Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

http://news.yahoo.com/buy-fallout-4s-nuka-cola-210240373.html

God help me but I will purchase some Nuka Cola Quantum, and I _never_ buy tie-in merch.

https://bethesda.net/data/images/event/31/fallout4_grognak_full.jpg

More Grognak comix!

https://twitter.com/BethesdaStudios/status/645985936006889472

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPcAVZ2WUAAKK8U.jpg:large

Eff it. Bit the bullet and used Amazon cred accrued from all those hotel rewards to pre-order the game.

That being said, Bethesda posted some interesting audio bits:

https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/bringing-voice-to-fallout-4/2015/11/03/43

Interview with the protagonist's two voice-actors.

also, dig this:

https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/facing-the-music-in-fallout-4/2015/11/02/42

They hired Lynda Carter as a voice and to perform some of the songs on the radio.

The sample song they include is ok, but waaaaayyy too hi-fi for my tastes. I'll wait for some modder to dirty up the track a bit.

did anyone read this?

http://kotaku.com/the-relentless-champions-of-classic-fallout-1715984448

Maybe you’re rolling your eyes at what seems like a bunch of grizzled men and women writing corrosive forum poetry about how PC gaming is ruined forever. But here’s the thing. No Mutants Allowed aren’t wrong. Fallout 3 is a massive departure from what that series meant in the mid-’90s. The NMA users’ cynicism may be loud, but you have to remember, this is about ownership. It’s a battle as old as time. The hardcores. The casuals. The blood runs deep. These people love Fallout, and they saw Fallout become something else. Yeah it’s just a video game, but that helplessness is profound.

It's really poorly written, and seems an exercise in proving how gaming as a culture creates spoiled manbabies with no sense of perspective.

the bland freelance prose of that article is a lot worse than any of the 100%-otm opinions expressed in it by bitter nerds

i preordered this too

The first comment is about how clunky the gameplay of Fallout/Fallout 2 is... which is true!

The cult Fallout people on the web are right to praise the characterization and setting of the originals, but even with a bunch of third-party community patches and hacks to get it running the way it "should" run, it's a pretty glitchy game. The new games are a much different thing and feel like a different franchise that's inspired by the previous one, but that's the world we have. Not that many people want to play something that reminds you that life is nasty, brutish, and short, and if they do, they want to be able to respawn a moment later.

really, they should look into playing that weird eastern european Stalker-ripoff mmo that cankles documented on ilx a long time back

or they can play wasteland 2 which is basically the faithful sequel to the original isometric games.

those original 2 games were amazing but anyone who hates f3 bc it isn't another isometric RPG is an idiot. f3 is fantastic.

i don't think anyone says that (or few admit it), it's often because they had the "easy" mode/scaling/grinding of Bethesda games.
i greatly enjoyed FO3 but I totally understand people who don't like their design philosophies

it's not like activision took the franchise and made it into a call of duty game. f3 somewhat resembles the elder scrolls series but that series is fantastic and up there w/ the original fallouts as an RPG franchise standout

like maybe i'm being unfair but i got the impression that fanatics at the time didn't really get the value added that bethesda was bringing to the table maybe bc like morrowwind/daggerfall/arena were overshadowed by the massive success of oblivion?

people who get angry that their franchise doesn't lockstep follow their ridiculous demands for PURITY who ignore the dozens of games sent to market that are made explicitly with them in mind: what's on their steam playlist

I've no doubt preferring FO1/2 over 3 is a valid position, though its one I don't hold. It's more the entitled "Why didn't you make exactly the game I wanted to my specifications" crew I find so alienating.

f3 was a lot more like oblivion than it was like morrowind

but even with a bunch of third-party community patches and hacks to get it running the way it "should" run, it's a pretty glitchy game.

so is f3! i mean, all my post-daggerfall bethesda games are unrecognizably modded compared to f1/f2.

f3 wasn't weird like morrowind but it was more like morrowind than conventional horses-and-swords fantasy setting oblivion.

anyone who hates f3 bc it isn't another isometric RPG is an idiot.

Why didn't you make exactly the game I wanted to my specifications

people who get angry that their franchise doesn't lockstep follow their ridiculous demands for PURITY

look i'm sure there are strawman-incarnate nerds if there are strawman-incarnate anything, but still.

on the other hand

who ignore the dozens of games sent to market that are made explicitly with them in mind

article def minimized kickstarter-era stuff like pillars of eternity, which has made these guys gods again like they're call of duty kids.

like when fallout 3 came out and everyone enthused like it was the greatest act of immersion in history and the different kind of promise of the late 90s seemed to be dormant it was more forgivable to be upset than it is now that entire studios are like IS THIS ENOUGH LIKE THE LATE 90S FOR YOU SIR ARE YOU SURE

(i also preordered white march pt 2)

everyone enthused like it was the greatest act of immersion in history now who is strawmanning? :p

haha

i mean i said some things myself about the sun coming up over the broken spines of freeways

"immersion" is dumb. i've never felt truly "immersed" in a video game. what would that even mean? that you forget that you're a human being holding a controller? ppl are dumb. gamers are dumb.

no of course you don't forget, you glimpse an experience of being elsewhere.

anyway nhex is right, aside from complaints i don't even want to hear myself make about super mutants and the brotherhood of steel, it's this--

it's often because they had the "easy" mode/scaling/grinding of Bethesda games.

--which is a post-morrowind philosophy, understandable maybe in reaction to a game where you moved at a crawl and actually hit harmless-looking grubs nine out of ten of the times you clicked on them. understandable for n00bs.

not just a hardman thing because in a video game the difficulty of things (not just of game as whole but comparatively, of areas, or of different things you try) is a huge part of yr like sensual experience of the place.

