I thought the Witcher comparisons to Elder Scrolls games was weird until I actually saw someone play Witcher 3
a huge world, excellent voice work for a great many quests, a well-written main questline...
frik, I hope the next TES game steps up its game
With Horizon, possibly God of War, Mass Effect and even Zelda playing in their sandbox, I think Bethesda needs to improve before they become also-rans in the open world era they helped create.
The shooter mechanics aint the best, but I have to admit they got a lot better when I upgraded my pc/video card for a much better frame rate..
The worst bit is the wonky movement of enemies. If one decides to take cover, on the wall on the other side of the room.. they just kind of "warp" there. Plus everything always seems to know you're pointing a gun at them, and can leap out of the way just in time, as you pull the trigger.. It's one thing if you're fighting some hyper intelligent robot or something.. but against zombies (er, feral ghouls) and mirelurks and mole rats??? wtf
I can understand how mirelurks can block a melee attack with their shells, but it honestly irks me to see a barehanded raider put up his dukes and trigger a block-stagger when I have a flaming hunk of metal slicing at them. (Of course, that only happens when you run out of AP.)
As a side note, has anyone run across a mod/fix for VATS where you don't spend ten or twelve seconds watching every final kill as the world unloads on you? Or is that something that can be adjusted in the vanilla game menus?
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
The shooter mechanics aint the best, but I have to admit they got a lot better when I upgraded my pc/video card for a much better frame rate..
The worst bit is the wonky movement of enemies. If one decides to take cover, on the wall on the other side of the room.. they just kind of "warp" there. Plus everything always seems to know you're pointing a gun at them, and can leap out of the way just in time, as you pull the trigger.. It's one thing if you're fighting some hyper intelligent robot or something.. but against zombies (er, feral ghouls) and mirelurks and mole rats??? wtf
I can understand how mirelurks can block a melee attack with their shells, but it honestly irks me to see a barehanded raider put up his dukes and trigger a block-stagger when I have a flaming hunk of metal slicing at them. (Of course, that only happens when you run out of AP.)
As a side note, has anyone run across a mod/fix for VATS where you don't spend ten or twelve seconds watching every final kill as the world unloads on you? Or is that something that can be adjusted in the vanilla game menus?
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
It's a machine that takes in some form of energy and outputs work.
The shooter mechanics aint the best, but I have to admit they got a lot better when I upgraded my pc/video card for a much better frame rate..
The worst bit is the wonky movement of enemies. If one decides to take cover, on the wall on the other side of the room.. they just kind of "warp" there. Plus everything always seems to know you're pointing a gun at them, and can leap out of the way just in time, as you pull the trigger.. It's one thing if you're fighting some hyper intelligent robot or something.. but against zombies (er, feral ghouls) and mirelurks and mole rats??? wtf
I can understand how mirelurks can block a melee attack with their shells, but it honestly irks me to see a barehanded raider put up his dukes and trigger a block-stagger when I have a flaming hunk of metal slicing at them. (Of course, that only happens when you run out of AP.)
As a side note, has anyone run across a mod/fix for VATS where you don't spend ten or twelve seconds watching every final kill as the world unloads on you? Or is that something that can be adjusted in the vanilla game menus?
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Sure, they are doing great. The reaction to Fallout 4 wasn't that enthusiastic, though, and a lot of people are starting to see the creaks and duct tape in their engine.
This isn't gloom and doom. It's just pointing out that the visual spectacle of Bethesda's games is a selling point, and that selling point is going to become less effective if they become the "ugly, janky company" in a world where there are a half dozen other competing open world franchises that look and play better.
I love Bethesda. I'm one of the people who think Fallout 3 is a much better game than New Vegas, simply because Bethesda's environment design is top-notch in a way that makes you want to check out every inch of the map to find a new interior tableau that tells a tragic story or glorious vista seen from a mountaintop. Obsidian's effort, by contrast, felt like an old-school RPG developer telling a good story but not really knowing what to do with the map.
