Environment is too dense... The latest screenshot with the dog mate... I remember way to Shady Sands took days. No such thing in F3/F4. All about dynamics, entertainment, FPS. Fallout 1/2 was the game that Bethesda was willing to buy, but now, what they sell looks like battlefield with steampunk skins. No more deserts, no more sense of danger on the way in the middle of nowhere... God, let me be mistaken, please!

Welcome to the forums. Have a fishy stick. BGS' Fallout is different from the one you remember. If you can't accept its new direction, stick with the old games.

Its kinda unfair to compare FO 1-2 setup of a overworld with map points and 4 continuous map, it be very straining, if not near impossible to make the wast distances of 1-2 done on 4 level.

Altho it IS, in fact, possible. Closest example is Dragon Age Origins and Inquisition, altho it doesn't quite do it the same...

no, I agree and understand it. Every time I see titles Fallout n+1 there's some voice of hope erupting from depths of my memories forcing me to dream about something like "maybe this time, it'll be somewhat close to what it was in the origins, with new graphics, characters, stories". Yeah, game industry has great inertia which Bethesda cannot bypass.

The game industry has nothing to do with it. BGS makes the games they've always made. You either like their game design (which they've done for 21 years) or you do not.

Old and unfortunate news; since FO3. What makes it worse is that they had actually started out with a larger world ~as they should have, but because one really needed to use the map to travel (as they should have), they cut it (probably for not being fun to walk in realtime ~as it didn't need to be of course ~because it was wasteland in between the important locations. All of the games since have been heinously compressed to a few square miles instead of the size of a US state.

Nope, compare F3 to what we see in F4 - main accent on dynamics! 100 barrel skirmish. Now don't tell me F4 isn't one step closer to dynamics of battlefield.

Probably, but OP has a point that some of the character got lost when the wasteland more or less turned into a carnival with attractions every 5 meters (that's ~10 feet for you metrically challenged yanks).

I understand this is in no small part due to technical limitations I really have no clue about and modern players somewhat lacking patience and the willingness to walk a bit (more) to go somewhere interesting, but I very much enjoyed the knowledge that in between the "attractions" there existed a hostile terrain. Mostly characterized by miles and miles of nothing (at least unless you were skilled in survival techniques) and the occasional host of hostile plant- or wildlife or one of the various shades of humanity that eked out their existence just like me - barely, dirty and probably assisted by bullets.

I don't see how making combat looking smooth and fun to use a bad thing, RPG can be smooth too.

War. War never changes. But games do.

Just wanted to point out 5 meters is actually ~16.4 feet (for all the freedom units challenged Brits out there ).

That in essence is the inertia mrmoon is talking about, the trajectory of gaming dictates that any game with any semblance of FPS mechanics must aspire to the quintessential mechanics of the most successful shooters.

People have been hankering for 'rage-like' fps controls for years, even though Fallout under BGS' dominion is (purportedly) an RPG.

Those with a cynical outlook of game development perhaps.

I don't see the problem here.

lol, and if they made it more empty? People would complain that the game wasn't dense enough. I'd rather walk through a theme park, than an empty parking lot.

This, pretty much. Open plains and fields here and there are all good and well, adds atmosphere, but don't saturate them in it.

I think it's long past the point where they could design the games to have a vast procedural landscape around dense FO3 sized settlements; (or if that's thought to be too big 1/6 the size of the FO3 map). Future DLC could be just as they already have it ~like with the Pit, though instead they could drop it down on the map as something that can be walked to in real time or via the map, or via transportation.

Fallout 1 and 2's maps worked the way they did because California and Nevada are largely empty deserts, with notable locations spread over a large area, with little to nothing of interest in between. The areas of nothing were abstracted into a map that the player walked over, instead of actually walking around all that empty nothing, because that would be beyond boring to actually have to walk all that empty desert.

The East Coast however is exists in a state polar opposite ot that of the west, where many cities are clustered into smaller areas, and landmarks have a far shorter distance between them.

Keeping the map the same as it was in games on the west coast would have been a monumental waste of location possibilities, as you wouldn't be able to squeeze even 1/10 of the national landmarks/famous districts of a place like D.C. into a map like that of shady.

They changed it because it SHOULD have been changed, as it makes no sense to keep it the same when the environment is entirely different.

Well they are doing a ruined Boston makes sense it would be dense...same with dc in fo3..I personally am very excited to see what this game has in store

It's true.

Arcanum however had the same basic system with one major change... It allowed the PC to walk wherever they wished. It's supposed to take two [real life 24 hour] days to walk coast to coast in Arcanum.
*No one is supposed to do that, but it's possible in the game.

On the East coast (In a FO5) ~one would hope the devastation is par with FO1&2, but if not, there could be countless procedural ruins, camp sites, abandoned RV parks, suburbs; industrial parks, strip malls, drive-in theaters, brick yards, water parks... stadiums... etc...
All stuff you could pass on the way ~on foot or in a vehicle; or bypass via the map-travel (unless ambushed there; and then the PC deals with the encounter at the location where it spawns).

We use feet too...

Although distances on the ground are more likely to be measured in yards.

If no one is supposed to do it, why bother making it in the first place? That's about as useful as Daggerfall's map, which was the size of Great Britain or w/e. There's no point in making a massive procedural world, when 99.99% of people are just going to skip it via fast travel.

They could fairly easily make a map with tons of randomly generated stuff, stretching from Boston, to Ronto, to The Pitt, to D.C., and all the way down south to The Broken Banks, but why bother? You would just strip each of the places that actually mattered of tons of details and world building, since all of that would be spent in dev time making the procedural world content, which only lessens the quality of each importance place, reuding what we learn about those places to the small snippits of culture and backsotry we got on Fallout 1/2/Tactics' locations.

Its literally a system of quantity > quality. Which I would hope we would have moved past already.

And even Fallout 1/2 didn't make you actually go through all that empty nothing, and let you quickly bypass the walk via a highly abstracted map travel system. I would hope that if Bethesda went to such a large covering area system, they would stick to the format the older games used, since it was done for many still valid reasons.

I really don't see any reason to do it, besides to cover more important locations in one game. But even then, those other locations would be far better off as their own games, or DLC for other games, where they can receive far greater detail and development then if they were all jammed into one game.

Glad you asked. The reason is because by designing it that way, they can call up [use] any location on the map between points A & B where a nuetral, hostile, beneficial, or special encounter is determined to occur.
Remember that Fallout generated abstract terrain for whatever was on the map when an encounter occurred. This would generate full quality locations for those encounters... Not 5 static encounter maps; with the side effect that it is all fully explorable, and doesn't have to be entirely empty. It also could contain locations that simply cannot be found except by traveling to the exact spot on the map; (which could be by chance, or by NPC information).
IE. You'd probably never find it by using map travel; as map travel implies a focused march; though IMO Stat checks should give the chance of noticing it from the map screen, if close enough.

And, as has been covered in several other threads, thats already covered by the random encouter system, and via walking around the game world on foot normally.

You can keep trying to side step the fact that Fo3/NV's fast travel =/= Fo1/2's map travel, and that Fo1/2's map travel = Fo3/NV's walking around the game world normally on foot, since that is what map travel was an abstraction of, but that doesn't change the fact that what you keep asking for is already in the game.

That is already doable in-game. skyrim has systems that prevent back entrances to locations form spawning until you reach the end of the dungeon, so you cant just cheat your way through meta-knowledge.

They could easily make a main entrance simply not spawn until an NPC tells you about it.