Of Deathclaws & Radscorpions: A Fallout Thread

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*

http://www.target.com/p/nuka-cola-quantum-for-fallout-4/-/A-50148691

I dig the bottle color but that label design is disappointing.

Upgraded to a Radeon R9 290X card for this, since the old card was 3 years old. Here we go.

Will play Witcher 3 on (mostly) Ultra at 45-60 fps, so that's nice.

The FO4 Lootcrate went out:

https://instagram.com/p/9zQu4KA7C4

I dig the retro poster:

https://i1.wp.com/www.gottabemobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/IMG_4132-e1446756817497.jpg

yeah i built a small god last month and this will be the first thing (besides an hour or so of the sw:battlefront beta, and lara croft's hair) that puts it through its paces at all.

preloading!

i was gonna wait for reviews but then this thread psyched me up a bunch and now i've preordered too

For some reason, somebody thought it a good idea to throw a big LA opening party last week.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/fallout4party?src=hash

I'm digging the art direction of it, but I dig Fallout-y design. Also, Vault Tec insignia donut layout!

One of the more amusing reactions was Max Landis on Twitter going on about the obvious LA-standard party fillers in the place just there to look pretty and hep and getting squicked-out by the post-apoc imagery on the walls.

my copy got delivered early on saturday, so i played a fair bit over the weekend cuz my wife was out #wastingmylife

it's very much a bethesda fallout game, for better and for worse, so there's shitloads of stuff to do, most of it pretty interesting, but i've already run into a few bugs (characters walking on tables, a madly spinning box that followed me all the way through a building, an important npc decided to try and kill me for some reason and i had to reload, losing 20 minutes of progress)

the graphics are fucking weird - there are some super-beautiful lighting effects which sometimes make the wasteland look awesome but it's very obviously based on the old graphics engine so the characters are ugly as sin and in flat lighting it often looks like total butt

i've also recently found an npc who might end up being my favourite in the whole series

in summary: more of the same so far, kinda wish it was a little bit more of a progression from 3/new vegas, but i'm enjoying it all the same

Finding the whole, Bethesda:"we will let you play but don't talk about this game until 9th nov" thing a bit over the top tbh

i've played fallout 4 ama

not sure what you're talking about ste. bethesda can't stop anyone from playing the game if they got it legally, they have every right to pull down streams of leaks

have they been embargoing reviews? i thought that was ste was referring to

yikes that xbone freezing

http://i.imgur.com/MYpPSnZ.gif

Disappointed to hear it's based on the old 3 engine. Sounds more like a dlc but they are treating it as a standalone.

Did gta 4 or 5 use the previous gen engines as well?

oof, that xbox gif is painful

i've seen framerates tank occasionally on ps4 too. also, semi-regularly i'll be in the middle of a conversation with someone and be interrupted by a 5-10 second pause while the game struggles to load up the next section of speech. the characters just stand there looking blankly at each other, it's kinda hilarious