Anime Schoolgirl posted:

make critical VATS headshots make the targets' eyes explode, even when shot from back or side of head = return of eyeshots

Phil Tenderpuss posted:

I had a lot of fun playing Fallout, too. New Vegas at least. Its just incredible to me that they are still using the Gamebryo engine and all the animations, models, and assets that they've had in the engine since oblivion.

Bholder posted:

And the unreal engine dates back to 98, nobody complains about that.

Raygereio posted:

It's actually pretty darn likely there is. No one in their right mind throws everything out the window and start from scratch, reinventing the wheel as they go along, unless they're somehow forced to. Where possible everyone - not just Bethesda - re-uses stuff.

SunAndSpring posted:

Bethesda really needs to stop relying on essential NPCs as a crutch. If someone in a quest can die, write a new path around it rather than just making him invincible. I mean, what if I want to shoot him because he's a bad guy in my opinion? I remember being really frustrated in Skyrim by how that one racist guy in Windhelm was inexplicably unkillable, and it made me wonder why they can't accept that the player will sometimes gently caress up and kill a guy with a quest.

SirDan3k posted:

No just a small set of players enjoyment, everyone else doesn't want to go through some extra bullshit hoops or reload a save because a dathclaw or dremora eats a characters face or they ran in to punch a radroach/skeever and ate more then their daily recommended dose of friendly fire bullets/fireballs.

Your desire to murder every character is weird, you are weird. Feel free to prove my assertion by showing how high Essential NPC disabling mods are on the Nexus download lists.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

Let's be honest each other, with ourselves, with T. Howard: The game needs crotch shots. Like, I realize that somebody out there is spitting out their Ramune and insisting that head shots are the only thing that really "matter" in targeted combat, but the reality is that the best way to shoot somebody is not necessarily the best way to kill them. Unreal Tournament '99 had a community-made mutator that added "crotch shots" and it was always at the top of THE list.

The game also needs targeted melee, predominately for targeted melee crotch shots.

SunAndSpring posted:

I also like how dumb the Enclave's plan to wipe out the local populace of D.C. was. You figure it would've been more efficient to just kill them all with their loving orbital weapons platform or send a few squads of power armor troopers with the most advanced technology in the wastes to clear out all the settlements and muties, instead of hoping that everyone is too stupid to realize the watering hole has been poisoned.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

Fallout 4 is so big its lead producer hasn't seen everything it has to offer

Gardiner later explained that several of the half-dozen Bethesda Q&A testers were getting "lost in the game".

quote:

Game director, Todd Howard: "We know we sacrificed some great storytelling [by allowing] the player to do whatever they want."

quote:

Lead designer, Emil Pagliarulo: "If you play Fallout 3, you know, Liam Neeson is the voice of your dad, and there are some good emotional beats there, but there's only so much you can do when you're clicking on a line of dialog and there's no spoken response. So the emotional depth that we got by having a voiced protagonist has actually [made the story] way more tense than I ever expected."

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

Basically? T. Howard.

The "core" Bethesda writing group is one of the most morose concentrations of false talent you'll ever encounter. It's the living embodiment of overwrought insecurities and "gold star"-culture, predominately due to the fact that it's staffed almost exclusively by people who will use DeviantArt accounts and slash-fic samples in lieu of resumes, and is steered by Emil Pagliarulo's incoherent pidgin.

"RPGs like Fallout are a distinctly American thing," T. Howard once explained. "And to break that mold, we felt we needed somebody with a distinctly different worldview."

Hence they found Emil Pagliarulo under some storm-battered rock in the Hebrides and shipped him back to the states like King loving Kong. This is the same Emil Pagliarulo who couldn't speak English, who had had only limited interactions with other human beings, and who'd never even seen a computer up to that point.

Like Pete Hines, Pagliarulo couldn't tolerate Michael Kirkbride's eccentrics, including the way Kirkbride frequently threatened to "write [Pagliarulo] into another dimension". The thing was, Pagliarulo was incredibly superstitious and had recently been exposed to the game Myst; he demanded that T. Howard fired (or "transitioned into a consultant") Bethesda's lone talented writer. The abyss was formed.

