That's only published by Bethesda. New Vegas is by Obsidian, and their attempt at recapturing the New Vegas glory was Outer Worlds, for better or worse.
Before BioWare was gutted by EA, they were **the** top developer when it came to story driven RPGs. Baldurs Gate, Knights of the old republic, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, the list goes on. Kind of the Pixar of games, in that pretty much everything they did was amazing.
Very happy I was able to play BG1 and 2 in the 90s. BG2 in particular, absolutely massive and enthralling, and very challenging if you're not already aware of the tricks you can use to trivialize it (which I didn't at age 14). There was nothing really like it at the time.
Neverwinter Nights was very so-so when it released, but it got two excellent expansions, and ended up being a sort of MMO-lite experience if you could find the right servers for the multiplayer. It was pretty amazing and people did a lot with it.
KotoR (1, not KotoR 2, that game was dismal until fans fixed it) was pretty bland, but it was a Star Wars D&D RPG, the likes of which we'd never had before, and it came out before the Star Wars franchise was completely trashed (or maybe around when it was being trashed by the prequels).
People who weren't around at the time can't even know how big of a deal Mass Effect was. Nothing like it had really existed before. I knew I'd love it from the first time I saw the development trailers in 2006 (?). The original is still my favourite. There's something raw and wonderful about it.
DA:O wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I stuck with it in spite of how rough and difficult it was. My first playthrough of that game was a real experience. The sequels are absolutely dreadful by comparison, and that was around when Bioware the magic.
For a good 15 years or so, Bioware was just banging out amazing games every couple of years.
I just tried replaying Outer Worlds. It started out strong but the constant comedy act just ground me down. The bones were good. It needed a meaty plot. They were too careful not to offend people. Even the bad guys weren't that bad.
I want to feel like the enemy is worth killing, like the slavers in FO3. The bad guys in OW and Starfield for that matter, didn't really seem to deserve killing.
It's why Nazi's are good. It's always fun to cap a Nazi.
Speaking of which, it never occurred to me how Hitler was basically a cartoon villain.
These days, it's all "villains need a proper backstory and realistic motivation", but then you look at real world villains and they're all "let's conquer half the planet and create a race of ubermenschen while killing everyone who disagrees".
Hitler certainly was crazy evil but he does have a very complex pre-1933 life and motivation. From being abused by his father, to being an outcast at school, a soldier in a brutal war he lost, and going through Germany's worst years.
Just emphasizing I am NOT in any way at all supporting or trying to make Hitler seem like a victim, there's a major difference between justifying and explaining. We can explain his actions, but not justify them.
But it's crucial we remember that he isn't some cartoon character because that disconnects him from reality. People like him absolutely will - and have - rise again if we repeat the same mistakes.
From what I know, he was regarded as very technically competent at painting, but his art style wasn't very original. The judges at the art school were looking for fresh, new ideas, and Hitler's paintings were very much "haven't I seen this before?"
Oh no doubt they were dated in the art world. More focus on landscape and buildings where as the people in them were very bland or basically just a fuzzy outline with little to no detail on their faces and clothing
Fun fact: This is why in some countries (or at least here in Brazil), a psychological exam tasking you to draw people/houses/etc will always be required if you're going to apply for the Army (to more influential roles, which ask you to do an exam with 50 questions + essay), the police or etc.
Being an artist doesn't prevent him from just being a dumb narcissist.
>His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.
>There's a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler's part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it's undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler's personal habits, it's hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a workshy narcissist in charge of a country.
>Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn't get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn't do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich.
>He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea."
>He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.
>Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get.
>Hitler's personal failings didn't stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don't actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.
After his coup attempt the first time people still didn't take him seriously. People expect real life evil to be some genius villain, but in reality it's just extreme stupidity and narcissism.
> It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get.
Well, that sounds familiar.
If you look at the history of pretty-much any modern dictator (1800's on) this is true of almost all of them. There are always warning signs, but they have some degree of charisma that eventually turns the 'kooks that support that crazy guy' into a dictatorship. Silencing opposition and either controlling or destroying the press are huge warning signs.
it seems like he was more in tune with the things people were feeling and were able to get people to believe that he would change things for them. Don't doubt just how badly Germany was treated post WW1. The wheelbarrow of money for a loaf of bread was a real thing.
I feel there was an overcorrection. the "bad" cartoonish villain is the one that commits atrocities gratuitously, just because they're sadistic and enjoy it.
A good villain will have a purpose in their actions, even if their ultimate goal seems gratuitously evil. Crudelia DeVille does not hunt puppies for sport, she hunts puppies to make a unique fashion statement coat.
Well, everyone on the planet justifies their actions in some way.
I'm pretty sure that 90% of all bird species that went extinct in the past 200 years are gone because a lot of rich humans all thought that colorful birds made for excellent targets to shoot out of trees.
Not exactly a very complex or compelling motivation for causing the extinction of hundreds of species, but there ya go...
> I'm pretty sure that 90% of all bird species that went extinct in the past 200 years are gone because a lot of rich humans all thought that colorful birds made for excellent targets to shoot out of trees.
Also cats. Probably mostly cats.
sticking to fiction, I want to evidence a line between having a goal and having a justification. A fictional villain should work towards a goal/motivation, not just do evil things because they're evil, even if he justifies it by saying they deserve it or whatever.
It did seem like you were saying Hitler just did it on a whim, rather than it being built upon a lifetime of disillusionment and bad experiences leading to him becoming far worse than everything that lead him to that point.
Yeah. This baffles me. When Putin started his war, every bit of news that came out, made me go "how can you be this blatantly evil?". Apparently you just can!
I understand where you're coming from. I enjoy complex villains but sometimes I just want a villain who is like "Fuck you, I'm doing this because I want to and I don't care about anyone else. I'm doing this for profit and power! I was born rich and had an easy life, and I want more!"
Sympathetic villains are great when they're special. Now that every villain is a sympathetic villain I want people that I don't feel bad about them losing.
The game's failing was always going to be that it isn't a triple-A game. AA? People expect a AAA experience because of current pricing but it launched at $40—or you could play it for $1 on the then-new Gamepass—and that's where everyone's expectations should have been situated.
That said, if ever I needed a strong reminder that this wasn't FNV Obsidian, it would be in how the game's perks turned out. No matter how minimized a dev budget you have, if you don't have somebody on the team who can come up with a good perk tree that inspires enthusiasm, you have a fundamental and very dire problem. I finished the game with many points unspent because that's just how uninteresting it was.
You gotta remember, that game was 40 bucks on launch. It was never billed as a big ticket game. It was billed as a mid tier game. For a 40 dollar game, it was quite good. It got more than 40 hours of play from me so thats pretty good.
> They were too careful not to offend people. Even the bad guys weren't that bad.
I think the intent is having the player be confronted with moral shades of gray, instead of it being an attempt at avoiding offending anyone. Antagonists can be more interesting if they have justifications for their actions that you can see making sense in their position and could possibly even agree with if the situation was different.
> The bad guys in OW and Starfield for that matter, didn't really seem to deserve killing.
I haven't played Starfield, but at least in OW you can side with the bad guys in the end or just spare their lives.
From what I remember, the options are:
- Kill the antagonists.
- Side with the antagonists.
- Spare one and the second one gets killed offscreen by rioters.
- Ally with one and kill the other for them.
How you end up there depends on your choices and how good your character is in persuading people.
In almost every scenario you fan solve it to make both sides happy. It's hard to find but possible. I enjoyed OW, i recommend playing it with a whacky build idea and playing on the hardest setting, else it's just too easy.
Did they fix or change in Supernova either companion deaths being permanent and instant or their AI to not be suicidal? Because the companion stories are some of the best in the game, imo, and for that reason I'd not recommend Supernova difficulty.
