Nah, that’s a scorchbeast. Giant irradiated bat. Been in the game since launch.
Though, really, it’s a dragon. Minus the Fus-Ro-Dah stuff.
Pretty much. Same animations, same bugs.
Oh wow!
“Earlier today, there was an error that caused players in our Xbox community to download the Steel Dawn Update ahead of schedule, but prevented them from actually playing.”
God, never change, BGS. You fuckheads can’t even get a DLC launch right without breaking something.
On contrary, it was the first CRPG that I felt was worthy as a original RPG settings and adaptable to pen and paper. Bethesda screwed the pooch immediately with Fallout 3…which is largely an incoherent-amalgamation of concepts from Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and even Fallout Tactics all thrown together with reckless abandon.
I’d agree that the direction the game took removed it from any real RPG roots, and turned it into a (rather entertaining and often satisfying) first-person open-world action adventure game with RPG trappings. I still believe, though reasonable people of course can disagree, that the original concept was itself largely incoherent. Interesting, witty, and intriguing, yes, but not really coherent. The first two games had solid tactical combat systems and serviceable RPG systems, both of which had balance and mechanical issues which could probably have been worked out over time. The lack of coherency to me is in the game world itself. The timeline, the factions, the contextualization of your actions, the relationships between the stuff in the world, your abilities, and the narrative–all of these things to me are very haphazard.
Post-apocalyptic as a general setting is very flexible. Fallout is very specific; it’s a parody of mid-20th century futurism and the whole atomic-era “I love the atom” cultural blip. It wasn’t very solid satire, as it never addressed many of the actual social and cultural issues of the period off which it was riffing, and it wasn’t terribly well constructed as a game setting, as it never let good mechanics or game systems get in the way of a funny visual or a parody of advertising, consumerism, or the like. I mean, I loved all the Fallout games, even Tactics, but mostly for the systems. Whether turn-based tactical combat or FPS style world crawling, they draw me in. The setting can be enticing, but as soon as you get interested in something, either it’s a Potemkin village façade in the game you are playing, or the next game ditches the idea entirely and runs with an entirely new–and often random seeming–interpretation that trashes whatever interest you had.
I do agree the game systems were eminently adaptable to a P&P RPG. It would not be the first, of course; Gamma World went that route long ago.
Gamma World was a CRPG that became a pen and paper RPG?
Fallout was far less parody and more alternate history as envisioned through the lens of 1950’s America on what an imagined future would entail if the transistor was never invented but portable fusion reactors were perfected, turned post-nuclear apocalyptic, or at least was at one point anyway until it got turned more into a parody of itself, with thoughtful or consistent world-building flying out the window.
I meant Gamma World was a post-apocalyptic RPG; the idea of a pen and paper game of that type was what I was getting at. Sorry for the confusion.
I’d agree Fallout could have been an alternate history. You can make the argument that the first game, maybe the first two, came close to this, though I’d say neither really closed the gap between idea and execution all that well. Certainly it became a parody of itself rapidly thereafter.
My problem with treating Fallout as a more or less intellectually serious endeavor is the details and the follow-up. The series never really established the baseline America pre-alternate history split, and thus had no foundation on which to really build its different take on the future that never was. America in the 1950s was a complex social, cultural, and political environment, but Fallout just cherry picks a bit of fashion, a bit of tech, and a bit of social structure and runs with it.
I do often wonder though what might have happened if they had really done the work necessary to develop the concept, which FWIW I adore.
The actual pre-nuclear war settings is less important than the post-nuclear one, but one thing it definitely wasn’t was…literally like 1950s America with advanced technology, which is what Bethesda I feel got very wrong at the start of Fallout 4. Culturally it was probably unrecognizable, but the game as a setting is really about the post-nuclear communities that are equally unrecognizable, the vault experiments, and the retro-futuristic tech-aesthetic centered on the pre-war technology.
Stuff like Super Mutants, BoS, were localized events/factions that just became symbolic and inseparable from the franchise at large even if it doesn’t make any sense to include them.
I’m not really bothered by the incoherence and thematic inconsistencies. Whatever Bethesda messed up in terms of lore besides all their other faults, they made up ten fold from a world design perspective, at least to me. The main draw for me is just exploring the worlds they design, even if a lot of other elements of their games have major issues.
Certainly true. This is actually one of the things that sort of disappoints me, because they didn’t need the retro-futurist stuff to do a lot of this, but the retro-futurist stuff they do sometimes undercuts the other parts. The Vaults are hands-down one of my favorite parts of the lore, but it isn’t really until Fallout '76 that you finally get into a lot of backstory there, though parts are hinted at all along.
Yeah, that’s why I have so many hours in these games. The physical worlds are great, and the atmosphere is often spot-on.
From the Bethesda/Microsoft livestream:
Howard was hopeful that the acquisition by Microsoft will help Bethesda’s games be better-tested at launch, and that access to the Game Pass ecosystem will enable things like public betas much more easily.
Yep it was hilarious how they learned zero lessons from any MMO that had ever launched before, going all the way back to Ultima Online and Everquest.
Anthem did the same thing, and it later came out that all mention of the “D Word” (Destiny) was forbidden in the offices. Amazon’s New World initially demonstrated similar innocence of everything the genre has taught us.
I don’t understand how devs at large studies, such as Bioware or Amazon games, get away with this. How many industries practice willful ignorance of their competitors’ experiences in the market? It’s just so breathtakingly incompetent.
The looter/shooter genre is much newer but yes they ignored all lessons from Destiny. Huge competence gap at these companies. Probably a management gap too.
I can understand having a “Look, we don’t want to be Destiny/WoW/Whatever but with _____ knock-off, we want our own identify”. But if you’re making a game that’s in the same genre or going to be competing with them, you need to at least look at what did and didn’t work. Especially when you’re talking a live service game because you have literally years of them publicly learning from mistakes and adjusting to them.
You can take lessons from other games without cloning those games or losing your own project’s identity. Really does seem like some poor management and direction from the top.
Fallout 76 is fantastic. Unfortunately I’ve completed every quest in the game (level 150). They really need to add some new content. Hopefully they’re working on an expansion.
This is my build. It’s a non power armor commando build.
I shoot people in the face with assault rifles :D
Character Build Planner & Calculator | Fallout 76 | Nukes & Dragons
I really did try and like this game, Add me on steam… you can see I played 2000 hours of Fallout 4. Bless my heart,
But this game sucks. Good god, it never made any sense and its some weird combination of an mmo and some kinda – -heck i played it for 100 hours, It’s just terrible.
So why on earth would I play Fallout 4 for 2000 hours?