Would you sacrifice detail for size? Would you rather have an explorable map comparable to something like Borderlands (in size - not style or gameplay). Is it necessary to be able to pick up every spoon and coffee cup? Would you trade the clutter for vehicles?

I'd like a number of smaller hubs of extreme detail (not just visual) scattered around a wasteland that actually feels like one. However, the point of size is moot if the content doesn't deliver.

When you say a wasteland that feels like one what do you mean? I wish there was more wandering - I want to get lost in the game, physically lost with no idea where I am. You can see the strip pretty much from Goodsprings. I would like some huge tracks of land, maybe sparsely populated save for the plant life and bugs. Throw in the occasional POI like a caravan and I would be a happy wanderer.

I prefer FNV/FO3 style worlds.

Borderlands is huge and full of very little that interest me.

I picked a larger wastleand.

but i would much rather have at least 15 settlements that feel like settlements. Not 3 huts and 10 people walking around.

skyrim's holds and town felt way too small. at least make one with 60-70 houses with a ton of people.

I mean that it doesn't feel like a wrecked suburb where everybody is a neighbor or a miniaturized acted themepark (like FO3 and NV), that it looks and feels like an actual wasteland. It shouldn't be cramped up with all kinds cool™ [censored] one minute walk from one to another throughout the whole map. That means that I can (and sometimes should) walk long patches through nothing (because there needs to be nothing there, it's a wasteland). How the different gameplay elements come in to play with that sort of thing is another matter, but just like in Fallout and Fallout 2 you hoofed for days/weeks in a direction and possibly encountered nothing at all (or possibly you did while hoping you wouldn't) until you finally reached a settlement, that's approximately how it should be.

This, basically. Have a few very detailed towns and cities, some generic destroyed areas, and a lot of generic wasteland.

I kinda wanna pick up forks and coffe cups and take 3 days (real time) to get across the map .. Though places quests in that area would be impossible.. If it was hub and only hub design.. Where the quests are only found in the hub.. Maybe they should hire one person to place the cups and forks while the rest of the team just builds the world . I want a world 4x the size of Skyrim with forks and cups.. Its not 3 days walk but its enough distance to keep towns apart.. Maybe 5x .. Or 6x.. Though 3 days walk is just no quests and borderlands as someone above mentioned..

^

I'd also like to add that I HATE their overuse of 'kits' to design their worlds as it is super lazy and ends up making everything look like a rearranged version of something else. For some reason, their kits are also very buggy and at times cause actors to fall through or get stuck.

None of those options in the poll apply to me.

Yeah, the poll seems pretty inappropriate and done out of anger more than interest in opinion.

I favor the Fallout 3 and NV route of keeping your sphere of influence local. Your not going to walk anywhere further away than a single city and/or surrounding suburbs in a reasonable time frame anyway. I don't favor the inclusion of vehicles, i dont favor huge maps full of "generic wasteland" to fill it up and stop it from being "cramped up with all kinds cool? [censored]", i dont favor having the game take place over an area covering many states but only having 6 or 8 places that are important or even in the same place when you come back. I didnt like Borderlands and oddly enough it was recommended to me by someone who said "if you like Fallout try Borderlands".

In Fallout 3 i had a sink full of dirty dishes, including plates, forks, knives, spoons and a couple cups. I also had a "recyclable bin" with some bottles and cans in it.(occasionally the box would go back to its original spot leaving my floor covered in refuse)

How much detail do you want to sacrifice and how much generic wasteland would you want to replace it with OP? I mean...enough to "get lost in"? Thats alot.

Agreed.

Detail all the way, maybe not in the sense of picking up every coffee cup but having proper seasonal system and weather that effects what crops are growing and caravan routes.

Open worlds today look great but they don't really operate or behave like cohesive logical worlds rather just playgrounds with cool stuff too see and FONV is a culprit of this as well it has no seasons or weather systems either which for a game as cohesive as FONV it's a bit silly.

A video I done on the matter - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LurGtAAh5lA

Size isn't much of a factor anymore honestly, dev engines are so big now they could make it as big as they

wanted to. If they actually do that is a completely different story. Btw this is basically just another vs

thread. And one that just so happens to fall under FO4 suggestions so imo it needs to be deleted, just

stirring up more animosity and anger. Poor poor mods, I can't even begin to imagine how insane all of this

stuff is driving them.

*I want a wasteland that takes me three real days to walk across!*

In the games before Bethesda, the PC had to brave the wastelands; and was on a tight time budget; they HAD to get back with the machine part, or their family/community would die.

