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Fallout 4 Open World Discussion

Justac00lguy

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Someone posted this on reddit. They basically have done a rough estimate on the map size from the landmarks (scale in between them) in the trailer. Obviously it isn't going to be to fully accurate, as open-world games do scale down, but the map so far is looking pretty big.

This is just an estimation so far, it could be bigger or smaller once we see more landmarks and the actual map, but it's twice the size of Skyrim. Do you think that's too big or would you like to see that kind of scale? I'm split because I think Fallout games strike a really good balance when it comes to size. Their worlds never feel to big and overwhelming, or empty either. Plus a large majority of the game is spent in abandoned houses, buildings, underground, caves, vaults etc. so it's not all about the actual physical size of the world. I would like a bigger map size, but not too big I guess.
 

Mercedes

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That estimate, however rough, sounds quite small, to be honest. It's still damn big, but smaller than I anticipated. I know scale isn't everything and it's what fills the world that really matters, there's no point having a huge, barren world for the player to sulk through, but for a game like this, and from Bethesda too, their debut on next-gen hardware, I was expecting a bit more. I mean, we had plenty of games last-gen which eclipsed Skyrim and are quite close to this. GTAV is about ~22 square miles (actually 30, but that number included the oceans around it so I lopped an estimate of their size off) and I loved that open-world, lots of quality touches, though I suppose GTAV's budget surpasses anything else out there and maybe not the best comparison, Fallout 4's budget is probably not even half. The only current-gen open-world game we can compare this to would be Witcher 3 which is about 60 square miles, and that excludes interiors, caves, other realms, etc.

I suppose there's no point looking into a rough estimate that could easily be very wrong, nor being all negative about a game that I know barely anything about, but if this estimate rings true what I'm hoping from this is Bethesda is putting quality before scale. Keeping the map smaller in order to deliver a much higher quality of content and exploration. Which I can live with! :) I hope it's not some engine limitations, however. That'd be a shame.

Maybe my expectations are just too high, but when I think open-world and Bethesda, I think big! Either way, I just want to see this game in motion now. Hurry up E3.

Anyway, I want to go back and give Fallout another chance, and just thought I'd throw out if people think I should play Fallout 3 or New Vegas in order to do that?
 
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Justac00lguy

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That estimate, however rough, sounds quite small, to be honest. It's still damn big, but smaller than I anticipated. I know scale isn't everything and it's what fills the world that really matters, there's no point having a huge, barren world for the player to sulk through, but for a game like this, and from Bethesda too, their debut on next-gen hardware
Small compared to what though? It's much bigger than other Fallout games and bigger than Skyrim, which honestly I felt was too big at times. It's a huge world when you consider there's hardly an transport and you walk at a slow pace through the world. Unlike a GTA or Just Cause which have large open worlds, but because of the transport and pace of exploration it feels somewhat smaller than the size of the world boasts.

Mercedes said:
I was expecting a bit more. I mean, we had plenty of games last-gen which eclipsed Skyrim and are quite close to this. GTAV is about ~22 square miles (actually 30, but that number included the oceans around it so I lopped an estimate of their size off) and I loved that open-world, lots of quality touches, though I suppose GTAV's budget surpasses anything else out there and maybe not the best comparison, Fallout 4's budget is probably not even half.
Most of those games are completely different though. Like I said about GTA V, it's a different kind of open world. Your driving around in cars, boats, planes etc. I mean San Andreas is actually of a similar size as Skyrim, yet it feels infinitely smaller, so I don't think that's a good comparison.

Mercedes said:
The only current-gen open-world game we can compare this to would be Witcher 3 which is about 60 square miles, and that excludes interiors, caves, other realms, etc.
I mean the only thing I can say, when compared to other RPGs, is that Fallout is mainly played indoors, that's where the bulk of the detail and size is. The size of the actual outside world is just touching the surface really. When you consider all the tiny details inside every building, the fact that you can interact with almost any object and go inside any structure makes actual overworld size somewhat irrelevant when it comes to gameplay.

Maybe it's different if you haven't played or really experienced the game, but a bigger world would probably be worse in some ways. Of course it's come accustom now for game companies to boast their ego though the size of the game, but that is just the beginning in my opinion. GTA V is, if I recall is twice the size of New Vegas, yet NV feels twice the size of GTA V. I think if they went with a really huge Fallout, even 30 Square miles sounds too big, it would really take away from the game. Since you're meant to wander the world slow and you find secrets and hidden details in almost every part of the map; it's not really meant to be crossed by horseback/other transport where you'd essentially miss half the game.

