tal

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I liked Fallout 4. I mean, the dialog was annoying compared to New Vegas, but the story was fine. That was 2016 for the initial game, and the DLC later.

EDIT: 2015. 2016 for the DLC.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I'm not going to wait two years -- though I'm opposed to preordering -- but there are other benefits too. Two years down the line:

• A bunch of bugs are patched. Even if Starfield is relatively free of bugs, there will be some.
• The wikis for the game have been written up. Some obsessive person will have sat down and figured out the quirks of game mechanics and documented them. Understanding stuff like the relative merits of armor-piercing, bleeding, and so forth in Fallout 4 was complicated.
• Starfield's expansion packs will be out.
• Mods will be out, and there will probably be some pretty "must have" ones.
• You'll have more hardware oomph to throw at the game, make it smoother/higher res.

tal, rok temu

If you mean just the Creation Engine, that was 2011.

If you trace it back to Gamebryo, then Morrowind was 20 years ago, but I don't think that one can say that even Skyrim looks much like Morrowind.

tal, rok temu

textures

What about the textures? Like, higher texture resolution?

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

One thing I did want in Fallout 4 that I don't believe it presently does is dynamic generation of polygons in curves.

The game has environments with kinda curvy surfaces, but aside from the dynamic level of detail models, the engine can't go throw spare horsepower at generating more polygons to make smoother curves. I think that that's a good match with long-lived PC games, because people playing it years later on more-powerful hardware can burn their extra cycles on making things pretty.

It's not vital or anything, just think that if there's one game where it'd be neat, it'd be Bethesda-type games.

tal, rok temu

VirtualBox isn’t compatible and must be uninstalled. Yeah, not doing that, got my family’s mail server in there

In all seriousness, might be worth just setting up a physical server separate from your gaming system.

I mean, I've thrown out many computers that would be entirely capable of running a mail server and the like.

tal, rok temu

From ping-pong balls to dynamically-resizing horse balls.

tal, rok temu

Well, Outer Worlds is already almost literally “Fallout 3, in space”.

Outer Worlds really did not scratch my Fallout itch.

Yeah, superficially it's similar in a number of ways, but:

• For all practical purposes, the game is fairly linear. The world is open, but you have little reason to go back.
• The Fallout perk system introduces a lot of interesting mechanics, is an important part of the game. The Outer Worlds perk system was almost entirely flat bonuses to one thing or another. Didn't change much how one would play the game.
• I rarely found myself stumbling into new and interesting situations just walking around the world.
• The weapons weren't all that interesting or customizable. That includes the uniques, other than the science weapons.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Some people in this thread are apparently streaming it to their Deck from their PC. If you're set on playing it on a Deck, that might be an option.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

The New Vegas dialog system is much better.

However, the graphics are getting kinda long in the tooth.

And it is significantly less-stable. I've definitely fallen out of the map a number of times, too.

And without hitting a wiki, you can lock yourself out of a lot of things that aren't obvious. Choices matter, but often in not-immediately-apparent ways.

tal, rok temu

my monitor freaks out if I raise the hz higher than 100 so can’t tell how high it’ll go

Try a shorter monitor cable? I had a really long cable that did not deal well with high refresh rates.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

If you liked Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, have you tried the Wasteland series? It's what Fallout 1 was modeled on, and that series kept going.

It's not Fallout, but it's the closest I have found to "more Fallout 1 and Fallout 2".

That being said, I thought that the Fallout jump to 3D would not work well, and I think I was very much wrong there -- the series did a pretty good job jumping the gap.

feels like Fallout

If you like the desert American Southwest "New Old West" theme in Fallout 1 and 2 and New Vegas, the Wasteland series does that.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Music is great!

Thanks. I specifically meant to ask about this in this thread and forgot.

I liked the music in New Vegas a lot, liked Fallout 4. Fallout 76 was a disappointment music-wise -- I'm not a fan of country, and didn't think that the DJing was good, left the radio off. Was really hoping that the Starfield music would be good.

tal, rok temu

To be fair, the realistic space combat video game genre really doesn't exist, that I've seen.

You can get pretty hard-realistic combat aircraft sims. Not many, but they exist.

But in space combat games, you're always playing something roughly like Star Wars. Which is cool and all, but just not what actual space combat would likely look like.

googles for one of the pages talking about the issues

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/real-life-space-combat-would-look-nothing-like-star-wars

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Thanks, haven't seen it before. If it does a release, I'll take a look.

tal, rok temu

I can see why you would not like it if you were expecting NMS but it was never intended to be that.

Come to think of it, most of the comments in this thread that are unhappy about it seem to be comparing it unfavorably to No Man's Sky.

tal, rok temu

Ah, I gotcha, yeah, I guess I can see that.

Yeah, from that standpoint, I imagine that Fallout 76 must have been a complete disappointment, because that element is almost nonexistent there.

You ever play Jagged Alliance 2? It's pretty old now, got more of a combat focus, but has a lot of the "multiple ways to pull things off".

