Fallout Fallout 4 Thread

[Space Satan]

 

[ArchAngel]

Morning exercise

 

[Hirato]

oy vey, modders already fixed the dialogue system.
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1235

 

[Perkel]

Lol betheda did some colosal fuck up on textures part of game. Modders claim that textures used are huge but they are basically upscaled for no reason.

Here is mod that changed weapon textures. And you can see that it goes from 480MB to just 170mb without almost any loss of quality.

This is not all. It is for all textures in game. We are talking here about 5-6GB or more size reduction and waaaaay faster loadings of game.

Anyone remember Skyrim fuckup with compiler flags being leaved in release version of game and modders patching it giving almost 30% boost to fps (later bethsheda patched it themselves) ? This is the same kind of shit.

"It just works"

 

[Sykar]

oy vey, modders already fixed the dialogue system.
http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/1235

Spoiler

It is hardly fixable since a good dialogue system would be able to offer a lot more than just 4 dialogue options (at best) for conversations. All they do is rearranging the choices so it is "less obvious". Thanks to VO there is not much more they can do though.

 

[Perkel]

It is hardly fixable since a good dialogue system would be able to offer a lot more than just 4 dialogue options (at best) for conversations. All they do is rearranging the choices so it is "less obvious". Thanks to VO there is not much more they can do though.

It is better becuase:

1. Gives you full sentences
2. You can use 1234 buttons insted of arrows to choose

It doesn't fix dialog themselves because they are shit.

 

[baturinsky]

Funny thing, dialogues are shit in big part because engine enforces LOWER limit on dialogue options. Writers had to always give at least (and at most, but this can be worked around by branching) FOUR options. So even if there is only one or two real choices (which was actually norm for Morrowind), they have to throw in useless placeholders such as "sarcasm".

 

[Space Satan]

Sound familiar. Let's see, hmmm...ah! "Dialogue Wheel is far superior to Dragon Age: Origins' list mechanics. Anyway, you are a troll and a hater, so you are banned from attending Bioware Social network."

 

[Killzig]

I've hit the point where I'm actively angry whenever Super Mutants show up in the game. Why are they in Boston? Why are they sacrificing themselves? They're smart enough to know how to make more of themselves, but not smart enough to contemplate their own mortality or fate as a species? Is there any thought given to this world beyond reddit-tier jokes / skeletons holding hands / hugging the toilet at the bar?

 

[baturinsky]

I've hit the point where I'm actively angry whenever Super Mutants show up in the game. Why are they in Boston? Why are they sacrificing themselves? They're smart enough to know how to make more of themselves, but not smart enough to contemplate their own mortality or fate as a species? Is there any thought given to this world beyond reddit-tier jokes / skeletons holding hands / hugging the toilet at the bar?

If people are stupid enough for suicide bombing, what do you expect from Supies? And from strategical viewpoint. sacrificing one guy for a pretty good chance of offing high-profile target that otherwise would kill hundreds of your people is not that stupid.

 

[Killzig]

That's weak tea. How the fuck do they even know who the SS is? Why are they even here? Why are they eating people? What is the point of this faction in FO4 besides RARRRRTHREAT?

 

[pippin]

It doesn't fix dialog themselves because they are shit.

This. Having 4 options isn't really a problem if those are handled properly. But in FO4 they suck and you barely have stat checks (since there are no skills).

 

[moon knight]

Finally I tried this game.
It's optimized like shit.
Really, it's not possible that The Witcher 3 runs better then this on my rig.

 

[Crooked Bee]

An ex-Harmonix, Crystal Dynamics and 2K Marin dev on why Fallout 4 is so magical and its bugs so endearing: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/fallout-4-bugs

Snippet:

The Beauty of Bugs

But what if you’re a gamer who doesn’t care about Bethesda’s staff turnover or work environment? What if you don’t care how the sausage is made and you simply want a tasty, bug-free sausage? It turns out how the sausage is made has great bearing on what you end up eating.

Bethesda’s games allow for absurd levels of player freedom in a huge playground of quests, characters, and systems. You can create your own character, equipment, and, inFallout 4, town. You can spend hundreds of hours exploring aimlessly. You can join factions and guilds, be good or evil. Many games do these things, but Bethesda’s brilliance is that it places minimal restrictions on how players interact with, or overlap, these systems.

Want to kill some major quest givers, locking yourself out of a ton of content? Sure! Want to skip hours searching for your father in Fallout 3 by stumbling on his hidden location? Why not? Feel like putting so many cabbages into your house in Oblivion that the game barely functions? Knock yourself, and your framerate, out!

Meanwhile, every Assassin’s Creed protagonist will “de-sync” if he kills too many civilians. Solid Snake’s missions are aborted if he leaves the area. You can’t pull out a gun inMass Effect unless the game decides it is Designated Gun Time.

