Fallout 4

There's more than one video out there explaining what's happening vis a vis paid mods on Fallout 4 and Skyrim, and how the content creators are getting reamed by Zeni Max Media. If you don't want to go looking for them that's your problem. If you actually watched the first video from Wong you'd have heard him say that he first became aware of the possible scenario by watching another video from a guy he trusted who had contacts in the industry.

And as I said, if I had proof of the standard you seem to require, I'd also be under a NDA. You do know how those work, don't you?

Oh, and one more thing, I do know the modders are getting paid, as I did watch the video I posted. What you missed is that they're only getting paid ONCE as a lump sum, rather than getting paid a cut of every sale, which even the shitty system of paid mods that was kicked in the spine the last time managed to set up.

edit

No, that last bit's not quite fair. I should have said that there is strong enough evidence for me to believe that the modders are only being paid once as a lump sum, rather than per transaction, as that was what was being stated in the video.

edited 5th Sep '17 3:52:17 PM by TamH70

Modders really should get paid for every download of their mod, Naco style.

Not sure what Naco is.

It's a Kim Possible reference. One of the main characters created a new dish at his favorite fast food place, and then sold that dish to the restaurant. He ends up rich because he's paid money for every Naco sold.

Oh okay. Thanks for that.

Very Melon: That would be an ideal solution and honestly sounds a bit more fair for the devs making the content overall.

edited 5th Sep '17 5:21:12 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

Yes. I agree on that. Let's end that subject there.

new topic.

Next Fallout when? And will it be a mumorpeger? I'm not holding my breath on it being another Obsidian single-player focused game, though I'd love it if it were so and I would get that on release so fast the pixels wouldn't have formed on the buy this game screen properly.

I really hope it's not an MMO. They tried that with Elder Scrolls, and it flopped, right? Would definitely like another Obsidian. I mean, I enjoyed Fallout 4, but Bethesda just... they get weird about some things. They try to shoehorn in family members you don't care about, railroad the plot (though 4 was better than 3 or Skyrim), and just have stories that are thematically disjointed or even self-defeating.

What was the gap between 3 and New Vegas? The actual release dates, I mean, not in-universe.

edited 5th Sep '17 5:03:56 PM by Discar

Well... the Elder Scrolls mumorpeger went fee-to-pay rather quickly, i.e. buy once, pay for any expansion packs, and cash shop DLC of whatever was on sale, rather than being sold as a monthly subscription and as a potential "World of Warcraft" killer, which it was heavily touted as. I'd call that a flop but Zeni Max Media seems to be raking in the money from what they're currently doing.

edit

Publication gap? Quick bing on that.

Rolled out date of Fallout 3, including Japan - December 4, 2008. Any territory that was going to get the game got it by then.

Full rollout date of New Vegas, including the Asian territories - November 4, 2010, just under two years from release of Fallout 3.

edited 5th Sep '17 5:09:27 PM by TamH70

I recall someone several pages back found some rumors of the next one being in the US South East because of certain similar patterns such as project names alluding to the general area. Though to be fair you can name a project anything you choose. I wouldn't mind it being set in that region though. Although I am kind of wondering what they could do with the parts of Canada that got annexed by force. That could be possibly interesting as well.

I am in on the hopefully not an MMORPG crowd for the next fallout. I wouldn't turn my nose up at Fallout 3 and New Vegas redone in the Fallout 4 engine.

edited 5th Sep '17 5:26:19 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

Supposedly New Orleans was trademarked so the current thought is that the 'Gatorclaws' from Nuka World are assets for a new spin off title from Black Isle set in New Orleans on the same game assets and coding as F4 was. Basically a repeat of the F3/New Vegas trend.

And I'd be down for that. I liked New Vegas far more than either of the latest numbered installments because it had better writing and execution.

I'm leaning towards the No-MMO crowd myself, but there's one thing that would turn that around. IF they did it with an MMO version of the settlement system and gave us a Star Wars Galaxies-style faction building system, I would join that to become a merchant and work with my faction to rake in the coin.