Under Pagliarulo's bizarre "leadership", Bethesda's writing clan developed a legendary incompetence that could weather no criticism and bristled with insecurities when Fallout 3's writing was compared (unfavorably) to Fallout 1/2 and, later, New Vegas. In an effort to appease his Gingerkin, T. Howard's been trying to bury Obsidian in the basement ever since. It's very much a Cinderella story: The beautiful Cinderella (Obsidian) trapped in legal limbo while her high-functioning-retard poo poo-sniffing stepsisters go to the Ball and write extensions to The Lusty Argonian Maid.

frajaq posted:

New Vegas has too many quests

Magmarashi posted:

Figure A is the ejection port. This is where the shell is ejected from the shotgun when the shot is fired.

Figure B is the magazine, which contains the shells loaded with shot.

They should be much closer. In fact the ejection port should be basically right on top of where the magazine loads, like this.

Wolfsheim posted:

Wasn't that gender specific, though? Like if you're a girl you gently caress the guy's son and as a guy you gently caress his daughter. At least that's the way I remember it

Zoq-Fot-Pik posted:

2house2fly posted:

That's all fine really because the whole DLC is a video game designed by an insane racist.

Cream-of-Plenty posted:

This is the Talon Company mural found in Fallout 3. As you can see, it depicts Doom 3's Maledict gripping the plump buttocks of a weeping baby boy in its claws. You could go to your local CVS Pharmacy right now, dig through a bin to uncover a copy of the game in its original shrink wrap for $2.99, plop it into your disgusting "backup" Xbox 360, and behold this image--no DLC or modding necessary.

A Bethesda employee dreamed up this image and said, "Yes, this. This will encapsulate the Talon Company perfectly." T. Howard put his wax seal of approval on it and the rest is history.

Several years ago, when someone asked Ropekid about this image in a (now archived) New Vegas thread, the Lead Designer got real quiet and seemed to skirt around the question. "Obsidian doesn't agree with the direction Bethesda took the TC [Talon Company] in. Obsidian doesn't like it at all."

The truth of the matter is that Talon Company never had a fully realized backstory--at least not in the game. While its function was to serve as a mysterious and malevolent force that was "like the Enclave, only blacker and more evil", lead writer Emil Pagliarulo took advantage of the faction's blank slate to inject a degree of symbolism into them that was otherwise unheard of in the game.

Throughout this 2008 GameReactor interview, Pagliarulo draws numerous (abrupt) parallels between Fallout 3's setting and the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840's.


Add to this the fact that "dragoons" were Irish boys the British Empire abducted at an early age, indoctrinated, and subsequently turned against their former compatriots, and the image of a demon clutching a soft baby bottom makes almost too much sense.

Also, consider that Pagliarulo's Twitter claims he is...


...and has posted cryptic messages in the past.

marktheando posted:

Interview with my hero Todd Howard that was linked to on Eurogamer's fallout Friday thing- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/11723096/Fallout-4-interview-Bethesdas-Todd-Howard-on-building-the-apocalypse.html

Things we didn't know- that the pre war intro is mainly in 2075, and we will be spending a good amount of time there. There are story reasons for the settlement building. Your gender will be important at times.

oblomov posted:

There is common sense though. They will have to have mods curated first. That's perhaps is not bad considering some poo poo on Nexus. The thing though a lot of more complex mods use various extenders to the game which I cant see working on consoles.

SunAndSpring posted:

You disappoint me on so many levels.

Tenzarin posted:

Fallout 3
In Fallout 3, there are conversation situations where characters with low Intelligence are granted other dialog options, often relating to their low intellect. However, these options are few and far between, unlike the other Fallout games where one could play the entire game as a person without Intelligence. One instance is in Roosevelt Academy, where if the Lone Wanderer activates Dean Dewey while having an Intelligence below 4, he will deem them a "special needs" child, and escort them to a "proper room."

7c Nickel posted:

I don't necessarily want to get too in to it, but the whole thing comes off as nerd chauvinism to me. They like to think that because nerd culture exalts intelligence, that their affiliation means they too are smarter than everyone else. A 1 int character is already mechanically crippled but the developers decided to tack on an extra system just to mock them. Characters with 1 Endurance don't randomly lose turns due to being out of breath. Characters with 1 Agility don't... poo poo can a 1 AGI char even perform most actions? I seem to recall most taking more than 1 pip. Anyway my point is they don't feel the need to tack on another system to the other stats. Intelligence is singled out so that anyone 2 deviations from the norm is now a blubbering caveman who can't speak in complete sentences.