Bethesda using cutting edge tech would be amazing.
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
Yeah. I've been playing Bethesda games for a long time. I know that engine when I play it.
Fallout 4 is the first Bethesda game in a long while that wasn't a visual marvel on release.
If you look at how a similarly big ticket open world game like GTA V pushed tech forward hugely on release, it's pretty clear that Bethesda are trailing the pack.
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
It's a machine that takes in some form of energy and outputs work.
In games, it's a machine that takes in work done in other programs and outputs more work.
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
Let me put it another way. Creation is to Gamebryo what Windows 98 and ME were to Windows 95. People are asking for them to make a Windows XP. (I would use newer examples but the analogy is clearest at this era).
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
Let me put it another way. Creation is to Gamebryo what Windows 98 and ME were to Windows 95. People are asking for them to make a Windows XP. (I would use newer examples but the analogy is clearest at this era).
And while I have do doubt that "engine" is more complex than a box they put the game in, developers market their engines as much as their products. It's the reason that I, as a consumer, have sat through countless engine logo screens while booting up games over their years. It's why some games feature the name of their engine on the box (or Steam screen) as a selling point.
So, as a games consumer, that's the only real reference point I have to environment in the games I play. If developers don't want people criticizing their engine because "It's more complex than that!", they should stop marketing those engines so heavily to consumers.
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
Let me put it another way. Creation is to Gamebryo what Windows 98 and ME were to Windows 95. People are asking for them to make a Windows XP. (I would use newer examples but the analogy is clearest at this era).
People also talk about scripting issues and models, and those aren't engine issues.
Aside from the fact that they're done mostly outside of the engine, if they were engine issues you wouldn't be able to change them and people do that all the time when they make mods to fix it.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
Let me put it another way. Creation is to Gamebryo what Windows 98 and ME were to Windows 95. People are asking for them to make a Windows XP. (I would use newer examples but the analogy is clearest at this era).
Why stop at XP when they could just license Unreal 4 and skip right to Windows 7?
CD Projekt Red also nearly went bankrupt making the Witcher games, and had to suspend development on other games to stay afloat. One such game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been in development hell for four years now.
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
Let me put it another way. Creation is to Gamebryo what Windows 98 and ME were to Windows 95. People are asking for them to make a Windows XP. (I would use newer examples but the analogy is clearest at this era).
Why stop at XP when they could just license Unreal 4 and skip right to Windows 7?
One of the core components of any Bethesda game is the way the environment can be manipulated and littered with objects that can be picked up, moved, thrown, etc. Their games created spaces where you could steal all the spoons long before you had any reason to need a thousand spoons.
It's not the kind of thing you can just replicated in a new engine. I've never seen an Unreal game approach the environmental activity you find in a Bethesda title. While I think Bethesda needed to have a new engine - or at least duck tape some modern character modeling and animation into the old one - I understand that there's a reason it's such a major task.
Wow, the Contraptions DLC is gonna be hit or miss with some folks; for me, it's a 'mostly miss' since there's only a few things I can see myself using. The weapon and armor forges will be handy when you're trying to outfit all of your settlers into a unified appearance/combat loadout, but by the time you scrounge enough materials to do so, you've probably already stockpiled a shit-ton of weapons and armor. This feels very much like an end-game time waster.
The conduits for running electricity are a nice touch for tidying up settlements, though, and I'll be using plenty of them.
Weapon and armour forges? Fucking hell, I can't believe they're putting functionality like that in DLC.
There's one crafting machine each for weapons, armor, boxed pre-war food, fireworks, explosives, ammo, heavy weapons, pre-war clothing and pre-war junk items. I have no doubt that the modding community will add new recipes within a matter of days to each machine, but the initial crafting lists are uninspiring to say the least. I can imagine some players wanting to be entirely self-sufficient and having a field day with their assembly lines, but the workstations and sorting machines can take up a lot of real estate, more than most settlements have to spare.
