Vagrant0

It's probably the reverse situation. There is a big difference between Development and Quality Control. Morriwind and to a lesser extent Oblivion were done in a much more rushed development environment due to both trying to fit the game on the console media at the time (xbox and xbox 360) and trying to meet the production deadlines. In the case of Oblivion, there is strong evidence to suggest that they had to dramatically cut down the number of voice actors and probably re-record dialogue lines just to make the game fit on disc (since there would be fewer duplicate sounds for commonly voiced things like rumors, combat taunts, and the like). Surprisingly, voices alone account for roughly 2/3 of the space on the disc due to the file sizes used. This was not a technical limitation of the engine since they clearly had this working for their E3 demo, and modders were able to add unique voices rather easily. The presence of unused assets usually means that development had to be cut short unexpectedly since these assets were originally sent to the art team to create so that the development team could use them. Part of this is also that development didn't have the time to go through cleaning up code of comments, or removing those assets from the game. A lack of unused assets usually means that the development environment was much more tightly controlled and development had enough time to go through removing unused assets before the game was sent off to QC. Quality Control with Bethesda games is a very different situation, and has been missing the mark repeatedly since Shivering Isles was released for Oblivion. For this, a rushed state can contribute to it, but more often stems from the control environment being used and what sort of time frame exists between Alpha tests, Beta tests, and final checks before the game goes to print. One possible explanation for this state of things is that their QC environment is much more focused on the console versions of these games since generally console versions are not as open to patching as PC is. I know it's a different story between 2005 and now in terms of console connectivity. But it does explain a lot about how these games tend to look and perform between the systems. The games on consoles are much less prone to severe gamebreaking bugs, much less prone to stability problems. Not trying to shift this towards a pointless console/PC debate, just pointing out that the QC component is probably more console focused, which makes perfect sense given their sales figures. http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Fallout+3 http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Fallout%3A+New+Vegas http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Skyrim&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0&results=200 http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Fallout+4&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0&results=200 Admittedly, the PC figures are probably inaccurate and only counting initial sales, but there is still a fairly large split between the two, even when compared against play counts shown on steam charts. It's still ultimately about money at the end of the day. http://steamcharts.com/app/72850#All Long story short, less rushed development time means fewer unused resources, but more rushed QC time usually means more buggy release. Bethsoft still has not found their Goldilocks zone in terms of production.

Reading these... Still gotta say that a world without Jar Jar, the Starwars franchise being rebooted and bastardized by Disney, and the handful of horrible games and related ventures would be a better place for all. Yes, this means no KoTR or KoTR2, but sacrifices have to be made for the greater good.

I'd probably waste it by choosing to smack George Lucas upside the head repeatedly when he got the idea to start working on the prequels. Not that I personally care about the result, but it had to be done.

That is a discussion for another place since those servers are technically illegal due to infringing on the software copyrights and is not allowed here. Thread closed.

Not possible. It's an online game, and despite being on consoles most the actual gameplay (locations of npcs, quests, ect) is handled by the servers. Generally, the only things done locally in games like this is just a storage of assets.

Just a bit of criticism. Generally, for games people are needing the sort of music which imparts emotion or complements the sort of gameplay they have present. Things like club music might be great while playing a twitch shooter, or the sorts of gaming where you are mostly just playing without concerning yourself with anything beyond the raw actions. But it lends itself poorly toward the sorts of applications where you want music to evoke tension, dread, elation, inspiration, wonder. If you're looking to get into producing music for games or mods, you may want to diversify the kinds of samples you have available.

Erm, just to point out something here... Free in this sense does not relate to a monetary cost. There will always be people wanting to earn something for their patents, manufacturing costs, or servicing costs, this is not a matter of debate. Instead, free in this sense is energy which, in the process of generating that energy, has either no or very little material costs or few hazardous byproducts per unit of energy generated. This is essentially "free" energy in that it is not tied to limited resources in order to continue generating that energy. Unfortunately relatively few of these have had any practical application, and the ones which have also have expensive manufacturing costs.