My problem with MMOs isn't really the quality of the game itself (though that hardly helps), but rather the fact that it just kills the franchise. MMOs are both super profitable and super high maintenance, so it becomes impossible for the games to continue beyond it. You can't have a different game set in a world that has an MMO, because the MMO already spans the entire world. Oh, you can do an expansion, but that's hardly the same as getting a whole new game. The Old Republic is the only exception I can think of, since it's set so far in the past that it has no effect on modern Star Wars games.

Would I be crucified for admitting I actually really really enjoyed 4's crafting system? Genuinely enjoyed building fortress/supply stations everywhere I went, the only frustration being that I couldn't scrap a car that's a mere four or so meters away from a car I CAN scrap because artificial boundaries. I wish there were a way to move the ruined vehicles.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

And even that's not a guarantee, since the scuttlebutt is that ESO is limiting Bethesda's ability to move forward with VI, despite ESO also taking place in the distant past of that universe.

It's not too hard to envision the Fallout series ending up in the same boat if it gets a MMO (regardless of where/when said MMO takes place).

edited 5th Sep '17 8:40:47 PM by TotemicHero

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

TOR handles canon with "all routes are happening at once," so if they really need to reference something in a later game, they can. I don't know how ESO does it, but TOR is in general better at story than most other MMOs.

Black rabbit: Nah. I have to admit I went total scrounger and tinkered with it a lot during my first play through.

Who watches the watchmen?

I liked the crafting. Heck I even liked the vanilla settlement stuff. But managing the settlements was done BADLY.

I'm not sure if Obsidian would work with Bethesda again - they got burned bad after the New Vegas deal. Yes, business is business, but why walk yourself into an unpleasant relationship? They have enough of their own I Ps ticking over now they don't need to worry - unless they want to use the contract fee they'd get to fund another internal game; but that means you risk being another Gearbox (Alien: Colonial Marines funds being channeled to Borderlands, anyone?)

I'd like a NV style game though - improved Dialogue and enemy types.

x6

That and, y'know, being suddenly made non-canon will do that to a game.

I'm not down for an MMO because I've yet to really find one that feels... emersive enough for the RPG roots. I already didn't care much for how F4 handled being an RPG for enough reasons to fill a novella. I can't see an MMO addressing any of those issues and would probably activly make those worse.

Not to mention an MMO kind of just feels counter to parts of the tone and feeling of the Fallout world. Its an apocalyptic wasteland where everything wants to kill you and the only thing stopping them is the bullet in your chamber. That doesn't feel like it works or could concievably be made to work in an MMO setting where there can be thousands of players running around at one time. Atmosphere is really big to the Fallout Franchise and it isn't condusive to an MMO setting.

Another thing is just the whole player choice situation. Fallout 4 had a lot of issues with that. MM Os can't really adapt dynamically particuarly well. That's going to cause problems. Even if you relegate player choices to being character/NPC related, I've yet to really find an MMO that makes me care for many NP Cs because NP Cs just end up being quest givers and passive within their own world. There are exceptions here and there, but its really easy to get lazy with an MMO.

Heck, gameplay would have to change dramatically. FPS doesn't translate to MM Os that well. For example, stealth is a valid form of combat in Fallout and when ESO happened, that didn't translate very well to the MMO environment and is part of the reason I didn't touch it post-Beta testing. My favorite method of gameplay (be so sneaky and one-hit kill everything) suddenly isn't there.

I'd just like them to do one because I vastly prefer New Vegas to F3 and F4 and want a good game out of those nice assets and also the slight joy at Obsidian doing Fallout better than the actual IP owners do.

edited 6th Sep '17 2:53:52 AM by InkDagger

Definitely agree. The problem with F4 is it feels like a Fallout theme park - lots of vignettes and "quirky" quests (Bloody ghoul child in a FRIDGE?!) that feel like a funny idea on paper but don't hold up well.

And I preordered the pip boy edition and love the game.

But New Vegas feels more cohesive - it shows things progressing, shows how societies could grow. Despite you building things in F4 there's no New Reno, or Shady Sands feeling to the place. Heck there isn't a Rivet City, really.

