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Fallout 4 Announced
An anonymous reader writes: After teasing gamers with a countdown timer yesterday, Bethesda has now announced Fallout 4 for PCs, the Xbox One, and the PS4. They've also released an official trailer (YouTube video). The game will be set in post-apocalyptic Boston, and the player character will apparently be accompanied on his adventures by a dog. The Guardian has a post cataloging the features they're hoping will be improved from previous games in the series: "The combat system in the last two Fallout games was not universally adored. It often felt you were shooting wildly and blindly, biding time before you could use the the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting (VAT) system, which allows players to focus in on specific parts of enemies with a percentage chance of hitting them. ... Well-written, hand-crafted quests are going to be vitally important. The Radiant Quest system used in Skyrim sounds brilliant on paper: infinite quests, randomly generated and a little different each time. But the reality was a lot of fetch quests in similar looking caves. Bethesda may be tempted to bring that system across to Fallout 4, but there's an argument for abandoning dynamic quests altogether and opting for a smaller range of authored challenges."
To absolutely fucking no ones surprise a sequel was announced to a popular and profitable franchise.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
I saw the article linked with things some folks want, and hated most of it. Vehicles? Really?
Here's what I'd like;
- Companion characters & character development done by the Bioware teams (I'm gonna ignore the low-average quality from the Dragon Age Inquisition game). Bethesda Softworks does an admirable job with environment and atmosphere, but their NPC's are generally flat, with a few exceptions. Companions most of all. Multiple companions might be nice, Companion quests, idle-time squawking/interparty squawking, scenarios providing different options with different companions.
- Combat that always feels like a challenge, and not just in a ninja-monkey way where their stats scale to your level. Perhaps limit the character growth and equipment attributes in a D&D 5'th ed sort of way. Adjustable, though (see 'customization' below)
- They rock at allowing mods, but having a truly made-for-third-parties-without-a-debugger-running sort of script evaluation (profiling), execution, merging and management system would be swell. Knowing a module was going to crash - or even just which mod caused the crash - is a big help.
- Enough customization to allow different play styles, not just different difficulty levels. For example, the New Vegas optional 'hardcore' mode requiring food, drink and sleep, but perhaps with a checklist of 'collectables' and an easy combat or excessive loot for folks who are more interested in achievements than someone who wants to soak up the atmosphere. This includes any time a dev said "But that won't work on console" - make it an option. None of this dumbing things down just because it has to run on a console.
- That mod thing up there? I'm putting it here again because I like mods.
- Oh, and an easy way to add songs to a playlist rotation, not requiring a mod with a new radio station, necessarily.
None of the modern fallouts recreate and capture the spirit of the two first ones.
I do listen to Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots. However, there is a special charm to listening to them armed with a mini-gun in a poisonous, radioactive wasteland with a dog as my companion while fighting giant spiders.
Though, I suppose I could always just move to West Texas. Same difference.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'm still trying to get into Base Cochise in Wasteland. Does anyone know where the sewer entrance is in the Church of the Mushroom cloud?
New Vegas is an improvement over 3, I didn't realize how much until I played them back to back.
Cheap storage VM.
The Radiant Quest system used in Skyrim sounds brilliant on paper: infinite quests, randomly generated and a little different each time. But the reality was a lot of fetch quests in similar looking caves. Bethesda may be tempted to bring that system across to Fallout 4, but there's an argument for abandoning dynamic quests altogether and opting for a smaller range of authored challenges.
The Radiant system still shows a lot of promise, they just need to keep what they've got and add even more randomness. If you've played enough Skyrim it should be clear that they copy-pasted a lot of the cave models, and much of the dungeons could be tiled and randomized; not just the loot. The assassin quest line is tons of fun but then the Radiant quests afterwards are all some guy standing around defenseless - it reeks from lack of effort. The war questline has some great battles that could return as skirmishes or rebellions afterwards, or with different objectives ("babysit this VIP" or "kill the enemy commander" for example).
TL;DR: It's not a bad idea, they just need to run with it. We've already got plenty of games designed for the first 20 hours of gameplay.
"That dog"?!? His NAME is Dogmeat! :D
Actually, that's probably the grandson of the original Dogmeat.
I wouldn't let the intro to NV put you off:
.308 AP) and political and military struggle between new powers that aren't just scrabbling for canned goods in the smoking rubble and are actually starting to jockey for power in a post apocalyptic rebuilding.
Like the intro to Fallout 3, it's intended to show somebody who knows nothing at all about the game enough that they can at least get themselves killed competently, rather than because they can't find the stimpack in their inventory and don't know what VATS is. If memory serves, it's also a fair bit shorter than the Fallout 3 intro(which was well done, and so fine the first time; but having to spend ten minutes being a baby and another 15 dealing with adolescent vault-bullying every time you want to try a new character build gets kind of dull). The character creation stuff in Doc Mitchell's house is obligatory; but you can skip Sunny Smiles' quest entirely(though it's a generous early-game source of caps and 5.56 rounds, so you might not want to).
Once you get past the intro, the game mechanics are largely the same(SPECIAL and VATS); but there is some additional polish to the skills and perks; the gameworld is really markedly different from the Capitol Wasteland; the local factions and characters are mostly well done and don't overlap at all with FO3(the Brotherhood of Steel is technically present in both games; but in very different capacities).
