That's not what he's saying. He's talking about after doing a certain quest (like Blood Ties) you'd get to see some fruit of your labor in the town itself. Nothing to big, but people changing their dialogue to reflect your hero status (Megaton is a big offender) or a new family/person arriving in town because it's safer now. Just something that shows that your quest had a bit of an effect.

I'm pretty sure the people acknowledge you completing the quest in Arefu. Big Town as well, and lots of people in Megaton comment on you disarming the bomb. So I don't think that could be it.. I mean, what do you want.. a party? You already get free gifts from townspeople!

Arefu-People in the town help you, the town gets a new guard and Ian West returns. I think this one was done pretty good.

Big Town-You get well acknowledged and the townsfolk may give you rewards in certain side quests. Red heals you for free I think.

Megaton-Not much changes. The Church of the Atom isn't impacted for one. But Lucas Simms is definitely more friendly and generous.

Tenpenny Tower-Well, at least two side quests (I count showing the letter as a small side quest) are blocked of and people aren't nearly as grateful. Understandable as some wanted the ghouls in, but blocking of reporting Argyle and showing the letter peeved me.

Canterbury Commons-Admittedly not much can change, to be honest. The townsfolk do seem grateful (well, Ernest does.)

In several cases, acknowledgement could be better.

I think it would be pretty cool if you could make your own weapon...completely custom.
Now we couldnt over power it, but do it like this:you have different parts to make a gun. One thing makes it shoot faster but slower reload speed, another part lets you shoot more bullets at once but heavier, a long barrel will make it easier for long distance things and a short for short distance you get what i mean?
Have different parts that we can choose to put on our own gun...but we have to have our repair up to a certain level to use more advanced things. Not everything can be made with this idea but i think having freedom in our guns would be fun.

The problem with this suggestion is that it is more feat than feature. Whenever people talk about Arcanum, they always mention that you can travel everywhere without using the world map, but everyone agrees that no one in their right mind would do such a thing. It's a cool accomplishment, but the result isn't worth much, and if they could have saved any man hours by reducing the vast majority of the map to a few repeating areas (like Fallout), then they should have done that.

I can see the benefit of the old Fallout method, because the towns get much more attention and are much more interesting and busy as a result. I can see the advantage of the FO3 style, because exploration is much more fun and interesting. I don't see the benefit of a vast procedurally-generated wasteland, because it probably won't be very much fun to explore, and it would likely be harder to produce than a few repeating areas. Maybe it would make sense as a backdrop for massive vehicular combat, but that would also change the focus of the game.

I'd personally like to see better dialogue choices that have multiple branches like the previous games did. I felt no connection to the characters in Fallout 3 like I did with say, Myron or the Enclave in Fallout 2. Their voice acting was the best I'd heard in a game, bearing in mind Fallout 3 was what got me into the franchise earlier this year, I've only very recently started playing the other two.

Fallout just needs to go back to being what it was meant to be - a proper RPG. I'm not bashing Fallout 3 because it's honestly the best gaming experience I've had in years but I can see how it differs from how it used to be. Hopefully New Vegas will get it back on the canon track, and then Fallout 4.

Though I am confused as to how F:NV is a spin-off and not a direct sequel? Depending on wether you have Broken Steel or not, how could you continue the story if ?

If Fallout 4 does happen it would also be nice to see it take place in the commonwealth, as it has been mentioned in FO3 many times (including it's DLC).

Questlines depending on your karma?

-Bad-bad-bad-bad-bad-bad-bad-end game
Neutral-neutral-neutral-neutral-neutral-neutral-neutral-end game
-Good-good-good-good-good-good-good-end game

that way when you play you can see 3 different endings or you can SLOWLY fluctuate from good to neutral to bad and see a variety of things and get unique dialogue choices and stuff.... meh...

Except, that I am not talking about repeating areas... I mean that there should be 50 or 60 hand done sets (like Dunwich, or a shopping mall, or a football stadium), but the bulk of the land would preferably be assembled on the fly using the tile sets in what ever direction you went (possibly saving that data for future use ~or not).

Arcanum took 48 hrs to cross coast to coast, but Fallout 4 could seed the land with encounters, and "set piece" locations amidst the procedural clutter and ruins. The idea is that if you wandered the wastes, you could in fact encounter strangeness like you did in FO1 & 2, that you would not encounter anywhere else; (though, it would be good to bring back Outdoorsman, and allow for encounters during fast travel, that would set you down on the world map).

