Fallout Fallout 1 is the best RPG of all time that stood the test of time

[Lilura]

Give me new content or give me death.

I forgot to mention mods, too. The modding revolution that graced the Renaissance, while certainly not "inexhaustible" (I did talk it up a bit in my write-up), does offer quite a lot of novelty. The obvious Infinity, Aurora/Electron and Morrowind aside (huge in themselves), take for example the restoration/new content/TCMs for Fallout 2, Jagged Alliance 2 (Deidranna Lives), ToEE (KotB), Deus Ex (The Nameless Mod) and Warband (Prophecy of Pendor/Brytenwalda). Then you have the tactics mods like 1.13, RAVage and SCS. Just a small sample of what's out there if one bothers to look.

I don't need anything else. The industry is a joke these days; I've seen too much. There reaches a point where you just don't care what's coming out next. Still, I'm glad you are happy. I am, too.

 

[Fairfax]

My mistake. Regardless, choosing Unity was certainly the better call considering it's still supported whereas Gamebryo hasn't been for years.

It was a better call than using Gamebryo, but it still gave them problems. They struggled a lot with Unity, to the point where they had to outsource areas to Streamline Studios, and everyone knows the technical issues the game had.

The better call would've been to use an engine they already knew how to use, like UE3 or even Onyx. They saved money by going with Unity, but now they're stuck with all that comes with it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

My mistake. Regardless, choosing Unity was certainly the better call considering it's still supported whereas Gamebryo hasn't been for years.

It was a better call than using Gamebryo, but it still gave them problems. They struggled a lot with Unity, to the point where they had to outsource areas to Streamline Studios, and everyone knows the technical issues the game had.

The better call would've been to use an engine they already knew how to use, like UE3 or even Onyx. They saved money by going with Unity, but now they're stuck with all that comes with it.

If they had used UE3 for PoE, they'd be using an EOL engine right now.

 

[Fairfax]

My mistake. Regardless, choosing Unity was certainly the better call considering it's still supported whereas Gamebryo hasn't been for years.

It was a better call than using Gamebryo, but it still gave them problems. They struggled a lot with Unity, to the point where they had to outsource areas to Streamline Studios, and everyone knows the technical issues the game had.

The better call would've been to use an engine they already knew how to use, like UE3 or even Onyx. They saved money by going with Unity, but now they're stuck with all that comes with it.

If they had used UE3 for PoE, they'd be using an EOL engine right now.

Plenty of recent games did just fine with it, all of which look and run much better than PoE. For PoE2 they could've switched to UE4 if they felt it was necessary, a transition that went well for dozens of studios.

 

[ilitarist]

Really, name the ones that have sold better than Fallout 4 and Skyrim.

Honest answer: Far Cry 3. Back when it was released it was praised as "Skyrim with guns". Of course it's even more shallow but it gives you an open world with multitude of approaches to any problem. It's a fun game but gets you bored pretty quick. Skyrim and Fallout 3-4 have their much more interesting world and aesthetics. Besides there's at least some choice & consequences in Bethesda games so they're more interesting to most people as games. But if we're talking openworld FPS then Far Cry 3 does exactly that almost perfectly, same with Borderlands that adds co-op experience to the mix.

 

[ilitarist]

The problem with CryEngine is also that you can't use it for anything apart from freeware games. Developing with proper tools costs subscription.

With Unity you can get full set of tools and sell anything you did as long as revenue is not above $100.000. After that you need to pay. This proposition looks much better for a startup.

UnrealEngine got its free tools relatively recently and it already gets more popular (PUBG is made using UE4, also mobile games are often made with it) but it's much more demanding, IIRC you need to use C++ there while Unity allows for much more forgiving CSharp and still allows for JavaScript.

 

[Roguey]

I'm sure for most of those consumers the quality of the game isn't tied up in how many people bought it. Now how many people think it's actually good or bad based on the game itself is a different matter, but this "it's a good game because it sold well" bullshit you're going on about is fucking stupid. You want to take that outlook then clearly it's totally shit because it doesn't come near the sales of openworld games like Gta and Red Dead, or of other FPS games like Call of Duty.

When millions of people buy Oblivion and Fallout 3 and millions more buy Skyrim and Fallout 4 it's time to admit that people aren't continuing to buy games they hate. Skyrim has also sold more than everything you listed except GTA5, however I'm sure its return on investment is more impressive. GTA had a team of 1000, Skryim's was 90.

So you're saying it become obvious Gamebryo was dead the very same year they released a new version of it? Some would say a newer version of an engine shows the company is still in that business.

The writing was on the wall.

It was a better call than using Gamebryo, but it still gave them problems. They struggled a lot with Unity, to the point where they had to outsource areas to Streamline Studios, and everyone knows the technical issues the game had.