I really do love Bethesda when they swing for the fences, but I keep having the same thought over and over again: the individual mechanics of each portion of the game are great and show signs of considerable evolution, but they don't match up very well with each other with regard to time and resource investments ... or even necessity for that matter. Like, I can create a whole world of goodies but I'm probably going to have an easier time just scavenging shit from murder-hoboing my way across Boston a few times.
Fallout 4 will probably be their biggest financial success but I don't feel like it's a masterpiece, rather it's just a stepping stone to the next iteration of the open-world concept.
Yeah, Fallout 4 is definitely not in the realm of Skyrim. Then again, it's not as though I didn't play the fucking thing for hours and hours and hours and hours and have a lot of fun doing so.
I like Fallout 4 a lot, but I can't see myself putting in the 750 hours I have in Skyrim or even the 300ish I have in New Vegas. There are just enough things that are off or half baked.
I put in I think 115 hours into Fallout 4 so far, all pre DLC. I keep thinking I'll go back to it and do more, and at least play with the DLC, but I keep doing other stuff. Skyrim I played the hell out of, but everything felt similarly disconnected to me, outside of the main plotline. I stopped once I was an unstoppable killing machine and had finished the assassin's guild questline. The end of that and its lack of effect on the world really turned me off. Similarly in fallout the utter lack of change from whatever you do causes me some grief.
New Vegas is the game in this lineup that I have played the most, and it's not even Bethesda.
I just generally prefer how the factions work in Skyrim. I tend to make a character and run through a faction (maaaaaaaybe two) along with some random quests and then start over again. You can't really do this in Fallout 4 because all the factions are tied to the main quest.
I just generally prefer how the factions work in Skyrim. I tend to make a character and run through a faction (maaaaaaaybe two) along with some random quests and then start over again. You can't really do this in Fallout 4 because all the factions are tied to the main quest.
I wish the faction and settlement systems were tied in together - i.e. settlements were things to be fought over, allied with, and have their ownership and level of development reflected in the gameworld surrounding them. That would make for a lot more replayability.
Bethesda should have run much harder with the theme of "rebuilding the wasteland" that kind of falls off as the game goes on. I can understand not having complete faith that gamers would take to the settlement building system, but even a bit more Far Cry-style capture the flag gameplay around them would have been nice.
I think the highs are generally much higher in Fallout, and Elder Scrolls is much more consistent, but at a much lower pitch to me than Fallout
Like I actually had more fun with Elder Scrolls when I modded in a mace that does infinite damage cause I just plain don't enjoy the combat in Elder Scrolls, and I love it in Fallout
Just looked this one up: it doesn't look like Contraptions work if you're not near them. So, if you have a Contraption set up to automatically make adhesive, you might have to actually be *in* the settlement.
And that makes no goddamned sense for any kind of industrial automation.
Reddit Edit:
1. Supply lines might as well not exist for manufacturing. Even if you use the vacuum conveyor belt to pull everything out of your settlement's workbench, it can't access junk/components which are in another settlement's workbench. Good luck trying to remember which of your settlements' workbenches has that pile of telephones you remember scavenging.
2. For the love of Atom put components/junk directly into the manufacturing machine. Sure, it looks good when stuff's getting moved along conveyor belts but if you decide to make some 5mm rounds, put 100 steel and 50 fertiliser into a container (suitcases don't count, btw, although dressers do) then set up a vacuum conveyor belt to suck the components out of the container and feed them into an ammunition machine, the conveyor belt will transfer all of one resource (one at a time) before it starts to transfer any of the other resource. It'll load all of the steel before starting on the fertiliser rather than take 2 steel, 1 fertiliser and start producing ammo while it loads the next components. If you wanted to make a dozen shotguns, for example, you'll have to wait to the conveyor to load 36 adhesive, 12 gears, 24 oil, 60 screws and 84 steel first. It'll only actually start producing shotguns when it gets around to loading the wood.
3. Machines are self aware. They know when you're not paying attention (waiting, sleeping or wandering off to another settlement to empty its workbench) and will stop working if you're not around, are waiting or are catching 40 winks. At least you can wander around the settlement in the meantime.
