Fallout 4 scepticism...

[JimboUK]

 

 

 

Reviews for FO4 cannot be published until after the game is released.

 

 

That alone should set alarm bells ringing.

 

 

 

Why exactly?

 

Near enough every AAA title in the last 2 years smacks on a review embargo - It's now basically a given so that no one can leak or talk about anything in regards to the main story in an official way before release.

 

There haven't been many top games that have done it and sucked. Watch Dogs is the only real one i can think of off the top of my head that a review embargo was a bad thing for.

 

 

The embargos rarely last right up to release, those few that do tend to be for games that turn out to be bad, Ubisoft ones usually. Bethesda have only just lifted the embargo on the embargo, they actaully had an embargo on telling people when the embargo would be lifted. They've been getting streams taken down today, some console players already have the game, this on top on getting every unauthorised video and image they find taken down. If they were confident in their product they wouldn't behave like this and if they're not confident then why should anyone else be?

[Dark0ne]

Moved this to the FO4 forums. Carry on.

[throttlekitty]

Things I know for sure:

The FO4 EULA is more restrictive than previous Bethesda games.

The game is meant for console players.

There is not a FO4 section here at Nexus. http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/?

Bethesda does not want anything related to FO4 made public unless they control it.

Reviews for FO4 cannot be published until after the game is released.

The game is not Next Gen like Tod Howard claims.

Bethesda will lie about the contents of a game. Think Skyrim and Arkane developing Prey2.

 

Things I suspect:

FO4 modding will be restricted in ways people will not be happy with.

Bethesda wants FO4 modding to be aimed at console users.

There is a secret about FO4 modding we do not know. Like there was for monetized mods.

 

I have been doing a lot of research for FO4 because I want a new game to play that is good. What I am finding is not nice to see. I can not share the links here because some of the site are blacklisted and others might cause problems for Nexus. I am glad I did not pre order the game. I will wait to see what happens. :confused:

 

I really don't think FO4 modding will be that restricted because of the potential of console mods. Here's my thoughts on this.

 

I'm really curious if they plan on monetizing on that end, however. Logistically, Bethesda would have to pick viable mods for the consoles; ones that don't rely on external things like FOSE, amp out graphics, or very **hungry scripting, doesn't break ratings/performance/company image/etc. Then they'd need to QA it and likely get approval from Microsoft and Sony. I don't know much about how Sony does things, but MS charges publishers for patches (or at least used to), and are very concerned with the performance of their console. Bethesda would have an agreement not to do/allow certain things to happen with their game, so they'd need to have control over what mods get published and retain that control post-release. Can't have someone sneaking in a patch that draws dicks on everything, it may be more sensible for Bethesda to handle mod updates, or need to QA each release every time.

 

That said, It's a fair bit of work on their part, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some amount of monetization happen for console mods. On PC, we have the choice to make or download our own mods at our own risk, and as such, we turn to the community and authors for support if a mod is misbehaving. They simply wouldn't be able to fully support the users for both the game and any given mod-break situation.

 

 

**Remember that they previously ran into all kinds of memory issues with Skyrim for long-term players; I remember they asked people for lots of save games to help fix the situation. I don't recall if they did or not, but this also may limit what things too, hard to say.

 

quick edit: Cheers Dark0ne

Edited November 7, 2015 by throttlekitty

[JimboUK]

 

 

Maybe they'll look to add F4SE functionality to consoles in future patches?

 

 

It is possible I suppose, but that didn't happen so much with Skyrim. However I expect that it is more likely functions we provided in SKSE have made it into the F4 base papyrus scripts. But we won't know until we get the game.

 

 

That would be good, I think the better the experience on consoles the better it will be for everyone in the long run, a good experience may tempt some over to the PC where they can start making them.

[GroceryBaggins]

http://i.xomf.com/jvwbr.jpg

 

Hey. Buddy, come here for a seocond. It says here that you didn't pre-order my game... Care to explain?

[RoyBatterian]

There is going to be things that are good and bad about Fallout 4, same as any game. There will be graphical improvements, performance improvements, and other improvements. Beth's games have always been fixed or enhanced by the modding community. There are things we're not going to like at all, but I refuse to give any spoilers. There will be bugs, that goes without saying on any game anymore, no studio releases a bug free game these days because the projects are simply too large to test properly.

 

I shall remain on the fence until I've played the game, even with Beth's track record. Until you play it yourself it's kind of hard to judge, at this point it's all conjecture. I for one, am still excited for a new game to play with many possibilities on the horizon for modding and enjoyment. As always if I don't like something about the game, I'll try to bend it to my personal vision, and share it with others so that they may also enjoy it if they choose. For that is what modding is all about. This is supposed to be fun after all, if you aren't having fun... well maybe you should think about doing something else with your time.

