I just encountered a glitch in fallout 3 where Npc are teleported off of the playable map and into a blank layer, and can only be reached by jumping over the Megaton wall.. there is no way to get them back to where they belong (on ps3 anyway)


Npc's should have a place that is there initial spawn point and upon loading all npcs spawn at that place..

I am sure fallout 4 is going to be a great game but when you have a quest and the npc you need to talk to is in an unreachable place. This can be a big buz kill.


Every game has its bugs this is one bug that might be avoided though :3

I don't imagine having the exact same bug across two separate games is even likely.

Not unless they're building on top of Fallout 3.

I think that NPC AI should check if they are in inaccessible areas, and teleport to an area adjoining the area where the PC is; but not a fixed respawn. In Witcher, they had a lot of NPCs all exiting the same doors in Vizema, in the mornings; sure, it looked like a boarding house, but it was also a non-player accessible door, and looked pretty bad IMO.

In Oblivion a hotel in IC was the drop point, problem was that you could get enemy npc even daedra dumped in where.

However this was only if they fell off the map sort of speak.

One benefit of the TES / Fallout system is that NPC are active in the background so they would be at suitable locations then you enter.

During night and most would be at bed, during day at work.

Then you have drop points as fallback. Things might be easier now becasue its fewer load doors.

First problem I see with this?

Think the Taverns in Skyrim, a lot of NPCs from the town would congregate in them in the evenings. You save in the busy Tavern. You reload.

Where''s everyone gone?

Second problem. Suppose someone changes location as part of a quest? Better hope the script is updated for their default location otherwise loading a save could screw things up.

Example: You have an NPC. Let's call him Clint Thrust and his initial location is a cave in the wilderness. Now Clint hires you on too clear out a Radscorpion nest in a another nearby cave. He tells you to meet him in a town at the other end of the map once you'r done.

You clear out the nest, then head to the town. You find him and decide to save, but after saving as you approach Clint, the game crashes. You shrug, you've not lost much. You load your save. Clint is gone. Where is he? Oh Damn, the script didn't update his location and now he's back at the first cave.

You head back find him. But when you talk to him, he wants you to clear out the Radscorpion nest, the location update script failing also reset his dialogue. But the game knows you've already done that one, but Clint won't acknowledge it.

Bingo, uncompleted quest.

Now there would be safeguards against the above yes, but considering how easy it is for quest stages and scripts to screw up in Bethesda games, I'd rather not have the extra headache of yet another script to worry about.

I'm pretty sure that a blanket system like that would lead to many other problems. (like, don't save/load during an escort quest. Or, pity the guy who keeps waiting for a merchant caravan at a certain city, it might never get there if he loads a save more than once every few hours.)

depends on when you save. npc's start stuff at certain times, like "go to inn at 20.00", so when you save/reload 20.44, npc's will evaluate their ai packages, find the time for going to the inn passed and won't.

I would prefer that the game-state of my save file be preserved, but when an NPC is loaded into the gameworld, there should be a check done to verify that they are in a valid location (as Gizmo suggests above).

That was only for actors that were added by mods.

this _does_ happen just like this for npc's.

it does NOT happen for player though, since it's a part of pathing (check if on valid navmesh), and player's kind of auto-motive and hence doesn't path