Demos are a lose-lose situation for developers. Old video, but explains it better than I can. "Try before you buy... via piracy" is a very similar problem to the demo dilemma, but instead of the developer making and packaging a game demo, a user gets everything for no cost, no restrictions, and is essentially on their own honor to decide when the cutoff point is. For most, this cutoff point usually is several hours into the game, or even after they've beaten it, where upon entering mid-game or seeing the end they justify some reason why they don't like it, and therefore never buy it. Even if you do buy it later, with the way most games are priced these days, you end up being able to play day 1 (or even before in cases of leaked versions), but only end up buying it when it is on sale and you feel guilty, if at all. Repeat this for not one or two games, but a few dozen, and it becomes a free-rider like situation where you are benefiting from other people paying for the cost of a game so that you can sit back, have similar experiences, but contribute nothing. For younger people, this usually leads to a mentality where they expect everything to be free, or find some way to get it for free, usually because it is rated higher than their parents allow, or because their parents don't want to buy it for them. They'd "buy it if they had the money", but only until they realize what it takes to get that money and how many other things they need to buy first. Meaning that in the majority of cases, people pirating games are just trying without being in such a position that they would buy. No matter intentions, it doesn't work in the larger scheme of things. With Steam's new refund policy, and the fact that there are dozens of review videos, streamers, and other gamers out there that can give you a honest and clear impression of a game; the risk of buying games has almost gone away. It's a far ways away from the state of things 20 or even 10 years ago when most games were sold in stores, and before there were people on the internet reviewing this content without developer incentives. If you're unsure about a game, do research, wait for patches, play one of the hundreds of other titles that get released monthly, or just go back to an old game and see if you can mod it to keep your interest. Even if you hate a developer, don't play their game, don't talk about their game, and play something from a developer that you do like. There's no justification for piracy.

It's arguably the biggest problem of all these survival sandbox type games, most of them are either online only, mostly unfinished, or generally lacks interesting objectives.

It's fun to a point, but suffers from that issue of having to know a good server with people who are respectful in order to get any enjoyment from it. It's an open world sandbox survival game where a large portion of "progress" requires more than a few hours of effort. Meanwhile it is incredibly easy for someone who is already established to walk into your encampment with their dinos, break everything, and steal whatever you have that is worth taking, setting you back to almost square one. Playing with a group working together, where you are splitting up duties and where you don't have to worry about losing everything because you logged off can be good, but is very hard to get when you don't know people.

The opposite may also be true, as new engine might be highly mod-unfriendly. We've already seen such things. Quite likely that this would be the case actually. While they might not go as far as having areas that are closed off, it would mean re-figuring out how things like mesh and texture resources are used, and may end up using some proprietary formats for models that have new-fangled effects, like hairworks. It might also change the world formatting so that things placed in the world are part of unchangable large statics instead of individual forms. Single piece large statics are much easier for a game developer to work with than ones made of multiple parts. Not only can you pretty much just hand off everything to an art developer to arrange and drop it into place, as opposed to setting up each individual static, but often means you can optimize those large meshes better. This is because a tileset of generic meshes usually needs to have other faces or components which allow parts to fit into eachother in a variety of situations. In building that tileset, often you end up building components which aren't actually used but were made beforehand for the sake of having enough options for level builders. Meaning that instead of interiors comprised of tiles, we could also be stuck with interiors that are a singular mesh, similar to Doom3 (4). For a developer, this is easier, but for a modder this greatly limits the amount of things you can reasonably do with the game without specialized knowledge in breaking apart those meshes into a sort of tileset. The bad part of all this is that it might lead to even more corners being cut... Bad like Dragon Age 2... Where interiors that are a singular piece get re-used.

Rendering or graphical style is not the engine, it is just a component. Aftereffects are things that are added 'after'. Animations are not the engine, they are just resources with a bit of coding to string them together. Interactions are based on how the game itself is scripted, and has little to do with the actual engine. They have been continually updating their engine as they go. Just like how Unreal, Crytek, and similar companies update their engine. The biggest change that came with FO4 was a switch to 64 bit and multi-threading. From a programming standpoint, that is, in itself, a very large undertaking and probably where a large portion of their development budget was spent.

It's the engine they own, that they have spent time developing and training among their staff. It is an engine which has become more and more tuned for making the kinds of games they want to make. They aren't going to just drop it and start over. The engine isn't even the problem, rather the problem is that their development cycle doesn't seem to give them enough time to really tune, work, or utilize the engine very well. Beyond that, they probably have too many design decisions made by committee instead of actually looking at a mechanic and weighing its value as it relates to the greater game.

Don't look too closely at those houses, you'll notice that some of the windows change position if you look at them from the outside instead of inside.

