I feel like Starfield is an obvious exception to that. It's got 1000 planets and they used significant procedural generation to make them.
If anything we should expect them to put the effort that they used on size to go into depth now. I bet they will use that procedural generation more on dungeons, but the over world will be typical Bethesda
Bit apprehensive if that is the case! I love how crafted a lot of the areas in Fallout have been thus far - lots of storytelling through well placed items.
Yeah Todd really needs to break off from this obsession with procedural generation, the "radiant" content is easily the weakest in all their games, and damn near ruined Starfield completely.
His studio is famous for giant handcrafted worlds that few competitors can match, it's wild that he's trying to move AWAY from this.
radiant quests are the definition of busy work. a good rpg shouldnt have busy work, the game itself should incentivize freeform busy work that isn't an obvious "go here and get this random item" quest loop that never goes anywhere! maybe in an online game like 76 but keep that shit outta single player
I think there can be fun radiant quests. I also don’t think the gameplay loop should be reliant on them. Having a some radiant quests after you’ve completed all the scripted content for a faction or area can be kinda nice if you wanna RP still being involved with them, I always enjoyed doing thieves guild radiant quests sneaking around ransacking houses and shit lol.
The biggest problem I have is that I feel it de incentivizes creative quest design rather than supplementing gameplay. Instead of getting a bounty board of named characters who committed specific crimes, we get fully randomized and completely nameless characters for example, because they figure people are doing it just for the reward. This would be fine after we’d completed a bounty-hunting quest line in each city, but the radiant quests effectively replace it.
I think there's a place for radiant quests especially in games like fallout and skyrim where people will play the same character for dozens of levels. But Bethesda is leaning too heavily into it I think and have been for a while. The skyrim faction lines were noticeably worse and shorter than they were in Oblivion because they were counting on the radiant quests to beef up the content for instance.
I'm just coming into fo4 for the first time right after a fresh playthrough of new vegas and the radiant quest system is so.. uninteresting. especially for me as I have a tendency to explore the map regardless of if there is a for-sure incentive, so by the time i started getting radiants from the BoS, the game seemed to imply that helping the squires at the police station leads to something, only to do like 4 of them in a row and realize that the game was just feeding me radiant quests.
I like radiant quests. I think it’s a good background mechanic. Having something that you can do on the side to be a reliable way to make money, improve reputations, or otherwise advance is a good thing. I know the Minutmen radiant quests got on a lot of people’s nerves, but it makes sense. You’re rebuilding a faction from scratch. You would have to go defend settlements, clear dungeons, etc.
Obviously radiant quests can’t be the entire game, but they’re fine as a mechanic when used properly. Like in Skyrim you can take assassination jobs endlessly from the Dark Brotherhood. You can take endless robbery jobs from the Thieves Guild. In Oblivion you could fight in the arena. In New Vegas you can fight in the North Vegas sewer. Those are fine. Having the whole game be that is not.
Hell, on launch 76 every damn quest line was either read a log or listen to a holotape, go meet someone, *gasp* they died, pick up the note or key or whatever and turn it into the robot they were supposed to, and go again.
I agree. What makes them good or bad isn’t necessarily if they’re easy, but if they’re convenient. Like in fnv you can turn in NCR dog tags to the legion for a rep increase. You progress the radiant quest by playing the game naturally (explore and kill enemies) and only occasionally need to turn the quest in for a reward. That’s great. Starfield had radiant quest that distracted you from how you would play the game naturally. Like you may get a bounty to kill a ship in space. You do it, fly to the ship, blow it up, go back for reward. It acts more like a lazy “real” quest than as a radiant quest. It’s something you have to go out of your way to do that doesn’t progress the game beyond money and exp, which is fine if it’s an interesting quest, but that’s not what radiant quests are. Comparing Skyrim and Starfield, they both have radiant bounty quests that function basically the same way. The difference is that in Skyrim (at least early game) these quests also “reward” by making you explore the world and go places you maybe wouldn’t have otherwise and game designers can use that to push players into cool or fun areas. In Starfield you don’t get that exploration meaning you are having to go out of your way and stop playing the enjoyable parts of the game to focus your attention on a boring radiant quest. Like you said, the key is if they are used correctly. When they are I think they tend to go unnoticed, but when they suck they are annoying and stand out.
Yeah, I enjoy the radiant quests. Sometimes I don't feel like doing real quests but still want something telling me to go and clear out some dungeon for a sense of direction.
I think the frequency of radiant quests popping up is the key factor.
I initially liked the Minutemen quests, but the constant spam of them became annoying. Do one quest, go do some Minuteman shit, do another quest, go do some more Minuteman shit got tiresome.
It would have been nice to get a sense that your actions where actually having an impact, but it was still just a constant stream of attacks on your settlements.
Early on, you’ll get a decent mix of the two, but there’re only so many settlements to unlock so that eventually stops and you’ll ultimately get nothing else besides either defending settlements or rescuing hostages
That's only in the early stages of the game when you haven't established all the settlements.
Once you get everything set up, it's just "You gotta go save X settlement" on like a 30 minute cd. And it doesn't matter how well fortified you make the settlements, how many turrets you stack all over the place, or how much progress you've made in the main storyline or just the Minutemen storyline.
>His studio is famous for giant handcrafted worlds that few competitors can match, it's wild that he's trying to move AWAY from this.
His studio is currently famous for *reasonably large* handcrafted worlds, but did previously create and were famous for other things.
Bethesda originally got their RPG pedigree status from Daggerfall, which was a giant world made possible entirely through procedural generation and liberal usage of "radiant quests". The truth is, this stuff is in TES' DNA, and it'll probably never be done away with completely; the ideal here is for Bethesda to try and find a way to do it *well*. A good radiant quest should feel like something your (human) GM has thrown together for a quick session, and your scripted quests should avoid being so monotonous as to feel like something a computer has generated using a simple algorithm...
I went from Starfield into Fallout 76 and it’s crazy how different the world feel. 76 has so much character while Starfield just feels so sterile, which in many parts makes sense. But in the lived in areas it’s just so off.
From what Todd’s said in the past, he wants to optimize gaming so procedural generation can run a lot of world building mechanics, similar to the OG Elder Scrolls titles. I’d guess this is why they’re excited to work under Microsoft. Lots of MSFT’s AI tech could be retrofitted for game development.
IIRC Todd’s logic was the more content that can be created by an algorithm, the deeper they can go on story mechanics and designing more unique map locations. I’d assume this would also allow them to better optimize future games.
Honestly I’m hyped for the future. My biggest peeve in games is doing the same thing in the same location multiple times which is why I hate roguelikes and souls games and can’t play a game more than once without getting bored. If the location changes every time while keeping the same general story I’d be more than happy to play a game multiple times.
For sure. I think people are too critical of procedural generation. They can craft dungeons with it and then fine tune them, it's not like the entire thing is just generated.
I hated the procgen dungeons in Starfield. I don’t care if overworlds are created like that, but dungeons should be unique and serve a purpose.
But only sci-fi space exploration overworlds, and even then, it should be limited. It doesn’t make for endless replayability, instead, mind dulling repetitiveness
> I bet they will use that procedural generation more on dungeons
Would this be as crazy as the internal design of enemy ships in Starfield? Ladders and doors were seemingly placed at random.
It’s not. Procgen was only used to generate locations of POIs and landscape. Everything is still handcrafted, even radiant POIs.
And it is their biggest game so far by almost every metric. Dialogue, quests, POIs, etc. it just had some questionable execution that made it feel small.
The community will patch it and fix all our bad design decisions mentality of Behedsta needs to stop.
The Reason I don't buy their games anymore.
With AI I fear they will just add MORE stuff without thinking about if it its a good idea or if it is too buggy.
16 times the Detail does not make a game good on its own.
I haven't bought the last 2.
Me: "I am disappointed in the quality of a product and I wont buy anything more until it gets better and gave my reasons for doubting it will get better"
You: "that does not make you a martyr"
WTF?
Like I am not allowed to have an opinion on Behedesta or I am a martyr?
Awful might be taking it too far. Maybe in the context of the expectations and studio, but probably not for the game itself.
It wasn't good, but I don't think it was so bad that I would call it awful.
No, I played it quite a bit, and it was awful. I really wanted to like the game. It was a space game that was kinda serious but also quirky. It was just released as a shitshow.
I played through many of the side stories, which I thought were decent, but predictable. The problem with the game came down to how there were so many planets and they all felt the same. Sure. There were slightly different plants and creatures. But enter any one of the caves and they are all the same layout. How is that fun? And there wasn't any variation to resource collection. Scan everything. The cities were unnecessarily large with very little in them. Why?
Even the ship building was lackluster. Everything is blocky. None of the parts seem to fit cohesively. And there weren't options for smooth or sleek ships. The memes were the best part of shipbuilding, but it was missing a lot of features to make it interesting, or at least fun to build.
