Starfield Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Gargaune]

I would have easily traded settlement management for land vehicles and flying ship around planets.

If they aren’t doing land vehicles then it’s most likely the same reason they don’t do them in their Fallout games. There’s some interview that got posted here (this site, I don’t think it was this thread) a few years ago where Todd Howard says the reason Fallout doesn’t have vehicles is because their engine can’t handle the player moving that fast through the game world. It would seem that problem is still a problem with their engine.

It's more accurate to say it's a design limitation. If you watch a speedrun of their games, the engine clearly hand handle the player physically moving that fast. The problem is the cells don't stream in in time so everything looks glitchy. If they really wanted to add vehicles, it's easy to see all the ways they could reduce the data streaming load. Instead of tracking every NPC and item in the cell at all times, they could simply unload those resources when they're out of view. They could drastically reduce geometry without sacrificing visual fidelity if they didn't dot their landscapes with so many points of interest and modeled interiors. But that simulation detail has become part of their brand so they elect for heavier loads and constrain the player's speed to compensate.

Without getting into the nitty-gritty, you're right, Gamebryo can handle vehicles. You figure out your maximum traversal speed and you optimise what and where as needed, tech application is driven by use case needs. The bigger problem has been flying "vehicles", like dragons and vertibirds, because of the much wider area to cover from high up, but that too can be addressed. And anyway, Skyrim had (slowish) horses, Fallout 3 got cars in the Frontier mod, Fallout 4 has a fully working (albeit not very polished) motorcycle mod, so it's not exactly a novel concept.

The main issue, however, isn't software design, it's game design. Take the aforementioned Fo4 motorcycle mod for an example - it's a neat idea, but not very useful because the map topography and content density can't accommodate it, you can't go more than three hundred metres before you have to get off and fight something. To build vehicular gameplay, you need a giant map with open expanses, like the one in that Mad Max game. And then you need new gameplay loops to fill those expanses and keep that game "mode" as interesting as the pedestrian one, or you end up with Cyberpunk 2077's cars, i.e. pretty but dumb. You can't half-arse it (like settlements), you need a complete extra game mode so it's a pretty dramatic shift in scope. I wish Bethesda bit the bullet and gave us the full Mad Max experience in their next Fallout (if we live long enough to see it), but I wouldn't be surprised if they kept passing on it.

On a somewhat related note, one of Fallout London's trailers has a guy riding a bicycle. Which proves Jeremy Clarkson was right about cyclists, they're a menace to civilisation.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Todd Howard looks so old now.
I realize he has wrinkles and little undereye bags which he hadn't back in the day.

Are you so alone in the world that seeing people age is some revelation worth stating. Yes, Todd Howard is entering his mid 50's which can include wrinkles and bags. Shocking.

 

[Robotigan]

The main issue, however, isn't software design, it's game design. Take the aforementioned Fo4 motorcycle mod for an example - it's a neat idea, but not very useful because the map topography and content density can't accommodate it, you can't go more than three hundred metres before you have to get off and fight something. To build vehicular gameplay, you need a giant map with open expanses, like the one in that Mad Max game. And then you need new gameplay loops to fill those expanses and keep that game "mode" as interesting as the pedestrian one, or you end up with Cyberpunk 2077's cars, i.e. pretty but dumb. You can't half-arse it (like settlements), you need a complete extra game mode so it's a pretty dramatic shift in scope. I wish Bethesda bit the bullet and gave us the full Mad Max experience in their next Fallout (if we live long enough to see it), but I wouldn't be surprised if they kept passing on it.

This probably says more about the games I play informing different expectations--I've barely touched GTA and their clones--but I don't think the Fallout setting really needs them. Cars probably wouldn't be a big part of a post-apocalyptic future anyhow so unless your setting is stylized around them, Mad Max, they're not necessary inclusion. But I guess the older Fallouts had them (kinda) so the idea had already been implanted. I don't think a space game needs land vehicles either. You don't think of astronauts spinning donuts in flashy rides, at most you'd expect a buggie for hauling cargo. Contrast with Cyberpunk 2077. When you say "open world cyberpunk", the Akira motorcycle slide is one of the first things that pops into people's heads.

 

[Gargaune]

This probably says more about the games I play informing different expectations--I've barely touched GTA and their clones--but I don't think the Fallout setting really needs them.

