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Fallout 4
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xtal
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June 3, 2015 - 10:53 am
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It's finally official. Yay!

http://fallout4.com/

 

Even if Fallout 4 is to 3 what 2 was to 1 (which seems likely) I'll be happy.

If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever

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Synonamess Botch
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June 3, 2015 - 4:04 pm
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Xtal, after your epic rant about Bloodborne vs AC, I'm frankly baffled by your enthusiasm for this game.  Fallout 3 really blew me away when I first played it, specifically the part when I first stepped out of the vault.  Then reality set in, the scales fell away, and I saw it for the mediocre game that it was.  Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh - it did have some good qualities but was ultimately a huge disappointment.

I'm not bashing here, I honestly want to hear your arguments.  I have no experience with any TES game (or AC game for that matter) so my view of Bethesda is limited to Fallout 3.  Given that, I see them as capable of creating huge worlds filled with a bunch of detail, but with no idea how to put it all together into something compelling beyond the trinkets and boring tasks (and dead-eyed NPCs).

Rule #2: Double-tap

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Steerpike
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June 4, 2015 - 1:22 am
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I will say that I personally consider New Vegas to be Fallout 3, and Fallout 3 to be The Elder Scrolls: Radiation. I like Bethesda's games but I'd rather they handed this off to Obsidian again.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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geggis
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June 10, 2015 - 8:06 am
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Synonamess Botch said
Xtal, after your epic rant about Bloodborne vs AC, I'm frankly baffled by your enthusiasm for this game.  Fallout 3 really blew me away when I first played it, specifically the part when I first stepped out of the vault.  Then reality set in, the scales fell away, and I saw it for the mediocre game that it was.  Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh - it did have some good qualities but was ultimately a huge disappointment.

I'm not bashing here, I honestly want to hear your arguments.  I have no experience with any TES game (or AC game for that matter) so my view of Bethesda is limited to Fallout 3.  Given that, I see them as capable of creating huge worlds filled with a bunch of detail, but with no idea how to put it all together into something compelling beyond the trinkets and boring tasks (and dead-eyed NPCs).

Can I have a link to this epic rant? Xtal's rants are the best.

I've only ever played Morrowind and Fallout 3. Morrowind I think I spent more time modding because when I finally did start playing properly I realised that the combat was dreadful and the dialogue/NPCs sleep-inducingly boring. So I decided to track down a GOTY version of Fallout 3.

Modding was a lot easier but some way into my first playthrough the thing just started to crash frequently and I stopped playing. Months later I picked it up again and tightened up my mod list and everything went much better. Eventually though I said to myself 'Why am I doing all this again? Oh yeah, I'm trying to find Liam Neeson.' and shortly after that I stopped playing. Now, I enjoyed Fallout 3. Had a great time exploring, the atmosphere was incredible at times, and some of the mods really added a lot to all that, but one thing I learned about modding Bethesda games is that they don't improve the wooden characters and writing, which are easily the biggest issues with their games from my experience. I just find the NPCs kind of soulless, or lacking some sort of spark which makes them interesting. It doesn't help that they recycle voice actors so much and they're not that great either. As Scout once said:

Characters are not Bethedsa’s thing. They are more like landscape painters. Really amazing landscape painters who don’t do portraits very well. I love wandering a beautiful landscape but I also love specific characters to populate it. And that seems what I want more and more. New Vegas had both...

In the end, I just didn't give a shit about half of the stuff on my quest list and it didn't help that there were all sorts of weird quest and character behaviour glitches. Rivet City was a mess for me. From a comment I posted elsewhere a long time ago:

"Last night at Rivet City, lots of security guards were asking whether I’d seen this little girl that had gone missing and it just so happened (as part of her scripted sequence) she was running past them when they asked. I couldn’t talk to her because “she shouldn’t talk to strangers” despite me talking to her countless times before. I also couldn’t ‘bring her home’ until she got to where she was running off to. Bizarrely, the only way out of the city is over the gate bridge (the very thing that stops Raiders and Super Mutants getting in apparently), but the girl was able to escape nevertheless, she’s a genuis O_o. So I thought I’d ask the beggar outside Rivet City if he’d seen a girl run past, after all, he’d got nothing better to be doing than watching the road… but nope. What about the security guard who stands there all day? Nope.

Then there are times like when I break into somebody’s room and they’re in there when I do so but they greet me as I if I’d done nothing wrong. At present I’m dressed in Abraham Lincoln’s top hat, some leopard skin pyjamas and I stink of beer (I’ve been drinking lots to carry around more stuff) and Fallout 3 tells me that’s very charismatic (+15 speech skill and +1 CHR at least!)"

There was also something that was making everyone at Rivet City attack me on sight at one point, and to this day I still have no idea what was causing it.

So yeah, I need to play New Vegas by the sounds of it.

Fallout 4 and characters: Animation... Animation never changes.

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Steerpike
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June 14, 2015 - 2:38 pm
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I suspect Helmut's referring to Xtal's should-be-required-reading-in-game-design-seminars The Order: 1886 review. Now that I'm into Bloodborne a little bit I see even more wisdom in his rant. And yes, Xtal's rants are the best rants.

Ever.

Oh yeah, Gregg, I remember you and Armand years ago undertaking an epic modding of Morrowind. That game was a world of mods unto itself. I know a guy who's spent like 800 hours playing it and has no intention of moving on. The disappointing Oblivion cooled me a little on Bethesda, and the time investment for these RPGs makes me sad. Because I want to have time for them, but I just don't.

