- Joined
- August 30, 2006
- Messages
- 7,830
Bethesda made a couple of small modifications to the combat system in Fallout 4, Todd Howard told The Telegraph. All for the better, of course.
More information.By his own admission, Howard has said that the gunplay in Fallout 3 was not as good as it could have been. One of the main criticisms of that game’s action was that its blend of first-person shooting and behind the scenes stat-crunching that characterises RPGs leant too heavily on the latter. You would line up what looked to be a clean headshot, only for the game to decide you had missed because your abilities were not high enough.
Fallout 4 doesn’t shy away from statistics and dice-rolling —it remains an RPG first and foremost, says Howard— but one of Bethesda’s goals was to “make it feel great as an action game.” If you’re good at aiming, says Howard, you can compensate somewhat for lower stats. But not entirely, as Fallout’s myriad systems are layered on top of the improved action.
VATS has been tweaked. In Fallout 3, when you entered VATS the game would pause as you lined up shots to specific body parts, with the percentage chance of a clean hit displayed on each limb. In 4, VATS allows the action to continue at a very slow pace. “We found some ways to make it a bit, not a ton, but a bit more dynamic,” says Howard.
“It’s very, very slow and you’ll see the percentages change because the person is moving behind or coming out of a wall. So queuing up the shot at the right time matters. And while the playback is happening, the criticals are not random, you assign which shot is the critical one and you load up that bar. So it’s a little bit more under your control, not a lot, but just enough to make it feel better.”
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2006
- Messages
- 7,830