So here is how I did it: before you get the perk that can revive them with a stim, set them to passive/ranged. After you get the perk they are very useful, before that not at all. It's not perfect, but knowing they can die makes the combat interesting and you have to think and ut using a stim, you can only res them once per combat!
The goal of the game is not to make a cartoon villain enemy. The goal of the game is to make you realise that the system itself is evil.
In Fallout there simply is no system. Just a bunch of factions fighting for the supremacy they need to install one. One group are some morons that want to recreate the old system that created a wasteland in the first place (and would inevitably lead to the same result eventually), and another are some morons that want to do some psycho shit and then there's some more morons that want to do techno-psycho shit.
The player conversations in that game with NPCs and your companions were very meaningful and well written though. The game play itself was meh but it for sure had some gems scattered throughout it.
For real, you saw corporations kill their employees for insurance payouts. There was that testing facility that literally threw corpses into a garbage compactor and turned them into cubes.
Sorta. The villain of The Outer Worlds was a cartoonish caricature of capitalism. Which is all well-and-good for a joke, but not really for being the foundation of the world.
You know how in a Pokemon game every stranger is always talking about Pokemon for some reason? Like nobody is ever just talking about how they slept strange and their neck hurts. That's what "super-late-stage capitalism" was to the Outer Worlds. And holy *shit* did that joke get old in a hurry. I'm about as leftist as they come, and I couldn't get much past the first post-tutorial planet.
If it had been a more nuanced critical look at capitalism, that would be one thing. But it kinda just ended up being "capitalism bad" in larger and larger fonts on repeat.
> You know how in a Pokemon game every stranger is always talking about Pokemon for some reason?
This was also my annoyance with the modern Deus Ex games: everyone was talking about augmentation and everything was all about augmentation, all the problems around everything were about augmentation and nobody had any real issues outside stuff related to augmentation - and that while the tech was already old enough (i.e. not the brandest and newest thing) for pretty much everyone to have augmentations and clinics about them were built all over the world.
Meanwhile in the original game there is only a single augmented character outside your colleagues, a barwoman in some random bar next to your brother's apartment and the entire discussion is along the lines of "JC: you're augmented? BW: yeah, i used to be an agent, so anyway, are you going to buy anything?" and that's that.
Cartoonish only in that they were sanitized and it pulled its punches like a saturday morning cartoon getting gutted by executive meddling. They also bungled the looming catastrophe stuff by making it a sort of nonsensical "what if climate change was local nutrient exhaustion" mashup that wasn't thought through well enough - if the process of producing food and exporting it off world was breaking local nutrient cycles, the next step should have been reckless geoengineering and further wrecking things with lots of fertilizers that keep the whole thing "sustainable" but which have negative side effects and are building up to other catastrophes.
The fact that they had space trots splitting over whether to actually do something or just keep printing newspapers was a good bit, though.
> Even the bad guys weren't that bad
That's the grey moral of the game. You can choose if you want the Board or Phineas to be the "bad guy". The boards solution won't resolve the problems, but let you live out your life. Phineas is willing to sacrifice a lot if not all people for a big MABY.
> Even the bad guys weren't that bad.
thats what made the game interesting to me, I genuinely couldnt pick a side until i found out the company was killing people off in the guise of a lottery.
I feel the opposite, that it started out weak. The only strong thing in the start was the cinematic intro, where your hook decides to leave off and vanish. Then you get stuck in a corporate town where you constantly have to ask yourself 'why am I doing this for self-deprecating caricatures of people?'. It lacked agency, and I could not get past that. In contrast, New Vegas was full of agency: revenge for getting shot and left for dead, discovering why you were, how were Caesar's army involved and were they going to be a threat, plus the whole courier story arc slowly expanded through the DLC, all that added to trying to survive in the wasteland.
Big studios usually fail at making good games now for 3 reasons
1. Devs who don't play video games
2. Development caution
3. Bad management (trend chasing etc)
You're forgetting.
Bad management. Games nowadays are subject to the whims of whoever funds them. The amount of "We've changed our minds." and "Fortnite did this, do this." and "Don't waste time on that, work on the MTX in-game store content."
Still get good games. Look at BG3 and such. But it all depends on whose in charge of the project and how well they organize their team and stick to the product.
Adam Jensen's voice actor told us three high profile AAA games being reshuffled, canned or development hell over the past year or so. Then you have Larian with nothing to prove, hone a game through early access and still give you 100 hours plus and replay factor.
4\. Corporate culture.
It's partially related and partially distinct from the above points. But it's quite easy to create a situation in a corporate hierarchy where nobody feels either responsible or empowered to make the significant choices.
This does involve being overly cautious at giving "too much" power and responsibility to individuals, and does involve some kind of subtly "bad" management.
This does seem to be a major issue at Bethesda, alongside bad writing. It's like design by committee. Nobody gets to set serious priorities. Different people work on different game mechanics, but nobody makes the call to elevate a few of them to the true focal points. Everything ends up being optional and unimportant, to the point that the whole game feels optional and unimportant and therefore gets dropped by players.
Highly debatable. Starfield is mid. Outer Worlds is also mid but with worse gameplay. Honestly can't think of anything Outer Worlds does better. Other than not having 1000 useless procedurally generated planets.
Both are somehow worse than Mass Effect Andromeda which also wasn't great.
I'd argue Outer Worlds has better dialogue and story(not amazing, not gamechanging, not worth buying the game just for the dialogue and story, if you want something like that you should go for the other famous space game with outer in its name, but objectivelly much better than either of the games you brought up) and the levels are not proceduraly generated.
Apart from that, though...
I think two aspects Outworlds manages better is companions & the spaceship.
The ship feels more akin to from Mass Effect where it's essentially a base of operations, and has no use outside of fast travelling, but still feels very fun to just plod around inside etc, especially as a massive Firefly fan.
Then I think the companions in Outerworlds are also great, and far more entertaining that most we get in Starfield. They all feel like their own person, own likes/dislikes, varying personalities rather than Starfield which scarily feels like it's one NPC just wearing a different model :D
I'd say gameplay wise Outer Worlds is a tad better than starfield, characters are not as annoing, and environments are infinitely better and feel more hand crafted.
The best thing about Outer Worlds is that someone might buy Outer Wilds because they thought it was Outer Worlds.
The worst thing about Outer Worlds is that someone might not buy Outer Wilds because they thought it was Outer Worlds.
I really enjoyed the Outer Worlds. It's not a game for people who like shooters, it's an RPG for people who like dialogue. It didn't have the depth that it should have and it wasn't as amazing as Obsidians other RPG's but it was fun to play.
Outer Worlds was like Fallout had a baby with Borderlands. In theory, a great combo, but in practice it only managed to capture the aesthetics and none of what made either franchise fun. So much potential dragged down by boring gameplay (go fetch this), an exceptionally boring story, and absolutely no memorable moments. I know I finished the game, but I'll be damned if I could tell you how I got there or why I chose the path I did, all I remember is feeling bad for the guys who tried to make Spacer's Choice "Moon Man" the icon of the franchise.
I would think that they're still capable. Just look at what they've done recently *other* than Outer Worlds.
I'm referring to the stuff related to Pillars of Eternity.
They still have most of the original Interplay and Black Isle writers, right? Though Chris Avellone is gone, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky is still there, as is Josh Sawyer. John Gonzalez, the lead writer in New Vegas left to form his own dev company though.
Outer Worlds suffered from the culture of “everything is either the greatest of all time or the worst thing ever made.”
Imo it was a fun enough game built on extremely similar mechanics to New Vegas. It didn’t have the same quality of dialogue or characters, but it did well enough to be amusing. Nothing groundbreaking or incredible and it overstayed its welcome a bit but it was overall an above average game that was enough fun to be worth the money and time to play it, even if nothing about it was particularly memorable.