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

We still haven't established whether some form of warp drive is doable or not. Even if you can't move faster than light, if you can distort spacetime around yourself sufficiently in the right way, you can maybe get a functionally-similar effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

The Alcubierre drive ([alkuˈβjere]) is a speculative warp drive idea according to which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, under the assumption that a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created.[1][2] Proposed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the Alcubierre drive is based on a solution of Einstein's field equations. Since those solutions are metric tensors, the Alcubierre drive is also referred to as Alcubierre metric.

Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination more quickly than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.[3]

The local velocity relative to the deformed space-time would be subluminal, but the speed at which a spacecraft could move would be superluminal, thereby rendering possible interstellar flight, such as a visit to Proxima Centauri within a few days.

tal, rok temu

The night/day thematic thing, where sunshine kinda comes back to Paris as you liberate areas, was really nifty.

tal, rok temu

I thought I remembered playing it on my Linux machine, but maybe I'm misremembering.

ProtonDB doesn't have any data:

https://www.protondb.com/app/1785600

googles

This guy is running it on the Steam Deck:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ua89ot/one_of_the_best_games_ever_the_saboteur_works/

tal, rok temu

Clearly the game needs a Dogmeat facial expression mod.

https://img.ilcdn.fi/IzG_zochUwlOAhQBDnbDTftjGcg=/full-fit-in/612x/img-s3.ilcdn.fi/33c3f60a7ac4a5c63152c9835552888c10104f6688c6c17f342543889a49dee2.jpg

https://post.bark.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/main1.jpg

https://theawesomedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/derpy-dog-portraits-by-kevin-sarasom-28-1.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/75/21/77/75217779432d335f6bbd2b6e370b6cee.jpg

https://justsomething.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/15-dogs-with-facial-expressions-that-are-so-human-it-s-hilarious-12.jpg

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cYNlJYQI3Uw/maxresdefault.jpg

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I used to think the Bethesda glitches were cute too until 76 came out.

I enjoyed Fallout 76, but I also ignored it until something like three years after release, at which point it was in a decent state.

It wasn't Fallout 5, which is what I really wanted, but I got my money's worth out of it.

Only bug I hit that was kind of obnoxious was the occasional inability to pick up an item from a corpse, where one would have to look away from the corpse and then back. While being a bit immersion-breaking, it was also pretty easy to work around.

Honestly, the whole Fallout series has been pretty buggy, starting with Fallout 1, but still, a good series. Some of it just comes from the complexity of having a bunch of scripts running that can interact in odd ways in a relatively free-form world.

One of my bigger wants for Fallout 5 is easier diagnosing of problems with mods and trying to be more-robust against such problems. Maybe produce more-foolproof API functionality for common script tasks or something.

tal, rok temu

I imagine that LLMs have been trained on his reviews by this point and are vigorously producing articles exploring the intersection of pop gaming and the Elder Things.

tal, rok temu

I mean, an automated grammar checker should get this. Shouldn't even require a human editor.

https://languagetool.org/

Plugging it in there catches it and suggests "least buggy".

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

That's probably part of it. A big chunk of the aspects that I didn't like about it relative to Fallout 4 -- from killing off slow-mo/pause VATS, to not having a world that can change much, to limited-size "settlements", to limited moddability, to having immersion-breaking other players jetpacking around with not-in-theme names, to having limited story content -- come from the fact that they built it to be a multiplayer game.

But even so. I've seen some footage of the game at release, and it was pretty bad. And not just bugs, but the content...I mean, a Bethesda game not having human NPCs?

I will give them props for putting a lot of effort into fixing the game post-release, but I still feel that the thing shouldn't have shipped when it did. It simply wasn't ready when it went out the door.

Also, some of the fixes they did do that I think people did like -- like reducing the severity of the food/water/radstorm survival elements, which many players didn't like having to hassle with, or reducing the role of PvP, which a lot of the playerbase didn't like -- didn't result in game rebalancing. Like, the player shelters were clearly intended to be a significant element to deal with radstorms, but radstorms are essentially ignorable. Food was intended to play a bigger role, and there are features oriented towards things like reducing the rate of one's demand for it, but that was removed.

If you look at Fallout 4 or even moreso Skyrim, modders went through and rebalanced the game long after the release. I'm not saying that everyone who played those games got to enjoy those changes, but I think that they were good ones. Fallout 76 isn't really moddable in that way, so it's dependent on Bethesda's devs to do all that...and they didn't really do that.

There were no really memorable moments from the game, the way, I don't know, the battle for The Castle or the arrival of the Brotherhood of Steel's aircraft or some other moments in Fallout 4 really stuck with me. I guess to some extent that's part of just having to make a lot of the content something that you play over and over, but it still was kinda disappointing.

And I'm not demanding that they work for free. I bought all the DLC for Fallout 4 and Skyrim. I'd happily have bought something like the (excellent) DLC packs for earlier games in the Fallout series for Fallout 76. But, instead, they only sold mostly-aesthetic content in the Atom Store. Which, okay, great, if someone really wants to decorate their player camp and wants to pay for it could be appealing to someone. But they didn't create a route to pay for more story content, more maps or the like. They did create new free content, but that necessarily has a limited budget, and again, was kinda oriented around multiplayer (and didn't catch on much with me and didn't seem to be terribly popular with players on the fo76 subreddit, either).

There are some things that I did like about it, that I don't think it got credit for. The building mode performance was significantly-improved over 4. They toned down the "everything is dark and awful and evil and every person and company is twisted" aspect in 4, which I think was a big plus; there were plenty of people just trying to live their lives in difficult situations, which felt more like 1. I'm not absolutely rabid about the new areas, but the Mire looked nice by the standards of their engine, was a good use of their engine's godrays. They did a bunch of performance and stability work (that had to happen, given that one couldn't just "reload earlier saves" if something broke in a saved game a la the single player games).

I could have lived with Fallout 76 not being Fallout 5, but what I wished that they could have done was to keep selling single-player content in traditional DLC form. A lot of MUDs and similar games have a "remort" feature where one can start with a new character and earn some persistent rewards for doing so, so playing through story content multiple times is still fun. "New Game Plus", kinda. The online aspect for single-player content would just be to provide DRM, so that people wouldn't just go swipe all the stuff that they're selling in the Atom Store. And the stuff on offer in the Atom Store...ugh. If you look at the mods in Fallout 4, people created high-resolution texture packs, new companions, new story content, and they don't have anything like that for sale. You could have segregated anything that affected balance out of the multiplayer areas, had very solid single-player-only content. It might not have been Fallout 5, but I think that it could have done a much better job of making people who wanted that happier while still providing a multiplayer game for those who wanted a multiplayer game.

tal, rok temu

I don't think that the issue is the quality of their QA. Well, okay, maybe that's a factor, but I don't think that that was the big one for Fallout 76.

Some of the issues in Fallout 76 that they shipped with, they had to know they were shipping with. It wasn't that QA didn't turn up problems, but that they took too-ambitious a plan, ran out of time, and then didn't delay the release to fix all the broken stuff. Yeah, they did a lot of work to fix the game post-release, but by then, a lot of players had already been soured by the initial bad experience.

They did significantly delay the Starfield release, so I assume that they are trying to put this out in a more-sane shape.

tal, rok temu

Maybe if they make enough money on this, they can expand and develop The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series in parallel, as well as whatever else they have cooking, instead of working on only one title at a time.

tal, rok temu

Hmm. It'd be interesting to go through game credit screens and build a database to try to predict good games.

tal, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Why do people care?

I mean, yes, all else held equal, I'd rather have a video game two days earlier or whatever, but this is way down the list of things I'd get worked up about.

Hell, the !@PatientGamers crowd waits for at least a year after release, at which point all the patches and whatnot are normally out, often sales are on, hardware to run a game tends to be cheaper, and often people have done substantial work on game wikis and the like. I can understand someone not wanting to wait for a year, but who can't handle a day or two?

EDIT: Or let me put another perspective on it. The release date is essentially arbitrary from a player's standpoint. Suppose some serious bug had shown up late in development -- which could easily have happened -- and that release date had been pushed back by five days. I doubt that anyone would have said anything, even though they would have gotten their hands on the game several days later. But the inability to preload making that same game show up playable a couple of days later has articles being written complaining about it. Why? The delay happens either way.

tal, rok temu

I have a bunch of controllers that I got to use on a Linux system, and finally settled on the 8bitdo Ultimate for its Hall Effect analog sticks after nearly every other controller I had (a bunch of XBox or XBox clones) exhibited some degree of analog drift. Note that only their Bluetooth model has the Hall Effect sticks -- there are multiple Ultimate controllers.

I don't remember potentiometer-based analog sticks being this problematic twenty years back, so I'm not sure if the controller hardware is just running with a more-aggressively-small dead zone today or what.

Had moved away from a Logitech F710, which I was happy with except for the fact that some device somewhere near me had started occasionally causing its proprietary Logitech protocol to see drop-outs that Bluetooth controllers didn't see. Plus, OP wants to use his thing with an Android device, so he probably wants to stick with Bluetooth anyway.

I'd historically preferred Playstation-style controllers, but too many games detect and nicely configure themselves for X-box controllers and don't reasonably deal with the Dual Sense I tried. Also, there are few PC games that leverage some of the unusual hardware features that the Dual Sense has, so you're paying in money and weight for something that you won't be using.

While I like the controller itself and it's presently the best I've tried, I'll mention two major caveats:

• It does not have rumble motors. This makes it lighter, but it is a feature that I would rather have than not. There are some PC games that do make use of rumble motors.
• It has a Nintendo-style button layout rather than an X-Box style layout (at least the Hall Effect version does). 8bitdo does sell replacement buttons with XBox-style colors, if you're willing to deal with replacing them and remapping the buttons in software.

Also, specifically for OP's situation, it does not support pairing to multiple devices. I have a keyboard that can pair to three and then just choose the destination device with a wheel. He may want that, if there are game controllers that can do that, unless he's willing to get multiple controllers.