Fallout 4

[buzzmong]

Okay. That definitely looks like a step forward in the mechanics.

[FatherJack]

Why, welcome to my illuminated flaming magenta cock house!

[shot2bits]

Not watched all of both those videos but i got far enough for them to say its still that horrible wonky engine they have used for god knows how long. I love their games and ill admit some degree off affection for the engine, kind of in the same way you do for an old dog you've had for years but it keeps shitting and pissing on everything and at this point i imagine no amount of felching with it on their part is going to ever fix it. the source engine is a good example of incremental design, that horrible gamebryo shit bethesda use is like the Frankensteins monster of game engines, it shouldve been dead and buried long a go but they just wont let it die, and changing the name of it doesn't count!

Rant aside i am super excite, i love Bethesda's RPG's but i honestly think the best thing they could do is make a new engine from the ground up to avoid their current pitfalls, or at least make the modding support miles better considering their games are renowned for the modding community and what comes out of it, yet all they generally provide is a level editor that requires the community to make a metric fuck ton of middleware tools for it to be useful for anything other than making new areas, quests, npc's and items out of the stock selection of stuff already in the game. i remember trying to make custom item models and textures for oblivion yonks ago and once you got to the stage you would need to for say UE or Source where you just import it to the editor and do whatever you wanted to do, it required you to go through 2 or 3 more pieces of software with loads more work before you could even think about importing it, and even importing anything itself was a pain in the ass let alone doing anything with it once you've got past all that.

OK so that led into another rant about how horrible their engine is, but i still love what they do and they are just incredibly lucky to have such a dedicated community.

[spoodie]

I don't think either the Source or Unreal engines can render the massive open areas required for Fallout and Elder Scrolls games. Perhaps iD Tech or Frostbite engines would be able to. I imagine the developers would have to spend a lot of time learning a new engine, to make the most of it. And maybe they would have to make compromises to fit the game to the new engine.

[deject]

I'm sorry but the "It looks like Fallout 3!" camp is insane. It's no BF4 or Far Cry 4, sure, but it also doesn't look like an 7 year old game.

I, for one, am incredibly super excited for this game. The only game I want more than this is Half-Life 3.

[FatherJack]

Not watched all of both those videos but i got far enough for them to say its still that horrible wonky engine they have used for god knows how long. I love their games and ill admit some degree off affection for the engine, kind of in the same way you do for an old dog you've had for years but it keeps shitting and pissing on everything and at this point i imagine no amount of felching with it on their part is going to ever fix it. the source engine is a good example of incremental design, that horrible gamebryo shit bethesda use is like the Frankensteins monster of game engines, it shouldve been dead and buried long a go but they just wont let it die, and changing the name of it doesn't count!

at least make the modding support miles better considering their games are renowned for the modding community and what comes out of it, yet all they generally provide is a level editor that requires the community to make a metric fuck ton of middleware tools for it to be useful for anything other than making new areas, quests, npc's and items out of the stock selection of stuff already in the game. i remember trying to make custom item models and textures for oblivion yonks ago and once you got to the stage you would need to for say UE or Source where you just import it to the editor and do whatever you wanted to do, it required you to go through 2 or 3 more pieces of software with loads more work before you could even think about importing it, and even importing anything itself was a pain in the ass let alone doing anything with it once you've got past all that.

Well it's not the wonky Oblivion/Fallout engine (Gamebryo) but the wonky Skyrim engine (Creation) they're not quite the same thing, mostly because legally they can't be Gamebryo was a licensed product from a supplier and Creation is a Bethesda thing (that they now give away for free)
The Creation Engine is to Gamebryo what Source/GoldSrc was to the Quake engine - based on some elements of it, but bought fully licensed, modified and developed in house until it's almost a different thing.

While a few Fallout 3 mods exist, I don't think I've ever used a single one except a swearing one to be used at my parents house (where swearing is mandatory,) there are 25,000 mods for Skyrim on the Steam workshop, many of which I've tried - that would indicate modding is getting easier and better with Creation.

I do appreciate that most of the mods re-use in-game assets, but then most mods in general do that and with pretty successful results (think Hide & Seek), mods that try to use player-designed assets tend to look a bit arse. That's because it's reasonably easy to tweak a few variables, not too hard to script a bit of code and within most people's grasp to rearrange a few models artfully. Being able to do all the jobs of an entire design team with concept, character, texture and background artists, modellers and animators is not something many can claim. Player-created sound is usually pretty sketchy, too, although I did hear of a Fallout 3 mod to make Sydney a permanent companion where the author actually got the voice actress to record a bunch of new dialogue.

[Grimmie]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsFpH4jm-QI[/youtube]

NICE

Bethsoft also have some cool 50s PSA style videos on their YouTube channel about the SPECIAL stats. They're a good watch.

[buzzmong]

Interesting.

I can't help but feel those animations on the PipBoy are going to get old really quickly. Hopefully there's someway to make them static.

[FatherJack]

Interesting.

I can't help but feel those animations on the PipBoy are going to get old really quickly. Hopefully there's someway to make them static.

The animated Vault Boys or the fact the hand moves when you change screen?

I kinda liked both of them, it's not like I spend long stretches gazing at the Pip-boy, and the times I do I'm looking mostly at the text - I found neither animation distracting when I was reading the text on that clip.

The perks tree looked a bit messy and confusing, as they are all based off SPECIAL for their requirements, even though some of the ones I saw in that vid used to be skill based. I've seen pics of weapons with skill requirement, so skills still exist, but are rounded down into ranks, rather than the old method of only increments of 25 usually being any use in skill checks.