NV isn't a wildly radical re-imagining of what Fallout should look like in 3D or anything; but it's modestly more technically competent and polished than FO3 is(hence the existence of the Tale of Two Wastelands project; and it is very much it's own RPG. FO3 is a much more 'apocalyptic' take, since Washington was an obvious candidate for getting nuked to hell, and there's a lot more crumbling-cityscape and deaths by radiation and supermutant attack; along with the fact that the East Coast Enclave are still a reasonably viable force. NV is very much post apocalyptic; but there's a lot less tightly packed death zone and a lot more wilderness(some of it largely benign, some brutally lethal; seriously, don't fuck with Cazarores, or try to stop a deathclaw with anything less than
You obviously don't have to trust my advice or anything; but especially if you already own the game(or find it when it goes on sale, which it frequently does), you are really missing out by not giving it a few more minutes to make its case. Let the doc patch you up, don't even talk to Sunny if you don't feel like it. If you really hate the intended early game, you can even go 'in reverse' by heading directly from Goodsprings to Camp McCarran: it takes a touch of practice; but there's a fairly safe path from Yangtze Memorial(veer to your right a bit if you see radscorpions on your left, early game weapons don't do much against their armor) and between Sloan and Black Mountain more or less straight to Repconn HQ. There are deathclaws on your left and supermutants on your right; but even feeble sneak skill should allow you to avoid the attention of the deathclaws without getting too close to the supermutants(always err on the side of too close to the supermutants: a deathclaw can run faster than you can, and is functionally unstoppable at low levels. A supermutant is something you probably can't defeat at low level; but it will usually stand and shoot at you and not pursue particularly aggressively. Unless you get particularly unlucky, or your character build has nearly no HP, you can survive being fired on, for a short time and at a distance, by a supermutant, which gives you time to get away).
Once you make it to Repcon HQ, you can either swing right and head to freeside, or head to Camp McCarran(if you go this way, try to stick reasonably close to the wall, where NCR troopers will provide a mixture of fire support and meat shield against any fiends. You can usually score some energy weapons from the fiends and and some 5.56, a
You didn't take the "Puppies!" perk?
No location would be immune from a potential fuckup; but The Institute, from its brief appearance in FO3, would be something I'd love to get to poke around in. Seeing a large, significant; but not Washington city post-nuclear-war, will also be interesting(Boston definitely does enough to earn a nuke in any likely superpower-scale missile exchange; but the distribution would be different from Washington, since federal infrastructure is quite limited and a lot of the defense contractors and such are outside the city, where space is cheaper).
I could also seriously consider delighting in the presence of a group of non-feral-but-deeply-unhinged ghouls who have gone from revolutionary war reenactment into full-scale holding-bunker-hill-with-muskets for reasons they no longer understand. Not a joke that could take too much beating; but if ghoul in a tricorn hat happened to attempt an authentic black powder musket kill on my vault dweller, I'd be delighted.
If there was FO3, with another area of content right next door, I'd have explored that area too even if it was the same green sky, same game play, same enemies, etc. Why not? I mean 100 hours in FO3 and you can't be bothered with 1 hour in FO:NV?
You bought the game. Sure it was only $4, but if $4 fell out of my pocket I'd still spend the effort to bend down and pick it back up.
Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas are the best Sci-Fi RPGs I have ever played (and I am still playing through the various pieces of DLC for Fallout New Vegas having recently finished Old World Blues and started on Lonesome Road)
There aren't too many things that will make me not buy this. If Fallout 4 on PC doesn't have the awesome mod support Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas have I wont be buying it. If they add any extra crap DRM on top of the Steam DRM I wont be buying it. If they make the system requirements too great that my fairly beefy system can't play it I wont be buying it. And if they do anything to intentionally make it harder to reverse engineer the games data formats and stuff I wont be buying it.
Oh and they should put some effort into making the engine more stable and less prone to crashing (Fallout 3 and New Vegas aren't exactly the most stable games I have ever played)
Not too sure I like the idea of randomly generated dungeons or quests either, I much prefer the hand-built dungeons/quests of Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas to the randomly generated areas of games like Diablo 2.
After you play it through (assuming you are playing on a PC), check out nexusmods. I went out and bought the PC version just for the mods. They add an incredible amount of story an detail to an already rich universe.
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallo...?
The one weird(though largely harmless in practice) thing about having the intro be both skippable and 'in game', is that it doesn't appear to level in any way, since it was built as a lightweight introduction; and none of the characters involved will react as though it's unusual if you come back later and start it.
Stagger out of the doctor's house, looking like you could really use the help, and Sunny will show you some stuff about guns, wilderness medicine, and Ringo will be deeply pessimistic about your chances against Joe Cobb unless you rally more or less the entire town.
Walk back to Goodsprings, power armor gleaming, CZ-57 Avenger on your hip and enough mini nukes in your backpack to qualify for a seat on the security council, if there were such a thing; and Sunny is still happy to help the new guy plink bottles and kill a few geckos, and Ringo still doesn't think that you'll be able to handle Joe Cobb. This...ends poorly...for Joe.