("immersion".)

imo immersion is when the rules of a game world are something you can begin to predict not because you're thinking about the decisions the game designers make, but because the world itself is so cohesive that you make "in-world" decisions not knowing a rule but they work out. low-level immersion can be something like "I can jump up there, because i know i am good enough at jumping" vs "I can jump up there because the level designer made that for me to jump up." higher level immersion can be "I am going to kill that guy because Caesar hates him and he'll probably grant me favour" vs "I'm going to kill that guy to add ponits to my Caesar Likes Me score"

imagine that first sentence was legible, holy shit will learn to do words

to the extent that immersion exists don't you feel like difficulty takes away from it? like i love difficult games but i generally find my associated experience with them is repetitiveness and mediating frustration - not losing myself in the beauty + experience.

dying+reloading+dying+reloading def takes away from it (tho of course it "immerses" you in something else, a cycle of recurrence which doesn't necessarily have to be outside the gameworld, cf majora's mask for something in which failure is diagetic, i'm not rly famil with dark souls but isn't your reincarnation explained somehow) but learning "i cannot go there/do that because of my level of progression / decisions i have made about my character / the general dangerousness of the postapocalyptic wasteland" contributes to immersion in the postapocalyptic wasteland imo.

difficulty absolutely takes away from immersion, but immersion is also not the only goal of most AAA games. they need to get every "type" of game player--those interested in simulation (the immersion-craving types) and those interested in systems (competitive "gamers" looking for a challenge), and i guess to a lesser extent those interested in a cohesive, authored story (if you go by the GNS theory, but I think it's mostly the GS theory in open world games)

immersion is when the rules of a game world are something you can begin to predict not because you're thinking about the decisions the game designers make ... higher level immersion can be "I am going to kill that guy because Caesar hates him and he'll probably grant me favour"

right, and even higher: i want caesar's favor because my character has become disillusioned with democracy following procedurally generated experiences x and y and scripted experience z, and he's a fascist now

"immersion" is dumb. i've never felt truly "immersed" in a video game. what would that even mean? that you forget that you're a human being holding a controller? ppl are dumb. gamers are dumb.

the most immersed i ever felt gaming was during fallout 3, playing it every sunday while my gf was studying at the library, spending hours playing it in the dark and creeping myself out so bad that i walked into the kitchen, didn't see my cat in the darkness, trod on his tail and the hiss/squeal he emitted was so like a murderous radscorpion i almost soiled myself.

Immersion... immersion never changes.

you've got me feeling immersion / deeper than i've ever dreamed of

I feel like the main reason no mutants allowed is such a big thing still is because fallout 2 was buggy as fuck and they basically spent a significant amount of time un-fucking the game by correcting game breaking/ending bugs. that breaks immersion too.

Nu vegas was the closest thing we got to a big studio sequel to the PC originals and it was not awesome but good enough for me.

Anyway I preordered on console and cant wait.

I never finished the expansions for FO3 and didn't even touch New Vegas, so I'm gonna wait on FO4, probably next year's inevitable GOTY edition with DLC

new vegas modded, so that night falls, and there are people in the casinos, is pretty awesome. around as good as the originals storywise, and even unmodded it's a more dangerous game than f3, easier for me to imagine as a real place. less of a sense of lonely, isolated exploration tho admittedly.

(by "so that night falls" i mean "so it gets dark". tbf even morrowind needed this.)

FO:NV did it for me, but I could get into some deconstructive thing about how much my feelings toward it were affected by the knowledge that the "original"(and thus "correct"/"proper") folks worked on it. SOOOO much of FO for me is vibe & tone, which 3 didn't have enough.

The series was far more about just offing Mad Max-rejects in the nec desert; it had to do with that particular post-war 50s American optimistic "Gee whiz! Science!" with Cold War-paranoid bits that froze the aesthetic, culture, & technology at about early Kennedy era(e.g. no digital miniaturization or wireless, but plenty of nuke tech everywhere). The creators then poured bucketfuls of black humor and irony into that. Comedy (and commentary) was an essential part of the core of the game, which is why you could subsist on 50s TV dinners decades after they were produced.

NV had enough of the jokes and (for lack of a better term) zany weirdness that I dug, along with the characterization and occasion weird rabbit hole predilections of the creators showing thru(e.g. dialogue of Hegel and Latin).

Tho I will say I really enjoyed the quick Lovecraft glimpses, which were something Black Isle/Obsidian never would have done but Bethesda sure as shit would have.

So we'll see what the final result this time will turn out to be. Hopefully not janky as FUCK.

Also, I will never not play this on PC due to the need to both mor and tinker if need be when jank inevitably occurs.

Also, the ability to upgrade hardware and power thru unoptimized code.

looked at that sentence for a while thinking, how do you upgrade hardware and power using unoptimized code

Power as verb, not power as noun

FO4 companion app is out, doesn't really do anything yet but you can play missile command in it.

Launch trailer:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X5aJfebzkrM

Highlights: gameplay footage, iron sights, female protagonist V/O(who gets the last and singular line of the trailer), bullet sponges, janky character face models

3 days and counting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5aJfebzkrM

that's a good lookin game

don't know how i feel about this being set in present day boston instead of an alternate timeline future

Aaaaand here's the 20% off for PC:

http://www.dealzon.com/deals/fallout-4#fallout-4

I *wish* present day Boston had more Replicants wandering around

misread that as "republicans" and was like whoa you want to shoot republicans that is hardcore

*insert Enclave's-around-since-Fallout-2 joke here*