I assume Microsoft is going to look at the potential sales dollars and will have a developer start a fallout game. That way, Bethesda gets to work on ES6. When Bethesda does get around to releasing FO5, the other fallout game will have already been out.
I can't imagine Microsoft executives seeing %600 fallout franchise increase numbers and just wait 10 years for Bethesda to Bethesda.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. It looks dated compared to so many other big budget games, and somehow runs worse; it's been pretty explicitly shown by modders that the game is insanely unoptimised.
I honestly hope FO5 can *not* be a creation engine/Bethesda game.
Try telling that to all the modders who won't be able to mod the game how they like if Bethesda moves to another engine like stuttery unreal. If only moving engines were that simple. Sadly it's just something redditors say without knowing a damn thing about developing games
Exactly. Moving to a new engine gains some new following maybe, and silences the constant hate, but also alienates the majority of their longtime fanbase. To many players, an engine change would literally warrant a "see ya, guess I'll just replay all the old shit again".
Not to say that I wouldn't keep up and see what things looked like if they did. I just feel like it would result in a full deconstruction and potential gutting of what makes their games special to me. Starfield already felt like an odd departure and a pale imitation to me all at once, even within the same old engine, basically. Can't imagine mistaking a Fallout screenshot for Far Cry, or Elder Scrolls for Elden Ring, etc.
I don't get the "updated engine" post either lmao, the game has very dated graphics and technical limitations we see in all Bethesda games.
The NPCs looked genuinely horrifying at times
Every Vault in FO5 will be procedurally generated with each section separated by a loading screen as part of Vault-Tec CEO T. Howard's latest insidious experiments.
But oh boy will you have *succulents.*
When modders pulled the game apart, it seems that the 'loading screens,' were put in place because of the limited console memory. The consoles have more storage than ram, so they adapted to that.
I have played Starfield extensively since release. At one point, loading screens were the bane of travel in the game.
Guess I should have added /s to my post but I thought the joke was obvious.
That's the entire game though? Enter a building, loading screen, get on your ship? Loading screen. Travel to another planet? Loading screen. Land on planet? Loading screen. Get out of your ship? Loading screen.
The game is endless loading screens and to sit here and act like it wasn't one of the most profilic complaints is disingenuous to say the least.
I kinda want the ppl who are working on 76 to work on the next fallout spin off. The writing for wastelanders and BOS questline was amazing. Along with stuff like lore and holotape stories you find are just great. Also the design team knows how to do their job! Everything looks amazing. They need to make a fallout game. Idc if its not bigger than the last, I would be happy if its as small as Fallout 3.
I gotta admit, the subteam assigned to making FO76 updates have worked damn hard to save that mess of a game, and bring back what the fans actually want.
I remember doing a BoS questline where you're meant to be undercover (i.e. pretending you aren't the Brotherhood), and getting reprimanded for wearing power armour to the secret meeting and blowing our cover.
I was legitimately shocked, it was like playing a real Fallout game again. Gotta give them credit for that.
I would *love* it if they did this and set it shortly after the bombs drop and *before* 76 opens.
I want to deal with the scorched plague *as it arises*, interact with the Responders and the Mistresses of Mysteries, maybe even be responsible for the plague in the first place after helping Eckhart in his machinations, then get involved in whatever desperate endgame I might choose to get involved with, be it a last stand with the Brotherhood trying to deal with the scorched at the glassed caverns / end zone, escorting refugees east past Harper's Ferry, or working with Eckhart in a failed last ditch attempt to launch missiles at China from one of the silos.
Maybe even a 4th secret ending where I succeed at resetting the simulation by targeting a small village outside Beijing.
I was thinking that they could actually do a main game set in pennsylvannia nearer to the main game timeline. Would be able to reuse lots of assets that way!
Hmm... a pitt prequel, maybe? Or set around the Philadelphia area?
oooh oooh, I bet post-apocalyptic Scranton would amazing, and references to The Office, especially to the strangler, could be fun.
We already have Pittsburg covered and Philadelphia would be too thematically similar to Boston to justify a whole new game imo. Id rather they did NYC or Chicago
The only problem with Chicago is there's no terrain. No mountains, hills, swamps. Just city, lake, then cornfields in every other direction. Might make everything two one dimensional as far as fallout games go.
I was just trying to think of what would be easy to make.
Personally think Chicago has a high chance of being Fallout 5's location.
Philadelphia I think would be a perfect smaller scale NV style spinoff from 4 and 76.
I played on launch, beat the main quest and did some farming, and then picked it up again after Wastelanders came out.
I kind of feel bad for players who didn’t play in “real time” because I felt like the return of human settlers as the result of our actions pre-wastelanders was a really cool storytelling device and made the return of humans feel really dramatic and rewarding. It felt like meaningful roleplaying.
I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that now when new players exit the vault, the “follow the holotapes of the overseer” quests are just fully intermingled with the updated wastelanders questline?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why they would do it that way, I know a lot of the complaints about the launch version had to do with the empty almost lazy feeling of the world, the majority of players wanted a classic fallout with real NPCs and interactive dialogue. So it’s probably smart to have new players thrown right into the version with human NPCs and an expanded quest line. But I do wish there was an option to play “in order” and only have humans return after beating the original “empty wasteland” quest.
I don’t suppose an option like that exists, does it?
I just started playing 76 a week ago. What was the main story like with the lack of regular NPCs? And to answer your question, yes the holotapes are kind of intermingled with the wastlanders quest line.
I feel like I'm missing a quest or two. I've ran into several scorch beasts outside of events but I feel like I should fight some as part of some quests and also learn more of them.
Granted I haven't been to fort defiance outside of an event to protect it from the scorched. It does feel like I'm missing information either way and I'm not sure if it's cause of game design or some side quests missed. I know I haven't learned in game why nuking the map is a good thing or actually how to nuke the land in the first place. I figured I'd eventually get to it in quest.
At launch, picture the world empty of all humans except for player characters. Any quest that involves talking to a human didn’t exist. The plot was sort of a large scale murder mystery; you emerge from the vault and find the scorched, these bizarre zombie creatures, and an otherwise abandoned wasteland, including places that still feel like livable towns.
Where is everyone? Did they all become scorched? Are they hiding? Did they run away?
By following quest lines through robots, computer terminals, paper records, recordings, and most importantly the tapes and caches left to you by the Overseer (who still seems to be alive and is just one step ahead of you) you piece together what the hell happened here and come up with a plan to restore this segment of wasteland to be a safe habitat place (relatively speaking).
The game was like that for a year after launch. Also, although the structure of the map was broadly the same, tons of places that now have human settlements didn’t exist, like foundation. They were just barren segments of wasteland.
When the expansion came out it was like all our efforts from “Act 1” paid off and people returned just like we (the player character) planned. So the quests had to go in order: follow the overseers questline, THEN move on to anything human related.
Part of me would want to experience that and part of me is glad I didn't. Like from a story perspective that seems to give importance to the actions of the players, but I see just how boring that can be for many.
I really wish the option to play in order existed. That would be really neat. I just started playing 76 last year and the more I hear about the original release the more interesting it sounds. Especially if you didn’t have to wait for the updates to be released and could somehow just unlock them as you play.
I played through a bit of The Long Dark and its neat playing a game where it feels like you’re the only survivor (for the most part). Its eerie and unsettling but intriguing at the same time.
> I kinda want the ppl who are working on 76 to work on the next fallout spin off. The writing for wastelanders and BOS questline was amazing
Oooh, gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there, pal.
The writing for the *original release*'s found lore, especially the holotapes, was amazing. The quests were... eh, kinda bad, but the lore was amazing.
The Wastelanders update was... good enough. Not great, but good enough, especially in contrast to how bad the questlines at release were.
But Steel Dawn and Reign were amateurish at best and the Pitt was pathetically bad. Haven't fired the game up again since the Blue Devil update, so I haven't hit the boardwalk in Atlantic City, but the quality of the plotting and writing for 76 has been dropping for a while, so I don't have high hopes.
You should come back for the next content patch coming in June. I've been doing some of the PTR stuff, and I think you'll be happier with that new storyline.
If it's interesting enough everything before Nuka-World on Tour was Bethesda Game Studios, including Wastelanders and BoS quests. I've heard that the DLC that the UK based team, Double Eleven releases is well received and highly praised.
Yes. You can almost completely play the game without interacting with other players, aside from some Events and boss fights (and some OP people can solo those).
The game was built around quests, you just originally weren't getting them from human NPCs. You were getting them from holotapes, terminals, automated radio broadcasts, or notes you found in the world. Now that human NPCs are back, you get quests from them too.
Pretty much the only content you *have* to do with other players is world bosses, and those are like, totally optional and are a very small portion of content.
You’ll spend most of your time questing/exploring solo, and building your camp.