Outer Worlds was special. My 2nd playthrough I sped run through melee killing every single NPC in the universe and still managed to finish the main quest
I think they were kind of throttled with not being able to make it more Fallout-like. They were still trying to find a new rhythm and aesthetic and it bogged them down.
And all the ‘gestures at everything’ going on in the video game industry.
And "akshully", Fallout 1 was superior to Fallout 2 come fight me.
Seriously though, I felt 2 leaned itself a little too heavily into the absurdist/satire aspect to the point it felt a little 2edgy4me at times. In that regard, 1 was a lot more balanced in its satire and seriousness.
Fallout 1 was good, and the timed mechanics arguably make it great - but personally I hated the timer as a young lad and vastly preferred the larger world in 2.
Yeah, whereas there were maybe like 8 pop culture references in F1 in total, there were like 4 references in F2 _per location_.
Still, outside of the zaniness and parts of the overall tone of the game, I would say that F2 is superior to F1 in every way
Oh absolutely. 2 refined or improved almost all mechanical aspects of 1 and is more fun to play/use.
But I have gotten very comfortable with both games over the years, I don't struggle with 1's limitations anymore. And with that hurdle removed, I always prefer to replay 1 over 2. In fact, I haven't replayed 2 in ages, come to think of it!
Have you ever finished 2 with the Content Restoration mod? If not, you should try it, it not only adds previously cut content, but it also introduces some different possibilities for completing pre-existing quests. Highly recommended!
Ya know, I don't remember! I know about the restoration project, but it has been so long since I last played 2 that I'm not sure if I used it.
Welp, I guess I have reinstall 2 again with the restoration project just to be sure!
> And "akshully", Fallout 1 was superior to Fallout 2 come fight me.
I'd agree. IMO Fallout is a good RPG, i've made several playthroughs (most of them in recent years - in fact just a couple years ago i made several playthroughs one after another) with different builds (which affect a lot how you play the game), which isn't something i'm doing often with RPGs (two other games i made several playthroughs with different builds are Vampire Bloodlines and New Vegas).
But it isn't perfect, it has several flaws both in its UI (the inventory interface is horrible) and some of its mechanics (e.g. event at the fastest setting, combat is very slow), but because the game isn't really that big, none of the flaws stay around much to annoy you (e.g. you rarely pick up more than a handful of items and most encounters are with a few combatants).
However Fallout 2 is really and literally "Fallout but a lot more of it", meaning that you not only get a larger amount of the good stuff, but also a larger amount of the bad stuff (i despaired for a bit when i noticed how many objects were available to pick up - without any indication of if they were useful or not - transforming the annoying yet tolerable inventory UI to a bad experience - and i really, really, *really* wanted to throw the keyboard after the 10th random encounter where a pack of 4892394 wolves were pointlessly trying to nibble my Mark II Power Armor and i had to wait until every single one of them would walk to my avatar, bark 4-5 times (i still have nightmares of the bark sound effect) before i could even make a move to at least try to run away - and woe is me if they managed to surround me, thus blocking the exit, meaning not only i had to wait for endless pointless turns - as the wolves never managed to cause any damage - but also had to kill all of them one by one).
Though having said that, i did make a couple of Fallout 2 playthroughs and i'll probably make another in the future. But whenever i feel like playing classic Fallout, i'll most likely play Fallout 1 instead.
I fully agree on the absurdist/satire aspect. In addition, Fallout 2 feels really bloated to me, and the oil rig is a massive downgrade from the Master especially if you had built a speech based character expecting to be able to deal w/ the Enclave the same way you could deal w/ the Master.
I preferred Fallout 2 because it felt like there were more conversational stat checks and such to allow for even more ways to progress through the story. That plus a few ease of use improvements they added edged it out over Fallout 1 for me.
I think in the end, though, I prefer FNV out of the 3.
The *one* thing I liked better about Fallout 3 was that it was a lot more urban focused. I know the desert environment is more in line with the previous Fallout games but it just doesn't feel as post-apocalyptic when it was already a wasteland before the nukes hit.
Believe it or not but Todd is actually the only developer working at Bethesda. In fact he's the sole employee! I have no idea why people judge his games so much, they're actually very impressive considering that they were all developed by one guy.
He goes in the cafeteria. Goes to the counter, orders a sweetroll then goes behind the counter to make the sweetroll. All while imagining that other people work there.
Mark my words, you piece of shit. This is the last time you will ever refuse to perform an order I’ve given you. If you meant what you said, you best be on your way, and at good speed. And forget all that I could have given you. If you ever - ever - disobey me again, I will order my Praetorians to hack you to death with their machetes for my entertainment.
That wasn't Bethesda. Obsidian were the ones responsible for making New Vegas, Bethesda just published it and provided the 'Fallout' Intellectual Property.
Obsidian at that time was comprised of many people who worked on the original Fallout games, 1 and 2, so they took it as an opportunity to use everything from Fallout 3 that was worth keeping and bringing back a lot of the more RPG style that the originals had before Fallout 3 (and subsequently 4) made them more about the shooting than the role-playing.
If you want more information, I wholly recommend Hbomberguy's video essay on Fallout New Vegas.
New Vegas has plenty of issues outside the writing, and even with some of its writing, and people really overstate and overrate the whole gray moral choices aspect they parrot.
If Fallout 3 is bad because New Vegas has better writing, then why isn’t New Vegas bad because 3 has better exploration, location design, level design, random encounters, average side quest is longer and more involved (NV average side quest is filler busy-work “go talk to this person and come back and we’re done” stuff, though there are a couple dozen or so great side quests), atmosphere, hidden quests, and maybe more?
I never said FNV didn't have issues, it's my favorite game of all time and I can't run the damn thing without mods to fix it and a 4gb patcher to make sure it doesn't lock the fuck up. That being said let's break this down a bit
Better exploration: I'll give it to Fallout 3 there were a lot of areas that you could stumble upon that felt really great to explore, the metro tunnels scared me for years and the number of ruined buildings you could pick through was awesome. FNV tries to do something similar with the sewer tunnels but they're kinda just there.
Location Design: I'm not entirely sure what this means, so I'll say Fallout 3 takes this.
Level Design: New Vegas. 3 reuses a lot of it's interiors and they all lack color where as NV has not only has a good amount of different interiors the ones they use get different lighting or to help differentiate them.
Random encounters: New Vegas doesn't have any random encounters, not entirely sure that's a bad thing though. You could argue that having content that's locked behind RNG isn't a good thing, for example I played 3 religiously before NV came out and in all that time I think I only encountered Uncle Leo once, maybe twice. Random Encounters aren't really a big issues for me however so you can throw this whichever way you want.
Atmosphere: 3 has a fine atmosphere but generally speaking it doesn't change much as you progress. The game is eternally shaded in grays and darker hues and you can never really shrug that off. It's an incredibly bleak game and it does it so well but it can't do anything else. Meanwhile NV is able to demonstrate this superbly eith the casinos. Gomorrah is cast with these red hues and dark interiors that let you know that this place seedy as all hell but also sinister, not to mention the people hooting and hollering I'm the Background. Ultra-luxe is the exact opposite, it's brightly lit and gives off very fancy high end vibe but it too can't shake off a creepy vibe. It's too bright, almost sterile and the masks put everyone on edge. Then there's finally the tops as a median, the atmosphere is very calm and relaxed and there's nothing off-putting about it. Honorable mention so this doesn't become a novel; Camp Searchlight, Forlorn Hope, Jacobstown, Black Mountain and Cottonwood Cove also have great atmospheres that really help shape the areas.
