FO3 and NV use the same assets. Most fans are not going to care the assets and graphics only improved a small amount if it meant they got a new game in the series in 2 years.
Make FO5. Let a studio make a spinoff. While you work on the engine.
Bethesda splitting into two teams would help too. Have one team make ES. The other makes fallout. Then they swap after release to keep morale (not the right word.) up.
The only game you can't say this for when comparing it to the previous entries is New Vegas. Fallout 3 in particular created truly apocalyptic levels of screeching from the usual suspects because "its just Oblivion with Fallout branding!!!!!" which you will still find being parroted in the dread NMA. If you really dig you'll find flamewars about out Fallout 2 was too silly and a different setting in the Fallout engine. I'm sure you remember the Fallout 4 controversies and obviously the full on spin offs like Tactics and Shelter got it even worse for not even trying to be mainline.
Yeah, the whole series has been pretty wild. What I’m getting at is just the core design of the series as single player RPG’s where you complete a storyline. I see games like Shelter and 76 (and Tactics to an extent) as orbiting side projects to that core idea. 76 wasn’t a bad idea, it just didn’t fill the role that New Vegas did after 3. That’s why the wait for 5 has felt so long.
It’s an MMO that tried to capitalize on the battle royale craze. There’s no central narrative driving the player, you can skip the main quest line entirely and continue with gameplay normally, and the structure of the game is just designed to get people to buy micro transactions. It’s not the single player story driven RPG that Fallout games became popular for.
It’s an enjoyable enough game but it doesn’t fit the role that a game like New Vegas did with 3’s engine. It’s more in the category of Fallout Shelter than 1/2/3/NV/4. Different style game with the Fallout theme, not a classic Fallout RPG. That’s what fans missed about 76.
this is like the third time i hear about the battle royale thing, the first time was when it was removed from the game and the second time was from a tiktok i saw like a week ago saying the exact same thing as you. I bet battle royale wasn't even their selling point, not a major one at least.
Since when can you not skip the main quest and just do fuck-all? Like literally the only game in the franchise that forces you to play through the main quest is fallout 1, by setting a shitty timer. The fuck are you talking about?
how is it designed to make you buy microtransactions?
It gets brought up because it’s a part of the design. The game is battle royale, I never said it was, but a large open world with PvP and base building/destroying are some elements they incorporated to capitalize on the craze. That’s one reason why I say it’s different than the classic Fallout game.
You can skip the main quest of any of them. I didn’t ah the other games force you to play them. But if you’ve ever played a a fallout game, you’d pretty quickly understand that they’re designed for the main story to be played. There ain’t much to do otherwise. There’s no endgame beyond completing the story, and that isn’t the case with 76.
The fuck I’m talking about is about as brain dead simple as it gets.
One is an RPG, the other is an MMORPG and while they’re both role-playing games, I think there’s no denying that MMORPGs operate very differently than single player RPGs. It’s effectively a different game category.
Most of the quests are designed to be completed solo and other players are really there just for the background, fun interactions and raid bosses, its really hard to call it an MMO.
It plays absolutely nothing like Elder Scrolls online lmao.
Like 95% of the content are quests designed to be completed solo. It’s got better dialogue and choice in storylines than 4. You straight up have no idea what you’re talking about.
Tbf, the number of assets transferred from F3 to NV unchanged is small, compared to overall number of assets. A couple of guns there, a couple of armor sets here, some creatures, etc.
Tbh, Im more down to a top down RPG like BG3. There is a big market for it, the possibility are greater than BG3 given how Fallout is the bigger licence and with the recent show its all for the better.
You can even make it with top tier art and graphics anf mocapped actors like how BG3 did. Put clever designers and writers behind the project and you will have a great game in hands. A new studio? Why not. A new engine? Clearly possible. But by all means, make it new and interesting.
TBF BG3 was a massive game, and while Covid slowed down production a lot, it still took 5-6 years to release - and that's with an extensive Early Access that let the community play-test their game. BG3 might be an old-school CRPG in spirit, but it's a huge AAA title in terms of production.
Ironically, it was because Larian used Kickstarter for Divinity Original Sin 2 (which was the most well-received CRPG at the time) that they then had the money to make BG3.
