Fallout: NV - Constrained by Consoles

Silver

Spaceman
Staff Member
Joined
February 13, 2014
Messages
9,312
Location
New Zealand
@PCGamesN Fallout: New Vegas was constrained by consoles according to lead world builder Scott Everts.

Fallout: New Vegas would have been a better game if it was PC-only, according to the game’s lead world builder. Scott Everts says that the restrictions of the game engine brought about by the game’s console release forced his team to strip away a lot of their initial ideas.

In an interview with Everts, he told PCGamesN “[the game] would have been a lot different if it was PC only. We had a lot of plans early on. Like, ‘Here’s where the water is stored, here’s where the farms are, here’s where the government is centralised’. We had it all planned out - it wasn’t just a bunch of random stuff.”

[...]
More information.
 
Joined
Feb 13, 2014
Messages
9,312
Location
New Zealand
I kind of like the idea of outsourcing console development; just write the game for the PC then let a partner company do the porting & required modding via a license agreement. I'm sure it's not that easy to do (except with Unity?), but at least you're not restricting the original game to the least powerful system.
 
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
5,521
Location
Seattle
Players would have bitched and moaned about cut features, regardless of who developed the console port. Bethesda (not Obsidian) would have suffered a lot of abuse if GameBryo ended up significantly better on the PC than the console, which they undoubtedly knew, because they're not that stupid. I can't blame Bethesda in this case for not allowing it.
 
Joined
Aug 12, 2010
Messages
170
I like that idea @rjshae; - sounds good!

Damn console users. Get off my lawn already - it would be so much greener and lush without you trampling all over the grass.
 
Joined
Jun 4, 2008
Messages
3,959
Location
NH
I like that idea @rjshae; - sounds good!

Damn console users. Get off my lawn already - it would be so much greener and lush without you trampling all over the grass.

Just don't render the grass when running on console. Problem solved.
 
Joined
Aug 12, 2010
Messages
170
Seriously, if you are going to play a game on a machine that's a fifth or less than the cost of a decked out computer, you should be grateful even if you have no roads or grass on the ground! When they start coding these games on consoles, then I'll start taking consoles seriously. Maybe.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2011
Messages
18,788
Location
Holly Hill, FL.
I would think the primary issue was memory (perhaps I am mistaken) and the newest console resolve this issue. Having said that i much prefer the game be designed for PC (including proper PC interface) and then ported to consoles :)

No wonder PC sales (were) lagging giving how games were crippled for the platform.
 
Joined
Oct 20, 2006
Messages
7,758
Location
usa - no longer boston
Consoles stall the industry progress. Some consolefans refuse to accept it, but I'm sick of different console (and phone!) designs that appear in game ports for no logical reason but only because the original platform contains weak hardware so the game couldn't be better.

I'm sick even more when I see critics praising and crowning designs that are IMO outdated. I'm not talking about graphics.
 
Joined
Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
That is questioning the capacity to deliver progress in video gaming.

As so often, with double standard people, the causes are external. They have the perfect plan, the perfect organization. Yet it fails. But not because it is not perfect, but because of external causes. Usually connected to people.

Ah, video products would be better if resources were not diverted by piracy. For some products, piracy was made way harder. Yet no progress in those products.

Consoles are another pebble in the shoe: they are pulling back the PC scene.
The crowdfunded scene has shown very little to support that. Most products could be done on consoles in the first place.
The number of products that could be set as a milestone in gaming on PC are very scarce in the PC scene.

Between telling that devs do not know how to push forward, how to deliver progress and pointing fingers at other people, one way is better than the other.
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2011
Messages
6,265
In all fairness there's only so much that can be added even to a PC game, without causing a massive number of problems. For example Mission Mojave - Ultimate Edition - FNV Community Patch contains "more than 27,000" FNV fixes. Moreover, as I recall, PC games were limited to a cap of 4GB RAM when FNV was designed and released, and not all gamer's PCs had even that much RAM -- resulting in a cap on game detail as a practical matter .

Could Obsidian have crammed more details into the game? Probably so. But given the number of bugs in the game initially, and remaining after all patches, it's reasonable to expect such extra content would have carried an additional cost of more bugs. FNV was a big game with a big content. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

__
 
You cannot compare the memory of a Console to what you can found on a PC. The Consoles have only one type of memory. On a PC, on top of the "RAM", the GPU has its own kind of memory, often faster.
On a Console the game shares the memory available with the buffers and the textures. On a PC the available RAM is used only for the game itself. Textures and buffers are handled by the VRAM on the Graphic Card.
 
Isn't this old news? Afterall, the entire reason behind the Strip being split into multiple parts was because consoles couldn't handle it all at once.

Also, it's not simply antiquated console technology that is to blame - Gamebryo is in itself an antiquated, clunky piece of shit that should have been jettisoned long ago. The game has issues running on PCs as well, given how much of it is restricted to a single CPU thread.
 
Joined
Nov 10, 2008
Messages
5,978
Location
Florida, USA
You cannot compare the memory of a Console to what you can found on a PC. The Consoles have only one type of memory. On a PC, on top of the "RAM", the GPU has its own kind of memory, often faster.
On a Console the game shares the memory available with the buffers and the textures. On a PC the available RAM is used only for the game itself. Textures and buffers are handled by the VRAM on the Graphic Card.

Fair enough. Thought it was implicit in my comment that PC and Console limitations are different. My comment was to say that even without console limitations, PCs also have limitations, including a 2GB (corrected) RAM usage cap at the time, And that FNV for PC had thousands of bugs, even after final patch. More detail would have meant more bugs and likely more of the original bugs left uncorrected.