They're not necessary but they do present an appealing opportunity, a Bethesda Fallout plus some Mad Max/Carmageddon action would be pretty fucking awesome. Dunno about you guys, but I could go for a 1968 Mustang pick-up truck conversion with a Power Armour crane in the back, Dogmeat in the passenger's seat, and a bonnet-mounted minigun. Rusted green with Le Mans stripes and a Bettie Page decal saying "fuck ferals!"*

* - not literally

I don't think a space game needs land vehicles either.

I do agree when it comes to Starfield, a semi-realistic "NASA punk" rover won't be that exciting a ride, and you'd be somewhat limited in building themed gameplay loops for it.

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

Uh I don't know what the fuck I was reading but if you are re-DMAing your inventory simply to add/remove items you are an idiot.

You should only need to re-DMA it if you upgrade your inventory size. Even so that's probably dumb as fuck.

Are you making some idiotic sim game where your inventory size fluxuates every second?
Do you think Starfield's minimum of 16 GBs of ram has anything to do with inventory size and the "epic" UI graphics?
Wtf.

Pick a theoretical max and allocate that. Then simply don't use the unused slots. Linear array access is fast as fuck.
And if you did have multigrid inventory you wouldn't have 1000 slots, more like 100 at best.
Then it would be tabbed. And if it is tabbed it's called tabindex * slotsperpage as your start iteration point.

You should only need 1 inventory and 1 item class for your entire game btw. More than that is feature creep.


And yes if you re-DMAd when you physically ran out of space in the other slots, it wouldn't matter.

Tying issues of VIEW (UI) to DATA , is like tying your character speed to your FPS. That's bethesda level shit alright. BUt don't come in here suggesting
having a grid-based inventory is really inferior to vertical scrolling list because of memory space issues or row traversal.

I sorry if I hurt any feelings by this critique.

Sincerely,
creator of Redaxium 1 and 2.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I don't think a space game needs land vehicles either

This a game where you are supposed to explore planets... it should be a given to have some kind of vehicles for planet surface travel, if the sci-fi setting is to be taken seriously and not like some space fantasy.

 

[Robotigan]

Are you making some idiotic sim game where your inventory size fluxuates every second?
Do you think Starfield's minimum of 16 GBs of ram has anything to do with inventory size and the "epic" UI graphics?
Wtf.

Yes? This is quite clearly what Bethesda's game systems are designed around. Each NPC and container has its own persistent collection of items that every actor can access. That's why if you mod Oblivion to restore its original Radiant AI, they'll all start killing each other because they're trying to raid each other's inventories for food.

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

Are you making some idiotic sim game where your inventory size fluxuates every second?
Do you think Starfield's minimum of 16 GBs of ram has anything to do with inventory size and the "epic" UI graphics?
Wtf.

Yes? This is quite clearly what Bethesda's game systems are designed around. Each NPC and container has its own persistent collection of items that every actor can access. That's why if you mod Oblivion to restore its original Radiant AI, they'll all start killing each other because they're trying to raid each other's inventories for food.

OK I think I understand what you are being confused by. You view looting any target as essentially a broad search operation performed across every inventory slot.
You also probably believe there will be a temporary copy generated of every single inventory slot as part of the matching algorithm. Thus creating something resembling a dupe of the inventory over time.
Depending on the programmer's inexperience who did the coding this could very well be true.

For the sake of argument let's say this is the case for Bethesda.
Heap allocation is still much more expensive than copying data to a temporary stack variable.
In other words facilitating dupes using stack variables is far superior than dynamic memory allocation.

A stack variable is much more optimized for by the code itself. A fixed space is set aside or expected by the process thanks to the code.

Now let's assume for sake of argument that's not applicable to complex objects such as an Item Slot or Item.

You still have another problem in your thinking. Bethesda's games like Fallout 3/Oblivion, Skyrim/Fallout 4 etc.. are not heavy reactive engineering games like minecraft or factorio.
There will not be a situation where every single npc loots every other single npc all at once. Else you are imaging a singularity of them all being literally ontop of each other, and queuing up looting
every single other person in that position as a task to do at once. Sorry but Bethesda's games have no such parallel action. And would probably crash for reasons unrelated to inventory
if such things were possible.

Bethesda games are buggy and no doubt have shipped ridiculous scripting blunders But i'm not going to concede that an npc decides to loot all other npcs inventories at once.
Bad would not even begin to describe how silly that design is. Also if Bethesda was sane, the decision to loot would not be occuring every game frame, regardless of npc. Instead it would be broken up into events
or atleast time delayed attempts.

