i want new york!

I would like to see more depth in civilized locations.

- more quest givers and multi-layers - hopefully some that are political and involve 3 or 4 way power struggles in the town/city

When I first saw Megaton in FO3 I could barely contain my glee at seeing a Church of the Atom, a sherriff, a saloon etc. .... only to be sadly (SADLY ) disappointed by the shallowness of the locations. I mean, you couldn't even set Gob free!

I'm hoping FO4 will also have more factions with quest givers - it was a shame that the Talon Company, Riley's Rangers, Tenpenny, BoS, Outcasts, Enclave had diddly to do overall. I mean, I went to all that trouble to rescue the Rangers and then realized I would never need to visit their base again..... sigh.

I would like to see quests that involve sneaking and planting evidence and stealing and using speechcraft to actually make speeches that sway events.....

Most of the locations in FO3 felt so shallow for how awesome they looked. I approached Tenpenny Tower thinking I was about to entire a bastion of evil (same with Paradise Falls) that would give me many avenues of wreaking havoc on the wastelands... nope, one quest at each. Sigh.

So, my two cents. I'd be happy with a FO4 the same size in terms of world space but with much more politics and factional rivalry and gameworld changes based on your actions.

I also like Vainglorious' desire for new factions, creatures that add to the Fallout universe.

J

Not so much 'combat optional', but missions where the task is still completable by your less than ideal build (either using combat, stealth, diplomacy, or deception). Personally I (for some reason) dislike games where you have several (even many) choices but the game couldn't 'care' less which one you take. However, a game that supports an intellectual solution (from PC's with the right stats), and also offers other solutions (combat, stealth, etc...) would be very interesting.

The ideal game might have a "favored" path for the quest, but would rarely block a PC outright from tackling any of them. *In this way you might have a brawler with poor stealth that could complete the "thief quest" with inelegant brute force ~disappointing to the NPC perhaps, but they'll have their mcGuffin. The Loxely Quest in FO1 comes to mind tho', where he asks you to steal a thing, but without killing the owner. I'd like a game that made conditions like this rather tricky without the proper skills ~but still possible to achieve.

Perhaps a Quest mechanism that acknowledges success, but also acknowledges finesse and "extra credit" if applicable. ~Giving additional XP's (or bonus items/ even favors) to the thief that left no trace, no bodies, and sounded no alarms ~Yet made off with the prize (or even planted misleading evidence at the scene) ~ as opposed to just getting the object and making it back alive (which even non-thief PC's could reasonably accomplish).

*The above mechanism would apply to all builds of course; and be just as acknowledging with a diplomat, or a brute (just in different ways).

That's not exactly what I meant ? I want the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave (and perhaps the Super Mutants) out of the picture entirely. They've already been done; we know their origins, we know what they're about, and we know what their general goals are.

In Fallout (the original), the player did not know anything about Super Mutants when they were first encountered. You had to unravel the mystery as you played the game, which culminated in confronting the Master and learning the truth behind everything... the vats of goo et al.

In Fallout 2, the player had no idea what to expect in that first random encounter with Frank Horrigan and Enclave soldiers. They were mysterious, they basically told you to piss off, and you had no idea where they were from, how they were organized, where they got their technology, or what their goals were. Discovering this later on in the game was exciting. The Brotherhood of Steel is similar in that regard.

So fast-forward to Fallout 3, where the entire plot is based around the Brotherhood of Steel, the Enclave, and (to a lesser degree) Super Mutants. We're rehashing old territory at this point (twice over, in the case of Super Mutants). The details of the plot may be different, but experienced players know perfectly well what all of these factions are about.

Now, ghouls are a staple, part of the environment, and it's fine to leave Super Mutants in the game as adversaries (though not as part of the main plot, preferably). But the Fallout franchise doesn't work like the Elder Scrolls series. You can't use exactly the same factions, races, and whatnot in every single installment with only minor variations, and expect actual Fallout fans to remain interested.

My two cents anyway.

FO3 is not even a year out and already Bethesda churned out two DLCs with a new setting & factions (and with a third coming). There's no reason to believe FO4 will be more of the same as FO3, especially with the various hints at the Commonwealth, both in the actual game & DLC.

