Fallout 4 Fallout 4 musings

Okay, I'm playing New Vegas and Fallout 3 right now, mostly 3 but switching back and forth. This has me thinking about Fallout 4 and what I'd like to see.

1. Companions that are world and situation aware. I'd love to see companions in the main game that match some of the wonderful work done by modders. Primarily, I'm thinking of Vilja and Willow. Vilja is very opinionated and she recognizes many of the quests and locations in Skyrim. She'll comment on various people that she's met and will greet several of them in a very natural way. Willow is similar in that she is afraid of Deathclaws, wants to see the strip, thinks House is whacko, etc. Willow is basically a barbie-doll, but she has great scripting that makes her feel more real than vanilla companions in either Fallout.

2. Civilization. It has been hundreds of years since the Fallout and all knowledge wasn't lost. Since there are robots, there should be vehicles. Though roads are pretty torn up, I'd like to see some type of ATV or at least a horse-like beast at minimum. I'd like for the civilized areas to be clean too. It makes no sense that people would choose to live in filth. Since the game is likely taking place at the Institute, I think we should see advanced tech outside of weapons, armor and robots.

3. Work. I'd like to see people actually out earning a living. A caravan should be more than 2 people and a beast. There should be 2-3 guard dogs, some brahmin, and several merchants all traveling together. Something along the lines of Fallout 3 but having all of the merchants in one group and maybe 2-3 competing groups. One of the recurring jobs would be getting scavenger contracts from various merchant groups to clear out prized buildings. Conflict could arise if a particular find is being worked by two groups. You should run into other adventurers in some of these ruins. Speech might determine whether you work together, stealth might allow you to acquire the other guys' stuff, etc.

Any ideas?

I think the modders that made…oh, what was it called…The Strip Renovated (or something?)…were onto something. And the mod that put working streetlights across the wasteland, or at least on major roads. I find it hard to believe that all of human civilization would look exactly the same in the F3/FNV timeline as it did in the very beginning. Progress has to be made sometime, and it only seems natural to me that certain towns/nation states/whatever would start to rebuild. There should be places that are more polished, and where people aren't wearing dirty, dingy, spotted, moth-eaten prewar stuff.

Progress.

More character customization options.

And I'd like to see working romances, but I know I'm a minority there.

Immediate NifTools and Blender support be damned, what I want most of all is an Engine that isn't a cobbled-together 10 year old relic prone to crashes if you look at it wrong.

I would love fewer loading screens. Apart from that I think that VATS needs to be rebalanced and made more interesting for melee weapons. I would also enjoy the ability to pause the game to give NPCs more specific commands (take cover, aim at that guy, etc.).

I would like to have a vehicle or mount. If the game is really set in the Boston area, I wouldn't mind a boat!

More Interesting Ruins.
More Mutants, lots of weird and deadly mutants (human, animal and plant)!
More Color.
Less politics.

Man, I agree with all of this. No wonder it's taking them so long. They're putting all of this in the game

I wonder about Drithius' comment. There is a massive, massive modding community for Gamebryo and its assets. Are the modders willing to jump ship en masse to something new? If not, do the gains of a new engine outweigh the loss of 90% of the modders? If they use Unity, doesn't it require an expensive license to mod? What other engine might be a worthy replacer of Skyrim's? How many sandbox games can rival Skyrim for graphics?

I enjoy the working romances as Lydia seemed a little robotic, so she would work great as a robot mate, like the one House had in FNV I love romancing Vilja. It takes forever and she is hard to please and you have to deal with her parents, etc. Maybe they can hire Emma to write one of the romance questlines.

crpgnut said:

If they use Unity, doesn't it require an expensive license to mod?

Click to expand...

Bethesda would never use Unity… and I'm thankful for that.

I'd like to see them explore the possibilities of a manufactured character, such as a clone or a robot (or even a clone-cyborg). Your initial goal could be to escape the programming of your builder scientists and attain your own unique sense of self-identity. Once you gain a factory stronghold, Death could just mean that your psyche is inserted into a new copy, while retaining all the qualities and skills of your previous existence. The fact that you are non-human can allow your character to accomplish things that a human could not, such as high resistance to radiation, remarkable physical abilities, and self-programming of new skills.

rjshae said:

I'd like to see them explore the possibilities of a manufactured character, such as a clone or a robot (or even a clone-cyborg). Your initial goal could be to escape the programming of your builder scientists and attain your own unique sense of self-identity. Once you gain a factory stronghold, Death could just mean that your psyche is inserted into a new copy, while retaining all the qualities and skills of your previous existence. The fact that you are non-human can allow your character to accomplish things that a human could not, such as high resistance to radiation, remarkable physical abilities, and self-programming of new skills.

