Hello everyone,

As an avid player of Fallout 3, I do have a few major concerns and questions. I am certain that there are others who have wondered about this but were reluctant to ask. Here are the questions:

1. Are we going to see a substantial improvement in aiming?

Elaboration: On PC, aiming with mouse feels like an extension of your hand, whereas on consoles it feels very unintuitive (at least for me). The sluggishness made me rely heavily on V.A.T.S. The situation is different from a console version of a FPS. Playing games like CoD, BFBC2 etc one still feels like snappiness of the controls even though they are less erratic than when played with mouse. When I played Fallout 3 on PS3, I felt as if the speed of the movement of my weapon (even with very high sensitivity setting) was nearly half the speed of the enemies' movement and locomotion. It was highly irritating in close quarter combat with multiple enemies.


2. As Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax has acquired id software, will there be an Oblivion or Fallout game to utilize id's latest engine, id Tech 5?

Elaboration: Rage is looking fantastic and it is more than a FPS. The "mega-texture" tech is something I assume might do wonders for a RPG with such vastness. The only real concern is that people get really comfortable with making money in a certain way, the idea of taking risks or spending more money than one has to goes out of the window. I am not going to name names, but certain companies have shown that they care only for profit with numerous (sometimes annual) sequels with slightly improved tech since people will buy them regardless. I really hope to see a Fallout game dressed in id tech 5 one day.

Todd Howard talks a little about it in this interview.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-08-16-bethesdas-todd-howard-interview?page=2

Hmmm, Id Tech 5 engine is good for enclosed spaces, not a sandbox game. And for controllers... well you could use a mouse on consoles.

Controller aiming will always be inferior to keyboard and mouse. There's nothing they can do about that.

As aforementioned, the feel of aiming in Fallout 3 is highly sluggish compared to other fps such as BFBC2 which also run at around 30 fps with a controller. It sometimes feels like an annoying design choice rather than a side effect of some sort.

Kind of proves my point. Overhauling for this gen then seems out of question.

I couldn't disagree more. On any game i can manage it i use a 360 controller with my pc, ergonomics and immersion are far more seamless. In terms of speed and efficiency i find the controller to have far more advantages. It does abysmally in terms of hot keys and other mapped tools, so for some games it simply isn't an option. There are times i prefer a keyboard but the reasons definitely aren't gameplay (foxfire and the like). I also like to play with code occasionally and i switch between the two on the fly when i need a distraction (nothing takes your mind off C++ or python than busting some heads). After having toyed with programs for controller scripts as much as i can, it is hard to make a standard setting that will work on any system. I am reminded why consoles with inferior hardware can work so well, since they are all the same you know exactly how far it can be pushed and do excellent things within those limits. So to break it down, i would rebut your concern with "aiming" perhaps sometimes a keyboard is more convenient, but in terms of precision pixel perfect control that depends entirely upon the user and settings and not the format (keyboard mouse/controller).

Fallout 3 is NOT a FPS. It's a Action RPG with FPS elements (hence the VATS system.) That's probably why aiming seems to be so poor with controllers.

As for the ID Tech 5 stuff... if they do it with Fallout, they'll likely do it with TES, since the Fallout system is based on the TES Gamebryo engine. Furthermore, the first few games they make with the ID Tech 5 will be crappy, since it probably won't be ID working on it, but Bethesda Softworks, who do not know how to use the ID Tech 5 system effectively. They could solve the problem by hiring out ID to make the next Fallout, but that would be crappy too since ID software generally makes FPS, not RPG games.

It's kinda like asking the Mercury specialist to make the next Lincoln model because both are owned by the same company.

So, for your questions...

I can't say yes or no to the first since it's Obsidian making New Vegas, not Bethesda. It's possible that there's an inherent limitation in the Gamebryo engine (in which the answer will be no) or that Bethesda didn't concentrate too much on it (in which case the answer is maybe, as Obsidian may not care too much about aiming speed as well.)

The second... well, not gonna say no, but I will say it's unlikely since Bethesda seems to like the Gamebryo engine, and Fallout 3 and New Vegas seem to be following the route of the Elder Scrolls series. Both series of games are designed to be highly modular (as you can tell by the amount of mods made by the development software released for both) and it's unclear if the ID tech 5 engine can handle the modularization that Gamebryo can.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/111/1112464p1.html

This was the article I was looking for at first. They will not be using the ID per Todd Howard for the reason Silvade said above.