The better call would've been to use an engine they already knew how to use, like UE3 or even Onyx. They saved money by going with Unity, but now they're stuck with all that comes with it.

Saying they "knew" how to use UE3 because of Alpha Protocol is a bit of a stretch, considering that game's state shows they clearly did not. All engines have drawbacks. One of Sawyer's developer pals on YCS has had a bunch thoughts over the years:

I wish they realized how shitty the engine is earlier on in development so they could have gone with something better

oh you mean like virtually every game's development ever

from a guy that has been dumb enough to work on two teams that have written their own engines, writing your own engine is really fun until it isnt. hooray, you get to do all the stuff you want to do, like big graphics and whatever else coders cream their sheets at night about, but then eventually you are going to have to do all the ui work, or a million other tasks you just wish that you'd been smarter about and just used an off the shelf engine.


so yeah write an engine to have a blast and pull on your dick but it is not what you want to do to actually ship a game imo

game engines have specialties and predilections that you can go with or try and go against, with huge ramifications to scope and finish quality. COD still owes a lot to the fact that it still runs on the bones of quake 3

i think epic realised all the big ganme companies were build their own engines so they had to change strategy. when they made it free it completely blindsided unity.

unity was crazy when it first came out though, even though you could only use it on mac for some retarded reason.

theres also the trouble of any licensees of a certain scale will get the unreal engine, and find some aspect of it not entirely to their liking and, programmers being programmers, for decades they've just ended up with mutant offshoots of unreal that cant be reconciled with the main codebase.

i like how the story just keeps playing back in different ways. like bethesda owning idtech means that everyone has to use that now too, because why the fuck should they pay for unreal engine license fees now? but that means that arkane says right, oh totally, here we go, we're using id tech 5. and then they go and re-write 70% of the engine anyway and call it the void engine, and it ends up having a troubled launch.

is it agreed that unity is overall the best entry level game making thing

maybe. the trouble with unity as compared to say, unreal engine is that unity is very easy to get something together, very hard to actually polish and ship with. unreal engine is kind of the reverse. hard to get into (though they are expanding documentation and tutorial content all the time) but easier to get it really polished in the end.

i wouldnt really consider either entry level though

 

[Davaris]

The problem with CryEngine is also that you can't use it for anything apart from freeware games. Developing with proper tools costs subscription.

With Unity you can get full set of tools and sell anything you did as long as revenue is not above $100.000. After that you need to pay. This proposition looks much better for a startup.

UnrealEngine got its free tools relatively recently and it already gets more popular (PUBG is made using UE4, also mobile games are often made with it) but it's much more demanding, IIRC you need to use C++ there while Unity allows for much more forgiving CSharp and still allows for JavaScript.

If you are making a 2D game you don't need an engine and what do you need a 3D engine for if you are making a turn based game?

Unity games run poorly because of C# garbage collection. If you know how to get around the garbage collection problem, then there is no reason to use C#.

C++ is too slow to compile and is an over complicated mess. OO was always an awful idea that never worked. Unreal is too complicated and unwieldy to develop 2D games with.

C is simple and runs like lightening and a unity built code base no matter how big will compile in 10 seconds. If you set it up right it is easy to script with, you don't have memory problems and you can do instantaneous live looped coding.

If game engines disappeared tomorrow the industry couldn't make games any more. They need to go back to basics and simplify their life. They need to learn2code procedural, low level.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Really, name the ones that have sold better than Fallout 4 and Skyrim.

Honest answer: Far Cry 3. Back when it was released it was praised as "Skyrim with guns". Of course it's even more shallow but it gives you an open world with multitude of approaches to any problem. It's a fun game but gets you bored pretty quick. Skyrim and Fallout 3-4 have their much more interesting world and aesthetics. Besides there's at least some choice & consequences in Bethesda games so they're more interesting to most people as games. But if we're talking openworld FPS then Far Cry 3 does exactly that almost perfectly, same with Borderlands that adds co-op experience to the mix.

But Far Cry 3 sold worse than either Skyrim (#12 best seller of all time in terms of number of copies, probably much higher in terms of revenue since they keep re-releasing at high price points), or Fallout 4, which moved more units on its first day than Far Cry 3 did in its first 18 months. The truth is that unless your franchise is called Grand Theft Auto, single player games just don't do much better than BGS titles. It was a trick question. The game was rigged from the start.

As far as me the consumer is concerned they aren't.

Your opinion is a drop in the ocean when it comes to the 30 million who bought Skyrim.

I'm sure for most of those consumers the quality of the game isn't tied up in how many people bought it. Now how many people think it's actually good or bad based on the game itself is a different matter, but this "it's a good game because it sold well" bullshit you're going on about is fucking stupid. You want to take that outlook then clearly it's totally shit because it doesn't come near the sales of openworld games like Gta and Red Dead, or of other FPS games like Call of Duty.

