Not really, that was a tradeoff that needed to be made years ago, but not anymore. Modern rendering hardware can handle pretty much anything thrown at it, and it's all optimized to handle 3D meshes and textures and lighting and perspective. Isometric 3D¹ is a big step backwards in rendering for no gain in performance. Isometric is ineffective for outdoor scenes and even large interiors, because even movable-camera isometric lacks any simulation of perspective. This makes it a suitable choice only for games where the view is tightly constrained, and undesirable for games where a high, wide, and handsome view of the landscape is considered desirable.

Fallout 3 is on a double-layer DVD, and it doesn't even fill two-thirds of it. There isn't a disk space issue. It's more a matter of having main and side stories that need a large, rich world to play out in, because no game developer who wants to make a profit will sacrifice development cost and time to market for a game that is bigger than it needs to be.

¹True isometric projection (in which the Cartesian axes make 120-degree angles with each other) has never been practical for raster displays, because anything parallel to the XY plane axes suffers badly from aliasing. A pseudo-isometric projection in which the camera elevation is reduced to 30 degrees gives much better results. It is the latter which is commonly called "isometric", even though it is not.

I dont think we have to forget Isometric.

But I'm also not in favour of tying the artists hands. Perspective isnt as important to me as the story.

If the developers in the future think their story is best told Isometric, then by all means they should do it.

OTOH, if they think the story is best told First Person (and FO3's world showed how much that can add to the game when you see those landmarks through your characters' eyes) then they should do that.

Lets not tell the artist how to paint - lets just buy him canvas and paint and judge it when its done.

Provided he doesn't leave the damn painting unfinished.

I don't think it's so much a question of performance and rendering potential. But what a developer can achieve with the time they have. And focusing on a rich and interactive game environment is all well and good provided there's enough time to include everything else. Fallout 3 to me seemed on the whole an unfinished product. Most FPS' can look amazing because there's little that needs to be implemented gameplay wise. With a game like Fallout 3, which requires alot of attention to detail in all its aspects. Focusing on just one isn't going to do it any justice. Whilst some people find it great that you can view the Fallout world in a fully interactive 3D environment, I feel this is secondary to what has made Fallout a unique and infinitely playable series in the past. It's clear where Bethesda has its priorities for now. And I'm hoping they'll move the goal posts for their second instalment of the franchise.

There is nothing wrong with Isometric.

Think about people who have played pong for years and years. It's the same all these years and it is still being played.

I still play Minesweeper. Alot.

Though that probably says more about me than it does about the appeal of Minesweeper

Well, one example of a game where 2D isometric actually is a technical limitation is X-Com. (Playing Apocalypse right now - and frak if those brainsvckers aren't just the most annoying creature in a videogame ever...) That's an example, to me, where the gameplay has stood the test of time (I don't think better computing power could inherently improve upon the rules system,) but where the interface and presentation is starting to really show it's age.

I go through that series every couple of years, and what I've been noticing lately is that I'm really starting to fight how the tactical mode is presented in that game. Even if it were a fully 3D environment, you'd still want all the functionality of being able to view the game board on a level-by-level basis (and with a button to bring you back to a base 3/4 overhead view for ease of use.) But lately I'm noticing that I find it really hard to get a sense of the format of a lot of these structures, especially in Terror of the Deep and Apocalypse which has more complicated floorplans. The full view is pretty much useless beyond eye candy, because it cuts off a lot of your view, but it's necessary to get an overview of how the game board is constructed.

I find I'm constantly switching over all the views for each turn just so I can get a handle on what's going on, and wishing that I could just take a 3D camera through the level and pick my own angle on the action. It would make figuring out line of fire a whole lot easier, for one (not to mention being able to actually toss a grenade without running into obstruction errors all the time.) Throw in the lighting effect that you get playing darkened areas in the first two games in the series, and it starts to get very confusing.

With the original Fallouts this is not so much of a problem - everything takes place on the same plane, so height is not really much of a consideration. But at the same time, that's kind of a limiting factor. I would love to see some of these old turn-based gems updated for the modern age (or best yet - a completely new installment that retains the original ruleset,) but I'd much rather see a fully 3D version than an update that kept the 2D isometric format. I think it would be a missed opportunity.

Turn-based is a design consideration and not a technical limitation, certainly. But I think in some cases, the ways in which these older games are presented certainly are. These days you can get the visual fidelity and detail that you could only achieve with 2D animation back in the day, with the added bonus of being able to freely view the action without having to fight the interface to such a degree. A complicated, multi-level floorplan is always going to be confusing in a game like XCom or Fallout, but I think full 3D would help to alleviate a lot of that.

That's a great post, NCD. And I agree 100%; I'd love to see a new X-Com game come out, with a fully 3D client - still the same general "overhead" view, just with a free-moving camera.

No, quite simply I've never liked isometric, I bypassed a lot of top name games over the years because they were done isometric, I guess I'm just a true 3D "perspective" fan.

