Having just played Mothership Zeta, I found myself thinking the whole way through: It's too bad Fallout 3 wasn't smaller with more unique locations (like a massive robot creation plant that actually seemed and LOOKED and was animated differently in the game instead of the same "dungeon" template used everywhere else) that really left an impression. So many of the places in Fallout 3 felt similar in my opinion.

The Enclave Base is an example of an exception - you knew you were somewhere different and unique.

The DLCs are also examples with the Pitt and Mothership Zeta showing examples of completely different architecture and animations.

I would much (much!) rather see a smaller free roam world if it meant having unique locations and, just to add an additional thought, more factions and quests that had you go back and forth from forementioned unique locations doing quests that actually impacted the power struggles/political landscape of the Wasteland.

Depth - in quests, environments, dialogue, solutions - are my preference any day over yet another subway station, or the Roosevelt Academy that looks just like the Dunwich Hospital that looks just like .... X,Y,Z.

My .02 but I'd be interested in hearing other people's opinions.

J

It seems like the games from Bethesda have been getting progressively smaller. Morrowind was like 1% the size of DaggerFall, Oblivion was smaller than Morrowind, and Fallout 3 seems even smaller than Oblivion, although F3 has a lot more unique quests and such.

I'd rather have the same size of F3 but with more unique things like you said.

Well OP, you make a good point, although I don't think it's feasible for the developers to create too many unique architecture styles and scenery items. All architecture and scenery must be created by artists and programmers from the ground up, so the more there is, the longer it takes to develop the game (and the more expensive it is).

Also, Fallout and Fallout 2 used a very limited number of tile sets and scenery items (and character models, for that matter), far fewer than in Fallout 3. To simulate variety, the developers had to get creative when designing the various areas in the game, and I think they succeeded in making Fallout and Fallout 2's areas feel unique.

That being said, I do agree with you. I would prefer if Bethesda dispensed with the "open world" entirely (how open it really felt in F3 is debatable, IMO), designed cities, towns and locations as nodes on the map, and simply utilized a random encounter system for when players travel between nodes, just as in the original games. That means they wouldn't have to bother with implementing all the largely empty space in between meaningful areas, could focus on creating more scenery items and architectures, and would have more development time to expend on making each location feel more unique, even if it does use the same old scenery.

In the end, I think the feeling of unique areas depends more on the creativity of the developers (scenery item placement, NPC dialogue, lighting, et cetera), and less on the actual variety of architecture and scenery items.

Still, Planescape: Torment did it best, if you ask me. 95% of the areas were hand-rendered backgrounds, completely unique, with the exception of insignificant things like generic houses and a few other areas.



Daggerfall's areas looked much the same everywhere you went, including the huge dungeons (which, as veterans will note, are easy to get lost in because everything looks the same), and the game made prolific use of random generation. Of course it was a lot bigger than any of its successors. Quality over quantity, in my opinion.

Generic scenery and random generation are an aspect of old-school cRPGs that I don't miss, and never will. I've always hated Roguelikes for that reason.

This also isn't 1999 and we aren't playing top-view isometric games anymore.

No, we're playing casual, consolized first-person shooters and first-person shooter derivatives! Ah, the sweet taste of progress!

Also, have you heard of a little game called Diablo III? It's sort of an indie title. Word is they're using an isometric viewpoint for it! It probably won't sell any copies. After all, isometric viewpoints have been outdated since 1999.

In all seriousness though, isometric viewpoints have nothing to do with this. It is still possible to develop and release games with unique backgrounds that are all made by hand, using today's technology and showcasing excellent graphics. Unfortunately, the type of games that can be made this way have fallen out of vogue... I'm hoping they'll be back in vogue by the time I'm an old geezer, because the pendulum usually swings both ways as time marches on.

Id love more unique locations, and Im sure Beth would to, but don't take the open spaces from me. A lot of folks, like me, would freak out if they went that route

I love games like Mass Effect, but I prefer Beth games (slightly) because I can go where, and do whatever I want. Thats why I can play them for so long. That's what Beth does best, their core principle

Just wait a few years for the tech (and the console users who are new to RPG's) to catch up with their, and our, ambitions

Ultimately, Bethesda only makes RPGs a certain way, and they won't deviate from their basic formula. That's why Fallout 3 feels very familiar to someone who's played Oblivion, even though they should be completely different games (the identical voice actors may also be a factor). Fortunately, most of us do enjoy Bethesda's RPGs, but I personally become frustrated from time to time knowing that they'll never budge from certain ways of doing things (the terrible shared-dialogue-topics thing needs to stop), and also annoyed when they make changes I don't agree with, such as reverting back to shameless level-scaling in Oblivion.

I was actually pretty much satisfied with Fallout 3's game world. Oblivion was too big for it's own good and started to be kinda boring. Sure I can go "everywhere" but the world feels so dull and generic and I am not really into "biiiig boooring space".



Fixed

Who's this "we" you're speaking of? And are you deluding yourself into thinking that Diablo 3 won't sell more copies on PC than Fallout 3 on all platforms?

You're absolutely correct! It's 2009 and we're flooded with generic uninteresting first person shooter games that are developed/marketed to the lowest common moron.

