Fallout 4?

[henke]

Yeah there's also a bit of framerate drop on the PS4 when looking through scopes outside. Um, not much I can do about that in the options I'm afraid. I suppose I can always just cry about it. It'll be harder to see the stuttering THROUGH MY TEARS!

[Jason Moyer]

Weirdly I never ever get framerate drops outside, but I've had a few on occasion inside when there was lots of dynamic lighting action going on.

While I'm thinking about it, here's a great article about Bethesda's studio culture and the tradeoff between making games with the scope that they do vs the lack of polish: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/fallout-4-bugs/

I keep seeing people comparing FO4 to the Witcher 3, and aside from W3 having 2.5 times as many people working on it, it also doesn't allow nearly the player freedom that the newer Bethesda games do. W3 is an action RPG in an open world; Bethesda used to make those (see TES 1-3) but have moved on to making worlds with some RPG bits thrown in there. And unlike other open world games, I can actually put a pile of time into a Bethsoft game (or Fallout NV) without being bored out of my mind.

[Ostriig]

I get that people would want to assess one against the other, looking at The Witcher 3 as something between Fallout 4 and, say, Dragon Age: Inquisition, in terms of mechanical structure, but I'd argue that CDPR's game would rather sit somewhere in between DA:I and GTA V in most respects. Broadly, they're open-world RPGs, but The Witcher 3 has less in common with Fallout 4 or Skyrim than it does with those other two titles.

That's more my speed, to be frank, I got more satisfaction from TW3 at the same early mileage than from FO4 - which I am overall loving so far, flaws notwithstanding - but it's not a simple comparison.

[Nameless Voice]

Hmm, interesting article.

I'm not sure I fully agree with it, though.
The problem with Bethesda's games isn't their bugs or their lack of polish in edge areas.
It's more the lack of polish in core game areas, a lack of cohesion in game systems, and just terrible, terrible writing.

I think a big part of it is isn't that they don't have enough people to polish, but that they don't give the people that they do have enough time to polish. I'm sure the developers would have liked to fix some of the nastier and more obvious issues, but their games tend to feel rushed, like the developers weren't given enough time to fix things properly.

Having a team of individuals with little oversight is great in terms of designing areas in the world, making quests, and so on; but not having oversight in world theme is a bad idea, especially in something with an already-established setting. That's probably a large part of why the Bethesda's Fallout games have jarringly unrealistic game worlds that don't "fit" with Fallout lore - the designers just built what they felt like, with no oversight to make sure what they built actually fit the world.

As for writing - I don't think there's much that they can do to improve that other than hiring more full-time writers. The current formula simply isn't working there.

[Phatose]

Is there any way to get a proper reflex sight on a pipe rifle, instead of the ridiculous 2 screws and a ring one they call reflex? I've got loads of .38 ammo which I'd prefer to use first, but the sights on that thing suck, and the .38 conversion for combat rifles requires gun nut 4 - which you can't even get til level 38, by which point I don't expect to need it.

[Judith]

I agree with NV here on the article: thinking like that just makes Bethesda have their own category of a game, where they always win. In the end, the audience doesn't care how big the team was. It's the final results that matter most, as in other media. Nobody cares how many people will mix your debut album, as long as it's good. Bethsoft staff kind of lives in their own world, where they slowly work on what they have, but you can't just ignore what other people in your industry are doing. And they're doing much better job.

By the way, Emil Pagiarulo is the their lead writer since Fallout 3, and he's an ex-LGS employee. I wonder how the things would turn out if they had Jordan Thomas instead.

[Nameless Voice]

Something else: RPGs are always buggy. They are massively complex games with tons of possibilities, no one can have tested them all. I don't think I've ever played one that didn't have at least a few bugs.

But you know who else had a small team? The original Fallout team, yet their game was much more polished in terms of writing, setting, coherence, gameplay, balance.
On the one hand, I'm tempted to say "okay, they didn't need to spend as much on graphics in those days", but... I'm not even sure. Making all those sprites must have been a huge amount of work, just a different skill set. Plus, we didn't have as good tools back then.

What about Larian? Divinity: Original Sin feels more polished than Bethesda's games despite being from a very small company (I'm seeing an employee count of 40 for Larian, though that figure may be outdated.)

[faetal]

I'm not sure it's possible to make something with as many variables as a Bethesda game and not have a fuck load of bugs.

[Judith]

Bugs don't bother me that much, it's a big virtual world to explore. But, low quality of writing, go-fetch-kill quests, and some, almost random changes to UI and controls... All of it sends a clear message: we're not sure of what we're doing, we just build huge beautiful worlds, and put a lot of stuff there, hoping for the best.