Click to expand...

I'd love to see this game, but not as a Fallout. I'd rather see this as an iteration of Deus Ex.

crpgnut said:

There is a massive, massive modding community for Gamebryo and its assets. Are the modders willing to jump ship en masse to something new? If not, do the gains of a new engine outweigh the loss of 90% of the modders? If they use Unity, doesn't it require an expensive license to mod? What other engine might be a worthy replacer of Skyrim's? How many sandbox games can rival Skyrim for graphics?

Click to expand...

Speaking as a former niftools developers (from oblivion to pre-skyrim; max, niflib, nifskope) there are usually a few people that can do the modding tools but it took a lot of work to reverse engineer the netimmerse file format.

I think that single player games will be modded but not as quickly and as a result the community may never really form if tools take too long to be released. If companies can release export tools or design documents it helps a lot. If that is there and the game is any good then people will jump but it may take time. Look at Morroblivion or Skywind for that passion.

Anyway I have some hope for Unreal based games in the future as tool source can be had fairly cheap but licensing and redistribution restrictions may be a big headache for that engine and modders. I don't know much about FO4 at this point and I've never tried Unity modding so have no comment on it.

Thanks, figment. I would love to see a totally new engine, but am horrified to even think about losing the modding community.

People would gradually adapt just as they've adapted for Skyrim's Papyrus scripting. It would just take time.

But this is a pie-in-the-sky argument anyway - I doubt Bethesda will ever move on from Gamebryo as long as they keep selling millions of copies + modders continue shoring up their ineptitude as much as the cumbersome engine allows.

There was speculation they might use the ESO engine for Fallout 4. I'm not sure of the differences.

They need to recapture the classic feel of Fallout where combat is pretty brutal and the unique dialogues were memorable.

This INT3 run is pretty funny in Fallout 2. Took drugs just to invite party members while experiencing the discrimination against retards in the wastelands.




Also

Ugh! I thought Fallout 2 was the weakest game in the series. I prefer Bethesda's vision of the game, but I know there are some who remember the past more fondly. I guess if Bethesda would accept a game that only sold 50,000 copies, but then they could call it Wasteland 2 instead....

Fallout 3 is probably the worst imo.
Nothing good was memorable in that game.
Things that stick out are stuff that are really bad and doesn't fit the post-apoc setting. E.g: Megaton, Vampires, Mothership Zeta. The rest are a series of forgettable quests that nobody even talked about. Not to mention their vision of 'Brotherhood of Steel' as a bunch of upright Paladins of justice. Which is not entirely accurate at all.

I don't know what kind of vision they set for Fallout 4 but Bethesda ideas of extra content in DLC is enough clue that they're really bad at it.

Eh...It wasn't That bad, finished it recently in fact.
I think they really did try to recapture some of Fallout infamous black humor and atmosphere...but their writers, for the most part, really weren't up to the task...convincing president Eden to self destruct almost choked me to death.
Besides...Legion in FNV, was far worse, in my opinion.

Fallout 3 was pretty bad out of the box, but not for the reasons rk47 claims. It was much too easy even on the hardest difficulty, and the compass showed you where everything was before you were even close.

I thought it was great though after I modded it to become more realistic and difficult.

True…I also jumped right in with + 150 mods combined, have enough experience with Bethesda that I no longer bother playing "vanilla", even on the first run.
Good atmosphere, but the more you played it, it became more and more tiresome. "Odd" world design…no crops, place built around atom bomb, Lamplight, goddamn metros…felt like the bombs fell a few weeks back and threw everyone into lethargy afterwards.
In the end, honestly a very mediocre game even with the mods…don't see anything aside from atmosphere and a few "cool" moments perhaps, that really stood out.
Even if they're not my cup of tea, I get it how games like Last of Us or Batman receive all those GOTY awards, but with Bethesda? I have no idea how they pull it off with their quality of writing, animations, voice acting, engine and stability issues and overall game play you'll find in their games.

This is why the November release date is kind of nice… because the Steam Christmas Sale and the release of the modding kit might just happen at around the same time.

Of course, I doubt any mod will rectify the limited dialogue menu system that panders to consoles.