7c Nickel posted:

All I'm saying is that nerds who masturbate to their imagined intellectual superiority deserve to be stuffed into lockers until the age of 45.

7c Nickel posted:

Why should I not want to play a stupid character? After all, maybe I like to play characters as far from myself as possible.

Inverness posted:

They've supposedly been finished with the game since E3 and used the time to bugfix and optimize.

I'm doubtful that they're hiding bad things. When companies want to hide bad things they generate hype with excessive marketing and highly tailored gameplay videos.

I think they're confident and are just waiting for the floodgates to unleash on launch day.

Magmarashi posted:

That's not what I'd classify as excessive in comparison to the lengths and depths other companies go to.

Magmarashi posted:

None of that. All of that is considered bog standard AAA gaming marketing these days.

Minorkos posted:

Well I mean, games look like total poo poo without shadows. Like you're better off downgrading just about any other graphical feature except for removing shadows completely. If the game is so hard to make run well that they have to turn off shadows completely then there must be something very wrong with the game

I'm still gonna say that the shadows are just bugged for some reason because no way they would turn off them completely, right? Even the PS4 port of Planetside 2 has shadows, and that's a game that like half the PC community plays with shadows off completely because of the huge framerate hit

edit: Like the textures in the above picture look really sharp and apparently the game runs in 1080p too, so I don't understand a reason why they would intentionally take shadows out

ImpAtom posted:

No they don't. You get a tutorial for it and then you basically can ignore it aside from sidequests.

ImpAtom posted:

I guess if that is what you mean it's true but it's kind of implausible to call it a constant interruption when it takes less than two minutes and trivial amounts of resources.

ImpAtom posted:

You can?

No it isn't. If you sell everything you keep then you have enough caps to just buy the resources you need.

ImpAtom posted:

... What? They drop from almost every turret you kill.

They also show up fairly regularly in shops. They don't have a Shipment option as far as I know but they're not rare by any means.

ImpAtom posted:

You need exactly 1 Military Grade Circuit Board for that quest.

ImpAtom posted:

They also show up regularly in military installations, of which the main plot sends you into several and literally the mission before that sends you into a place that has 3-4 of them right there. I get what you're saying but I don't think most people are going to run into that particular hurdle.

widespread posted:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ibtimes.com/fallout-4-review-dangers-hype-video-2174132

What's a review embargo.

Also that link wouldn't play nice for whatever reason.

http://www.ibtimes.com/fallout-4-review-dangers-hype-video-2174132 posted:

"Fallout 4" is the most anticipated game of the year, although you probably didn't have to be told that. Odds are, you've heard of the game through its ubiquitous marketing (including the mobile game "Fallout Shelter" that's been teasing eager players for months) and you've got more than a passing interest in getting your hands on Bethesda Softworks' latest post-apocalyptic adventure. You may want to take a seat, however.

Here's the setup: In 2077, humanity is heavily reliant on nuclear energy. As a result, the world stands on the brink of war -- and, as you might guess, somebody detonates a few atomic bombs on U.S. soil. You and your family are evacuated to the nearby Vault 111, run by the seemingly benevolent Vault-Tec, to wait out the bombs' effects. Instead, everybody is cryogenically frozen. More than 200 years later, somebody defrosts you, kills your partner and kidnaps your infant son. So you must venture out into the world you used to know to find your son -- and to fix the broken mess the world has become while you're at it.

You'll probably want to stock up on Nuka Cola. Like other open-world games released this year, "Fallout 4" doesn't respect your time -- it will consume weeks of your life. There's so much content here that it'll probably take you 100 or more hours to truly finish the game.

The Good

Fallout 4 Wasteland 1 The radioactive remnants of the Commonwealth are as barren as you'd expect, but in a way centuries of desertion and nuclear fallout have made some parts of it hauntingly beautiful. Bethesda Softworks

If you're new to the franchise, be warned that the wastelands are not a forgiving place. "Fallout 4" poses a challenge, and it will slap you down any chance it gets. It's purposefully difficult -- there's limited ammunition and most of the guns aren't that powerful at first.

That's where the definitive feature of "Fallout 4" comes in -- the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System, aka VATS. With the press of a button, time slows and the game allows you to shoot at specific parts of your enemies. There's something incredibly satisfying about blowing an enemy away with a shotgun in slow motion. To new players, this may feel a bit like cheating at first -- but the wastelands are stacked so highly against you that you'll need to use VATS at every possible chance to stay alive. At least until you build an arsenal of superweapons.

