I'd vager that if Fallout 4 is Bethesdas next game, it won't be announced until after New Vegas is well out.

Considering the urgency under which your father left the vault, with no explanation, and the ensuing chaos, I'd say his plea not to follow him was flimsy at best.

As for OB, once everyone was safe & sound at CRT that was basically the jump off point (for me anyway) to quest, find out what's going on with these gates, then head back when ready.

I'm not so sure about How I would feel. He left the vault for some reason and in doing so. caused one of my lifelong friends to die, another one to almost get beaten on my account, and made me run for my life from the only place I have known. And on top of all of that, he LEFT me, without warning and without proper reasons why.

So maybe i wouldn't go running all over the place after him. Besides, I don't think I'd really go running off into the unknown until I got my bearing a bit, and built a better understanding of how the world works.

Same here. Every interactive option in a game should impact gameplay; Its fine that its there, fine that its pretty, but there needs to be a tangible effect and purpose for its use.

Armor raises armor class (or in this case DR)
The +1 sword confers an edge (so to speak) for the user.
Tools like wrenches and lockpicks can effect their respective skills (Its a fact that the better your tools, the easier your work becomes).

Sitting could give even minuscule bonuses to activities that are best done sitting, just as the reverse (running while sneaking) effects one's activity for the worse. When an interactive thing is done for sake of atmosphere alone, and servers no tangible benefit or penalty (like dishes with no monetary value), its a step toward "Simulation", and a step away from a "Game".
Awkward as it is... I don't dislike the premise behind the "magic clothes" in Fallout 3, but I'd have liked it better if the Repair affecting jumpsuit had had a stocked tool belt to make the bonus plausible.

A game's rules should work like the gears of a clock. Each gear has a reason and measurable effect; Gears in the clock that look pretty but affect nothing, shouldn't be there, unless the clock is stylized semi/or non-functional art.

Consider a functional in game slot machine... It takes your money for the chance at gaining winnings ~to have it in the game as simply an interactive toy that is free to use and gives you nothing when you win, is a pointless waste of time.

All games abstract and condense to essence whatever activity the game depicts (like War for instance); Simulations seek to recreate a reality or substitute a detailed false reality. These things are somewhat like oil and water to each other. Modern RPG's have almost all become simulators with a bit of a game, instead of a game with a few nice touches with the art and story.

Speculation for Fallout 4 depends upon whether the guiding intent is to create virtual life where the player spends his RL hours at 1:10 (or other ratio) wandering step for step in the game world, or whether the intent for Fallout 4 is to have a larger distilled narrative that encompasses months, years, or a decade in the game setting ~and shows you the high points; (Personally I'd greatly prefer the latter).

Am I the only person, who no longer wants the character crawling out of a vault, or being a decedent of a Vault Dweller? (No pun intended.) I know in FO2, your related and don't start in a vault, and same with FO:T, but I think it would be fun; just to have the players character just be some wastelander, rather be apart of the BOS or something like that?

In F4, Ditch the forced tutorial phase in a cave (or vault). Make it optional. Like: game starts in a village, as a tutorial you can help out some villagers and gain some experience and possibly some starting equipement - but doing these things would be up to the player. If he doesn't want to crawl through it every time, he can leave the moment the game begins.

Great fun to start as a BOS directly... "Here's a laser rifle and a power armor, go nuts!" Too easy.

And here's the thing, if Fo4 is like Fo3 (the map) then if you're a wastelander, it would mean that you would already know about the towns/settlements and surely other landmarks.
Becuse unless he's/she's isolated and noone talks to him or he's/she's deaf then he should've heard something about another town during his 18+ years he's/she's been alive.
The PC should be from somewhere isolated (vault) or some other town/village outside Fo4's world map.

Yeah, you could have the character stumble into a Megaton-like tutorial settlement from parts unknown (perhaps to be revealed later in the plot) and through the introductory dialog with other NPCs in the town you do your 'chargen' process.

