I hope the slides aren't gone. We haven't really seen the "full" intro so everything is up in the air. The leaked casting document had the main character giving an intro - whether that comes before or after entering the vault is also up in the air - nonetheless the script implies that there is some form of an intro. This could essentially indicate an outro/ending slide. Fingers crossed.

I always liked the slides. They topped off everything you did in the wasteland.

If the game has no ending, then the idea of having a "game ending slideshow" is a rather ridiculous contradiction as far as I'm concerned. The only reason it would be included would be as fan service, an attempt to toss a few crumbs to the "old" Fallout fans, and everyone would know it. The "old" fans would take it as a slap in the face, while the "new" fans would rage about how it "restricts their freedom" and "destroys their immersion", and that Bethesda should just stop catering to the old school fans. It would end up satisfying no one.

If they do include the slides, I'll bet one of the very first mods that appears on the Nexus is one that disables them.

The ending slides are just icing on the cake - the cake being your actions, and the icing being Ron Perlman's sixy voice. But, I see your point. It would have been strange in New Vegas where the ending slides note the player not doing a certain quest line and having a neutral slide, and the player turns around in the metagame and goes about finishing the uncompleted quest. There's a disconnect.

Edit: Adding to this, you don't really need to encapsulate all of the possible quests and outcomes, though. The disconnect can be avoided by limiting it to the main narrative. Exactly how the FNV DLCs were handled.

Well, you can still have a "major story resolved" ending narration, without it having to be an "End". (I'm reminded somewhat of the various Borderlands DLC that, even though they're in the middle of the normal gameplay, have intro & finale narrations.)

You could have that kind of narration, but it would be interesting to see how well it would work in a Fallout game. Borderlands has an entirely different vibe to it - it's over-the-top cartoony and campy and silly, and will cheerfully, even enthusiastically, shatter the fourth wall if necessary to keep the fun going. It's a superb shooter that's not afraid to poke fun at itself.

Fallout, even though it has it's own sense of humor, takes itself quite a bit more seriously. Creating a cinematic sequence for the end of the main storyline, in a Fallout game that doesn't have a definite ending, would be a bit more challenging to pull off without the game making a parody of itself (i.e. without having the audience laugh at it instead of with it).

I wonder how the story will play out with no level cap.. Hopefully there will be some sort of system that will ramp up the difficulty in the story if you're a higher level. Some people simply run through the story.. other people do everything there is to do in the game world before they complete the story. That makes for a pretty massive level gap to have to balance.

As a person who mostly plays these games for the exploration fun.. no level cap is really great news. As someone already pointed out in a previous post, maxing out a character will still be pretty impossible. (depending on how much xp for is worth and how fast you level.) Most people will never reach a level like 300.. But it will probably allow you to max out your initial character build. It also allows you to start off the game with simply a rough idea of what you want to be and make that decision later after you've progressed a bit. No more sitting down with pen and paper and figuring out exactly what you need to accomplish to build your ideal character.

Also it wouldnt be too hard to install a mod to give you a level cap.

Sounds like a bad idea to take out the slideshows. I enjoy them way too much and I know a lot of other players do too.

You really couldn't encapsulate all possible outcomes without it devolving into a hopeless mess. One big advantage Obsidian had with the DLC for New Vegas was that they knew from the start that they would do four "major" ones, so they were able to sit down and storyboard the vanilla game and the DLC and create a nicely integrated total package. I don't think Bethesda had this luxury in that they really didn't know how many DLC they were going to release for Fallout 3 (which is completely understandable seeing that FO3 was their very first Fallout game, and they really didn't have any idea how well it was going to go over with the fans).

They don't really have that luxury in any game they make, since they don't pre-plan any DLC.

They just look at what people say they want more of, or better version of, and do that.

No, there was no feeling of anything for FONV except perhaps weariness of the boring and uninteresting setting (including both world and characters).

For FO3, everyone seems to forget that they included various things that were homages to the original games because they were relaunching the franchise (at great expense) and were trying to please both old and new players. The original ending (pre-Broken Steel) was exactly that. Kind of ironic with various people claiming that they prefer the original games.

Edit:

You don't need a game-ending cinematic or slideshow. All you need is a main quest-ending cinematic or slideshow. It's one quest of hundreds and most BGS players don't even bother with quests because they are not the point of BGS' games.

