Obsidian making Fallout: New Vegas

[Promethean]

screw voice actors. that money is better spent elsewhere. if Bethie didn't spend all that cash on a lame duck like Liam Neeson they could have afforded one more "monkey with a typewriter" (Mr. Hines' words) and come up with dialogue which actually did the series justice. i mean...man, maybe it's because i'm old-school, but i don't even have the patience for voice acting. i read quicker than they speak and i just click past it all anyway. it's one of the worst and most overused areas of modern RPG's.

There's a difference between hiring celebrities for their name and good, but not necessarily famous voice actors.

 

Its why you take Grey DeLise and Crispin Freeman over Liam Neeson

[crakkie]

Obsidian needs to make sure they have some great music from the 40's and 50's like F3 did.

 

And a great ambient soundtrack like Fallout1/2 did, Mark Morgan or no.

[aries101]

Pidesco wrote (from the previous thread)

 

It's a pure action game with a called shot system glued to it which gives you free shots and essentially breaks the gameplay. And worse it was tacked on with only two goals: to appease the turn based crowd and to allow for the slomo gore. Fallout 3 would have been a better game without it.

.

 

I actually happen to agree with this. In my mind, it would have been better to just have had pure realtime combat and then the ability to stop time with a bullet mode like in Max Payne (the game, not the movie). Halo and other FPS games has shown the way it can be done. (Halo not knowing a bulletime mode, though).

 

As for the combat in F:NV I definetely would like to see something along the lines of what bhlaab suggests; it reminds me so much of how Bioware is planning to do combat for DA: Origins. Maybe Obsidian needs to speak their very good friends at Bioware? about this?

 

As for armor, even Power Armour, my take is that any armor should make you take less damaga, not be harder to hit; a higher agility score should make you harder to hit, but in Power Armourm you should still take damage, maybe only 1 damage if people hit you. I mean, you ehither hit or you miss. When or if you hit, you should at least do 1 damage to the guy, even if he is Power Armour; it might mean that you only will get a dent in the PA, but is is much realistic than the whole 'I have armour on, therefore I'm more difficult to hit' tune...

 

And no, Vegas does not have subways apparently, but it does have 'casinos' and 'casino's again. And these could well be seen as dungeons, couldn't they? Anyway, I do get your point, Mikhailian, it does become tiresome at one point to run around in subways...

 

As for writing dialogue that will reflect if a character has high intelligence or low intelligence; I agree that this would be great to have in the game. However, the production value alone for this is probably tremoundous; each line has to be written for at least maybe 3 or 4 characters in the game,

and then the game has to respond with 3 or 4 lines appropriately to character's lines. It really is a lot of work - at least according to David Gaider, the Lead Writer for DA: Origins over at the Bioware DA forums. And it does add very little to the game - in terms of how many manhours there would need to be invested into writing such (great) dialogue.

[Promethean]

After reading the sample for the DAO book, I dont know know if Gaider is really that great a writer or if DAO will really have great dialogue. He hasnt done anything of BG II's caliber since and only has a few bright spot like HK-47 (which Avellone did better), Jolee Bindo, Wild Flower (who was half ruined by that stupid made up language the two spirits talked in) and a handful of quests otherwise.

[mkreku]

Things I'd like to see Obsidian improv/add to Fallout in FO:NV

 

*Vast and open wastes. It would be nice to really get that huge and barren desert wasteland feel, where walking somewhere actually takes awhile.

This! Someone wrote in the previous version of this thread (that is now locked) that more empty space is useless. It's not. No more than having more/longer dialogue to read through. It sets a mood. Fallout 3's world was OK, but I never got that lonely, barren feeling because the world, although relatively vast, was brimful with life and settlements.

 

I would love to be able to walk through a rock desert seeing nothing but swirls of dust and tumbleweed, without having ten arrows indicating that there's an entire village two dunes away..

[Gizmo]

... Someone wrote in the previous version of this thread (that is now locked) that more empty space is useless. It's not. No more than having more/longer dialogue to read through. It sets a mood. Fallout 3's world was OK, but I never got that lonely, barren feeling because the world, although relatively vast, was brimful with life and settlements.

 

I would love to be able to walk through a rock desert seeing nothing but swirls of dust and tumbleweed, without having ten arrows indicating that there's an entire village two dunes away..

Most definitely. It needs it; and a smart/smooth overland travel option would make a good option to go with it.

 

Edited April 26, 2009 by Gizmo

[Slowtrain]

Would people really enjoy walking through a huge expanse of empty wasteland if you knew there was nothing in it?

 

My guess would be most people would end up hitting the fast travel button pretty freaking fast. And fast traveling all over the place seems to defeat the purpose of a super-huge wasteland, no?

[TwinkieGorilla]

Would people really enjoy walking through a huge expanse of empty wasteland if you knew there was nothing in it?

