Rule of thumb with ANY Bethesda game is just wait 6-12 months after release, and MAYBE it won't delete your saved game. No one ever learns with these guys. Cool games, horribly buggy for most of its early life.
I played Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 side by side. By the end of Fallout 4, I realized that I had been mostly playing the same game for 10 years (all of Todd Howard's games since TES4[1]). I almost stopped playing near the end. Witcher 3 is one of the best games I've ever played. Todd Howard has lots of work to do if I'm going to get another one of his games.
I'm watching Cyberpunk 2077 intently.
[0] They leave the "entertaining" ones in. It's usually up to modders to fix what they can. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/112719-Bethesda-S...
Then again, there was a large gap between trying Fallout 3/NV and Fallout 4, so maybe my perception changed.
one of my reactions to fallout 3 was that unlike the original fallouts, it wasn't funny.
Not quite. Fallout 3 was all Bethsoft, and Obsidian mostly did Vegas.
Fallout 3 has no big story twists, and clear good guys and bad guys. The main quest is entirely linear, with a large spectacle near the end, ending with a pathetic boss fight. Most everyone (except Dad and maybe 3 Dog) comes off as one dimensional with only one purpose in life. There are some cool side stories and places (a cave filled with orphans, and a mad scientist's escapist simulation), but I recall them being static for the most part.
New Vegas is complicated and more gray in comparison. Who's good or bad is murky. I don't recall any big story twists, but the characters had depth. Take for example, Caesar: I doubt Bethesda would have thought to give him a tumor. There's lots of powerful factions, which not only have stories, you significantly participate in them. The main story branches off into about 4 very different endings, something that Bethesda didn't do until F4.
Back in the day, I watched the Zero Punctuation review of New Vegas[0]. I remember literally everything he talks about! I drank out of that toilet!
In writing in RPGs, I will dock some points from Larian. Recently tried Divinity:Original Sin. The setting and the writing was so generic.
They solved this in Fallout 76. Can't be accused of having shallow characters if you put no characters in the game!
For me, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and any subsequent Bethesda games based on this engine are automatic no-buys for me at this point. I sincerely hope Fallout 76 sells poorly (relative to other Bethesda titles) so that they can get the message where it hurts.
”I think most people that aren't making games use the word 'engine', you know, they think of 'engine' as one thing, and it's, we view it as technology, right? so there are lots of pieces, and every game, parts of that change. Whether it's the renderer, the animation system, the scripting language, the AI, the controls... so, some people talk about Gamebryo but that's, like, we haven't used that in a decade.”
”And a lot of it is, some of it is middleware, whether that's Havok animation here, and, so 76, we changed a lot of it. You know, it's an all new renderer, new lighting model, new landscape system, and then, when you go to Starfield, even more of it changes. And then Elder Scrolls 6 which is really out in the horizon, even more of that will change there.”
The quote is translated from a video interview in German here:
https://www.gamestar.de/videos/fallout-76-interview-mit-todd...
Here is an English translation of the video interview:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BethesdaSoftworks/comments/8v1u2z/t...
People point at the right speech moments, look disappointed appropriately, a timer then fires for a story option that's only open for five seconds. It looks so much more _alive_ than a Bethesda game.
There's hints of it back in Witcher III if you know where to look but I'm super excite for 2077.
I mean this is a company that currently releases a multiplayer game without any anti-cheat, anti-tamper technology. Cheating in Fallout 76 will be as hard as locating the config files and changing them with your text editor.
It would be a start if they automatically adjusted the value based on the refresh rate of your monitor.
They do need to fix their physics and modernize frame rates and aspect ratios but other then that I hope they never change to some completely different engine. Loading in Bethesda games is always much faster than most other games too.
But FO76? I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist, they might as well have just released it as a DLC for FO4 because it seems completely pointless as is.
I'd expect to read that on /r/games but not on HN :-(. Engines are source code, they can be fixed and many are fixed (some even descend from codebases older than the NetImmerse/Gamebryo/Creation engine). The issue is that Bethesda doesn't fix their engine, not that their codebase's history goes back more years than whatever time delta the marketing teams of mainstream companies have convinced the gaming public is supposed to be "good" by arbitrarily changing the name or version of their engines.
Unless we're talking about a brand new studio or tiny developer, no engine is being made from scratch anymore - especially in the AAA space. Even id Tech 6 traces its lineage to Quake 1 in 1996 (Carmack said at some point in the mid-90s that he starts new games from scratch, but that was up to Quake 1 and since then every new engine is an improvement to the existing codebase). Same with Unreal, LithTech (latest version being LithTech Firebird and used in Shadow of War), RAGE (which is based on earlier AGE from before Rockstar bought Angel Studios), Serious Engine and of course NetImmerse/Gamebryo as well as a bunch of others (and note here that i'm only mentioning engines that started in the 90s - if we go forward a little bit, a ton of "modern" engines started in early 2000s).
