Obsidian making Fallout: New Vegas

[Maf]

But in comparison to Fallout 1 and 2, it fails to capture the 'epic' size and scope of the world with this reasoning:

 

Travelling is done in an instant from point A to point B in Mass Effect. Sure it has lots of planets and galaxies you could travel to, but it fails to capture the sense of scale for the player since there is no sense of 'time' being passed during the journey.

 

The old Fallouts had it because it does not take an instant for the player to travel to another location and the time and days will continually tick during the journey. Some quests I believe is even associated with time itself. The travel is not always safe since there will always be a chance for hostile encounters depending on the distance needed to travel. Thus travelling from one end of the map to the other would seem to provide the sense of 'vastness' with an unknowing journey ahead that anything could happend. Mass Effect did not capture this at all.

Time is a good point, Fallout 1-2 made you work to save your vault/village within the alotted time.

If you went ahead and did whatever you want, you would eventually fail the game.

I can't remember feeling any sense of urgency in Fallout 3.

[Pop]

Fallout 2 didn't have any time constraints.

[Zoma]

It doesn't also have to use Fallout gameplay designs to reflect the vastness of the world. Morrowind was designed for the players to feel the sense of 'hugeness' of the world. How did it achieve? By simply removing instant click on map and go design and instead, uses the sandriders(?) as a form of quicker transport to different regions.

 

FarCry 2 succeeded in this area also, using buses or vehicles as form of transport to make the world seemed big. Now here underlies the problem that usually having such huge worlds often presents itself so empty and void with FarCry 2 being the perfect example of falling into such pitfall.

 

But I think it can be avoided, since there are other similar games with huge worlds managed to avoid the pitfalls. GTA 3 and 4 certainly made the world felt responsive to a degree and definitely not empty.

[Wombat]

At least, the choice of the city is wise in terms of both its distinction and density.

[Pop]

So let's brainstorm a bit on possibilities, yes?

 

Things that can possibly get play -

- Vegas' past w/r/t the Mafia. This seems like an obvious choice.

- Water. Las Vegas is a ****ing huge consumer of water, way out in the desert where there is very little. It plays into a lot of regional tension regarding the shipping of water over state lines. A nice tie-in to F3 in some ways.

- Power. All that neon signage has gotta be juiced by something. The obvious thing would be to tie it into the oil crisis faced by the world prior to the war in the Fallout Universe, but that seems unlikely to me as America stopped burning oil for non-auto purposes in the 1970's, if I remember correctly, and the FO the Bible has the official timeline diverging sometime after that (in the 90's I think?) But Obsidz can get creative if they wanted to.

- CSI

 

Anybody got anything else?

Edited April 22, 2009 by Pop

[Ping5000]

I'm still trying to comprehend all this.

 

This is easily the most monumental development in my life.

 

I'm skittish with anticipation. Obsidian really is the last bastion of CRPG developers with a relative amount of popularity. They've never quite tamed the intricacies of the technology existing today, but they know where they stand in their abilities in writing: somewhere really high.

 

I don't know how long they've been in development, but it's planned to come out next year. Even with the engine and gameplay systems in place, RPGs of this nature need a lot of time. The amount of branching quests, the amount of branching dialogue, the amount of choice and the consequences that follow. If time is of paramount concern, the chances of those RPG traits being neutered is high. On the flipside, Obsidian could just cram it with stuff, with a lot of it not working, but after Neverwinter Nights 2, I think they learned from their grievous errors. It recovered with a malestorm of patches, too.

 

Even 2 years is pushing it. Assuming that's the maximum amount of time they have with development, Obsidian needs to treat this game as an expansion. Treat it like Mask of the Betrayer. A much more personal, small-scale story, dense with content on a relatively limited selection of areas and fix everything Bethesda did wrong, like atmosphere. Writing. Characters. Anything that involved social contact.

 

I know Obsidian is excited. Josh Sawyer's vision for Fallout 3 was lost when Black Isle crumbled from financial destruction. Chris Avellone wishes months of pre-production meant something. Feargus Urquhart was fat and sad before Bethesda approached his studio. He's still fat, but he's now in a constant state of elation.

[CoM_Solaufein]

Why do people call Fallout 3 puny? I hit location 164 on the map after 90 hours of gameplay.

I agree, not even close to puny. It rates up there with Oblivion and Morrowind when it comes to places to explore. Far more than Kotors, Bloodlines, and both NWNs put together.