As I said, 3D vs. 2D has nothing to do with perspective.

Actually no, that makes you somebody living in denial. Isometric is a certain view. Top down that is. "True 3D"? Sounds like pure [censored] to me, since 3D's only advantage over 2D is that you can turn the camera around and look at stuff.
Ever played Warcraft 3, it is set with Isometric as default with several minor capabilities to adjust the camera(from 2003 also if i remember correctly).

I guess I forgot "IMHO"

Fallout shipped in 1997 as did http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8cQhr0eobw&feature=related/.

It was possible at the time to create a 2.5d Isometric sprite engine with a rotatable camera as was done in DK (and that could even go totally first person), I don't know why they didn't do it with Fallout.

In 1998 Interplay shipped both "Fallout 2" and "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Zy37JwCxs". Again they kept to the same format, but they certainly had other options. [Its interesting to me that DBtS' combat puts Oblivion's combat to shame, and fully achieves what Fallout 3 does not in terms of targeting enemy limbs and dismemberment.]

There's more than that. It also aids in animation as well as what kind of lighting you can achieve ~not to mention scaling it to the desired pixel resolution. Personally, if it doesn't affect gameplay one way or the other, then I couldn't care less if its 3d, 2d, or 2.5d.

Once upon a time fixed isometric may have been more of a limitation than a design choice. And whilst alot more is possible in this day and age, I don't think games have to conform to being rotational observational 3dimensional wizardry all of the time. A developer could still benefit from a fixed perspective. What annoys me in most FPPs are airwalls, a section of the game I cannot access because it's nothing more than scenery. Yet in a games like Fallout, which are arguably alot more restricted, I never got the impression I was being held back from going anywhere.

In this repsect I feel fully interactive 3D environments still aren't upto scratch with development and engine resources. They take up too much of it. And then it essentially becomes a limitation of choice. That will likely be remedied in the years to come, provided advancements aren't so focused on visual gratification like they are in today's gaming world.

... that's just the 3D version of "you have reached the edge of the playable area of this game. Please turn back."

In F1 and F2, that was the edge of the overland map.

I think the source of your problem isn't the "airwall" itself, it's that you can SEE past the demarcating line even without being able to GO past it ... unlike an overhead map, where the visible AND the accessible cut off at the exact same time.

And short of an infinitely-large gameworld (ha!), or equally-arbitraty (and immersion-disrupting) "big cliffs in every direction" hard-wall boundaries ... I just don't see that being fixable in the foreseeable future.

I personally have never played the first Fallout's, and don't plan too. I prefer the way it is, and i doubt Bethesda will send Fallout back to what it was now.

That's true, but I guess I just don't think the portrayal of most games today are as 'cutting edge' as some people would think. And you're right, it's completely psychological on my part, but that's enough to make me consciously aware of it, which is when I hit the boundary between freeroam and restricted play, though I'm aware these kinds of restrictions need to be put in place simply because of resources both in the development stage and in how the current platforms handle the product. I guess I'm just very interested in an age where all the right boxes can be ticked without the compromises. I don't see why a game with FO3s scope can't be improved upon resource and capability wise 10 years from now. But then it's just a comparative argument of what people would want FO1 & 2 to be now

I understand they are limitations of today, rather than development blunders, and capabilities of today can at least pass these choices off as successful, as they deserve to be from what I've seen. Whilst an infinitely-large gameworld would never be a successful achievment over any length of time, the content within those worldly boundaries could hopefully become seemlessly integrated into eachother within a few generations.


Well that's your prerogative. Hate the series love the game huh

Actually this was solved way back in the days of 'Bards Tale' and 'Eye of the beholder'. Its a simple solution too. Both had an endless [wrapping] world.

In the modern case... after a point, just procedurally generate an infinite wasteland and track the distance/time traveled and require that much time/distance to travel back (to the world). In fact... I bet its not so hard to do that in such a way as to simulate the distance between two towns by requiring X amount of distance through the wastes before bringing the town into view. If they had done something like that then the player could have had the choice to fast travel (via Overland map), or walk it themselves and possibly stumble across actual special encounters.


You have to wonder at the reason they'd part with so many million dollars for the IP and the name when all they essentially used were the BOS, the power armor, and the Vault boy. The games have an earned reputation. Restricting your experience to only the third of three, is much like deciding to watch only Highlander 3 and passing on 1 & 2.

Both these points came to mind, I don't know why I didn't mention them.

It would make alot of sense to create a temporary 'cell' between more pominent locations, with a spawning environment (much like Daggerfall perhaps? from what I've read at least). This would even go as far as to create a greater sense of longevity as every game for every person on every playthrough would have a greater emphasis on difference. And judging by the amount of unessential locations in FO3, it's not like people would be missing out on valuable questing in relation to these 'disposable' locations not spawning. It's also alot more convincing in a series like Fallout because the world has essentially been erased anyway.

Vote else.

