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Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

I didn't find FO3 too overbearing, because I was able to decide what sort of person I was during the intro. It does lock your background down a lot, but I guess I was happy with the background they chose in any case and didn't mind it being locked down.

   
Made in de
Huge Bone Giant






Yeah, I liked that Fallout 3 combined the tutorial with playing through a few stages of your childhood. That gave me more of a sense of who the character was, influenced by my own choices, once I played the adult version.

I don't disagree with Voss's point, but to some degree you have to fit a character into the context of a world. Preferably with as blank a slate as possible so people can play their character according to their wishes, but in some way you'll always be locked into something you may not have envisioned for your character. I think that's unavoidable.

Of course Bethesda didn't even try with Fallout 4. That was the mistake.

Nehekhara lives! Sort of!
Why is the rum always gone? 
   
Made in us
The Conquerer






Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios

 Da Boss wrote:
I play Skyrim for the feeling of immersion in another world. It's not got writing nearly as good as the Witcher for example, but it's a lot easier to make your own character and then roleplay your playstyle in that game than in most other games.

That's the problem with Fallout 4. I'm not able to be my own person, because I already have a substantial backstory and a missing child to hunt down. That's not what I come to Bethesda games for. So now I have to put up with the mediocre writing AND no immersion and limitations on the narrative I can tell myself about the game.

Not everyone goes to these games for those reasons, I've seen a lot of people disappointed by the writing and they have a good point. But the writing for me is secondary.

I wonder if they'll keep that aspect of the games going forward. I feel like they've been moving gradually away from it.


Ehhh, I wouldn't call 10 minutes of family time and an implied career in the armed forces "substantial backstory". That's pretty dang close to blank slate.

And I mean, you can just ignore the main quest. Nothing is railroaded or forced. You can play the game for hundreds of hours and never progress the main story beyond you leaving the vault. You don't even have to go rescue Preston's group at the beginning.

Honestly I think Fallout 3 had a more linear forced storyline than Fallout 4. And even less control over your backstory. Your whole backstory plays out in the prologue. You grow up in a vault, have a sweetroll stolen, shoot some roaches, escape with the help of your girlfriend and try to find your dad who left.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/05/22 01:42:07


Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines

Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.

MURICA!!! IN SPESS!!! 
   
Made in de
Battlefield Tourist






Nuremberg

Having had a wife and kid, and the kid being taken and possibly alive, and your wife murdered, is pretty huge to me.

You might feel differently about it, but it caused a significant disconnect for me with the game. That, and the voiced protagonist giving answers that didn't match with the text I chose really took me out of the experience.

   
Made in us
Terrifying Doombull




 Da Boss wrote:
Having had a wife and kid, and the kid being taken and possibly alive, and your wife murdered, is pretty huge to me.

Going to agree and disagree. For the first play through, it felt a lot deeper than most Bethesda games. I was way more invested than I expected to be.

Subsequent playthroughs.. eh. I just load a save at the vault entrance, redo customization and ignore it, because once you know what you're doing and don't have the exploration aspect to pad it out, its a very short and shallow story.

And what the various factions are doing Makes No Sense, so its best to ignore them too.
'We want to be completely separate from the surface, so obviously androids are better than robots. And we're going to keep building them, and replacing people. How does this help... uh... we've got to build more, right?'
or
'The androids are people, so we need to save them, by making them forget and just... seeding them among the population already freaked out by people being replaced by androids. What could go wrong? And what do you mean destroying the personalities of beings seeking self-determination might have negative consequences?'

You might feel differently about it, but it caused a significant disconnect for me with the game. That, and the voiced protagonist giving answers that didn't match with the text I chose really took me out of the experience.

Oh, yeah. The dialogue choices are oversimplified anyway (and don't achieve anything beyond yes, no, and pay more), but the disconnect between selection and result is atrocious. And really baffling, because they had to know they weren't matching their recorded dialogue. Or weren't recording their script (depending on the order they did it).

Efficiency is the highest virtue. 
   
Made in us
The Conquerer






Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios

Yeah, I'm not sure why they didn't go for a sleeker version of every previous game where your entire dialogue was spelled out so you could actually make a choice.

Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines

Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.

