Neither am I. It's clear that we both have had very different experiences in playing our Fallout games.

Myself having similar in play and style of the early Fallouts, yourself not. Shrug.

Game experiences apparently differ from person to person depending on their approach to the game. Nothing can be categorically stated as being this or that ... it depends on each player's view and game-play.

... Somewhat proving my point that ...

Fallout 3 has pretty well all you want and can be played in any style and pace of your choice. It was an enhanced version of Fallout 1 and 2 and with the same kind of content and game-play.

It's up to the role player.

And that we would like more of the same style and game-play in Fallout 4.

I've made my point. I will leave you to it.

So I'm still stuck on this "open-world sandbox RPG without a Main Quest" concept. I think it might possibly have some legs, an opportunity to do something really different with the medium. Most RPGs tend to take a bit of a movie-style approach to their design (in that playing is at least somewhat akin to watching a really long movie, with some sidequests thrown in as a regular distraction.) For a game that's going to be essentially a collection of sidequests (or if you're making one without a main quest, I guess they'd all just be considered "Quests,") maybe a more episodic approach would be interesting.

(Disclaimer: by "episodic," I don't mean "Bethesda should make Fallout 4 one of those games where you buy tiny bits of the game for $10 a pop, with a new episode coming out every other month or so.) What I'm thinking of is a complete game that approaches it's design more as a TV series following multiple seasons, than a movie where it's really all just one long self-contained storyline.

Here's what I was thinking of: If we consider each (relatively) self-contained Quest as one episode in a series; then a string of them together could be considered a Season, complete with a Season Finale which will generally leave on a cliff-hanger and introduce slight changes to the paradigm, which will define what's going to happen in the next Season. All of the Quests could be divided into the various acts that would make up the game - at the start only a portion of them are available to the player. (Quests, that is - this is still an "open-world RPG" we're talking about, so there's no reason to arbitrarily bar the player from areas of the game's geography; and there's always plenty of dungeons in a Bethesda game, and all of those would be considered seperate from the Quests in the game.)

After playing through a certain amount of Quests, it would unlock a "Finale" sort of quest; which would roughly tie all of your adventures to that point together in some ingenious fashion, while slightly altering the world in some key manner. After that Finale Quest was finished, it would "reset" the world and open up a bevy of new quests. There'd be nothing keeping the player from holding off completing all of the possible Quests in a particular "season," but you wouldn't necessarily have to do them all in order to move on to the next one. (And it wouldn't necessarily have to always "wipe" all of the Quests you didn't happen to have finished, either.)

What this would serve as would be a useful way to allow the game to react to your character's decisions in meaningful ways. One thing that's often bugged me about RPGs in general is that there's often a sort of "hub" town that you tend to go revisit over and over again (in Fallout 3, that'd be Megaton or Tenpenny Tower, depending on where you house ended up being.) But after exploring the place once, and doing all of the quests there, no one really has anything left to offer you. The place gets a little repetitive once there's no more NPCs worth talking to. If the game sort of "updated" itself every few Quests, it could take into account the impact of the choices you made in those Quests - slightly changing the new ones to take into account the choices you've made, and allowing the NPCs to react to the same, as well.

Since it's an RPG without a Main Quest, this is something that could repeat itself ad infinitum (or at least until they stop adding DLC, of course.) Anyway, just an idea.

Vehicles please, in order of importance to me:



1.) The Motorcycle, light weight, uses less fuel than other vehicles.

2.) The Humvee, military version please, for when you have a group of people with you that need to shoot on the move. Much like Fallout Tactics, except that it would be more like Fallout 3. VATS in a vehicle anyone? I say yes!

3.) Armored Transports

4.) Something that flies.

5.) Bicycle

6.) Rollerblades

7.) Skateboard, and run down raider skate parks and competitions.

8.) Stilts

9.) Pogo stick

10.) Pony

11.) Robot dog

12.) Human slave

13.) Mutated mole rat

Yeah that about sums them up.

This would be a sight...