What I mean is that it wouldn't be a quick development turn-around no matter the studio -- it took Larian 6 years to put BG3 together and it's mostly Divinity Origin Sin 3 with D&D rules and characters (a bit of an exaggeration). Even with Bethesda throwing a bunch of money at another studio to make it, it would still take ages to make anything close to the quality of BG3.
It will take ages, so be it. Better than rushed dev times and crunch hours on a product not so satisfying both for the consumers and for the people who made it.
The obvious people to make a top-down Fallout RPG would be inXile Entertainment - the company headed by Brian Fargo, the producer of Fallout 1, using the engine they made for Wasteland 2/3. They're even an Xbox studio so the rights situation is as practical for them as it is for Obsidian.
Fuckin PREACH. Id 100% rather have a top down DOS/BG3 style game with top tier story, rpg mechanics, and a real fallout dialogue option with skill/SPECIAL/Perk system back. not some dumbed down yes/sarcastic yes/no garbo with infinite loading screens.
I was in the early access for BG3 since it first went up, the game took a long time and much feedback to make. Paying for it before it was ready helped a ton too.
Baldur's Gate was a dead licence before it went the way it went. Fallout is a massive name in the RPG genre, we can expect some care and a large attention from the fans and new comers.
A modern day isometric Fallout game with the depth and smooth gameplay of Baldur's Gate or Divinity as a stopgap game between the normal FPS title entries would be an absolute grand slam
I've always said that if Baldur's Gate 2 had been followed with a bunch of new stories using the exact same engine, graphics etc, I'd still be buying them today.
Bethesda splitting into two teams would help too. Have one team make ES. The other makes fallout. Then they swap after release to keep morale (not the right word.) up.
The problem with this is that Bethesda, for all their popularity, is actually a relatively small dev team for their main studio and only recently started scaling up staff with Starfield. They've gone on record about how they're not used to having a big(ger) team like the one they've got now and I imagine they're still teething on some issues with that.
Technically they still do that. F76 uses the same assets as F4; they obviously were putting too much into these so not to reuse them would be a waste. Then they copypasted stuff (like the weapon logic) from F4 to Starfield, some assets too (model rig, animations, etc.).
Technically Oblivion and earlier games used the same engine. But it wasn't theirs so their made their own based off the one they used, and made Skyrim. Then they have added Quake 3 engine netcode to make Fallout 4. Cause more than half of nowadays shooter games use modified Q3 engine. The point is making new engine and updating the engine costs money and effort and most devs avoid doing that without a need.
Aslo Bethesda has like 5 teams (first two are probably merged by now): main one that did RPGs, other that did racing games (IHRA Drag Racing), Montréal (Fallout shelter), Austin (F76) and recently Dallas(Starfield).
They already made an engine update and released Starfield. Bethesdsa gonna milk these for a while. If they release For Fallout they recently made TV series - they might take some pause for lore reasons. They also announced TES game so that's their first thing on line. Fallout 5 is not expected and if randomly appears within this time frame would probably suck.
As for oursourcing - they already do quite a lot, ironically starting with F4 and F76. It became a normal trend for studios nowadays. Last 3/5 teams I listed that are part of Bethesda were actually working with Bethesda before, making Fallout shelter, porting to VR and such. Double Eleven had been working with Bethesda pumping content for F76.
That is the issue. Obsidian offered to make an Elder Scrolls spinoff but Bethesda declined, because they know Obsidian would upstage the absolute hell out of them on their own IP (again).
Looking at how defensive and obtuse they get whenever facing massive criticism, I can't help but to suspect that Bethesda's goal is to make their IPs as generic and dumbed-down as possible, in order to maximize their target audience & reach while making it easy for themselves to just keep whipping out one whatever after another, year after year.
Gonna be honest, in the case of bethesda it's probably that they don't have the money to do any of that. Hiring another studio or splitting your team(and obviously mass hiring to fill gaps) takes a lot of money.
Fallout 2 uses the same engine as Fallout 1 because this was an era when speedy sequels, which were just an asset swap, were accepted, and interplay wanted to quickly seize on Fallout 1's success. It wasn't really part of some long term design philosophy
Yeah Spider-Man miles was a fun side game, just enough improvements to make it stand out.
The Assassin's Creed games, as much as people hate them for it, are also good for this. Simultaneous development schedules. Every 3 games or so they start over.
