Agreed. I liked the old Fallout games but they never had the sheer number of hours that I put into Fallout 3.

Dude, in Fallout EVERYTHING is desert, because the erath was whipped clean by radiation. Fallout was supposed to be "empty", because it is a post APOCALYPTIC game.

Everything in a game is an illusion. Also copy paste procedure dosn't make content rich, only details and ideas make the difference.

It is the bottom line, and well put. FO1 and 2 creators went out of business, and part of them used Beth for NV. Thus, the clashing going on versus the true FO fans of old versus the "new", sort of speak.

It is fair to mention that Interplay canceled any Fallout Sequel in favor of quick console releases. So it really was not so much a decision of the Fallout 1 and 2 creators. They have been probably more disappointed than anyone else that any work on a Fallout sequel was in limbo. Many of the original Fallout developers still make the games they want today - and quite successfully to say that, as seen with Obsidian and inxile. Does it really matter so much if one company is making their work possible trough kick starter and the other is selling it to 15 million people? I mean that's just my opinion but I always thought one of the great things about video gaming was the diversity, be it with the PC or the consoles.

People should also not forget that even Bethesda went trough the one or other financial trouble in their history as well which they overcome trough the support of their parent company Zenimaxx. There are also a vocal group of old-time Elder Scroll fans which had to go trough quite a lot of changes as well, from the Arena/Dagerfall games up to Morrowind and later Oblivion/Skyrim. Each of those games marked different stages with different people in charge. Reading a bit about the history of how Morrowind came to life is ... interesting to say the least.

That has nothing to do with it ~and isn't strictly accurate.

Also: The project leads left Interplay to form their own company while Fallout 2 was in early development. Interplay later went down the tubes due to mismanagement. It laid off the RPG devision, and some of them went off to form Obsidian.

I'd rather not play a hiking simulator if it's all the same to everyone.

It may not be "strictly accurate" but I hit the bulls-eye. FO4 has arguments on both sides, thus the clashing going on. Am I wrong?

Actually 5 meters is more like 16 feet, to you US-customary challenged non-Yanks

...you can climb that mountain?

I'd prefer a dedicated hiking simulator. I'm really hyped for EA Trails 2016

In Skyrim it always felt a bit odd that locations were so close to each other. Most of the time you could pick a direction from a dungeon and run into another camp or dungeon or something within 1 or 2 minutes of running. You're telling me that that bandit camp so close to the town hasn't been found by someone and wiped out by the guard yet?

It has been stated that FO4's world is bigger than Skyrim, I hope they stretched locations out a bit as a result.

Which is good - normally I am critical of the directions game makers take their games, too - but you have to remember that Fallout 3 played in the city limits of Washington DC (so why should there be a damned desert without buildings etc. within a city?) and Fallout: New Vegas did have lots of deserted parts (which were frankly speaking: quite boring -.-)

I am glad that with Boston we are back in a city (I hope that there are only a few boring, deserted corners!)

greetings LAX

ps: Don't use Bioware's Dragon Age: Inquisition as an example, please...that game was not well done (DA:O is so much better -.-)

Hate to say it but some people need to put the rose tinted glasses away, this happens with a lot of franchises. It gets to nostalgic, even if the game wasn't great by any stretch. It was the 1st etc.

Questing will always be what it is, go get this,kill him/her, go retrieve xyz.

A lot of times we remember things way better then what they were and that seems to happen way to often with a certain group of FO players.

That is not to say the originals do not, or have not earned their place as some of the greats in RPG history, but the times have changed. Bethesda chose to apply the approach to Fallout that made their Elder Scrolls series so popular, and you know what? Back in the day I'm sure there were many Fallout fans who said to themselves "Man, imagine if instead of up here, it was first person, like Daggerfall or Thief."...trying to be era specific there.

No series remains completely the same forever...

Exceptions to this rule are sports franchise games...and the much vilified Call of Duty series. If you have played one, you can, in fact, played them all.

My only real complaint about the density is the scaling. I would love to have seen Boston at a 1:1 scale. Other than that, I have been wanting a large city in a BGS game for a while. Those small towns of Whiterun, Windhelm, Solitude, Markarth, and Riften were simply not big enough for me to ever feel comfortable playing as a thief. This looks like a city that I want to explore. Maybe there will be more generic NPCs so that I would have less qualms about pick pocketing. In Skyrim Nazeem was a go to, as was Maven Black-Briar in Riften, but I wanted it to feel more crowded. More anonymous. Hopefully there is a bit of that for Boston.