[Ostriig]

I've yet to see much that I'd file under bugs, to be honest. Bugs are development errors that result in unintended behaviours, my bellyaching's been with stuff that is working per design. So, for instance, the Lone Wanderer perk working despite having Dogmeat along or subtitles and lipsync skipping lines, those are bugs. Eh. The key binding or inventory listing, though, are down to shortcomings in interface design, and even stuff like mechanics failing on uncapped framerates I wouldn't consider a bug in the strict sense - it's poor coding practice and a surprising from an experienced developer like Bethesda, but it occurs when the game's run outside of release parameters, regardless of what we think of said parameters.

Otherwise, I gotta say the game seems fairly solid technically, I haven't had any crashes nor have I run into a heap of glitches so far. At least not any severe ones.

On an unrelated note - bleh, load times.

[Jason Moyer]

Yeah, this is the first game that's making me seriously consider investing in an SSD, assuming that more RAM wouldn't make the constant loading more tolerable.

[Ostriig]

Alrighty, got to play with the graphics settings. Arrived at a scene in a wooded area where I was sitting on ~45fps idle and ~30 looking through a scope.

- Disabling Vsync did nothing. Didn't even get around to forcing it through the graphics drivers, just set iPresentInterval to 0 in Fallout4prefs.ini and loaded the game, no effect whatsoever.

- Lowering or outright disabling Antialiasing or Anisotropic filtering did nothing. Nearly nothing, maybe a frame or two when setting AA to Off.

- Lowering Godrays from Ultra to High... boom! Frame counter jumped back up to the 60 cap straight away. I was taking a random stab at it there, since there were no light shafts on display at all, but yeah, that's the culprit. Guessing the game is calculating around all those trees just in case there are any godrays to render, if the weather conditions are right.

If I stumble upon a scene with clearly visible light shafts in a forest and I remember to, I'll take some screenshots to compare, right now I can't say whether there's any real difference between Godrays Ultra and High, but as it stands, if you're having trouble with your framerate, consider dropping this setting to see for yourselves.

Edit: Jason, SSDs are a beautiful upgrade in general. I've only got one for the OS, though, not sparing the space to stick games on it. Dunno whether RAM capacity would help with load times at this point, but funnily enough it appears that RAM speed has a noticeable impact on framerate - search for The importance of RAM on this page.

[Nameless Voice]

I've yet to see much that I'd file under bugs, to be honest. Bugs are development errors that result in unintended behaviours, my bellyaching's been with stuff that is working per design. So, for instance, the Lone Wanderer perk working despite having Dogmeat along or subtitles and lipsync skipping lines, those are bugs. Eh. The key binding or inventory listing, though, are down to shortcomings in interface design, and even stuff like mechanics failing on uncapped framerates I wouldn't consider a bug in the strict sense - it's poor coding practice and a surprising from an experienced developer like Bethesda, but it occurs when the game's run outside of release parameters, regardless of what we think of said parameters.

Yup.
I've seen plenty of minor bugs that make the game look unpolished, but nothing really significant. Things like NPCs sitting where they shouldn't be able to, horrible AI around elevators (where they stay outside then teleport inside a moment later), buildings floating above the ground (not so much that this is possible, but that it's really hard not to do it when building your own), some corrupted scope graphics, a few other minor oddities.
Sometimes the bugs show up all the time - which kind of makes me wonder why they didn't fix something that was so prominent - but they're not game-breakers.

The flaws in the game are all design problems, shortcomings, things that weren't thought out properly, or just a lack of consistency and coherence in the systems.


Lone Wanderer works with Dogmeat? I was wondering if it applied to him or only to the human companions.



Load times? I haven't noticed any. It loads almost instantly after the initial load. My computer is slightly dated, but has 16GB.
I do have it installed on an SSD, though. Those are one of the best inventions in the last few years, everyone should get one.
The larger ones have become much cheaper lately.

[Jason Moyer]

The only real notable glitchy things I've found are the load times being incredibly long even though my hard drive activity is sporadic rather than steady during most loads/transitions, a single item from a completed quest (Trish's Note, don't think that's really spoilery) that I can't drop (compare that to the dozens of items in Oblivion or FO3 that become stuck in your inventory without the unofficial patches), and a couple radiant Minutemen quests that became uncompletable but for some reason suddenly disappeared from my journal (think it was when I advanced the main questline further). Oh, and the system for fast-switching weapons seems to break pretty easily. I've had situations where I put my gun away and pulled out an invisible one, but mostly it will take like 15-20 seconds to pull the new gun out which isn't really convenient when I'm trying to swap from a .50 cal sniper to a combat shotty.

[Nameless Voice]

Ah yeah, that weapon swap bug is really annoying.
Luckily, combat is pretty easy so you can usually survive 15 seconds of waving your empty hands around while it fixes itself.

I couldn't think of it when making the previous post, but that's one of those frequent bugs that make me wonder how they managed to not fix that before shipping, since it's pretty prominent, fairly frequent, and interferes with gameplay.

[Jason Moyer]

Welp, I've hit the point in the main quest that actively pisses me off. There are parts of it that initially make no sense that are hand-waved away on a terminal. If you know what I mean then keep reading (trust me, the part I'm talking about is ridiculously obvious and fairly late into the MQ).