 

[Vic]

what he said

STARFIELD HYPE

 

[Robotigan]

OK I think I understand what you are being confused by. You view looting any target as essentially a broad search operation performed across every inventory slot.
You also probably believe there will be a temporary copy generated of every single inventory slot as part of the matching algorithm. Thus creating something resembling a dupe of the inventory over time.
Depending on the programmer's inexperience who did the coding this could very well be true.

I'm completely lost. Look, I'm not a game dev just recalling a few CS classes from some years ago. I'm suggesting that as long as each item is stored as a reference anyway and containers (including but not limited to the player inventory) can hold arbitrarily many items, why not just accept the overhead of a list structure instead of instatiating large arrays for every container? And yes, if an NPC AI has a "get food" objective wouldn't that involve broad search operation through all nearby containers until a suitable item was found? I'm not sure what you mean by copy. I was

Heap allocation is still much more expensive than copying data to a temporary stack variable.

Huh? I'd assume all persistent data is allocated on the the heap.

There will not be a situation where every single npc loots every other single npc all at once. Else you are imaging a singularity of them all being literally ontop of each other, and queuing up looting

That's not... I was just using a figure of speech.

You still have another problem in your thinking. Bethesda's games like Fallout 3/Oblivion, Skyrim/Fallout 4 etc.. are not heavy reactive engineering games like minecraft or factorio.

Isn't there a hard player inventory limit in Fallout 76 because they didn't think their servers could handle so many entities at a time? That seems to imply that tracking all these entities is a heavy operation somehow.

 

[deuxhero]

I would have easily traded settlement management for land vehicles and flying ship around planets.

If they aren’t doing land vehicles then it’s most likely the same reason they don’t do them in their Fallout games. There’s some interview that got posted here (this site, I don’t think it was this thread) a few years ago where Todd Howard says the reason Fallout doesn’t have vehicles is because their engine can’t handle the player moving that fast through the game world. It would seem that problem is still a problem with their engine.

It's more accurate to say it's a design limitation. If you watch a speedrun of their games, the engine clearly hand handle the player physically moving that fast. The problem is the cells don't stream in in time so everything looks glitchy. If they really wanted to add vehicles, it's easy to see all the ways they could reduce the data streaming load. Instead of tracking every NPC and item in the cell at all times, they could simply unload those resources when they're out of view. They could drastically reduce geometry without sacrificing visual fidelity if they didn't dot their landscapes with so many points of interest and modeled interiors. But that simulation detail has become part of their brand so they elect for heavier loads and constrain the player's speed to compensate.

On a somewhat related note, one of Fallout London's trailers has a guy riding a bicycle. Which proves Jeremy Clarkson was right about cyclists, they're a menace to civilisation.

Really, I do think bicycles, both pedal and electric, should be more prominent in Fallout. The world's defining features include lack of petroleum and crazy potent batteries, so it should be a natural combo. From a gameplay point of view,
1: Bikes are still based on character status. Strength, Agility and (especially) Endurance determine how useful a bike is to a character, rather than just making their attributes moot.
2: Bikes are still relatively slow vehicles, only about double or less walking speed (expert in foot marathon is about 12 MPH average, expert in bike marathon conducted on expensive bike in ideal terrain is 25 MPH average). Even without engine limitations, fast vehicles still have issues of making the game world seem to small on vehicle and too large on foot.
3: Bikes handle varied terrain well, and since they're light enough to be carried or wheeled even the stuff they don't handle well can be traversed without the question of how to get your ride back
4: Bikes are modular enough and require relatively few tools that it would be entirely plausible to make bike customization a thing. Change seat to reduce fatigue, change tires to impact how it handles terrain, add a motor to make travel less tiring at the cost of the bike being heavier and needing power cells, etc. This gives a use to Repair without retarded weapon durability systems (the only parts that wear out in an appreciable round count on a modern firearm that isn't shit are springs, bolt, gas tube and, in some designs, roller/lever delays, gaskets and barrel, if the cartridge is hot enough the barrel cheap enough. Only bolt and barrel are meaningful repair jobs), but isn't mandatory must take for all builds (needing an NPC to fix new parts to your ride is "merely" very inconvenient and a hassle, depending on part weight and where the nearest one you want to deal with is), or so high it would be limited to end-game where only one high value maters (a handyman could figure out a wheel swap, but a suspension upgrade or motor installation might trouble him)
5: Bikes have limited passenger capacity, a perfect excuse to limit companion count naturally. One of the F2 TCs already did this: You could take multiple companions, but if you wanted to use the electric motorcycle you could only have one at a time.
6: Most bikes are low end garbage ("bike shaped object") made in Taiwan (Fallout 4 concept art implies it was still a separate and independent country in Fallout universe). This means there's plenty justification for low end junk to populate the world rather than the PC being the only one with a bike.
7: From their invention in the 1880s to the start of WW2, bar the interruption 1914 to 1918, every machine shop worth anything was making bikes as part of their company ("Iver Johnson's Arms & Cycle Works"). It's a low tech enough industry to exist post-war (main question is tire rubber, though virgin rubber a good pick for a valuable commodity in Fallout anyways)
8: You can shoot and be shot from a bicycle, and some even had modifications to help with that (use as a bipod or MG mount) while the rider is totally exposed (greatly simplifying systems)

