. Why do I care about these people?
Yes, that would be because people -- possibly these very same people -- griped bitterly that the intro in Fallout 3 was "too long" before letting you go explore the world. In other words, with Fallout 4, Bethesda gives people what they demand, and then people complain about that, too. Geez.

Fallout 4 isn't perfect. And the people who still insist that Fallout 1 and 2 were the only true Fallout games are always going to find things about Fallouts 3 and 4 to object to. I might even agree with some of those objections... but good grief, there is a buttload of solidly enjoyable fun to be had in Fallout 4!

And again, that is before the gates to modding are flung open. Once people can crank out mods without Bethesda breaking them with patches, any mechanical parts to the game that someone doesn't like can probably be improved.

As for objections to non-mechanical aspects of Fallout 4, like "not enough story" -- would those folks rather no one had any new Fallout games to play at all because this one doesn't manage to achieve War and Peace levels of commentary on the human condition?

Failing to be a perfect game does not make it a bad game. In fact, I think I'll go play it some more right now.
It's definitely not the same people complaining, it's just the 'audience', and different parts of it. I personally enjoyed FO3's introductory passes, even though they were also rather bare bones, sterile and cold, in a way. They still gave me at least half a glimpse into life in the Vault (that consists of 30 guards and 10 residents). The way to make it more enjoyable would have been to make it less sterile and expand upon it, not chopping it down to five minutes of staring at a baby-like object and then exchanging hollow 'love you's with a partner, before being ushered quickly to get heartstring-tugged and shoot up wild dogs. Besides, a quick start can easily be achieved, and a lot of mods have done it. Give the option to just drop the player in the wastes, with a text introduction and a handful of items that fit who they chose to start with. There you have it, an option for a lengthy introductions, and a quick-cheap-easy way to immediately start and not care about babies and spouses, too.

It depends on what's 'enjoyable' content. The inch deep, miles wide stuff Bethesda provides as of late is not my thing at all, I simply don't find it compelling or 'fun', personally. I put down Skyrim after a couple of hours as well, because yeah, I can explore, but the puzzles are dumb and people are boring. I might rather have the IP sitting and collecting dust, actually, waiting for a competent developer with more story writing skills and an understanding of how cRPGs are supposed to look like, and not beating up canon with a spiked baseball bat. But then again, personal opinions, and I'm obviously the minority here.

I'm not asking for perfection. I'm asking for an entirely different direction. And I think that's fair, since the series took a serious one-eighty. Fallout has always been about playing a low-int character, or being a dick to people, or just plain doing whatever you want, without being on the rails of the main character's supposed personality. The whole thing's like the new Ghost in the Shell MMOFPS. It's just not what Stand Alone Complex was about, it completely misses the point, it doesn't even try the 'War and Peace' thing, and I'd rather it didn't exist. And I think I can freely expect good writing from franchises previously focused on good writing, or at least an attempt, and I don't deserve mockery for expecting so.

I would have loved to like this game. I'm holding out for ELEX now, to give me my fix of apocalypse.
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Re: Fallout 4

#230
Flatfingers wrote:
Fallout 4 isn't perfect. And the people who still insist that Fallout 1 and 2 were the only true Fallout games are always going to find things about Fallouts 3 and 4 to object to. I might even agree with some of those objections... but good grief, there is a buttload of solidly enjoyable fun to be had in Fallout 4!
I personally loved Fallout 3. I would say it's my personal favourite of the whole series. (though I have not played 4 yet)
Flatfingers wrote: And again, that is before the gates to modding are flung open. Once people can crank out mods without Bethesda breaking them with patches, any mechanical parts to the game that someone doesn't like can probably be improved.
I admit, Skyrim went from being a pretty solid base game with a bunch of flaws to probably in my opinion the best game ever when you mix in a boat load of mods. It's unfortunate that the they can't be released somewhat better, I mean, they all get a massive amount of dev time. I guess we are lucky the for amount of free talent that exists.
Flatfingers wrote: As for objections to non-mechanical aspects of Fallout 4, like "not enough story" -- would those folks rather no one had any new Fallout games to play at all because this one doesn't manage to achieve War and Peace levels of commentary on the human condition?

