I headline “Bethesda Softworks” to keep the format I’ve been using, but really I should just have put “Fallout 3” because that’s all they were showing and that’s all anyone cares about. I had a little bit of problem with this scheduled appointment – The time I was set to see it got confused by either PR or myself (we couldn’t decide) – so I didn’t perhaps get quite as much hands-on time as I would have liked (is there ever enough hands-on time at these kind of shows for hundred-hour RPGs?) But I got to stand and chat to executive producer Todd Howard while I waited, so it worked out for the best, really.
The most important things Todd told me was that there isn’t an Oblivion-esque “The World Scales With You” system. This is probably common knowledge, but lets write it anyway. There are easy areas, hard areas, and so on. There some bosses and stuff who do scale, but only roughly on the basis of when you first encounter them. Which is probably fair enough.
Talking about my hands-on experience of Fallout 3 actually feels a little dicey, because when I sat down to play I was given a long list of things I wasn’t supposed to talk about, which I promptly forgot. I know I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything the loading screens say (they feature background details on the world) which is a shame, as my reaction to one of them forms an at least mildly interesting anecdote. But let’s press on.
Fallout 3 is based on the Gamebryo engine and the modifications that Bethesda Sofworks made to it for Oblivion (I’m going to get this one right for sure) and the striking thing you’re going to notice as you move about the game world is that it feels very much like Oblivion. It doesn’t look exactly like Oblivion thanks to the urban decay, though there are some obvious markers – such as that weird, slightly wrong way that people look. But it kind of makes sense in Fallout 3 considering they’ve all been warped by radiation and stuff, I guess.
That it feels like Oblivion is a pretty important thing to note, I think. Because as a result (and I have to note that I played this with an Xbox 360 pad, not a mouse and keyboard) I didn’t like the real time fighting any more than I did in Oblivion. In fact less, because there was a great and immediate satisfaction to using Oblivion’s bows that the guns of Fallout (or at least, the ones from the early game) don’t have.
But that’s where the V.A.T.S system comes in. It is incredible. I refuse to believe anyone is going to play the game using real time combat when V.A.T.S is available. You see, V.A.T.S. turns every battle into an amazing cinematic event, and not in a lame way like a Final Fantasy game or something. The minute you spot an enemy, you choose your position to attack from, enter V.A.T.S mode, select the body part et cetera (classic Fallout stuff, you know the drill) and watch what happens. The cinematics are generated on the fly and delightfully satisfying. While shooting an enemy stalker (damn, er, just enemy) who is miles away with a pistol is a boring exercise in shooting at a dot, in V.A.T.S you’re able to watch as your bullets batter him with a pounding velocity, crippling his body parts or exploding his head [“or her head, obviously.” – Equal Opportunities Ed.]
During my play time, I had a fantastic battle with a feral dog using the V.A.T.S system, where I selected V.A.T.S the second he leaped for my throat, and popped him in the head repeatedly as he sailed through the air only to land as a sad little doggie corpse.
V.A.T.S removes completely the problem that we’ve all had with the Oblivions system of battles – that they look incredibly stupid – and turn it into something thrilling.
Anyway, after a few short battles, a bit of exploring and some interface fiddling (the Pip Boy 3000 is perfectly usable) my time was over. Before leaving I picked up one of the promotional bottles of “Nuka Cola” which was literally flat cola (and kind of nice for that, somehow) and asked Todd if they were going to include modding tools with the game for PC. His answer? That they haven’t announced anything, and they’re very focused on making a great game first and genuinely don’t know if they’ll include one or not.
It’d be a real shame if they didn’t as the modding community around Oblivion is pretty great, but it seems like at least the lessons they’ve learned from Oblivion might mean this is a game that doesn’t need patching by fans to make it actually playable.
I know, I know – I’m speaking too soon. I can’t help it – that V.A.T.S thing was awesome!
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You missed i was addressing comment that’d said this new Fallout had “virtually nothing” common with the earlier games; not virtually everything.
And even then some of things you bring up are arguable — “proper” understanding of the franchise? That’s subjective and down to individual opinions. Emphasis on RP? Very hard to say based on short previews given, the longer previews appear to have enough RP factor in there. Getting the story right — again, subjective and we have no details to tell if they actually did.
I treat what any forum group, not just NMA, has to say as an opinion poll.
Bloodlines was a great game, in my opinion the real problem with the combat was virtually every major quest ended in a boss fight with no option other than combat. But the main disadvantage hybrids have compared to turnbased is people with different reactions and fps skills will have a different time with the game.