Do try New Vegas if you haven't. I loved it. In the end it became too big, but it absolutely nailed the black humor and postnuclear environment. If you felt Fallout 3 did a good job of that, wait until you play New Vegas. There's no comparison.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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Synonamess Botch
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June 14, 2015 - 10:38 pm
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Here's the rant I was referring to, from our Bloodborne thread.  Scroll up a bit from the bottom.  Like a good Andy Summers solo, sometimes the shortest rants are the best.

https://tap-repeatedly.com/forum/never-mind-the-bollocks/bloodborne-1/page-3/#p17418

I also need to dive back into New Vegas.  I dabbled a bit but got distracted, which of course has never happened to me before.

Rule #2: Double-tap

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Synonamess Botch
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June 15, 2015 - 1:35 pm
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It's got crafting.  And building.  Oh the interior decorating we'll do.  Joy.

Rule #2: Double-tap

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xtal
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August 21, 2015 - 2:01 pm
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Yeah so ... I don't know a great way to answer your question. I'll try the simplest.

I really, really, really enjoy the moment to moment gameplay of Fallout 3 and New Vegas. I don't in AC 4. I did in AC 1 (for about 5 hours) and AC 2.

I always wanted to love the open world concepts of Morrowind and Oblivion, but I stopped playing both for different reasons. Fallout 3, like a billion people have said, is Oblivion with guns, which really worked for me. I liked exploring the wastes and found a lot of the quests amusing and enjoyable, I think VATS was at once a nice homage to the turn-based style of the first two Fallouts, and a solid answer to combat in Bethesda's always-meh combat.

When New Vegas came out I rated it way, way better than Fallout 3. With some time passed it's a bit closer. Story and whatnot New Vegas is still miles ahead, all of it great. Having the NCR back, and the Legion. Fantastic stuff. But the game itself is kinda iffier than 3, as hard as that is to believe. I can't remember the absurd amount of times New Vegas crashed my PS3. Fallout 3 never did. And a lot of the DC Wasteland I enjoyed more than areas in New Vegas. I think the major weaknesses of both games were their main "cities," the Strip in NV and Downtown in Fo3. Downtown was worse because it was a boring maze of tunnels and cement garbage; at least the Strip was relatively compact, and the things in it tended to be interesting (some of the glorious casino quests; especially the White Glove Society).

At the end of the day, I'm a big fan of the four major Fallout games and that's why I'm very excited for 4. After playing two Assassin's Creed games to completion and another two about 5 hours worth I find them boring. Which is why AC4 was the victim of my rant praising Bloodborne.

I said I was sick of open worlds, and I am. But I won't stop giving new ones a shot. And of the ones I know, Fallout is a big exception. Bethesda in general, really; I appreciate their style. It feels like they care.

If being wrong's a crime I'm serving forever

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Dix
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August 21, 2015 - 11:41 pm
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I have much the same general burnout with open worlds; that said, Bethesda's never given me much reason to count them as the exception.  Every Bethesda game I've played (including a little bit of Fallout 3 before frankly giving up on it) has just been really dull to me.  So I have a hard time understanding why I have friends literally planning week-long vacations from work based on the release of Fallout 4.

My Bethesda experience has generally been one that seems to emphasize quantity over quality, the ability to just do a lot of stuff instead of doing stuff that is fun or memorable.  Perhaps I am simply just not the right type of gamer.  I know the Fallout games have their moments, to be sure...I just don't know if they have enough of them to justify the hours and hours in between.  Increasingly, maybe because of age or maybe just because I've played a lot of stuff, I want a tight, rich experience, and that's just not what open world games in general, and Bethesda's in particular, generally offer me.

Of course, I say that being someone who has so far returned to Assassin's Creed every year.  I can't explain that.  I really can't.

"Home is not a place.  It is wherever your passion takes you."

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Synonamess Botch
Texas, y'all
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August 22, 2015 - 10:06 am
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Dix, just embrace the apparent contradictions.  That's all I can offer.  I have at best a thinly veiled contempt for most JRPGs, but I'm currently satisfying my SMT craving with a nice binge, and enjoying every moment.

I hear you Xtal.  I've never actually been drawn to open-world games, since "Do whatever you want" always translates in my mind as "Do nothing particularly meaningful or interesting, except indulge your kleptomania or obsessive/compulsive urges."  But there are parts of Fallout 3 that hint at how great it really could be, which makes the moronic stuff all the more disappointing.

What baffles me is how enthusiastic people seem to be about...building stuff.  I guess it's why I'll never understand why anyone would play a Sims game.

Rule #2: Double-tap

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Steerpike
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August 24, 2015 - 10:09 am
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People like the idea of open worlds more than the execution, I'd bet. Most open worlds tend to be large spaces with story missions and then a bunch of repetitive, often fourth-wall-breaking "stuff" you can do, like races. For an open world to really fly it needs to be pretty handcrafted, it needs to encourage exploration without breaking any of its internal story, and it needs to feel like stuff is happening around you and not because of you.

STALKER did this well, except for the encouraging exploration part -- you'd poke into new places knowing that eventually there'd be a main story reason to go there, and often the visit wouldn't net you anything of value but might cost a lot in terms of ammunition and medical supplies.

Witcher 3 has a sort of a good mechanic with the question mark icons, all of which break down into one of four or five main types of subquest but which seem interesting. The problem there is that Witcher 3 is too big. I tried turning off the ? icons on my map, hoping to just organically find what I found, but it became impossible to manage. So it rapidly becomes an icon hunt, though at least the icons are somewhat interesting once you find them.

As for Fallout 4, hopefully it'll continue the trend of good Fallout stuff. Bethesda did a nice job with 3, though Obsidian "gets" Fallout more and New Vegas was a more engrossing game. Still, there's a lot of neat stuff promised this time around, so I have high hopes for F4. At the very least they were decent enough to not tease the game until it was nearly ready to ship, so people don't go through a froth of excitement only to have to wait a hundred years before getting their hands on the thing.

Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.

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