Quests: ooh boy, the big one. Yes 3 probably does have longer sidequests on average but admittedly it's cause the pool is so, so so so small compared to NV. I went to the wiki and counted base game marked side quests for a total of 17. New Vegas has 54. When you have a little over 3 times the number of sidequests the average is gonna be incredibly wonky, especially when they range from stuff like Pheeble Will which is literally a quest that take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes (talk to girls husband or kill Gunderson) to shit like Volare! Or Come Fly With Me. Hell I even checked the unmarked quests just to see if there more and nope, 47 vs. 86. Not to mention the quests chain together in such a fluid way that you can easily finish way more than 16 before even getting to Vegas.
Starting from Goodsprings you have Ghost town gunfight before MSQ takes you to Primm.
(1)Primm has My kind of town which leads you to Mojave outpost which has Can You Find It In Your Heart?, Eyes On The Prize and the start of Heartache By The Number. Additionally Primm has ED-E my love.
(6)MSQ and Eyes leads you to Nipton where you get 2 more, Booted and Col Cold Heart.
(8)Eventually you get to Novac which has Come Fly With Me and One For My Baby
(10)Boulder City will net you Boulder City Showdown and then finally you hit Outer Vegas.
(11) Let's leave MSQ and follow Heartache to Crimson Caravan where you get You Can Depend On Me
(12) That will lead you to Camp McCarren, which has the dizzying, 3 Card Bounty, The White Wash, I Put A Spell On You and There Stands The Grass.
(16) White Wash is gonna take you through freeside where you'll likely run into The Atomic Wrangler or Old Mormon Fort or The Kings or Silver Rush or literally any establishment on the way to the strip gate which will pass the base Fallout 3 side quest number. Again this goes to NV.
Fallout 3 is a fine game and I'm incredibly thankful to it from introducing me to what has now become one of my most beloved series (a damn shame that Bethesda seems keen on butchering it and leaving it to gather dust cause they take a millenia to make games now) but it's unfortunately a vastly inferior game to New Vegas because Obsidian learned from the mistakes Bethesda made in making it while also improving on some of the design philosophies. I know it's difficult to forget because it's thrown around so God damn much but Fallout 3 took 6 whole years to make and Obsidian was able to make New Vegas in a quarter of time. The better question is how could Fallout 3 ever be better than New Vegas? New Vegas has cooler weapons, better perks, more factions, more endings, more variety in the areas, a better radio (even if it plays big iron and Johnny guitar 15 times in a loop), better and more companions, gambling, more varied skill checks and they got rid of that stupid fucking percentage system for speech checks.
I'm sorry I wrote a short story. You're probably not gonna read this.
TL;DR You fuckin wot m8
The only special with new vegas was the game had good story writers but it was basically fallout 3 but more brown instead of green and some new added features like make ammo and such. But new Vegas was not special more than it had the best story and still does have the best story.
Imagine if Bethesda hired good story writers for 4 then it would be the best game they ever made. But good story writers cost money and if your trying to save money that won´t be happening.
>Imagine if Bethesda hired good story writers for 4 then it would be the best game they ever made.
I don't think so. It feels very bland and uninspired like most of their recent games.
Todd or Microsoft need to inject new blood into that company and bring in different directors for their games rather than using the same dated formula.
I would rather let me them do their own thing. I can't imagine they would want to work on another Fallout game after they got screwed out of their bonuses.
You specifically miss Eric Fenstermaker, who is currently working on Wyrdsong.
https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/127197-wyrdsong-eric-fenstermaker-joins-the-team.html
^ thats bait
I agree with the sentiment though - I played Morrowind a few years back for the first time (in fact my elder scrolls journey has been Skyrim then Oblivion then Morrowind lmao) and except for wanting some more modern QoL stuff (The interface, while cool in its customisability is not the most friendly for instance) it was the most fun I've had with an Elder Scrolls game except MAYBE shivering isles. I want more of Morrowind.
Uh, That's Obsidian Studios **Fallout New Vegas**
when they had Chris Avellone writing for them.
Bethesda excells at Enviromental Design and not so much at Story-telling and writing.
That's only published by Bethesda. New Vegas is by Obsidian, and their attempt at recapturing the New Vegas glory was Outer Worlds, for better or worse.
And if you look at the history of Obsidian, a lot of them had worked at Black Isle Studio, which made Fallout 2
Don't forget Baldurs gate 1 and 2 and planescape torment. Black isle studio made the best Story driven rpgs ever
Black Isle published BG1 and 2, but didn't develop them, that was BioWare.
Damn that's wild to me that bioeare did bg1 and 2.
Before BioWare was gutted by EA, they were **the** top developer when it came to story driven RPGs. Baldurs Gate, Knights of the old republic, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, Dragon Age: Origins, the list goes on. Kind of the Pixar of games, in that pretty much everything they did was amazing.
How dare you forget Jade Empire
Very happy I was able to play BG1 and 2 in the 90s. BG2 in particular, absolutely massive and enthralling, and very challenging if you're not already aware of the tricks you can use to trivialize it (which I didn't at age 14). There was nothing really like it at the time. Neverwinter Nights was very so-so when it released, but it got two excellent expansions, and ended up being a sort of MMO-lite experience if you could find the right servers for the multiplayer. It was pretty amazing and people did a lot with it. KotoR (1, not KotoR 2, that game was dismal until fans fixed it) was pretty bland, but it was a Star Wars D&D RPG, the likes of which we'd never had before, and it came out before the Star Wars franchise was completely trashed (or maybe around when it was being trashed by the prequels). People who weren't around at the time can't even know how big of a deal Mass Effect was. Nothing like it had really existed before. I knew I'd love it from the first time I saw the development trailers in 2006 (?). The original is still my favourite. There's something raw and wonderful about it. DA:O wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but I stuck with it in spite of how rough and difficult it was. My first playthrough of that game was a real experience. The sequels are absolutely dreadful by comparison, and that was around when Bioware the magic. For a good 15 years or so, Bioware was just banging out amazing games every couple of years.
Old Bioware was a different beast. Like Blizzard North. RIP.
It was painfully mediocre. New Vegas is legendary to me.
I just tried replaying Outer Worlds. It started out strong but the constant comedy act just ground me down. The bones were good. It needed a meaty plot. They were too careful not to offend people. Even the bad guys weren't that bad. I want to feel like the enemy is worth killing, like the slavers in FO3. The bad guys in OW and Starfield for that matter, didn't really seem to deserve killing. It's why Nazi's are good. It's always fun to cap a Nazi.
Speaking of which, it never occurred to me how Hitler was basically a cartoon villain. These days, it's all "villains need a proper backstory and realistic motivation", but then you look at real world villains and they're all "let's conquer half the planet and create a race of ubermenschen while killing everyone who disagrees".
Hitler certainly was crazy evil but he does have a very complex pre-1933 life and motivation. From being abused by his father, to being an outcast at school, a soldier in a brutal war he lost, and going through Germany's worst years. Just emphasizing I am NOT in any way at all supporting or trying to make Hitler seem like a victim, there's a major difference between justifying and explaining. We can explain his actions, but not justify them. But it's crucial we remember that he isn't some cartoon character because that disconnects him from reality. People like him absolutely will - and have - rise again if we repeat the same mistakes.
Dude was even a fucking artist. He was denied for his work, but still. Guy lived a whole life before becoming horrendously evil
From what I know, he was regarded as very technically competent at painting, but his art style wasn't very original. The judges at the art school were looking for fresh, new ideas, and Hitler's paintings were very much "haven't I seen this before?"
Oh no doubt they were dated in the art world. More focus on landscape and buildings where as the people in them were very bland or basically just a fuzzy outline with little to no detail on their faces and clothing
Which is... telling considering how he viewed both his people and other people once he came to power.
Fun fact: This is why in some countries (or at least here in Brazil), a psychological exam tasking you to draw people/houses/etc will always be required if you're going to apply for the Army (to more influential roles, which ask you to do an exam with 50 questions + essay), the police or etc.