Waaaaay way back 22 years ago, "Pool of Radiance" had FPP and overland map exploration, and the game did procedural generation of the combat map whenever you had an encounter. That map simulated the current environment, including the interior building walls and layout if you were indoors, and procedural landscape if you were outside of a town.

Skip ahead to modern day, and Dwarf Fortress auto generates the entire continent on install.

And this that I just found... :drool:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7wbP3I8Aeg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67qOa1YhF3A

You seriously cannot compare the technical details of text based games with modern 3D engines. It shows a patent lack of understanding.

i'd like to see something with the scale and depth of F2, but with the gameplay of F3. Lucky enough, New Vegas has a good chance of turning out to be just that!

I could, but I wasn't. What part of "FPP and overland map exploration" did you not catch?

Now... will you say that it is not possible to generate a data set that an engine can use to procedurally string together pre-made tiles (like the ones in NWN, TES, and FO3)?

**Funny thing, but since you brought up text base games and all...
I have yet to see a game made this century that can out do the best text parsers from the late 80's & early 90's when it comes to intelligent NPC responses. Fallout 1's text parser was useful and cool, but woefully primitive. Fallout 2 didn't have it at all, and FO3 has lost even the text menu (which was a major link to Wasteland btw).

The irony is, that today's machines could handle a text 'bot that could fool a large percentage of people into believing it human.

i wanna see not just double but triple or quadruple land space that was in Fallout 3,
i want a much more better america to roam, i want to see a bigger megaton, with actual camps
of hungry and thirsty dieing people who are not allowed in outside in torn tents fighting off and
living off ants daily, i wanna see a bombed out city invested with raiders and whatnot on your approach to a BIGGER rivet city,
not that much bigger though, cos i'd like the bombed out city to also have some pionts of interest
(giving you reason not to just be in rivet city) like people who cannot get into the city who deal with raiders daily
and set up shops here there and little checkpiuonts here and there, how about fighting your way from the dc area
to catching a train to the centre of the a huge double laned high street through to Rivet city, the huge road could
break off at an intersection and some small blocks with alleys can lead you to rivet city
maybe it could be set like 50 to 100 year ahead of the fallout 3 game and their are more people due to cleaner water and
you need to help rebuild (forgot the name) out of minefield (as minefield used to be an inhabited town)
since their is clean water in the game (because its AFTER fallout 3) we could have a different problem, like cults poisoning the water (fluoride lol)
and super mutants still using radiated water and drugs to convert people into a super mutant, their could be super mutant factories that
use captured humans that have been drugged to death to burn in the furnaces or whatever and that could be the reason their is ACID RAIN
in the game! it'd be awesome! and like i was saying about the cults is not only do they try and poison the water supply and attack our cities water purifiers and you have a chance to get on either side, you can either try and be evil and turn the lands back into a wasteland where murders go unnoticed and stealing thrives, or you can be good and help the cities fight the people who are trying to destroy healthy mankind! if you choose to be evil you could get mission like burning down newly planted or forest that have been their for a while, and create death camps and such for your cause
there could also be like a neutral way to play the game like you help both, sorta like a jack sparrow, not evil but not good either
i think their would be TONS of possibilities, i REALLY hope bethesda check my posts and other peoples awesome ideas, they'd be fools otherwise!

Chicago, New York, or San Fransisco (SP)
Just big places to explore.

Chicago and San Fran have been done....

In the Fallout series' no less

Everything in Fallout 3, though (and this going to be the same for Fallout 4, as well, I'd imagine) is just different combinations of the same set pieces. Every single house you enter is composed of the same pieces, regardless of how the floorplan is laid out. Every Vault you enter is either "rusted" or "standard," and it's all made up of different combinations of the same 20 or so pieces. Each time you go into a cave, or an abandoned factory, it's made up of and filled with different selections of items - all drawn from a finite list. The only thing in any of these games that's "hand-crafted" are the individual segments that make up the game world. Then when you design a level, you're just putting those pieces together in different orders.