Mind you, I've given more thought to world building and game development writing that than Bethesda has on almost anything.

 

[Late Bloomer]

I would have easily traded settlement management for land vehicles and flying ship around planets.

If they aren’t doing land vehicles then it’s most likely the same reason they don’t do them in their Fallout games. There’s some interview that got posted here (this site, I don’t think it was this thread) a few years ago where Todd Howard says the reason Fallout doesn’t have vehicles is because their engine can’t handle the player moving that fast through the game world. It would seem that problem is still a problem with their engine.

It's more accurate to say it's a design limitation. If you watch a speedrun of their games, the engine clearly hand handle the player physically moving that fast. The problem is the cells don't stream in in time so everything looks glitchy. If they really wanted to add vehicles, it's easy to see all the ways they could reduce the data streaming load. Instead of tracking every NPC and item in the cell at all times, they could simply unload those resources when they're out of view. They could drastically reduce geometry without sacrificing visual fidelity if they didn't dot their landscapes with so many points of interest and modeled interiors. But that simulation detail has become part of their brand so they elect for heavier loads and constrain the player's speed to compensate.

On a somewhat related note, one of Fallout London's trailers has a guy riding a bicycle. Which proves Jeremy Clarkson was right about cyclists, they're a menace to civilisation.

Really, I do think bicycles, both pedal and electric, should be more prominent in Fallout. The world's defining features include lack of petroleum and crazy potent batteries, so it should be a natural combo. From a gameplay point of view,
1: Bikes are still based on character status. Strength, Agility and (especially) Endurance determine how useful a bike is to a character, rather than just making their attributes moot.
2: Bikes are still relatively slow vehicles, only about double or less walking speed (expert in foot marathon is about 12 MPH average, expert in bike marathon conducted on expensive bike in ideal terrain is 25 MPH average). Even without engine limitations, fast vehicles still have issues of making the game world seem to small on vehicle and too large on foot.
3: Bikes handle varied terrain well, and since they're light enough to be carried or wheeled even the stuff they don't handle well can be traversed without the question of how to get your ride back
4: Bikes are modular enough and require relatively few tools that it would be entirely plausible to make bike customization a thing. Change seat to reduce fatigue, change tires to impact how it handles terrain, add a motor to make travel less tiring at the cost of the bike being heavier and needing power cells, etc. This gives a use to Repair without retarded weapon durability systems (the only parts that wear out in an appreciable round on a modern firearm that isn't shit are springs, bolt, gas tube and, in some designs, roller/lever delays, gaskets and, if the cartridge is hot enough, barrel. Only bolt and barrel are meaningful repair jobs), but isn't mandatory must take for all builds (needing an NPC to fix new parts to your ride is "merely" very inconvenient and a hassle, depending on part weight and where the nearest one you want to deal with is), or so high it would be limited to end-game where only one high value maters (a handyman could figure out a wheel swap, but a suspension upgrade or motor installation might trouble him)
5: Bikes have limited passenger capacity, a perfect excuse to limit companion count naturally. One of the F2 TCs already did this: You could take multiple companions, but if you wanted to use the electric motorcycle you could only have one at a time.
6: Most bikes are low end garbage ("bike shaped object") made in Taiwan (Fallout 4 concept art implies it was still a separate and independent country in Fallout universe). This means there's plenty justification for low end junk to populate the world rather than the PC being the only one with a bike.
7: From their invention in the 1880s to the start of WW2, bar the interruption 1914 to 1918, every machine shop worth anything was making bikes as part of their company ("Iver Johnson's Arms & Cycle Works"). It's a low tech enough industry to exist post-war (main question is tire rubber, though virgin rubber a good pick for a valuable commodity in Fallout anyways)
8: You can shoot and be shot from a bicycle, and some even had modifications to help with that (use as a bipod or MG mount) while the rider is totally exposed (greatly simplifying systems)

Mind you, I've given more thought to world building and game development writing that than Bethesda has on almost anything.