Mercedes said:
Anyway, I want to go back and give Fallout another chance, and just thought I'd throw out if people think I should play Fallout 3 or New Vegas in order to do that?
There's no order really, they're quite separated. Fallout 3 is darker, more desolate with an eery atmosphere, while NV has a western-like feel and is slightly more advanced. New Vegas' story is more political and blurs the line between what's right and wrong and you can change the world much more with your choices. F3 is more of a personal story with a set path and there's the "good guys" and "bad guys". New Vegas has more quests and locations, whereas F3 focuses more on size and quality in these aspects. It's all a matter of personal preference really.
 

Mercedes

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Small compared to what though? It's much bigger than other Fallout games and bigger than Skyrim, which honestly I felt was too big at times. It's a huge world when you consider there's hardly an transport and you walk at a slow pace through the world. Unlike a GTA or Just Cause which have large open worlds, but because of the transport and pace of exploration it feels somewhat smaller than the size of the world boasts.

Most of those games are completely different though. Like I said about GTA V, it's a different kind of open world. Your driving around in cars, boats, planes etc. I mean San Andreas is actually of a similar size as Skyrim, yet it feels infinitely smaller, so I don't think that's a good comparison.

Small compared to really the only other open-world current-gen title. And the comparisons were moreso on a technical level than the actual game flow and design of each, which I wasn't really comparing between the different titles. I was expecting a rather large leap in the scale and content that open-worlds could boast when we moved to current-gen hardware, which is just so much more capable. And we've had those leaps! There's already been games which have show-cased what exactly is possible on them, huge open-worlds bigger than ever before with even more quality content than what filled much smaller spaces. Bigger, and better! And so I was expressing slight disappointment that Fallout 4 might not be pushing the hardware as much as it could.

Now I'm not knocking it for that, not every game needs to be some boundary-pushing technical piece and not every developer needs to join in on the variety of arms races which are currently ensuing, but I am entitled to think it's a shame a big release like this might not be doing it.

Though of course, this is all just based off someone's maths to judge the size of the world. I'm explaining what I meant but it's all purely hypothetical and I would like nothing more for all that to be dead wrong!

I mean the only thing I can say, when compared to other RPGs, is that Fallout is mainly played indoors, that's where the bulk of the detail and size is. The size of the actual outside world is just touching the surface really. When you consider all the tiny details inside every building, the fact that you can interact with almost any object and go inside any structure makes actual overworld size somewhat irrelevant when it comes to gameplay.

Maybe it's different if you haven't played or really experienced the game, but a bigger world would probably be worse in some ways. Of course it's come accustom now for game companies to boast their ego though the size of the game, but that is just the beginning in my opinion. GTA V is, if I recall is twice the size of New Vegas, yet NV feels twice the size of GTA V. I think if they went with a really huge Fallout, even 30 Square miles sounds too big, it would really take away from the game. Since you're meant to wander the world slow and you find secrets and hidden details in almost every part of the map; it's not really meant to be crossed by horseback/other transport where you'd essentially miss half the game.

I'm not sure why a world being bigger if the amount, and quality, of the content isn't compromised is a bad thing? I mean, going off what you're saying, it sounds like a very large part of the games is exploration and discovery, something which I adore in games, so what would be bad about having an even bigger world full of more things to explore and discover, if the quality and content is not at all worsened by the increase in scale? And I didn't feel like I missed out on any of the content on other open-world titles just because we had fast travel or horses. If I saw something, I'd just stop and go explore. I don't feel I would have gotten more out of the games without those means of transportation.

Also, adding to that, so I'm under the notion that if Bethesda added transportation, like a dune buggy type deal or something like that, you'd dislike that feature?

There's no order really, they're quite separated. Fallout 3 is darker, more desolate with an eery atmosphere, while NV has a western-like feel and is slightly more advanced. New Vegas' story is more political and blurs the line between what's right and wrong and you can change the world much more with your choices. F3 is more of a personal story with a set path and there's the "good guys" and "bad guys". New Vegas has more quests and locations, whereas F3 focuses more on size and quality in these aspects. It's all a matter of personal preference really.

Okay, thanks! Sounds like New Vegas might be more my thing, then. :) Shall reinstall that and give it a play sometime, looking forward to it. Did love a lot of the concept art and style of the world I saw! And I'm not going to mention it to anyone! I hate being bombarded with "OMG VANILLA SKYRIM IS ****, YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD THESE BILLION MODS!!!" type things when mentioning you're playing any Bethesda game on PC.
 