Weapon and armour forges? Fucking hell, I can't believe they're putting functionality like that in DLC.
There's one crafting machine each for weapons, armor, boxed pre-war food, fireworks, explosives, ammo, heavy weapons, pre-war clothing and pre-war junk items. I have no doubt that the modding community will add new recipes within a matter of days to each machine, but the initial crafting lists are uninspiring to say the least. I can imagine some players wanting to be entirely self-sufficient and having a field day with their assembly lines, but the workstations and sorting machines can take up a lot of real estate, more than most settlements have to spare.
I really do love Bethesda when they swing for the fences, but I keep having the same thought over and over again: the individual mechanics of each portion of the game are great and show signs of considerable evolution, but they don't match up very well with each other with regard to time and resource investments ... or even necessity for that matter. Like, I can create a whole world of goodies but I'm probably going to have an easier time just scavenging shit from murder-hoboing my way across Boston a few times.
Fallout 4 will probably be their biggest financial success but I don't feel like it's a masterpiece, rather it's just a stepping stone to the next iteration of the open-world concept.
Yeah. I liked Fallout 4 enough to play for 200 hours but the whole time I couldn't shake the feeling it was just a beta for the next TES game.
it's a take I don't really disagree with, being as FO4 is the game that finally hit me with the reality that no open world game is going to be my next "Morrowind"
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it's a take I don't really disagree with, being as FO4 is the game that finally hit me with the reality that no open world game is going to be my next "Morrowind"
Posts
With Horizon, possibly God of War, Mass Effect and even Zelda playing in their sandbox, I think Bethesda needs to improve before they become also-rans in the open world era they helped create.
I can understand how mirelurks can block a melee attack with their shells, but it honestly irks me to see a barehanded raider put up his dukes and trigger a block-stagger when I have a flaming hunk of metal slicing at them. (Of course, that only happens when you run out of AP.)
As a side note, has anyone run across a mod/fix for VATS where you don't spend ten or twelve seconds watching every final kill as the world unloads on you? Or is that something that can be adjusted in the vanilla game menus?
Meanwhile Bethesda Softworks has turned itself into a conglomerate of publishers and studios through a parent company (Zenimax) which was created by Bethesda for the purpose of acquiring studios who occasionally back up Bethesda Game Studios who are their game development arm. I don't think Bethesda is in any trouble.
If anything they've been making out better than a lot of AAA studios because their lower overhead (They have dev teams in the double digits for Bethesda Game Studio games rather than in the 100s) lets them make more profit, and because they effectively are their own publisher they make the games they want without ridiculous publisher demands mucking up the process.
I get wanting a new game engine, but acting like the Creation* engine puts a serious damper on them is silly.
*Because that's what they use. It is not the same engine as Fallout 3.
Just tab out? You can cancel Vats at any time
Creation is at best a fork of Gamebryo and not really what people mean when they say "new engine".
I honestly doubt a lot of people know what an engine actually is.
It's a machine that takes in some form of energy and outputs work.
Gonna try that later.
Sure, they are doing great. The reaction to Fallout 4 wasn't that enthusiastic, though, and a lot of people are starting to see the creaks and duct tape in their engine.
This isn't gloom and doom. It's just pointing out that the visual spectacle of Bethesda's games is a selling point, and that selling point is going to become less effective if they become the "ugly, janky company" in a world where there are a half dozen other competing open world franchises that look and play better.
I love Bethesda. I'm one of the people who think Fallout 3 is a much better game than New Vegas, simply because Bethesda's environment design is top-notch in a way that makes you want to check out every inch of the map to find a new interior tableau that tells a tragic story or glorious vista seen from a mountaintop. Obsidian's effort, by contrast, felt like an old-school RPG developer telling a good story but not really knowing what to do with the map.
Bethesda using cutting edge tech would be amazing.
Yeah. I've been playing Bethesda games for a long time. I know that engine when I play it.