In a perfect world, and assuming Bethesda had unlimited resources at their disposal, I wouldn't mind seeing vehicles, as well. But I have to admit that's it fairly low down on my own list of priorities. The thing with adding a vehicle into a game like this is then you sort of have to make the world around being able to traverse it with a vehicle. If you were to just pop a vehicle into Fallout 3, for example - I'd have trouble seeing the point.

The places to explore in F3 are relatively dense. When I'm out exploring, I'm usually moving from one point of interest to another. At any given moment, there's probably something cool to check out a few miles down the road, but there's also going to be something just as interesting right within walking distance of where I am. If I had a car in Fallout 3, I can't imagine spending more than a few seconds in it at any given time; before I came to something else that required me to get out and explore on foot again. Sure, I could have used a car to get from one end of the map to the other (or just to get back from Megaton or something to the last place I'd been to - for more exploration,) but that's what fast-travel is for anyway.

I have to figure the only real reason to have vehicles in a game like this is to aid in exploration. And unless the world map is actually set up for a vehicle to be of some use in that regard, I can't think of any really compelling reason for why it would need to be included. And, of course, the problem with that is then you're going to have to put a lot of resoures into designing the game around this one feature, and making sure it works really well, etc. And frankly, I think their is likely better spent doing other things.

On the other hand, of course - it's not like I'd be crying foul if they just made another Fallout 4 and sort of happened to plop an optional vehicle quest into the game even though it was still something that was going to be more about being "neat" than useful. Even if it ended up being more of a hassle than it was worth (like in Oblivion, where I had fun riding a horse for the first couple of hours, but before long just went everywhere on foot because of the hassle involved,) I could just choose not to use it, and probably wouldn't think it was all that big of a deal.

In short: a vehicle in Fallout 4 isn't something I'd really insist that they take resources away from other improvements just so they could add it in; but if they did have vehicles in Fallout 4 (even if they turned out to be really poorly-implemented and something I saw as a waste of time,) it wouldn't be the sort of thing that I'd dedicated entire threads to complaining about...

Make it faster and easier for the player to
exit dialogue and make the perks,skills and
special points have more effect on the dialogues

and if the player chould maby invest in things like
shoops and towns to get some extra money whould be
nice too , and dont forget to put a thompson gun in the game
please, and have more money options, like a bottle cap is worth
1 bottle cap, but a metro ticket is worth 40 bottle caps
that way you dont have to carry 10000000000 caps ^_^

EDIT: and yea please keep the third person view
option too, and if you ask me a car or some kind of
PERSONAL transportation whould ruin the game,and
maby with a perk or some thing you chould make robots
over and over as they die as your companion, and maby
the robot is strong depending on the body,weapon AND
the computer chip that has the character of the robot on it
that way you dont have to cry every time it dies because
you can just take the chip out and put it in another one
, and a perk that slow downs the degradation of weapons
is cool too!

love you bethesda

make ALOT of options for dialogue
add at lease one vehicle, make it extremely hard to get, have upgrades, and by the time you have the best vehicle, you feel extremely rewarded about how far you've come
OPTION TO JOIN ENCLAVE/MAIN STORY'S ENEMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How about dirt bikes?

maby a more accurate kind of the 10mm Submachine Gun ?
maby one that has shoulder support, i think it looks really cool
but then i see that you hold the gun like its a pistol,it took all the
''cool'' away from it. and maby you can allso buy special bullets
that makes the guns more deadly ? , and it'd be cool to see more
people from other parts from the world like canada, and russia,

and not to sound like a fashion police or some thing, but can you have
more of the ''pretty'' uniforms, like the wasteland doctor fatigues suit ?
and more army gear that dosnt have metal on them, you know like cargo
pants and stuff,?? and also why was there no official ''loner'' home that you chould find or buy?
and one last thing, can you make radiation more deadly ? so that anti radiation perks are more
use-full

but any ways i know you guys are gona make fallout 4 the best game of 2010-3000 :fallout:

I want a strong legs perk that makes you jump twice as high and far.
And a 'human bullet' perk later, that makes you jump towards distant enemies,
so you can set them up from vats at a distance, and leap into a kill.