Here's another comment from J. Sawyer taken from a more detailed PCGamesN version of the shortened PCGamesN OP discussing the necessity of "triage" in game development:


“If you choose to make one aspect of the game more complicated, then it helps to roll back on other stuff,” Sawyer explains. “For example, one thing that would’ve been smart of me to cut are disguises in New Vegas. Faction outfits, which were cool but very time consuming. In retrospect, they’re really cool, I really like them, but they’re buggy as hell and they took a long time. Any developer who is like ‘Hey, we’re going to do this thing in the game that’s very complicated and reactive’, the best way of managing the risk for that would be to look at other things that are potentially complicated and reduce the complexity of them. It’s triage.”​


Point is you can't keep and/or implement all original ideas of game design without causing problems -- gotta draw a line and get on with it.

__
 
Point is you can't keep and/or implement all original ideas of game design without causing problems -- gotta draw a line and get on with it.

__

Yup. This same "Constrained By Consoles argument" goes back to Pong probably.

"Pong was constrained by consoles. We wanted to have different color selections for the paddles but required 2kb of memory we didn't have." Etc..

At some point you have to call a game finished.
 
Yup. This same "Constrained By Consoles argument" goes back to Pong probably.

"Pong was constrained by consoles. We wanted to have different color selections for the paddles but required 2kb of memory we didn't have." Etc..

At some point you have to call a game finished.

Point on target -- considering the following quote also from the more detailed PCGamesN article:


There is an old game developer saying that goes ‘a game is never finished, it just ships’, and that was certainly the case for New Vegas. So much so that Sawyer felt compelled to carry on working on it after the launch, using his personal time to build one of the game’s most popular mods, JSawyer's mod…​

__
 
Point on target -- considering the following quote also from the more detailed PCGamesN article:


There is an old game developer saying that goes ‘a game is never finished, it just ships’, and that was certainly the case for New Vegas. So much so that Sawyer felt compelled to carry on working on it after the launch, using his personal time to build one of the game’s most popular mods, JSawyer's mod…​

__

If you take that saying to the logical conclusion then no art, project, game, music piece, etc. is ever finished. So someone could be working on the same single piece an entire lifetime. See George Lucas for an example of that. :)
 
Hmm, Beth's intention was to transfer the original, near-dead, niche FO games to a new generation of gamers: they are young, they play consoles, they want more action and simplicity.
Hence the game had to be designed as such. In that regard, FO3 was a triumph. It is perfectly playable on PC and consoles FOR WHAT IT IS.

Now, for some strange reason, it seems that Obsidian's intention was to undo what Beth did -- which is totally baffling. Beth made a huge success with FO3, the market proved that their idea was genius. Why change this?

Eventually, Obsidian did the right thing though: with PoE, they have created a brand new IP, that is truly theirs, totally niche, hardcore community driven -- perfect for fulfilling their old school RPG creation itch, much to our delight.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2008
Messages
820
Now, for some strange reason, it seems that Obsidian's intention was to undo what Beth did -- which is totally baffling. Beth made a huge success with FO3, the market proved that their idea was genius. Why change this?

Not sure if serious.
 
Joined
Nov 10, 2008
Messages
5,978
Location
Florida, USA
Not sure if serious.

There is a basis for what he is saying (as applied to Sawyer) in the detailed PCGamesN article. Essentially Sawyer says he had hoped for a more hardcore, more difficult, Fallout 3, more akin to the Fallout originals:


Sawyer says the desire to build the [JSawyer's] mod, which adds a host of balance tweaks and cut content, came from personal taste. He played the first Fallout in college and ended up working at Black Isle just after Fallout 2 shipped, in the hope of creating a traditional sequel, hardcore difficulty and all…

"…So after everything was wrapped up and everything was done [in FNV], I was like ‘Ah, you know what?’ I downloaded the game at home to see how it actually plays and just kind of tuned it the way I wanted to tune it…Tuning is a never-ending process, but in New Vegas there was a particular disconnect [with the] style of game overall because I had come into Black Isle wanting to make Fallout 3, which in my mind would have been a much more difficult game.”​


[Edit] <grins> didn't mean to ignore the possibility that you are referencing the continuing 'discussion' whether Bethesda shouldn't have simplified FO3 so much… i.e., Sawyer's desire for hardcore FO3 was right on for old-schoolers…
__
 
Last edited:
Depends on the graphic card; intel hd for example uses system ram. Anyway this isn't really a valid comment (imho). the real issue is total ram availble for the game itself (whether some ram is used for the gpu is doesn't matter as long as you accurately represent the amount available for the game). Yes memory speeds are different but that is again very minor for most games.

The new consoles have 8 (or 12) GB of ram which is plenty for both game and gpu functions. Yea the pc can always have current state of the art hardware (gpu/cpu/ram) but the game has to function well on a wide range of platforms and some will not be much better than the newer consoles.

You cannot compare the memory of a Console to what you can found on a PC. The Consoles have only one type of memory. On a PC, on top of the "RAM", the GPU has its own kind of memory, often faster.
On a Console the game shares the memory available with the buffers and the textures. On a PC the available RAM is used only for the game itself. Textures and buffers are handled by the VRAM on the Graphic Card.
 
Joined
Oct 20, 2006
Messages
7,758
Location
usa - no longer boston
Back
Top Bottom