 

My guess would be most people would end up hitting the fast travel button pretty freaking fast. And fast traveling all over the place seems to defeat the purpose of a super-huge wasteland, no?

 

heh. i was thinking the same thing. i liked the way Arcanum and FO1&2 handled travel. it gave the impression of a vast wasteland (or land in general) without having to see it in front of your face. i agree that D.C. was a bit too covered in "terrain" and there should be more flatlands, but fast-travel with random/special encounters FTMFW i say.

Edited April 26, 2009 by TwinkieGorilla

[thepixiesrock]

Obsidian needs to make sure they have some great music from the 40's and 50's like F3 did.

 

Actually I think Fallout 3 was pretty weak there. The stuff they had was good I guess, but they needed more, and also, most of it was really from the 30's and some 40's, but they didn't really have anything from the 50's that I heard, and that was a shame, they really should have.

[Gizmo]

Would people really enjoy walking through a huge expanse of empty wasteland if you knew there was nothing in it?

 

My guess would be most people would end up hitting the fast travel button pretty freaking fast. And fast traveling all over the place seems to defeat the purpose of a super-huge wasteland, no?

Let them... its an option, there for that very reason ~right?

 

Consider if the game did just that, but considered you to be traveling quick and hurried, and reduced the chances of your PC finding a special encounter (reduced ~ not removed...). That you could wander across something unique might be an incentive to some (to many I'd think); but also just walking in the desert alone would again set the tone, and be interesting in and of itself.

 

*Secondly... Consider that if they secreted a repairable vehicle or two into the game... the vast flat desert would take on a new function.

[Gorgon]

I reiterate : Motorcycle.

[Mikhailian]

Things I'd like to see Obsidian improv/add to Fallout in FO:NV

 

*Vast and open wastes. It would be nice to really get that huge and barren desert wasteland feel, where walking somewhere actually takes awhile.

This! Someone wrote in the previous version of this thread (that is now locked) that more empty space is useless. It's not. No more than having more/longer dialogue to read through. It sets a mood. Fallout 3's world was OK, but I never got that lonely, barren feeling because the world, although relatively vast, was brimful with life and settlements.

 

I would love to be able to walk through a rock desert seeing nothing but swirls of dust and tumbleweed, without having ten arrows indicating that there's an entire village two dunes away..

Exactly, it would do much to impart that feeling of loneliness and desolation that should be present in a PA desert wasteland that stretches to the horizon, blocked only by the distant foothills that border it. As far as weather, FO3 already has those little dust devils, but it really needs an occassional full-on dust storm.

 

Would people really enjoy walking through a huge expanse of empty wasteland if you knew there was nothing in it?

 

My guess would be most people would end up hitting the fast travel button pretty freaking fast. And fast traveling all over the place seems to defeat the purpose of a super-huge wasteland, no?

Let them... its an option, there for that very reason ~right?

 

Consider if the game did just that, but considered you to be traveling quick and hurried, and reduced the chances of your PC finding a special encounter (reduced ~ not removed...). That you could wander across something unique might be an incentive to some (to many I'd think); but also just walking in the desert alone would again set the tone, and be interesting in and of itself.

 

*Secondly... Consider that if they secreted a repairable vehicle or two into the game... the vast flat desert would take on a new function.

I would enjoy it, but as a compromise I think that fast travel should be tweaked so that the player can jump to their destination without previously having been there. They should just need the map marker, which they could obtain from npcs by asking around.

 

On the vehicle thing, I think it would be awesome to have that, but its features would need to be carefully balanced for the setting and expectations of most players. If it were an indestructable static, players would complain about the realism and it would unbalance travel, as driving it would make you invulnerable to the mobs you encounter. If it could be easily and completely destroyed, then you'd have an incredibly frustrating game mechanic that would force players to reload their games as the penalty would be too severe to accept. The typical solution would be to have available replacements for the vehicle in the game world, but having a Fallout world where there are other working vehicles about would strain believability. I'd suggest a compromise where the vehicle can be disabled and then repaired instead of being flat-out destroyed. Another thing I'd avoid would be vehicle combat. For obvious reasons it would unbalance things, but it would also strain the engine if it were done the way I think I should be done (by that I mean treating the vehicle as a set of armour for the vehicles components and the occupants inside.). I also think it's important that it be the sort of vehicle that the gamebryo engine could keep up with, and by that I mean it can't be too fast and it can't be expected to handle too well. A truck, jeep, semi, bus, or buggy would fit that requirement neatly, with smaller vehicles being less problematic for the overall world design.

Edited April 26, 2009 by Mikhailian

[Gizmo]

I would enjoy it, but as a compromise I think that fast travel should be tweaked so that the player can jump to their destination without previously having been there. They should just need the map marker, which they could obtain from npcs by asking around.