 

[Levenmouth]

Yeah.

PayNvidia2Win

 

[gurugeorge]

I would have easily traded settlement management for land vehicles and flying ship around planets.

If they aren’t doing land vehicles then it’s most likely the same reason they don’t do them in their Fallout games. There’s some interview that got posted here (this site, I don’t think it was this thread) a few years ago where Todd Howard says the reason Fallout doesn’t have vehicles is because their engine can’t handle the player moving that fast through the game world. It would seem that problem is still a problem with their engine.

It's more accurate to say it's a design limitation. If you watch a speedrun of their games, the engine clearly hand handle the player physically moving that fast. The problem is the cells don't stream in in time so everything looks glitchy. If they really wanted to add vehicles, it's easy to see all the ways they could reduce the data streaming load. Instead of tracking every NPC and item in the cell at all times, they could simply unload those resources when they're out of view. They could drastically reduce geometry without sacrificing visual fidelity if they didn't dot their landscapes with so many points of interest and modeled interiors. But that simulation detail has become part of their brand so they elect for heavier loads and constrain the player's speed to compensate.

On a somewhat related note, one of Fallout London's trailers has a guy riding a bicycle. Which proves Jeremy Clarkson was right about cyclists, they're a menace to civilisation.

Really, I do think bicycles, both pedal and electric, should be more prominent in Fallout. The world's defining features include lack of petroleum and crazy potent batteries, so it should be a natural combo. From a gameplay point of view,
1: Bikes are still based on character status. Strength, Agility and (especially) Endurance determine how useful a bike is to a character, rather than just making their attributes moot.
2: Bikes are still relatively slow vehicles, only about double or less walking speed (expert in foot marathon is about 12 MPH average, expert in bike marathon conducted on expensive bike in ideal terrain is 25 MPH average). Even without engine limitations, fast vehicles still have issues of making the game world seem to small on vehicle and too large on foot.
3: Bikes handle varied terrain well, and since they're light enough to be carried or wheeled even the stuff they don't handle well can be traversed without the question of how to get your ride back
4: Bikes are modular enough and require relatively few tools that it would be entirely plausible to make bike customization a thing. Change seat to reduce fatigue, change tires to impact how it handles terrain, add a motor to make travel less tiring at the cost of the bike being heavier and needing power cells, etc. This gives a use to Repair without retarded weapon durability systems (the only parts that wear out in an appreciable round on a modern firearm that isn't shit are springs, bolt, gas tube and, in some designs, roller/lever delays, gaskets and, if the cartridge is hot enough, barrel. Only bolt and barrel are meaningful repair jobs), but isn't mandatory must take for all builds (needing an NPC to fix new parts to your ride is "merely" very inconvenient and a hassle, depending on part weight and where the nearest one you want to deal with is), or so high it would be limited to end-game where only one high value maters (a handyman could figure out a wheel swap, but a suspension upgrade or motor installation might trouble him)
5: Bikes have limited passenger capacity, a perfect excuse to limit companion count naturally. One of the F2 TCs already did this: You could take multiple companions, but if you wanted to use the electric motorcycle you could only have one at a time.
6: Most bikes are low end garbage ("bike shaped object") made in Taiwan (Fallout 4 concept art implies it was still a separate and independent country in Fallout universe). This means there's plenty justification for low end junk to populate the world rather than the PC being the only one with a bike.
7: From their invention in the 1880s to the start of WW2, bar the interruption 1914 to 1918, every machine shop worth anything was making bikes as part of their company ("Iver Johnson's Arms & Cycle Works"). It's a low tech enough industry to exist post-war (main question is tire rubber, though virgin rubber a good pick for a valuable commodity in Fallout anyways)
8: You can shoot and be shot from a bicycle, and some even had modifications to help with that (use as a bipod or MG mount) while the rider is totally exposed (greatly simplifying systems)

Mind you, I've given more thought to world building and game development writing that than Bethesda has on almost anything.

Excellent points. One of my hobby horses is that we should definitely think of technology as being in three tiers - low, mid and hi tech. Low tech is what you can do with basic tools (knife, etc.), mid tech is what you can do with a machine shop, hi tech requires a whole international system of trade.

Mid is definitely what you'd see flowering in a post apoc scenario. After not too long a time, there would be towns big enough to have machine shops, power for them, etc., and they would help maintain a lot of the infrastructure and provide useful things like, indeed, bicycles.