It's best to think of Fallout 3 and future games as a new series, inspired by the old games. They will never be the same, they are made by much different developers in a much different time, but taken on its own, Fallout 3 is a masterpiece of exploration action-RPG gameplay.



Think of Fallout 3 as a reintroduction... they were bringing back a decade old series and introducing it to a new audience... considering the sales figures, I would bet 80% or more of Fallout 3 players are new to the series. Bethesda, smartly in my opinion, decided that to bring back the Fallout series they should sort of bring everything together that defined it, factions wise, and show off what it had done. They even had rather good cannon explanations for this, if just a little silly to have all happened at once.

I too worry the Enclave will be used as series villains, or the BoS will be a consistent part of the storyline (this one is more likely in my opinion). I really think though we can be reasonably optimistic that this won't be the case, because I think the reintroduction of these elements was the main reason behind their inclusion. If you look at the DLC, it already introduces some new ideas and new enemies, some of them extremely unique and more in line with what I would like to see in future games, like Point Lookouts "blank in a jar" confrontation. Others are a twist on the old ideas, like a BoS soldier gone rogue...

If The Elder Scrolls are anything to go by, I bet we get new ideas and new enemies amidst a world with some semblance of repetition. The Daedra are always around in TES games, but are only the focus as an enemy in Oblivion. I expect much the same in Fallout... the BoS espexially will probably always be used, but not with the focus Fallout 3 put on them.

Yes, to be fair, I freely admit that since 80% of the target audience didn't grow up with the original games, rehashing the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave wasn't a bad move per se. I do wish Bethesda hadn't bastardized the Brotherhood of Steel and turned them into a post-apocalyptic Knights of the Nine, though. If you're going to reintroduce something, you should do it properly. I know bashing the "splinter group" nature of the Brotherhood in Fallout 3 is becoming a theme with old fans like me, but we old fans really, very sincerely don't want to see the Brotherhood turned into a "knights in shining armor, honorably ridding the wasteland of the forces of evil" sort of organization.

The portrayal of the Enclave, however, was acceptable in Fallout 3, so there's that.



Yes, well, what happened between Morrowind and Oblivion with factions was that we traded these:

House Telvanni, House Redoran, House Hlaalu, the Morag Tong, the Ashlanders, the Imperial Legion, the Imperial Cult, the Quarra, Berne and Aundae clans, the Tribunal Temple, and the East Empire Company (all join-able factions with related quests and NPCs)

...for these:

The Dark Brotherhood, The Blades, Knights of the Nine, and The Nine Divines (there are other join-able factions, but they're all either 100% honorary fluff titles or you "join" as an infiltrator during the main quest)

Oh yeah, and by the way, the Dark Brotherhood actually did exist in Morrowind. So did The Emperor's Blades. This doesn't even take into consideration Oblivion's grand journey down the road to generic-ness and extreme consolitis. So for me, the trends set by Elder Scrolls sequels doesn't bode particularly well for Fallout 4.

Well I was speaking more in broad story terms... I agree Oblivion was dumbed down for mass consumption (I don't agree with calling it consolitis, since it is more an effort to get more people to play, regardless of system, and if gaming was only on PC the same thing would have happened). I think Fallout 3 shows an effort to go back the other direction at least in part, as it is much deeper and more intelligent than Oblivion was in many respects. Bethesda seems to be trying to find a happy medium between Daggerfall's niche-oriented complexity and Oblivion's simplified generic tendencies.

I agree that Fallout 3 is a far better game in its vanilla state than Oblivion, and shows that Bethesda has "learned its lesson" in some respects. I enjoyed Fallout 3, whereas I detested Oblivion until some major modding efforts made it worth playing.

I do think both Oblivion and Fallout 3 suffered from consolitis, though. There was an Xbox version of Morrowind that was very playable and popular, yet the game's UI and control scheme on the PC didn't seem to suffer from this. Oblivion's did, however. The level of difficulty, too, was toned way down in Oblivion. Check out the Morrowind forums, where new Morrowind players who've only ever played Oblivion before bemoan the fact that they keep dying, and can't understand why.

I just hope Bethesda reverses the trend and moves back to unique, colorful, highly detailed story lines with original themes and ideas, and resists the urge to dumb down future games while also making them incredibly easy.

THE COMMONWEALTH!!!!