'Flooded'? Hardly.

I like how Fallout 2 covered a larger area, but focused on the main towns and cities rather than all the small settlements in a smaller area, Fallout 3 had Megaton, Tenpenny Towers, and Rivet City, but those were the only interesting places to visit that were populated with people, and even those seemed a lot less populated than Vault City or New Reno, a lot less technologically advanced too

I think Fallout 4 should focus on the more interesting places in a larger area, than all the less interesting places in a smaller area.

No thanks, Fallout 3 was compressed more than enough as it is.

The point he was making is that it's easier to hand render TILE BASED isometric games circa late 1990's such as PS:T, Ultima 7, and the first two Fallouts, then it is to render a fully 3d game like FO3.

I'm cognizant of the point he was making, but it's not as though I didn't already realize that. There were fully 3D games all throughout the 1990s as well, such as Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Wizardry, Daggerfall, System Shock, Wing Commander, and many others.

My point is that tile-based, isometric, two-dimensional, and/or static-background games are not "outdated," as he implies; therefore, it's not unreasonable to expect completely unique, hand-made environments (or successful games using "outdated" techniques) even today. Diablo III will be isometric, Braid (a successful platformer on Steam and Xbox Arcade) is 2D and has static backgrounds, Disgaea 3 is isometric, tile-based and also 2D (though it is admittedly not a next-gen game), World of Goo is 2D and has all-unique backgrounds, and the new Sam and Max games (among others) have completely unique, hand-made 3D backgrounds.

Those "outdated" techniques are still perfectly viable, and it is still easy to hand-render environments if your game is made in a certain format. It is entirely possible to re-create Planescape: Torment using today's technology, in much the same form it was when released in 1999, except with dramatically higher resolution, far more advanced graphical techniques, and all those bells and whistles... including hand-made backgrounds.

And that game would sell like hotcakes.

I know exactly why they make games smaller.
They want to publish more games for consoles and consoles simply don't have the power of a computer.
It's as easy as that.

Imagine how awesome FO3 would be with at least 4 times the area to explore and to do "stuff".

I agree with the thread starter. Repeating things too much is bad design and there's no need for this anymore. It doesn't mater if the game is already good. The time spent on making a ton of similar locations would be better spent improving characters and working on bigger and more unique locations. Instead of each location being a island in the world make locations that depend on each other in a delicate political network and let the player influence this network.

I doubt anything isometric tile based would sell like hotcakes in this market. There is a new tile based Fallout game. Check it out at NMA.

Fallout 2 covered a dramatically larger area, several thousand square miles. It covered the area from San Francisco all the way north to southern Oregon and as far East as Nevada.

And F3 would have been a lot worse if there was pointless, empty space between locations A and B.

And F2 had things like random encounters to fill in the space between towns, which worked more like random battles in JRPGs than the set locations and encounters distributed to them from a pool.

We wouldn't have the Unreal Engine then, on top of that Gameing computers would cost a fortune and to keep fans from droping out of a game saga they would keep games very basic. That would lead to very little advancement in enhancing graphic and such.

More unique looking locations would be nice, but it would also mean less content overall... it's a balance thing, and I think Fallout 3 does it relatively well. There are a lot of unique locations, and still a lot of content... it's a good balance, mostly.

Oblivion went over the line with the endless identical "fortress" dungeons... and having so many abandoned forts made little sense... not to mention none of the mines had workers in them, despite people mentioning being miners. That game went too far in using the abandoned dungeon sets too much.

Agreed. It's not something Bethesda would likely do (hopefully Obsidian with New Vegas?), but my preference was and is for a massive world, like the original Fallouts, with zoned areas that the player travels between via the world map. Even better would be to give the player an option to travel across the world in real-time, but for this to take hours of trudging through fairly featureless wasteland - much the way it was handled in Arcanum. I just don't feel a highly compressed world provides the necessary sense of isolation.

This allows for more varied, populated and content-filled areas as the devs are not spending so much time working on the filler content in between. In particular, I'd have all those dungeons make way for far more interesting settlement-based content. New Reno of Fallout 2 may have been silly, but it's probably the most roleplaying and gameplay rich city of any game, and a great example to follow.

No. Morrowind was 6 square miles, Oblivion was 16 square miles (about). Morrowind's landscape just seems bigger because it isn't the same thing over and over and has really unique locations.

I love fallout 3's huge map, Ever stood on the highest point of a cliff and looked into the wasteland? Bethesda did such a good work making you feel the difference on the inside. I almost cried *sob*

I want something even larger. Guess what you are in a wasteland. That said more locations should have with quests. Lefant Plaza was huge and barely had any quests related to it. Fort Bannister could have had a great quest related to Talon...etc.

Here is what I would do.

1. More quests and more story driven quests-ala replicated man.
2. Real consequence of Karma. Karma has almost no effect and can be changed at will in Fallout 3.
3. Real choices for stats and skills--everyone with all 10 stats and 100 skills reduces the opportunity for roleplaying.
4. Figure out a way to keep some of the excitement of the early game. Remember the first time you went into Springfield School at lvl 3-4?