Justac00lguy

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Small compared to really the only other open-world current-gen title. And the comparisons were moreso on a technical level than the actual game flow and design of each, which I wasn't really comparing between the different titles. I was expecting a rather large leap in the scale and content that open-worlds could boast when we moved to current-gen hardware, which is just so much more capable. And we've had those leaps! There's already been games which have show-cased what exactly is possible on them, huge open-worlds bigger than ever before with even more quality content than what filled much smaller spaces. Bigger, and better! And so I was expressing slight disappointment that Fallout 4 might not be pushing the hardware as much as it could.
I've never really liked the assumption that bigger is better, I think it's more of a pretentious argument brought up in a lot of cases. Oblivion was a game made 6 years before Skyrim yet was actually bigger, but yet the latter game was the one that everyone considers to be one of the greatest of its time and is considered the pinnacle of open world gaming among many mainstream fans. If you go back to the likes of Daggerfall, that game was the size of a country. Now I know the argument back would be, but the game has evolved from a gameplay and visual perspective and that would be my exact point. There's only so much a game could do with size. Hell in 10 years time we could have planet sized games (No Man's Sky) pushing that boundary, but there's only so much you can actually go with size and that's where the bigger is better argument really falls over itself.

It has to be relevant to what the game is trying to achieve. For example, The Legend of Zelda, in that case bigger is what a lot of people are craving because the series is more so contained sandboxes mimicking an open world. But when you have an already huge open world game where it takes 15+ hours to complete the main quest (average) and +100 hours to do everything else, then bigger gets harder to achieve.

This is why I was never the biggest fan of Skyrim, and I've known many people to have the same view, the game felt too overwhelming. The size was great and all, but when there is too much to do and your quest list almost becomes a checklist of chores, and constant distractions plague your playthrough, things get tedious. Fans of the series, and people with tons of time on their hands, or who can commit themselves to this kind of world will love the game, and hell even I loved my 50 hours of the game, but that's not going to be everyone. Theoretically if a game pushes the boundary in size every year then in 5-10 years time we'll have a 1000 square mile game with over 100,000 hour play time, which would be literal hell trying to play. My point is, there's a time and a reason to make a game bigger, and it's not always the right design choice just so a game can market it's ego and make it a selling point.

Now I'm not knocking it for that, not every game needs to be some boundary-pushing technical piece and not every developer needs to join in on the variety of arms races which are currently ensuing, but I am entitled to think it's a shame a big release like this might not be doing it.
I don't even think every game needs to push the boundary. The Order pushed the boundaries in terms of visuals yet was a pretty borderline average game. Size doesn't necessarily mean pushing boundaries either. I mean Skyrim will probably be up there for years as an influential title yet it didn't push any boundaries in terms of size. If you set out just solely on making something bigger because it's on next-gen for the right to say it, then the game could lose all its charm. Hell, the game might push boundaries, we don't even know yet, but I don't think the key to success is to push boundaries, especially when it can make or break a game. Give me a brilliant open world game with great exploration, detail, refined gameplay, interesting plot/characters, improved physics/engine over physical size any day of the week.

I'm not sure why a world being bigger if the amount, and quality, of the content isn't compromised is a bad thing? I mean, going off what you're saying, it sounds like a very large part of the games is exploration and discovery, something which I adore in games, so what would be bad about having an even bigger world full of more things to explore and discover, if the quality and content is not at all worsened by the increase in scale?
Yeah like I said before, you could apply your state of mind to a 1000+ sqaure mile game and I think most people would agree that it would be too overwhelming. If they can go for a bigger a better world then by all means go for it, but there's a big problem with that, In being, that it just might not suit the game. Fallout is already big enough in many people's eyes. I spent 80 hours in Fallout 3 and 100 hours in New Vegas and then more hours in separate playthroughs and DLC. That surly isn't considered small for a single player experience when the majority of games typically last >10 hours. Though my point being, if the game is 5x as big in scope, then just completing the main quest line would take 50 hours plus meaning to experience the game fully you would have to put in these hours. He problem with this is that most people don't have that kind of time, you can lose interest, feel overwhelmed, or the game's pacing might be completely different to the point where it doesn't even feel like the same kind of game anymore.

I've always said in the new Fallout, that I wouldn't mind a bigger game, but I just wouldn't want it to be too big; it wouldn't feel right in this kind of game. Especially when you consider the amount of detail in the game. Just because another game is bigger and was successful doesn't mean every game should follow suit or face living in its shadow. Fallout is a huge series with its own feel to the game and there honestly isn't a whole lot that needs to change. The main thing is refinement. Character models, textures, physics, engine, bugs, animations etc. Those were really all the negatives the series received and it's better to fix them first and foremost and then maybe add on. The game could honestly just be a big success it it did just that and nothing else.