The best selling CoD is Modern Warfare 3, which has sold 30.7 million copies as of ATVI's latest SEC filings.

here's the whole call of duty series:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/321374/global-all-time-unit-sales-call-of-duty-games/

Skyrim hit the 30 million mark over a year ago; now that it's on Switch, where it's consistently been one of the top ten best-sellers, I suspect it's crossed the 31 million threshold easily. Red Dead Redemption had sold 15 million units as of a year ago--it did not sell another 15 million in 2017, not even close, Take-Two would've mentioned that on their conference calls. Bethesda claims Fallout 4 is "more successful than Skyrim over the same period of time," which could mean anything, but probably safe to assume it's sold more than 15 million units.

The point is, from Bethesda's perspective, they're doing everything right. When you're beating Red Dead and Uncharted and most of the Call of Duty franchise, you don't ask yourself, "geez, what could I have done differently?" You don't say, "if only we'd used a better engine!"

The point is, pretty much everything we hate about these games is a feature, not a bug.

Edit: shit, I took too long and Roguey beat me to the punch. Fucking rogues.

 

[ilitarist]

But Far Cry 3 sold worse than either Skyrim (#12 best seller of all time in terms of number of copies, probably much higher in terms of revenue since they keep re-releasing at high price points), or Fallout 4, which moved more units on its first day than Far Cry 3 did in its first 18 months. The truth is that unless your franchise is called Grand Theft Auto, single player games just don't do much better than BGS titles. It was a trick question. The game was rigged from the start.

We were talking about which game is better open world shooter. The trick is that Far Cry 3 is better open world shooter/action game but Skyrim and Fallout 4 still have RPG elements that elevate those games. Skyrim & Fallout 3-4 may be bad RPGs but they're great products in general and have just enough of RPG in them to give you a glimpse of a dream, of a true role-playing world simulation experience. If you take the best RPG you can, including Fallout 1, it will still be far from that vision of a perfect RPG, so for those people who don't focus on roleplaying aspect in general the difference between Fallout 4 & Fallout 1 roleplaying is not that big. Everyone can see that there isn't much choice in Fallout 4 and the narrative is questionable. In other words, there are infiinite number of inconsistencies and suspension of disbelief in Fallout 1 when you're talking just about RPG parts, but in Fallout 4 there are 10 times as many of them!

Also Far Cry games are probably much cheaper.

 

[fantadomat]

Fallout 4 have the best shooter mechanics of them all,if it can be called a Fallout game. The only good thing that dredge of a game is the shooting.

 

[agris]

Regarding the favorable quotes for Fallout: Obsidian's Gamebryo Edition, I guarantee if you go to the source material there will be quotes that indicate they are avoiding criticism of it or being taciturn, as the previous poster mentioned. Rogue had a weird tendency to try to promote mis/dis-information.

I typed up that massive interview myself, I think I'd remember if Josh said something disparaging about Bethbryo.

Oh, I don't doubt your ability to remember it. I only doubt in your desire to present any information that goes counter to your narrative.

 

[PorkBarrellGuy]

Fallout have the best shooter mechanics of them all,if it can be called a Fallout game. The only good thing that dredge of a game is the shooting.

If you're talking about FO3 and so on, the "shooter" mechanics are fucking awful.

 

[fantadomat]

Fallout have the best shooter mechanics of them all,if it can be called a Fallout game. The only good thing that dredge of a game is the shooting.

If you're talking about FO3 and so on, the "shooter" mechanics are fucking awful.

Oooook,this is strange,pretty certain that i wrote 4,maybe i have a brain tumour or something. Anyway i edit it.

 

[Lhynn]

This fucking thread.

 

[Roguey]

Oh, I don't doubt your ability to remember it. I only doubt in your desire to present any information that goes counter to your narrative.

Sawyer's criticism of Bethbryo in the past have included the way it handles animation blending (fixed as of Skyrim), and something about how it handles memory that made their games eventually unplayable on the PS3 (irrelevant with the current console generation). He'd also have positive and negative things to say about every other engine he's worked with.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

This fucking thread.

Codex in a nutshell

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Diggfinger]

AMEN
1,000,000 brofists for Makabb
Thread closed

THis is the best RPG (game) of all time. Currently playing Nevada (the Russian mod) and absolutely loving it. Fuck it, even the graphics are superb and way more atmospheric than most games today.

Jason Anderson, Tim Can, Leonard Boyarsky...we salute you

 

[Sykar]

AMEN
1,000,000 brofists for Makabb
Thread closed

THis is the best RPG (game) of all time. Currently playing Nevada (the Russian mod) and absolutely loving it. Fuck it, even the graphics are superb and way more atmospheric than most games today.