Also, interestingly, I think there would be scope for the tech going in peculiar directions - e.g. (not that this is a serious example, but just to get the point across) you might see the return of the Penny Farthing, or other weird things like that.

 

[NoMoneyNoFameNoDame]

OK I think I understand what you are being confused by. You view looting any target as essentially a broad search operation performed across every inventory slot.
You also probably believe there will be a temporary copy generated of every single inventory slot as part of the matching algorithm. Thus creating something resembling a dupe of the inventory over time.
Depending on the programmer's inexperience who did the coding this could very well be true.

I'm completely lost. Look, I'm not a game dev just recalling a few CS classes from some years ago. I'm suggesting that as long as each item is stored as a reference anyway and containers (including but not limited to the player inventory) can hold arbitrarily many items, why not just accept the overhead of a list structure instead of instatiating large arrays for every container? And yes, if an NPC AI has a "get food" objective wouldn't that involve broad search operation through all nearby containers until a suitable item was found? I'm not sure what you mean by copy. I was

Heap allocation is still much more expensive than copying data to a temporary stack variable.

Huh? I'd assume all persistent data is allocated on the the heap.

There will not be a situation where every single npc loots every other single npc all at once. Else you are imaging a singularity of them all being literally ontop of each other, and queuing up looting

That's not... I was just using a figure of speech.

You still have another problem in your thinking. Bethesda's games like Fallout 3/Oblivion, Skyrim/Fallout 4 etc.. are not heavy reactive engineering games like minecraft or factorio.

Isn't there a hard player inventory limit in Fallout 76 because they didn't think their servers could handle so many entities at a time? That seems to imply that tracking all these entities is a heavy operation somehow.

Physics updates and AI pathing could be server-sided reason to limit entities. And GPU optimization issues would be a client-side reason to limit entities server-side. Else unfair advantages and other user-unfriendly problems arise.

For multiplayer games.. esp FO76 hilarious issues, you might have to watch how you sync all the items of npcs and corpses in the area. Imagine you had an epic troll make ridiculous amounts of duped items
and store them into inventories/everywhere. I cannot even begin to speculate how they sync items or at what rate they do. Because that information has to go across the web and be parsed, there's room for unusual amounts of bloat.
A network programmer would still probably call bullshit on this thought but i'm not up to date on what modern networking is really able to pull off.

Yes you can use list structures / arrays/ multidimensional arrays. But you'll just invent the same boilerplate to manage these anyway. So you may as well use a linear array with a fixed size.
Now you can customize this per npc, but once allocated you can just set the slots used rather than re-allocate anything at all. It's simply one more variable that dicates how much of inventory is used,
or if you want to be more specific you could add a variable for each slot to deactivate/activate slots. What you show is what is available.

Yes heap is great for persistent data most of your RAM is for the heap not the program itself. That said stack is faster, and someone can tell me if i'm wrong, but the processor has its own CACHE
which is like its own local memory. Things are expected to be thrown away and re-used like crazy there. Heap's persistency is owed to being unlike this behavior. That said people can build
their own resource management for heap allocated objects. It's just not the same as what the processor job which tries to do a lot with a little.

 

[Gargaune]

