Bethesda always chooses to have NPCs be critical to the plot, which… is kind of annoying. You can’t save the world if you don’t do XYZ in that order, every time. Which means rescuing Nick Valentine, helping Blades lady, etc, etc.
I always feel like I’m following a script. It gets extra annoying when random people are immortal because they have quest to find cabbages or something. So if I accidently get caught robbing their house, everyone knows because they can never die for no real reason.
I think that’s a little lazy. There is always a clever solution, Bethesda makes it feel like they’d rather just do the easy route and that’s all they seem to do with this regard. Making an NPC immortal is easy, changing the game when he’s killed is hard. Bethesda is like the water of developers, going the route of least resistance, at least in this particular point.
Bethesda solves the problem of making a player being able to have a living world and have a reliable way to not miss content by making sure some NPCs are immortal or can only be killed by the player. FNV does the same by removing all the living world and adding an ending available through a single immortal NPC (also this ending is more or less a copy of NCR ending). I can’t see how Bethesda way can be called the route of least resistance in this particular point. No other game dev company even tries to combine storytelling and living world on this level.
You keep attacking me as if it’s a personal insult for you that Fallout 3/4 might have something that is missing in FNV, or as if you’re flawed for loving something that isn’t perfect in every way.
FNV has very few elements of an alive breathing world, there are several “random encounters” where some groups can ambush you if you hate you, there is a single quest that becomes available with the passing of time (Primm maradeurs), there are very little systemic reactions of the world on your actions. F3 or 4 or Skyrim have hundreds of random encounters, most of which are connected to the stuff you did in the game, often you see result of your actions through those NPCs. They move around the world and depending on faction relations will interact with other characters independedly of you. There are persistent NPCs who travel around the world, there are threats to you or other people that appear from time to time - there’s plenty of activity that does not directly aimed at the player.
That’s a living world. It’s not Mount & Blade or Space Rangers but it’s most daring realization of it outisde of niche indie games.
I don’t remember these games enough to know if your numbers are right, but to me New Vegas is more a living world than Fallout 4 or Skyrim just because the game had a static power level for enemies and areas - if you took off towards Rad Scorpion country at level 4, you were going to die. If you did so in Skyrim, you’d be fine because the game seemed to level to you. To me that’s a living world (New Vegas) vs. a Leveled World (Skyrim).
Both game worlds have events and things happening based on decisions you made. I much prefer the harsh, static world of New Vegas to the ever changing to cater to the player world of Skyrim, though I have fun with both games.
Skyrim still had some leveling limits and it was possible to find enemies way stronger than you, but yeah, in general the world was much more gentle. And Oblivion (more so than Skyrim) has punished you for leveling up by relying too much on your level making everyone same level as you so if you haven’t leveled right then you became weak and grinding only made it worse. So it too had huge issues with player-world interaction.
FNV has a certainly more interesting world due to writing and amount of thought put into it, as well as focus on interconnectedness. It’s a more traditional approach to world crafting and the more tried one, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone over any Bethesda game. But I find it irritating when people regard FNV as if it’s a masterpiece made out of crap that was Fallout 3, or that Bethesda is dumb mainstream milking cow. They do a lot of interesting stuff in their games, a lot of it falls flat but they should be admired for trying to innovate while having such huge mainstream success.
No. You’re wrong. I am attacking what you say. A critical difference.
You invoked the “living world” mantra that is somehow sacred to only Fallout 3/4 and Skyrim but not New Vegas while at the same time defending invincibility flagged NPCs because…? This raises questions.
So it is clear to me you seem to be totally obsessed with the idea of a world that exists outside of the players actions. Bethesda RPGs aren’t really the first thing that comes to mind… Sorry(not sorry). This is what is hilariously dubious nonsense. Play something else. I would at first recommend Star Control 2. (since I already mentioned S.T.A.L.K.E.R.)
P.S. But I also guess Fallout 1 works after a certain amount of time
If you’re trying to say you’re not attacking someone personally then refrain from using phrases like “you defend”, “you seem to be totally obsessed”, “play something else” and so on. Apart from that I don’t see a point in answering exactly the same question for the third time.
Prickled feelings aside, I remember I had a similar discussion with @Desslock a while back. He appreciates Bethesda’s efforts more than I do in attempting to have an actual simulation where every NPC has a schedule and place to sleep and they actually travel from city to city and can get attacked on the way, etc. I personally think it’s largely behind the scenes and hidden from the player and is not as effective as in Gothic for instance, which actually makes it much more obvious that this is going on and it has better animations instead of the hilarious animations in the Bethesda games, which actually help in making it actually feel like a living simulation as opposed to just a theoretical one that is not obvious to the player.