That's how it worked in Fallout 1 (if you had someone mark your map first).

 

...

I think RAGE will change their mind on a few things before New Vegas comes out. Personally Vehicle to Vehicle combat worked well in the "After the Bomb" RPG setting for the Palladium [PnP] games, and I think it can be made to work here. For an action game VtV combat basically equates [unless you're driving] to just additional hazards to be mindful of ~namely falling off the truck, but the trade off is new combat options to be mindful of ~namely pushing others off the truck.

Edited April 26, 2009 by Gizmo

[Slowtrain]

I'm definitely not saying there wouldn't be some appeal to a huge trackless land; I'm just curious because it seems often that games that use large worlds get criticized by gamers becasue it takes too long to get from one place to another. Even in shooters like STALKER:SOC and Far Cry 2, the amount of traveling drew a good number of complaints.

 

I mean, imagine if the FO3 world was simply expanded, like a big piece of rubber. Same number of locations but they were all stretched away from each other until there was many kilometers of real time world between each location. Are gamers really going to want to walk around, partaking of the great emptiness between locations? If not, and they are just going to use the fast travel button, isn't the devs time better spent on other things than creating a vast world of nothing?

[mkreku]

Would people really enjoy walking through a huge expanse of empty wasteland if you knew there was nothing in it?

 

My guess would be most people would end up hitting the fast travel button pretty freaking fast. And fast traveling all over the place seems to defeat the purpose of a super-huge wasteland, no?

But it doesn't have to be empty to be barren. If you fill that landmass with a balanced amount of "goodies" to find, exploration becomes fun and rewarding. My beloved Gothic games are a good example of this. Clever world design and plenty of small things to do and find. For example, in a desert you may end up finding an old car, half buried in the sand with a still locked trunk. Or perhaps a few unmarked graves (did you bring your shovel?). Or, like in Fallout 3, sewage drains you can enter. There's plenty of stuff you could fill the world with that would still let that world feel barren and desolate.

 

Of course, if you just make a huge landmass with nothing in it and tell people that it's empty, then it's a waste of time. The lure is supposed to be that there may be something out there for the people who enjoy the exploration aspect of games.

[Aristes]

I have to say that moving towards vast barren spaces doesn't appeal to me. Maybe there is some way to give more of a feeling of a vast open area but still packing the terrain with a lot of things to do. I'm afraid Crash is exactly right. It sounds cool in theory, but players are going to complain if there's nothing to do.

 

Of course, this kind of hinges on what Obsidian does with travel. If they can't make substantial changes to travel, they should not make substantial changes in terms of the amount of content in areas the PC will traverse. If they can make some major overhauls, they might be able to give a better impression of that huge, sprawling wasteland!

 

EDIT: I guess it took me too long to post. In light of mkreku's post, I would really have to see what he means by comparing it to Gothic. I haven't played that title, but seeing would be believing.

Edited April 26, 2009 by Aristes

[Gizmo]

I mean, imagine if the FO3 world was simply expanded, like a big piece of rubber. Same number of locations but they were all stretched away from each other until there was many kilometers of real time world between each location. Are gamers really going to want to walk around, partaking of the great emptiness between locations? If not, and they are just going to use the fast travel button, isn't the devs time better spent on other things than creating a vast world of nothing?

Arcanum was mentioned before... It had a huge map, with overland map travel or cell to cell [area to area] travel.

IIRC it supposedly took 48 real life hours to walk across it without fast travel. (though... where I read that bit I haven't a clue anymore ~I never tried it myself).

 

But it doesn't have to be empty to be barren. If you fill that landmass with a balanced amount of "goodies" to find, exploration becomes fun and rewarding. My beloved Gothic games are a good example of this. Clever world design and plenty of small things to do and find. For example, in a desert you may end up finding an old car, half buried in the sand with a still locked trunk. Or perhaps a few unmarked graves (did you bring your shovel?). Or, like in Fallout 3, sewage drains you can enter. There's plenty of stuff you could fill the world with that would still let that world feel barren and desolate.

 

Of course, if you just make a huge landmass with nothing in it and tell people that it's empty, then it's a waste of time. The lure is supposed to be that there may be something out there for the people who enjoy the exploration aspect of games.

Indeed. Edited April 26, 2009 by Gizmo

[Mikhailian]

I'm definitely not saying there wouldn't be some appeal to a huge trackless land; I'm just curious because it seems often that games that use large worlds get criticized by gamers becasue it takes too long to get from one place to another. Even in shooters like STALKER:SOC and Far Cry 2, the amount of traveling drew a good number of complaints.

 

I mean, imagine if the FO3 world was simply expanded, like a big piece of rubber. Same number of locations but they were all stretched away from each other until there was many kilometers of real time world between each location. Are gamers really going to want to walk around, partaking of the great emptiness between locations? If not, and they are just going to use the fast travel button, isn't the devs time better spent on other things than creating a vast world of nothing?