Mercedes said:
And I didn't feel like I missed out on any of the content on other open-world titles just because we had fast travel or horses. If I saw something, I'd just stop and go explore. I don't feel I would have gotten more out of the games without those means of transportation.
Yeah that's where this series differs and exactly why it doesn't have transportation, well yet anyway, lol. Like in GTA V, you will ignore quite a lot of the details since you're in a car or some other mode of transportation most of the time. I mean imagine how big the game would seem if you couldn't run and you couldn't use any sort of transportation. That's why GTA shoots for that kind of scale. That's why Fallout--even though it can have large open areas--has quite a lot of detail; locations, enemies, items, around every corner to keep you busy. If you took a car, or hell, even a horse, and put it in either F3 or NV the game would seem a lot smaller than it is. I guess you could balance out a huge Fallout game with some of transportation, but honestly I like the lone walk feel the game has to it; makes you really appreciate every inch of the world.

Though I would also so that the literal sq mile map size is touching the surface when it comes to actual game size and content in the game really. There's so much detail, because it's a post apocalyptic game, that it would probably extremely hard to replicate all this detail on an improved engine with improved physics/graphics etc. and then upscale it 2 or 3 times. It's not like they're just replicating scenery from the real world, they have to go over every detail to make sure it fits this apocalyptic setting. Then of course you have the fact that you can interact with most objects in the game and that they're not just there purely for cosmetic reasons. Then, like I said before, most of the actual size is indoors and that's where you'll be doing most of the exploring, so even if the sq mile size might not seem that big (though I think 99% would disagree), the game feels a lot more extensive from the inside portions and detail.

I would love the map to be somewhere in the 20 Sq mile range personally, maybe even smaller of anything. That would be the perfect size in my opinion considering that this game seems a lot more populated with more buildings. It probably will be a huge game, I just really disagree with the notion that bigger is better or groundbreaking, or even important, when a game is already huge and when it just doesn't seem of any reason or purpose other than to say "lol lol we have the biggest game now!".

Okay, thanks! Sounds like New Vegas might be more my thing, then. :) Shall reinstall that and give it a play sometime, looking forward to it. Did love a lot of the concept art and style of the world I saw! And I'm not going to mention it to anyone! I hate being bombarded with "OMG VANILLA SKYRIM IS ****, YOU NEED TO DOWNLOAD THESE BILLION MODS!!!" type things when mentioning you're playing any Bethesda game on PC.
Vanilla isn't really all that bad, it's just when you've played with tons of mods that vanilla seems ****. If you start off with vanilla and add a few mods here and there it will probably be better. It's like when you first switched to a HDMI Cable. At first you don't really see the big deal, but when you go back it will seem awful. Of course I played the vanilla games on console, so I don't know any better anyway.
 

Emma

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This is why I was never the biggest fan of Skyrim, and I've known many people to have the same view, the game felt too overwhelming. The size was great and all, but when there is too much to do and your quest list almost becomes a checklist of chores, and constant distractions plague your playthrough, things get tedious. Fans of the series, and people with tons of time on their hands, or who can commit themselves to this kind of world will love the game, and hell even I loved my 50 hours of the game, but that's not going to be everyone. Theoretically if a game pushes the boundary in size every year then in 5-10 years time we'll have a 1000 square mile game with over 100,000 hour play time, which would be literal hell trying to play. My point is, there's a time and a reason to make a game bigger, and it's not always the right design choice just so a game can market it's ego and make it a selling point.
You're not playing TES right if constant distractions bother you. :P
Don't mean to offend you here or anything, but that's what fans of the series love the most. The more you can do the better, the more you're pulled to do a dozen different things at once the more I like it. If you want a linear, focused game with a clearly defined goal with guideposts telling you where to go with no distractions along the way, then Elder Scrolls and Fallout are the wrong franchises for you, because massive worlds overflowing with distractions is kind of the whole point. The entire point of these games is that it takes you literally a couple real world months, at least, to do everything, instead of just a few days like any other game does. If it's just too much for you then I have to wonder why you're playing these games at all. This is these games' identity. You take this part away, you're robbing them of what makes them unique and popular. It's like taking Mario out of Super Mario, Samus out of Metroid, or Link out of Legend of Zelda. It's just not done.