If you look at how a similarly big ticket open world game like GTA V pushed tech forward hugely on release, it's pretty clear that Bethesda are trailing the pack.
In games, it's a machine that takes in work done in other programs and outputs more work.
Let me put it another way. Creation is to Gamebryo what Windows 98 and ME were to Windows 95. People are asking for them to make a Windows XP. (I would use newer examples but the analogy is clearest at this era).
And while I have do doubt that "engine" is more complex than a box they put the game in, developers market their engines as much as their products. It's the reason that I, as a consumer, have sat through countless engine logo screens while booting up games over their years. It's why some games feature the name of their engine on the box (or Steam screen) as a selling point.
So, as a games consumer, that's the only real reference point I have to environment in the games I play. If developers don't want people criticizing their engine because "It's more complex than that!", they should stop marketing those engines so heavily to consumers.
People also talk about scripting issues and models, and those aren't engine issues.
Aside from the fact that they're done mostly outside of the engine, if they were engine issues you wouldn't be able to change them and people do that all the time when they make mods to fix it.
Why stop at XP when they could just license Unreal 4 and skip right to Windows 7?
One of the core components of any Bethesda game is the way the environment can be manipulated and littered with objects that can be picked up, moved, thrown, etc. Their games created spaces where you could steal all the spoons long before you had any reason to need a thousand spoons.
It's not the kind of thing you can just replicated in a new engine. I've never seen an Unreal game approach the environmental activity you find in a Bethesda title. While I think Bethesda needed to have a new engine - or at least duck tape some modern character modeling and animation into the old one - I understand that there's a reason it's such a major task.
The conduits for running electricity are a nice touch for tidying up settlements, though, and I'll be using plenty of them.
Because I feel like raiding
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There's one crafting machine each for weapons, armor, boxed pre-war food, fireworks, explosives, ammo, heavy weapons, pre-war clothing and pre-war junk items. I have no doubt that the modding community will add new recipes within a matter of days to each machine, but the initial crafting lists are uninspiring to say the least. I can imagine some players wanting to be entirely self-sufficient and having a field day with their assembly lines, but the workstations and sorting machines can take up a lot of real estate, more than most settlements have to spare.
I really do love Bethesda when they swing for the fences, but I keep having the same thought over and over again: the individual mechanics of each portion of the game are great and show signs of considerable evolution, but they don't match up very well with each other with regard to time and resource investments ... or even necessity for that matter. Like, I can create a whole world of goodies but I'm probably going to have an easier time just scavenging shit from murder-hoboing my way across Boston a few times.
Fallout 4 will probably be their biggest financial success but I don't feel like it's a masterpiece, rather it's just a stepping stone to the next iteration of the open-world concept.
I remember stopping playing because nothing seemed to fit in with anything else.
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New Vegas is the game in this lineup that I have played the most, and it's not even Bethesda.
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I wish the faction and settlement systems were tied in together - i.e. settlements were things to be fought over, allied with, and have their ownership and level of development reflected in the gameworld surrounding them. That would make for a lot more replayability.
Bethesda should have run much harder with the theme of "rebuilding the wasteland" that kind of falls off as the game goes on. I can understand not having complete faith that gamers would take to the settlement building system, but even a bit more Far Cry-style capture the flag gameplay around them would have been nice.
Like I actually had more fun with Elder Scrolls when I modded in a mace that does infinite damage cause I just plain don't enjoy the combat in Elder Scrolls, and I love it in Fallout
And that makes no goddamned sense for any kind of industrial automation.
Reddit Edit:
Yeah. I liked Fallout 4 enough to play for 200 hours but the whole time I couldn't shake the feeling it was just a beta for the next TES game.
Like this is Oblivion all over again.
Although I could absolutely see that being a canon part of Fallout lore.
it's a take I don't really disagree with, being as FO4 is the game that finally hit me with the reality that no open world game is going to be my next "Morrowind"
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I too left my heart in Morrowind