The framerate bug everyone mentions? By keeping the fixed timestep that they already have with their framerate capping, uncapping the framerate, decoupling the game updates and ensuring they are called at ~60Hz (or whatever they want) and interpolating the visual state between update states they'll have the currently best approach for 60+ Hz displays with barely touching most of their systems (mainly the rendering code), let alone rewriting everything from scratch.
(as a sidenote i always find it funny when people think that Bethesda will make a brand new polished and bugfree engine when they do not give enough time to their programmers to fix issues in their existing engine that are often minor)
> which a very substantial proportion of high-end PC gamers have in late 2018
According to Steam's hardware survey only a combined 1.28% uses an ultra-wide monitor as of October 2018. In perspective, that is almost the half of a combined 2.47% that uses non-widescreen resolutions and more than twice the users using 1280x1024 than users using 2560x1080 (the most common ultra-wide monitor resolution).
I mean, considering 160 million active users (or so, last time i checked) this is still an estimated around 2 million users, but that is only a tiny bit higher than the percentage of Linux users (0.72%) and less than half of the percentage of Mac users (2.84%) that Bethesda is completing ignoring - so i don't exactly expect them to put any effort towards a tiny percentage of ultra-wide monitors either (which, if we consider porting studios like Feral than handle everything themselves and only need a code dump from the original developer, might actually need more work from Bethesda's side than making the game available on Linux and Mac).
Not that i excuse their lack of support for ultra-widescreen, mind you (especially considering that it is trivial to have if you also don't screw up FOV tweaking - which btw, Bethesda also does). But the proportion of PC gamers using ultra-widescreen isn't really anything special to affect their decisions.
That said, I will admit that my language could have been more precise. It's less that they won't "move away" from their old engine, and it's more that they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times. Anyone who has played Oblivion can attest to the fact that, even if they've swapped out the terrain system or the lighting effects system, their new games are just reskinned copies of Oblivion, complete with all the same bugs, quirks, idiosyncracies, and lack of decent PC support that's always been there.
In the past Bethesda has relied on modders dealing with things like supporting modern monitors. Now that's not possible with Fallout 76, so the poor PC support becomes much more pronounced.
For what it's worth, I think it's hard to draw too many conclusions from the Steam hardware survey, because that's including everyone with Steam. Instead of asking how many Steam accounts have a 21:9 resolution monitor, it would be better to ask how many potential PC buyers of Fallout 76 have a 21:9 resolution monitor, and I suspect the number is higher than 2 million. You have to keep in mind many of those 1080p 16:9 folks have Steam on an old desktop or a laptop that couldn't even run Fallout 76 decently -- there are plenty of 2D indie games that would still justify having Steam installed.
> they won't invest properly in updating it for modern times
This is very different from "moving away" from their old engine and isn't just a matter of language precision: one requires rewriting everything from scratch in a multiyear project that is a big undertaking on its own (with results that are very likely to not be as stable and bug free as people would imagine) that practically no company with an existing codebase does anymore (especially at the stage and size of Bethesda), whereas the other requires fixing a few subsystems that are already there and a tiny fraction of their existing codebase that can be done as part of their updates between games. It is certainly a much smaller change than the renderer updates they've done so far.
About the Steam hardware survey, every PC gamer has Steam installed (there might be a few who do not, but they either only play one or two games, like Battlefield or somesuch, so they do not really matter as far as PC audience comes, or they are so few that they are statistically insignificant - for all intents and purposes Steam has a monopoly on the market and both developers and publishers use every single statistic it provides as pretty much The Truth). With that in mind, PC buyers for Fallout 76 - or any other AAA game - are inside this audience, either as a whole or as a subset, so this 2 million is actually the best case. In practice it is most likely lower because not every single one of those 2m gamers would be interested in Fallout 76 (it isn't like having an ultrawide monitor is some sort of requirement to like the game :-P).
Not every PC gamer is in the potential target audience of Fallout 76. That doesn't increase the numerator -- it dramatically decreases the denominator, making those 2 million a much bigger percentage.
Either way, I feel vindicated with Fallout 76 now being the lowest rated Fallout game in history, selling >80% fewer copies than Fallout 4, etc. Hopefully Bethesda learns a lesson from this and starts putting in the same effort as their peers in the industry.
> their insistence on sticking with their old creation engine
...because it is a common thing to say about Bethesda. But the reality is that they can stick with their engine just fine - they just need to fix their bugs. The problem isn't that they keep using their engine, everyone does (as you already wrote in the first paragraph here), the problem is that they do not give their programmers the necessary time to fix the issues with their engine.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/06/windows-10-october-updat...
From what I found it was a reasonably well known bug too.
Back in the day games used to release on carts and we could not patch them. Now that we have Day1 patches and people expect bugs, production companies shoot for earlier release dates because they can.
Obsidian was founded by a lot of the people who worked on Fallout 1 and 2, and I thought New Vegas was about 10x better than Fallout 3.
But Fallout 3 used the 3rd party Gamebryo engine anyway, so the engine wasn't really developed by Bethesda either.
To be fair, Fallout 2 (my entry to the series, and a game I still love) is famous for being utterly bug-ridden and full of incomplete/broken quests. Disappearing car, anyone? :P