I've always said in the new Fallout, that I wouldn't mind a bigger game, but I just wouldn't want it to be too big; it wouldn't feel right in this kind of game. Especially when you consider the amount of detail in the game. Just because another game is bigger and was successful doesn't mean every game should follow suit or face living in its shadow. Fallout is a huge series with its own feel to the game and there honestly isn't a whole lot that needs to change. The main thing is refinement. Character models, textures, physics, engine, bugs, animations etc. Those were really all the negatives the series received and it's better to fix them first and foremost and then maybe add on. The game could honestly just be a big success it it did just that and nothing else.
Asking a game this big to be bugless at launch is not realistic. You will not finish the game within a single gaming generation if you do. It's not going to happen. What is far more practical is to do the best you can, then launch, then listen to player reports of bugs. A lot of bugs happen in ways that reflect individual player choices, which make it nearly impossible for a tiny group of playtesters to account for every single thing you can do in huge games like this. But a giant group like the end-players can. Yes some people hate using customers like this, but the problems can be patched. Patching was not a thing when Oblivion was out. The "patches" that it got were, for the most part, meant only to set up the DLCs and did next to nothing to fix actual problems. Even when Skyrim rolled around, bug fixing in patches was still a very new thing and the game was not made with that in mind to start. This time it is different.

Funny you bring up GTA V because it's a prime example of problems being patched as soon as possible following player reports. Rockstar is obsessive with fixing absolutely everything that ever goes wrong in their game. Bethesda is probably not going to be that obsessive. But they definitely will be better at patching that they were in Skyrim, and Skyrim, unlike all their previous games, actually fixed a lot of bugs that it had at launch, including very common ones, which the previous games didn't even attempt to fix if they even fixed any bugs at all (which were almost always esoteric bugs no one had ever heard of or experienced instead).
 

Justac00lguy

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You're not playing TES right if constant distractions bother you. :P
Don't mean to offend you here or anything, but that's what fans of the series love the most. The more you can do the better, the more you're pulled to do a dozen different things at once the more I like it. If you want a linear, focused game with a clearly defined goal with guideposts telling you where to go with no distractions along the way, then Elder Scrolls and Fallout are the wrong franchises for you
Nah, completely wrong. I love both genres, never did I say I prefer linear games. I went out of my way to do side quests, search every location, have every item, in the Fallout series. I just said Skyrim was slightly overwhelming for me. I think that's a perfectly reasonable opinion to have and I've seen many share this view. The idea that if you find one game overwhelming then you can't play the others is kind of ridiculous - I enjoyed the others immensely; in fact I enjoyed Skyrim immensely, I just didn't like the pace of the game. That's why I prefer the Fallout series because, even though it's another huge RPG, it has its own style of open world and one that is different (in subtle ways) to TES. It's a matter of preference, I prefer the former approach to open world design than the latter.

Anyway, that analysis was just to point out that a game on a bigger scale would have these problems. Sure a core following may love it, but if people don't have the enough time, or if they aren't as dedicated, the game is going to be too overwhelming to the majority. I'm not too anal on game size, I just prefer a world on the same level as Fallout 3 and New Vegas; it had the perfect balance of tons of things to do without going too over the top. I know everything nowadays is bigger and better and I expect that, but yeah I definitely don't want the developers to make the game huge to flex their ego so they can just use it as a marketing tactic.

Matt said:
because massive worlds overflowing with distractions is kind of the whole point. The entire point of these games is that it takes you literally a couple real world months, at least, to do everything, instead of just a few days like any other game does. If it's just too much for you then I have to wonder why you're playing these games at all. This is these games' identity. You take this part away, you're robbing them of what makes them unique and popular. It's like taking Mario out of Super Mario, Samus out of Metroid, or Link out of Legend of Zelda. It's just not done.
Yeah sure, as a huge open world game fan, I completely agree, but I still think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. You're acting as if I've never touched a huge open world game before just because felt one game was too overwhelming, There's a point where games get too big. Surly a game that take 10,000 hours to explore is not the direction to go (an extreme example, but one too emphasise my point). This brings me back to my original point when I was replying to Mercedes, bigger isn't always better. If games continue to expand in this manner, then they will become too big. Like I said, I don't mind the game being bigger, I just throughly disagree, in this situation, that bigger (on the level of 50-100 mile Sq. game) is right for the Fallout series.

Matt said:
Asking a game this big to be bugless at launch is not realistic. You will not finish the game within a single gaming generation if you do. It's not going to happen.
Again, I don't really know where I said that I expect them to launch the game bugless, lol. My point is that, you can make a world huge and then focus less on the quality control stage. New Vegas, my 3rd favourite game of all time, was a result of this at launch. It was launched prematurely and had a number of bugs which stopped the game, froze the game, and completely broke the game. This wasn't a launch only thing, it happened months after.