 

Let me refute something already said here. Claiming the game runs on Gamebryo is like saying that CS:GO runs on the Quake 1 engine. Things progress and change, they may be based on them, but they become their own thing after so many years. Just because it uses a similar record system and nif format for models doesn't mean the entire engine hasn't been rewritten many times over by now. The rendering pipeline is a huge part of that, and it's completely different. Claiming otherwise is absolute nonsense.

 

Also don't think that one or two modders in the community are lord and master to the games and know everything, that's insulting to the other modders of the community who have put forth great effort to understand the inner workings of the games on many levels. These games are very complex and have many facets to them, it requires many people working together to understand them when documentation is not freely available about their inner workings. Even the guru's rest on the shoulders of others.

[IcyDeadPe0ple]

Well, I'm sure similar topics were already discussed but I'd like to hear some fresh thought on that matter.

 

It's no secret that there's pretty big hype around Fallout 4, that's pretty obvious since FO3 and FNV were rather successfull games (for wide public anyway). And I really don't want to get deep into discussion about how Beth destroyed classic RPG setting by making no-brainer sandbox FPS from it with levelling and loot, and how graphics are pathetic (especially for action first person shooter) and how Wasteland 2 brings both these games on it's knees story/atmosphere/gameplay and roleplaying-wise. But I'm sure that's rather subjective opinions, I just want to hear more about technical part of the game, not affected by opinions much.

 

So, it's pretty obvious from videos and screenshots that we'll have "upgraded" Creation Engine (a.k.a rebranded ancient Gamebryo from early 2000') on our hands and we have some idea about how it works because Skyrim. Now, Skyrim is fantastic game, I love it with all my heart and I don't even have a problem that 2011 game looks simply awful for it's time, but we have texture/animation packs, ENBs and other stuff making it look like true nextgen. But visuals aside game is simply broken mess, infested with bugs and much more malfunctions which Arthmoor with USKP team successfully ironing out TILL THIS DAY!

(Beth... just why?)

 

Another problem of this engine is ridiculous amount of CTDs and broken saves which is somewhat connected to modding but still happens to users with vanilla games. My Skyrim is modded to some extent (still, not overburdened for sure) and it took me many hours and days to fix this mess because I was getting CTDs basically every 5 minutes... I really wanna bow to Sheson and his famous Memory Patch which saved many lives (mine included) and rather simple solution which somehow Beth had no idea about...

(Really? Do these guys even know how to work with that engine?)

 

Modding is pretty big part of TES and now Fallout games. Without it game feels too flat and unappealing, like raw piece of source code, at least for me. Anyway, if you play on PC you WILL have at least some even minor mods installed like SkyUI maybe?

 

Now to the main problem:

Aside from the fact that FO4 will look ancient (like 2008 FO3 with unnoticable visual improvements considering it's gonna be same ol' first person shooter) because it's really not important... Will we have ANOTHER broken mess on our hands which selfless users and modders will put their time to fix? (and won't be able because it's broken to it's core). In my opinion it's pretty obvious that this Creation-Gamebryo thingy has shown its complete inoperativeness and had to be dumped loooong time ago, but we'll still have to deal with it.

 

Don't you guys afraid that we'll have to deal with the same mess again and Beth doesn't even care about this? It's not about how good game will be on it's gameplay or story part, but more of technical state, which will drain all the fun from it. I sense a major cashgrab here... Sure you can say: don't buy it if you don't like it, but game has insane potential, it's FUN as the concept but can't deliver it because of issues described above. Yeah, I hope that devs will avoid same mistakes but somehow I know they won't...

 

How do you feel about this now?

In my case, I never experienced CTD issues with vanilla Skyrim. Seemed to be much more stable than Oblivion and FO3.

 

As for the graphics, I suppose some of us who have been fans of Bethesda games for a number of years might be seeing the glass as more half full than half empty when each new game comes out and it looks much better than the previous game.

 

I was blown away by how good the vanilla Skyrim graphics looked compared to Oblivion and now I'm ecstatic about the vanilla FO4 graphics and lighting.

 

Do FO4 graphics really look that bad to you? For me in this kind of open world sandbox game, the art style, the attention to detail in the world, environmental storytelling, dynamic systems, etc., are more interesting than, say, the resolution of various textures, but I think this game looks pretty stunning.