I want to visit MIT. They could even throw in some references to The Scout from TF2, since he's a Bostonian.

There'd have to at least be someone there who says, "Brudda... If you were from, where I'm from, you'd be [censored]in' dead!" His name could even be Scout and he carries a unique sawn-off shotgun called Force-A-Nature

Not sure if this has been brought up before, (probably has) but well here goes....


Fallout 3 was so addictive and i still play it from time to time if bored but what it really lacks to me is a freind or freinds with me.

By freinds i don't mean AI companions i'm talking about some kind of online capability that allows 2 or more clients to connect to eachother and explore the wastelands together.

To some this may seem like a silly idea but to me it opens up a whole new potential to the game, not only can i explore the wastelands and aquire unique weapons / armours i'd have a freind with me to share the experience.

Now i'm not a programmer so i don't know how hard this would be to implement but Fallout 3 only failed on the "No Online Play" to me, the rest was fine.

So yeah that's what i'd like to see in Fallout 4, the possibility to hook up with a few freinds and play cooperatively, exploring the wastelands, trading weapons, setting up strongholds and fighting off the mutated wasteland creatures.

There's my 2 cents

I would be fun to have Co-Op play in Fallout 4, but if Co-Op were implemented, there would have to be some serious limitations.

In games like Oblivion and Fallout 3, playing with someone else could drastically alter your game. What if your friend did something like kill a major or quest giving NPC? Or what if you wanted to approach a situation in your game a certain way, but then your Co-Op partner approached it completely different and messed things up for you?

If Co-Op was implemented, there would have to be serious limitations on what your partner could do in the main game.

Yeah well the V.A.T.S system would need to be altered slighty so that if your freind was in targeting radius he'd be brought into the V.A.T.S system if you used it too..

Also as far as quest givers go online they could always make them respawn quicker i guess, there would have to be some serious changes i agree but in my eyes only good things could become of Co-Op.

Nothing on the scale of MMORPG because that would be just silly, respawn times would have to be high, weapons and armours would have to be either craftable or easier to find and plus some kind of monthly sub to pay for server costs and constant up-keep of the game which isn't what i'm driving at, at all.

Basically what i'm suggesting is some kind of direct connect between 2 - 8 maybe 10 players who host a server off their own machine (so the host has to have a beast to run it:)), that's not too many players but just enough and allowing passwords to be set on servers so the games are private would also be a bonus..

The only problem with Single-Player games is that once you've done everything and been everywhere it's game over, but if you have a freinds or freinds with you the magic tends to last alot longer since more players brings more excitment to the gaming experience

I really would love to see some sort of Co-Op in the next Fallout to see how it goes, i was playing Fallout 3 last night and it just hit me, "What if i could play with freinds rather than roam around on my own just killing Enclave for their armours + weapons to sell"

I agree with what StingingVelvet is saying. Try to think of Fallout 3 like the new Star Trek movie. Not quite as technical or smart as the originals, but with a lot more excitement and mass appeal. It'll never be Wrath of Khan, but it can still blow your girlfriend's head to the back of the auditorium. 3 may not be what you started out with, but it gives you something to talk about with a lot of gamers new to the series, who are probably getting into the older stuff now, too.

What I would like to see in Fallout 4 is something I've experienced in 2: a rival. I ran into this guy when I got away from my tribe that not only claimed to be the old chosen one, but claimed he was gonna kick my crap in (in so many words). I'm not saying have somebody with the same background, but someone who fights you periodically throughout the game, possibly dying at the end or he can helping you (maybe a high level speech check?). His difficulty should be leveled along with his loot like in Oblivion, but with just one guy not AN ENTIRE COUNTRY INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO RIFF RAFF AND WILDLIFE. Think Gary from Pokemon... with a gun. And don't just have him stand and shoot like a run of the mill raider. He should use legit tactics like luring you into traps and stuff.

I agree with StingingVelvet and NEDM on this, and day is still young. We're less than a year into this, and as with Oblivion, it takes some time for really big mods to get built, for the big balancing mods to sort the world out, and for enough unique content to get added. The game is already Fantastic with it's combined DLC's, a huge world with alot of potential.