Failing to be a perfect game does not make it a bad game. In fact, I think I'll go play it some more right now.
No one is looking for a deep novel type story. What my personal issue is taking the player freedom away from playing the way they want to play. The option to create our own "story" is removed.

So far, the biggest feature of FO4 seems to be that the gun fights are better... Sorry, but if I wanted a FPS I would PLAY a FPS. It seems like the list of things that have been removed and stream lined to death is long.. Meh...

I really fear for the next Elder Scrolls game. I expect we will be stream lined into cookie cutter characters....
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Re: Fallout 4

#232
Zanteogo wrote:I really fear for the next Elder Scrolls game. I expect we will be stream lined into cookie cutter characters....
As do I, Zanteogo. :( I'm hoping that such pollution is not visited on my beloved TES franchise. I pray earnestly that Bethesda don't screw the pooch with the next ES game and have learned/are learning valuable lessons from FO4. :angel:
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Re: Fallout 4

#233
Victor Tombs wrote:
Zanteogo wrote:I really fear for the next Elder Scrolls game. I expect we will be stream lined into cookie cutter characters....
As do I, Zanteogo. :( I'm hoping that such pollution is not visited on my beloved TES franchise. I pray earnestly that Bethesda don't screw the pooch with the next ES game and have learned/are learning valuable lessons from FO4. :angel:
They won't. FO4 is selling well and is getting generally good reviews. (though I notice on metacritic is has horrible user reviews.)

The problem is, the old school gamers can squawk all we want to try to keep long running series true to their nature, but it makes no difference. Changing a game to have mass appeal to a more general audience is just where the money is when it comes to the big budget triple A games. Making Fall Out 4 an openish world mass effect 3 style game is what makes the dough. (to be fair, I have not, and at this point have no plans to play FO4, I am only going by what trusted people have informed me)

edit: The second most voted up user review:
Spoiler:      SHOW
It wasn't really apparent how bad this game is until a second play through. While the new weapon mods system is great, as Is the new power armor system, everything else falls short. And a lot of things made no sense. After a battle fought in power armor parts had to be fixed since a grenade fell nearby. Understandable, but if you fight the same battle in raider armor made from junk you never need to fix it. Weapons also never break, weaken or jam, even those made from plumbing supplies and driftwood. Which oddly enough describes half the guns in this game. The build system lacks physics making it possible to build bases that hover in the air. And they have a crippling parts count limit that seems pretty arbitrary.

The game is small both in size and density. There are 3 towns with voiced characters. everywhere else is populated by raiders. Skyrim had 9 believably large cities and several more towns. all with voiced characters and many side quests New Vegas had at least 7. Even fallout 3 had 4 such locations. Most fallout 4 side quests use repetitive dialogue, especially the minutemen ones. And nearly all consist of Nothing more than, going somewhere and killing or fetching something. gone too is the humor these quests brought in previous titles.

But the real problem is the story. Which relies on a series of twilight zone style twists. Which of course are no fun the next time. Dialogue options are limited and you don't actually know what your own character is going to say. Perks have no effect on dialogue at all and neither does the special. In the past perks like Lady Killer or Black Widow, led to fun dialogue options, now they effect nothing but damage. Even if you have 1 intellect you don't have any option to ask stupid questions, even when talking to scientists.

The background given to your character if they are male is that there a war veteran, while if your female you're a lawyer, and yet the story progresses exactly the same. Despite most of it involving killing people. Come on since she is voiced and a Lawyer; I expected her to be a little upset after killing somebody the first time, but... nope. She didn't even react to facing a Deathclaw, which also happens in the first 20 min. Why they didn't Just have whoever YOU choose be the ex soldier, I don't know, It would have made more sense. Especially since you get your first power armor within the first 20 minutes, and know how to work it, something a lawyer turned housewife should not know how to do.