Walking from the vault to the Brotherhod of Steel's bunker was a ten day walk through the mountains if you went the straight & "short" path between locations.

Now the way Fallout worked it did not need to depict the trip every footstep of the way. Travel on the overland map was pretty self explanatory, and the speed you achieved during a day depended on the terrain you were crossing. You could however choose to look at the land at any point in between A or B, and the game would show you an explorable abstract of it; you were always at risk on the overland map of having good, bad, indifferent; or plain bizarre encounters while traveling.

This was lost in Fallout 3 ~no really, it was (even though FO3 does depict every footstep of the tedious trip, unless you use the map travel option ~which comes with no risk at all).

The game Arcanum (also made by the crew that made Fallout), improves on the system, and the map plays like Fallout 1, but with two really significant changes... The map can have impassable obstructions that must be dealt with when you arrive at them; and the entire continent can be explored in real time ~and I've read that it takes about 48 [real] hours to walk from coast to coast.

What's spectacularly fortunate in Fallout, is that the world is a wasteland ~ie.depopulated and ruined. It actually makes sense that there is nothing out there for a week's walk in any direction. The technology is possible now to create a Rogue-like Wasteland in 3D/FPP, and salt it with good, bad, indifferent; and plain bizarre encounters. The trick is simply to make the local area around a major settlement resemble the areas around Megaton/Rivet City/ Ten Penny/ Paradise Falls... etc (meaning effectively like FO3 plays everywhere in the game), while the true wastelands extend off into the distance ~a weeks trek to get to another major settlement... Kind of like an amplified Oblivion, where you stumble out of the wastes into a slum surrounding a small, central city... Like the Hub, or Junktown.

Quests should mostly be local, but a few involve arduous travel to another settlement, or delving into the wasteland to return with something, or finding a place lost out there ~Like the "Sierra army Depot"... So your PC is a week from town, low on water, and just over the next ridge they see a fenced off area with a steel compound surrounded by some broken tanks, and six dead raiders cut to pieces near a hole in the fence ~months old carnage. What do they do?
(Or perhaps they were sent there... given the latitude & longitude on their pip, and they had to explore to find it; they have a security badge that is supposed to get them in the door, past the auto gun turrets)...

If the game encouraged exploration (FPP), but made it clear that the wasted/ruined/land was VAST, and that the PC can do most of that traveling as a rote forced march that you don't need to sit through ~but there was still the risk of that travel... The game could work quite like the originals, but better.
Allowing full exploration ~of sometimes empty places ~as they should be, but sometimes not; sometimes the place is really unusual. In Fallout 1 & 2, there was an awful lot to explore, but most of it was near a town or military installation [town]; sometimes it was in a cave; or a vault. The common understanding was that it was not sensible to assume that every square inch of the wasteland was a fun part of the sandbox; some simply needed to be passed through; though the game would stop the trek if the PC encountered anything of interest along the way.

And so... like every fallout before it, the wastes could be explored, but the player knows that the meat of the game is not usually found in the wasteland, and should have no qualms about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbigblL3wbU the vast distances between major towns; and gets to watch as their PC traverse the bombed out wastes along the way... I'm not sure if many noticed, but the bombed out landscape has far more of an impact when seen from above, than from the ground.

But don't mistake what I've said for wanting only map travel... No, they should be able to stream in the wasteland world as the PC walks though it, complete with old houses (with stories), and secret food caches (like in "the Road" film), and wandering monsters; or just people.

I don't see why they don't simply stream in a procedural interim landscape in between their choice set-piece locations... In the Fallout series, the wasteland might as well be outer space, and the towns planets or mining asteroids... No one playing a space sim would complain of a week's travel though empty space... And that's exactly what the wasteland is supposed to be ~usually; but sometimes it's not... and that's what's cool about it. In Fallout the player would finish up loose ends and get supplies before making the arduous trek to the next major location; this whole aspect is gone from Bethesda's interpretation of the series, because EVERYTHING is a short walk over the hill. This really needs to change IMO.

*And as a side effect, it creates a real-time use for vehicles... So that the PC could drive across the wastes; and have protection and different chance for random encounters; and be able to haul a great load of weight on the trip.

They have Skyrim as example for the map; why not do that in Fallout (restore some of what it always was); only... http://s271.photobucket.com/user/Gizmojunk/media/FO_3DMAP_zps59341745.mp4.html, and adjust the speed depending on terrain... this stuff isn't hard to do.