Sure, more pieces is going to make the game seem less repetitive - but it still, simply, comes down to how large of a variety of pre-set building blocks each interior level and outdoor cell can draw from. As far as putting them together - having a human put a bunch of Lego pieces together isn't going to make it any less repetitive than if a computer were to do it. Because it's still just a bunch of the same pieces rearranged in different ways.

Seriously, every store you ever went into in Fallout 3 is the same dozen or so blocks moved around in different combinations - no matter how "unique" each of them might have seemed. I still don't see how one would inherently be any less repetitive than the other...

I have my doubts that they'd really take any of this terribly seriously. Sure, you always want feedback; but I generally assume that any idea I might come up here with that might actually be all that great is likely something these guys will have already thought up well before me. I mean seriously, I doubt anyone puts all the effort to actually be a game designer just to use other people's ideas...

I'm saying that repeated areas save time and effort. Making a vast boring wasteland will probably be a waste of time, even if it is procedurally generated.

It still won't work well if you are serious about creating a truly large wasteland. FO1&2 worked because there was no actual wasteland. The devs concentrated on the towns and the rest of the wasteland was an obvious charade. The fact that it was an obvious charade was actually good for players. They don't waste time screwing around with an undeveloped part of the game, and the devs don't waste resources trying to create something that was never intended to be fun.

If they create a vast wasteland, then it needs to support some fun gameplay. It would be useful for something like crazy vehicular combat, but they shouldn't do it just to say that they did it.

Lol, I'd like to see a game without crashes, freezes, game breaking glitches, or hard resets.

Let's start there.

I disagree (incredibly so). Besides... How much time does it take (and take away from what)?

If you design an algorithm that "stitches tiles together" to make an infinite path in any direction, you then can devote all your time to locations. Also, While I do ascribe to the bland desolate wastes ~instead of teeming overcrowded "wastes"... It need not technically be barren. I certainly never said 'empty' or 'boring'.

Everyone knows that (well most know ~or should know). It was not a charade or a trick of any kind, it was symbolic, and it was indeed good for the players as nothing much is out there in the wastes, and encounters are few and far between ~and there is nothing at all like it in FO3. Have it like that, and the game can hit you with an ambush 10 miles from town, and 50 miles from where you're headed, and put you in game on a realtime simulation of the terrain (that technically could be walked all the way to town in either direction ~with additional chance at encounters).

No it doesn't :rofl:,
~but it would be neat if you could find Special encounters out there (or via fast travel with high luck).

Yes it would ~and it might also introduce a problem of loading (or assembling) content at fast vehicular speeds.

My overall point is that like Fallout 1 the wasteland would be vast (and largely unexplored ~even by hardcoe players), but it would be there and cost nothing no matter how much of it you had. Most everyone (but not everyone) would fast travel over it (and they'd miss out on a few specials :shrug:); but the main locations could be spread out across several States (and not just with pure procedural lands in between ~though my concept of procedural seems quite alien to most naysayers here).

Another point is that the game world could be very different for every player (and perhaps on a per-PC basis); Different with respect to the procedural content, not the landmarks and major cities.

I don't think walking all the way from town to town in a large procedural generated terrain with a chance on a few special encounters is much incentive for people to waste that time walking over essential mostly empty space.

A world map like Fallout 1 and 2 would be better, since it circumvents the wasteful and boring walking forever to get somewhere and still have place for procedural generated map pieces and encounters. It would be easier/simpler I would think.

I would have to disagree. It would actually make the game a bit more "realistic" or "immersable" because you have to cover a longer distance to get from A to B. You might get pounded into the ground by a horde of Behemoths or you might get told a shortcut or another map location by a caravan leader.

Well... Bethesda seems to have a specific way of doing things. That procedural generated landscape was a big feature up until Daggerfall, but that was a while ago, and they have made a 180? turn since Morrowind, and they are now viewed as 'experts' in predefining every single little detail in their game worlds.
Discussions about alternatives to that will actually get nowhere at all, unless people are willing to accept that the 'Bethesda way' is not the only, the absolutely single, the one and only 'correct' and/or fun way.
Exploring the world just for the sake of it - without any specific goal, for example, is a big part of post-Daggerfall Bethesda's games as well. So people need to accept that this is not an indisputably - absolutely - no exceptions - necessarily - the one and only proper and/or fun feature an RPG needs to have.