Fact is Bethesda, while an excellent company, is prone to having buggy games. My point is, I would rather have a complete game, with less bugs than the previous, than a huge broke game which stops me from enjoying it as much as the previous (for months my data was lost). It's completely illogical for Bethesda to go the New Vegas route again. It was a much better game than F3 yet got **** on because of the number of glitches and game breaking bugs; it wasn't a coincidence it got like a 84 score on metacritic compared to the predecessor's 93. It's not only unfair to the buyers, but it's absolutely ridiculous from a marketing standpoint to repeat the same mistake.
 
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Dio

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That estimate, however rough, sounds quite small, to be honest. It's still damn big, but smaller than I anticipated. I know scale isn't everything and it's what fills the world that really matters, there's no point having a huge, barren world for the player to sulk through, but for a game like this, and from Bethesda too, their debut on next-gen hardware, I was expecting a bit more. I mean, we had plenty of games last-gen which eclipsed Skyrim and are quite close to this. GTAV is about ~22 square miles (actually 30, but that number included the oceans around it so I lopped an estimate of their size off) and I loved that open-world, lots of quality touches, though I suppose GTAV's budget surpasses anything else out there and maybe not the best comparison, Fallout 4's budget is probably not even half. The only current-gen open-world game we can compare this to would be Witcher 3 which is about 60 square miles, and that excludes interiors, caves, other realms, etc.

I suppose there's no point looking into a rough estimate that could easily be very wrong, nor being all negative about a game that I know barely anything about, but if this estimate rings true what I'm hoping from this is Bethesda is putting quality before scale. Keeping the map smaller in order to deliver a much higher quality of content and exploration. Which I can live with! :) I hope it's not some engine limitations, however. That'd be a shame.

Maybe my expectations are just too high, but when I think open-world and Bethesda, I think big! Either way, I just want to see this game in motion now. Hurry up E3.

Anyway, I want to go back and give Fallout another chance, and just thought I'd throw out if people think I should play Fallout 3 or New Vegas in order to do that?

I thought 3 was way better than New Vegas. I didn't enjoy New Vegas much at all but I had so much fun with 3. So obviously I would recommend 3.
 

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Franklin said:
This is why I was never the biggest fan of Skyrim, and I've known many people to have the same view, the game felt too overwhelming. The size was great and all, but when there is too much to do and your quest list almost becomes a checklist of chores, and constant distractions plague your playthrough, things get tedious. Fans of the series, and people with tons of time on their hands, or who can commit themselves to this kind of world will love the game, and hell even I loved my 50 hours of the game, but that's not going to be everyone. Theoretically if a game pushes the boundary in size every year then in 5-10 years time we'll have a 1000 square mile game with over 100,000 hour play time, which would be literal hell trying to play. My point is, there's a time and a reason to make a game bigger, and it's not always the right design choice just so a game can market it's ego and make it a selling point.
@Justac00lguy

Yeah I've expressed this on the forum before, and I too am a firm believer that bigger doesn't always equal better. The smaller the deviation, the better the accuracy achieved is something that comes to mind when a discussion around open world game size pops us.

Don't get me wrong, I adore the humongous and immense size worlds of Elder Scrolls, Skyrim has plenty of rich content filling it's world so that it doesn't feel like a hollow shell. It's the content in between that gets a bit overwhelming for me. I like to stick to one quest chain at a time so that I can follow the narrative clearly. It gets a little tricky when a quest sends me to a town I've never been to before and suddenly I'm bombarded with scripted events that almost make the entire occurrence supernatural. By the time I've left the town I have five new quests in my quest log that were forced upon me. I find this rather unfavorable as it could take days or even weeks for me to get back to these quests, and I've most likely to have forgot what originally happened thoroughly.

Gaming is still in a juvenile state and I suspect developers have yet to find a harmony between world size, content, and general man hours put into it all. A game would require a substantial amount of diverse gameplay and content if it should hold my interest for the crazy amount of gameplay JC stated above.
Many Indie titles use the huge open world gimmick as a marketing point, but all I've seen is a huge world with very little going on, Fallout and Elder scrolls have always had a nice amount of content within them so that they don't feel empty.

Getting back on topic. I've always enjoyed Fallouts world, although big, it was also quite linear, especially New Vegas that had you on a set path, although this was for narrative reasons. I personally would prefer less linearity with Fallout 4. Maybe this time round we will receive a mode of transport... like a gerocycle please? :)

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Justac00lguy

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Yeah New Vegas had a somewhat linear path to it in the first quarter of the game, up until you got to Vegas. I think they did that for the casuals and newcomers mostly. That was one of my small gripes with the game itself. I mean it is mostly open and huge to explore, but the mountainous landscape created barriers between locations. I hope F4 fixes this somewhat.
 