No you've got it all wrong. If you were a wastelander, you could be just arriving into the area!? You wouldn't know about the towns and settlements etc. you'd only have you, a gun or something and whatever else you'd have had to make the trip from Point A to Point B. You could play as a Wastelander, who travelled from the NCR (or anywhere else you prefer) to say the Capital Wasteland? (Now I do want FO4 to be somewhere other than D.C., but it's just an example.)

Well, there was certainly no urgent reason to look for him. I'm not saying that the PC shouldn't be interested in why dad left, but it's not like Oblivion where you are racing against the Mythic Dawn with the fate of the world on the line. Once the gates started opening (which was very early), there was no reason to do anything but the main quest.

The dilemma is that they need to have a compelling main quest, but at the same time support sidequests and exploration. The traditional method is to have a very compelling main quest with no handholding, and no a priori distinction between sidequests and min quests. They can't do that with FO4, because many people simply won't play a big sandbox game with no hanholding. So, they need to have a main quest that is intriguing, but too mysterious to be urgent until the end. FO3 was pretty good at that. In Morrowind, I honestly think it worked because the main quest was never very compelling, even near the end.

ROLEPLAY is the reason for being able to sit. If that doesn't mean anything for you, then don't do it.

Bugs Free Game. That'a all I want. the rest? Bethesda will take of that (I have full trust in them...)

But wouldn't it be good if sitting down had an effect in addition to pretending something? The way you say it, it sounds like you're against such a thing.

Minor resting bonus (like sleeping) would be cool.

But if sitting down did have an effect, it would tempt the player to do it only so as to achieve that effect which would detach him from the pure roleplaying experience of pretending to do something for no reason whatsoever. A gameworld that actually reacts to what you're doing is very restrictive as it does not allow for unlimited possible outcomes of an action, since it forces a limited pre-set number of possible ones, thus limiting severely the roleplaying experience.


(If the Bethesda fan's definition of 'roleplaying' gets too popular, maybe we should consider finding another name to call the genre that all RPGs not made by Bethesda belong to, because it starts getting too confusing)

This is true...You see it in Oblivion with hopping around all the time for the Agility bonus, but its also still needed [IMO]. The extreme alternative is a "game" (really a Sim), where you can go anywhere you want (do anything you want), and have no driving reason other than to "be there" and that doesn't last as a strong incentive to play. Study World of Warcraft, and wonder if removing the peer pressure and it's garish user interface would improve its addictiveness. I'd think the numbers game is the reason to play.


Everything has to have a technical reason... ~in a game; Not so in a Sim, unless you consider completionism a technical reason (which I do in a simulation). *Then again, I make a clear distinction between the two.

If Fallout 4 [speculating] drifts closer to being a PA simulator ~IE. [IMO] becoming commensurately less of a game... It may well do away with numerical Hitpoints for instance, favoring multiple (and increasing) 'wounded' animations and bleeding (with blood trails that enemies can see ~like a second kind of nav-mesh path) ~All of this is superb for a simulator, but IMO awful overworking for a game. IMO that kind of detail should be the spice, not the meat of it. If Fallout 4 went that (simulator) route, it'd compare [IMO] like trying to eat pure pepper with powdered beef sprinkled on top instead of the other way around. (*Ironic that another player group thinks the same of excessive rules vs depiction of reality )

The ultimate end [purpose] for a Sim, is to experience as close as possible, what it'd be like in that situation/world; But for a game (boiled down to essence), it is to perceive (and act upon) the consequence of the rules in order to win (or advance)... The rest is secondary... Like icing on the cake.

Most Sims still have a little bit of game in them, but ideally they'd have none ~at all!
(Can't "level up" in a Flight simulator).
This is what I'd predict for Fallout 5 if Fallout 4 tries to become more and more of a transperant window to the wasteland ~basically a Post Apocalyptic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIc45xDmGy8 with guns (Look familiar? ).