Even if you dont like multiplayer, those big world events are so easy to just walk over to and join the combat to take down the boss, no communication or typical mmo setups required.
Yes. It has quests like every other game, you just can do them with friends and you also see other players out and about. There’s also global events where you can get a bunch of people together to do different things
I only interact with other players when I’m feeling social and even then only with the emotes. I have voice chat muted and my mic is off. I never actually speak to other players. I just do my own thing and maybe sometimes show up to events.
There’s not really any pvp except for the clueless noob who starts with you to take your workshop that you only claimed for a daily quest in the first place. Like okay lv27, here’s my workshop if you want it that bad.
Sometimes veteran players will swoop in and help a noob out of a sticky situation and then disappear Mysterious Stranger style. Most people are pretty chill.
Yes. They were understaffed and had very little experience but still made a very nice game under time constraints, when the bugs were patched a bit after release it was a very fun game. It got a lot of unnecessary hate but I honestly really liked it! If they put the effort from that game and the experience they got into a smaller spinoff, possibly Fallout 3 size, I would actually find that really nice.
I preordered it and I honestly really liked it! I played it day one and ran into some strange glitches and still liked it even then, but as patches came it became more and more enjoyable. I never understood the hate for the game, and given the crew working on it, they made an excellent game
Doesn't particularly relate to design tho, this is performance. Iirc they had to cut the fidelity to help the mmo aspect to function in their engine - design detail and textures were reduced
Todd Howard is way more cool guy if you watch interviews with him where he talks as a normal "private" human, look up the podcast from Lex Fridman interviewing him.
People dont have to like his public EP (executive producer) persona and all his decisions etc. but making him to be the antichrist himself is extremely overblown.
Yep, and at the end of the day, he was a big part of the reason Bethesda got the Fallout IP in the first place - because he himself was a massive fan of that world and game and he wanted to make a Fallout game. So I always find it a little silly when people criticize him for single handedly ruining the franchise or whatever other dumb opinion they have about the guy. Public persona or not, to me he seems like he genuine cares about the franchise and that he’s a big fan of it himself.
Both can be possible. He *does* love his games. He also knows he’s running a business and that he must make more and more profit.
To do that each game has to be more and more accessible and dumbed down.
No Bethesda title will come close to Fallout 3 or Skyrims leveling system or world design again.
Considering how random and chaotic things are with the world, Todd could still come out announcing himself as Christ for the 2nd coming.
Mud will totally be on your face when if he opens the gates Hell and dooms us all as the Antichrist.
I hope they do more story updates with 76. The last one that came out was the brotherhood storyline in 2021 and I hope after the Minnesota story expansion coming in June. We get more like I would love to see an expansion for the free states and enclave.
I thought they added more story missions? (Atlantic City and Blue Ridge Caravan). Also what Minnesota expansion? The next update in June is taking place in Virginia (Skyline Drive).
Surely even Bethesda aren’t silly enough to not capitalise on the shows success? It would be foolish to wait ten years and potentially have the show finish or decline in popularity.
They can't reshuffle their development plans that much. Elder Scrolls 6 is next in line after Starfield, they're already ramping up that production, and they'll have to finish THAT before starting on Fallout 5. I don't see them getting F5 out before 2030, minimum.
The best they can do is jumpstart development in the next year or so but currently the plan is to wait until TES VI is out which will take years alone. They would have to put together another studio to do so and even then it is doubtful that we get anything before near the end of the decade.
Why they didn’t have a fallout new Vegas, 3 or literally any other fallout game remaster ready for the show blows my mind. I mean we know how easy it’s been for Bethesda to remaster the same game over and over again…
I’ve been playing fallout 3 on my series x and it feels like a remastered experience, especially since I haven’t played it since 2009.
It’s really not that mind blowing to consider, maybe, Bethesda would rather put the majority of their efforts into their more recent games because those players are more supportive towards Bethesda
It’s like they expected it to suck or something? Despite having some amount of creative control. It seems like the success kinda caught them off guard.
Well tbf. I thought there was a good chance this show would suck too. And even though it’s good I’m still surprised it was THAT good and successful.
Oh well in the long run if this means we get more fallout content I’m ok with it I just SO wish they had a fallout 3 remaster in the works.
I lowkey want the 76 team to work on the next fallout they have some great modders on the team and their art designers and writers are nailing the fallout feel as of late excited to see the expansion this June
76 is legit now. People who still hate or act whiney about it are a special breed of silly to me. Truly get over it and learn how development works and versioning
look, the content is okay, but the performance and connection are still and will apparently remain dogshit. i love the fallout series and don't have a weak stomach for games that don't run well, but 76 is on a whole other level. even i can't get past it enough to properly enjoy the game.
I'm not going to play 76. Not now, not ever. I'm never going to forget Bethesda's actions as a compamy surrounding the release. Trying to prevemt refunds, gimping people who paid for the collector's edition with a cheap bag, accidentally doxxing said players when they moves to fix it, the entire saga of dark rum, etc.
They could make the game into the best piece of entertainment to ever exist and I still won't touch it. It's a matter of principle. Looking forward to Fallout 5 though.
Here’s the thing though. There is probably zero overlap between the people who did those very questionable business related things you mentioned vs the people who actually created 76.
You can enjoy and play 76 now friend. You dont have to wait until Fallout 5 to “forgive” them.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about how Fallout 5 will turn out. BGS has been less than impressive with their past few releases with Starfield being the disappointment of all of them, with its super bland by-the-numbers story that had absolutely nothing to say.
I'm not worried. The bad part of Starfield is the boring exploration, and that comes from having completely procedurally generated planets. That's not how they make maps in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, so it doesn't matter.
And on the other hand, Starfield is their most RPG heavy game since Fallout 3, with plenty of skill check and choice consequences. Fallout 5 will be fine.
I genuinely hope so. Their games have become increasingly more bland in an attempt to cater to a wider and wider audience with each release starting with Skyrim.
In 76 they made a choice to have ZERO NPCs. That's not bland.
In Starfield they open up EVERYTHING and decide that you can travel anywhere, have space battles, have some of the best looking parts of any game I've ever seen. May not have been your cup of tea but it's anything but bland.
I think you're just aging and these things aren't as shiny as they once were. Happens to all of us.
lol starfield is extremely bland dude. It just feels so incredibly uninspired. I mean good god look at the stupid float and touch the light shit you do for every shard. Loo how boring the corporate intrigue missions were on Neon. Look how lazy the red mile is. Look how ridiculous and lazy the intro was. Look how damn boring all of the dialogue is. Aesthetically it is bizarrely bland for a game set in space.
They were in space and could have literally made anything and the most creative planets just look like rural Nebraska with blue plants instead of green ones. The game is just tedious and utterly uninteresting story wise and feels like a chore to play. Also the ridiculous amount of haze and weird color grading and terribly implemented lighting is wild.
NMS gameplay is atrociously boring but they destroy Starfield aesthetically and being able to freely explore makes starfield feel ancient by comparison.
I will say that gunplay and graphics were greatly improved over their previous games but they need an actual interesting world and story for those to shine.
Each Bethesda game has been considerably more streamlined that its previous iteration.
Skyrim is more watered down than Oblivion. Oblivion is more watered down than Morrowiwnd. Fallout 4 is more watered down that Fallout 3.
Bethesda has been on this downward trend for awhile and it really came into fruition with Fallout 4 and 76 which are half baked RPGs at best. What made Fallout great was largely stripped away in favor of more shallow and insultingly simplified game mechanics and world design. Bethesda games were always greater than sum of its parts, but not as of recently. Starfield all but doubled down with bland writing, quest and world design. The game is the living embodiment of being painfully average.
To think Fallout 5 (especially now with the show's success) or TES6 will suddenly reverse this trend is wishful thinking.
Thank you for expanding on what I was trying to get across. Just because Starfield is more open world doesn’t mean they’re trying to appeal to a more hardcore RPG audience. In my estimation the blandness comes from trying to cater more and more to the console audience. The Oblivion UI was definitely designed for a mouse and keyboard. Fallout 4’s UI was designed for a controller which is very annoying since the gunplay plays more like an FPS and that caters more towards a mouse and keyboard. There’s other things that stick out but that’s just a quick example off the top of my head just from a mechanics standpoint.
Errant Signal has a great video on this. While this was made awhile ago, I think the same points he makes are applicable to Bethesda's recent releases as well.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqkZXNZwZq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqkZXNZwZq4)
I hated the new persuasion system in Starfield, it completely broke the immersion by removing any sort of coherent narrative logic to the speech checks
Yeah, the dialog checks… “give me this thing you’re sworn to protect” “No.” “you should give be this thing that you’ll get in trouble for giving me” “ok fine.”
Is that much different from speech checks in other Fallout games? For example in NV I refuse to believe it's realistic that you could talk down Lanius.