What I think is a real gift to the community is that New Vegas is based on the Fallout3 engine, even using the GECK. This means that there is active development from the major game houses on the same engine we're building with today, and that in 2010 we get another entire saga to the story. Given that New Vegas is being built by the Fallout 1/2 crew, we can certainly expect a different flavor. To the developers of That game I would only remind them that we're going to have Excellent muscle memory on the Fallout3 engine, so I hope Very Hard mode is indeed just that.

Add to this the spice of a possible Fallout4 in the future along with many fabulous mods, and I really see no reason to despair.

M

I agree the UI being ugly as heck at higher resolutions was a symptom of console-first development... I guess I will give you that as consolitis.

Difficulty... I see that as a symptom of level-scaling, pure and simple, which was an idea born from mass-market desires for the game, which only relates to the consoles in the respect that they are the more mass-market gaming system. It's not that consoles had a technical reason that required level-scaling, it was a choice made to try and get more casual gamers to buy the game, which would be something Bethesda would want no matter what game systems were available, be it consoles or PC only. That is why I try and avoid calling it "consolitis," which I view as a more technical thing... bad UI, the cities being their own cells maybe... FEAR 2's annoying flashing item decals and 16:9 ratio.

The absolute biggest problem I had with Oblivion was the dumbing-down of the world and shallower lore aspects, which was all about mass-market appeal, rather than the console not being able to handle it well. They were feeling their way through how to make an open-ended RPG that can sell 5 million copies and still make RPGers happy... it's a process, much like Horse Armor was a process toward making expansion content in a new age, something they have all but perfected with FO3, as far as I am concerned.



I think Fallout 3 already shows this to be the case. While hardcoe FO1 and FO2 fans would still be quick to point out it lacks depth and maturity compared to those games, and I would agree, it is miles better than Oblivion in many, many key areas, as you yourself stated. I have very little doubt that Bethesda right now is working on TESV, and I have little doubt they are doing so with the lessons of Oblivion and Fallout 3 in mind. I am sure we will go back to the depth of Morrowind in many areas, but with the more visceral combat and immediacy of Oblivion and Fallout 3, which to me sounds perfect, personally.

The entire game industry as a whole right now is in search of that fabled happy medium between casual, win-button gameplay and depth and complexity that turns off most gamers. Stumbles will be made, like Oblivion's scaling and the new Prince of Persia having no death penalty what-so-ever, but in the end I am fairl confident we will reach a place as an industry where most people are happy. I don't think we will ever see a game like Daggerfall, Fallout 2 or Planescape again, which is sad and I know infuriates many older gamers, but we will be given rich and detailed experiences in ever more realistic and beautiful worlds, with dialogue, role-playing choices and social commentary depth we can all enjoy and accept as "good enough." I hope so anyway.

Bear in mind, I'm an optimist.

Honestly I'd like to see a choice in where and what you start off as and get certian benifits from both.

Examples.
Vault...Vault dweller obviously, you gain a bit of a boost in med and science

A town... settler, you gain a boost in Repair and are more likely to find a bit more ammo/meds/caps in crates since you live via scaving

Raider Out post... Raider, boosts in small guns and melee weapons

Trading Outpost... Trader, Boosts in Bartering and speech

But yeah something like that nothing drastic just a lil bit here and there and each of them have a seperate storylines that merge into one general one... Sheet just give me a fallout MMO already lol

:facepalm:

I really enjoyed all of your viewpoints but this one. This is a classic mistake of the old trying to predict the future based on what we know in the now. I used to think that about Wing Commander, and in time came Freelancer. I could make many parallels, but the point is I wouldn't short-change the power of the gaming industry.

To your very points, I think the game industry will continue to grow and mature, games will become better and better, and as our society opens more with each passing decade, game companies have more social freedom to do things that right now are either not possible or not expedient to the business.

I have every confidence that the games will only continue to improve, and fully expect to be blown-away by the next Bethesda game just like I was the last two. For those who fell truely in love with an older game or older version of a game, of course that will be the golden revision for them. Just as many of us fall in love with music in our teens that we claim is the best all our lives (look at Zepplin Fans or Deadheads). The young do not think that at all, they think that the current top songs will be the best and will probably think so all of their lives too. I think games are like this in our minds, and we never really fall out of love with games that deeply move us - even if a newer, shinier one comes along.