Edit:
URU has a dead "whark" that fell from the sky... (I never noticed before)

I think you are generally correct here, which makes me wonder how you can be so wrong on everything else. To the extent that chairs do confer benefits in real life (and they do), a good sim would account for those benefits. Purely cosmetic features are definitely not the defining aspect of a sim, because the target of a sim is rarely filled with irrelevant or useless stuff. If TES was more of a sim, then all of that silverware would be used to eat, and if you ate with your hands you would suffer some sort of social or health-related penalty.

The distinction you are applying to the topic is just about superficial features, which games can embrace for a variety of reasons, including to enhance a role-playing experience.

Touch?... there goes my attempt at being a [censored]...
I still think the Elder Scrolls skill system has a lot of potential...
but maybe skills such as running and acrobatics should be dropped from the list of skills for that reason.
That way running around all the time wont make the character faster but it will still maintain the perfectly practical function of helping you waste less time getting to your destination. - which would still be very different than sitting in a chair in the game because it has no function whatsoever.

I wouldn't expect FO to ever get so close at being a sim by the way.
It might have been fun, but I still suspect, for no apparent reason, that its advocates are less than it seems around here and not as dedicated.
If Bethesda's games didn't have anything substantial to offer other than a sophisticated 'make believe' gameplay, I would at least suspect that there would be plenty of competitive games around that would offer the exact same think... but I can't think of any really.

I'm not adverse to sitting having an effect, such as speeding up/improving healing using food or whatever. The idea I'm against is that a roleplay device such as sitting MUST HAVE an additional effect.

In an RPG game, features that allow the character to mimic life are important to the genere. Roleplayers like sitting in chairs, or arranging stuff on tables and shelve, and displaying collections of stuff in game. I don't see these features pushing an RPG game towards a simulation. I'm more inclined to think that arguments supporting realistic economy, the need to eat and drink (or suffer consequences), real world weapon characteristics, overly complex MODELING systems for combat, push the game more towards a simulation than the ability to sit in a chair.

I reject the argument that every aspect of gameplay must have quantifiable results. Not everything in RL has quantifiable results.

Everything else ~How exactly?

Give it time
~just kidding; I don't think TES or FO4 will include anything that can be viewed as tedious, and so the finer details like ammo weight and etiquette penalties will likely never appear, but as to small details... they are important in a Sim if it makes it more believable (and/ or informative... But it just becomes more like a tool than a game).

*This is pretty cool BTW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF0yyfhchvg

Actually I'd think a good game would shave all of that off unless it had a pressing reason to keep it. Games are an abstracted representation ~just look at Chess and Monopoly.

I think the main disconnect here is that I'm not at all looking for a window into a virtual world :shrug:, I'm looking for an awesome system (which is why I can rank http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kfFYU3kDqE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIKD6_3o3X8, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtlEB8U5blI, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqOfuE46wLQ as more or less equally favored RPG's).
The Fallout series had an awesome system, that's what I liked about it.

I reject argument that aspects having no quantifiable results qualify as gameplay. :shrug:

They qualify as immersion. The thing thatirritated me the most about Morrowind? The fact that you can't sit in chairs. I don't like recieving points for things that would confer negligible benfits in real life.

Of course you do. You WANT a simulation.

That's not gameplay, but its is true...

As for Chairs... Sitting calms, and allows concentration... The idea that sitting in FO3 or 4 might confer a minuscule bonus is a good one I think, because its a negligible benefit, yet still is one.


Actually, I'm rather fervently against it becoming more of one... Do we have different definitions for simulator?

Seriously?

I don't get it...
You people are happy having your character eat and sleep every day because you will successfully pretend he's hungry or sleepy, even though the character doesn't acknowledge or react neither to hunger nor to satisfying it... yet you can't accept him not acknowledging a chair?
I suppose it's all about appearances then?
If it looks right - if it looks like he's eating or sitting or whatever then any more depth is irrelevant?

And by the way:
Is it sitting that confers negligible benefits in real life in this case?
Because if that's what you mean I challenge you to spend half a day without sitting, and see whether or not the benefit from doing so, would be negligible when you finally do.