And Lanius was absolutely the dumbest character to be able to talk down. I thought it was cheap for this psychopath that murdered his entire tribe for surrendering to give up because you told him there's kingdom to maintain somewhere else.
except also the mission design, half finished feeling mission levels(red mile wtf man?), extremely bland aesthetic/npc's/companions, excessive fast travelling to have a two line conversation because space apparently doesn't have email or phones?, writing, city designs, and poi's were also just terrible.
The menu is the worst they've ever done as well. The way you navigate to missions is so stupid.
>The bad part of Starfield is the boring exploration, and that comes from having completely procedurally generated planets. That's not how they make maps in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, so it doesn't matter.
That’s not how they’ve made maps in Fallout and ES **so far**
This. Right here.
AI tools and procedural generation have come a looooong way since Skyrim and FO4... bet my bottom dollar that concept/first map draft will be purely generated.
I'll take you on that bet, as long as you don't confuse the purely procedural generated maps from Starfield with the partial procedural generation they've been using since Oblivious to geneate the terrain, trees and stuff.
I feel like people aren't understanding what went wrong with Starfield.
People are forgetting that in 2016, Fallout 4's survival mode basically popularized the survival game genre. They were around before, but they more or less exploded with F4's survival release. All of these games were mechanics focused and were very light on plot and story.
Bethesda wanted to position themselves as a pioneer within the genre, so they started work on Starfield as a creation engine based survival game.
Unfortunately for bethesda, over halfway through Starfield's development, survival games fell out of vogue, and traditional RPGs became more popular again.
So, with only a year or two left in development, Starfield was completely retooled from a survival game into an RPG. The end result was that they simply didn't have enough time to create quests and flesh out content, as they wasted most of their development cycle on survival mechanics that would never make it into the final version of game, making the finished version entirely too short for the effort that was put into its development.
>People are forgetting that in 2015, Fallout 4's survival mode basically popularized the survival game genre.
Rust, DayZ, Don't Starve, 7 Days to Die, The Forest, Subnautica, Ark and Minecraft all predate Fallout 4. Survival in Fallout 4 wouldn't even come out until 2016.
From the modding side, there definitely seems to be a lot of 'bones,' left from the survival mechanic elements, things like food, drink and fuel useage.
That's so sad if true . I really hope they bring back those survival mechanics to the new fo games.
I've assumed that Bethesda actually simply followed the trend and decided to capitalize on the survival games popularity by adding it to fo4.
It is just such a good a fit. I could never get into regular survival games because they have no point to them.
Starfield was a cash grab though. Idk how many times I said it was gonna suck bland ass and be a steaming reskin f4 settlement-radiant-quest garbage. That shit wasn’t in development for 25 years, it was in development from when todd walked out on stage, maybe after.
If they release a fallout game blander and even less fallout than 4, all is lost.
Would hope these ratings and reception to the show would light a fire in them to build FO5 faster and ES6, but I think they’re more likely to just use it to keep extracting money from FO76 and their mobile games. And can’t even trust them anymore.
You can so tell that they just weren’t prepared for this, you figure they would’ve done some sort of upgrade ala Last of Us Remastered for FO3 maybe. It’s good they had 76 around cause I’ve been rly liking it and my friends are enjoying playing together but a part of me does think they didn’t see this explosion coming lol
I love Fallout as much as anyone but idk fam instead of making a new game how about you keep content coming for 76 and start working on, oh, I don't know, releasing the new Elder Scrolls game already???
AI is about to completely change games forever. A lot of people, myself included, have a lot of doubts and fears about AI and the companies that provide it. A lot of it comes down to plagiarism and people using AI to replace other humans work. It has a lot of risks.
However - LLM AI can obviously be very powerful when set to do very specific tasks, and if those tasks are creating automatically generated quests based on recipes set by the developers, NPCs with dialogue trees that keep expanding based on your actions and so on, it could be amazing.
Imagine a Skyrim type world where every single NPC is capable of being a major character. Previously, we could only imagine we were pals with the shopkeeper we keep returning to, even though he said the same line every time we see him. Imagine instead that he asks us questions about our latest adventure and the stuff we’re bringing to him, and we can respond back. Imagine that he starts to take a genuine interest in us, and maybe even asks to come along on a quest. That he dies to a skeleton horde but manages to save us, and thanks us for letting him live his dream of being an adventurer. Or whatever.
Generated moments like this can fit in alongside with written quests, and you can use AI directors and actors to make everything unique and suited to each player.
RPGs like this are about to explode with possibility from AI. A lot of people are already tired of hearing about AI is going to do this and that, but in these scenarios, where AI is set to do the fairly simple task of playing a character, it will really work. There’s already amateur versions of AI companions for Skyrim and they are very impressive. Just imagine what a big developer would be able to do with the tech.
the game is a fomo'ed clunky mess that limits how much you can grind in a day where the best gear is hidden behind that and RNG, and is truly designed to get you to spend money in their store
that said, it's still pretty damn fun. it has an awesome community like FF14, but it feels like an mmo from 20 years ago where they're trying to figure things out and some of it is good and some of it is just dogshit. overall i would recommend it, but with heavy caveats, as even mmos from 20 years ago had things like a chat system. and like all fallout games, you will need mods for a good experience (get the chat mod)
You clearly don't understand how game development works. Making a new engine could take as long as a full game. Not to mention that it's incredibly expensive and requires a lot of resources.
Not to also mention that a large percentage of developers are using engines that are over 20 years old. The age of the engine is not a problem, and it's never been. It can be updated just like how they updated it for every game. They use it because it suits their needs and it's easily moddable.
The Creation Engine wasn't even a new engine, not really, they built it from the Gamebryo engine.
Hell, I've been making mods since Morrowind and you can tell the engines share A LOT of commonality.
I mean starfield looks great.
The constant starfield hate got old very fast , and I mean the main sub is still hit or miss for actually even liking the game. But I mention it because that type of surface level criticism and demand gained so much traction in regard to starfield that I worry Bethesda could be delayed in both TES and fallout rollouts. Hopefully it won't, because now that it's part of MS a lot of studios might help to take the burden off of main Bethesda and instead do something like FNV
I'm not saying I'm hoping for an FNV 2 but.... hehe
The Creation Engine 2 they started using with Starfield has about as much to do with Gamebryo as Unreal 5 has to do with what they used for Unreal Tournament.
Theres infinitely larger concerns.
With the work they put in to update the engine for Starfield, hopefully means we're getting TES6 and FO5 on a quicker timetable
Not sure abt that bc BGS follows the "Every game will be bigger than the last" mentality
I feel like Starfield is an obvious exception to that. It's got 1000 planets and they used significant procedural generation to make them. If anything we should expect them to put the effort that they used on size to go into depth now. I bet they will use that procedural generation more on dungeons, but the over world will be typical Bethesda
Bit apprehensive if that is the case! I love how crafted a lot of the areas in Fallout have been thus far - lots of storytelling through well placed items.
Yeah Todd really needs to break off from this obsession with procedural generation, the "radiant" content is easily the weakest in all their games, and damn near ruined Starfield completely. His studio is famous for giant handcrafted worlds that few competitors can match, it's wild that he's trying to move AWAY from this.
radiant quests are the definition of busy work. a good rpg shouldnt have busy work, the game itself should incentivize freeform busy work that isn't an obvious "go here and get this random item" quest loop that never goes anywhere! maybe in an online game like 76 but keep that shit outta single player
I think there can be fun radiant quests. I also don’t think the gameplay loop should be reliant on them. Having a some radiant quests after you’ve completed all the scripted content for a faction or area can be kinda nice if you wanna RP still being involved with them, I always enjoyed doing thieves guild radiant quests sneaking around ransacking houses and shit lol. The biggest problem I have is that I feel it de incentivizes creative quest design rather than supplementing gameplay. Instead of getting a bounty board of named characters who committed specific crimes, we get fully randomized and completely nameless characters for example, because they figure people are doing it just for the reward. This would be fine after we’d completed a bounty-hunting quest line in each city, but the radiant quests effectively replace it.
I think there's a place for radiant quests especially in games like fallout and skyrim where people will play the same character for dozens of levels. But Bethesda is leaning too heavily into it I think and have been for a while. The skyrim faction lines were noticeably worse and shorter than they were in Oblivion because they were counting on the radiant quests to beef up the content for instance.
I'm just coming into fo4 for the first time right after a fresh playthrough of new vegas and the radiant quest system is so.. uninteresting. especially for me as I have a tendency to explore the map regardless of if there is a for-sure incentive, so by the time i started getting radiants from the BoS, the game seemed to imply that helping the squires at the police station leads to something, only to do like 4 of them in a row and realize that the game was just feeding me radiant quests.
