After playing Fallout New Vegas, I've realized their was a lot of places with big spaces that went to waste. Like for example the Lucky 38 had a lots of space but it all went to space because of Mr. House didn't allow anyone to go into the Casino accept the Courier. Imagine how awesome it would be if there were tons of people, lots of people in the cocktail lounge, lots of rooms. I'm happy that luxury casino with the masked people didn't go to waste, that was enjoyable. Another place that had big space that went to waste was Freeside, basically half of Freeside had boarded up. There was tons of places that could've been restaurants, motels, drug stores, jail, small times casinos other than just one, food stores, town hall, and heck even a school.

I hope in Fallout 4 all the big places have some purpose and won't just be boarded up like in Freeside.

Well we need some big open spaces for the settlement building system.

I'm all for more things to explore, but on the other hand this leaves spaces for modders to work with and flesh out.

Bethesda get's better with the design of inner spaces/dungeon etc. with each game they make. I've recently replayed Morrowind and many of those dungeon now look rather simplistic. But in the end the designers can only work so many hours and add things before the gamers get to anxious and want to play.

Really? Because I found the dungeons in Skyrim to be awfully redundant and simplistic in nature as well.

@Zerginfestor I kind of thought the same too, Skyrim also really lacked dungeons as well. Or I probably haven't found them yet.

They were more unique then Oblivion's....In a way....but they got very repetitive and were very simplistic. Lets not talk about the puzzles that solved themselves...

Compare them to a dungeon in Morrowind and tell me it's not huge progress.

After a while, You kind of tend to sway away from ANY cave or dungeon, only forcing yourself into one because of a damn quest.

Oh god, the puzzles...one of those "Why even bother setting this up here? It's like you're trying to tell me I'm too stupid to complete a challenging puzzle" moments.

@Blinzler, I'd say it's not a huge progress at all. You move a bit around a small, enclosed region, avoid some obvious traps or just face-tank them and yawn. Then you follow the path, which does a special U-turn, face some big baddy/miniboss/mob, grab some pretty bleh treasures, and then pull a lever, which basically connects you to the very entrance or makes a convenient exit. Every dungeon in Skryim focuses on this concept, with only a handful that offers unique loot. It really feels like they're focusing on people with ADD, they gotta keep moving and not once backtrack otherwise they'll get upset.

We could always go back to the Daggerfall era where you could literally get lost in a cave/dungeon for example takes me 25 minutes to clear a cave/dungeon over 40 minutes to use the map to get me the hell out of it.

Biggest part of that problem is the lack of a useful map.

Perhaps they should blend it together, because in Skyrim, you didn't need a map at all. You knew in the back of your head after a third time in a dungeon that there will always be an 'exit route'. It's like taking a 2spooky4me tour. Bring in the Daggerfall regions, but actually have a nice map :3

I could but it would be a lie

Can we get back on topic? I don't want my thread to be locked because we were talking about the Elder Scrolls, not trying to be a be a jerk but please can we get back on topic...

With every item in the game now being useful I don't think going into areas in fallout 4 will be a waste unless you don't find what your looking for.

part of the 'useless' spaces was down to hardware and software limitations.

Fo4 should be running on a 64 bit system which should drastically improve the amount of crap they can cram into a cell. Potentially it could be near limitless depending on your hardware. lets hope they went that route. all the open spaces can be added to via mods. so i'm not really worried about empty areas nearly as much as i am worried about the size of the map.

More fleshing out of the world is always good in my opinion.

Er... the Lucky 38 made perfect sense. It wasn't empty for 'no reason' it DID serve a purpose, namely letting the player know that all was not well in Denmark. If the devs want to use emptiness as a means of communicating something then they should.

there will be mods for thoes big open spaces....

Lucky 38 was empty on purpose, what you propose would completely change it and turn it into just another casino.

But Freeside felt pretty empty, yeah. I blame consoles' tiny memory.

there were mods for both the Lucky 38 and free side on PC. . .

maybe its just me, but i feel snip alot of the complaining seems to disregard the idea of mods entirely, alot of the so called negatives being brought up are exactly what I would expect from bethesda. I don't want a completely closed off fully engineered game, it needs to have room for modding.

I have a faint memory of a mod that would populate Freeside a bit and I remember not being very impressed with it, heh. But that was relatively shortly after release, I'll check Nexus for my next play-through.

Being moddable doesn't excuse the game from having content. Otherwise i agree.

I still LOVE Oblivion's Ayleid ruins a lot more than many of Skyrim's dungeons, even though a common complaint was that they all looked the same

Maybe for you. Me, I explored every one of 'em. I love seeing a new "entrance" icon on the local map in Beth games.

(Not that Fallout 3 was lacking in places to check out, but the http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout3/mods/5573/? mod was great fun. )

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On the main topic - yeah, that was one of the things that disappointed me in NV. Not that big places like Lucky 38 weren't used (made sense, plotwise), but that so many of the little places were wasted. Enter some random building in the ruins outside Vegas, and all it had was the front lobby. Every hall & door out of there was collapsed. Only places that had a quest associated with it had much to them.

Of course, that wasn't Beth, that was Obsidian.