I do admit that it’s cool that Bethesda continue to work on that aspect though, and maybe one day with better character animations and better mission scripting, those aspects of the game will be better appreciated by the player.
The blacksmith and his wife were killed in one of the first towns you encounter in Skyrim for me after some vampires showed up to attack me. Those were NPCs I interacted with. They’re gone now, so one less shop in this town for me to sell goods to. I have also also witnessed NPC deaths due to dragon attacks. Though can’t recall if those were random civilians or not.
Oh, and in Oblivion, I recall an NPC leaving town and getting ambushed by some enemies I “attracted”.
They have - they went from not having any animations and NPCs just standing around in Morrowind, to NPCs walking around town and having conversations with each other in Oblivion, to smithies and farmers working, and having schedules for work, heading to the pub for a drink and then returning home to sleep.
They definitely need better animations and work on their scripting.
I just hope the next Elder Scrolls puts more of an emphasis on conversations and multiple ways to finish quests as opposed to less. Would be nice to have less combat-oriented quests, as well.
Looking forward to Outer Worlds - Fallout NV in space is fine by me!
Yes, sometimes you can do some workaround solution. Like when critical NPC dies you can put a letter on them with the info so the player can continue the quest. This can work decently enough for sidequests. I am playing Kingdom Come and many of its sidequests and even main quests have tons of solutions like that. But there are still limits to this. Sooner or later you are going to have essential NPCs if you want player to finish a narrative character-driven game and do not want to rely on respawnable robots FNV-style.
Alternatively you can allow the player to kill anyone and display the “persist in the doomed world you created” message, Morrowind-style, but that is also just a useless crutch.
Please note that I am not particularly defending Bethesda. I agree that more often than not, they do take the easiest route and simply mark everyone involved with any quest essential. I do not like that either.
The number of unkillable NPCs in Bethesda games has shrunk considerably since Oblivion (when that mechanism was introduced).
The radiantAI is always actually toned down from its potential to avoid creating too much chaos and confusion - I’d love to see an official mod that just enabled NPCs wants/needs much further than the default game. Even in Oblivion, there was a lot of basic stuff that players generally wouldn’t see unless they really took an interest in, like NPCs who would visit friends in other cities - in Anvil, I think, there was a secret love affair, as a guy would visit a female NPC at night, etc. Even just seeing an NPC pick up a staff on the road and use it to blast an attacking creature was cool - while guards were tenacious, others could react in different ways, be braver/flee etc.
In Skyrim monsters can very easily wipe out NPCs that are relatively significant (in Oblivion no quest givers could be killed, while in Fallout 3/Skyrim etc. quest NPCs can be killed - only a smaller subset of NPCs core to major events can’t be).
I think they should really press down on the pedal more here because a lot of the stuff mentioned is basically unseen or so rare of an occurrence it might as well not exist. I don’t think “Bethesda RPG” when it comes specifically to dynamics in an open world game. Outside of just random encounters in the wild, I don’t actual recall anything else going on independent of player action. Towns are mostly static with some veneer of NPC scheduling.
I think a good first step though to go this route would be to trash their critical path main quest chain model for something that better suits a more unpredictable open world.
I think he’s more saying "stop having the main quest be A>B>C>D>E and have it be A, but if A dies/can’t be completed then B is also an option> C or D, etc.
Not procedural, but more open ended than “Do it in this specific order, there is no variation or other options.” Like I should be able to find leads for my kid in FO4 that don’t involve talking to Nick Valentine. The stuff he “does” are things the player could easily do with a few notes or alternate quests. But we don’t get that. You literally have to save Nick and have Nick hold your hand to the next lead.
I mean that’s alright the first time (unless you really hate Nick, then I imagine it’s hell), but for later playthroughs that massive linear chain is just painful. And you do see options later in that chain where it branches out and things can fail. They have the Minutemen be the “failsafe” route, but that sort of branching should be earlier and more prevalent. Even if every stage had only 2 options, that would open up a lot of replayability and variety.
right, so certain milestones could be “fixed” but the manner in which the player comes across them could be completely open-ended. For instance, the player needs to find a note to advance a quest. Instead of requiring the player to go to one specific place, it could potentially be found in thousands of places. You could place parameters on which type of locations make logical sense (so, you would find it from a bandit vs a feral platypus) and away you go.
I tend to not like open world games, because I wind up feeling lost. But you could program things in such a way that no matter which way you go, it is the right way, you just have to be careful so that what the player does doesn’t FEEL arbitrary. One of the reasons I loved the original Gothic was that I always seemed to find myself where I needed to go without really trying.