I like radiant quests. I think it’s a good background mechanic. Having something that you can do on the side to be a reliable way to make money, improve reputations, or otherwise advance is a good thing. I know the Minutmen radiant quests got on a lot of people’s nerves, but it makes sense. You’re rebuilding a faction from scratch. You would have to go defend settlements, clear dungeons, etc. Obviously radiant quests can’t be the entire game, but they’re fine as a mechanic when used properly. Like in Skyrim you can take assassination jobs endlessly from the Dark Brotherhood. You can take endless robbery jobs from the Thieves Guild. In Oblivion you could fight in the arena. In New Vegas you can fight in the North Vegas sewer. Those are fine. Having the whole game be that is not. Hell, on launch 76 every damn quest line was either read a log or listen to a holotape, go meet someone, *gasp* they died, pick up the note or key or whatever and turn it into the robot they were supposed to, and go again.
I agree. What makes them good or bad isn’t necessarily if they’re easy, but if they’re convenient. Like in fnv you can turn in NCR dog tags to the legion for a rep increase. You progress the radiant quest by playing the game naturally (explore and kill enemies) and only occasionally need to turn the quest in for a reward. That’s great. Starfield had radiant quest that distracted you from how you would play the game naturally. Like you may get a bounty to kill a ship in space. You do it, fly to the ship, blow it up, go back for reward. It acts more like a lazy “real” quest than as a radiant quest. It’s something you have to go out of your way to do that doesn’t progress the game beyond money and exp, which is fine if it’s an interesting quest, but that’s not what radiant quests are. Comparing Skyrim and Starfield, they both have radiant bounty quests that function basically the same way. The difference is that in Skyrim (at least early game) these quests also “reward” by making you explore the world and go places you maybe wouldn’t have otherwise and game designers can use that to push players into cool or fun areas. In Starfield you don’t get that exploration meaning you are having to go out of your way and stop playing the enjoyable parts of the game to focus your attention on a boring radiant quest. Like you said, the key is if they are used correctly. When they are I think they tend to go unnoticed, but when they suck they are annoying and stand out.
Yeah, I enjoy the radiant quests. Sometimes I don't feel like doing real quests but still want something telling me to go and clear out some dungeon for a sense of direction.
And they can take me to places I hadn't seen yet by chance, or places I've not visited in a long time.
Radiant quests are when I don't feel like deciding the fate of humanity but also want to use my new gun
I think the frequency of radiant quests popping up is the key factor. I initially liked the Minutemen quests, but the constant spam of them became annoying. Do one quest, go do some Minuteman shit, do another quest, go do some more Minuteman shit got tiresome. It would have been nice to get a sense that your actions where actually having an impact, but it was still just a constant stream of attacks on your settlements.
It was primarily taking new settlements from what I recall
Early on, you’ll get a decent mix of the two, but there’re only so many settlements to unlock so that eventually stops and you’ll ultimately get nothing else besides either defending settlements or rescuing hostages
That's only in the early stages of the game when you haven't established all the settlements. Once you get everything set up, it's just "You gotta go save X settlement" on like a 30 minute cd. And it doesn't matter how well fortified you make the settlements, how many turrets you stack all over the place, or how much progress you've made in the main storyline or just the Minutemen storyline.
Yeah but now we can have Radiant Quests* **Powered by AI!*
The future is bleak
>His studio is famous for giant handcrafted worlds that few competitors can match, it's wild that he's trying to move AWAY from this. His studio is currently famous for *reasonably large* handcrafted worlds, but did previously create and were famous for other things. Bethesda originally got their RPG pedigree status from Daggerfall, which was a giant world made possible entirely through procedural generation and liberal usage of "radiant quests". The truth is, this stuff is in TES' DNA, and it'll probably never be done away with completely; the ideal here is for Bethesda to try and find a way to do it *well*. A good radiant quest should feel like something your (human) GM has thrown together for a quick session, and your scripted quests should avoid being so monotonous as to feel like something a computer has generated using a simple algorithm...
I went from Starfield into Fallout 76 and it’s crazy how different the world feel. 76 has so much character while Starfield just feels so sterile, which in many parts makes sense. But in the lived in areas it’s just so off.
From what Todd’s said in the past, he wants to optimize gaming so procedural generation can run a lot of world building mechanics, similar to the OG Elder Scrolls titles. I’d guess this is why they’re excited to work under Microsoft. Lots of MSFT’s AI tech could be retrofitted for game development. IIRC Todd’s logic was the more content that can be created by an algorithm, the deeper they can go on story mechanics and designing more unique map locations. I’d assume this would also allow them to better optimize future games.
Honestly I’m hyped for the future. My biggest peeve in games is doing the same thing in the same location multiple times which is why I hate roguelikes and souls games and can’t play a game more than once without getting bored. If the location changes every time while keeping the same general story I’d be more than happy to play a game multiple times.
I think if they could adapt dungeons with that, it would make a huge difference. Especially when coupled with the radiant quests.
For sure. I think people are too critical of procedural generation. They can craft dungeons with it and then fine tune them, it's not like the entire thing is just generated.
I hated the procgen dungeons in Starfield. I don’t care if overworlds are created like that, but dungeons should be unique and serve a purpose. But only sci-fi space exploration overworlds, and even then, it should be limited. It doesn’t make for endless replayability, instead, mind dulling repetitiveness
God the thought of 100s of Starfield planet quality dungeons fills me with dread.
> I bet they will use that procedural generation more on dungeons Would this be as crazy as the internal design of enemy ships in Starfield? Ladders and doors were seemingly placed at random.
It’s not. Procgen was only used to generate locations of POIs and landscape. Everything is still handcrafted, even radiant POIs. And it is their biggest game so far by almost every metric. Dialogue, quests, POIs, etc. it just had some questionable execution that made it feel small.
Except for games after Daggerfall.
Is that true? I feel like fallout 3 (and even NV) felt about as big as oblivion
As much as I want new games man I get worried about them being half baked. Mean more so than usual
The community will patch it and fix all our bad design decisions mentality of Behedsta needs to stop. The Reason I don't buy their games anymore. With AI I fear they will just add MORE stuff without thinking about if it its a good idea or if it is too buggy. 16 times the Detail does not make a game good on its own.
So don’t buy their games, that does not make you a martyr
I haven't bought the last 2. Me: "I am disappointed in the quality of a product and I wont buy anything more until it gets better and gave my reasons for doubting it will get better" You: "that does not make you a martyr" WTF? Like I am not allowed to have an opinion on Behedesta or I am a martyr?
Y'all are agreeing and you tried to make it a fight. Lordy lordy
I think you should work on your reading comprehension.
I hope not, Starfield is a genuinely awful game, i hope they don’t fuck up TES6 or FO5 with this shitty procgen
Idk why you’re getting downvoted, it wasn’t a good game lol
Awful might be taking it too far. Maybe in the context of the expectations and studio, but probably not for the game itself. It wasn't good, but I don't think it was so bad that I would call it awful.
No, I played it quite a bit, and it was awful. I really wanted to like the game. It was a space game that was kinda serious but also quirky. It was just released as a shitshow. I played through many of the side stories, which I thought were decent, but predictable. The problem with the game came down to how there were so many planets and they all felt the same. Sure. There were slightly different plants and creatures. But enter any one of the caves and they are all the same layout. How is that fun? And there wasn't any variation to resource collection. Scan everything. The cities were unnecessarily large with very little in them. Why? Even the ship building was lackluster. Everything is blocky. None of the parts seem to fit cohesively. And there weren't options for smooth or sleek ships. The memes were the best part of shipbuilding, but it was missing a lot of features to make it interesting, or at least fun to build.
I assume Microsoft is going to look at the potential sales dollars and will have a developer start a fallout game. That way, Bethesda gets to work on ES6. When Bethesda does get around to releasing FO5, the other fallout game will have already been out. I can't imagine Microsoft executives seeing %600 fallout franchise increase numbers and just wait 10 years for Bethesda to Bethesda.
I want Fallout 77.
Starfield was the updated engine? Oh god.
For all the games other faults it was way more stable at release than most games they've made.
I could see them doing a spin-off quickly, like a New Vegas type project. But mainline game is years away. 2027 or 2028 probably.
Please no. I am fine with them taking 4 years if they need to for these games. I have a life and it’ll give me something to look forward to
Updated the engine and it still is awful. Got a 6800xt barely get 60fps in Atlantic City
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. It looks dated compared to so many other big budget games, and somehow runs worse; it's been pretty explicitly shown by modders that the game is insanely unoptimised. I honestly hope FO5 can *not* be a creation engine/Bethesda game.