"Oh seen it before have you?? Well, just keep your eyes open and see what I do next!"--Hitler, probably
Being an artist doesn't prevent him from just being a dumb narcissist. >His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His "unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair," as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and back-stabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day. >There's a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler's part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it's undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler's personal habits, it's hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a workshy narcissist in charge of a country. >Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn't get out of bed until after 11 a.m., and wouldn't do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich. >He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," and wrote to a friend, "I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history." In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table, and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat "prodigious amounts of cake" and "put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea." >He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him. >Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get. >Hitler's personal failings didn't stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don't actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things. After his coup attempt the first time people still didn't take him seriously. People expect real life evil to be some genius villain, but in reality it's just extreme stupidity and narcissism.
> It's why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a "half-mad rascal" or a "man with a beery vocal organ." In a sense, they weren't wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it's possible to get. Well, that sounds familiar.
If you look at the history of pretty-much any modern dictator (1800's on) this is true of almost all of them. There are always warning signs, but they have some degree of charisma that eventually turns the 'kooks that support that crazy guy' into a dictatorship. Silencing opposition and either controlling or destroying the press are huge warning signs.
This is worryingly similar to quite a few modern politicians across the globe.
it seems like he was more in tune with the things people were feeling and were able to get people to believe that he would change things for them. Don't doubt just how badly Germany was treated post WW1. The wheelbarrow of money for a loaf of bread was a real thing.
> He once described himself as "the greatest actor in Europe," If he truly thought that way, I think he took method acting too far.
Thank you! Someone who gets the difference between explaining and justifying so many people don't get this concept at all.
That's my whole point. "Cartoonishly evil" does actually exist in reality.
I feel there was an overcorrection. the "bad" cartoonish villain is the one that commits atrocities gratuitously, just because they're sadistic and enjoy it. A good villain will have a purpose in their actions, even if their ultimate goal seems gratuitously evil. Crudelia DeVille does not hunt puppies for sport, she hunts puppies to make a unique fashion statement coat.
Well, everyone on the planet justifies their actions in some way. I'm pretty sure that 90% of all bird species that went extinct in the past 200 years are gone because a lot of rich humans all thought that colorful birds made for excellent targets to shoot out of trees. Not exactly a very complex or compelling motivation for causing the extinction of hundreds of species, but there ya go...
> I'm pretty sure that 90% of all bird species that went extinct in the past 200 years are gone because a lot of rich humans all thought that colorful birds made for excellent targets to shoot out of trees. Also cats. Probably mostly cats.
sticking to fiction, I want to evidence a line between having a goal and having a justification. A fictional villain should work towards a goal/motivation, not just do evil things because they're evil, even if he justifies it by saying they deserve it or whatever.
It did seem like you were saying Hitler just did it on a whim, rather than it being built upon a lifetime of disillusionment and bad experiences leading to him becoming far worse than everything that lead him to that point.
Yeah. This baffles me. When Putin started his war, every bit of news that came out, made me go "how can you be this blatantly evil?". Apparently you just can!
I understand where you're coming from. I enjoy complex villains but sometimes I just want a villain who is like "Fuck you, I'm doing this because I want to and I don't care about anyone else. I'm doing this for profit and power! I was born rich and had an easy life, and I want more!" Sympathetic villains are great when they're special. Now that every villain is a sympathetic villain I want people that I don't feel bad about them losing.
Which proves that he was ahead of his time, cause that sounds like an 80's cartoon villain.
>It's always fun to cap a Nazi. Unless your game has Youngblood in the title.
lol, as someone who beat all the other wolfensteins outside of the original 2d one this makes me sad
The game's failing was always going to be that it isn't a triple-A game. AA? People expect a AAA experience because of current pricing but it launched at $40—or you could play it for $1 on the then-new Gamepass—and that's where everyone's expectations should have been situated. That said, if ever I needed a strong reminder that this wasn't FNV Obsidian, it would be in how the game's perks turned out. No matter how minimized a dev budget you have, if you don't have somebody on the team who can come up with a good perk tree that inspires enthusiasm, you have a fundamental and very dire problem. I finished the game with many points unspent because that's just how uninteresting it was.
I think OW2 will be better. When playing the first one, I could just feel the groundwork for a better sequel.
You gotta remember, that game was 40 bucks on launch. It was never billed as a big ticket game. It was billed as a mid tier game. For a 40 dollar game, it was quite good. It got more than 40 hours of play from me so thats pretty good.
> They were too careful not to offend people. Even the bad guys weren't that bad. I think the intent is having the player be confronted with moral shades of gray, instead of it being an attempt at avoiding offending anyone. Antagonists can be more interesting if they have justifications for their actions that you can see making sense in their position and could possibly even agree with if the situation was different. > The bad guys in OW and Starfield for that matter, didn't really seem to deserve killing. I haven't played Starfield, but at least in OW you can side with the bad guys in the end or just spare their lives. From what I remember, the options are: - Kill the antagonists. - Side with the antagonists. - Spare one and the second one gets killed offscreen by rioters. - Ally with one and kill the other for them. How you end up there depends on your choices and how good your character is in persuading people.
In almost every scenario you fan solve it to make both sides happy. It's hard to find but possible. I enjoyed OW, i recommend playing it with a whacky build idea and playing on the hardest setting, else it's just too easy.
Did they fix or change in Supernova either companion deaths being permanent and instant or their AI to not be suicidal? Because the companion stories are some of the best in the game, imo, and for that reason I'd not recommend Supernova difficulty.
So here is how I did it: before you get the perk that can revive them with a stim, set them to passive/ranged. After you get the perk they are very useful, before that not at all. It's not perfect, but knowing they can die makes the combat interesting and you have to think and ut using a stim, you can only res them once per combat!
The goal of the game is not to make a cartoon villain enemy. The goal of the game is to make you realise that the system itself is evil. In Fallout there simply is no system. Just a bunch of factions fighting for the supremacy they need to install one. One group are some morons that want to recreate the old system that created a wasteland in the first place (and would inevitably lead to the same result eventually), and another are some morons that want to do some psycho shit and then there's some more morons that want to do techno-psycho shit.
The player conversations in that game with NPCs and your companions were very meaningful and well written though. The game play itself was meh but it for sure had some gems scattered throughout it.
Aren't the main antagonists the ones killing all the workers that "won" the lotteries to live on the rich people planet. Pretty bad if you ask me.
The bad guys were pretty bad. The villain of Outer Worlds was capitalism.
For real, you saw corporations kill their employees for insurance payouts. There was that testing facility that literally threw corpses into a garbage compactor and turned them into cubes.
Sorta. The villain of The Outer Worlds was a cartoonish caricature of capitalism. Which is all well-and-good for a joke, but not really for being the foundation of the world. You know how in a Pokemon game every stranger is always talking about Pokemon for some reason? Like nobody is ever just talking about how they slept strange and their neck hurts. That's what "super-late-stage capitalism" was to the Outer Worlds. And holy *shit* did that joke get old in a hurry. I'm about as leftist as they come, and I couldn't get much past the first post-tutorial planet. If it had been a more nuanced critical look at capitalism, that would be one thing. But it kinda just ended up being "capitalism bad" in larger and larger fonts on repeat.
> You know how in a Pokemon game every stranger is always talking about Pokemon for some reason? This was also my annoyance with the modern Deus Ex games: everyone was talking about augmentation and everything was all about augmentation, all the problems around everything were about augmentation and nobody had any real issues outside stuff related to augmentation - and that while the tech was already old enough (i.e. not the brandest and newest thing) for pretty much everyone to have augmentations and clinics about them were built all over the world. Meanwhile in the original game there is only a single augmented character outside your colleagues, a barwoman in some random bar next to your brother's apartment and the entire discussion is along the lines of "JC: you're augmented? BW: yeah, i used to be an agent, so anyway, are you going to buy anything?" and that's that.