If you want an adequate Thief experience, I recommend the recent Thief game. It's not crowded, but it does a way better job at giving you the burglar experience than anything Bethesda has done yet.

Sorry, Beth, but it's true. But then again, Thief was all about being a Thief. Skyrim was about giving the player the option to be a lot of things with no dedication to just one in their design plan.

Played every Thief game since the first one. One of the reasons I want real cities in BGS games.

I agree. I know some people get annoyed at comparing to other games...But look at things like the Assassins Creed games. Massive cities, full of people. Grand Theft Auto...full of people, massive cities. Red Dead Redemption...smaller towns, full of people...

But, those games are different. They don't have other things hogging up the coding and working the engine...

Well, the technology can only improve.

Morrowind had a lot more people in towns...but Morrowind had static routines, very little dialogue, and no radiant AI dictating their movement. An NPC walking around was simply following a patrol command. Everyone remained at their station unless killed or otherwise influenced.

That doesn't happen to any Fallout players that I know... Most have the game installed, and probably played it recently.

*The problem comes of simplified premise. FO3 (and probably FO4) is a sandbox simulation of a patch of land in an interpretation the Fallout setting.

It's mainly concerned with shooting stuff and wandering the sandbox. That's what its audience wants; that's what they pay for. That's not something I can imagine anyone played the Fallout series for originally. Fallout was about exploring ethics in the the post apocalyptic setting. No games are about ethics anymore, least of all* FO3; unless one means the lack there of. One need only look at the first major encounter... Megaton. FO3 encourages the 'do-whatever' mentality. Fallout allowed that too, but it then ensured that the PC [and player] had to live with the consequences of those choices. Unlike FO3, Fallout did not forget in a few days ~or a few years.

*(Manhunt, Hatred, and some others have since come to mind that are worse.)

One thing every Fallout title had before FO3, was a vast area of separation between settlements, and FO3 [we know] did not have that... Everything was cramped into to a postage stamp size area on the map. Everyplace in Fallout or Fallout 2 was far enough away from every place else, that they could be plausibly ~and significantly different. This is the opposite, and gets silly in FO3. Like with the mutants and Little Lamplight being next to each other; where as in Fallout 2, Broken Hills was a fair distance from any neighboring town, and was unique in the game, for its supermutant citizenry.

A certain breed of them play them a lot, if not recently. Another certain breed hasn't played another game since 2001

I think you will find that the appreciation for Fallout is not so much the lore and setting ~though it is, but the priorities and gaming premise; what it supports, and what it accounts... That is the key to the fanbase I would think. FO3 could have been ~visually just as it is, and I bet most would have been fine with it, had it but simply stuck to the core values of the series, and held a high opinion/expectation of the player base. I can say that Arcanum was effectively the next great Fallout game ~in that respect; and that FO3 simply dressed up TES and its gaming philosophy as a sequel, and that 's why it was offensive. It was like watching one's child be born with missing fingers... and wanting it not to have been that way, because it shouldn't have been that way.

*That's my game-play aside opinion of it.

Of the landscape ~specific, I can say that in the series the wasteland was previously an area beyond the control of mankind, largely unexplored; and a hardship to cross... and I think we can all agree that in FO3 (and probably FO4) that it wasn't [and won't be] the case, as it is utterly implausible that the surrounding lands would be unknown in so small an area, and one settled for so long. The Wasteland loses all of its mystery and fearful reputation when its reduced to a city-park.

Before Fallout most RPGs were first-person: Wizardry, Might & Magic, Betrayal at Krondor, Daggerfall, Lands of Lore. Fallout could have been a first person game much in the same way X Com 2 or Wasteland 2 could have been, but it was not because of a design decision to make the combat turn based and tactical.

Well I for one would like to see better combat, there's nothing wrong with taking cues from Halo and Call of Duty in this department because they do it well, Fallout 3/NV did not.

The game should strive to be an RPG, but I can see how tricky it might be to make it so when in the game is set in the first person and you use guns for the most part.


My thing is you have to conpromises to ensure playability. This might be one of the major differences between first person and top down games. turn based tactical games work better in an an ISO map and first is better played real time.

There were many games that were not first person before Fallout, I know because I played them all!

Wasteland. the Ultima series, Phantasie series, Questron 1&2, Wizards Crown & Eternal Dagger, Shard of Spring & Demon's Winter, Breach 1 & 2 and Paladin 2, Magic Candle Series etc. The combat in the Gold Box games of AD & D counts as well.

There was a pretty good balance between 1st and 3rd person games before and after Fallout made the scene.