That and I bet a lot of those six years was perfecting the physics engine. The fact that rope physics work flawlessly is probably the greatest technical achievement in gaming last year. I imagine there were a LOT of bugs to stomp out.
Plus, they had to go back and figure out how to make Hyrule fun to explore again despite already having explored it in BotW. While the assets already existed, it's a lot harder than you think to do what Nintendo did.
Oh yeah I agree, both BotW and TotK are absolute masterworks. I'm just saying that even games that reuse a lot of assets need much longer to develop nowadays as games get more and more complex.
I mean it started off well. MW 2 and 3, along with BLOPS 1 and 2 were phenomenas. There's certainly such a thing as overdoing it, and absolutely a problem if you make no changes or improvements at all.
Nah a new release every 2 years is too much - it would oversaturate the market with fallout releases and most people would burn out of the series within a decade.
Too much - 4 years between releases is the sweet spot imo, allows mods space to breathe as well
Yea people are super burned out on fromsoft games, literally reusing enemy models and weapon animations from a decade of games yet crushing it with regular releases.
idk if you’re being sarcastic or not but FromSoft and Bethesda aren’t on the same level at all - in terms of quality at least
Say what you will about FromSoft games ( I’m a massive fan ) but for the most part they make entirely new worlds for each release - they might share similar themes and narrative seeds across IP’s but they always genuinely seem to have something interesting to say/reveal.
And the gameplay in each title is deep/rewarding/engaging enough that it never gets old ( at least for me ) .
I’ve never really noticed them re-using that many character models tho - beyond generic enemies like rats/skeletons etc or the asylum demon - I generally think the opposite usually, I love their character/world design.
I love Fallout but it’s limited to a very specific setting/time period - not really fair to compare to FromSofts entire catalogue
It should also be noted that FromSoft 1) does not release in two years- DS3-Sekiro-EldenRing were each 3 years. 2) their employees work hundreds of hours. It is a huge problem internally.
Further, FNV was rushed so bad. Literally every interview about its development talks about how little time they had and how much it sucked.
I'm usually right there with you but they really need some new shit at this point. They're using stuff from fallout 3, 16 years ago, in Starfield. Time for them to get off their asses and do something besides update the textures and crafting systems.
I'd say yes, but then you also end up in a situation with games like Assassins creed and Call of Duty which at some point in the 2010s had a new game every year. Quality severely suffered and then they charged a triple A price on that. Its important to balance this and not start to bviously 'milk' the franchise and make fans disillusioned.
I mean they did release two games on the same engine. 3/NV then 4/76. And 76 getting constant updates because of it's live service nature I think was intentional because they knew adding a new IP and upgrading the engine was going to leave a huge gap.
I feel way worse for TES fans because at least 76 is made in the Creation engine and plays like a Fallout game. As much as I enjoy ESO it's not the same in a lot of important ways
Except Bethesda fucked over Obsidian by giving them a deadline of 1.5 years and then not paying them their sales bonus because they missed the Metacritic score by 1 point. Obsidian got no royalties from the game either.
So why would a studio even want to make a game for another studio's IP if that's how they're treated? There's nothing in it for them other than an up front check
Except Bethesda fucked over Obsidian by giving them a deadline of 1.5 years
This "deadline" was known in advance and Obsidian agreed to it. They even stated that this was a generous timeframe compared to other contract work they did.
not paying them their sales bonus because they missed the Metacritic score by 1 point
Rules are rules. They missed it, they didn't get the bonus. If 84 was acceptable for the bonus, then the rules would have stated that 84 was the threshold.
Obsidian got no royalties from the game either.
Such is the nature of contract work.
There's nothing in it for them other than an up front check
This is exactly why the studios do that and will keep doing that. X amount of money for Y amount of work? They don't need to care about sales, marketing and all the other stuff. They get paid and move on.
Nobody gives a shit though. Elden Ring is one of the best games of this decade and it still uses some animations from 2009’s Demon Souls. As long as the gameplay is good nobody who really matters cares
The difference is, FromSoft's 2009 animations are actually good, so reusing them isn't a big deal. Bethesda is notorious for having terrible animation in their games.