[Deadly_Nightshade]

I think the main problem people had with Oblivion is that it wasn't as big as Morrowind...

 

Lulz... No, no, no... The main problem most people had, and I am talking about people who do not like the game here, is that it is a bad game. If you wish I can go into more detail, hell I'll even post my review of the game if you want it, but, let me assure you, the size of the game world was not one of the points I focused on.

[J.E. Sawyer]

- Water. Las Vegas is a ****ing huge consumer of water, way out in the desert where there is very little.

Fryda pointed me to this great .gif.

 

http://www.gifbin.com/982739

 

Watch Lake Mead on the right. Whoooosh.

[RangerSG]

I think that when mentioning the "level cap" issue in FO3, it's only fair to note that you had a level 20 cap in FO1 as well, and it was pretty easy to reach that before the end game. Also the "sense of urgency" in FO2 was very artificial, as no matter how long you took to get back to Arroyo, the vertibirds had already done their work. So those complaints on FO3 don't wash with me.

 

The one complaint I do find valid is FO3 had very dodgy writing in places. But writing has never been BethSoft's strong point, so I was hardly shocked. The other is the Vats system could've been cleaned up more and the melee combat system...well...ugh. It stunk in Oblivion, it still stunk.

 

And I agree about Oblivion being wretched as a game, though I loved Morrowind. So I'm not a BethSoft hater. But Oblivion was to me a step backwards in every area except visuals from Morrowind. I liked FO3, but I agree that Obsidian can add what the game lacked, so I'm optimistic.

Edited April 22, 2009 by RangerSG

[Nightshape]

Why do people call Fallout 3 puny? I hit location 164 on the map after 90 hours of gameplay.

 

We are starting to see gameworld well in excess of what we see from puny fallout/oblivions worlds... WoW(from what I here) is huge, and games like Fuel raise the bar (rumoured at 5,000 miles

[Ausir]

I prefer the FO1/2 model of more diverse locations with less detail than focus on one location with a lot of detail like in FO3 myself.

[Morgoth]

Make New Vegas more tight, but with more meaningful content. Many people these days only bother to play a game once, therefor it's important to count on everything on the first playthrough. Half the size of F3's world is more than plenty enough.

[Musopticon?]

I think that when mentioning the "level cap" issue in FO3, it's only fair to note that you had a level 20 cap in FO1 as well, and it was pretty easy to reach that before the end game. Also the "sense of urgency" in FO2 was very artificial, as no matter how long you took to get back to Arroyo, the vertibirds had already done their work. So those complaints on FO3 don't wash with me.

True, F2 played around with the illusion of player achievement a bit much. Then again, it has one of the better time limits that I can remember, not too strict, but urging you to actually finish your quest, the real motivation behind the character.

 

Anyhow, the problem in F3 wasn't the level cap, since F2 had some very rewarding character progression despite the same cap. The problem was the complete misdesign of how xp was handled and in how large quantities. The character was an unwinnable death machine because any player would reach the level cap way before the halfway mark, if he did any backtracking at all. I had to mod the game to slow down xp gain before levels felt meanigful, the game just threw them around like nothing.

 

Same could be said about the perks, one of the worst ideas of game design ever to give them out every level. I just had to pick several of those "+5 to something" perks in a row and lose any kind of challenge that much sooner. Perks in previous Fallouts were something you were anxious to find about and pick, because they were relatively rare, every 3 or so levels(depending on some traits).

[Ausir]

This is a list of things (both gameplay-wise and lore-wise) that were in previous Fallouts and I'd like to see included in Fallout: New Vegas, and that wouldn't be that hard to do even while keeping Fallout 3's overall gameplay system intact.

 

* Traits

* Low-intelligence dialogues

* Ending narration that shows you the results of your actions on various communities and people you came across

* Perks every 3 levels instead of every level, and more interesting perks

* Tying perks only to skills and stats (with higher requirements), without a level requirement (like JE Sawyer originally proposed for Van Buren)

* Higher maximum skill level, making it impossible to become a jack of all trades

* The higher the skill you want to increase, the more skill points you have to pay for one %

* Main stats having more influence on derived statistics and skills

* Strength requirements for weapons

 

* Mentions of the NCR-Brotherhood war from Van Buren

* Characters from Hoover Dam and maybe the Dam itself, given the proximity

* Poseidon Energy - given how important this corporation was Pre-War, I found it weird that it's not even mentioned in FO3

* Lots of references to Van Buren, so at the very least the story and backstory will be officially canon

Edited April 22, 2009 by Ausir

[player1]

Why do people call Fallout 3 puny? I hit location 164 on the map after 90 hours of gameplay.