2d is inefficient in this day and age. 3d can achieve the same effects with lower CPU utilization and more detail, due to being offloadable to the GPU. 2d is handdrawn, CPU intensive, and subject to time/budget constraints due to the need for every single thing to be drawn frame by painstaking frame.

3d is quite capable of top-down views, or 3/4 perspective, with detail and fluidity so good that it's indistinguishable, such as the last game from Ensemble. Can't remember it's name, Age of Empires successor, set in "America" tied to Europe. It was done in 3d.

First of all, that sounds boring...at lest as boring as overland travel in the earlier Fallouts, except worse, because you would be walking, (if you didn't fast travel, like you did in the early FOs, and if you did, what's the point of generated fluff content anyway) in an area that would have very little to explore.

Exploration is one of the keys to my enjoyment of FO3. Those "unessential" locations may be seen as such by folks who enjoy quest driven gameplay, but I love finding those locations and finding out the little histories they provide.

So, nope, I like it the way it is. If you ant random encounters, ala FO1/2, then have them when you fast travel, like in Fo1/2. That's easy enough.

It might sound boring to you, but I think it would combat one of FO3s main problems with having too much going on. Fast travel could simply be an improved system that FO1/2 employed back in the day with encounters filling in for the spawns. Whilst still leaving people able to travel the wasteland (wasteland being the most important term) for the chance to find that something special out in the vast wastes (and they would seem vast even within the same boundaries of FO3s gameworld I imagine) it could also give encounters enough of an importance to bring back some survivalist skills, either universally with outdoorsman or otherwise, but that's purely secondary and not really part of my debate.

It's not a case of players being quest driven or otherwise, those unessential locations will still be findable, with all those little histories you love, though there'd be a chance to find alot more of them, because they wont all be packed into a small gameworld, you can be walking along and in the distance fades in one of these unessential locations, and plenty more in its place throughout the course of your travels.

Random encounters exsist in FO3, there's no reason why this can't extend to flavour locales.

There isn't any vast wastes, and there certainly wasn't in FO1/2 either. There was a substantially meaningless map that did nothing but simulate, in a poor way, time and space. Fast travel in FO3 essentially simulates the same thing, but with the great bonus of actually being able to walk through fully rendered countryside. Going back to the islands of content in an empty sea of blackness of FO12/ would be a leap backwards. We don't need empty and pointless space. If anything, we need more of what FO3 provides: large game play areas, fully rendered and populated with content.

Ok, that's not an idea for you, fair enough. But I think it would be an improvement. You think I'm pro nothingness wastes, and if so you've missed my point entirely. I would have thought an idea like that would have nothing but a good reception to the exploration junkies among us. You can only discover a location once if it's apart of the set. The locations within that set being limited also. But that's what you like, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not suggesting a return to form with FO1/2 so far as bringing back the fast traveling aspects of those titles as an 'option' for fast travel. Whilst also incorporating a spawning environment for those intent on physically walking everywhere. I felt cheated with FO3s fast travel system, I cannot spend real-time hours getting from A - B, there are only so many hours in a real-world day, 24 in fact, and I can't devote most of them to traveling a digital wasteland, I at least would want an interactive option for fast travel, whilst also being able to explore a randomly generating wasteland on foot if I so choose. I'm pro-choice on this matter, incase that wasn't clear before.

definitely 3d. i actually dont mind isometric view games its the lates fad with third person over the shoulder views that drives me nuts. it turned resident evil 4 into an ok game when it would have been awesome had they give a first person option.

as far as getting a game in first person to have large scale i would simply point to world of warcraft or Lotr online. they are both significantly larger in size than oblivion or fallout 3. if a developer made a game that size for single player then indeed they would have a huge world on there hands. both of those mmorpgs have larger open areas with fewer details likes rocks and tree in them. i am perfectly willing to accept a little less clutter and detail for a larger world size.

Boring to you then ~point conceded; However I'd say it would seem quite like they did in Arcanum and both modes of travel would be optional, and they could have salted the wasteland with special encounters that one only finds if they actually stumble across it in the wastes.

You understand that the suggestion was [originally] to remove the "air-walls" found in Fallout 3 [and Oblivion]. The idea that it could be extended upon to create plausible distances in the game was just a thought (a cool, and welcome one IMO).

I disagree ~mainly because the map existed, the locations were accessible, and if you dropped stuff, and traveled a few hours, that stuff was not littering the ground in the new location. (besides, all the land looked much the same anyway, and was not intended to be of interest ~that's what the specials and randoms were for).

I don't understand why you view it thus, but its your opinion ~which we are all welcome to our own.

Perhaps I've not played enough, but I was under the impression that Fast travel was bypassing the walk entirely.

Again I don't get it... The empty barren wasteland is ... is...


To make it full of interesting sights and encounters kind of defeats the point of its name no? But the idea of a few dozen special encounters scattered across the expanse (like an Easter egg hunt) is IMO kind of cool.