Really, I do think bicycles, both pedal and electric, should be more prominent in Fallout. The world's defining features include lack of petroleum and crazy potent batteries, so it should be a natural combo. From a gameplay point of view,
1: Bikes are still based on character status. Strength, Agility and (especially) Endurance determine how useful a bike is to a character, rather than just making their attributes moot.
2: Bikes are still relatively slow vehicles, only about double or less walking speed (expert in foot marathon is about 12 MPH average, expert in bike marathon conducted on expensive bike in ideal terrain is 25 MPH average). Even without engine limitations, fast vehicles still have issues of making the game world seem to small on vehicle and too large on foot.
3: Bikes handle varied terrain well, and since they're light enough to be carried or wheeled even the stuff they don't handle well can be traversed without the question of how to get your ride back
4: Bikes are modular enough and require relatively few tools that it would be entirely plausible to make bike customization a thing. Change seat to reduce fatigue, change tires to impact how it handles terrain, add a motor to make travel less tiring at the cost of the bike being heavier and needing power cells, etc. This gives a use to Repair without retarded weapon durability systems (the only parts that wear out in an appreciable round count on a modern firearm that isn't shit are springs, bolt, gas tube and, in some designs, roller/lever delays, gaskets and barrel, if the cartridge is hot enough the barrel cheap enough. Only bolt and barrel are meaningful repair jobs), but isn't mandatory must take for all builds (needing an NPC to fix new parts to your ride is "merely" very inconvenient and a hassle, depending on part weight and where the nearest one you want to deal with is), or so high it would be limited to end-game where only one high value maters (a handyman could figure out a wheel swap, but a suspension upgrade or motor installation might trouble him)
5: Bikes have limited passenger capacity, a perfect excuse to limit companion count naturally. One of the F2 TCs already did this: You could take multiple companions, but if you wanted to use the electric motorcycle you could only have one at a time.
6: Most bikes are low end garbage ("bike shaped object") made in Taiwan (Fallout 4 concept art implies it was still a separate and independent country in Fallout universe). This means there's plenty justification for low end junk to populate the world rather than the PC being the only one with a bike.
7: From their invention in the 1880s to the start of WW2, bar the interruption 1914 to 1918, every machine shop worth anything was making bikes as part of their company ("Iver Johnson's Arms & Cycle Works"). It's a low tech enough industry to exist post-war (main question is tire rubber, though virgin rubber a good pick for a valuable commodity in Fallout anyways)
8: You can shoot and be shot from a bicycle, and some even had modifications to help with that (use as a bipod or MG mount) while the rider is totally exposed (greatly simplifying systems)

Mind you, I've given more thought to world building and game development writing that than Bethesda has on almost anything.

I agree with you thematically and how Bethesda's world of Fallout has forgotten the magic of the wheel has long been a big bugbear of mine. People should be using bicycles and brahmin-drawn carts (instead of strapping fridges to their stupid backs) with some frequency where the environment allows, and that's plenty often with roads still there. And if the Brotherhood can operate vertibirds and the NCR has tanks and trucks (I think?), some wastelanders should also be able to restore and use basic motorvehicles, even if they're a rare and expensive piece of gear. Power Armor runs on Fusion Cores, that's a thing, and wastelanders can apparently rig ethanol-based generators, so it shouldn't be that hard to hook up a motor to a transmission. A little motorised bike should be a piece of piss to assemble and maintain next to an armoured exoskeleton like a T-45 and you could run the fucking thing on moonshine.

But, like I said, the issue is gameplay loops, you've gotta start building larger spaces (even for bicycles, slightly), bike combat, bike enemies... Just imagine what'd be like setting up a game mechanic for bicycle combat and making it fun to play - can you fire two-handed weapons, do you have mounted weapons, reloading, can you do melee, can you move and turn, how you control steering vs. aiming, do you stagger or fall when hit, can you loot from the seat etc.? It's not trivial work, and horses were cool in Skyrim, but they didn't play great beyond moving around and running away from encounters you didn't feel like fighting. They didn't even have combat at first, it got patched in. The Witcher 3's traversal was well built for horseback, but mounted combat still sucked. Maybe Red Dead Redemption does it better, dunno, I haven't played any of 'em, but either way it takes a fair bit of work and development focus, it's not a spur-of-the-moment feature.

 

[deuxhero]

Aye, it's not a super easy thing to implement, but it is a marketable thing (customization, terrain shenanigans, vehicles existing) and not super hard to implement either (animations are something that's entirely possible to motion capture). Looting while riding doesn't really require anything since Bethesda has never animated the player grabbing objects. Restricting two handed weapons to those mounted on cycles of violence gives pistols/SMGs more of a use without making their damage arbitrarily high.

 

[Kiste]

Someone even wrote a 5-part blog post about how incredibly shitty Skyrim's thieves guild quest line was:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422
And he even noted that the thieves quest isn't even the worst Skyrim has to offer.

This takedown deserves its own takedown. It's not so much that I think the questline is Goodfellas or anything, but several online critics have the most bizarre tunnel vision that makes them insufferable to

I'm not gonna tediously analyze the entire piece because while I'm sure there's a worthwhile critique here and there,

You're not "taking down" the takedown, you're nitpicking two minor points with a good helping of sophistry and interpreting stuff into the quest that isn't there. The quest does not get better because you're filling the plot holes with stupid shit you made up in your mind.

The arrow part is clearly retarded and makes no sense on any level, how can you defend this shit? And the part about the captain, who just threw someone into the dungeon for life without trial for the crime of food contamination, and the thieves guild taking over his brewery because of corruption? Then why go through all the song and dance with the mead poisoning in the first place? Just pay the guard captain to arrest the guy on some random pretext. There would be absolutely no need for all that cloak and dagger shit.