But the real problem I had is in nearly every quest nothing you do matters. You can talk somebody out of killing a person, only to have their partner do it anyway, with the dialogue after being identical. No choice you make in a quest has any repercussions later. In fact there is no karma system, or even a bounty system like Skyrim. You can walk into town, kill 5 guards come back a few days later and they're back to cracking jokes about your armor. In general the game doesn't really let you be evil, no mater how many people you kill or what quest options you choose, folks will treat you as their savior. No hidden faction or missions are revealed for your misdeeds, unlike the previous fallout's or Skyrim.

Unlike New Vegas, you can't broker alliances between factions. Worst of all No matter who you side with, you get the same end missions with the same followed by the same monologue and montage after. Despite having radically different agendas all factions resort to the same exact methods. Making every choice you thought you made meaningless. Which is why I agree with many others in saying that this Is an FPS game. Not even a particularly good one.

On top of all this it lacks polish. Despite my I7 nvidia gtx 970 and 32gb of ram letting me average 60 fps, on one helicopter gunner mission it always drops to 12 fps. This is not only time this happens either.
Alright. Well time to take this game off my Steam wish list.
Last edited by Zanteogo on Sat Dec 12, 2015 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fallout 4

#234
alpan wrote:
Mistycica wrote:I'm holding out for ELEX now, to give me my fix of apocalypse.
You should definitely check out Age of Decadence, if you haven't already.
I'll deffo give it a peek. Though I have to admit, I grew up in the awkward age of 2000, so I sort of have 3D real-time as a prerequisite, while still expecting storytelling worthy of the classics :V
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Re: Fallout 4

#235
Mistycica wrote:
alpan wrote:
Mistycica wrote:I'm holding out for ELEX now, to give me my fix of apocalypse.
You should definitely check out Age of Decadence, if you haven't already.
I'll deffo give it a peek. Though I have to admit, I grew up in the awkward age of 2000, so I sort of have 3D real-time as a prerequisite, while still expecting storytelling worthy of the classics :V
Mistycica you have all my simpathy. But, has (oops) as you said, you are in the minority (me too).
If you want to try and stand isometric 2D, I suggest an old game: Arcanum.

It is one of the last True cRPG games made, with tons more content than any Bethesda's can shake a stick at -- in a Steampunk setting as a boon!
Arcanum's father was one of the creators of Fallout 1 and 2 if I am correct. If it gets your attention, you will quickly forget that it is a 2D.

It works on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 out of the box. I recommend the gog version as it comes with a load of goodies, which you otherwise have to fetch off the www hoping the old links have not died.


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As for Fallout 4, it ought to be named something else. It is no Fallout, period.

Bethesda delivered minimal content, and players are beginning to notice it. And in reusing the Skyrim engine with a couple of gfx upgrades they have once again resumed the same old engine they have been recycling since Morrowind! Their engine was not cutting-edge in early 2006 with Oblivion. It was aging already by the end of 2008 with Fallout 3. It was old tech at the end of 2011 with Skyrim, and now in 2015 it is archaic software. It should be deprecated, buried and forgotten. Its technical flaws and hard limits are something you do not find in any contemporary product of similar scope.

Their games might sell well, but Bethesda has been reusing old assets with minimal facelift and a reskin. People need to acknowledge the state of things: this dev is living on past glories, marketing cheap stuff at full price, and reaping undeserved credits. Fallout 4 will probably be candidate for the GotY award nonetheless. They only need a couple (paid) professional reviewers to propose the thing, the others will jump on the bandwagon as it always happens, and it will be another undeserved slice of glory for them.
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Re: Fallout 4

#236
fox wrote:
Mistycica you have all my simpathy. But, has (oops) as you said, you are in the minority (me too).
If you want to try and stand isometric 2D, I suggest an old game: Arcanum.

It is one of the last True cRPG games made, with tons more content than any Bethesda's can shake a stick at -- in a Steampunk setting as a boon!
Arcanum's father was one of the creators of Fallout 1 and 2 if I am correct. If it gets your attention, you will quickly forget that it is a 2D.