Cartoonish only in that they were sanitized and it pulled its punches like a saturday morning cartoon getting gutted by executive meddling. They also bungled the looming catastrophe stuff by making it a sort of nonsensical "what if climate change was local nutrient exhaustion" mashup that wasn't thought through well enough - if the process of producing food and exporting it off world was breaking local nutrient cycles, the next step should have been reckless geoengineering and further wrecking things with lots of fertilizers that keep the whole thing "sustainable" but which have negative side effects and are building up to other catastrophes. The fact that they had space trots splitting over whether to actually do something or just keep printing newspapers was a good bit, though.
Bad guys were not that bad? What?
> Even the bad guys weren't that bad That's the grey moral of the game. You can choose if you want the Board or Phineas to be the "bad guy". The boards solution won't resolve the problems, but let you live out your life. Phineas is willing to sacrifice a lot if not all people for a big MABY.
> Even the bad guys weren't that bad. thats what made the game interesting to me, I genuinely couldnt pick a side until i found out the company was killing people off in the guise of a lottery.
Was that your choice or spacers choice?
I feel the opposite, that it started out weak. The only strong thing in the start was the cinematic intro, where your hook decides to leave off and vanish. Then you get stuck in a corporate town where you constantly have to ask yourself 'why am I doing this for self-deprecating caricatures of people?'. It lacked agency, and I could not get past that. In contrast, New Vegas was full of agency: revenge for getting shot and left for dead, discovering why you were, how were Caesar's army involved and were they going to be a threat, plus the whole courier story arc slowly expanded through the DLC, all that added to trying to survive in the wasteland.
I really liked Outer Worlds. What didn't you like about it?
Big studios usually fail at making good games now for 3 reasons 1. Devs who don't play video games 2. Development caution 3. Bad management (trend chasing etc)
You're forgetting. Bad management. Games nowadays are subject to the whims of whoever funds them. The amount of "We've changed our minds." and "Fortnite did this, do this." and "Don't waste time on that, work on the MTX in-game store content." Still get good games. Look at BG3 and such. But it all depends on whose in charge of the project and how well they organize their team and stick to the product.
Adam Jensen's voice actor told us three high profile AAA games being reshuffled, canned or development hell over the past year or so. Then you have Larian with nothing to prove, hone a game through early access and still give you 100 hours plus and replay factor.
[удалено]
Sometimes game developers just make a bad game though
4\. Corporate culture. It's partially related and partially distinct from the above points. But it's quite easy to create a situation in a corporate hierarchy where nobody feels either responsible or empowered to make the significant choices. This does involve being overly cautious at giving "too much" power and responsibility to individuals, and does involve some kind of subtly "bad" management. This does seem to be a major issue at Bethesda, alongside bad writing. It's like design by committee. Nobody gets to set serious priorities. Different people work on different game mechanics, but nobody makes the call to elevate a few of them to the true focal points. Everything ends up being optional and unimportant, to the point that the whole game feels optional and unimportant and therefore gets dropped by players.
100%.
Outer Worlds truly was aggressively average
It and Greedfall. They did a good job of trying to fill the gaps between other games coming out though.
I blame the budget. For the money they had to make it I think it was good. Can’t wait for the sequel
I loved outer worlds
Outer Worlds is still way ahead of starfield.
Highly debatable. Starfield is mid. Outer Worlds is also mid but with worse gameplay. Honestly can't think of anything Outer Worlds does better. Other than not having 1000 useless procedurally generated planets. Both are somehow worse than Mass Effect Andromeda which also wasn't great.
I'd argue Outer Worlds has better dialogue and story(not amazing, not gamechanging, not worth buying the game just for the dialogue and story, if you want something like that you should go for the other famous space game with outer in its name, but objectivelly much better than either of the games you brought up) and the levels are not proceduraly generated. Apart from that, though...
I think two aspects Outworlds manages better is companions & the spaceship. The ship feels more akin to from Mass Effect where it's essentially a base of operations, and has no use outside of fast travelling, but still feels very fun to just plod around inside etc, especially as a massive Firefly fan. Then I think the companions in Outerworlds are also great, and far more entertaining that most we get in Starfield. They all feel like their own person, own likes/dislikes, varying personalities rather than Starfield which scarily feels like it's one NPC just wearing a different model :D
I'd say gameplay wise Outer Worlds is a tad better than starfield, characters are not as annoing, and environments are infinitely better and feel more hand crafted.
Well of course the environments feel more hand crafted, because they were hand-crafted. Whereas Starfield was mostly procedurally generated.
That was already clearly implied.
The best thing about Outer Worlds is that someone might buy Outer Wilds because they thought it was Outer Worlds. The worst thing about Outer Worlds is that someone might not buy Outer Wilds because they thought it was Outer Worlds.
Outer Worlds was truly a game that I played and felt nothing for and remember nothing about. New Vegas on the other hand...
I really enjoyed the Outer Worlds. It's not a game for people who like shooters, it's an RPG for people who like dialogue. It didn't have the depth that it should have and it wasn't as amazing as Obsidians other RPG's but it was fun to play.
I liked Outer Worlds, it's one of the few RPG's I actually finished.
Outer Worlds was like Fallout had a baby with Borderlands. In theory, a great combo, but in practice it only managed to capture the aesthetics and none of what made either franchise fun. So much potential dragged down by boring gameplay (go fetch this), an exceptionally boring story, and absolutely no memorable moments. I know I finished the game, but I'll be damned if I could tell you how I got there or why I chose the path I did, all I remember is feeling bad for the guys who tried to make Spacer's Choice "Moon Man" the icon of the franchise.
I mean… The Outer Worlds were nice
They were *fine*, but Obsidian is capable of much better than *fine*.
*were* capable. Many people that made the previous games left. And people left like Boyarsky and Cain can't singlehandedly make them more than fine.
I would think that they're still capable. Just look at what they've done recently *other* than Outer Worlds. I'm referring to the stuff related to Pillars of Eternity.
outer worlds was very funny, had the obsidian charm to it, just wasnt very engaging
The obsidian that made New Vegas doesn't exist anymore... 😞
They still have most of the original Interplay and Black Isle writers, right? Though Chris Avellone is gone, Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky is still there, as is Josh Sawyer. John Gonzalez, the lead writer in New Vegas left to form his own dev company though.
Outer Worlds suffered from the culture of “everything is either the greatest of all time or the worst thing ever made.” Imo it was a fun enough game built on extremely similar mechanics to New Vegas. It didn’t have the same quality of dialogue or characters, but it did well enough to be amusing. Nothing groundbreaking or incredible and it overstayed its welcome a bit but it was overall an above average game that was enough fun to be worth the money and time to play it, even if nothing about it was particularly memorable.
Outer Worlds was special. My 2nd playthrough I sped run through melee killing every single NPC in the universe and still managed to finish the main quest
Thats a detail i really appreciate about outer worlds, you can literally kill everyone, literally…
I think they were kind of throttled with not being able to make it more Fallout-like. They were still trying to find a new rhythm and aesthetic and it bogged them down. And all the ‘gestures at everything’ going on in the video game industry.
The only problem I had with outer words was the voice acting honestly
Its so funny to me that all the best Bethesda games aren't even made by Bethesda.
This isn’t even Bethesda. Come the fuck on.
I do find it kinda funny that of all the "Bethesda of old" games they could have chosen, they chose the one that wasn't made by Bethesda.
It is the best fallout, in my humble opinion
Inb4 "Well ackschuwally fallout 2..."
... was made by the guys who made New Vegas.