I agree, not even close to puny. It rates up there with Oblivion and Morrowind when it comes to places to explore. Far more than Kotors, Bloodlines, and both NWNs put together.

 

Only problem is that 80% of those places are pure hack and slash.

 

Don't get me wrong those other 20% are good. But you can't know when you see some new location if there is actually something interesting or it's just another "dungeon" with nothing to give.

 

Even H&S is good to, if place is interesting to explore. Or there is an interesting reward at the end (like that Medic Power Armor ). But you can't know without going through the dungeon first.

Edited April 22, 2009 by player1

[RangerSG]

I think that when mentioning the "level cap" issue in FO3, it's only fair to note that you had a level 20 cap in FO1 as well, and it was pretty easy to reach that before the end game. Also the "sense of urgency" in FO2 was very artificial, as no matter how long you took to get back to Arroyo, the vertibirds had already done their work. So those complaints on FO3 don't wash with me.

True, F2 played around with the illusion of player achievement a bit much. Then again, it has one of the better time limits that I can remember, not too strict, but urging you to actually finish your quest, the real motivation behind the character.

 

Anyhow, the problem in F3 wasn't the level cap, since F2 had some very rewarding character progression despite the same cap. The problem was the complete misdesign of how xp was handled and in how large quantities. The character was an unwinnable death machine because any player would reach the level cap way before the halfway mark, if he did any backtracking at all. I had to mod the game to slow down xp gain before levels felt meanigful, the game just threw them around like nothing.

 

Same could be said about the perks, one of the worst ideas of game design ever to give them out every level. I just had to pick several of those "+5 to something" perks in a row and lose any kind of challenge that much sooner. Perks in previous Fallouts were something you were anxious to find about and pick, because they were relatively rare, every 3 or so levels(depending on some traits).

 

I don't know if I ever felt I was invincible in FO3. Like previous incarnations, I was always one nasty explosion from being splattered all over the wasteland. 1 super mutant critical with a rocket launcher, or hitting the car nearby *cringes* was usually enough to remind me of mortality. I think the perk every level decision was made to mitigate the pain of the loss of traits (in fact, I'm sure that this was mentioned as the rationale in an interview). The why of that was a lengthy discussion, and I didn't entirely agree, but I could see why they made it. It did make the game easier if you wanted to powerlevel your PC, yes. But if you wanted an RP concept, it gave you a way to make the game playable throughout. *shrugs* I'd love to have traits back, of course. And I'd trade that for the old perk system. But I'm not sure how viable that kind of change would be.

 

To me, if the choice has to be made between system tweaks and story, I'll take more story every time. That's what I think Obsidian can give us that FO3 did not above all else. So that's what I care the most about seeing.

[Ausir]

But I'm not sure how viable that kind of change would be.

 

Traits should be very easy to do, given that they're selected at character creation and optional. Bringing back the old perk system (or an improved one, akin to Van Buren) would be harder.

[alanschu]

So would Mass Effect be made more epic if they didn't instantly travel you there and made it possible to have the warp drive interdicted?

 

 

The random encounters weren't horrible in Fallout (though I found more often than not unless I was late game and geared to max, they were often overwhelming), but for the most part I found them a drag.

 

It certainly does contribute to the sense of scale of the world. Mass Effect at present is simply giving you a sense of. . . I'm not sure how to express properly. Maybe 'enclosed' due to the hub structure? But the point I'm trying to make is there is a sense of 'time' passing during the journey that the old Fallouts had that provides the the sense of consistency that the world is that huge and may even change as time goes by.

 

 

Fallout's encounter can be avoided later if you decide to invest in outdoorsman skill, giving you a choice to evade enemy encounters. Pretty much depends how you build your character.

 

 

I did not find what you describe at all. It was time filler that distracted from the rest of the excellence of the game IMO.

[alanschu]

world map filler.

Huh, I thought Fallout 3 had that in abundance, even with its dungeon hack tendencies. And now that we're going into the desert around Las Vegas how can we avoid that in any case?

 

 

The thing about the Fallout 3 movement though, was that I was still in the game.

 

 

The thing I hated about Oblivion was marching to destination and I used fast travel galore. What I liked about Fallout 3 was marching everywhere and I rarely used Fast Travel. THere was jsut something I enjoyed about leaving megaton and marching into the downtown core. There's something about the atmosphere of the Fallout 3 map that just captivates me. Particularly the city part. I enjoyed walking along a wall in anticipation that there could be some loot-happy sniper waiting for me, and it makes sense given the setting too.