It's a bad corner we've backed ourselves into. You can't just exclude people from entering the US. Not only is against the very thing that the US stands for. Not only does it put us in a precarious state when it comes to those business relations that have developed with the Middle East. But is also, unilaterally, does not work. Every day there are hundreds of people hopping across the border from Canada or Mexico, both legally and illegally. We can't even keep out people who essentially cross without any sort of documentation, how are we going to enact some sort of testing to see if someone is Muslim or not? It's just plain ignorant of how things are to even suggest such a thing in a serious tone. And we all know that the next brilliant idea along this line is to try and re-locate people where they can be more easily monitored and be assured that they are not near any major city... Because you have to do 'something' about the ones who are already here and who are likely to be rather pissed off. We can't just ignore them since they are intent on bringing the whole house of cards down with them. They have taken the last 10 years to get organized, study the ways we've been responding to terrorism, and solidifying their power. The actions they're taking now are designed to use our news media against us, make politicians work towards impossible solutions, and complicate those things that were already working. They are resolute in bringing Western culture to its knees, while we've spinning our wheels uselessly and fighting amongst ourselves over crap that doesn't actually matter from one week to the next. And we can't just kill them. Even if we could afford something as ambitious as a clean sweep of the Middle East, public opinion would be decidedly against it. Even if their attacks became more bold and destructive, there would still be riots in the US against any military action because that is the culture we've allowed to be created here. 100 or even 1000 deaths from a terrorist act don't mean anything when it isn't somewhere near you. 1,000 or even 10,000 dead Americans don't mean anything compared to the number of also innocent civilians in the Middle East who have died from bombing or drone attacks. Each of those deaths we've made happen only add fervor to their cause. Answering genocide with genocide only leaves too many bodies left to count and nobody better off. And yet, they're the ones who are committed to the notion. The only solution is to not read from the script they are handing us, change the way we react to these threats. Look at the situation logically instead of emotionally. Where logical similarities exist, follow up on them to seek out other plots instead of stopping yourself short because some people might be oppressed. But in that same notion, not be blinded by trivialities such as race, religion or gender; Muslim is a co-relation, not a causation. Grant rights and training to mentally and psychologically stable and responsible civilians to arm themselves so that threats can be responded to as they occur; local militia was once a thing. Make these groups enemies within their own communities so they don't have help or resources to pull from when trying to devise a plot, leave them with no leg to stand on. If we're going to change our culture, then we might as well aim for a culture that is stronger and more resilient without slipping into fascist propaganda.

Best suggestion I can offer is to look at Skyrim or FO3, and familiarize yourself with some basic modding for those games since they use essentially the same engine. In particular Skyrim would be of value since it is more recent and uses the new engine specific scripting language Papyrus. Tutorials for Skyrim modding are also fairly easy to locate for a large number of topics.

It happens because it keeps working. We've gone from being a confident culture where we were urged to go back to resume normal behavior to a reactive culture where a presidential candidate can suggest banning entry to the US for all Muslims and still be considered a presidential candidate. Small attacks like this are not intended to cause high body counts, cause significant damage to a population or services. They exist solely to cause an extreme reaction, and have been more and more effective at pushing us into a state of lockdown. This is what these groups are attempting to achieve since it means an end to the Western way of life, and we've been playing right along. I'm sorry to sound cold and callous, but 14 or even 50 lives lost not a particularly significant amount. Even the random nature of these attacks is not significant when you consider how many places there are in the country where gang violence is a regular occurrence. The only thing that makes these events newsworthy is that they were done by "terrorists" against Americans, so the news media latches onto them and runs with it. Nevermind the daily shootouts in the slums or along the Mexican border... Nobody cares about those deaths since it's isolated to areas that are out of sight and out of mind. The agenda, of both the media, and the terrorists, is to cause fear and chaos, and they are both succeeding.

They are talking about the houses which are not normally scrappable. Such as the houses at Tenpines, Country Crossing, or Coastal Cottage. These structures cannot be scrapped in workshop mode, and do not have a reference ID for them to be disabled by console. There are some mods that supposedly allow scrapping or disabling these structures, but using these mods may lead to savegame corruption or incompatibilities with future versions of the game. This is because these mods and all mods are currently made with 3rd party tools that don't handle game data in safe, reliable ways.

I don't disagree with most of it, but I would argue that customizable characters are not a required component. You can still do a tabletop game where the players are using characters created by a DM that is designed for a more fixed campaign. A handful of oldschool D&D modules were laid out in this way since the concept of the module was that it was something that people with only limited experience could play through an adventure with minimal setup time. No, it's not as diverse or interesting as a fully open and custom campaign, but it was something that made this type of game more accessible for those just getting into them. Which, is kinda the big thing about RPG videogames. They are something that can introduce more traditional elements to players without much complication, in an easier to digest setting. In this light, FO4 is only continuing the trend.