M

I call that nostalgia-goggles, and it's pretty common in all forms of media. I remember eagerly buying the first season of Quantum Leap on DVD when it was first released because I looooved that show as a kid, only to find it svcked. A lot. Fans of the original Fallout games certainly look at Fallout 3 through these nostalgia-goggles in a lot of respects. I think the main problem though is that the games are simply different... you and I, we love Bethesda's games and Fallout 3 is another Bethesda masterpiece of exploration-focused gameplay in the action-RPG genre, and it is a great action-RPG game... that's not what the old Fallout games were though. I think that's the main complaint from the NMA folks and hardcoe fans... it's not that Fallout 3 is bad, it just isn't the Fallout they knew, and maybe they don't like Bethesda games like you and I do.

Anyway, I didn't mean we will never see games the caliber of Daggerfall, Fallout 2 or Planescape again, I simply meant games exactly like that are probably a dead class of game, at least from large publishers. The number of people enthused about that level of depth and complexity in games, the real consequences RPG with real resource management and challenge, and loads of text, is simply too small to sell a game to... which is sad... but it doesn't mean we won't get great games of a different type.

Of course, what do I know. We said ages ago the point and click genre was dead and buried, yet Telltale Games seem to be having a large amount of success ressurrecting Sam and Max and Monkey Island, much to my delight. Bioware is also releasing Dragon Age this holiday season, which is supposed to be a Baldur's Gate-like game with an old PC RPG feel... maybe that will start a trend. I personally LOVED Mass Effect and never thought it lacked for depth or interesting role-playing... maybe I was just lured in by the awesome 80's sci-fi vibe which made me long for my childhood though.

Anyway, I'm rambling now. I have a suspicion the days of Icewind Dale are behind us, but you might be right... never underestimate the game industry and the places it could take us. I look forward to the future in any event.

I've no idea where this optimism about games getting better and better comes from. They certainly look nice, and have more explosions.

I like all kinds of game genres, and we are certainly seeing games now that are ten times better than anything before in certain genres. Cinematic games and FPS games, for example... The Darkness was one of the best cinematic games I have ever played, and I loved every second of it... I know many disagree, but Assassin's Creed was an amazing experience for me, very immersive and compelling with stunning realism and sights and sounds. The recent Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is about the best interactive western movie you could ever hope for.

I could go on and on listing great games of course... it depends on the kind of games you like on whether you agree I suppose. Still, if western PC-style RPGs is all you like, I think they trickle out with enough frequency to keep you entertained, if nothing like their heyday... again I will mention Mass Effect, and follow that up with The Witcher. I personally didn't like Neverwinter Nights much, but I hear people who like that genre loved it.

Well you're right about the preference of games, heh. Games today aren't total crap, don't mistake me, but it's rare to find really good ones (market's bigger these days) and some genres have just been killed by making them more 'accessible' (tactical FPS, the death of the sim genre it seems). Given the industry today, I can't see any hope for games getting greater and greater every year (and more social freedom for game designers, heh, please). But who knows, maybe the PC gaming market will shrink and we'll get better quality, hah.

The death of true tactical shooters really irritates me, probably more than the near-death of deep and complex RPGs. I was a massive Rainbow Six fan back in the day, and while I enjoy the two recent Vegas games as pure shooters, the fact a real tactical shooter game hasn't come out in like a decade is very depressing. That genre hasn't even been watered down or anything, it has just flat-out dissappeared.

Space combat sims like Tie Fighter and Wing Commander are another genre that seems to have vanished... they were even popular on consoles around the PS1 era, with Colony Wars and some other stuff... now they are gone. Nothing. Nada.

I have a strange fondness for grid-based tactics games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre, and those are VERY rare, and when they do come out they tend to really svck. Japanese RPGs are kind of getting rare themselves this generation of consoles, due to Japan's gaming tastes changing... at least they are on consoles.

Point and click adventure games could give us hope though, as I pointed out before... that was a dead genre for years until a couple years ago when Telltale pulled the corpse from the fire. Now we have Lucasarts putting their classics on Steam and releasing new Monkey Island games... that's a rather amazing development for a genre considered dead not long ago. The same thing could happen with space shooters or classic RPGs... all it takes is for one developer to make an amazing game and spark renewed interest.

