My thoughts, and hopes for the future regarding the game.

Post » Sat Nov 28, 2015 6:10 pm

First, let me state that I have tried to keep this spoiler free apart from some vague references.

So BGS, I like your game, but there are some issues I have with it on which I really want to voice concern.

First the positives:

I'm enjoying the story. Yeah, it's a straightforward narrative that's just been sprinkled with emotional moments, but I'm enjoying it nonetheless. You folks really like metaphorically book-ending your Fallout narratives don't you :P.

The companions are an improvement over Skyrim's extremely simple mechanics. The fact that they actually like or dislike my actions is nice. At a time when so many complain you strip out rpg elements, it is nice that this one, albeit still somewhat simple, is more fleshed out than your previous entry.

The game is much more stable than Skyrim. I haven't had one crash yet, and no bugged quests, so you at least prioritized game-breaking stuff to be fixed going towards release pretty well.

The problems:

The forced voice over and how you negated possible solutions: Yeah, I think many have known since the reveal that the voiced PC was going to be an issue with some. I can appreciate why you did it; you tried to tell a story, and granted, when I'm listening to the story you told, it is well done. But you did negate the ability of the player to tell their own story. Forgetting the forced backstory, (I've long learned to just enjoy the ride and then make my mind up who I am going to be when I emerge from the tutorial's darkness.)

you limit players when I think there are ways you could have avoided doing so without compromising your story.

Why not give the player a PC Voice volume slider? Then, we could play in our heads more how we wanted and use the voices we wanted. Yeah, the dialogue system is still there, but honestly, your games have never been one for dialogue options, but at least we can make the inflections we want in our head.

Even if you did give the player a VO option though, slider your dialogue system is pretty buggy atm, and I hope gets fixed. Subtitles break constantly, and I found that if I disable the cinematic dialogue camera sometimes dialogues won't play or bug out. So even if I had a way to mute or just not pay attention to my character's voice, I couldn't avoid seeing his/her face because turning off the option is buggy right now. This happened to me right from the start when I tried disabling the camera and couldn't get past that first real mission in Concord. Re-enabling it fixed my problem.

I have seen many reviews, and laugh at how different some are (some folks saw the story as a negative, some as a positive-likewise a mixed bag on the settlement building), but one thing I have seen a few times and agree with is your initial pacing. We get some pretty power armor (albeit with some drawbacks) in the beginning and settlement building is kinda thrust upon the player early. I get that you want to introduce players to the sandbox mechanics of the game, but I worry that initial impressions may be mostly just that, only sandbox. There's no real thrust to the story around Sanctuary, it does seem to lose focus. Not much I see you being able to fix here, just something to keep in mind.

Finally, why the suddenly shocking limiting UI options? So unless we use 16:10 or 16:9 widescreen we get a tiny window to work with? What about 5:4 or 4:3, or even new resolutions like 21:9? Yeah, one can edit and get the game to fullscreen by editing the ini, but then you get strange bugs like focus objects getting pixelated or lockpicking breaking completely. Did you guys tie lockpicking to the actual pixels on the screen or something? I'm using a 5:4 monitor atm (1280x1024) and messed with the ini so I'm not playing in some tiny window, but I have to live with using the console to unlock stuff if I really need it because lockpicking becomes invisible.

Also, how come there is no brightness setting?

I almost wish this is a case of these settings just not being done for launch rather than the choice to just abandon these options for the player. I find it troubling when a developer decides to suddenly drop support for so many configurations, and this ironically is probably my largest worry atm, because I don't want to be shoehorned into just the options that appeal to the senior game designer or something.

I do like your game, but ironically, I find myself almost longing for Skyrim's crashing days because at least then I had some more options...

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Esther Fernandez
 
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