It works on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 out of the box. I recommend the gog version as it comes with a load of goodies, which you otherwise have to fetch off the www hoping the old links have not died.
Getting some really great suggestions here, thank you :3 I'll make sure to get around them and give them a shot! I mean, play DF with the default tileset, and Aurora 4X, so I guess I shouldn't be the one holding out on good games due to clunky interface or dated graphics :D
panic
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Re: Fallout 4

#237
alpan wrote: Indeed, Victor, Morrowind is one of my favourite games ever for precisely that reason -- the quality of its music, if not the quantity :)

At any rate, I have less of a problem with the gradual simplification of Elder Scrolls, because I have no problems with ES having less impactful decisions, or infinite quests, or forcing you to play a neutral or good-oriented character because the ES series have never really been about the idea of choice and consequence, unlike Fallout. I did dislike the introduction of heavier level scaling and (in particular) walled-off cities with Oblivion but these have been somewhat fixable by mods, and felt that Skyrim was generally an improvement over Oblivion.
I too feel the Elder Scrolls series peaked at Morrowind. Oblivion's scaling was a nightmare and it was a huge drop in quality IMHO from Morrowind though I still consider it a pretty good game overall. That's a testament to how great I feel these games are that one could fall so far and yet still be considered overall good. Anyway Skyrim largely fixed the level scaling issue in my mind and as a result was a much better game than Oblivion but did not attain the level that Morrowind did.
alpan wrote: Speaking of walled cities, I do believe Bethesda will have to think long and hard about having every city and every building have its own loading screen for the next ES game though -- The Witcher 3, in particular, makes it look particularly easy to have a technically competent open-world game, with few loading screens during actual gameplay, and certainly none during city/building transitions. :)
I suspect these will go away in Elder Scrolls Next. I think the issue is with memory limits and 32-bit constraints. The Witcher 3 is the marquee game for RedEngine 3 which is designed for 64-bit only support on systems with multiple gigs of memory available. The Fallout series on the other hand piggybacks it's engine from the prior Elder Scrolls game. Sure there are some tweaks here and there but Fallout 4 is fundamentally based on the Skyrim Engine and Skyrim was designed to run on 32-bit systems and consoles with extremely limited memory by today's standards.

Elder Scrolls Next will almost certainly included a fundamental engine upgrade (that Fallout 5 will eventually share) and will be 64-bit only just like RedEngine 3. On the other hand though those walled cities I felt made it a natural to convert the game to an MMO (opportunities to spawn instances)... in my mind at least the mechanics of Elder Scrolls are already very MMO friendly and it just seems like an MMO is the only way to ever really do Elder Scrolls with multiplayer. I was so excited when Elder Scrolls Online was first announced and so disappointed when I found out that it wasn't the Elder Scrolls MECHANICS largely taken online but more typical MMO "Theme Park" Mechanics with the Elder Scrolls lore slapped on. If they ever do a Fallout Online I hope they go back and make a "sandbox" MMO instead of another "Theme Park"

I enjoy Fallout 3 and 4 as Sci-Fi Elder Scrolls with the understanding that they aren't Bethesda's priority and they largely piggyback on the prior Elder Scrolls. I don't compare Fallout 3 and 4 to Fallout 1 and 2 at all as they are entirely different kinds of games that just so happen to be set in the same world setting. That particular chain for me goes: Wasteland -> Fallout 1 -> Fallout 2 -> Wasteland 2... with perhaps a Wasteland 3 coming at some point in the future.

Fallout 3 and 4 go in the Elder Scrolls chain for me. Both are worse than Morrowind (as is Oblivion and Skyrim though too, again the series peaked there) but Fallout 3 was better than Oblivion on which it was based... I'm < level 30 in Fallout 4 and haven't even gone to meet the guy in the glowing waste or whatever it's called so for me I can't say if it's better than Skyrim yet but in theory that's what it succeeds... I can already say it's no Morrowind though... but what is? Morrowind is probably my favorite game of all time.
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Re: Fallout 4

#238
Asmodai wrote: Morrowind is probably my favorite game of all time.
Man, you will probably hate me then, as I tried several times and couldn't get into morrowind at all, on original Xbox or the PC version, yet I have probably 200 hours in oblivion and nearly 600 in skyrim, and just got to the 100 hour mark in fallout 4 :D

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