Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

XP

New Vegas is great from a lore and writing perspective but Obsidian really botches the Bethesda engine. The main joy I got from playing Fallout 3(haven't played 4) is wandering around and running into all these unscripted battles and encounters between the various factions and creatures in the waste. That's the best part of the Bethesda engine to me; It's this big fishbowl for different AI to battle it out whether the player interacts with them or not.

By contrast New Vegas is just too empty. They set up this huge faction system but they hardly ever encounter each other in the open world outside of some skirmishes between the Fiends and the NCR outside of the city. It's mostly just Cazadors and the occasional NCR patrol.

yep, the world and the population of that world were much better on 3 vs NV. and happily, 4 kills it in this category. in particular going thru boston itself it is almost unbelievable how well they have done this environment, how big a step forward it is.

that's pretty fair, when I played through I thought it was a little too event-driven and could have used some more random encounters

good old Fallout 2 would have a lot of random encounters while traveling where you'd encounter one group gunning at another

and also a few too many random encounters where you'd just run into some plants that wanted to kill you

feel like i am not quite half the way thru 4 and i have been trying to hold off on any opinionating until i have experienced most of the game but since i have started now i might as well go all in and say i think they have totally crushed it. there is very little i have come across that they haven't got right. actually, one thing that i was v positive about before but am maybe wavering on slightly - the benefit of the aforementioned waiting to give thoughts - is that the whole settlement thing is p well put together if you want it but the game lets you do as much or as little as you want without bugging you about it. however i am now getting the 'defend settlement' alerts... but, overall, i just think everything works and they have improved so much. i love it.

Disappointed by the mega dumbed down speech "trees" in F4. Feel like no matter what you say you end up in the same place. Can you even play a bad character in this? Seems like the worst you can do is be a smartass. Story is generic and rolls out awkwardly. Lots of deadly dull, paint-by-numbers quests. Have done the bare minimum with the settlement feature. Doesn't appeal to me.

Gripes out of the way, exploration is still a lot of fun and there are plenty of neat ~atmospheric~ moments. Enjoying the weapons/armor modding too, even if it's pretty clunky.

I am like 25 hours in fwiw.

I only play about an hour a day but I like how every time I do, I come across something I've never seen before.

Ran into some Sons of Adam last night - holy crap

Glad to hear 4 kills it in the wandering/unscripted encounter category. I guess I will blowing money on a next gen console as soon I figure out how to play this without being a bad parent.

On the accent though... I gotta ask: how the fuck do people have asian/southern/french/English accents in a world where presumably continental air travel has been grounded for 200 years and the only people to talk to are local?

haven't played FO4 yet, but when groups divide and then isolate, accents based on their commonalities will pop up or reappear. really doubt it explains anything, but maybe social/ethnic groups became more insular (especially within vaults) and their accents became more pronounced?

the question just makes me ponder the English accent of Shakespeare's time and how it sounds to our ears like a weird mash of North American standard and.. Scottish or something?

they talk to a microcommunity of ~6 people? xp

Thing is, I'm asking this based on people with different accents all hanging out in the same city (diamond). Nine of them should have been in vaults, none of them appear to be isolated from anyone else... I appreciate that you guys both tried to give me a good explanation tho :)

maybe it's an affectation, like wearing a fedora and saying "m'lady"

i mean in guess in games design terms the answer is 'well, ethnic communities in the US in some cases preserve vocal traits over two centuries in a situation where they are x thousand people in a community of y hundred thousand people -- and the x people in y hundred people in this game who have these vocal traits are an abstraction of the x thousand in y hundred thousand'?

diamond city is kinda meh as a city but it's def better than vegas in NV. what are the the best video game cities? like ones that really feel huge and bustling and alive? it seems like a really tricky thing to pull off.

that's the sort of question they ask on the insert credit dot com podcast to be followed by six minutes of 'yeah, uh ... that's a real dang tough one'

the megatraveller games (and, i'm sure, various others of a similar level of technical development) had some cities in which a lot of people walked around and paid no attention if you got shot to death in the midst of several blocks of urban development, which i think is probably nearer the feeling of being in a 'huge, bustling, alive' city than games which try to actually make you give a shit

Vice City

baldur's gate not bad.

the x people in y hundred people in this game who have these vocal traits are an abstraction of the x thousand in y hundred thousand'?

this kind of thinking habitual for me w bethesda games--what you see on the screen w the towns and people is like shorthand for what is "actually" "there". as the games have gotten more and more granular in their simulation of miscellaneous inanimate objects the dissonance here has spiked.

even new vegas wasn't as ludicrously barren as vivec. megaton felt pretty good because it was dense and did not actually seem intended to have a population upwards of like 50.

better than diamond city in f4 is the ruins of boston in general btw, which people are right to praise. lots of multi-level buildings, buildings half-converted into raider forts, buildings where you can exit via a bombed-out fourth-story wall a short jump from a collapsed overpass, that kind of thing. totally depopulated of course, but plausibly. and actually the juxtaposition between the towering cyclopean sprawl of empty boston and the modest dinkiness of diamond city is thematically relevant or whatever. talking to people and following quests very rarely "feels like fallout" to me in this game but walking around sure does.

i've been thinking about megaton the past couple days--it's kind of the that-picture-of-kids-fighting zombies of things that made it into actual videogames

i haven't been southeast of diamond city yet - are there more ruins there? i've mainly been doing side quests and settlement building and general raoming on the north side of the map, so i feel like i haven't really explored boston proper yet.