MURICA!!! IN SPESS!!! 
   
Made in de
Huge Bone Giant






Because you're playing Nate or Nora, not your own character? The moment they decided that the main character has a canonical personality, player choice was out. The lacking dialogue system is just another expression of this. You're not going to get to create your own story if the idea is for you to watch someone else's story.

That's the fundamental problem with the premise Bethesda chose and something I hope they won't do again.

Nehekhara lives! Sort of!
Why is the rum always gone? 
   
Made in us
Beautiful and Deadly Keeper of Secrets





I don't believe that was something they decided. It was more a practical reason because they decided to go with the main protagonist having all lines voiced and so cut down on options as a result.
   
Made in us
Terrifying Doombull




 Geifer wrote:
Because you're playing Nate or Nora, not your own character? The moment they decided that the main character has a canonical personality, player choice was out. The lacking dialogue system is just another expression of this. You're not going to get to create your own story if the idea is for you to watch someone else's story.

That's the fundamental problem with the premise Bethesda chose and something I hope they won't do again.


The characters had a canonical background, not personality.
Personality-wise, you're stuck with yes, no, sarcastic or greedy, but you can mix them up as much as you want.


I tend to agree with ZebioLizard2 as well. Full voice acting is the bane of options.
I find it a waste anyway- after I get a feel for a characters voice, I tend to start skipping, because I read faster than the actors chew through their lines, and I don't need to read it and then hear it.
Voiced lines tend to be inferior anyway, because between music, sound effects and ambient noises the voice lines can often get lost in the cacophony.

Efficiency is the highest virtue. 
   
Made in de
Huge Bone Giant






Voss wrote:
The characters had a canonical background, not personality.


I don't know, I thought there were enough lines of text detached from the choice wheel for me to get that impression. Maybe I'm misremembering.

Nehekhara lives! Sort of!
Why is the rum always gone? 
   
Made in gb
Mad Gyrocopter Pilot





Northumberland

I don't know, for me it just made me think of Mass Effect. That did largely the same thing. You had a character who was Shepard and the things that they said weren't always same as written.

I didn't have a problem in Fallout 4 with all that. My problem stemmed from them creating the idea that you are out for revenge and to find your lost son, only there's A Super Clever Twist.

One and a half feet in the hobby


My Painting Log of various minis:
# Olthannon's Oscillating Orchard of Opportunity #

 
   
Made in us
Terrifying Doombull




 Geifer wrote:
Voss wrote:
The characters had a canonical background, not personality.


I don't know, I thought there were enough lines of text detached from the choice wheel for me to get that impression. Maybe I'm misremembering.


There are places where you can get snippets, but there are so few interactions (due to the lack of NPCs, something that plagues a lot of Bethesda (and Obsidian) games) that its hard to tell. Some of the weirder stuff stands out for me, such as Tinker Tom, where you can take him seriously and drink acid to 'purge yourself' of his imaginary Institute nanobots or deride him as the idiot he is. A set personality doesn't really allow for that. Or deciding that your son is a monster and blowing his brains out on the roof of (totally not) MIT. Or taking the Brotherhood seriously, which should be a stretch for a pre-war person.

Back to Starfield for a moment, supposedly (at least according to early PR things), one of the major improvements they're adding to the engine is a lot more NPCs and interactions. So less of a feel of tiny cities separated from a not particularly big world, and hopefully a greater sense of choice and consequences. And hopefully interactivity. Its kind of embarrassing when the game lets you completely seriously ask NPCs what ghouls are after you've spent 30+ hours in the Wasteland, killing hundreds of the things.

Efficiency is the highest virtue. 
   
Made in us
The Conquerer






Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios

Voss wrote:
Its kind of embarrassing when the game lets you completely seriously ask NPCs what ghouls are after you've spent 30+ hours in the Wasteland, killing hundreds of the things.


Well, its not like your character knows that what the zombie-like creatures are called when you leave the vault. You'd only know what a ghoul is after someone said "those are ghouls".

It would be a lot of effort to have contextually removed dialogue options just because you've advanced to X game stage.

Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines

Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.

MURICA!!! IN SPESS!!! 
   