This change basically suggests that Bethesda just want to make Fallout a sandbox game for people to waste their time doing random stuff in. And even though that is what F3 is without these things implemented, this statement basically confirms that intention. It leaves me very disappointed. I want a solid story that will provide me with an epic and interesting adventure. I never played the Fallout games as a giant sandbox. Sure random exploring can be fun but it's not the focus of my game play, and never was for Fallout 3, or NV for that matter. And it seems to me that most people who want a sandbox focused game are the old Bethesda fans who play their games for this reason. Just because they made games like this in their past doesn't mean the next RPG type game they make should follow the same formula, especially when it's a well established game with a strong following.

If there is no hard level cap for F4, I hope that at least there will be a soft one at a reasonable level, and that no ending simply means it's playable after the actual main story ending.

I don't recall dying at the end of FO2.

Sweet!

I have to ask....what is so damn important about a level cap? Please be very clear in your explanation because it seems like most of you are just grasping at straws in order to stay unreasonably upset. It's gotten to the point where I'm dreading any more information released because instead of discussions about the new info I just see people being irrationally upset and complaining for the sake of complaining.

So curious why you guys are upset you can continue after the story if it has an ending. Fallout 2 allowed this so it's not a new concept to the fallout franchise. If you suddenly decide to go murder someone just because you didn't like the way the ending went then you are metagaming the story and breaking rp. It's also unlikely that anyone who would be involved in the ending could be killed anyway as beth likes to make their story npcs immortal anyway (whether or not that's a good thing is another discussion.) Beth could also make the decision to skip ahead after the main quest line like how broken steel went. It'd be nice to actually see some influence on the game world if they went that route.

That's the journey I prefer. Its enough ( and better ) to me to help or hinder smaller groups in a more personal way and my quest be more personal than world spanning. I tend to be a main quest avoider because of this. I may play dozens of characters over the life of the game but typically only do the main quest once

Which is EXACTLY the way it should be. Same for F03 and FONV and all DLC,

The key words here are immersion, sandbox, and REPLAYABILITY.....

Once you add this (and the new RTS feature), replaying the game's value will become very significant for many players who want to explore and enjoy the world in different avenues. Because you're no longer forced into replaying only the MQ.

edit: as a sandbox immersion gamer, it's like SteamTeck said: fallout is not about the destination, but the journey

It trumps my selfish desires, but not yours. Gameplay integrity should trump wanton chaos.

It shouldn't be my job to restrict myself here anymore than it would be for me to shoot badly on purpose because the character build implies a bad shot (but the mechanics don't do that). At least they should've kept some intrigue there and opened the cap after the main quest is over, when there's no real point to any of it anymore.


Sounds charming, at least.

- Play balance.... easier to have this, when the player isn't an infinitely increasing Uber Dude who can do everything, get every ability, etc.

- Having to make choices in how your character is built. When you only have X levels in which to choose perks/stats/etc, you actually have to think about how you want your character to grow. When you can just get everything...... And yes, one can delete one's character when they his Level Whatever, and thereby have a "level cap".... except that Beth games encourage hanging around & exploring longer. In the previous games, even the TES ones, I didn't have infinite levels - at some point you stopped gaining skills/levels/etc. But I still kept wandering/exploring/questing long beyond that point, because "get stronger/gain levels" isn't the primary focus of gameplay. For me, at least.

What does a level cap have to do with choosing to play or not play the MQ? Most of my playthroughs of Oblivion, Skyrim, and FO3, ignore (or mostly ignore... might sometimes advance it to unlock world events/etc) the MQ. You can do that with or without a level cap.

Personally, I think a level cap is what encourages replayability - since you can't do everything on one character, you've got more reasons to play other ones. No cap / MOAT? Less reason to replay.

Good

Fallout is an open-world game designed with the player's freedom to be who he wants and to do what he wants as the top priority. Story is important too, but it takes a back seat to player freedom. Tim Cain called Fallout a sandbox game.

It makes me glad, honestly. It always bothered me in F3 how the Enclave and the BOS ends up just sitting in front of the Rotunda for a few years waiting for me to get around to entering the front door.

The game will obviously have a Main Quest, that when you complete, the game is basically over. I know some people may want to sit around roasting marshmallows and managing some settlement, but really, that is the end of the game. I would also like to point out that after the sliders in FO2, you returned to game with your MQ completed. So, it isn't something new to us old fans and as long as there are sliders, I won't take it as a slap in the face. I think no sliders at all is a slap in the face, and just turning FO more and more into TES with guns.

What about people who aren't roleplaying as the main character but rather someone else? Meaning one's who don't intend on doing the main quest. Such a restriction would needlessly penalize them.