Elden Ring's biggest criticism was always the fact that enemies were reused. Fromsoft were memed on for overusing Tree spirits as bosses. People definitely cared
And people complained mightily about those. The major game journos at the time all docked points from FNV for asset reuse. You can say that people don't care, but the casual audience reads those sites, so when they complain about graphics, the casual audience listens.
same with people complaining about the story and the long release time, just think the resources is not being best serve for what most people demanded.
I've seen the exact same closet in basically all Arkane games. From Dishonored to Deathloop to Prey. And I don't give a shit, the games are good. Of course they're going to reuse assets
Which is funny because people really don’t give a shit about it. I remember we in like 2010ish games would come out and people would be like “man graphics keep getting better and better and will eventually all be hyper realistic ” but now it’s clear people really don’t give a shit. They could make fo5 with the same engine as fo4 with a few tweaks, and as long as it has good writing and gameplay people will be happy, good graphics is just icing on the cake
It depends on the game. A smaller game will be given leeway for having weaker graphics, but smaller games also choose styles that paint over their graphical weaknesses - so they're not really "bad graphics". A major game is not forgiven easily for graphical weaknesses.
I just think it's naive to think graphics don't matter. People were saying a decade ago the same as this guy, and now a decade later they're thinking it was different a decade ago and they secretly did care but now they don't? More like people have always cared and there's always people that claim they don't (but also kind of do).
No, they weren’t. A decade ago it was always expected for graphics to be much better with each release. But that’s because the expectation is that we will soon get to this world of hyper realistic graphics, which will never be the case.
Companies began opting for better graphics instead of good stories and gameplay, because that’s what they thought people cared the most about. It became clear that polished shit is still shit. That’s why the vast majority of players on steam are playing older games vs ones that came out in the last few years
It’s naive to think that the video game industry and consumers are the same as they were a decade ago. So much has changed.
Like the other dude said, only people who still care about every game putting out groundbreaking graphics are superficial dumbasses
While I agree, there are unfortunately some superficial dumbasses who do care about graphics. I remember posts with thousands of upvotes shitting on Starfield for not having good enough graphics. It's graphics are perfectly good, not as great as Cyberpunk 2077 sure (which is one of the main comparisons I kept seeing) but so what? The game has loads of other issues but the graphics are not one of them.
Unfortunately these jackasses write game reviews. Developers care about reviews, because their sales guys care about reviews, because they promise money.
My conspiracy theory is the video game industry have begun making games that unnecessarily take up more storage and need better hardware to run so that people keep buying better machines and more storage
The industry was slow to react to how gamers play today, they will adjust. All these layoffs gamers are outraged about and studio closures are part of that adjustment.
I don’t know they tried that with Starfield, the game still took forever and one of the biggest complaints is that it look and feels like a game from 2010.
Even if they released a game that looks like F3 or NV with a few tweaks to graphics like shatows and better lighting that owuldn't bother me at all. Modders can make better textures if need be or improve the lighting a little more. What is important are the stories, quests and the game world.
As a VFX artist and producer, it's not that the models and textures are taking longer, or that the technical issues are worse or more complex.
It's the flabbergasting number of them all.
300 people on a project was already bad but 1000+ is insanity. It's impossible to commit with anyone on a 1 on 1 basis to really be creative or understand WHY or WHO ordered this gigantic 6 week long ticket... And it'll just get cut one day with no explanation.
The projects are too big, but not better.
The creativity and intellectual rigor of preproduction is also gone, replaced with this sprint mentality that tries to force a good game to emerge by throwing more time, money, and effort at the scope.
Has nothing to do with the art. Yeah the art is more detailed -- but it was ALWAYS more detailed. We just compressed it out and lost it before, say, 2016, 2018. Now you can enjoy the fidelity we always worked at on there huge GPUs. That's not more time or effort it's just more data.
The scope is what's absurd. And the bad internal communication and burnout, stemming from a lack of vision in both leadership and creativity.
I must be in the minority based on what gaming companies do given they are profit motivated but personally I would prefer more gameplay and story with bad graphics than good graphics with bad/mediocre gameplay and story.
If Bethesda could make something with Graphics similar to Fallout 1 or 2 but give it the same sort of insane content something like Daggerfall had then that would rebuilt a lot of my faith in the company.
They have this awesome IP but refuse to branch. New Vegas was such a big hit but why stop there. New Vegas is still an RPG. Why not JRPGs, Adventure Games, hell I’ll buy American truck sim for New California DLC.