I'd have liked a more in depth, less broad settlement management system, for example (Not done via dialogue menus, but a feeling that what you built mattered)

NV has its issues - the quests that don't quite marry up (Veronica staying with a dying Brotherhood... even though you convince them to lift the lockdown and ally with the NCR?) whilst Boston and the Capital Wasteland don't feel like they've really progressed.

Well, I'd also argue that New Vegas also engages with its settings and themes significantly more. New Vegas is ALL about the old world that died and what murdered it and if history will repeat or if we learn from our mistakes.

We have the NCR that kind of want to be what America used to be and reinstate that idea. Have they learned from the past or will they make the same mistakes again?

Then there's the Legion, who are arguably the most atypical of a post apocalypse faction. Do they triumph in a new world in order for people to be 'safe' in an other wise inhospitable landscape? (I kind of think this is the least developed option of the bunch)

Will Mr. House and his old world ideas of life and luxury with its Disney-esque masquerade to hide the shady underbelly and societal problems reshape everything back to what it was?

Or, will one person decide that they know best and shape the world for themselves? Are they greedy or can they genuinely learn from the past?

It actually tries to say something about the backstory and how it shapes the story and themes of the plot.

F3 and F4 don't really do the same. They're post-apocalyptic, sure, but most of the details end up being... set dressing at times. The fact that our F4 protagonist survived the bombs is wasted on the fact that its BARELY relevant to anything that's happening. If we ignore that, not even the synth plotline is used to its fullest potential with a Synth!Spouse questline being cut and no one even bothers to ask 'Wait, what if this magic guy who is a One Man Army and uniting the entire Commonwealth and has kind of confusing motives (and an unexplained backstory of being 200+ years old) might be a synth?'

I've even suggested in this thread before that, with the whole 'forced straight marriage' at the beginning, maybe they could have created a theme that the apocalypse, for all the damage it did, ended up being shockingly amazing at making society accepting or ambivilent to other people's race or sexuality compared to the pre-war days. At the very least it would have been a thematic point rather than just... awkwardly there for no reason like most of the prologue.

F3 is strange too. It has a theme of America (being D.C. and all) and some religious thematics, but I'd argue the core is the Father-Son bonding story and finishing the dream your father had for the wasteland. But, the ending feels out of place. Why does this story of 'finish what your father started' end on 'sacraficial death for messiah archetype' for no real built up reason. Admitedly, the DLC obviously retcon'd this (even if it treats you like shit for doing the logical thing), but the story of Fallout 3 doesn't engage with the setting any more than it really has to.

I suppose one argue it doesn't have to: Fury Road doesn't have much of a 'deep' lore to its series, but Fury Road is also rather minimalist when it comes to a story and doesn't really *need* to engage with its setting on a deeper level because it doesn't concern itself with having some deep lore or anything. That's not the point.

But Fallout does have deeper lore points that should be engaged with and it just doesn't. It tries to, the opening of F4 does open during the pre-war, but then it just refuses to do so outside of the most face values attempts, such as the pre-war segment being no more than about 5 - 20 mins of gameplay.

I totally agree. It's the thing we always say about Bethesda - they are (currently) great at building worlds... but not so great with the in game stories.

F4 and F3 are GREAT framing devices, but the content and plot of those games isn't cohesive or as fulfilling. NV has issues, but it really does carry great themes that intertwine. That whole concept of Letting Go runs throughout. Every faction has its issues, its infighting and disagreements.

F4 feels like an abandoned place - yes it's a wasteland but the whole idea of the Institute, or even your character having more than meets the eye involvement with Synths, is wasted. But they learned a bit from NV with the variety of endings and conflicting paths, at least.

It's just it doesn't feel as meaty as NV. I suppose because Boston doesn't have a theme to it (They try to overlay revolutionary era America but it doesn't quite gel) - compare to NV where you go from Western, to frontier war, to casino Mobsters. It IS a theme park but doesn't feel like one.

