Bethesda gets Fallout

[Riggswolfe]

http://pc.ign.com/articles/780/780262p1.html

Let the snarky jokes about bugs begin.

Honestly, my only worry is that NPCs in the Elder Scrolls are usually kind of flat. My ultimate wish would be keep the underlying systems the same but update the graphics. It's not Fallout if I don't get to choose bizarre perks and such.

ETA: I Know they were already working on number 3 but now there is hope for 4 and more to come out.

[Sky]

I'm not so much worried about the bugs as the consolization and dumbing-down of their own franchise. I've read interviews with them before, and they keep claiming to be huge Fallout fans that will do justice to the franchise...but I've not seen that from their other products. Bums me out, Bethsoft was one of my favorite devs back in the 90s.

Attitude: Wait and See.

[rk47]

It's going to be dumbed down with compass and a quest pop up telling me to kill 10 rats right after I talk to the starting NPC, so I'm not placing too high expectations from it. Oblivion is a nice big sandbox, but the silly quests and dumb scaling mobs ruined any sense of exploration for me. It took a lot of mods to make it acceptable, and I'm just interested to see if Bethesda gonna give mod freedom on Fallout or not

[Sauced]

"Interplay is developing its own Fallout MMO, but under terms of the deal will be acting as licensee rather than owner. A special clause of the agreement states that Interplay must commence full-scale development on the title within 24 months of the date of this agreement or forfeit its rights to the license.

Additionally, Interplay has agreed that it will commercially launch the Fallout MMO within four years of the start of development or again forfeit its rights to the IP. If the game does indeed see the light of day, Interplay has agreed to pay 12% of the game's sales and subscription fees to Bethesda."

Cranking out an MMO under a time crunch to keep the license?  I bet that game is gonna be awesome.

[Murgos]

Bethesda is still one of my favorite devs.  They are one of the few dev houses willing to do their own thing.  All the doom and gloom about Oblivion sucking is pretty silly, the game was a wide open single player sandbox of amazing scope and detail.  There really isn't anything else comparable and even though there were some bad decisions made with the design it still followed very well along their core principles from Arena onward.

Oblivion was not the horrible train wreck of stupendous proportions people here are making it out to be.  Mostly it's problem is missed potential not pure unadulterated suckiness.

[Yoru]

Um? They've "had" Fallout for at least two years now...

Oh, I see - they bought the whole IP, instead of just licensing it. Doesn't really change much, though.

[Strazos]

I can't remember the last Bethesda product I liked. I'm not holding out hope for their Fallout game.


Also, poor Interplay...who could possibly want to put their ass on the line to pound out a MMO under such a tight deadline?

[Riggswolfe]

I'm not so much worried about the bugs as the consolization and dumbing-down of their own franchise.

I keep having to reply to this stuff. The consolization boils down to menu systems. That's it. The so-called dumbing-down was by player request. Players complained loudly on the forums that Morrowind was too sandboxy and that quests had bad directions and so finding the people you wanted was hard. They also complained about travel times. So, Oblivion gave people quest pointers and instant-travel options. So, don't blame Bethesda, blame your fellow gamers. It's the same movement that led from EQ to WOW in MMOs and honestly, I'm surprised that on a site where people don't want cockblocks in MMOs they do want them in their singleplayer games. Because that's what Oblivion was, Morrowind without the cockblocks.

[Sky]

Oblivion was not the horrible train wreck of stupendous proportions people here are making it out to be.  Mostly it's problem is missed potential not pure unadulterated suckiness.

I agree. I guess I missed where someone said it was a horrible train wreck of stupendous proportions.  I just liked the first two elder scrolls games better than the last two. They are simplistic but pretty.

Morrowind removed the instatravel from the older games, btw. It also removed the massive dungeons that were my favorite part of the series, and that's really my main gripe. You won't find me saying Morrowind was a great game, I thought it sucked, too. I'm a Daggerfall and Arena guy. Of course I blame my fellow gamers, to make money one must cater to the LCDtards.

I also disagree there's no competition. The Gothic series is great and there have been a few good isometrics like Divine Divinity or Sacred.

[Riggswolfe]

I also disagree there's no competition. The Gothic series is great and there have been a few good isometrics like Divine Divinity or Sacred.

IMO the Gothic series is ok but it's much smaller in scope than the Elder Scrolls. It also feels more limited in character creation and what you can do.

Divine Divinity and Sacred are more Diabloish and so I don't consider them direct competition.

I miss the bigger dungeons too btw.

[Fabricated]

The thing is that 90% of Oblivion's problems can be solved by mods. Did they ever release the model importer so people could make their own models/weapons/buildings/etc without hacks?

[Kail]

I miss the bigger dungeons too btw.

It's not just the dungeons that bug me, it's the whole direction of the game.  You've still got the glitchy code, the boring gameplay mechanics, the stupid levelling system, the fairly blah graphics that won't run on anything with specs lower than Cerebro, and so on.  I loved Daggerfall, and I'd love to see them do "Daggerfall, only better" but instead, they seem focused on "Daggerfall, only smaller and with shinier graphics."