The Art vs Art encounter is really the only thing I've come across which has made me annoyed beyond words. For whatever reason, in my save the encounter is bugged so that they start shooting at eachother just because the player is within range. This immediately triggers not one, but two relationship decreases for most of the available companions. Even if I can actually find them in the 5x5 cell loaded area before one kills the other, or both get killed by whatever is around, the dialogue doesn't trigger reliably. Further, when the dialogue does trigger, none of the options actually affect anything. I tell them to put down their guns, and pass the "skill" check, the conversation stops and they go back to shooting eachother, I say decide to kill one of them, and the other just tries to kill me. If my companion is around, the companion just ends up killing both. While this might be fine... Even after I've killed them, seen nearly a dozen of Art's bodies in my game, the encounter STILL spawns to repeat the same exact situation. I've tried modifying their forms to make them non-aggressive, spawn with 0 health, setup within a raider faction with no crime attached to shooting them. Nada. Worst of all, they seemingly spawn in nearly every part of the city, so every time I fly past downtown Boston in a vertibird, fast travel to Goodneighbor, Bunker Hill, CIT ruins, Cambridge Police Station, ect, I lose relationship with my companion.

The damage values don't take into account explosion or radiation damage, only the projectile damage, and in the case of the MIRV, only the damage of the MIRV canister and not the individual explosives. For the explosions, each of the MIRV explosions deals the same damage as a single fatman, with slightly less radius and lower force. For Bethsoft games, you can't trust ingame numbers to tell you everything.

The fallout timeline interestingly suggests that the Brotherhood has used such airships previously. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline#2254 And that he had indeed reconnected with the Western chapter. http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline#2283 Which explains the airship and fleet of vertibirds.

FO4 and Skyrim are still roleplaying games. They are still games where a significant portion of the content is centered around the player assuming a role of someone in that world and making decisions based on that role that affect the story of the game. Not every decision has to be meaningful, or important to official cannon. Just deciding to head in one direction instead of another arguably means having a different experience or sequence of events from the perspective of the player. As opposed to an adventure game where the sequence of events/experiences are usually fixed or fairly rigidly defined. Or opposed to a sandbox, where the player is not given any background, or real position within the game, but is tasked with defining that role themselves. In this context, FO4 is closer to being a traditional roleplaying game (as designed) than Skyrim since the player's role is more defined and central to the game storyline. As restricting as it might feel to not be able to just kill everyone you come across, for the character that the player is playing, being a sociopath conflicts pretty strongly with being from a time before the chaos where they raised a family in a nice suburb.

Erm, you do realize that most oldschool western RPGs also had either unkillable or nearly unkillable NPCs. Baulders gate, Planescape Torment, ect had npcs which either took no damage, or which had instant kill abilities. Even in tabletop RPGs, it is fairly common for DMs to give key NPCs very high levels or other advantages to make attempts to derail the story very short-lived. Yes, it is possible to do a story without these things. but that creates other issues. For one, it means extended time spent developing story or events for things which normally wouldn't occur, or building content based on contingencies. This is development time that quite frankly, very few game companies can afford to spend the resources on, just to reward people for trying to intentionally derail the game they wanted to make. Back to the tabletop analogy, while a DM might not anticipate it and go with a player killing a key NPC for lols a few times, eventually they will get tired of having to trash their week of preparation every time because of one player. For a commercial game however, having a designed element which drops the equivalent of a Tarrasque or level 20 wizard (D&D and most other tabletop games have dozens of similarly "unbeatable" encounters for just this reason) on the party because they've gone so far off the intended path of the campaign is not an easy thing to implement. It would also have about the same amount of annoyance for the players, and only lead people to try and think that that element is something that you are supposed to defeat legitimately. The annoyance to players is actually less if they initially hit a brick wall when trying to go outside the intended path instead of hitting an even larger one several steps later. A single action can be undone or recovered from easily; realizing that something you did several hours ago just ruined your game is often much harder, and usually means playing through content... Made worse if the realization point came after spending several more hours trying to get around that wall. On a commercial game, having unwinnable conditions leads to customers who will report your game as being broken, unfinished, or just have a disappointing "ending". Even trying these days wouldn't get past an approval committee since development budgets tend to be extremely tight and limited to only those things related to the intended path of the game... With even intended and central aspects cut or toned down because of time, hardware, engine, or budget constraints. That said, is it a bit high in FO4... Not really. I believe Skyrim and Oblivion had a larger number of essential NPCs. That's actually saying something considering how much more of FO4 is strongly tied to story events.

Mostly related to AI actually. The game uses periods like waiting and fast traveling to update NPC behaviors, packages and background simulations. It's less of a problem when in interiors because when inside the majority of those NPCs are at a lower processing priority than they are when out in the world. Every settler is another persistent actor that has their actions simulated, and why most of this slowdown occurs at times where settlers are either waking up or going to sleep.