Try telling that to all the modders who won't be able to mod the game how they like if Bethesda moves to another engine like stuttery unreal. If only moving engines were that simple. Sadly it's just something redditors say without knowing a damn thing about developing games
Exactly. Moving to a new engine gains some new following maybe, and silences the constant hate, but also alienates the majority of their longtime fanbase. To many players, an engine change would literally warrant a "see ya, guess I'll just replay all the old shit again". Not to say that I wouldn't keep up and see what things looked like if they did. I just feel like it would result in a full deconstruction and potential gutting of what makes their games special to me. Starfield already felt like an odd departure and a pale imitation to me all at once, even within the same old engine, basically. Can't imagine mistaking a Fallout screenshot for Far Cry, or Elder Scrolls for Elden Ring, etc.
Creation engine is veey mod friendly so it wont happen
I don't get the "updated engine" post either lmao, the game has very dated graphics and technical limitations we see in all Bethesda games. The NPCs looked genuinely horrifying at times
If by work on the engine you mean "I can hear the faint hum of it screaming for the sweet release of death ever second I play" then yes it's ready
Every Vault in FO5 will be procedurally generated with each section separated by a loading screen as part of Vault-Tec CEO T. Howard's latest insidious experiments. But oh boy will you have *succulents.*
When modders pulled the game apart, it seems that the 'loading screens,' were put in place because of the limited console memory. The consoles have more storage than ram, so they adapted to that.
Oh that's interesting. Thank you for sharing!
Have you played Starfield? You can walk around an entire planet without a load screen
And every planet has like one of 4 identical things on it. I can’t express how deeply disappointing that game was.
Liar.
I have played Starfield extensively since release. At one point, loading screens were the bane of travel in the game. Guess I should have added /s to my post but I thought the joke was obvious.
You forgot the /s.
That's the only thing you can do without a load screen.
... That's 95% of the game. Load screens are literally only for fast travel
That's the entire game though? Enter a building, loading screen, get on your ship? Loading screen. Travel to another planet? Loading screen. Land on planet? Loading screen. Get out of your ship? Loading screen. The game is endless loading screens and to sit here and act like it wasn't one of the most profilic complaints is disingenuous to say the least.
And the entire game is fast travelling between dull planets and equally insipid cities.
Weird I spent the entire game exploring cool planets and fighting space pirates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I kinda want the ppl who are working on 76 to work on the next fallout spin off. The writing for wastelanders and BOS questline was amazing. Along with stuff like lore and holotape stories you find are just great. Also the design team knows how to do their job! Everything looks amazing. They need to make a fallout game. Idc if its not bigger than the last, I would be happy if its as small as Fallout 3.
I gotta admit, the subteam assigned to making FO76 updates have worked damn hard to save that mess of a game, and bring back what the fans actually want. I remember doing a BoS questline where you're meant to be undercover (i.e. pretending you aren't the Brotherhood), and getting reprimanded for wearing power armour to the secret meeting and blowing our cover. I was legitimately shocked, it was like playing a real Fallout game again. Gotta give them credit for that.
I was annoyed because the paladin was shouting at the top of her lungs all sorts of stuff she shouldn’t be saying undercover lol
The sub team came on very recently, that Brotherhood stuff your talking about was made by the main office.
Personally I kind of want them to just make a whole standalone game with the 4/76 Engine and assets.
I would *love* it if they did this and set it shortly after the bombs drop and *before* 76 opens. I want to deal with the scorched plague *as it arises*, interact with the Responders and the Mistresses of Mysteries, maybe even be responsible for the plague in the first place after helping Eckhart in his machinations, then get involved in whatever desperate endgame I might choose to get involved with, be it a last stand with the Brotherhood trying to deal with the scorched at the glassed caverns / end zone, escorting refugees east past Harper's Ferry, or working with Eckhart in a failed last ditch attempt to launch missiles at China from one of the silos. Maybe even a 4th secret ending where I succeed at resetting the simulation by targeting a small village outside Beijing.
I was thinking that they could actually do a main game set in pennsylvannia nearer to the main game timeline. Would be able to reuse lots of assets that way!
Hmm... a pitt prequel, maybe? Or set around the Philadelphia area? oooh oooh, I bet post-apocalyptic Scranton would amazing, and references to The Office, especially to the strangler, could be fun.
We already have Pittsburg covered and Philadelphia would be too thematically similar to Boston to justify a whole new game imo. Id rather they did NYC or Chicago
I would be soooo psyched for Chicago!
The only problem with Chicago is there's no terrain. No mountains, hills, swamps. Just city, lake, then cornfields in every other direction. Might make everything two one dimensional as far as fallout games go.
I was just trying to think of what would be easy to make. Personally think Chicago has a high chance of being Fallout 5's location. Philadelphia I think would be a perfect smaller scale NV style spinoff from 4 and 76.
76 looks so crisp right now.
I'd definitely prefer the 76 team over the 4 team. Dialogue choices are kinda funny and writing is just better overall.
I played on launch, beat the main quest and did some farming, and then picked it up again after Wastelanders came out. I kind of feel bad for players who didn’t play in “real time” because I felt like the return of human settlers as the result of our actions pre-wastelanders was a really cool storytelling device and made the return of humans feel really dramatic and rewarding. It felt like meaningful roleplaying. I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that now when new players exit the vault, the “follow the holotapes of the overseer” quests are just fully intermingled with the updated wastelanders questline? Don’t get me wrong, I understand why they would do it that way, I know a lot of the complaints about the launch version had to do with the empty almost lazy feeling of the world, the majority of players wanted a classic fallout with real NPCs and interactive dialogue. So it’s probably smart to have new players thrown right into the version with human NPCs and an expanded quest line. But I do wish there was an option to play “in order” and only have humans return after beating the original “empty wasteland” quest. I don’t suppose an option like that exists, does it?
I just started playing 76 a week ago. What was the main story like with the lack of regular NPCs? And to answer your question, yes the holotapes are kind of intermingled with the wastlanders quest line. I feel like I'm missing a quest or two. I've ran into several scorch beasts outside of events but I feel like I should fight some as part of some quests and also learn more of them. Granted I haven't been to fort defiance outside of an event to protect it from the scorched. It does feel like I'm missing information either way and I'm not sure if it's cause of game design or some side quests missed. I know I haven't learned in game why nuking the map is a good thing or actually how to nuke the land in the first place. I figured I'd eventually get to it in quest.
At launch, picture the world empty of all humans except for player characters. Any quest that involves talking to a human didn’t exist. The plot was sort of a large scale murder mystery; you emerge from the vault and find the scorched, these bizarre zombie creatures, and an otherwise abandoned wasteland, including places that still feel like livable towns. Where is everyone? Did they all become scorched? Are they hiding? Did they run away? By following quest lines through robots, computer terminals, paper records, recordings, and most importantly the tapes and caches left to you by the Overseer (who still seems to be alive and is just one step ahead of you) you piece together what the hell happened here and come up with a plan to restore this segment of wasteland to be a safe habitat place (relatively speaking). The game was like that for a year after launch. Also, although the structure of the map was broadly the same, tons of places that now have human settlements didn’t exist, like foundation. They were just barren segments of wasteland. When the expansion came out it was like all our efforts from “Act 1” paid off and people returned just like we (the player character) planned. So the quests had to go in order: follow the overseers questline, THEN move on to anything human related.
Part of me would want to experience that and part of me is glad I didn't. Like from a story perspective that seems to give importance to the actions of the players, but I see just how boring that can be for many.
I really wish the option to play in order existed. That would be really neat. I just started playing 76 last year and the more I hear about the original release the more interesting it sounds. Especially if you didn’t have to wait for the updates to be released and could somehow just unlock them as you play. I played through a bit of The Long Dark and its neat playing a game where it feels like you’re the only survivor (for the most part). Its eerie and unsettling but intriguing at the same time.
> I kinda want the ppl who are working on 76 to work on the next fallout spin off. The writing for wastelanders and BOS questline was amazing Oooh, gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there, pal. The writing for the *original release*'s found lore, especially the holotapes, was amazing. The quests were... eh, kinda bad, but the lore was amazing. The Wastelanders update was... good enough. Not great, but good enough, especially in contrast to how bad the questlines at release were. But Steel Dawn and Reign were amateurish at best and the Pitt was pathetically bad. Haven't fired the game up again since the Blue Devil update, so I haven't hit the boardwalk in Atlantic City, but the quality of the plotting and writing for 76 has been dropping for a while, so I don't have high hopes.
You should come back for the next content patch coming in June. I've been doing some of the PTR stuff, and I think you'll be happier with that new storyline.
If it's interesting enough everything before Nuka-World on Tour was Bethesda Game Studios, including Wastelanders and BoS quests. I've heard that the DLC that the UK based team, Double Eleven releases is well received and highly praised.
Does 76 have quests ? I thought it was straight multiplayer
Yes. You can almost completely play the game without interacting with other players, aside from some Events and boss fights (and some OP people can solo those). The game was built around quests, you just originally weren't getting them from human NPCs. You were getting them from holotapes, terminals, automated radio broadcasts, or notes you found in the world. Now that human NPCs are back, you get quests from them too.