If you suck at fps games you might have to spend more points to increase your character’s gun skills just to make the game playable, while the experienced fps player can get away with increasing other character skills and relying on their own skills for combat. Perhaps providing a fuller experience as they can do more in the game. Turnbased provides a level playing field, if you want to play a high combat skilled character both players will have to spend points to raise the skills. Character progression becomes a pure role play choice not a game play necessarity.
Real time with pause is a terrible design. In turnbased nothing happens unless you tell the character to do something. In real time i.e. fps or tps games nothing happens until you do something. But in real time with pause games you just sit back and let the game get on with the minimum input from yourself. Okay Baldur’s Gate and KotOR weren’t as bad as Dungeon Siege, but the number of times that combat resolved itself with me even in the room, or my characters running off and getting themselves killed while I was managing another character. Or NWN2 where they’d fight amongst themselves because my druid use an entangle spell and they walked into it.
Albides: Bloodlines is a different franchise though, so there’s nothing wrong with it being an action-RPG. The action-RPG thing works for certain games, but I don’t see how Fallout could benefit from this shift in genre. Fallout 3 could very well be a good RPG regardless of being more action-oriented, but an action-oriented game is not what fans want from a sequel to Fallout.
I’m still cautiously optimistic as far as Fallout 3 goes, mainly because I haven’t seen the things that I consider most important. The combat looks a bit uninspired and dull from what I’ve seen.
If the real time with pause game resolves all itself with no need for input from you, then it means turn based version of the same encounter would be resolved with you just repeatedly telling your character to shoot an enemy (since that’s what the automated real time boils down to, given the usual lack of AI) I really don’t see approach that involves just mechanical, repetitive task that requires no thought and only takes more time… as improvement, in such case.
How does nothing happen in RT games if you do nothing? The AI controlled pieces can act all the time, even if you do nothing.
The advantage of TRwP is in my opinion that things happen simultaneously. In full RT games is that one army, or one piece, moves fully, acts, and then the other army/piece acts. Even if there have been intelligent approaches to solve that problem, for example the Gollop approach with ready actions or the PnP RPG approach where you withhold your initiative, the beautiful thing about a computer is that it can make things happen simultaneously and still give you the time to interrupt and reassess the situation. I think RTwP hasn’t been done enough and there are still countless possibilities to be explored. Hybrid systems between RT and TB are a field that needs much more love.
And regarding Fallout TB combat: as much as I like TB combat, the Fallout model as not particularly well done, so I’m not too sad to see it go. It’s just that as I said before, ISO TB is a very relaxed mode of combat, as opposed to with Fallout 3 where I will have to concentrate on that stuff.
Recently been replaying FO1 and I have to say the combat can be utterly annoying, principally because your teammates ability to shoot you, each other or any hostage in the room is almost unerring, and often involves criticals. I think one of the reasons everyone loves Dogmeat is because the 4 footed fecker’s the only NPC who won’t tag you in the middle of a fight.
Well that’s down to NPC ai over anything. The combat itself is fairly deep in the sense you can think first before tearing radioactive monsters to smithereens.
But I do agree. Taking on the Raider camp while Ian sprays everyone including you with 10mm bullets is fucking annoying.
@Real Horrorshow -
Regarding your quote:
“And Fallout fanboys, just get over it already. If you expected a game developer to release a turn based isometric RPG in 2008 you’re out of your minds. I don’t care how great the old games are, no one’s going to play that shit.”
You need to read through this blog post, it perfectly sums up people’s thoughts:
http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Solivagant/diablo-3-vs-fallout-3-how-to-make-a-proper-sequel-92764.phtml
Plant42, don’t you think that anyone who calls Bethesda “the worst collection of developers in this gaming age” is a little hard to take seriously?
Why would someone take the word of a blog over thier own logic? Why can’t you let people make up thier own mind?
That goes for everything you can quote or link. Sometimes linking is just convenient, if you feel your thoughts have been summed up pretty well and you don’t want to write a novel.
The fact that people act in sequence is precisely *why* I prefer turn-based combat to real-time with pause. Still, I got over my antipathy to the latter long ago, with Planescape: Torment.
Swifty–
What I was trying to get at is that all of our speculation thusfar has been based entirely on trailers designed to show off the combat system (which is what makes all of the forumrage [on both sides] surrounding this game so hilariously inane). It would be hard to make it look like fun if the character you’ll be playing as is being torn to shreds by the enemies. Have you ever seen any mass-market game advertising try to sell with “look how hard you’ll be getting your ass kicked?”
Betheseda is an extremely accomplished (not to mention loaded) developer. While we maybe haven’t seen a fully developed VATS battle yet, there’s just no way they’re going to allow one of their main selling features to be broken and unbalanced like you’re suggesting.
@tmp, I never said anything about the game resolving advantageously to you or your character.
@Jochen Scheisse I was talking about your character’s actions, but there are plenty of full real time games that nothing will happen until you cross an invisible line. There are two problems with most RT&P games. The first problem is the character ai, not the npc or enemy ai but your character, your avatar in the game world getting up and doing their own thing. Now it’s one thing for a npc follower in Fallout to go off and get themselves into trouble because they are npcs and it gives them an illusion of life. But when you own character keeps doing it it’s bloody annoying.
The second problem is it can really interupt the flow of the game when you keep pausing it. Now don’t laugh, rtwp (assuming you actually use the pause) can start and stop far more often than turn based does especially games with auto pause.
Ah Ian would life be the same if you didn’t shoot me in the back? I swear that must be deliberate. But who’s the greater fool, the one who sprays and prays or the one who stands in front of the one who sprays and prays (well at least after the first time)?
“there’s just no way they’re going to allow one of their main selling features to be broken and unbalanced like you’re suggesting.” Hmm unlike radiant ai by all accounts?
Leeks!, of course we’ll have to wait till a final version to really find out as there were only a handful of combat situations shown but I am just reading previews and looking at the movies they’ve wanted everyone to see. Any optimistic forecasts for now will be based on those but that also means you can’t rule out certain worries as some footage and descriptions are pretty clear.
And while I guess Bethesda is showing much effort and enough good intentions to make things challenging, you can’t already say this for sure if you look at the mistakes (some main features included :( ) of their last title. They still got plenty time to do their thing though.
Did you play on the pc? Was the UI as unmanageable for pc users as oblivion’s?
Then why would you “just sit back and let the game get on with the minimum input from yourself” if leaving it this way would resolve in the opposite manner? And the argument still applies — in turn based game i can just click “next turn” repeatedly and, due to providing such minimal input, it’ll resolve exactly as bad for character i play… where is that difference that makes the turn based approach not “terrible design” by the same logic?
“Did your character have the Bloody Mess perk as well? I found it a bit disturbing that all E3 videos show a character with that perk. Are gamers really so easily satisfied by a bit of gore? Pow, shot in the leg, head explodes, E3 crowd cheers stupidly. I’m baffled.”
Yeah, I had a similar reaction. Particularly since Microsoft are pushing the family console angle. Seemed strange to have *such* gratuitous gore at their press conference.
@tmp if you just click next all the time in turnbased the enemy will attack and your character will always just do nothing. But in RT&P quite often you can leave them to get on with it and they’ll come out on top. Or they’ll lose badly to a bunch of enemies that you’d have no trouble squashing when in control. Do you really think that’s good design?
In turnbased your characters have no ai, so you supply all the tactical decisions. Say you have enough action points to make three snap shots, do you take them all and leave your character standing in the open, what if they all miss? Do you spend a few extra action points to make one aimed shot that has a better chance of not only hitting, but hitting a vital area and then use the rest of your action points to get behind cover? If your first shot doesn’t penetrate your opponents armour do you switch weapons, switch ammo, run like hell? If the level of your tactical acumen is just to shoot shoot shoot then yeah you might as well be playing a real time and pause game.
AI in real time games is never going to be as good as in a turnbased game since no matter how powerful your computer it’s got to handle the ai for several characters at once compared to one at a time. It gets even worse when you add in the party ai for which ever characters you aren’t controlling at the time. If you think getting shot in the back was bad in 10 year old Fallout it’s nothing compared to the ai in the 2 year old NWN2.
Sure you can turn the party ai off in NWN2 but that’s rare. Having to control all your party in a RT&P game is tedious, with you usually having to start stop all the time quite often after every action. Leave a character alone for too long and the ai would kick in and they’d go off doing something stupid, or they would just spam their default attack, when much more powerful attacks were available.
Virtually every RT&P game I’ve played except for the Freedom Force games which have no party ai IIRC, when I’ve had to leave the game during or just before combat. I’ve come back to find the combat resolved, not always successfully but usually my characters are still standing. Though not as unscathed as they might of been if I had been directing things, who’s meant to be playing the game me or the computer?
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So you mean, unlike in Fallout, where you always wanted to aim for the eyes?
Well let’s see. In situation where the character has no problem to win using just the basic autoattack, the RT&P allows the player to skip all the menial clicking on ‘attack’ and ‘next round’ buttons. In situation where this simple approach won’t work due to number of enemies or whatnot, the player can (and is expected) to take full control over the character and carry them through.
What exactly is so terrible in this design? Saving you the menial parts when your input wouldn’t make any difference? Or requiring you to actually provide input when it does make the difference?
The same applies to RT&P games really — you supply the character with the tactics and they carry them out. The only real difference is, you don’t have to re-supply the same tactics over and over and over and over on every turn, if there’s no actual need to change the last issued action.
If the game encounters are simplified to the point where i can get away with this approach, then the problem is entirely different from just the choice between turn-based and something that has potential to flow faster. And replacing RT&P with turn based gameplay wouldn’t magically make it any more interesting.
Fallout 2 and Half-Life were released virtually at the same time. And yet, the AI of enemies in real-time Half-life was leaps and bounds beyond that of Fallout.
The whole ‘great potential’ thing is meaningless if it’s not realized, and the turn based games don’t exactly show stellar track record in this area. Not to mention it’s hardly needed when as long as the basics are done well most people playing the game could never tell the difference.
So you mean, unlike in Fallout, where you always wanted to aim for the eyes?
See, that’s one thing that seems to be ignored by most people in these discussions – those many areas where Fallout could be significantly improved. For one thing, you could vastly improve the ‘aim at specific body part’ options by adding location-specific armour, so that head/eye shots aren’t always the best option – a bloke with a helmet but bare arms, say, or something as simple as shooting someone through a gap in a wooden fence, which you wouldn’t even be able to see without the new perspective. Very simple, but that alone could make for a better tactical system, while everyone is obsessed with where Bethesda might go wrong. And that’s just off the top of my head – they’ve had scores of people considering things like this for months.
Unusually, the more I think about this, the more I’m thinking it might end up being a net gain for the series, even if they’ve lost some points in a couple of areas.
@tmp Sure it saves menial tasks, but at the cost of making the non menial tasks more of a chore, what’s so terrible is you spend more time fighting the game’s ai for your characters than fighting the enemy.
Turnbased allows you full control, where as RT&P you are always having to adjust the orders, sometimes having the game override your orders, or take the random chance that the orders the game picks are the best for the situation. Me I’d rather take the menial task rather than leave it up to chance. The trouble with default attacks is your characters might win through, but at what cost. If default attacks use up more ammo/power to get the job done relying on them even in simple situations you can find your characters in a worse position than if you exerted full control for all the characters all of the time. Which is hard really hard to do in RT&P.
RT&P just doesn’t flow faster than turnbased, not unless you set the game to easy and let it play itself. Not when you are constanly stop starting the game to issue orders or to cancel stupid decisions made by your character’s ai. In turnbased you might have to give the orders all the time but at least you’ve got the chance of giving the right orders that’ll end the situation faster. Besides turnbased has other tricks to make the game flow faster, in Fallout you can adjust the combat speed so that the game plays faster, try that in RT&P and you wouldn’t have a chance. Jagged Alliance 2 had an option for auto resolving combat, much like leaving it to the computer in RT&P you had no control and the computer wouldn’t always make the best decisions so it was pure chance if you’d come out unscathed or not. But it made low level random encounters less of a chore (if you thought they were a chore that is).
Half Life and Fallout 2 are two very different games with different approaches, comparing them is a little farcial don’t you think? Half Life isn’t even a real time and pause game so it hasn’t to do with this discussion at all.
Turnbased games not showing a stellar track record? Well there’s not exactly many of them being made recently for the mechanics to be refined and improved, but so far they’ve shown a lot better track record than any RT&P game.
@sinister agent, aimed shots were always the best option anyway due to their much lower chance to hit but I don’t think you’ll find many who wouldn’t agree that Fallout couldn’t be significantly improved in many areas. But the key word here is improved, not replaced with a radically different system which has it’s own foibles. You don’t need to replace Turnbased combat to add an location based armour system, you don’t need to replace the viewpoint to add gaps in the fence, as long as the character can see through the gap you don’t need to. That’s where line of sight rules come in, something already available in turnbased games.
Christ, the real time versus turn-based argument is back *again*?