I still think Sleeping Dogs is one of the best representations of a city as space and as community I've ever seen, however biased by crime films it may be. Every GTA game ironically misses the mark on this. I'm sure if I think about it I'll think of another couple of good cities in games.

Actually GTA:SA was also a good city space because it was revealed in such an autobiographical way. Like you owned your own memories of the space because the story drove you through its parts so well. I can still remember the 2-3 blocks around the Grove Street neighbourhood when I close my eyes. Obviously I can't do that with the wohle game but you don't "live" anywhere else in that world. Can't say the same for 3, VC, 4 or 5 though.

I don't necessarily think the Los Santos GTA V is the best from an interactive standpoint, but they got the feel of LA down pretty well I thought. By contrast, Liberty City of IV had a real bad uncanny valley thing going on, plus their version of Brooklyn was like five blocks.

Does Bully's town count as a city

I dunno if interactivity is necessarily vital to making a city feel like a real space—after all, how much of your own city is interactive to you?—so the examples I gave (Sleeping Dogs, GTA: SA) have a lot of spaces you can't really interact with. However, the layouts, the ambient life, the aesthetic details separating neighbourhoods... they felt real. As in, they felt lived in. Too often virtual city planners go too far in making a neighbourhood "poor." I was trying to explain to someone recently that the best way to make a neighbourhood appear poor is to look at a real one. What do you see: is it all strip clubs, trap houses, and gun shops? No, it's churches, and clothing stores "for him and her", and sketchy pizza joints, and immigrant community centres. Things that would be displaced in a more up-and-coming neighbourhood still exist in these places. But instead we get these cartoon representations that "signify" poor instead of being believable, because that's what gets past the test in a boardroom. "Make it sketchy. There. It's poor now."

I realize that this is a bigger conversation that has little to do with Fallout 4 (um the typical city model doesn't really apply to alt-history-post-post-apocalypse-50s-atomic-wasteland) so maybe I should break it off into its own conversation (haha guess who went to school for urban planning and wrote a paper or two on representations of cities in virtual spaces).

xp Bully is actually one of my favourite examples of a memorable, livable space that tells its own story! thank you for reminding me of that one.

ctrl+F "shenmue"

Still haven't played it. :(

I keep thinking of examples like GTA: SA and how you can go to the fast food shops and to the different stores and the game's story even involves a few missions where you are helping out someone that works at a fast food joint so you are picking them up. That game did a really good job of using gameplay to flesh out the city.

It's really only a few major meetings w city NPCs against a field of digital trickery and randomized crowd noise. So what makes a video game city? Is it all about the illusion? Or it is important to have as many unique interactions as possible? A real city has a lot of people that you will never interact with. Skyrim had some cool cities where almost everyone in them had routines and names and unique dialog. Except the guards (Arrow in the knee lol).

Shenmue is almost a city where you can only ask one question a day and it has to be the same question to everyone

Just realized that with a yellow fedora and a yellow trench coat and wrist-mounted electronics, you can run around cosplaying Dick Tracy

animal crossing is prob the right answer here

I own Shenmue and never really delved into it deeply, I did watch a friend play my copy and he was mystified

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/00/d3/38/00d3387814cfad6e8fd9fe2245d10238.gif

L-R: Nick Valentine, kingfish's player character

I thought about that, but there's no yellow tie and the hat is wrong. And the gender.

bully is the best gta game

like all the ambition in the main series is cool but when they constrain themselves to working on small-town scale you realize they were kind of on small-town scale all along

Have you found Cheers yet?

― Drop soap, not bombs (Ste), Monday, November 30, 2015 4:51 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not yet. There's plenty of the city I haven't been thru yet.

― Professor Goodfeels (kingfish), Monday, November 30, 2015 8:18 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cheers doesn't pop up as a location, you kinda have to know where to look. plus you have to go down the stairs so you can't even see that it's a door from ground level

― nerd shit (Will M.), Monday, November 30, 2015 8:20 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

came across this today! it kind of made me sad inside.

inside cheers, i mean.

Hey guys I've heard there's a ghoul problem at Abernathy Farm. For the nth time.

have you heard about that farm run by ghouls?

isn't that somethin?

does ignoring those missions until they fail actually have much of an effect? i've failed a few but it's not made much of a difference afaict

preston garvey is definitely the roman bellic of this game - an annoying prick who keeps bugging you with the same lines of dialogue over and over and over

bully is the best gta game

truthbomb

i need to play bully again bc in my memory i 100% agree w/ that truthbomb

i really haven't played f4 for a few days. the sick need ot keep going is kinda fading. i might be able to jump on the main quest and actually beat the game and get it out of my BRAIN soon enough.

i bought bully's "championship edition" on sale on steam the other day but the pc version seems to be really ugly? maybe this is improvable; i didn't try very hard. the soft edges of the ps2 version's cartoon town--changing w the seasons!--make for my favorite ps2 environment, i think it is prettier than shadow of the colossus. (nb i also think the big shell is really pretty.) i have heard though that the wii version is the ideal. anyway yes that game is just right.

i really haven't played f4 for a few days. the sick need ot keep going is kinda fading.

it's weirdly hard for me to click on f4. i bring up the launcher and then i check ilx a while, and then half the time i go to bed. but i play nothing else. "followed the freedom trail" last night; that was very cool actually. a puzzle! the solution was not "shoot it"!