Made in de
Huge Bone Giant






Not sure it would be that much effort. You have a stats window with creature kills, so the game already tracks your encounters to a degree. You'd just have to have track the ghoul subtype separately in that particular example. The "hard", as in expensive part, is to have the necessary voice acting to reflect more options.

Nehekhara lives! Sort of!
Why is the rum always gone? 
   
Made in us
Terrifying Doombull




 Grey Templar wrote:
Voss wrote:
Its kind of embarrassing when the game lets you completely seriously ask NPCs what ghouls are after you've spent 30+ hours in the Wasteland, killing hundreds of the things.


Well, its not like your character knows that what the zombie-like creatures are called when you leave the vault. You'd only know what a ghoul is after someone said "those are ghouls".

Hence my '30+ hours.' I'm not talking right out of the vault.
But FO4 will let you talk to the settlement people under the powerline near your home, and they'll explain ghouls if you ask. Weeks later, once you eventually make it to the Redlight district settlement (sorry, Goodneighbor), the ghoul shopkeeper will ALSO explain ghouls. No matter if other people have explained them or how many you've met/killed, or how long its been. Its lazy.


It would be a lot of effort to have contextually removed dialogue options just because you've advanced to X game stage.


Not at all. Geifer is correct, the big cost is voice acting.

Contextual dialogue is old, old hat in RPGs, going back to at least Baldur's Gate 1 (and, I believe, Fallout 1. Fallout 2 definitely had it, but I believe the whole Shady Sands/Tandi/Raiders questline had a fair bit of flex to the dialogue based on what flags you'd already triggered). Its a simple true/false flag (or a full variable if you want to really put some effort in).

The easiest example are quests where people send you off to recover something or kill something, and you've already done it and the quest item is in your bags. You get to tell them that and resolve the quest rather than accepting the base quest, ending the conversation then restarting the dialogue to turn the quest in. All it requires is 'KilledBob=true' and a check of that flag when the conversation starts the first time.

In this particular case, you could do a simple counter (if you've encountered more than 10 ghouls) and a flag if you've gotten the ghoul talk. If either are checked, you can get details, but you don't get the 'for dummies' ghoul talk.

You can go overboard with dialogue and dialogue flags(see Planescape Torment, which for all its cult classic status, put people off with the walls of esoteric junior college philosophy text), but it can be done fairly minimally to good effect. And FO4 has less text by an order of magnitude (and a similarly bigger budget). It was do-able, they just didn't value it.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/05/24 15:26:09


Efficiency is the highest virtue. 
   
Made in us
Regular Dakkanaut





Well that gameplay reveal certainly raised my interest significantly.

I'd say my concern now is going to be that there is way too little actual stuff to do on those 1000 worlds they are boasting of. I'm assuming a lot of procedurally generated stuff going on there.

An awful lot to cram into a single game between being a 1st person shooter, RPG, sandbox, settlement builder, space ship builder and sim - fear it may do all of those "just passable" vs. any being stand outs but I guess that is Bethesda's thing....

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/06/13 01:41:10


 
   
Made in us
Did Fulgrim Just Behead Ferrus?





Fort Worth, TX

I think the main point for all those extra worlds is just to give you places to find resources and lots of possible locations to build cool bases.

"Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds: Fire, walk with me."
- Twin Peaks
"You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you Sheriff Truman." - Twin Peaks 
   
Made in gb
Mighty Vampire Count






UK

 petrov27 wrote:
Well that gameplay reveal certainly raised my interest significantly.

I'd say my concern now is going to be that there is way too little actual stuff to do on those 1000 worlds they are boasting of. I'm assuming a lot of procedurally generated stuff going on there.

An awful lot to cram into a single game between being a 1st person shooter, RPG, sandbox, settlement builder, space ship builder and sim - fear it may do all of those "just passable" vs. any being stand outs but I guess that is Bethesda's thing....



I think thats fair - There are still huge limitations on what can be done with games - even AAA ones and whilst they may want to do all those things - their reach is not going to be long enough and they will fall short like so many games recently. But hypes gonna hype.