If that's what you like, that's fine, I like that too! But arguments like 'a randomly generated wasteland will be bad because it won't be fun to explore' are probably correct but missing the point. If the game has such a feature then its focus will will not be on exploring the wasteland, so whether or not doing so is boring, is irrelevant. It's like saying that FO3 is a bad racing game because you can't drive any of the cars!

As I see it, a randomly generated wasteland, would be nice because, even though I would not explore it naturally, it would provide an appropriate, infinite and varied 'battlefield' for random encounters when fast-traveling.

Then again, as I already said, Bethesda is known for making worlds that are fun to explore, and that's what I'd expect from them. But, quite frankly, they only seemed to got that completely right in Morrowind imo. Oblivion's landscape was as dull as the randomly-generated one of Daggerfall's, FO3 is substantially better, but not in the same league as Morrowind in that area. I find the big difference being that in FO3 (& Oblivion) I sometimes think "let's go and explore the world a bit now" while in Morrowind I just did it...

Maybe it was the lack of fast travel (since I was going to walk somewhere anyway I might as well take a look what's around the corner) or the tiny dungeons (I am far more likely to just check what's in a cave if I know it's not going to keep me away from my goal for 2 hours) or the ambiguous directions etc.
My point is, that even though FO3's wasteland has a high 'touristic' value, I just don't catch myself exploring aimlessly unless I have planned an 'aimless exploring game session'.

So I believe that to enhance exploration, they don't need 'more stuff' - more buildings, more enemies, more landmarks etc. They need to backtrack a bit to the basics: Regions, each with its own identifiable atmosphere, many small distractions instead of a few large ones, no fast traveling perhaps, no compass, and, yes, even ambiguous 'bad' directions to places that do not appear on the map before you have found them.

What I don't understand is why many here do not see that that would in fact be very like the FO1 map. I also do not understand why so many equate procedural with repetitive ; Nor why or so many make the odd assumption that I am advocating some sort of "wasteland treadmill". So I will ask these questions...

• Is walking from the Vault to Megaton a pain?
  
• Is exploring various areas along the corners of the map something most never do?
  
• Would most players describe the Minefield, or the Citadel interior as extremely repetitive?
  
• Would they describe the ant cave, Yao Guai cave, and wild dog cave as repetitive?
  
• Would most describe each and every vault as repetitive?

• If not... Why?

A procedural algorithm could create semi-random terrain with an intelligent streets and structure layout for numerous small towns, junkyards, city dumps, industrial parks, refineries, Shopping mall interiors, subway tunnels, flattened trailer parks, fairgrounds... what have you. As was mentioned, it could enable every single building in the game to have a plausible interior. At any point during the creation of the outdoor areas, a full blown set-piece (another town like like Megaton for example), could be placed on the map amidst the layout and more terrain generated beyond it, as you continue on your way. Any and all of these areas would have the chance at being occupied, so [theoretically] you could encounter threats like raiders at any point along the trek (though ideally not every other building and street corner).

The notion that what is being suggested here is in some way a repetitive walk past the same block of boarded up houses and the same repeating hill with a few of the same repeating rocks is patently ridiculous. <_<

What I don't understand is why people can't grasp the technical hurdles that would need to be leaped to gain not that much.

Anyone that has spent time in the GECK or similar tools would instantly realize that the feasibility of generating hundreds of miles of terrain is impossible.. at least with current technology. Not only does everything require hand placement to look good, generating the LOD for a world even the size of Fallout 3 takes days, if not weeks. On slower computers it could take a month. Nevermind the fact that even the smallest rubble consists of up to a dozen individual pieces carefully rotated on all 3 axis and all 3 planes. This is not something you will be doing on the fly.

Yeah, you could probably generate a mostly flat and completely empty single texture plane to walk on.. and you may even be able to put a few pre-fab empty buildings on it. And it would be laughed out of the industry.

Seriously, spend some time in the GECK and start deconstructing the landscape and you will see just how complicated and time-consuming it is and how infeasible it is to think you could automate it and have it look even passable.

Who is asking a hundred miles? I'm talking just past the draw distance ~It could even be a slider in the options that affects the distance and complexity.

*And speaking of procedurals...
This entire video (including the audio), is generated from a 177k executable at runtime.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWRpTl-tkKs&feature=related
(and no... this is not what I am suggesting ~in this the procedural part is in texture creation & animation). But... :rolleyes: