Bethesda's game announcements (another BlakeyTweets topic)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I always wanted to make a bumper sticker that read:

    This bumper sticker will change your opinion on religionpolitical party, social justice... recycling........ kittens.

    But I'm too lazy and also the print would be too small.

    I don't get why people think that the things religious people do, are unique.


  • FoxDev

    That'd be a bit long.

    How about

    This bumper sticker will change your opinion

    ❓


  • kills Dumbledore

    My other car doesn't have a stupid bumper sticker



  • @Jaloopa said:

    I found it one of the least frustrating games of that style. I don't tend to enjoy stealth games as much as I think I will, but Dishonoured ticked all the boxes for me. Every time I fucked up it felt like it was all on me rather than unfair mechanics, and if I found myself stuck there was generally another way around that I'd ignored due to getting blinkered on my chosen path.

    If I took an, most convenient choice, path.

    If I wanted to roleplay a specific style, no.

    I tried a no kill, teleported right behind someone that had been standing in the same spot, looking the same way for 30 seconds, and they turned around right before I executed teleport. So I said, eff it and crossbowed him in the face. Once I let go of the choices I wanted to make, and just made the most efficient choices, it was fun. But that means the game doesn't really give you a choice, it just gives you options. Not the same thing.

    Now, @blakeyrat will say, "I can't play ESO as a pure archer". And I'll tell him, "you need to diversify and use all your resources". Then he'll make the same argument I just made. And the argument is justified, because the game advertised choices, not options.

    But there hasn't been a game that really gave you choices, only options. Every game tries to get close to that. But humans always choose the most efficient path. Thus we are incapable of making choices.

    I guess it's not the games fault that they discovered that we don't have free will after all.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @xaade said:

    the game doesn't really give you a choice, it just gives you options

    How do you define those?



  • Choice is saying, each of these options are equally efficient, so you can choose what you REALLY want to do.

    Options is saying, there are multiple things you can do, but half of them are pointless and boring and inefficient and make you want to :headdesk:.

    It depends on your min/max level.

    If your desire to min/max is way beyond the game's ability to diversify, you have no choice.

    If the desire to min/max is average, and the game has screwed up balance so far that the average person can't enjoy several of the options, the average person has no choice.

    If the desire to min/max is zero, and the game has two options, but one of them ends in a game-breaking bug, no one has a choice. Except for that one guy in the green shirt. He likes finding bugs.


  • kills Dumbledore

    OK, but that only really makes sense if you're playing too be as efficient as possible. Don't you ever just want to fuck around and experiment? If I was a speedrunner I might agree with you but I play games to enjoy myself



  • You missed part of my point.

    People don't have to be 100% efficient. It's hard to force yourself into a certain style, if say, there's another style that's magnitudes more efficient. Not just slightly more efficient.... magnitudes.

    And that was what I didn't like about the game.

    The other options were magnitudes more efficient, but the game doesn't reward you well enough for sticking to the harder options. You don't get better at being no-kill. The vast majority of powers that unlock support an anything goes playstyle. The rewards in the game are geared for mixing it up. If you want to play ghost you can, but you won't get any advantages past the first level. You can unlock the teleport and that's literally all you need. Ok, possess can be helpful, but that's it.

    They didn't, say, give you an upgrade that made bodies invisible if you made a perfect no kill, no detection, knock-out.

    Nope, the only upgrade that made bodies invisible, involved killing people.

    That's my point.

    And I didn't have fun until I gave in.

    I'm not saying the game wasn't fun. I'm saying it didn't deliver on choice. It delivered on options.

    Just like Assassin's creed stopped delivering on stealth by making the game more efficient to just fight head on. It wasn't until AC3 that they reversed that, by adding guns to the mix.


    Dues Ex did a much better job on delivering on choices. You can get more advanced at stealth or killing as the game goes on. You can become a bullet hell tank, or become an assassin, and there's upgrades for each.

    Dishonored, gives you longer teleport.

    They could have gave you another teleport that turns you around 180 after the port. Because some of my no kill knockouts were, teleport to shadow behind person, turn 180, then knock out.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @xaade said:

    the game doesn't reward you well enough for sticking to the harder options. You don't get better at being no-kill. The vast majority of powers that unlock support an anything goes playstyle

    Yeah, that's definitely true. My first playthrough was stealth and by then end I knew that using any new upgrade would mean kills and probably mayhem. They were fun on my second "kill anything that moves" run but some felt a bit cheap

    I hope the sequel has more upgrades that are useful and fun for a stealthy style



  • @Jaloopa said:

    They were fun on my second "kill anything that moves" run but some felt a bit cheap

    Exactly.

    One playstyle was stealth and you get no advancement, and relied on quicksave jockeying.

    The other playstyle was kill everything, and you're a god if you take that route. Pointless, like a superman game.

    Neither was rewarding, but gave you cool endings.

    The most fun was just coming up with the most efficient path and mixing up the skills, which led to the least rewarding ending, and gave you a, "Ok, so there was literally no point in anything I just did. I could have literally started the game and took a boat away from the island and get the same result."



  • @blakeyrat said:

    If you don't like that the product exists, here's my advice:

    The "don't buy it" is sound -- but companies don't care about single individuals. If you can start getting other people to not buy it as well, though... ;)

    @xaade said:

    People don't have to be 100% efficient. It's hard to force yourself into a certain style, if say, there's another style that's magnitudes more efficient. Not just slightly more efficient.... magnitudes.

    QFT. Look at the gap between trying to play a Fighter and a Cleric in D&D 3.5 for a great example of this...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Goddamned, that whole horse armor thing.

    Every Gamestop had piles of free codes for that, too, so I actually got it.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Do those same people get angry when Ford designs a new pick-up truck because they want Ford to dedicate all their resources to making their sedans better?

    I don't know if it's the same people, but the people who think we should double the mandated average fuel economy of cars in the next ten years feel that way.



  • Skyrim has a mod for that.



  • More effective would be to mandate work from home for jobs that can support it.



  • @Jaloopa said:

    It's great fun as a no-kill. Also gives you a lot more leeway for fighting your way out when you're seen than other stealth games if you're not intent on full-on stealth.

    Dishonoured was one of my favourite games of the PS360 generation

    Interesting, the difficulty of the final level is based on how many enemies you kill. Meaning, the more violently you play, the more difficult the final level-- not sure if they were making a story point with that, or it was just some game tester bitching the level was too easy because he took all the combat upgrades.



  • @xaade said:

    If you succeed in a stretch, and everything went well, you felt untouchable.

    Correct.

    @xaade said:

    But failing was sometimes impossible to control, and then you just had to reset.

    You don't have to reset. You missed the XBox achievo, but who gives a shit. Just keep playing.



  • @xaade said:

    I don't get why people think that the things religious people do, are unique.

    Blah blah blah, you think I didn't have an entire line of these hypothetical bumper stickers planned?



  • @xaade said:

    Now, @blakeyrat will say, "I can't play ESO as a pure archer". And I'll tell him, "you need to diversify and use all your resources". Then he'll make the same argument I just made. And the argument is justified, because the game advertised choices, not options.

    The problem is Dishonored options are fine; your problem is resetting the level when you hit the slightest problem with your approach. That's not the game's fault.

    @Jaloopa said:

    OK, but that only really makes sense if you're playing too be as efficient as possible. Don't you ever just want to fuck around and experiment? If I was a speedrunner I might agree with you but I play games to enjoy myself

    Exactly.

    The problem is Xaade's psychology, not anything the game designers did.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    That's not the game's fault.

    Except that's what the game rewards you for.

    There are three endings, one of them, the good one, requires resetting the game.
    The neutral ending is what you will most likely get, and it makes your entire involvement pointless.
    The bad ending, you have to work to get it, and you feel like you've done something to change things, for the worse, but at least you had an effect.


  • kills Dumbledore

    But all they are are videos after you've finished, not integral parts of the game. All three give you some sort of closure which is better than a lot of games



  • @xaade said:

    There are three endings, one of them, the good one, requires resetting the game.

    Not true; there's wiggle room. You don't need 100% no-kill to get the best ending, I know because I've done it. You only need to play "clean enough" that when the game loads into the final level, it loads the easiest version of it. (Fewest guards.)



  • I'm kinda meh on some of those things. I could care less about the character voice-over, it's going to feel a bit weird. I do think the crafting system and the ability to scrap things in the wasteland is a cool idea. I also, honestly, think the 'tower defense' bit will be a lot of fun. There is a Skyrim mod for that, Tundra Defense, that was pretty cool. Unstable as all hell, but when it worked it was pretty neat and I really liked the concept behind it. Hopefully it's not limited like the 'home building' feature of Skyrim where it was stupidly restrictive as to where you could build (it looks a lot less restrictive on the 'what').

    Not a huge fan of how blown out the in-game videos were. I'm hoping that was because they are trying to cover up for the weaker draw distances and resolutions on the dedicated consoles, and it's something that won't be present on the PC, or can be turned off in options. I don't want my games to look like I'm wearing the wrong prescription contact lenses.

    I'm also a little concerned about mod support. I don't remember them saying anything about mods. I'll be very disappointed if they made it harder or impossible. The modding community did some pretty cool things for Skyrim and the older games that really changed the feel of the games.



  • I'm disappointed that more Fallout games keep getting made. Especially when the whole joke is wasted by setting it 200 years in the future.

    The "funny" bit about Fallout was taking the optimistic, rose tinted vision of the future from the 50s, and juxtapose it with dark humor in a post-nuclear-apocalypse setting. But it's a joke that you can only exploit so much. 200 years is a long time. There's been little to no advancement in the Elder Scrolls either, and it's been advanced something like a thousand years, so I'm guessing they have no conception of time.

    Anyway, I'd prefer it if they'd let go of Fallout and explored some new IP. I'd love some open world, cyberpunk setting. It's what Fallout could be without the dumb retro-futuristic styling. Also, I'd appreciate it if they made not-stupid plots that match the tone of the world, instead of "let's find water for this place where exactly no-one is thirsty".



  • @nullptr said:

    I'm also a little concerned about mod support. I don't remember them saying anything about mods.

    They talked about it a ton when they were talking about Doom being moddable. They're going to set up a new site, Bethesda.net which will be a hub for mods. Somehow. Nobody'll use it.



  • @Kian said:

    Especially when the whole joke is wasted by setting it 200 years in the future.

    Not to mention the continuity problems it presents.



  • The press conference also saw Bethesda Studios give some details about the version of Fallout 4 it is creating for the Microsoft's console.

    Player-made add-ons, or mods, for the PC version of the game will be able to run on the Xbox One as well, said Todd Howard, game director at Bethesda.



  • @nullptr said:

    crafting

    Yet another bandwagon they're jumping on. "Hey, people like this... Minecraft thing, right? Let's put it in!"

    They had a crafting system in place since F3,and nobody cared there. It seems like it may be useful for the base-building thing, but it doesn't really look fun.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    They had a crafting system in place since F3,and nobody cared there.

    Because finding things gives you a reason to keep playing.

    I really wish they'd switch to procedurally generated items. It would have helped out Skyrim tremendously.

    Then enchanting could have been something cool like, being able to swap out a single attribute on an item. Instead of say, boosting the item past game-breaking.

    In fallout, it could have been workbenching, that you can go to a bench and swap out for a shorter barrel.

    But then again, you just end up with borderlands, with SPECIAL.
    Of course in Skyrim, you just end up with borderlands, since that doesn't have stats.

    But I'm ok with that.



  • @Kian said:

    Especially when the whole joke is wasted by setting it 200 years in the future.

    I came in only Fallout 3, so none of that makes sense to me.

    What was the original idea and how does 200 years break it?



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    Deus Ex match-three game!

    "I never asked for this!"



  • @xaade said:

    I came in only Fallout 3, so none of that makes sense to me.

    What was the original idea and how does 200 years break it?

    Remember the scientists trapped in that 1950s neighborhood VR simulation? How old are they?

    Shamus was bitching about how lights and machines still work, but one of the plot-points is that this world uses nuclear power for EVERYTHING, including "fission batteries" for lights and computer that could last for centuries, so that's not such a big deal.

    A bigger problem is that 200 years gives enough time for, hmm, the NCR in New Vegas to form, at which point you realize: wait a minute, they have a steady, effective government-- this game isn't post apocalyptic anymore!

    People living in the NCR had a higher standard-of-living than half of the people living in our REAL LIFE non-nuclear-war world.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    wait a minute, they have a steady, effective government-- this game isn't post apocalyptic anymore!

    It's still after an apocalypse. Just, you know, quite a bit after.



  • @Magus said:

    It's still after an apocalypse. Just, you know, quite a bit after.

    Right, but. That kind of misses the point.

    In the first game, when you leave the shelter, it's a BIG FUCKING DEAL.

    In New Vegas, they have better police service than most modern American cities. It's ridiculous. It's basically a western with lasers, it's a completely different genre.



  • Yeah, I felt that New Vegas was more like the Firefly crew gets stranded on a planet.



  • All I know is that they've had 200 years to clean up the exact rooms they are living in, and I still see trash, debris, unpatched walls, as if no one developed a skill to repair a wall.

    I mean, at bare minimum they should be able to fire clay. Hell, they have the ability to melt metal (repairing guns to 100% with enough skill), and yet they barely can patch together buses and plane parts.

    I mean, given you have fully functioning facilities that are abandoned, no one can even mix paint.



  • @xaade said:

    What was the original idea and how does 200 years break it?

    The original idea was that nuclear war broke out round the fifties, and ravaged the US (I don't think there are any references the the rest of the world, though we can safely assume the Soviet Union was also devastated). Some people hid in underground bunkers (the Vaults), and the rest had to survive on the irradiated surface. In the first game, you leave the vault twenty years later to find a replacement part for a broken water purification system in the vault. The society topside is only just recovering, and most people still remember life before the bombs. It makes sense that pre-war culture still dominates. Even using bottle caps as currency.

    Two hundred years later, none of that makes sense. Consider the Vaults. They might have been designed for a couple of decades, but already the first game's premise is that they can't last forever. How did your Vault last two hundred years with only the limited maintenance that the poorly trained people inside could provide? Consider the people topside, why are they still using caps as currency, when most caps should have deteriorated to nothing already, and means of producing coins or even digital banking should be available? Consider the technology, why are they stuck with the weird mix of retro screens and advanced artificial intelligence from two hundred years prior? Consider the towns, why are they still squatting in ruins instead of having rebuilt and covered the ruins with new buildings? Back to the Vaults, could ten generations (giving twenty years per generation) have really spent their entire lives in a hole in the ground with ten to a hundred other people as their sole company? Why didn't they produce any music, art, technology, new clothes, or anything in two hundred years? Where did they stuff all their dead? How did they control birth rates? It's all broken!



  • @xaade said:

    Now, @blakeyrat will say, "I can't play ESO as a pure archer".

    I don't know if ESO is horribly designed, but in Skyrim, I have played as pure stealth archer and pure restoration mage (although I had to use a few other spells for quests and one time I needed to shoot arrows from a quest bow during a boss fight to interrupt an attack). Leech seed FTW!



  • @ben_lubar said:

    I have played as pure stealth archer

    You didn't once drink a potion? Use an enchanted bow? Have a follower? Use a scroll? Do any of the number of things that a pure archer in that universe would be capable of doing without any help from magic. Did you smith an item? Cook food? There are various skills in ESO that you would say, "That's not being a pure archer", but would overlook in Skyrim.

    And templar class has vampire's bane, so it's thematic for a pure restoration to have.

    In ESO, my dual wield build uses only one ability from his class, which is an ability to increase his crit and heals me when I crit. Before that, I was using an ability from 2h that healed me a little and increased my damage, in the theme of rally cry. Both I think can fit thematically. But if you want to say play without any healing, did you really do that in Skyrim?



  • Devil's advocate.

    They explain away that the various vaults were social experiments, and that part breaking in the first game was designed to break at that exact time. The explanation is that the various vaults did have the technology to last for hundreds of years, but various vaults were scripted differently.



  • @xaade said:

    You didn't once drink a potion?

    That requires a skill in ESO? "Hey, what's your drinking liquid out of a container level?"

    @xaade said:

    Use an enchanted bow?

    I may have, but if I did it was a drop.

    @xaade said:

    Have a follower?

    I had Lydia for a while. Is that a skill in ESO? "Your being followed by other people level is too low. You must be at least level 52 in being followed by other people."

    @xaade said:

    Use a scroll?

    Nope, and that doesn't require skills, which is the point of scrolls over spell tomes.

    @xaade said:

    Do any of the number of things that a pure archer in that universe would be capable of doing without any help from magic.

    I crouched and pulled a string and then a sharp piece of metal was propelled into an NPC's head and they died in slow motion.

    @xaade said:

    Did you smith an item?

    Nope, I didn't have any way of making arrows because I didn't have the DLC. I got all my arrows from dead things.

    @xaade said:

    Cook food?

    Why would I cook food? It heals like 5 hitpoints and uses up like 5kg of my carry capacity. A potion I find lying around in a dungeon at level 1 is way more efficient than that.

    @xaade said:

    And templar class has vampire's bane, so it's thematic for a pure restoration to have.

    Assuming templar is something like paladin (WoW) or guardian (GW2), I was nothing like that. I was a vampire lord, but only so I could have the passive disease and poison immunity. I didn't put a single point into health or stamina. I didn't wear armor. I just went around casting leech seed and bone spirit in College of Winterhold robes.



  • @xaade said:

    They explain away that the various vaults were social experiments, and that part breaking in the first game was designed to break at that exact time. The explanation is that the various vaults did have the technology to last for hundreds of years, but various vaults were scripted differently.

    My understanding is that the breakage was accidental. Online sources support it:

    Most of the vaults seen in the games were non-viable 200 or even a mere 80 years after the War. While Vault 13 might have lasted until its scheduled opening date of 2277, the unplanned failure of the water chip forced the Overseer's hand and set subsequent events in motion. If Vault 101 was truly intended to stay closed "forever", its failure was inevitable; the only question was how long, and what form the change or disaster would take.
    Just because they had technology to theoretically make the vaults last doesn't mean that they would, even leaving aside the social experiments. And "social experiments" is a very thin excuse to hide behind after two hundred years, when the job had to have passed hands a few times. Even the people guiding the conspiracy would have died and been replaced a few times.



  • Not saying it's a good argument.

    But then again you have a talking tree, so....



  • Even if the setting was more consistent, it's disappointing that they continue to reuse the IP not because there's an interesting story to tell, but because it's guaranteed to sell. Which means that they only use the more superficial aspects of the franchise.



  • Is there even a coherent story shared between Fallout games? It's basically just "there are some underground bomb shelters and also the world has gone to shit" and the rest of the details are filled in for each area individually.



  • Yeah but compared to Elder Scrolls collectible card game, Fallout universe is getting it easy.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @ben_lubar said:

    "Hey, what's your drinking liquid out of a container level?"

    You laugh...



  • @Kian said:

    I don't think there are any references the the rest of the world

    San Fran in Fallout 2 is strongly influenced by a chinese sub that disembarked and took over.



  • Yes, there is a coherent story that spans all the games:



  • Right but how come some perfectly natural human beings are far older than 200 years old? Does it explain that?


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