As a sidebar to the above discussion, and relevant because the franchises are both tacitly based on survival narratives, I bought Max Max: The Game when it came out for the PC, and in many ways I'd say it's a better Fallout game than Fallout 4 was. Everything's knackered apart from the vehicles, and they've been made up out of dozens of other wrecked cars, trucks, buses and so on, and the game is far more reliant on the player scavenging resources to just survive. You see the player character, your avatar, eating maggots and dog food to stave off collapse. Sure, he's able to build a car for himself, but that's literally made out of scraps in a cave, with the help of a literal troglodyte, and even then at the early game almost every other enemy vehicle can beat yours in battle. It can take days, real-time, to get a Magnum Opus capable of hunting down enemy convoys and making them your bitch.

Fallout 4 gives you a mini-gun, power armor and access to other automatic weapons within the first ten minutes of the game's actual playing time and boom! goes any real challenge. You can refuse to use the power armor, and lots of folks do, as far as I know, but the game is built around giving you this embarrassment of riches and you accepting it as being in any way, shape or form a "survival in the wasteland" narrative after taking it up on its offer.

And having played both games to completion I'd say the Mad Max game has a much better, more varied map, with way lots more things to explore and do on that map than Fallout 4 does. Some folks make comparisons between it and the Assassin's Creed/Insert name of other Ubisoft radio-tower map type game, but they're just being lazy. There's arguably more story content in Fallout 4, but that's only really true if you go round making a point of doing all the side missions.

Plus the Mad Max game seems to me to be a far more accurate portrayal of what would happen to a reasonably sane (from a certain point of view) character when confronted with all the horrors that would face him in a post-apocalyptic hellhole. The player character in Fallout 4 doesn't seem to either face up to the trauma that they face in Boston, (apart from some mild daddy/mommy issues about Shaun), or has some inhuman levels of self-control when faced with events that would drive me batty.

Maybe she or he is a synth, after all?

How is that in any way a coherent argument? The rest of the things you've said, maybe — I haven't played any of the games based on Mad Max — but what you said above makes zero sense.

FO4 never directly contradicts the idea of the Sole Survivor being a synth, but neither does it offer a chance to confirm it, and it's pretty clearly intended to be up to the player to RP it themselves. The stark dissonance between the player character's reactions and their situation has been the subject of much (deserved) mockery, particularly how they veer between angst over their lost son in one dialog and casual acceptance of mortal danger in the next.

I suspect that Bethesda found it very hard to maintain the tone of the game past the introductory missions if the PC remained a scared, overwhelmed fish out of water. I know that I'd start to get very annoyed with them after a while. Perhaps it could have been solved by offering more diversity in dialog choices, so you could play "hardcore, no-nonsense survivor" or "bewildered, scared refugee" as you chose, but then you have the problem where you can choose the "scared", "desperate", or "hard-boiled" option at any given time, making you sound completely schizophrenic.

How believable would it be for the PC to remain a bewildered lamb past the first quarter of the game, anyway, after they've presumably racked up a body count numbering in the hundreds?

Complex characterization and distinct player choice are fundamentally opposed concepts in an RPG. I thought we'd established that pretty well. (And don't throw games like The Witcher out as counter examples, because Geralt's character there is pretty much fixed: your only real choice in that regard is whether to be a total asshole or a sympathetic asshole.)

edited 6th Sep '17 5:52:18 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

There's more narrative plot - or rather, scripted dialogue. In the Mad Max game there are a lot of ACTIVITIES.

That said, the Mad Max game was gloriously good fun and sold the feeling of being lost in a strange land. Its only flaw (From my perspective) was it was almost TOO large. You got fatigue. I loved it, have it on PS 4 and got the PC version cheap.

You have to fight the world in the game. Fallout 4 felt much more like a sandbox rather than a world. Again, New Vegas felt like a path, a proper journey. F4 feels like you are wandering aimlessly, but with little to no real challenge. Which can work, if it wasn't burdened by that urgent plot. Once you get a lot of the core bits out of the way, it's a great sandbox and works well. But some of the side bits to me feel very under developed.

Much like Mad Max could've perhaps put more plot into its areas - more NP Cs etc.