[Bunk]

Sigh... Fondmemoryitis strikes again.

Yes Daggerfall was cool - it was also the most buggy POS game ever released. It was full of randomly generated content that made no logical sense at all. It had a leveling system that a three year old could exploit, and had fast travel because basically the space between towns was one gigantic wasteland. Don't get me wrong, I loved it in its day, but Daggerfall done now would be an abyssmal failure.

I miss the bigger dungeons too btw.

It's not just the dungeons that bug me, it's the whole direction of the game.  You've still got the glitchy code, the boring gameplay mechanics, the stupid levelling system, the fairly blah graphics that won't run on anything with specs lower than Cerebro, and so on.  I loved Daggerfall, and I'd love to see them do "Daggerfall, only better" but instead, they seem focused on "Daggerfall, only smaller and with shinier graphics."

Some of the dungeons in Oblivion take more than an hour to grind through, they are huge enough to have to be seperated in to four or more zones.

Stupid leveling? It's Daggerfall's, but less exploitable. I understand the dislike of the scaled encounters, but I understand why they did them as well (avg gamers don't like encounters they can't win). It was easy enough to mod out.

Blah Graphics? Good lord. Complain about the facegen faces if you like, but really, it has some of the richest looking environmental graphics around. If you are a graphics whore - there are 400MB texture packs available to improve it even more.

Performance - I run it with custome textures on a 7900GT at 1680 x 1050,  high settings and AA on, and it runs just fine for me thanks.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not the Oblivion super fanboi - it has plenty of issues - it just bugs me with some of the nitpicky or downright wrong things that people like to say about it. Would I like to see some major improvements? Hell yea:

 - the NPCs still lack character
 - the face gen faces are hideous
 - its really annoying that they added voiceover, but only used 5 actors for 5000 npcs.
 - they should have done a better job on the scaling in the first place
 - the animations really should have been better - we are at a stage where a model should go through more than one frame of animation when it jumps

I really do think its biggest fault is that the NPCs don't bring you in to the story well enough. They improved that over Morrowind, but they have a ways to go. They need to be looking at Bioware for ideas on that front - companions or party members with actual backgrounds and stories would be a good start.

The thing is that 90% of Oblivion's problems can be solved by mods. Did they ever release the model importer so people could make their own models/weapons/buildings/etc without hacks?

I don't know how offical it was, but there are tons of new models in mods now - replacement bodys, new weapons, new placebles, etc.

[Sky]

Divine Divinity and Sacred are more Diabloish and so I don't consider them direct competition.

Only in interface and somewhat in combat. They are worlds ahead of Diablo in rpg-ness. Both feature large open worlds with tons of side quests and interactivity. Diablo was just a popular isometric hack-n-slash dungeon crawl (I'm well on the record as not liking Diablo much).

Bunk. It's not fondmemoryitis. I remember the bugs. It was one of those games that rose above the bugs, like Vampire Bloodlines (or the quirky interface of Gothics). I loved the randomly generated content. I don't exploit game systems, so I don't count that as a negative. I should note I've played Daggerfall as recently as a couple years ago when I was in a nostalgia mode (and X-Com and all kinds of Great Old Ones).

The problems you list with Oblivion, I consider minor. The bigger problems can be modded out? That's a broken game that the players fixed. That's worse than KotOR2, which just had the endings rushed and some deleted content, at least the core game was solid. Maybe if they collected the best 'fixes' and released it as an official downloadable pack, but I'm not going to waste my time sifting through third party shit trying to fix something I paid good dough for. I'll go play something that's good to go out of the box.

[Bunk]

Well, to be fair, the only big problem that "needed" to be modded out was the scaled encounters. Whether or not scaled encounters was a good idea or not is an argument on the level of Felucia/Trammel, or whatever the fuck they were called.

Oblivion really was bittersweet for me, much like Morrowind. I loved the shit out of it for about 30 - 40 hours worth of play, and then hit a wall - started to see the issues with it, and got bored. Modding brought me back a few times, but I know its a game I will probably never actually finish the main quest on.

My point being, it was far from perfect, but I did get enough enjoyment out of it to make me still want to see what Beth offers up next.


Oh, and Gothic - I bought Gothic 3 recently since it was cheap and well recomended here. If anyone can tell me how to run it without CTDs every five minutes it might actually be interesting... Appears the only patches are for the German version.

[Ironwood]

Played Morrowind much longer than Oblivion.  With every release of the same game but with more shiny, the time for me to say 'Wait, I've played this' becomes ever shorter.


I played THE FUCK out of Arena and Daggerfall.  The enchanting system was what made it for me.  And the horse.  I loved my horse.  In Oblivion I just tested how far we could fall before it died.

:)

[stray]

I was never a big fan of anything Bethesda, but I did end up buying the PS3 Oblivion port recently. I'm not playing it a lot, but it's better than what I expected to be (runs pretty good too).