[buzzmong]

The animated Vault Boys or the fact the hand moves when you change screen?
I kinda liked both of them, it's not like I spend long stretches gazing at the Pip-boy, and the times I do I'm looking mostly at the text - I found neither animation distracting when I was reading the text on that clip.

The animated Vault Boys, the hand was actually pretty cool and a nice touch.

The perks tree looked a bit messy and confusing, as they are all based off SPECIAL for their requirements, even though some of the ones I saw in that vid used to be skill based. I've seen pics of weapons with skill requirement, so skills still exist, but are rounded down into ranks, rather than the old method of only increments of 25 usually being any use in skill checks.

Concur, that screen didn't look friendly.

[Dog Pants]

Well, 8 of you are playing this right now. That's a bigger takeup of 5punkers than I've seen in a long time. How are you guys finding it?

[HereComesPete]

If its any good we'll not see them for a day or so when they come up for air.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Code: Select all

Berk: so, is it the best game in human history?
Joose: fuck no
Joose: its good though
Berk: goodo

So, apparently it is at least good.

[Dog Pants]

I added it to my wishlist and played Fallout 3. Felt like I was playing Fallout 4.

[fabyak]

I installed fallout 2 twice

[Grimmie]

It's good!

[Joose]

It is very good. Its basically fallout in the skyrim engine with a few shiny new bits and some of the more horrific bugs squished. Still very much the same engine though. Hooray for random physics glitches!

Quite enjoying the settlement building though. The shooting is also vastly superior to FO3, although its still not really up there with other modern shooters.

[FatherJack]

Well, 8 of you are playing this right now. That's a bigger takeup of 5punkers than I've seen in a long time. How are you guys finding it?

It's rubbish.

(goes back to playing it)

There are some things I like, some things I don't and some things that are okay.

like
It looks as good as you'd expect for a new game, haven't had any issues with crashes.
The base-building thing is good. You discover settlements, get people to live there then build various stuff like hovels, beds, resource production and defenses. It's a bit like State of Decay but you can customise the buildings and furnishings, so you can probably have a million of everything if you want. You rip apart existing broken stuff to get most of the parts, so you only have to go searching for unusual stuff - and there's even a feature to highlight specific things you're looking for in nearby containers.
Customisation of guns and armour looks fun, once you've gotten the plans.

don't like
Bit buggy with the interface, sometimes gets stuck in one thing/mode, only game-breaking once when I got stuck after using a terminal while crouched.
The keymapping isn't good, you can rebind some keys, but not others. Even with the defaults it's clumsy, there's one operation when you're in workshop (town-building) mode where you have to press 'R' then 'Enter' a LOT - these keys are not next to each other. If you rebind the keys you can get in even more trouble - they can be overridden in workshop mode and just do nothing.
The vault was disappointing, without spoiling why I think it was an opportunity missed to show more of something we haven't seen much of.
The skills are a bit of a mess. I was level 5 before I realised you could choose any of them, not just put points into SPECIAL (in previous games you did both, separately)

is ok
VATS is a bit different - it doesn't pause the game, just slows it down. This has you panic-clicking on body parts while using (non rebindable) keypresses to cycle between enemies/body parts - which can be clumsy, it's probably best to avoid your first instinct to use the mouse and just practice getting the keypresses right.
Some skills, like hacking are found via collectables - so wanting to control turrets or robots is no longer about maxxing your science, but probably entails reading an FAQ on where to find it.
There's a great big plot device that makes you very powerful, but then soon after limits that power. Could have been a game-spoiler for some, will have to see how it turns out.
There hasn't been anything particularly spectacular in terms of quests yet, not that I expect the unusual ones to appear at the start of the game.
The karma system's still there, but your companions opinion of you is based on what they see you do, not your overall karma score, so ask your prissy goody-two-shoes companions to go away before you litter the wastland with corpses.

[Joose]

The keymapping isn't good, you can rebind some keys, but not others. Even with the defaults it's clumsy, there's one operation when you're in workshop (town-building) mode where you have to press 'R' then 'Enter' a LOT - these keys are not next to each other. If you rebind the keys you can get in even more trouble - they can be overridden in workshop mode and just do nothing.

You can press e instead any time it says enter. At least I think its any time. Lets just say I havent pressed the actual enter key once yet.

Some skills, like hacking are found via collectables - so wanting to control turrets or robots is no longer about maxxing your science, but probably entails reading an FAQ on where to find it.

Whut? No, that's not true. You can find magazines and things that give you a bonus, but all the skills just have prerequisites like character level and stats. All you need to be able to take the first level of the hacking perk is intelligence 4, and you can actually hack before that. The perk just lets you hack harder things.

[FatherJack]

You can press e instead any time it says enter. At least I think its any time. Lets just say I havent pressed the actual enter key once yet.

That's useful to know, but only inconveniences me a bit less as my particular choice of movement keys don't work in workshop mode, it's probably easier to switch to the joypad rather than keep remapping the default keys though.

Whut? No, that's not true. You can find magazines and things that give you a bonus, but all the skills just have prerequisites like character level and stats. All you need to be able to take the first level of the hacking perk is intelligence 4, and you can actually hack before that. The perk just lets you hack harder things.

That's hacking terminals. It was a loading pop up that seemed to suggest the skill books were for walking up to turrets/robots and hacking them directly, but I could be misunderstanding it.

Edit: I see there is a skill for robot hacking specifically, so I guess the loading screen gave me the wrong impression.