What exactly do you mean by sacrifice detail for size? You mean, like having dozens of followers that have no personality and no depth to them (Uncle Todd's words) for the sake of having many?

Good point.. There wasn't much detail in Skyrim's world which was strange. Hopefully there is a reason for that and I am confident Fallout 4 will have much more detail than Skyrim.. They have a lot more capital to throw around and hopefully they aren't spending it on hype and advertising.. Since that is just a waste.

Why is it an either-or poll? That's a false dichotomy. A larger gameworld to maintain verisimilitude doesn't preclude a high level of detail.

You and I are on the same page. The hard part is making it fun from a gameplay perspective. Fallout 1&2 did it well by zooming out and only coming when there was something do to. Quest for Glory 3 (for the older kids among us) did it well too. It kept the sense of scale without resorting to locking down the walk button while you make a sandwich kind of gameplay. Skyrim was way too small for my liking. The biggest threat to the empire is populated by about 200 people? It should take several days, not hours (in game time) to walk from town to town.

We're getting to the point where they could actually make a wasteland that's big and detailed. And for the angry anti borderlands people - I'm not saying that FO should mimic the style or atmosphere of BL, just the fact that the towns in BL were unique and different, containing the small details that many people enjoy in these games, but you weren't able to manipulate them as much. Big, more unique world, fewer forks.

There could be three ways of traveling.

Manual hoofing (in FPP) would take the most time, and it could (intentionally) have the possibility of being boring through the player encountering nothing at all. But there are specific feats that could enhance the fun; like being more likely to encounter something special, being able to more easily avoid hostile encounters (because you see them coming - some of the at least), there could even be a system to provide mirages that could potentially trick the player or for the opposite lead them to something worthwhile, there could be random encounters (like the mirage) specifically open for that way of traveling and that way of traveling alone.

FO/2 style map traveling would be the (much) faster way, and considered to be more like rushing - and hence the avoidance of any encounter (except for perhaps non-hostile ones) would be based on chances dictated by the characters skill. Once again, this method could be encouraged (additionally to being faster) by unique encounters and features.

And a third way could be an opened by quest train route that goes from town to town for a fee and has (few) additional refueling stations that could work as travel stops too (the number of which could also be quest related); it would work as the instateleport travel where the bonus is speed and caveat is no encounters to stop for (good or bad). A neat little bonus could be an ability to sit through the train travel and watch the scenery, where you could possibly spot some (once again, few of them unique to this way of traveling) encounters and risk jumping off a moving train to check them out and the train of course wouldn't stop to wait (so you paid a full trip and still jumped off in the middle of nowhere probably less than half way off to where you were headed).

There are plenty of possibilities to explore different ways of making the gameplay in regards to maptraveling fun and engaging if there is willingness to do so. Alas, I don't think something like this will ever happen, nor the bigger map. We'll most likely get the usual treatment of these things.

I'm probably going against the grain here, but I don't get why the size of the map or the way in which we traverse it is being spoken about before actually making it logical and suspend our disbelief as an actual world not just a playground that never rains has no seasons but has some cool mountains that we can explore in an open world or node system...

I want the world to be exactly that a world I want a food chain, seasons, weather and having merchants inventory change on these things rather than having a game based around hoover dam in a place that never rains...with thriving agriculture.Obviously we can't perfectly recreate a world but i'd like worlds to make a solid attempt at suspending our disbelief not as playgrounds but as WORLDS.The rest is superfluous in comparison IMO.

They are different issues (while one could say that the way you travel the world and how compressed it is in scale are very much a part of building the suspense of disbelief, just in a more practical way). Travel mechanics have a constant and straight impact on gameplay whereas whether or not it rains does not. Wouldn't you say that weather mechanics - being just a visual flavor - are rather on the superfluous side in comparison to gameplay mechanics (while not denying eithers importance in its own right)?

I'm not one to argue a bigger map for the sake of bigger map, there's no point in that; how the game plays and feels like is what matters regardless of if the physical map is bigger or smaller. But even so, the way the gameplay aspect in this regard right now is handled is not very good (the miniaturization, the streamlining, the blunt simplicity, etc) and this also affects the verisimilitude factor, the believability and feel of it all.

Let's be realistic here. FO4 will be the same size as FO3/FONV with slightly better graphics.

We could also be "realistic" and say FO4 will be the exact same game Beth has done for the past 8 years (or, if broadening the scope a bit, the same game it's been doing over and again since Arena or Daggerfall) with few additional surface level quirks and heavyhanded streamlining for each subsequent title, but perhaps the point of bringing these matters up is to say that that probably should not be the case.