Jason Anderson, Tim Can, Leonard Boyarsky...we salute you

The graphics are far from superb and that was true even at release. The SPECIAL system was severely flawed in allowing almost no attribute progress whatsoever. Traits very unbalanced (Gifted > all, Skilled > garbage) due to that exact reason. Several skills were rarely if ever really useful like explosives, barter or gambling.
Combat was shit by any objective measure, it was just visually gratifying due to the gory death scenes which became old pretty fast though. Move, attack, use Stimpack. Those are the options you have in other words the combat is among shallowest across all cRPGs out there. I can make the argument that even Arcanum in TB mode offered more depth for that matter.
Companions were garbage. No surprise there since they were an afterthought and tacked on just as a challenge to show that it was in principle possible. On top of that they were horribly bugged.
Quests were mostly standard fare though reasonably executed. It has some nice C&C and the boss is better than in many other RPGs though only if you kill him via sabotage or through persuasion. Standard fight is boring due to cheesy endless summons and because combat is in general shallow as puddle.

FO1 is a prime example where the whole is better than the sum of its parts because some parts are just really bottom barrel. Where it shines is atmosphere, which is NOT just graphic related, far from it in fact, execution of story, writing, some dialogue and c&c though reactivity is rather limited.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

gezz, the codex doesn't respect anything these days

 

[jaydee2k]

Of course it is

 

[Master]

AMEN
1,000,000 brofists for Makabb
Thread closed

THis is the best RPG (game) of all time. Currently playing Nevada (the Russian mod) and absolutely loving it. Fuck it, even the graphics are superb and way more atmospheric than most games today.

Jason Anderson, Tim Can, Leonard Boyarsky...we salute you

The graphics are far from superb and that was true even at release. The SPECIAL system was severely flawed in allowing almost no attribute progress whatsoever. Traits very unbalanced (Gifted > all, Skilled > garbage) due to that exact reason. Several skills were rarely if ever really useful like explosives, barter or gambling.
Combat was shit by any objective measure, it was just visually gratifying due to the gory death scenes which became old pretty fast though. Move, attack, use Stimpack. Those are the options you have in other words the combat is among shallowest across all cRPGs out there. I can make the argument that even Arcanum in TB mode offered more depth for that matter.
Companions were garbage. No surprise there since they were an afterthought and tacked on just as a challenge to show that it was in principle possible. On top of that they were horribly bugged.
Quests were mostly standard fare though reasonably executed. It has some nice C&C and the boss is better than in many other RPGs though only if you kill him via sabotage or through persuasion. Standard fight is boring due to cheesy endless summons and because combat is in general shallow as puddle.

FO1 is a prime example where the whole is better than the sum of its parts because some parts are just really bottom barrel. Where it shines is atmosphere, which is NOT just graphic related, far from it in fact, execution of story, writing, some dialogue and c&c though reactivity is rather limited.

Great combat isnt necessary for being "the best RPG of all time", Fallout basically proved this. JA2 has better combat(in fact the best combat) but still isnt a better RPG than Fallout, why?

Companions arent necessary either so being an afterthought doesnt matter. JA2 has better "companions" and the entire game revolves around them but still its not better RPG than Fallout.

"Great" character system isnt necessary either as JA2 has this better too... Still, its somehow not a better RPG.

"Quests were mostly standard fare though reasonably executed. It has some nice C&C and the boss is better than in many other RPGs though only if you kill him via sabotage or through persuasion." --- i suspect this is this is basically where its at.

I cant think of any game that does this better, except Arcanum. If it ever got its combat fixed it would dethrone Fallout as Number 1.

 

[Sykar]

gezz, the codex doesn't respect anything these days

Valid criticism != lack of respect. I gave it plenty of praise. Also to me there is not such thing as a "best" cRPG. There are several great ones out there which have different merits than FO 1 but are in no way worse than it and I do consider some of them better including FO 2.

 

[Lilura]

Great combat isnt necessary for being "the best RPG of all time", Fallout basically proved this. JA2 has better combat(in fact the best combat) but still isnt a better RPG than Fallout, why?

Companions arent necessary either so being an afterthought doesnt matter. JA2 has better "companions" and the entire game revolves around them but still its not better RPG than Fallout.

"Great" character system isnt necessary either as JA2 has this better too... Still, its somehow not a better RPG.

JA2 is a better game than Fallout. A much, much, MUCH better game. Fallout is GOAT in RPG genre: JA2 contends for GOAT in gaming itself.

I cant think of any game that does this better, except Arcanum. If it ever got its combat fixed it would dethrone Fallout as Number 1.

Dream on.