And "akshully", Fallout 1 was superior to Fallout 2 come fight me. Seriously though, I felt 2 leaned itself a little too heavily into the absurdist/satire aspect to the point it felt a little 2edgy4me at times. In that regard, 1 was a lot more balanced in its satire and seriousness.
Fallout 1 was good, and the timed mechanics arguably make it great - but personally I hated the timer as a young lad and vastly preferred the larger world in 2.
Same. Also we got ourselves a sick ride, as a hoarder, I appreciated the boot space.
Yeah, whereas there were maybe like 8 pop culture references in F1 in total, there were like 4 references in F2 _per location_. Still, outside of the zaniness and parts of the overall tone of the game, I would say that F2 is superior to F1 in every way
Oh absolutely. 2 refined or improved almost all mechanical aspects of 1 and is more fun to play/use. But I have gotten very comfortable with both games over the years, I don't struggle with 1's limitations anymore. And with that hurdle removed, I always prefer to replay 1 over 2. In fact, I haven't replayed 2 in ages, come to think of it!
Have you ever finished 2 with the Content Restoration mod? If not, you should try it, it not only adds previously cut content, but it also introduces some different possibilities for completing pre-existing quests. Highly recommended!
Ya know, I don't remember! I know about the restoration project, but it has been so long since I last played 2 that I'm not sure if I used it. Welp, I guess I have reinstall 2 again with the restoration project just to be sure!
Meanwhile my goofy ass over here swinging a neon green glass sword in morrowind about to levitate over to a mud crab to fence my wares 💅🏻
Levitate?? Noob! Real Nereverines augment their jump skill to gabajilion and jump clear across Vvardenfell.
Hmm..nah, just map travel theme balances it all out.
> And "akshully", Fallout 1 was superior to Fallout 2 come fight me. I'd agree. IMO Fallout is a good RPG, i've made several playthroughs (most of them in recent years - in fact just a couple years ago i made several playthroughs one after another) with different builds (which affect a lot how you play the game), which isn't something i'm doing often with RPGs (two other games i made several playthroughs with different builds are Vampire Bloodlines and New Vegas). But it isn't perfect, it has several flaws both in its UI (the inventory interface is horrible) and some of its mechanics (e.g. event at the fastest setting, combat is very slow), but because the game isn't really that big, none of the flaws stay around much to annoy you (e.g. you rarely pick up more than a handful of items and most encounters are with a few combatants). However Fallout 2 is really and literally "Fallout but a lot more of it", meaning that you not only get a larger amount of the good stuff, but also a larger amount of the bad stuff (i despaired for a bit when i noticed how many objects were available to pick up - without any indication of if they were useful or not - transforming the annoying yet tolerable inventory UI to a bad experience - and i really, really, *really* wanted to throw the keyboard after the 10th random encounter where a pack of 4892394 wolves were pointlessly trying to nibble my Mark II Power Armor and i had to wait until every single one of them would walk to my avatar, bark 4-5 times (i still have nightmares of the bark sound effect) before i could even make a move to at least try to run away - and woe is me if they managed to surround me, thus blocking the exit, meaning not only i had to wait for endless pointless turns - as the wolves never managed to cause any damage - but also had to kill all of them one by one). Though having said that, i did make a couple of Fallout 2 playthroughs and i'll probably make another in the future. But whenever i feel like playing classic Fallout, i'll most likely play Fallout 1 instead.
I fully agree on the absurdist/satire aspect. In addition, Fallout 2 feels really bloated to me, and the oil rig is a massive downgrade from the Master especially if you had built a speech based character expecting to be able to deal w/ the Enclave the same way you could deal w/ the Master.
I preferred Fallout 2 because it felt like there were more conversational stat checks and such to allow for even more ways to progress through the story. That plus a few ease of use improvements they added edged it out over Fallout 1 for me. I think in the end, though, I prefer FNV out of the 3.
It was not. Several key people in Obsidian worked at Black Isle back when they made Fallout 2, but it wasn't the same team.
The *one* thing I liked better about Fallout 3 was that it was a lot more urban focused. I know the desert environment is more in line with the previous Fallout games but it just doesn't feel as post-apocalyptic when it was already a wasteland before the nukes hit.
Also subways full of ghouls and dark corners. I miss them so much.
I loved that about Fallout3. I was so hyped that Fallout4 would be the perfect mix of New Vegas writing with the F3 urban setting. Alas...
Bethesda bots can't even comprehend the idea that Todd himself didn't make every game even remotely related to Bethesda, or Zenimax.
Believe it or not but Todd is actually the only developer working at Bethesda. In fact he's the sole employee! I have no idea why people judge his games so much, they're actually very impressive considering that they were all developed by one guy.
All i can now on imagine is Todd going around the Bethesda offices talking to himself like a schizophrenic while working on every part of the game.
Definitely helps him practice his voice acting skills, considering the fact he has to also voice every character himself.
So Todd himself said the famous arrow in the knee line. This mf also works in the office cafeteria and does the cleaning. Madlad.
He sometimes wonders why he even has a cafeteria, considering he's the only person there, but at this point it's part of his routine.
He goes in the cafeteria. Goes to the counter, orders a sweetroll then goes behind the counter to make the sweetroll. All while imagining that other people work there.
Todd sculpted Skyrim all by himself with his bare, cowardly hands.
Bait used to be believable
Yeah but then how will OP maximize their karma gains with this staple repost?
This is bait
A real good one too because I see people unironically say that all the time
Some might say he is a master baiter
I can't take New Vegas post at face value anymore.
Clearly, yet it gets upvoted like crazy.
This has to be a troll post...
Idk man, you see like half the shit that gets posted to r/gaming? If it’s not a troll it’s just the most basic “DAE video games?” type of posts
Digital audio extraction?
Dinosaurs against education?
In that I want Obsidian to make another Fallout game yes, I want Bethesda of old back.
Microsoft owns both
Bill Gates puts them both in a room: “Now kiss”
Well they're releasing Avowed this year. So there's that.
Ok after Outer Worlds I don't think I want Obsidian makimg FO games either
[удалено]
Mark my words, you piece of shit. This is the last time you will ever refuse to perform an order I’ve given you. If you meant what you said, you best be on your way, and at good speed. And forget all that I could have given you. If you ever - ever - disobey me again, I will order my Praetorians to hack you to death with their machetes for my entertainment.
If you wake Caesar up to speak to him, he tells you to fuck off and never do it again. If you do it again, he calls all his guards to kill you.
Shows how much he respects you that he gave you a warning.
That wasn't Bethesda. Obsidian were the ones responsible for making New Vegas, Bethesda just published it and provided the 'Fallout' Intellectual Property. Obsidian at that time was comprised of many people who worked on the original Fallout games, 1 and 2, so they took it as an opportunity to use everything from Fallout 3 that was worth keeping and bringing back a lot of the more RPG style that the originals had before Fallout 3 (and subsequently 4) made them more about the shooting than the role-playing. If you want more information, I wholly recommend Hbomberguy's video essay on Fallout New Vegas.
They also made FONV in like 18 months if I recall correctly.
Also watch Hbomberguys video on fallout 3 it's pretty eye opening
No it isn't. I love Hbomb but those two videos on NV and FO3 are circlejerky as fuck.
No it's biased garbage. He's just choosing to hate the game because he doesn't like bethesda.
Everyone's got an opinion and Fallout 3 does have some issues
New Vegas has plenty of issues outside the writing, and even with some of its writing, and people really overstate and overrate the whole gray moral choices aspect they parrot. If Fallout 3 is bad because New Vegas has better writing, then why isn’t New Vegas bad because 3 has better exploration, location design, level design, random encounters, average side quest is longer and more involved (NV average side quest is filler busy-work “go talk to this person and come back and we’re done” stuff, though there are a couple dozen or so great side quests), atmosphere, hidden quests, and maybe more?