 

[Tacgnol]

Interesting that AMD seems to be out-dicking Team Green, though

I don't think Nvidia really cares about gaming sponsorship much anymore. Their new focus seems to be mostly on corporate AI.

They probably see gaming as a secondary market on which to offload a few overpriced cards.

 

[Kiste]

Interesting that AMD seems to be out-dicking Team Green, though

I don't think Nvidia really cares about gaming sponsorship much anymore. Their new focus seems to be mostly on corporate AI.

They probably see gaming as a secondary market on which to offload a few overpriced cards.

Gaming GPUs are still about 1/3 of Nvidia's revenue. What if the machine learning hype dies down in a few years? Nvidia is not stupid enough to keep all their eggs in one basket.

 

[Robotigan]

You're not "taking down" the takedown, you're nitpicking two minor points with a good helping of sophistry and interpreting stuff into the quest that isn't there.

It deserves a takedown from one of those bloggers/video essayists who write 10+ page critiques about trivial stuff. I was just pulling out two egregious examples of game critic tunnel vision to illustrate my point.

The arrow part is clearly retarded and makes no sense on any level, how can you defend this shit?

I didn't speak to the story itself. Frankly, I don't think I need to in this instance. Shamus made a big deal about paralysis being this one-off invention for the plot when it's an entire game mechanic interwoven into three separate skill trees. On an ordinary playthrough you'd stumble across several weapons and poisons imbued with that effect. That's not a minor nitpick. That's Shamus revealing that he was so hyper-focused on critiquing quest details that he wasn't paying attention to the game itself.

And the part about the captain, who just threw someone into the dungeon for life without trial for the crime of food contamination, and the thieves guild taking over his brewery because of corruption? Then why go through all the song and dance with the mead poisoning in the first place? Just pay the guard captain to arrest the guy on some random pretext. There would be absolutely no need for all that cloak and dagger shit.

I don't know, seems like ordinary politics to me. Not even the king can imprison whomever he likes or he'll lose his crown to a much more popular usurper. The pretext is what allows rulers/officials/politicians to play off their corruption to the masses, at the very least their supporters will pretend to buy it. Only idiots with short careers take blatant cash bribes, usually it's a veiled game of favor-trading that's much harder to prove. Maybe Maven secured the captain's position and he owed her a favor, or alternatively maybe he now has one of the most powerful persons in Skyrim in his debt. It doesn't really matter and the quest writer may not have put that much thought into it, but it's not difficult to make sense of the premise.
But also, why not just pay off the captain and skip the whole quest? Because that's the game. This is like when people complain about gunning down hundreds of bad guys only for the finale to present killing the big bad as a moral quandry. The solution is not to strip out all the gunplay to make the story coherent. That's putting the cart before the horse. If your fix for incongruent game narrative is to remove the gameplay, why are you making a video game?

 

[Silverfish]

The arrow part is clearly retarded and makes no sense on any level, how can you defend this shit?

I agree. It's unheard of that someone in Skyrim would do a sneak attack with a poisoned arrow.

 

[Kiste]

The arrow part is clearly retarded and makes no sense on any level, how can you defend this shit?

I agree. It's unheard of that someone in Skyrim would do a sneak attack with a poisoned arrow.

Yeah, one that conveniently paralizes you for a lengthy amount of in-game time (instead of seconds like the regular paralize effect) so you can conveniently listen to the conversation, then get clumsily murdered while the paralizing poison also conveniently and miraculously saves your life.

It also does not explain why she didn't paralize the other guy -- the one that was her actual target. Or why she didn't bring more than one arrow. And why she thought that harebrained scheme of luring Mercer into a fucking cave buy buying a mead brewery would actually work. Or why she immediately trusts you after reviving you.

Every single element of this fucking quest is stupid. It's plot contrivances stacked upon plot holes and glued together by a nonsensical plotline and NPCs that act like morons.

Or, to put it tersely: It's a Bethesda quest.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Interesting that AMD seems to be out-dicking Team Green, though

I don't think Nvidia really cares about gaming sponsorship much anymore. Their new focus seems to be mostly on corporate AI.

They probably see gaming as a secondary market on which to offload a few overpriced cards.

If you think a 4090 is overpriced, try buying an H100. $40,000 on ebay.

 

[Leinhart]

After Cyberpunk I will not hype any game until I have irrefutable proof that it is garbage. Does not matter how good or interesting it looks on promos.