I AM A MARINE PLAYER

"Unimaginably ancient xenos artefact somewhere on the planet, hive fleet poised above our heads, hidden 'stealer broods making an early start....and now a bloody Chaos cult crawling out of the woodwork just in case we were bored. Welcome to my world, Ciaphas."
Inquisitor Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos

"I will admit that some Primachs like Russ or Horus could have a chance against an unarmed 12 year old novice but, a full Battle Sister??!! One to one? In close combat? Perhaps three Primarchs fighting together... but just one Primarch?" da001

www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/528517.page

A Bloody Road - my Warhammer Fantasy Fiction 
   
Made in us
Terrifying Doombull




Yeah, Todd Howard over-promising stuff seems familiar.

Character creation looks good.

Base building looks... less bad than FO4. (No trying to force corner pieces to snap into place, we'll see how much terrain pops through)

Several factions (but too few for 1000 planets)

Ship building and flying are kind of meh.

They cut out the meat of the dialogue interactions, so no idea what that's like still.

Gunplay seemed... fine, but didn't exactly jump out at me.
Scale-wise and promise wise, all I can see are hordes of bugs. (Literally so in the flying sequences, there were lighting issues)

Visually it looks like a monster mash of ME:Andromeda/No Man's Sky/Fallout. Not sure there was anything particularly Bethesda about it.
General feel was Cyberpunk 2077: it has real potential to be both really big and completely empty.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2022/06/13 14:35:00


Efficiency is the highest virtue. 
   
Made in us
Did Fulgrim Just Behead Ferrus?





Fort Worth, TX

The vast majority of those 1000 planets should be empty, anyway, as most planets should be lifeless balls of rock useful only for resources and pretty landscapes. I would expect random radiant-style quests to take you to them to do things like investigate shipwrecks or destroy a pirate base, but nothing more involved than that.

I'm still not excited by this preview video, just interested in what the final product will be like. This video was too staged to be able to really get a feel for what to expect other than "Bethesda Game in Spaaace".

"Through the darkness of future past, the magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds: Fire, walk with me."
- Twin Peaks
"You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchetman in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you Sheriff Truman." - Twin Peaks 
   
Made in gb
Mad Gyrocopter Pilot





Northumberland

Really didn't wow me that trailer. I'm glad it's free on gamepass so I can try it out. Some of it looks interesting but it doesn't look utterly thrilling. I was expecting a little more.

Still using the same engine so it looks like fallout in space.


One and a half feet in the hobby


My Painting Log of various minis:
# Olthannon's Oscillating Orchard of Opportunity #

 
   
Made in gb
Leader of the Sept







I'll definately give it a go on gamepass. The mashup of fallout mass effect and no mans sky is actually quite a draw for me

If its simply a more grown up and threatening version of no mans sky, with a bit more of a narrative to it, then that also works for me.

Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!

Terranwing - w3;d1;l1
51st Dunedinw2;d0;l0
Cadre Coronal Afterglow w1;d0;l0 
   
Made in us
The Conquerer






Waiting for my shill money from Spiral Arm Studios

I am definitely stoked. The gameplay looks very good. But yeah, I am guessing that most of the planets probably have only 1-2 story tied locations, if any at all, and are just "No Mans Sky" esk space to build bases and get resources.

Though, the building system looks like it has good potential for random gen, so we might have lots of random gen NPC locations to check out. Hostile and neutral.

Self-proclaimed evil Cat-person. Dues Ex Felines

Cato Sicarius, after force feeding Captain Ventris a copy of the Codex Astartes for having the audacity to play Deathwatch, chokes to death on his own D-baggery after finding Calgar assembling his new Eldar army.

MURICA!!! IN SPESS!!! 
   
Made in gb
Leader of the Sept







As long as there is a reasonable quick travel system to be able to leave planets, I rather like the idea of random wilderness you can just potter about in. I am one of those people that really liked the vehicle exploration stuff in the Mass Effect games

Little snippets of lore and bits of intriguing (but usually tragic) stories played out in abandoned infrastructure and wrecks of vehicles.

Please excuse any spelling errors. I use a tablet frequently and software keyboards are a pain!

Terranwing - w3;d1;l1
51st Dunedinw2;d0;l0
Cadre Coronal Afterglow w1;d0;l0 
   
 
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