Something that I've taken from observing the FO3 mod scene is that it really isn't all that difficult and time consuming to rough out some pretty believable and rather large tracts of land using the tools that bsoft has. Even the geck is pretty good at this. Most of your time is going to be spent on the LOD and learning how to get rid of floating trees. Any interior location with npcs and navmaps is going to take much much much more time to create. These can always be added in after the fact. Even the scale of the D.C. map was altered after the fact because bsoft felt that the wasteland they had made was too strechted out.

[quasimodo]

I would also vote for a more spread out world. The only time I got a real "Fallout" vibe from FO3 was when I was exploring the mostly barren outskirts listening to the radio with the camera zoomed out as far as it would go.

[bhlaab]

I think the biggest way to reclaim the Fallout "feel" would be to have a more reddish-brown color pallette. In Fallout 3 the only places where I got that feeling was around the southwest area of the map, the rest of the game used a lot of hazy greens which is more Postman and less Mad Max.

 

Since it takes place in Nevada I'd say flatter terrain is more or less a given. However, I personally can't see myself being too happy with trundling through empty deserts to get somewherem and fast travel always feels like cheating to me. What would be cool is if fast travel had random enemy encounters and, if a special landmark happens to be in the "path" of your fast travel a mix of perception, luck, and maybe an outdoorsman skill would roll to decide if a little window pops up "You discovered an abandoned church. Check it out? [YES/NO]"

 

That way it kind of balances out the fact that you're missing all this neat stuff if you don't take every journey in realtime.

 

Another thing that was kind of a pain was that after level 10 or so the wasteland becomes filled with about a billion Death Claws. I thought they said they were fixing the scaling issues!

Edited April 26, 2009 by bhlaab

[Aristes]

This happy party of "more barren spaces" just doesn't make sense. I get mkreku's idea of non-npc enounters. That's cool. Put just as much stuff there, but make more of the environment interactable. Maybe even provide puzzles of sorts. Great. However, make sure there is a lot of crap around there easy enough for players to find. If the encounters don't include NPCs, the stuff you put out there has to be interesting enough to grab the players attention. I'm not just talking about interesting things in the environment the player can view. Yeah, the husband and wife suicide scene that the player sees in one of the houses in the wasteland of FO3 is interesting, but it still doesn't count as an encounter as such. Have scenes like that, but include more stuff around the houses that allow the PC some interaction.

 

As it stands, it seemed like you guys were saying you wanted a whole lot more of nothing. Now it seems like maybe it's more of an art direction where you want the perception of barren and empty spaces. I dunno.

 

Nevertheless, if the team must err to one side or the other, FO3 is a better bet than Gothic or Arcanum. No offense to fans of those two games.

[TwinkieGorilla]

Nevertheless, if the team must err to one side or the other, FO3 is a better bet than Gothic or Arcanum. No offense to fans of those two games.

 

a better bet in what way, exactly?

[Ausir]

Never played any Gothic, but I'd love to see a game as good as Arcanum again.

[Slowtrain]

Would people really enjoy walking through a huge expanse of empty wasteland if you knew there was nothing in it?

 

My guess would be most people would end up hitting the fast travel button pretty freaking fast. And fast traveling all over the place seems to defeat the purpose of a super-huge wasteland, no?

But it doesn't have to be empty to be barren. If you fill that landmass with a balanced amount of "goodies" to find, exploration becomes fun and rewarding. My beloved Gothic games are a good example of this. Clever world design and plenty of small things to do and find. For example, in a desert you may end up finding an old car, half buried in the sand with a still locked trunk. Or perhaps a few unmarked graves (did you bring your shovel?). Or, like in Fallout 3, sewage drains you can enter. There's plenty of stuff you could fill the world with that would still let that world feel barren and desolate.

 

Of course, if you just make a huge landmass with nothing in it and tell people that it's empty, then it's a waste of time. The lure is supposed to be that there may be something out there for the people who enjoy the exploration aspect of games.

 

But isn't what you are saying is: make a world just like FO3, but make it bigger by putting more empty space between the stuff. So all you are really adding is emptiness? Emtpiness that must be traversed to find the stuff?

 

If you are saying something other, I am mis-understanding it. WHich I very well migth be.

[Aristes]

If the goal of the developer is to sell games, I'd probably go with established recipe that the franchise used for commercial success. It's not like Gothic or Arcanum enjoyed the same level of sales. I also greatly enjoyed Arcanum, but you don't throw over what works for something that had tepid sales.

 

Anyhow, no one is going to complain about a tighter story or better npcs or dialogue. However, creating a huge swath with no interactables doesn't add to the game. It changes it. I could go for mkreku's non-NPC interaction idea, but there has to be SOMETHING there.