Do you mean FO3, and Fallout 1 & 2? Or do you mean TES 1-5? (and FO3)

I can agree; all the Fallout games and FO3 & FO:New Vegas had open worlds where the player could wander where their fancy took them.

New Vegas is built to interact with a static world. Here you got something, there you got something.

I played them all and loved them. But is this the true horizon? Is there an axiom that forbids thinking beyond what's set?

Fallout 3, New Vegas, and TES are all in the same genre, although there is differences between the games to keep them fresh. There isnt really much in common between Fallout 1/2 and Bethesda games, which is by design, since there are reasons why those games are niche.

What exactly do you have in mind that would be beyond the horizon? So long as it allows me to do deep roleplay as my longstanding characters, im sure i'd be happy with wherever Bethesda decides to go.

Oh, there's so much beyond it. So much I can't explain here. So much that's beyond comparison or examples.

Gaming is bound to grow in ways that we can't imagine, by the sole virtue of technology becoming advanced in ways that are hard to predict.

Tell someone playing a simple arcade game like Pac-Man back in the late 70s and 80s and one day there would be videogames that looked almost photorealistic, and that the character you control would have complete agency in the world, able to travel across a fully realized world and do a whole lot more things than eating pellets to get to the next stage. And then also tell him that this game would be pulling in more money that the latest blockbuster movie.

Would he think you were insane? That gaming would never become that complex, that technology would never get there? I imagine if someone told me about videogames even 20 years from now i'd think him to be insane. But its apparent that gaming is our most advanced form of storytelling yet. Will it one day be replaced by something even more advanced, as much as something like a book or a film can be replaced with something more technologically complex?

You're right. The ability of humans to craft stories and fictional worlds is only going to get more insane as technology progresses. One day our Skyrims and Fallout New Vegas's may look as simple and low-tech as pac-man, but they will still be just a valid of a experience as they are today, although obviously a lot of people will have moved on.

fix-ed

It's true...
It's sad. They managed to wrangle the Fallout IP from the desperate, to make something else from its parts. (Like buying a classic car for parts to dress up a Saab.)
And that's all we can speculate to happen from their future stewardship of it.

@Cannibalclub: One should highlight the changes to another person's quote.
(Have you noticed that I never post 'fixt' posts? I don't consider it polite except in [lighthearted] jest; but if I did, I would always make the change obvious.)

Thank you Jaramr. But what I'm thinking about is merely the next step. There is something hindering in the far future. There's something encouraging in the way towards it.

Ie. Bethesda can't create decent content by themselves, admitted by a big really devoted fan Jaramr even.

Frankly, I have no idea where technology will take humanitys ability to imagine fictional worlds next. One day we are reading about Middle Earth in a book and using our imagination to see the world, the next day we are watching X-wings fly around on screen and imagining ourselves with a grip on a lightsaber. just like the people we see on the screen. The next day we are in direct control of a character who exists in his own simulated world, and we can almost feel like we are living through that character.

Is the next step a direct brain interface, where we will sense the world around us as if we were really there? Maybe. We have a long way to go before we hit that level of tech, but then if we can already imagine something as advanced as that its only a matter of time until it bcomes reality.

This will be on the horizon soon:
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/avengers-vr-experience/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdTm7Vpape0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY8lsblffo4
One can imagine a Fallout sequel done like that with a PA suit instead.

Plenty of stuff that Bethesda created over the years has been more than decent.

Think you should get a penalty to sneak while in Power armor, like in tactics.

Upgrades to weapons and gear is fun. Perhaps have diffirent options for the same slot? So its not just one thing that is best, but you need to choose what upgrade to get. Or would that just make players have many of the same items with diffirent upgrades?

Agreed, and also one that depends on how many bottle caps they have in their pockets. [Hopefully they won't use bottle caps this time.]

Haha, 8) .

Agree with almost parts. I made some suggestions close to this before.

Resource management should be the only way to earn big money and should be forbidden to sell a rocket launcher for a water seller.

But this kind of suggestion does not seem to be very popular among most fans, so should probably be the walk and shoot things as always.

I doubt any sane game developer would actively punish you for carrying money in the game in such a manner.

Caps are known to be "money" to people as far north as the Commonwealth, as down south as "The Broken Banks", and as far west as The Pitt. If its on the east coast, there is a 99% chance they will use caps.

It's bottle caps; they make terrible noise in a sack.

Also Caps weren't money in Fallout; and caps were twice used as a joke in Fallout 2.

So does every other type of coin currency from gold coins to a penny. Your point?

Then how can I buy things with them?

Well this isn't California, and, just so you know, people have different opinions of things across the nation. What the people in Cali think about caps means literally nothing outside that area. Just like the real world.

Not like Bottle caps. Bottle caps are effectively conical, compared to coins.

You couldn't. (You could trade though. Fallout was item for item barter; coins are government property bottle caps aren't. And there is a tax for using coins, none on trading for bottle caps.)

In Fallout, people traded item for item, and used Bottle caps as a trade equalizer. Caps were not required; nor always present between bartering individuals. At most they were like poker chips in a casino-town... Not the same as money though.

Sadly, FO3 doesn't have bartering from the Fallout series. FO3 implements a cash sale for an itemized list of goods, rather than item(s) trading. If they'd done it right, the player would at times be expected to take a loss for the other person (NPC) not having equal goods, or enough spare caps to square the deal. Odd as heck that they actually had haggling in Oblivion, but not FO3.

It doesn't matter. the amount of noise is irrelevant to the fact that
A. All cons make noise
B. No game dev would even penalize you for carrying currency needed to play the game in such a manner.

If by "trade equalizer" you mean, could buy something using only just caps..... then sure.

Not in the Fallout I played. I bought things using solely caps, no barter of physical items besides caps and whatever thing I bought.

Fact: 1 Fiction: 0

It should, it would make an incentive to not haul around a fortune through small towns. It should not only come with a stealth penalty for hauling it, it should increase the chances of getting robbed; and would encourage the PC/player to convert coins/caps to items that are less conspicuous, and that don't make as much noise.

Have you been in a casino town before?

Did you not notice the barter menu was designed to look like a wooden table; as in... "Bring what you have to the table, for trade"?
*Bethesda seems not to have; they just made a it a generic pop-up menu that itemizes a list for caps and takes out for items you select to purchase.
The rest of the games proper use item trade ~and include caps as an optional item.

Let's expand this issue to the dimension it deserves.

True. Fortunately, there's no need to restrict currency to only caps. I mean caps aren't exactly the most efficient currency. We also need to introduce a cap bank on the east coast that desperately fights against the establishment of any new kind of currency that would supersede the cap (because they sit on presses - am I overlooking something here? Do we need to introduce some kind of cap religion to be able to justify this in any way - which would be [censored] boring).

The logical next step is to give a sneak penalty for almost every item that makes any kind of noise. I agree with AP. Keep it simple and don't convert every phenomenon into all kinds of conceivable realism-inspired mechanics. Armor and weapons (Ripper, Chainsaw) could give a reasonable penalty to stealth - which is enogh imo.

Drastically reduce the pc's ability to make money. Money should be a resource to play with, something that imposes a challenge. Resource management, like Yan said.

Pickpockets and robbers definitely need to appear.

Every item (caps included) should have weight. If a cap weighs 0.005 lbs, that's cool.

Agreed, [...]