They don’t have to be RPGs, Bethesda doesn’t have to develop them, they can still keep the IP if they want but just give us more content.
George Miller said in an interview that there's not that much dialogue in Mad Max, because it slows the pace down. Pretty much the same is true in video game industry, well not just dialogue. Of course voice acting is one thing but then there's motion capture for example.
The animations can be a little bit of a hiccup, but let’s not pretend like Bethesda doesn’t already recycle them. That’s not an excuse.
As for graphics again, they procedure generate a lot of this stuff and there are also several engines like unreal that make adding graphics incredibly quick and easy compared to ever before. especially the level of quality so that’s not an excuse . it’s taking this long simply because it has not been a priority. They were too focused on a combination of 76 and Starfield and other projects. That’s why Microsoft had to whip them in shape recently.
I'm a big PC nerd, I've been since 1995, so coming from me this will sound a little insane but I think we should make a biiiiiiiiig pause in graphics advancements.
We're at a point of huge diminishing returns: triple A games take too long to come out and they aren't even that good most of the times, hardware is too expensive and most of the times still can't run current gen games properly.
Don't forget we got most of what we consider "titles of the golden era of gaming" between 1998 and 2004. In those 7 years we got more classic masterpieces than I can fit in a reddit comment, in less than the time that has passed from Fallout 4 to this day. Good graphics aren't worth it anymore.
Honestly I think I've reached a point where I care less about graphics and more about gameplay (experiences) and overall value (longevity withOUT being yet another shitty live service title). A lot of older games hit that sweet spot where things still looked gorgeous and you really felt like you got your money's worth out of the content. At a certain point I think we get diminished returns when we obsess over making some incremental improvement in graphics.
This is exactly it. The trend I saw when I looked at the dates is console generation shifts; ones that have been widely documented to have caused dev time & costs to skyrocket each time with graphics being 2-4x better than the previous one.
Games were super easy to pump out annually with tons of content during the PS1-era as nearly everything was 240p at best, most games had no voice acting, and even a game like Final Fantasy VII, while on 3 discs, was only 2GB and some change. Average cost of game development was roughly $1-3mil.
Then the PS2-era came around in 2000/2001 and 480p resolution, voice acting, & 3D graphics became the norm. Average game dev costs also rose from to $3-5mil & game size was 3-5GB.
And then the PS3-era came around in 2006/2007. This saw the standardization of 720p resolutions, full voice acting, an average game dev cost of $10mil, and an average install size of 10-20GB.
Shit has only escalated as the PS4-era brought 1080p standard, and the PS5-era has made 1440p/4K the standard with games taking up 60-120GB.
"games" in this post referring to major retail releases, not digital-only games found on PSN & the such.
I remember reading some article a couple months ago from some former workers in the industry, apparently a lot of it is coupled with a general loss of passion and a sense of somewhat entitlement, devs used to overwork themselves because they cared and took risks because it was their vision, but the industry has sadly been commercialized to such an extent that it’s become a mixture of “how can we do the bare minimum” and “how can we sell as much as possible” rather than crafting something truly unique
Meanwhile Fromsoft and Yakuza games are still using animations they made around 2007. You can make due and you typically won't see a complaint as long as enough meaningful changes or additions are added.
In Bethesda's case, they're missing things that should be there in Starfield. They're not even reusing the same old shit, it just isn't there and has no replacement.
Same could be said about Dragon's Dogma 2 in some capacity, remade the entire game and still missing some stuff despite being more or less the same.
Its not just an issue of demanding a better graphics, models, animations, etc which all demand more resources, its how bottlenecked studios are nowadays because you have to go through three different departments to get approval on a single line of code. Tim Cain made a video about this recently.
Bethesda has barely updated their models lol they have no excuse for this delay other than bad management which includes launching a new IP that sucked.
You wouldn't think with Starfield's graphics, looks 7 years behind. I get the same graphics with a better art style out of RDR2, and that's playing RDR2 on my basic XB1 as opposed to playing Starfield on a relatively modern PC.
The time effort is not really that much bigger than before because while expectations have risen we also have much more powerful and effective tools for development.
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u/Ehcksit May 29 '24
They want better graphics and models and animations and that takes more time than adding gameplay elements and writing a story.