Emma

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Yeah sure, as a huge open world game fan, I completely agree, but I still think you're misinterpreting what I'm saying. You're acting as if I've never touched a huge open world game before just because felt one game was too overwhelming, There's a point where games get too big. Surly a game that take 10,000 hours to explore is not the direction to go (an extreme example, but one too emphasise my point). This brings me back to my original point when I was replying to Mercedes, bigger isn't always better. If games continue to expand in this manner, then they will become too big. Like I said, I don't mind the game being bigger, I just throughly disagree, in this situation, that bigger (on the level of 50-100 mile Sq. game) is right for the Fallout series.
Well for me the bigger, the better. I would be thrilled to have Arena or Daggerfall sized game with Skyrim's level of detail. For either franchise. I never want to run out of things to do and places to go. But in case you haven't noticed, the game worlds are getting Smaller in Bethesda TES games. Morrowind may have been a smaller geographic area than Oblivion, but it was scaled differently and the game world was actually bigger and packed with stuff. Oblivion's game world was actually mostly empty with the majority having nothing in it. Skyrim was smaller and more densely packed. Fallout has been getting smaller too. The first game was the biggest, the second was smaller, the third was smaller but more detailed, and New Vegas was smaller still but even more detailed. So your whole "obsessed with bigger" idea really isn't valid as that's not what they've been doing. If they suddenly change course with Fallout 4, that'll be a new thing that we can't say is a pattern for them.


Again, I don't really know where I said that I expect them to launch the game bugless, lol. My point is that, you can make a world huge and then focus less on the quality control stage. New Vegas, my 3rd favourite game of all time, was a result of this at launch. It was launched prematurely and had a number of bugs which stopped the game, froze the game, and completely broke the game. This wasn't a launch only thing, it happened months after.

Fact is Bethesda, while an excellent company, is prone to having buggy games. My point is, I would rather have a complete game, with less bugs than the previous, than a huge broke game which stops me from enjoying it as much as the previous (for months my data was lost). It's completely illogical for Bethesda to go the New Vegas route again. It was a much better game than F3 yet got **** on because of the number of glitches and game breaking bugs; it wasn't a coincidence it got like a 84 score on metacritic compared to the predecessor's 93. It's not only unfair to the buyers, but it's absolutely ridiculous from a marketing standpoint to repeat the same mistake.
Uh......... New Vegas is a bad example. Bethesda had nothing to do with is development and patching. It was made by Obsidian, a company that is notorious for releasing broken, incomplete games, way worse than Bethesda's, that they refuse to ever fix post-launch. They always blame their publisher but it keeps happening with them every single time despite not having the same publisher each time. And Bethesda certainly wouldn't do that to one of their developers.
 

Justac00lguy

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Well for me the bigger, the better. I would be thrilled to have Arena or Daggerfall sized game with Skyrim's level of detail. For either franchise. I never want to run out of things to do and places to go. But in case you haven't noticed, the game worlds are getting Smaller in Bethesda TES games. Morrowind may have been a smaller geographic area than Oblivion, but it was scaled differently and the game world was actually bigger and packed with stuff. Oblivion's game world was actually mostly empty with the majority having nothing in it. Skyrim was smaller and more densely packed. Fallout has been getting smaller too. The first game was the biggest, the second was smaller, the third was smaller but more detailed, and New Vegas was smaller still but even more detailed. So your whole "obsessed with bigger" idea really isn't valid as that's not what they've been doing. If they suddenly change course with Fallout 4, that'll be a new thing that we can't say is a pattern for them.
Yeah and it's a good thing in my opinion. I don't think bigger is necessarily better. While I do like a game that can keep my going for 100 or hours and with multiple playthroughs, I don't want anything too big. If you like bigger games that's fine, but I don't think it's necessarily the right direction to go; I think the Fallout games have a nice balance.

Matt said:
Uh......... New Vegas is a bad example. Bethesda had nothing to do with is development and patching. It was made by Obsidian, a company that is notorious for releasing broken, incomplete games, way worse than Bethesda's, that they refuse to ever fix post-launch. They always blame their publisher but it keeps happening with them every single time despite not having the same publisher each time. And Bethesda certainly wouldn't do that to one of their developers.
Yeah it was definitely Obsidian's fault, I was just using it as an example since it did get published under Bethesda's name. As long as they don't release a game with that many bugs, remember Fallout 3, had its fair share as well, then I'm fine. But don't sacrifice quality of performance for game size.
 