And hey, how about more face options? like freckles,
maby even body Structure

Body structure would be a plus. Tie it to stats...that would be interesting.

I think variations of body structure, tied to stats, would be an interesting trick, as well. Probably more important than the effect this would have being able to customize your PC to your heart's content, though, would be the improvement this would have on the NPCs you encounter in the game. It might be interesting to play an RPG where all the decrepit old people didn't still have the bodies of nubile young men and women in the prime of their life. (Or where at most the "fat guy" has a double chin, as well as a six-pack...)

heh, i want to make a build with bad posture, like me!

With Zenimax acquiring id software and by extension total access to id tech 5, I can only assume they intend to fully leverage that engine in future titles. Gamebrio has been bursting at the seams for years and needs desperately to be replaced, or else bethesda's future titles risk getting chewed up by the competion. They have an oprotunity there to have a toolset crafted by the authors of tech5, that will pefectly match their specific needs going foreward. Considering that a vehicle physics model is already in place for Rage, it'd provide an easy fix for vehicles in any future bethesda game.

Beyond that, the only real barrier I see to vehicles in a future Fallout game would be the design philosophy going into the settlements and wasteland. I agree that it wouldn't make any sense having them in the D.C. wasteland with it being so small and strewn with obstacles, but that design decision also played into the fact that it was traveled by foot (the two concepts playing off of eachother). But once you make the decision to have vehicles in game, you can start justifying things like greater distances between settlements and more navigable terrain. Plus, tech5 is entirely capable of displaying some pretty massive draw distances without sacrificing quality or creating nasty pop-in issues, which means it's nolonger necessary to craft the world in such a way that the line of sight is being constantly broken.

Just curious: who's the 'competition' exactly? Two Worlds? Gothic/Risen? or is it about shooters?

I think Dialogue must stay the same as in Fallout 3, dont make it bland so that the player can fill in the blanks, but let the writer come up with anything he wants. But, you must have choices in all styles: Yes, no, maybe later etc. IOr Good, Evil, Neutral. And never ever like 2 responses that are just both yes, as you sometimes had in Fallout 3.

Yeah I'm wondering that as well. As far as I know the most advanced engine used in RPGs is Gamebryo (and maybe Unreal 3.0). Gamebryo is a very versatile engine, so I don't see what the problem is. There's very few RPGs that look as good as Fallout 3. How good RPGs look when stacked up to shooters on the other hand doesn't matter at all; Fallout isn't supposed to be a shooter and thus isn't in competition with them.



That's going to happen sooner or later anyway.

Oh, I'm absolutely willing to bet that Bethesda is going to leverage the use of the Tech 5 technology in their future titles. I'm not terribly informed on the business side of things, so I could be wrong, but I'd imagine one of the benefits of owning a company that produces it's own graphics and physics engine is that you're then essentially getting all that technology for free. (Since you'd be licensing and paying for a product from a company whose profits go back to you, anyway.)

Adding the physics for vehicles probably wouldn't be much of a limitation, either. (Though truthfully, there was nothing stopping them from doing so with Gamebryo and the Havok physics, either - there's been a couple of racing games made with that combo; though I haven't played any, and can't say if they were any good or not...) And if they were going to have vehicles, they'd be able to make the game world from the ground up to incorporate that.

Still, though - more vehicles would mean (presumably,) a larger game map. And no matter what tech you're using to create that, someone's going to have to actually spend the extra time and resources on that larger game world, compared to the resources it took to create the one in F3. No matter how much you spread things out, it still equates to additional in-game area. And that means an opportunity cost: because those resources could go towards any number of other things, as well.

Like I said - if I was making a list of the priorities I, myself, would assign to this hypothetical Fallout 4, vehicles would be towards the bottom of that list. Simply because for myself, I'd rather those limited resources were put to use improving a number of other areas. But like I also said, it's not the sort of thing where I feel so strongly about it that I'd dedicate the rest of my life to criticisizing if they did decide to make that decision and add vehicles into Fallout 4 - at the cost of leveraging those resources towards other improvements.

I'd add to this that I don't really see competition in RPGs. I don't find myself choosing between RPGs much at all. I buy whatever looks interesting.