Naw man like 95% of the content in 76 is questing designed to be completed solo.
Dang i might play it then
Pretty much the only content you *have* to do with other players is world bosses, and those are like, totally optional and are a very small portion of content. You’ll spend most of your time questing/exploring solo, and building your camp.
Even if you dont like multiplayer, those big world events are so easy to just walk over to and join the combat to take down the boss, no communication or typical mmo setups required.
Yes. It has quests like every other game, you just can do them with friends and you also see other players out and about. There’s also global events where you can get a bunch of people together to do different things
Its an MMO so Yes
I only interact with other players when I’m feeling social and even then only with the emotes. I have voice chat muted and my mic is off. I never actually speak to other players. I just do my own thing and maybe sometimes show up to events. There’s not really any pvp except for the clueless noob who starts with you to take your workshop that you only claimed for a daily quest in the first place. Like okay lv27, here’s my workshop if you want it that bad. Sometimes veteran players will swoop in and help a noob out of a sticky situation and then disappear Mysterious Stranger style. Most people are pretty chill.
[удалено]
Yes. They were understaffed and had very little experience but still made a very nice game under time constraints, when the bugs were patched a bit after release it was a very fun game. It got a lot of unnecessary hate but I honestly really liked it! If they put the effort from that game and the experience they got into a smaller spinoff, possibly Fallout 3 size, I would actually find that really nice. I preordered it and I honestly really liked it! I played it day one and ran into some strange glitches and still liked it even then, but as patches came it became more and more enjoyable. I never understood the hate for the game, and given the crew working on it, they made an excellent game
BGS Austin is the studio in charge of Fallout 76 as of now compared to the main BGS
You don’t understand that they’re implying they should make another game?
I play FO4 and 76 on a PS5, and 76 looks terrible compared to 4. It’s like 76 runs in 480p while 4 is in 4K.
Doesn't particularly relate to design tho, this is performance. Iirc they had to cut the fidelity to help the mmo aspect to function in their engine - design detail and textures were reduced
Thats odd, I have the opposite. It looks amazing on my last gen xbox and looks amazing compared to 4 having low resolution textures everywhere
Same here . I think overall 76 looks better With mods my fo4 looks good thoug
Interesting. 76 looks way better on my Series X compared to 4
Lmfaooo it does not
Todd Howard is way more cool guy if you watch interviews with him where he talks as a normal "private" human, look up the podcast from Lex Fridman interviewing him. People dont have to like his public EP (executive producer) persona and all his decisions etc. but making him to be the antichrist himself is extremely overblown.
Yep, and at the end of the day, he was a big part of the reason Bethesda got the Fallout IP in the first place - because he himself was a massive fan of that world and game and he wanted to make a Fallout game. So I always find it a little silly when people criticize him for single handedly ruining the franchise or whatever other dumb opinion they have about the guy. Public persona or not, to me he seems like he genuine cares about the franchise and that he’s a big fan of it himself.
Both can be possible. He *does* love his games. He also knows he’s running a business and that he must make more and more profit. To do that each game has to be more and more accessible and dumbed down. No Bethesda title will come close to Fallout 3 or Skyrims leveling system or world design again.
Todd’s the best.
Also very important note, the whole “16x the detail” was never a lie. The MEME was the lie.
Considering how random and chaotic things are with the world, Todd could still come out announcing himself as Christ for the 2nd coming. Mud will totally be on your face when if he opens the gates Hell and dooms us all as the Antichrist.
I hope they do more story updates with 76. The last one that came out was the brotherhood storyline in 2021 and I hope after the Minnesota story expansion coming in June. We get more like I would love to see an expansion for the free states and enclave.
I thought they added more story missions? (Atlantic City and Blue Ridge Caravan). Also what Minnesota expansion? The next update in June is taking place in Virginia (Skyline Drive).
Minnesota???? My home state?
The new expansion is not in Minnesota. It's in northern Virginia.
Hopefully that means they release a new fallout this decade. (Press X to doubt)
Surely even Bethesda aren’t silly enough to not capitalise on the shows success? It would be foolish to wait ten years and potentially have the show finish or decline in popularity.
Bethesda be Bethesding
They can't reshuffle their development plans that much. Elder Scrolls 6 is next in line after Starfield, they're already ramping up that production, and they'll have to finish THAT before starting on Fallout 5. I don't see them getting F5 out before 2030, minimum.
The best they can do is jumpstart development in the next year or so but currently the plan is to wait until TES VI is out which will take years alone. They would have to put together another studio to do so and even then it is doubtful that we get anything before near the end of the decade.
Why they didn’t have a fallout new Vegas, 3 or literally any other fallout game remaster ready for the show blows my mind. I mean we know how easy it’s been for Bethesda to remaster the same game over and over again…
I’ve been playing fallout 3 on my series x and it feels like a remastered experience, especially since I haven’t played it since 2009. It’s really not that mind blowing to consider, maybe, Bethesda would rather put the majority of their efforts into their more recent games because those players are more supportive towards Bethesda
I would love a New Vegas with the power armour mechanic from 4
It’s like they expected it to suck or something? Despite having some amount of creative control. It seems like the success kinda caught them off guard.
Well tbf. I thought there was a good chance this show would suck too. And even though it’s good I’m still surprised it was THAT good and successful. Oh well in the long run if this means we get more fallout content I’m ok with it I just SO wish they had a fallout 3 remaster in the works.
A rushed game would be worse than a delayed game.
I lowkey want the 76 team to work on the next fallout they have some great modders on the team and their art designers and writers are nailing the fallout feel as of late excited to see the expansion this June
76 is legit now. People who still hate or act whiney about it are a special breed of silly to me. Truly get over it and learn how development works and versioning
look, the content is okay, but the performance and connection are still and will apparently remain dogshit. i love the fallout series and don't have a weak stomach for games that don't run well, but 76 is on a whole other level. even i can't get past it enough to properly enjoy the game.
I'm not going to play 76. Not now, not ever. I'm never going to forget Bethesda's actions as a compamy surrounding the release. Trying to prevemt refunds, gimping people who paid for the collector's edition with a cheap bag, accidentally doxxing said players when they moves to fix it, the entire saga of dark rum, etc. They could make the game into the best piece of entertainment to ever exist and I still won't touch it. It's a matter of principle. Looking forward to Fallout 5 though.
Here’s the thing though. There is probably zero overlap between the people who did those very questionable business related things you mentioned vs the people who actually created 76. You can enjoy and play 76 now friend. You dont have to wait until Fallout 5 to “forgive” them.
TLDR: “nothing to talk about right now, but we are always planning” the article is shit
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about how Fallout 5 will turn out. BGS has been less than impressive with their past few releases with Starfield being the disappointment of all of them, with its super bland by-the-numbers story that had absolutely nothing to say.
I'm not worried. The bad part of Starfield is the boring exploration, and that comes from having completely procedurally generated planets. That's not how they make maps in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, so it doesn't matter. And on the other hand, Starfield is their most RPG heavy game since Fallout 3, with plenty of skill check and choice consequences. Fallout 5 will be fine.
I genuinely hope so. Their games have become increasingly more bland in an attempt to cater to a wider and wider audience with each release starting with Skyrim.
In 76 they made a choice to have ZERO NPCs. That's not bland. In Starfield they open up EVERYTHING and decide that you can travel anywhere, have space battles, have some of the best looking parts of any game I've ever seen. May not have been your cup of tea but it's anything but bland. I think you're just aging and these things aren't as shiny as they once were. Happens to all of us.
lol starfield is extremely bland dude. It just feels so incredibly uninspired. I mean good god look at the stupid float and touch the light shit you do for every shard. Loo how boring the corporate intrigue missions were on Neon. Look how lazy the red mile is. Look how ridiculous and lazy the intro was. Look how damn boring all of the dialogue is. Aesthetically it is bizarrely bland for a game set in space. They were in space and could have literally made anything and the most creative planets just look like rural Nebraska with blue plants instead of green ones. The game is just tedious and utterly uninteresting story wise and feels like a chore to play. Also the ridiculous amount of haze and weird color grading and terribly implemented lighting is wild. NMS gameplay is atrociously boring but they destroy Starfield aesthetically and being able to freely explore makes starfield feel ancient by comparison. I will say that gunplay and graphics were greatly improved over their previous games but they need an actual interesting world and story for those to shine.
Each Bethesda game has been considerably more streamlined that its previous iteration. Skyrim is more watered down than Oblivion. Oblivion is more watered down than Morrowiwnd. Fallout 4 is more watered down that Fallout 3. Bethesda has been on this downward trend for awhile and it really came into fruition with Fallout 4 and 76 which are half baked RPGs at best. What made Fallout great was largely stripped away in favor of more shallow and insultingly simplified game mechanics and world design. Bethesda games were always greater than sum of its parts, but not as of recently. Starfield all but doubled down with bland writing, quest and world design. The game is the living embodiment of being painfully average. To think Fallout 5 (especially now with the show's success) or TES6 will suddenly reverse this trend is wishful thinking.