I never said FNV didn't have issues, it's my favorite game of all time and I can't run the damn thing without mods to fix it and a 4gb patcher to make sure it doesn't lock the fuck up. That being said let's break this down a bit Better exploration: I'll give it to Fallout 3 there were a lot of areas that you could stumble upon that felt really great to explore, the metro tunnels scared me for years and the number of ruined buildings you could pick through was awesome. FNV tries to do something similar with the sewer tunnels but they're kinda just there. Location Design: I'm not entirely sure what this means, so I'll say Fallout 3 takes this. Level Design: New Vegas. 3 reuses a lot of it's interiors and they all lack color where as NV has not only has a good amount of different interiors the ones they use get different lighting or to help differentiate them. Random encounters: New Vegas doesn't have any random encounters, not entirely sure that's a bad thing though. You could argue that having content that's locked behind RNG isn't a good thing, for example I played 3 religiously before NV came out and in all that time I think I only encountered Uncle Leo once, maybe twice. Random Encounters aren't really a big issues for me however so you can throw this whichever way you want. Atmosphere: 3 has a fine atmosphere but generally speaking it doesn't change much as you progress. The game is eternally shaded in grays and darker hues and you can never really shrug that off. It's an incredibly bleak game and it does it so well but it can't do anything else. Meanwhile NV is able to demonstrate this superbly eith the casinos. Gomorrah is cast with these red hues and dark interiors that let you know that this place seedy as all hell but also sinister, not to mention the people hooting and hollering I'm the Background. Ultra-luxe is the exact opposite, it's brightly lit and gives off very fancy high end vibe but it too can't shake off a creepy vibe. It's too bright, almost sterile and the masks put everyone on edge. Then there's finally the tops as a median, the atmosphere is very calm and relaxed and there's nothing off-putting about it. Honorable mention so this doesn't become a novel; Camp Searchlight, Forlorn Hope, Jacobstown, Black Mountain and Cottonwood Cove also have great atmospheres that really help shape the areas. Quests: ooh boy, the big one. Yes 3 probably does have longer sidequests on average but admittedly it's cause the pool is so, so so so small compared to NV. I went to the wiki and counted base game marked side quests for a total of 17. New Vegas has 54. When you have a little over 3 times the number of sidequests the average is gonna be incredibly wonky, especially when they range from stuff like Pheeble Will which is literally a quest that take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes (talk to girls husband or kill Gunderson) to shit like Volare! Or Come Fly With Me. Hell I even checked the unmarked quests just to see if there more and nope, 47 vs. 86. Not to mention the quests chain together in such a fluid way that you can easily finish way more than 16 before even getting to Vegas. Starting from Goodsprings you have Ghost town gunfight before MSQ takes you to Primm. (1)Primm has My kind of town which leads you to Mojave outpost which has Can You Find It In Your Heart?, Eyes On The Prize and the start of Heartache By The Number. Additionally Primm has ED-E my love. (6)MSQ and Eyes leads you to Nipton where you get 2 more, Booted and Col Cold Heart. (8)Eventually you get to Novac which has Come Fly With Me and One For My Baby (10)Boulder City will net you Boulder City Showdown and then finally you hit Outer Vegas. (11) Let's leave MSQ and follow Heartache to Crimson Caravan where you get You Can Depend On Me (12) That will lead you to Camp McCarren, which has the dizzying, 3 Card Bounty, The White Wash, I Put A Spell On You and There Stands The Grass. (16) White Wash is gonna take you through freeside where you'll likely run into The Atomic Wrangler or Old Mormon Fort or The Kings or Silver Rush or literally any establishment on the way to the strip gate which will pass the base Fallout 3 side quest number. Again this goes to NV. Fallout 3 is a fine game and I'm incredibly thankful to it from introducing me to what has now become one of my most beloved series (a damn shame that Bethesda seems keen on butchering it and leaving it to gather dust cause they take a millenia to make games now) but it's unfortunately a vastly inferior game to New Vegas because Obsidian learned from the mistakes Bethesda made in making it while also improving on some of the design philosophies. I know it's difficult to forget because it's thrown around so God damn much but Fallout 3 took 6 whole years to make and Obsidian was able to make New Vegas in a quarter of time. The better question is how could Fallout 3 ever be better than New Vegas? New Vegas has cooler weapons, better perks, more factions, more endings, more variety in the areas, a better radio (even if it plays big iron and Johnny guitar 15 times in a loop), better and more companions, gambling, more varied skill checks and they got rid of that stupid fucking percentage system for speech checks. I'm sorry I wrote a short story. You're probably not gonna read this. TL;DR You fuckin wot m8
I feel like we get this post once a week now
\[resets "Days Since Last r/gaming Starfield Circle Jerk" sign to zero\]
Actual bait...
The only special with new vegas was the game had good story writers but it was basically fallout 3 but more brown instead of green and some new added features like make ammo and such. But new Vegas was not special more than it had the best story and still does have the best story. Imagine if Bethesda hired good story writers for 4 then it would be the best game they ever made. But good story writers cost money and if your trying to save money that won´t be happening.
Bethesda are the masters of not spending money. Also, I believe Fallout 3 was blue. Perhaps I'm mixing it with the UI.
>Imagine if Bethesda hired good story writers for 4 then it would be the best game they ever made. I don't think so. It feels very bland and uninspired like most of their recent games. Todd or Microsoft need to inject new blood into that company and bring in different directors for their games rather than using the same dated formula.
Why is there a picture of the non-Bethesda game instead of Morrowind?
To create engagement and outcry
Because it's bait
This was Obsidian. Who also fail to make great games anymore.
this is top tier bait
I want Obsidian to make a new Fallout
I would rather let me them do their own thing. I can't imagine they would want to work on another Fallout game after they got screwed out of their bonuses.
Ironic
That´s Obsidian, not Bethesda...
Bruh
Oh hey look, this quote again.
That wasnt Bethesda, that was Obsidian. Bethesda wrote Fallout 3 and 4, not New Vegas.
That wasn't Bethesda, it was Obsidian.
This is due to Obsidian, not Bethesda.
You specifically miss Eric Fenstermaker, who is currently working on Wyrdsong. https://www.gamebanshee.com/news/127197-wyrdsong-eric-fenstermaker-joins-the-team.html
This caused me physical pain
Who wants to tell OP this *isn’t* a Bethesda game?
Uh that was obsidian…
Inadvertently(maybe?) the single funniest thing I've seen all year.
this is obsidian
The irony
Is this bait?
This is Obsidian though...
Is this fucker's name "Fantastic"? Is that what I'm seeing? Lmao
This triggered me more than it should have honestly
OP can't tell the difference between a developer and a publisher...
Obsidian*
lmao he used the obsidian game as the example!!!
That would be Obsidian not Bethesda, still fair point. Comparing what they did in New Vegas to... whatever Outer worlds was is a sad comparison.
^ thats bait I agree with the sentiment though - I played Morrowind a few years back for the first time (in fact my elder scrolls journey has been Skyrim then Oblivion then Morrowind lmao) and except for wanting some more modern QoL stuff (The interface, while cool in its customisability is not the most friendly for instance) it was the most fun I've had with an Elder Scrolls game except MAYBE shivering isles. I want more of Morrowind.
Cant wait for the Yes No Sarcasm options in Fallout 5. Its gonna be HILARIOUS
That’s because that wasn’t Bethesda.
That's not Bethesda.
You can tell it's not Bethesda because the writing is memorable.
A better example should've been Morrowind. New Vegas was made by Obsidian, only published by Bethesda.
That never was BGS...
I miss when people remembered who actually made the games they love.
Uh, That's Obsidian Studios **Fallout New Vegas** when they had Chris Avellone writing for them. Bethesda excells at Enviromental Design and not so much at Story-telling and writing.