This isn’t to say these games are bad. They’re quite good, actually. They’re just trying to avoid messy edge cases that make the fiction, the world, the tech, or the gameplay look bad. Such restrictions are like the berms encircling Disneyland, ensuring you don’t see anything less than perfect or see what’s happening backstage.

Bethesda games don’t care. They excel at what I’d call the “minimally-supported edge case.” They let you do what the systems and the world imply you can do. Even if it’s not well supported. Even if it’s going to look bad. Because that freedom is what’s important and special.

“Polish” is all about smoothing these rough edges. There is no cost-effective way of polishing most goofy edge cases. In fact, it’s often harder than building the core system. If you’re focused on making a polished, bug-free game, the smart move is to remove them, or make them impossible to reproduce. Bethesda’s games don’t do this. They often do the absolute minimum needed to make these edge cases work, but they keep them in.

There are smart ways to develop and polish games with huge scope and scale. The most reliable is to make the core design more predictable and repeatable, and less interdependent. Create a set number of formalized game play primitives or mission types, and repeat them over the game with a few mechanical twists and scaling difficulty. Make each “story mission” self-contained and separate them from the “free roaming systems.” Keep friendly “story spaces” from overlapping with combat. Mete out major upgrades on a tight schedule in line with story progression, but have less important or cosmetic upgrades be something you can grind for.

Does this sound like a game you’ve played recently? It isn’t a coincidence. These are some of the most reliable solutions for reducing edge cases and making implementation (and results) as predictable as possible in a large, open-world game. This also is exactly opposite of what makes Bethesda’s games magical. They’re sloppy, sprawling, surprising messes that show the sticky fingerprints of the people who made them. Polish says “no” a lot more than it says “yes,” and you can hear a lot of yes in Bethesda’s games.

Polish says you probably shouldn’t do a quest with a talking dog, because it’s going to look terrible with the lip sync system. Polish says you shouldn’t do a one-off Rube Goldberg trap using hundreds of physics objects in the game’s “creaky engine.” Polish says you probably shouldn’t put a “flying” spell that will kill the player 20 minutes into the game because it will playtest badly.

 

[prodigydancer]

Bethesda’s games allow for absurd levels of player freedom

Yeah. No skills, dialogue wheel, strafe'n'shoot gameplay.

 

[Gerrard]

It doesn't matter if you can see the whole dialogue lines when all of them are shit anyway.

 

[ArchAngel]

An ex-Harmonix, Crystal Dynamics and 2K Marin dev on why Fallout 4 is so magical and its bugs so endearing: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/fallout-4-bugs

Snippet:

Dear god. Can we send a suicide bomber to wired offices?

 

[Gerrard]

Great, I got stuck in crafting window because I was apparently pressing keys too fast and didn't wait for the awsum animations to finish.

E: and apparently the CloseAllMenus command no longer exists. Innovation!

 

[ArchAngel]

Great, I got stuck in crafting window because I was apparently pressing keys too fast and didn't wait for the awsum animations to finish.

It could be worse, you could have got stuck on any terminal you access. This is probably first game that punishes people with good computer. Anyone that achieves over 100 FPS in FO4 gets stuck when accessing terminals. At least for Skyrim physics to go berserk you needed to go over 200 fps.

 

[Bliblablubb]

“Polish” is all about smoothing these rough edges

Soooo.. there are no edgy people in potatoland then?



Sorry, playing FO4 drained my INT.

 

[Perkel]

An ex-Harmonix, Crystal Dynamics and 2K Marin dev on why Fallout 4 is so magical and its bugs so endearing: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/fallout-4-bugs

Snippet:

So in other words they have ~100 devs, they make game for 3-4 years on tools they use from Morrowind with their engineers constantly upgrading them, they sell 10mln units just for start which is like 650mln$

AND THEY RELEASE GAME IN THAT STATE WHEN THEY COULD DELAY IT HALF A YEAR AND FIX THOSE BUGS (Like witcher 3 case where they delayed game especially for that purpose which suprise suprise gave them mostly bug free launch for one of the biggest and complex open world games in industry)

So his piece is basically devs being devs. It is not our fault !

At least in Troika case they run on shoestring budget creating and innovating and they simply couldn't delay game where Betsheda can release game whenever they feel like and still rake bilion dollar if not more.

 

[Zeronet]

WHENEVER A NEW Bethesda game comes out, I hope and pray that it’s just as buggy and unpolished as its previous games.

I don't like to swear, but fuck this guy.

 

[Perkel]

I wonder how much Zenimax has to say in Betsheda.
Considering what was happening with studios dealing with Zenimax.

 

[baturinsky]

Isn't Zenimax=Bethesda?

 

[Athelas]

It sounds almost too absurd to be true, but their lack of polish appears to be literally a selling point. For example, the popularity of the 'arrow to the knee' meme provided a constant source of free marketing.