Next people will be back to moaning that big developers don’t make isometric sprite-based games any more. Oh, wait…
Hmm okay, so the terrible part is having badly implemented AI for your character get in your way? I can see this point, but i’m not sure if that’s a drawback of RT&P system per se — after all, one could take older Fallouts and their awful companion AI as example that turn based system is terrible design… on the same basis that you spend more time fighting the AI of your companions instead of the enemy.
Also, would that mean if RT&P game implemented the system in most simple manner — that is, having the character just carry out the order(s) you gave them until you change it, without any attempt from the AI to override them or to come up with its own… then it’d no longer be “terrible design” in your eyes?
No, i think it’s good counter-example to your argument how turn-based games will *always* have better AI than real time games. Because it shows that theory and practice often vary greatly, and that it’s actually possible in practice for real time game to surpass turn-based game in terms of AI performance. At least when it comes to ’simple’ tasks like combat tactics.
Except the companions in Fallout were always meant to be seperate entities that had a will of their own, not mindless packmules/buddies at your beck and call.
It would have been a better design for real time and pause games to allow control of only your character and to have no ai for that character.
Well in it’s way Fallout’s combat ai had more to deal with than Half Life’s. And how much of Half Life was scripted? Besides I don’t know if Fallout’s ai was even considered state of the art for turnbased games at the time, did the Fallout devs even attempt to revolutionise ai? Comparing a turnbased rpg, where combat is only part of the make up of the game to a first person shooter where combat is the be all and end all of the game is faintly ludricous don’t you think? It’s much more interesting to compare Fallout’s ai to NWN2.
Almost anything that Bethesda does wrong, the modding community can fix. Unfortunately Bethesda’s on the fence remark about mod support leads me to believe that they have no intention to do so; which would be a strange and stupid path for them to go considering how much the mods extended the life of previous games.
:edit:
Too late for the knife party, so I figure I’d just drop a couple of cents into the broken pachinko.
The purpose of any combat model has zero to do with the player, but with how the developer wants to portray his vision of combat. Turn-based, phase-based, realtime with pause or vanilla realtime is of no consequence, really. The people behind Fallout wanted to reinterpret combat from a Pen and Paper basis, hence, they felt a turn-based combat model where each unit took their time and where all actions were described in great detail. This, amazing as it may seem to some, worked very well and was enjoyable, despite the many deficiencies of combat itself. Bethesda wants to depict a fast and furious system, complete with a “cinematic” (I know, it’s a bloated term that means vague and juvenile interpretations of both videogames and cinema, but it helps to convey what they are going for) attention to detail. This one is also a crowd pleaser, and it works.
In fact, anything can work. Again, it comes down to what the developer wants, and the tools they gives players so they can experience combat. Because of this, while different combat models have their pros and cons, there is no ‘best’ method to handle this. People praise the general workings of turn-based because it lends itself to complex interfaces and careful planning, but forget that realtime with pause allow access to the same; while others declare realtime combat to be a more fluid and realistic approach when compared to a “turn” but forget that pausing the game is just as abstract, unrealistic, and flow breaking – specially in more hectic situations, where you may pause repeatedly to negotiate between combat and order queues.
I think the more important argument is how much of a part the player will play as opposed to the character. You can attribute this to an old way of looking at cRPGs, or how much it’s based on that Pen and Paper feel if you wish, but there’s a very clear line between what you can do and what the character can do. Is Dirk the Daring a great marksman, shooting down Super Mutant pubic hair from several miles away because of his skill, or because the player has lighting-fast reflexes and can circle strafe with the best?
To me, this kind of debate takes precedence over other things since it embodies the very notion of what we should expect in a role-playing game. The genre was made for the gamer who dreams of being a character other than himself – the might barbarian who can wield swords is appealing because we cannot, and the same applied to the cunning wizard who can use magic to alter reality, the cleric who can heal and save lives, the bard with a wanderlust and the verve to sing about it. That is what the genre does, carefully allowing you to construct a persona – as well as witnessing its achievements and failures – through its own set of limitations and possibilities.
And with Fallout 3, there’s certainly that old Deus Ex and Bloodlines dread on the horizon – how will certain skills or abilities, given the implementation of a more direct control in place, work? If I intend to role-play a very specific character that is not versatile in some areas, will the game be constructed in a way so that my character has optional methods of character and story advancement, or can I bypass the game’s limitations through my own tampering with the virtual environment and its entities, such as running up to a Mutant and shooting it point blank in the snot to counter the fact my character’s Perception is low?
Or am I to follow the mantra of Oblivion defenders and just “imagine” it?