You won't be doing that for a while, though. This is the post-apocalypse after all, so you'll have to wander far and wide to find materials and people to help you survive. Through all that exploration, you'll see just how broken nuclear war has left this once-proud section of Massachusetts, dubbed the Commonwealth.

The wastelands are more often than not some mix of gray and brown, and it's easy to get bogged down in that -- although that’s kind of the point the game is attempting to make. There are remnants of the old world, but they've lost their vibrancy. The new world feels hopeless. Until you look up: You'll see the brightest, clearest skies that humanity has viewed in a long time. The evening sunset is positively gorgeous, and there's really nothing that touches the brilliance of the Commonwealth's star-studded night sky. Too bad humanity had to bring itself near extinction for anybody to pay attention, a metaphor "Fallout 4" conveys subtly.

The Bad

Fallout Deathclaw The "Fallout 4" inhabitants are generally not a friendly bunch. Deathclaws, such as the one you see here, are pretty much your worst nightmare. They're ugly from afar, but even uglier up close. Bethesda

As I was picking my way through an abandoned brewery somewhere in the wastelands about 10 hours into the game, I blurted out, "When is something interesting supposed to happen?" I was bored, even after running through a few of the main story quests. "This is the hill I'm going to die on," I thought then. "Fallout 4" has very dedicated fans, and I imagine the reaction to these statements won't be particularly positive.

To be fair, I praised the sheer number of activities and quests available in "Dragon Age: Inquisition," a game similar to "Fallout 4." However, "Dragon Age" had a decently captivating plot and, more important, charismatic characters to invest you in their world, make you laugh and pull the story along. "Fallout 4" doesn't have either of those things. It's not that the game doesn't give you things to do -- it gives you far more than anybody could reasonably expect -- it's that it doesn't really supply a consistent set of reasons to want to do those things.

The story itself isn't the problem: It's the pacing. "Fallout 4" is a very, very slow game. And I'm not exaggerating this point for effect: The first five to 10 hours after you leave Vault 111 is mostly spent trying not to die at the hands of a random mole rat and on farming side quests to gain enough strength to push through main ones. But the side quests often involving boring nonplayable characters (NPCs) you’ll never interact with after the quest is done. There's never really a reason to care about what's going on, even as some quests have you defending struggling settlements.

The main characters don't really help matters, either. Some of your companions are mildly interesting, but for the most part there's not much to talk about. Conversations are usually bland and boring, aside from the sarcastic lines your character can spit out assuming you're so inclined. Nobody grabbed my attention right away, and nobody will stick in my memory (with the possible exception of Codsworth the robot). After 20 or so hours, when you've got a nice set of perks and a decent arsenal to complete some of the bigger quests with, the story does get a bit more interesting, but I'm not confident saying that the payoff is worth the investment.

Conclusion

Fallout VATS freezeframe Scoring critical hits in "Fallout 4" will treat you to small freeze frames like this one, which are always cool, no matter how many times you see them. Bethesda

"Fallout 4" is by no means a bad game, but, past the veneer of ruined Americana, I'm having a difficult time believing it's going to live up to the hype preceding it. The pacing ruins an otherwise interesting character motivation. But there is a staggering amount to do, places to find and Deathclaws to challenge. If you’re a "Fallout" fanatic, "Fallout 4" will be more of what you love -- I'm just not seeing what's really in it for newcomers.

Your Computer posted:

So I haven't followed any news on this game so far and took a look at the stream. With the dog and all, is there any word on how/if stealthy gameplay is going to work?

Shugojin posted:

I for one look forward to most of the perks literally not working until you install unofficial patches

Buschmaki posted:

Yeah, that's true. It's easy to criticize Fallout 3 because I know what I don't like about the setting, but if you pressed me to come up with a better one I couldn't do it. Obsidian definitely had the easier job developing Fallout New Vegas because so many things in the West Coast have been fleshed out, while Bethesda had to make an entirely new East Coast while keeping the same elements. That's why I hope they do something interesting with Synths, the Institute, and the Minutemen in 4, because it's giving them a chance to add their own unique contribution.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

seems Maccready is going to end up in shallow grave in my playthrough, and probably most of the other human companions as well.

Dapper_Swindler posted:

They are unkillable when they are recruited. i'll just shoot him the second i see him.