Emma

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Yeah and it's a good thing in my opinion. I don't think bigger is necessarily better. While I do like a game that can keep my going for 100 or hours and with multiple playthroughs, I don't want anything too big. If you like bigger games that's fine, but I don't think it's necessarily the right direction to go; I think the Fallout games have a nice balance.
I still say if you don't like huge overworlds, then TES and Fallout are not your franchises. It's all opinion of course. But it's the massive overworlds that are, as I said, the main appeal of these games. You have a big, giant sandbox world where you can do whatever you want, do the main story or not.


Yeah it was definitely Obsidian's fault, I was just using it as an example since it did get published under Bethesda's name. As long as they don't release a game with that many bugs, remember Fallout 3, had its fair share as well, then I'm fine. But don't sacrifice quality of performance for game size.
Well as long as Obsidian isn't making it, we'll never see another game in either of these two franchises that are that buggy. Until the next time Obsidian makes one that big anyway. Only Obsidian makes big, AAA games this buggy. Skyrim was essentially bug-free by comparison. Honestly the only serious, game-breaking bug that Skyrim had was one part of broken dialogue in the main quest that was very quickly fixed, and then the whole backwards dragon thing in the second patch that was also very quickly fixed. The overwhelming majority of the rest of the bugs are mere nuisances and not serious. Despite what some haters of the game wanted to say.

Whereas New Vegas constantly locked up on loading screens (often corrupting your autosave), frequently just crashed for no reason, your character's head (just your head and not the rest of your body) had an inexplicable deep blue hue applied to it at night, companion quest triggers (which are already impossible to get without a guide) are frequently bugged, several main quests had bugged dialogue. That's not even the tip of the iceberg.

For just annoying bugs, there were a lot of tiny, stupid ones that were incredibly easy to fix yet they absolutely refused to do so. Such as some items have a digit shift in their weight, like weighing 15 instead of the intended 1.5. Easy to fix yet none of them were. And there were a lot of those.

It was the most badly bugged game, that I still loved, that I have ever played. And they did not fix a single thing. No matter how easy it was to fix a particular bug, they refused. It's not even remotely in the same realm of bugginess as Fallout 3 or any TES game. Obsidian takes it to an obscene level no other can even come close to.

Bethesda licensed out New Vegas to them because they were busy at the time with Skyrim themselves and they felt sorry for the people at Obsidian, who were made up of people from Black Isle Studies, original makers of the Fallout series, who got screwed over by Interplay and effectively canceled as a franchise before the Bethesda purchase. And despite the relative success of New Vegas, Obsidian's poor handling of its bugs is probably going to prevent Bethesda from contracting out to them ever again.
 

Justac00lguy

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I still say if you don't like huge overworlds, then TES and Fallout are not your franchises. It's all opinion of course. But it's the massive overworlds that are, as I said, the main appeal of these games. You have a big, giant sandbox world where you can do whatever you want, do the main story or not.
I love exploring big games, just because I found one game off putting, I wouldn't say "these games aren't for me" when I've spent my life playing them, lol.

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Anyway on the topic of size, there was an interview with the lead producer who claimed "there is well over 400 hours of content" (source). So maybe it is going to be huge beyond expectation or it could just be pre-hype, but that sounds awfully big to me. Not really sure how I feel, I really liked the size of the previous Fallout games, so I hope this doesn't affect the pace of the game. Honestly, I just hope I have enough time to play it.
 

Emma

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I love exploring big games, just because I found one game off putting, I wouldn't say "these games aren't for me" when I've spent my life playing them, lol.

---

Anyway on the topic of size, there was an interview with the lead producer who claimed "there is well over 400 hours of content" (source). So maybe it is going to be huge beyond expectation or it could just be pre-hype, but that sounds awfully big to me. Not really sure how I feel, I really liked the size of the previous Fallout games, so I hope this doesn't affect the pace of the game. Honestly, I just hope I have enough time to play it.
Eh... generally whenever any developer gives you an estimate of how many "hours" worth of gameplay there is in a game, it is never correct. Sometimes it is way less, sometimes it is more. For Bethesda games like this, usually they give extremely small estimates and most players vastly exceed them. For BioWare games, for instance, completing them usually takes twice as long as BioWare claims. Bethesda it's totally unpredictable. Their estimates are extremely conservative, but due to the nature of the games they make, gameplay of 400 hours is on the very low end. It'll usually take several months of playing it to finish it along with side content. And that's not even really possible anymore because Skyrim introduced recurring, infinitely obtainable random quests. We can expect the same in Fallout 4, only more well-polished. So.... it could be a game where you could, conceivably, keep playing indefinitely on a single playthrough and never run out of things to do. A bigger game world means less likely that you'd get board with the randomly generated quests because they'd have more possiblities. And because you can create your own settlements, the nature of quests can be shaped by what you do, creating unique experiences that won't be the same player-to-player.
 

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