[Tagaziel]

Why do people call Fallout 3 puny? I hit location 164 on the map after 90 hours of gameplay.

 

Fpr me, the primary reason is that visually it's vast, but in practice, most of these locations are exactly the same. Every ruined building interior uses the exact same set of assets, usually without so much as a single factor to make it unique. The game is basically composed of four different places to explore - a cave, a ruined building, the subway and the access tunnels.

 

I'm currently replaying Morrowind, so I have a decent comparison - the Dwemer ruins. They look awesome, have a great atmosphere and everything, but except from a handful of locations, most if which are in the Red Mountain area (Dagoth Ur Facility, Citadels Odrosal and Vemynal), they look exactly the same and have the exact same set of generic loot. What's missing is the backstory, something Emil Pagliuro seemingly hates, preferring to tell the story through gameplay, even if it doesn't make any sense in the context of the game world (Vault 106, 108, lights on 200 years after the war, Tenpenny..).

 

Personally, I felt that Fallout was bigger, it simply felt like a big world. Fallout 3, sadly, doesn't have that feeling, since it's possible to get to DC from Andale just by jogging for a few minutes.

[Wombat]

- Water. Las Vegas is a ****ing huge consumer of water, way out in the desert where there is very little.

Fryda pointed me to this great .gif.

 

http://www.gifbin.com/982739

 

Watch Lake Mead on the right. Whoooosh.

I wonder how people can survive in Nevada without the lake. With a huge water chip? Since I haven't played FO3, I don't know how it is expressed but is there a desert in the game? I encountered a large desert in a game called Gothic III and, as a game, I think it was a failure. I needed to keep pressing the move-forward key for a long time to travel through the empty desert. It did feel vast but...yes, that's where I gave up completing the game. Guess I'd prefer random encounter system here, letting my character travel through the map and enjoy the sense of survival. Yes, I'm a wimp compared with those who enjoy the game while dealing with its numerous bugs and the empty areas... The sense of survival worked nicely in small island was dulled when the stage is replaced to a continent with a huge desert.

[Slowtrain]

I don't care about gameworld size. Unless you are going to make it "size" on the scale of Daggerfall, it doesn't matter to me.

 

 

What does matter is a terrible story, pancake flat characters, an unresponsive world, insane reptitve gameplay, and a total lack of consequences.

 

Why not make the world much smaller and eliminate all the totally aimless exploration of a bunch of places that all look the same and contain the same enemies and instead concentrate on fixing all the above problems instead?

[Wombat]

Why not make the world much smaller and eliminate all the totally aimless exploration of a bunch of places that all look the same and contain the same enemies and instead concentrate on fixing all the above problems instead?

That's what I'd like to suggest. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did it pretty well in building up sense of survival in a rather small area.

[mkreku]

People saying Fallout & Fallout 2 had huge maps are deluding themselves. You had a little dot slowly creeping from one square to another without ANY interaction with the map whatsoever. Once in a while you might get a random encounter, but they were the same over and over and they were (for the most part) totally uninteresting (and often seriously imbalanced).

 

And Fallout 3 is pretty big when you just take a look at the map size and go wow. But that feeling of size is wasted because someone at Bethesda thought "People don't like to wander too much" so they made sure to put generic raider camp #103 a maximum of 30 seconds from wherever you stand in the gameworld, complete with a little arrow always reminding you that it's there so you never feel all alone or lost or anything.

 

Bethesda are great at building gameworlds (I absolutely love how they've managed to tell little stories everywhere, like the skeleton sitting slumped over a table with a bottle of whisky in one hand and a revolver in the other.. or the female corpse in the bathtub with a still connected radio by her feet.. or the drainage with the lonely corpse and a ham radio.. or the shelter tube with a tiny skeleton and a teddy bear.. etc). They've managed to fill very much of the world with interesting details like that, if you bother to look.

 

Unfortunately they suck at writing meaningful dialogue and making quests with consequences. This is NOT game engine related, by the way, and this is the area where I expect Obsidian to shine. It's like Bethesda has ten different teams writing quests and dialogue trees.. and for some reason these ten teams are not allowed to interact with each other until the game is shipped. The individual quests are actually not all bad (well, some aren't), but the way they're shallowly just laid out on the playing field without ever affecting anything is.. sad.