 

There were some gorgeous PC version screenshots in the Bethesda.net article about updates to the Creation Engine, did you see those?

 

https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/the-graphics-technology-of-fallout-4/2015/11/04/45

 

The new features reportedly include:

• Tiled Deferred Lighting
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing
• Screen Space Reflections
• Bokeh Depth of Field
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
• Height Fog
• Motion Blur
• Filmic Tonemapping
• Custom Skin and Hair Shading
• Dynamic Dismemberment using Hardware Tessellation
• Volumetric Lighting
• Gamma Correct Physically Based Shading

There are some cases of corrupt save game with players, who never had installed a single mod on this game, savebloat is still an issue, and it can easily happen on non-modded game, when USKP actually eliminates or reduces to minimum that issue.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of this before.

In my case, I played Skyrim quite a lot of hours without mods from launch until the CK beta in late Dec or Jan IIRC. The only issues I experienced with vanilla Skyrim were minor stuff, like some textures turning purple when my video card ran out of memory, etc.

Seemed to be more stable than vanilla Fallout 3 and Oblivion which both crashed frequently. New Vegas was also rather stable at launch, some cosmetic stuff like radscorpions melting into the terrain but very few CTD.

Edited November 7, 2015 by IcyDeadPe0ple

[A18718]

Here's my scepticism with Fallout 4 and the future with RPGs from Bethesda.

 

http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aepEebp_700b.jpg

 

Aside that, the building your own settlment thing feels ripped from mods (From Fallout 3, NV, Skyrim) and it's not something I personally enjoy but I feel like the games going to try to push it down my throat anyways. I always loved player home mods (Underground Hideout being my go to for Fallout 3 & NV, without counting MZC).

 

I want to roleplay my character, not play an FPS with a guy having a certain voice with some fancy power armor (which I feel got "inspired" by Powered Power Armor) and trickled down with some RPG elements... I was not one of the many who were so enthusiastic with a voiced MC. I did like the idea in Mass Effect but Mass Effect isn't something I could roleplay with while Fallout 3 was for me.

Edited November 7, 2015 by A18718

[GroceryBaggins]

I want to roleplay my character, not play an FPS with a guy having a certain voice with some fancy power armor (which I feel got "inspired" by Powered Power Armor) and trickled down with some RPG elements... I was not one of the many who were so enthusiastic with a voiced MC. I did like the idea in Mass Effect but Mass Effect isn't something I could roleplay with while Fallout 3 was for me.

 

Unfortunately, that's going to be impossible with the mandatory companions, unkillable NPCs, only two endings, and only three dialogue options at a time, no skills, and Skyrim perk trees.

[StephanePare]

 

So the biggest problem--not to mention, as you definitely don't (I mean not even once) the visuals (which have I mentioned you don't mention and aren't the problem)--is that the game will be just like all the previous Bethesda games? Seriously? I don't mean to excuse Bethesda, but you know exactly what you're getting here. There's no "will we get a buggy game?" here. We know we'll get a buggy game. If you like other Bethesda games, then you'll like this one, bugs and all.

I didn't mention graphics because I don't care about graphics as much as actual quality gameplay, so yes, you're correct, I didn't mention them for that reason. I've seen comments that talk about the graphics and how bad they look. So what? A pretty game doesn't equal a quality game.

 

True, we know what we're getting and have the choice whether or not to purchase. As with all Bethesda games they virtually give us (modders and users) a base from which to create a finished game. Bethesda aren't the only culprits these days either. Most AAA games the past few years have been riddled with bugs or even unplayable. Dragon Age Inquisition is one that come to mind and they are still trying to patch it.

 

The thing is Bethesda are the only developers who create truly open world games where you can be anyone, or do practically anything, so if that's the type of game one likes there aren't many other choices. They have a monopoly and they know it.

 

So, actually, no. I won't necessarily like this one, bugs and all. There comes a time when game developers need to realize their customers are the reason they still exist, but that's a pipe dream.

 

There's a reason for that: The development time for something that large and open ended is so insane, bugs squashing is left for players to fix. It's that, or the game costs more, or gets simplified. Bug are the price to pay for the huge open ended feeling, the utter freedom and the size of the complex world. We literally annot have that, and few bugs, it's physically and financially impossible for any game developer, so we choose.

 

As for new vegas, I never played, every review i read said it was linear, so I didn't bother. All I'm expecting the game to do is give modders a decent frame, and a large enough world to really create the real game, they'll do better than any game developers ever can, once again.

 

Knowing now about how long it'll be until we get a geck, now i'm even firmer in my decision to wait a year or two.