So on Shaun's terminal they hand-waved away all of the obvious inconsistencies with Shaun's age and why Kellogg still looks young (he's a cyborg) and how Valentine and people in Diamond City remember Shaun (it was synth-Shaun). But the thing that really bothers me is this: If Kellogg knows who you are, knows you're looking for your son and WORKS FOR YOUR SON, why in god's name does he try to kill you instead of taking you to him? Kellogg's motivation in that quest makes no fucking sense whatsoever. And I don't see how the hell they can hand-wave that away.

[Judith]

It only gets worse. I finished the main quest today, and it was awful. When you enter this world, they do everything to make you the boss of every faction, the easiest way possible – it's pathetic. But towards the end, when all the things escalate, you can do nothing but participate in a giant slaughter of all but one faction. I maxed out my charisma, because at some point I believed a peaceful solution is possible, there was really no need for all this.

But I don't know what I expected from the devs, at this point Bethesda is so obsessed with single 'iconic' elements that were Fallout, they can't even use the phrase 'war never changes' in a sentence without sounding ridiculous.

Btw. "I'm Commander Shepard, and The Institute is the worst Citadel rip-off ever." And it looks abysmal in terms of visuals.

[Ostriig]

- Patch coming in the near future, will address the Activate/E mapping for quick loot;

- Only got to try this once, but there's some sort of first person cover mechanism working as a stand-in for leaning. Snuck up to a wall right beside an open door and went to look down the iron sights, camera automatically moved into the open doorway. Seemed good.

- Crafting's cool, quite the timesink. I like the settlement building, I like the weapons and armour modding and the tactical implications there, it's not a plain "make stuff better" button like in Skyrim. Downside is that it's dialled the inventory micromanagement up.

[henke]

While playing FO4 i've been thinking that, for the next game, I'd love to see jetpacks introduced, to add some verticality. Just now, while lazily scrolling through the buildable mods for the power suit, what do I find at the very bottom of the list? Jet pack! It's possible to add jet pack functionaily to the suit! It needs rank 4 Armorer and Science skills tho, and I have rank 1 in both of these. So far I've been sorta haphazardly adding points to whatever sounded good at the time, but now I've found something to actually work towards.

[henke]

Has anyone finished this yet? The main story line that is. Do the credits ever roll?

I headed to the Institute tonight, expecting the finale to be imminent, but instead the game just goes on and it seems I'll have to do some morally dubious stuff to keep the story going.

[Pyrian]

...it seems I'll have to do some morally dubious stuff to keep the story going.

I hate that sort of thing. "Be a jerk or... The storyline just freezes, as if the whole world were suddenly permanently encased in status quo." I'd even prefer the storyline where trying to do the right thing backfires than that. Nothing dissociates me from the protagonist I'm playing like being railroaded into doing something I'd rather not do, but do anyway just to keep the game going. (Far Cry 2, I'm looking at you, lol.)

[Jason Moyer]

Yeah, there's a point where the credits roll, although after the amazing slideshows from New Vegas it's disappointing as hell.

[Judith]

Yup, the main quest is really awful. The whole game is really, really outdated in almost all departments. And no, distracting players with crafting and base-building won't do.

Sadly, the ecstatic reviews on major gaming sites actually confirmed that mindless drones at Bethesda's F4 reveal conference were actually, uh, game journalists.

[Nameless Voice]

I'm still torn on the game, to be honest.

It's actually enjoyable to just wander around exploring old ruins, because they have a lot of detail and atmosphere, and aren't feeling too repetitive / copy-pasted yet.
It does a good job as a nuclear wasteland looting simulator, and I spend most of my game time wandering around and collecting all the tin cans, brooms and pipe pistols in ruined buildings.
But all over the place there are little jarring things, like people living in a mostly untouched ruin, where pre-war items haven't been looted and the skeletons of people who died in the war are still lying whereever they fell. There are even worse extremes, such as a ghoul who has been living somewhere for 200 years, but hasn't even cleaned up the bodies of his comrades who died when he became a ghoul, let alone given them a proper burial. Fresh melons on supermarket shelves. Working computers and technology everywhere even when the buildings around them are in ruins.

The story and quests are very hit-and-miss. Some parts are decently well-written or told, other parts are jarringly awful, and the same goes for quests - many of which are rather unimaginative fetch quests about foolish things that don't make sense and aren't properly thought-out. But mostly I've been too distracted by exploring and constantly being over-encumbered to pay too much attention to quests.

[henke]

Ok, so I looked at some walkthroughs for the last mission, and it says to load the Holotape on any terminal in the Institute, I've done that, and then given the tape to Sturges afterwards, but the game isn't over yet. I did do the first mission for Father tho, does that mean I can't get the regular ending and I've locked myself into a path where I have to side with the Institute?