I've warmed up to it mainly because playing a stealther/thief plays very similarly to playing Garrett in Thief. Stealth is fun in this game. Later on, I found out that Bethesda hired a guy from the Thief team, so I guess it's no coincidence (Emil Pagliarulo, from T2 and 3 --- Who is also, supposedly, the lead for Fallout 3).

[Ironwood]

The evil brotherhood of evil was awesome in Oblivion.

[Phred]

Morrowind removed the instatravel from the older games, btw. It also removed the massive dungeons that were my favorite part of the series, and that's really my main gripe. You won't find me saying Morrowind was a great game, I thought it sucked, too. I'm a Daggerfall and Arena guy. Of course I blame my fellow gamers, to make money one must cater to the LCDtards.

I also disagree there's no competition. The Gothic series is great and there have been a few good isometrics like Divine Divinity or Sacred.

IIRC People complained about those huge dungeons you loved so much too. So Morrowind's dungeons were again a reaction to what the percieved the market wanted. I thought the Oblivion dungeons improved on Morrowind's a bit. I'd like bigger as well but not the cut and paste massive messes that were in Daggerfall either.

The only fun thing I found about Arena dungeons was the disappear wall spell I used to cut out a lot of the pointless travel. Shame they kept dropped that spell in later games.

[stray]

The evil brotherhood of evil was awesome in Oblivion.

Thing is, the rest of the game is typical Bethesda stuff, which I've never really cared for.

Parts of it serve OK as a poor man's Thief though. Or rather, an open ended, less scripted, RPG oriented one. Or something like that.

Shit, I don't know.

Basically, that Thief guy was apparently responsible for all of that Dark Brotherhood stuff, the Arena stuff, and the stealth and security gameplay. Which is basically the good parts of the game. The rest is still crap.

[schild]

Thief + Dark Brotherhood are the only reasons I lasted as long as I did in that game.

[KyanMehwulfe]

The steep development bar set is at least somewhat reassuring for a project that inspires little itself.

[Wolf]

I agree. I guess I missed where someone said it was a horrible train wreck of stupendous proportions.  I just liked the first two elder scrolls games better than the last two. They are simplistic but pretty.

I think what you're talking about is just a reaction to how hyped the game was. I too felt it wasn't too much fun for me, but reckognized how it could really be fun to other people. Than I read a couple of reviews, both press and fan, and went "wth? this game JUST ISN'T THAT GOOD", so I had to compensate by saying it's an overhyped piece of shit :P

[Yegolev]

Changing your game sequels based on comments from people that did not like your game is bad.  They are not going to like your please-everyone design as much as the original fans liked the previous design.  Please refer to Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, and probably many others I can't remember.

[Phred]

Basically, that Thief guy was apparently responsible for all of that Dark Brotherhood stuff, the Arena stuff, and the stealth and security gameplay. Which is basically the good parts of the game. The rest is still crap.

The actual stealth gameplay was very similar in Morrowind iirc, with backstabs from stealth doing huge damage, etc. Only thing he added to that was the lockpicking minigame really. And the Dark Brotherhood quests, they were really good too.

Edit: Fixed busted quote.

[Ironwood]

Wow, your quotes are way fucked.  I don't think I said that.

[Sky]

Wow, your quotes are way fucked.  I like pie.

Me too!

[Furiously]

Basically, that Thief guy was apparently responsible for all of that Dark Brotherhood stuff, the Arena stuff, and the stealth and security gameplay. Which is basically the good parts of the game. The rest is still crap.

Wow, your quotes are way fucked.  I don't think I said that.

Nope - you were not drunk.... Or you were and you remembered...

[Morfiend]

I liked Oblivion. It gave me a lot of fun. I can think of a lot worse places that the Fallout license could have gone.

Heres hoping they make a decent game with it.

[schild]

Unfortunately, this is Fallout we're talking about. And I can think of better studios than Bethesda. :(

[Murgos]

The forums for the new Bethesda interpretation of Fallout are now open, and the sound is like a hundred thousand bats shrieking as they swirl around a jutting spire of obsidian. When I speak with fervor on topics that interest me, do I sound like them? It makes a strong case for a monastic existence.

From Penny Arcade.

Fallout may be an old license but there is still a lot of interest in it.

[schild]

A LOT OF INTEREST IN FALLOUT?

GEE. WHO'D HAVE THOUGHT?

WHY WERE PEOPLE INTERESTED IN DEUS EX 2?

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF OBSIDIAN BOUGHT THE PLANESCAPE LICENSE.

MYSTERIES THAT WILL ONLY UNRAVEL THEMSELVES ONCE COMIC WRITERS AND JOURNALISTS BEGIN TO INVESTIGATE.

Really though, Tycho is a fucking dook.

[Strazos]

I would cry is Obsidian got the PS license.

[Tebonas]

Well, we would have the first half of a good PS game then. Maybe we could trick Obsidian into planning a double length game so that they deliver a complete game for once!

[schild]

See, you blame Obsidian for that.

I blame the Star Wars license.