I have high hopes for Dragon Age, personally. If it is as similar to the old Baldur's Gate games as Bioware claims, and has the depth, lore and consequence they claim, it could really light a spark on consoles and PCs for that kind of RPG.

The quality of games where hit by what I have called the "Next Gen Boom" where everyone was immediately captivated by graphics, and this left less time, budget, and data resources to make a decent story and game mechanics.

Fallout 3 is an "Action-RPG", a Live Action (in this case, a FPS), and an RPG combination. FO3 does neither perfectly.

The RPG elements that need tweaking are of course the realism aspects. Enemies are bullet sponges, and so are you. On top of that, if you tweek the difficulty, it just becomes worse. Either you are too epic, or too brittle, and vice versa for enemies. Also, ammunition without weight has a primary problem that blends both generas. RPGs, especially a survival themed RPG, requires some form of inventory management, primarily weight, sometimes volume, and in FO3 this is gone for medical supplies and ammunition. As for an FPS, there are generally limits on how much ammunition you can carry for you're weapons. Also, there is a lack of flow. The game's quests don't really influence each other enough to really be called a story line. It's loosely ordered chaos. The game just feels like some of the side quests are out of place, and seem to be uninvolved in the beginning. If it was harder to get to the main part of the city, it would make you look around for supplies and ammo of high quality, and train to fight through the always mentioned HORDES of super mutants in the city, witch, obviously don't seem to exist in this game. Conversations also felt limiting and bland, not necessarily due to lack of options, but defiantly due to the total animation system, and a seemingly lacking involvement of the character. Mass Effect was good at this, but the main character doesn't need a voice.

As for the FPS elements, they are mostly simple. There is no real way to be tactical. Ubisoft is one company to look at. In Rainbow Six, the Cover System and combat feel, well, felt real. As for stealth mechanics, witch we all know are just plain broken, Splinter Cell felt a lot more like being a sneaky person. Enemies also didn't seem to react to noise. Tossing a rock to make a noise or tapping loudly on a wall would be nice, kinda like Metal Gear stuff. Distraction is a great method of Evasion. Also, smoke screens would have been nice. In Far Cry 2, the guns felt right. They would jam during a clip, instead of only when reloading, and you would loose that jammed bullet to the floor. And when you're gun broke, it blew up in your hands. (Witch would remind me of critical failures...)

The game also has a lack of common points to FO2. I understand not naming or even using some of the weapons due to copyright issues, but I know that some of those weapons weren't owned by actual companies. And SPECIAL, just like in Oblivion's system, got dumbed down. I understand that Bethesda is trying to focus on a broad market, but believe it or not. Even a casual player can handle substance... They are just pissing off the original market, sadly, but I do love you Bethesda.

All and all, there are a lot of ideas, but they would be repetitive of all the other previous ideas I, and others have posted.

P.S. Solar Scorcher would be nice.

These are a few things i would like to see in Fallout 4:

Character Developement - I like the way that you improve your character through SPECIAL and the skills but i would like to see a physical reaction to your choices like if you are high in strength or endurance your character should get bigger muscles or something along those lines. I would also like more options with character customisation, not like making a character at the begginning of a game but how you play should effect your appearance. eg how much time you spend in the sun should give you a tan or something like that. I just think that a level 1 character should not look the same as a level 30 character after that long out of the vault.

Weapons - The current weapons are good but they should be a bit more customisable, not massive changes just a few things like bigger clips or different stocks. I would also love to see some dual wielding going on, i mean a pair of Colt Python revolvers would just kick-ass. The dual weapons would also allow for two targets at once (simultaneous kills, not one after the other or aiming at two different places on single enemy that affects there how they react. Enemies should also be able to survive having a limb removed at least for a little while.

Environments - The wasteland really captures that desolate look you would imagine after the bombs fell but could they add some colour to it maybe? When i first found my way to oasis it really suprised me how i missed colour but hadnt realised it. So yes keep the destruction but add some areas that actually look alive as well.

Emotion - I dont know what it was but i didnt really care about many of the characters and i feel like i was supposed to. so maybe it would be a good idea to provide more backstory for the characters through speech, diaries and computers or increase the level of interaction. eg create new settlements, improve existing settlements(when they said girdershade was a settlement i was quite excited to go there but let me tell you something 2 people DO NOT make a settlement).

Anyway thats all i can think of right now