Fallout 4

[SamVision]

Still bad on my rig even after beta patch, some less bugs now but the FPS is 10-20 right now. God rays turned off it becomes barely 25.

[Nash]

I honestly don't know if BGS uses mo-cap. They weren't as of Skyrim...

They're a pretty damn small studio for an open-world game developer, all things considered. Like 112 people compared to Rockstar's 400+?

I suspected as much, which would explain the shoddy animation. Wish they'd invest more time and money into animation. Understandably it's not easy in a game engine where there are ten trillion variables as a consequence of being able to do anything, anywhere...

[GooberMan]

Actually, you'll find it is rather easy (especially with their bankroll, licensing an animation middleware is a comparatively small expense). But you need to be prepared to put the work in to the content. More likely there's been a conscious choice to cut back on animation quality, which means less data to stream in, and because there's less data to process for the animation itself there's more CPU time to handle anything they generate procedurally.

[Gez]

Didn't they mocap horses for Oblivion?

[GooberMan]

Maybe, but that doesn't mean you'll immediately get good quality animation. Take a galloping horse and a trotting horse. How do you seamlessly transition between the two when the speed is completely player controlled with analog input? Instead of having a third animation to handle the transition, it's generally done by plain blending between the two. And then there's also the part where you have to make it a looping animation. You can't mocap a seamless loop. You have to clean up the data after capture to get that.

The animation quality itself is altered by accuracy of values exported, how often the keyframes are found in the animation stream, etc.

[Nash]

How do you seamlessly transition between the two when the speed is completely player controlled with analog input? Instead of having a third animation to handle the transition, it's generally done by plain blending between the two.

Unreal Engine 4 has procedural blending between two animations called Blendspaces that takes an input (like player movement speed) without having the content author doing anything manually... and I think Skyrim already has this feature (your player character blends between walking and running depending on how far you push the stick)...

[GooberMan]

Yep. Pretty much any animation code in vidya games from the last console gen onwards does it. The results can vary, and it requires careful setup to make sure your network can handle all the transitions nicely.

The same setup is also used so that the player can run sideways and jump while aiming his gun in the other direction, for example. Powerful, but easy to mess up with the wrong inputs.

[ShadowTiger]

Every day I am reminded of the limitations of the movement engine, like what GooberMan above was kinda implying, probably, in some way. Or maybe I'm just looking for a way to agree with it and still bear relevance to something.

Right now my objective is to build up my Intelligence from 3 to 10. I'm on 9 so far. I'm just building settlements and settlements in order to gain as much experience as possible. I already have a ton of construction materials, and by golly I salvage absolutely everything that I can get ahold of wherever I can.

I want to learn from this video how to stack objects well. I'm really interested in creating awesome settlements. I'm sorry that I'm limited to a set number of objects.

For example, there was a settlement in a drive-through movie theater and diner. Unless it wasn't a movie theater. Probably just a diner. Whatever. And there is this VERY radioactive puddle near the middle of the place. I reeeeeaaally don't want anyone (Especially myself) accidentally passing even remotely close to that puddle. (It really is majorly radioactive. Like, +10-+15 levels just for a tiny puddle! What's up with that!) So I had to create a whole fence around it, and I had to use up so many potential

I'm getting the hang of wiring though. I wish copper were a little bit more common, but it's okay. Mounting wires to the sides of building is pretty interesting. I probably end up using too many large pylon (I know, I know, I need to build more Pylons.) structures here and there, but the wiring makes up for it when it's up against the buildings. Sadly, these too count for item number limitations. There's a mod out there that that removes the limitation, but the limitation is there in the first place to keep your client from crashing due to hardware limitations. I'm okay with that, I guess.

So, yeah. Building stuff. Pretty awesome. I wish junk fences were easier to place, as they're really not so good when you have to build them in a circle, but it's all good. Actually I think I was just building them in the wrong direction. Nevermind.

[Nash]

LOL that video was painful to watch. Really baffled as to why Beth assumed we want to snap all pieces and didn't include a button to turn off snapping. Also, lack of a roll button!

[Mav3rick]

If somebody want them...

[Nash]

"we're happy that Fallout 4 is our most robust and solid release ever, and we'd like to thank our amazing QA staff who worked as hard as anyone to break the game so we could fix it during development"



... but real talk though, yeah, this game is massive and the systems behind it is just ultra massive and complex and I can appreciate that, but what's most impressive is, I haven't had a single crash in my 60+ hours of play. So yeah, pretty impressive for the Creation Engine.

[Gez]

Thank you, doggie.
Thoggie.

[Ma77]

I found a costume or 2 thats amazing. I found Grognack's costume AND axe and the silver shrouds costume in the same building and before that i found a Cannon launcher, a deathclaw gauntlet which i added a 3rd claw to really fuck raiders up even harder than i already do.

The thing that Sucks ass about this game is theres no skill points like WTF. I know this game is "dumbed down" but i doubt the casually audience is THAT stupid to where they cant just put in skill points. The Pipe weapons suck balls and i just scrap them. The power armour is OP as fuck tbh. I think they missed a HUGE opportunity to go deeper with the Synths and there relationship with others but everyone hates them period and no other thing happen with that other than the occassional "YOUR A SYNTH DIE" and thats it. Oh also Synths are not even as tough as they make em out to be.

This games pretty good but not worth the Hype that surrounds it. Id give it a 9 but still

[Nash]

Yeah writing is quite disappointing actually.

Main story spoiler

---

I would expect things to be waaay more dramatic after you find Shaun and find out what he is and what he's become but nope, just a few stiffly delivered lines of dialogue and that's it? Also the Synths become friendly from that point onwards which makes the Wasteland a little easier to navigate for a while. I mean for all its attempts to be all cinematic and Mass Effect-like and stuff, the writing and the acting is just downright flat and disappointing. But eh, it's the best Beth has put out, hopefully the next game will fix these artistic issues with the writing and voice acting!

[SamVision]

Okay I've managed to get this foocker running properly. I like it but it's not that good. Bugs aside, it's a open world FPS pretending to be a Fallout game. Crafting is awesome, combat is not. It is extremely unbalanced, and I hope some mods will come to fix it somehow. Story and presentation is shite; voice work, graphics, and writing are all garbage but that's to be expected (but not excused). Building stuff is interesting but not very robust. Overall a 7/10.