Same here, actually. As far as the real high-quality titles go, I don't see the RPG market as being terribly oversaturated in the same way that, say, the WWII shooter market is. As far as Western RPGs go, there's really only Bioware, Lionhead, and Bethesda that I can think of, with an occasional Might and Magic game making an appearance every few years. Now, I might have my preferences between those companies, but the fact is that none of these guys are putting out so many games at once that I've ever had to choose between them.

I mean, I own literally the entire catalogue of games from all three of the major players in the genre; at least going back a decade or so. And that didn't really take a ton of effort on my part, either. It's not like I've ever had to sit at the store pondering which RPG title I was going to buy - they're few and far enough between, for the most part, that I'll end buying them all, eventually.

I think the closest it ever came was between Fable 2 and Fallout 3, which came out at roughly the same time, as I remember. But even then it was more a matter of which one I bought first, rather than choosing one over the other.

Hmm... yeah, that statement doesn't make as much sense to me now that I have sleep and caffiene. I think when I typed that I was thinking in general terms of games that do some of the same things (not all of them, mind you), but do them better. Borderlands is obviously a better shooter than Fallout, but it's an rpg in only the sense that rpg's tend to have stats and level progression. It doesn't have a dialogue system, nor does it really have a plot of any kind, although these things could be improved in future releases. If, that is, Randy Pitchford had interest in that, which he doesn't. Rage is much in the same boat, but given that Zenimax owns id software, it isn't competition by definition. Regardless of whether Rage or Fallout does better, Zenimax still wins. From my perspective the only developer that is even remotely positioned to compete would be Bioware, but they're either dissinterested in the PA genre, or don't want to compete directly with the Fallout franchise.

I don't know. I think what I should have said was that Fallout needs something like tech5 in order to keep evolving their game engines. It's highly unlikely but entirely possible that there won't be any viable competitors in this or the next hardware generation, but they're still going to be working against the consumers perception of acceptable software stability, graphics performance, and overall featureset. As advanced as some people seem to think Gamebrio is, it wasn't designed to do everything that it's doing in Fallout and it shows when it has the sheer volume of bugs that it does. Anybody who's paid much attention to software developement should understand the value of scrapping outdated code and rewriting everything based upon current needs. I think as long as Falllout is defined as a game that straddles the line between the rpg and the fps, people will be asking for more refined and modern fps mechanics and gameplay, so this 'back to the drawing board' thing will eventually have to happen.

On nu_clear_day's comment about the increased costs that come with developing a larger game world, yeah he's right. But I'm still waiting to hear more about tech5's scalable terrain texture approach. If id can scale back the texture detail for a less bleeding edge game than Rage, thereby curbing the huge disc space requirements, their engine could be the perfect solution. Quickly roughing out huge and detailed textures is tech5's strongsuit, and it could reduce the time needed to produce large game maps.

Maybe for FO4 they could add the start your own civilization thing.....different breeds of dogs (if included)....maybe have a family that you start....your own group that helps you out whenever you need them like a clan....idk still would like to see it in New York (refering to my previous post) or maybe Japan.
Maybe better clothing choices too...instead of it being like a shirt n pants together maybe they could be separate and different variations too

Will FO4 be scaled?

Bethesda's game TES II: Daggerfall had a huge, too scale playing map. It took you 2 weeks IN REAL LIFE to walk across the game world! You just dont see that anymore. My point is that in FO3, i felt everything was to close together and cluttered. The point of the nuclear wasteland is to show us the horror and desolation that followed the war, and when it takes you only 10 minutes to go anywhere, and your fighting dreaded beasties of all kinds every 2 minutes along the way (ok thats an exaggeration) then it takes away from the whole atmospheric, empty wasteland feel!

I think the next FO game should have a way bigger map to add to the atmosphere. And for you boys out there that say 'I dont wanna spend a longtime traveling everywhere!" Dont worry! Once you find a location you could always just fast travel to it. In the end i think everything would balance out!

I'd rather have the FO1 and 2-style world map - main locations as separate nodes, with travel on the world map between them.