Thank you for expanding on what I was trying to get across. Just because Starfield is more open world doesn’t mean they’re trying to appeal to a more hardcore RPG audience. In my estimation the blandness comes from trying to cater more and more to the console audience. The Oblivion UI was definitely designed for a mouse and keyboard. Fallout 4’s UI was designed for a controller which is very annoying since the gunplay plays more like an FPS and that caters more towards a mouse and keyboard. There’s other things that stick out but that’s just a quick example off the top of my head just from a mechanics standpoint.
Errant Signal has a great video on this. While this was made awhile ago, I think the same points he makes are applicable to Bethesda's recent releases as well. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqkZXNZwZq4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqkZXNZwZq4)
> In 76 they made a choice to have ZERO NPCs. That's not bland. Having zero characters to interact with isn't bland?
I hated the new persuasion system in Starfield, it completely broke the immersion by removing any sort of coherent narrative logic to the speech checks
Yeah, the dialog checks… “give me this thing you’re sworn to protect” “No.” “you should give be this thing that you’ll get in trouble for giving me” “ok fine.”
That just sounds like Fallout's option to intimidate...unless that's all there was.
Is that much different from speech checks in other Fallout games? For example in NV I refuse to believe it's realistic that you could talk down Lanius.
And Lanius was absolutely the dumbest character to be able to talk down. I thought it was cheap for this psychopath that murdered his entire tribe for surrendering to give up because you told him there's kingdom to maintain somewhere else.
except also the mission design, half finished feeling mission levels(red mile wtf man?), extremely bland aesthetic/npc's/companions, excessive fast travelling to have a two line conversation because space apparently doesn't have email or phones?, writing, city designs, and poi's were also just terrible. The menu is the worst they've ever done as well. The way you navigate to missions is so stupid.
>The bad part of Starfield is the boring exploration, and that comes from having completely procedurally generated planets. That's not how they make maps in Fallout or Elder Scrolls, so it doesn't matter. That’s not how they’ve made maps in Fallout and ES **so far**
This. Right here. AI tools and procedural generation have come a looooong way since Skyrim and FO4... bet my bottom dollar that concept/first map draft will be purely generated.
I'll take you on that bet, as long as you don't confuse the purely procedural generated maps from Starfield with the partial procedural generation they've been using since Oblivious to geneate the terrain, trees and stuff.
I feel like people aren't understanding what went wrong with Starfield. People are forgetting that in 2016, Fallout 4's survival mode basically popularized the survival game genre. They were around before, but they more or less exploded with F4's survival release. All of these games were mechanics focused and were very light on plot and story. Bethesda wanted to position themselves as a pioneer within the genre, so they started work on Starfield as a creation engine based survival game. Unfortunately for bethesda, over halfway through Starfield's development, survival games fell out of vogue, and traditional RPGs became more popular again. So, with only a year or two left in development, Starfield was completely retooled from a survival game into an RPG. The end result was that they simply didn't have enough time to create quests and flesh out content, as they wasted most of their development cycle on survival mechanics that would never make it into the final version of game, making the finished version entirely too short for the effort that was put into its development.
>People are forgetting that in 2015, Fallout 4's survival mode basically popularized the survival game genre. Rust, DayZ, Don't Starve, 7 Days to Die, The Forest, Subnautica, Ark and Minecraft all predate Fallout 4. Survival in Fallout 4 wouldn't even come out until 2016.
From the modding side, there definitely seems to be a lot of 'bones,' left from the survival mechanic elements, things like food, drink and fuel useage.
What? Fallout 4 was released to a screeching caucophony of gamers pissed off about how weak the RPG elements were.
That's so sad if true . I really hope they bring back those survival mechanics to the new fo games. I've assumed that Bethesda actually simply followed the trend and decided to capitalize on the survival games popularity by adding it to fo4. It is just such a good a fit. I could never get into regular survival games because they have no point to them.
> Fallout 4's survival mode basically popularized the survival game genre Genuinely ridiculous take
Starfield was a cash grab though. Idk how many times I said it was gonna suck bland ass and be a steaming reskin f4 settlement-radiant-quest garbage. That shit wasn’t in development for 25 years, it was in development from when todd walked out on stage, maybe after. If they release a fallout game blander and even less fallout than 4, all is lost.
Is 76 worth playing today? I haven’t played it at all, and have only seen gameplay from when it first released
It sure what the other guy is on. 76 is a fantastic game with a fantastic community. Does not hurt to try it out.
Do you want to play a fallout game or an mmo?
Lol such clickbait Tldr "we have plans but nothing to talk about "
Procedurally generated vaults huh
Please bring back Battle Royale, my soul yearns for Nuclear Winter
Would hope these ratings and reception to the show would light a fire in them to build FO5 faster and ES6, but I think they’re more likely to just use it to keep extracting money from FO76 and their mobile games. And can’t even trust them anymore.
It helps they made it free if you have Prime
You can so tell that they just weren’t prepared for this, you figure they would’ve done some sort of upgrade ala Last of Us Remastered for FO3 maybe. It’s good they had 76 around cause I’ve been rly liking it and my friends are enjoying playing together but a part of me does think they didn’t see this explosion coming lol
I love Fallout as much as anyone but idk fam instead of making a new game how about you keep content coming for 76 and start working on, oh, I don't know, releasing the new Elder Scrolls game already???
Todd needs to hand off production of FO5 so it can be ready before 2030 and maybe season 3 of FOTV
AI is about to completely change games forever. A lot of people, myself included, have a lot of doubts and fears about AI and the companies that provide it. A lot of it comes down to plagiarism and people using AI to replace other humans work. It has a lot of risks. However - LLM AI can obviously be very powerful when set to do very specific tasks, and if those tasks are creating automatically generated quests based on recipes set by the developers, NPCs with dialogue trees that keep expanding based on your actions and so on, it could be amazing. Imagine a Skyrim type world where every single NPC is capable of being a major character. Previously, we could only imagine we were pals with the shopkeeper we keep returning to, even though he said the same line every time we see him. Imagine instead that he asks us questions about our latest adventure and the stuff we’re bringing to him, and we can respond back. Imagine that he starts to take a genuine interest in us, and maybe even asks to come along on a quest. That he dies to a skeleton horde but manages to save us, and thanks us for letting him live his dream of being an adventurer. Or whatever. Generated moments like this can fit in alongside with written quests, and you can use AI directors and actors to make everything unique and suited to each player. RPGs like this are about to explode with possibility from AI. A lot of people are already tired of hearing about AI is going to do this and that, but in these scenarios, where AI is set to do the fairly simple task of playing a character, it will really work. There’s already amateur versions of AI companions for Skyrim and they are very impressive. Just imagine what a big developer would be able to do with the tech.
Booooo. Kill starfield. More fallout.
Cant they just make a fallout4 new vegas version somewhere else?
32 times the detail next?
How about they talk cross platform.
the game is a fomo'ed clunky mess that limits how much you can grind in a day where the best gear is hidden behind that and RNG, and is truly designed to get you to spend money in their store that said, it's still pretty damn fun. it has an awesome community like FF14, but it feels like an mmo from 20 years ago where they're trying to figure things out and some of it is good and some of it is just dogshit. overall i would recommend it, but with heavy caveats, as even mmos from 20 years ago had things like a chat system. and like all fallout games, you will need mods for a good experience (get the chat mod)
Hopefully Playstation is part of that future?
Fallout 5 will require a brand new engine. If they try and build it with the current engine, it's going to be horrible. It's already 10-years too old.
You clearly don't understand how game development works. Making a new engine could take as long as a full game. Not to mention that it's incredibly expensive and requires a lot of resources. Not to also mention that a large percentage of developers are using engines that are over 20 years old. The age of the engine is not a problem, and it's never been. It can be updated just like how they updated it for every game. They use it because it suits their needs and it's easily moddable.
The Creation Engine wasn't even a new engine, not really, they built it from the Gamebryo engine. Hell, I've been making mods since Morrowind and you can tell the engines share A LOT of commonality.
I mean starfield looks great. The constant starfield hate got old very fast , and I mean the main sub is still hit or miss for actually even liking the game. But I mention it because that type of surface level criticism and demand gained so much traction in regard to starfield that I worry Bethesda could be delayed in both TES and fallout rollouts. Hopefully it won't, because now that it's part of MS a lot of studios might help to take the burden off of main Bethesda and instead do something like FNV I'm not saying I'm hoping for an FNV 2 but.... hehe
Thank you
The Creation Engine 2 they started using with Starfield has about as much to do with Gamebryo as Unreal 5 has to do with what they used for Unreal Tournament. Theres infinitely larger concerns.