Bethesda Stream

By Shamus Posted Sunday Jun 14, 2015

Filed under: Notices 188 comments

E3 kicks off tonight with the Bethesda press conference. Josh and I plan to stream it and give live commentary. We expect Bethesda to discuss Fallout 4, Doom 4, and maybe even Dishonored 2.

You can watch the stream here: twitch.tv/spoilerwarningshow or try your luck with the embed below:

(Stream over. Since Twich refuses to archive anything, the embed has been removed, rather than turned into a broken link.)

If it works, we’ll upload the thing to YouTube. If not, we’ll just play another videogame.

EDIT: So that’s it! Thanks for watching everyone.

It didn’t really work out the way we wanted. People had to stream our channel AND the Bethesda channel, and the two were of course out of sync, and it was awkward and not ideal. I have no idea if it will be legal or feasible to have a proper archive version of the exchange. We’ll see.

We tried.

For those that missed it:

Doom 4 (Called simply “DOOM”) looks like a high-speed, high-damage, crowds-of-foes experience like the original, and not a slow-paced peek-a-boo in the dark like Doom3. Also a super-easy map editor. We were surprised and interested.

Dishonored 2: You can play as Emily? Sounds interesting. Too bad they still have Captain Boring as the outsider.

Battlecry: Meh.

Elder Scrolls Online: Huh. I guess they haven’t shut the game down yet. Good for them, I guess.

Fallout 4: Mixed reactions. YES you can be a woman. (Yay!) YES your protagonist is voiced. (Probably not going to be great.) YES it will be a “hunt down the people who killed your family”. (Yawn.) YES the interface is even more atrocious than before. (Sigh.) Some parts look stupid. (World-building.) Some parts look intriguing (crafting, base-building) and some parts are still up in the air. (Game feel.) Release in November. Fingers crossed.

 


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188 thoughts on “Bethesda Stream

  1. Mintskittle says:

    “We expect Bethesda to discuss Fallout 3…”

    I think you mean Fallout 4, unless they’re announcing a do-over.

    1. Tmacnt08 says:

      No, they’re finally announcing that Little Lamplight DLC

      1. Eruanno says:

        Pay five dollars to remove Little Lamplight from existence?

        1. Tmacnt08 says:

          No, pay ten dollars for the ability to kill children in Fallout 3.They add an entire hour long wuest where you hunt the lamplighters down and kill them. You can sell them to slavers, kill them out right, be a playground bully to them or even lasso them red dead redemption style and drag them around, tie them up to traintracks (they added them and trains), you can feed them to death claws and a whole bunch of other fun ways to get rid of them!

    2. MrGuy says:

      Well, SHAMUS is still clearly talking about FO3….

  2. To be fair, why get upset about a robot still working when robots have still been working all through the previous games? And Raiders would eat a robot? And raiders are even a match for a robot?

  3. Shamus, if you want a good post-apoc yarn that does have a hundreds-year-old revenge story in a vault-like environment, read the “Wool” trilogy by Hugh Howey.

    1. DougO says:

      Or not. If it hadn’t been on my phone, I’d have thrown the book across the room.

      1. Cinebeast says:

        Whoa whoa whoa, why? This is the first time I’ve heard anything other than praise for Wool. What turned you off about it?

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          It was all tangled.

          1. Wide And Nerdy says:

            *Rimshot*

        2. DougO says:

          If I wanted dystopic sci-fi meant to make me depressed and hate people, I’d re-read stuff from the 70s.

          1. That’s still not terribly specific. It’s kind of hard to have post apoc without the apoc, and it’s difficult to have heroics without villains.

      2. Oh? Why didn’t you like it? Was it the setup for the apocalypse itself? Because I thought that made far more sense than most and had quite a lot of thought behind it.

        I also read the books “out of order” in that I read the prequel book (Shift) before the actual Wool and the third book, Dust, so perhaps I had more insight into what was going on. It seemed to make a decent amount of sense to me.

        His other post-apoc book, “Sand,” I found far less interesting, as it relied on too much magi-tech and didn’t really satisfy many questions I had about the setting.

  4. Also, if you want Fallout 1 and 2 on your android device, it’s possible to do, though some tinkering is required.

    1. AileTheAlien says:

      Oh man, that sounds cool. Although, I wonder how well you’d be able to play the game on a phone. Tablets would work, but the tiny phone screen, trying to manage all the little buttons you need to click on…

  5. I wonder if there will be VR support later. (1st person view, look down to your arm while pressing a button maybe?)

    I hope the arm with the PIP boy will have a option to turn off any movement/sway.

    Other than that. Fallout 4 looks damn good.

    I wonder how far along they are with Elder Scrolls VI ? (fall 2016, spring 2017, hmm?)

    1. Incunabulum says:

      4 years is the average time between BGS (*not* bethesda Softworks) releases.

      Don’t be expecting TESVI until 2020.

      1. They are also much larger now than 4 years ago.
        And they are actively hiring for several jobs right now too.

        I’m pretty sure that around half the Fallout 4 team is now fully or partly working on ES-VI stuff.

        From the last Oblivion stuff (Shivering Isles) to Fallout 3 there was a 1 year “pause”.
        From the last Fallout 3 stuff (Broken Steel/Point Lookout) to Skyrim there was a 2 year pause.
        From the last Skyrim stuff (Dragonborn) to Fallout 4 there was a 3 year pause.

        I would not be surprised if they where doing voice recordings for the next ES game right now.

        If setup correctly then the devs will (when their work is done) flow from one project to the next. Like one of those timeglasses with sand in them.

        The people being hired now are most likely people that will be trained and put to work on either future Fallout 4 content, or trained to help with the stepping up of production of the next ES game.

        It’s been 7 years since the last Fallout game (not counting expansions/DLCs).
        It’s been 4 years from ES III to ES IV and 5 years from ES IV to ES V, there is nothing that dictates that ES VI will be 6 years after ES V, it could just as easily be 4, 3 or even 2 years.

        It really depends on how big the team(s) are, if the engine is faster/easier to work with, how artwork is done, writing/recording, a lot of stuff can be done out o sequence.

        It’s rare for a dev company to finish one game then just plop over to the next. I used the timeglass analogy. It may not be correct but it does illustrate a flow of manpower.

        A lot of assets from Skyrim can probably be recycles for ES VI, which will cut down on asset creation time. (no point making new textures if old ones are good enough)
        Assets from Fallout 4 will probably be recycled for the next ES VI as well (rock textures are rock textures).
        Same with shader scripts and sound effects. Sometimes a little tweak here or there is all you need.

        Also note that Skyrim was the first game to us the Creation Engine, Fallout 4 is the second.
        And the ES VI game will be the third to use the Creation Engine.
        The mastery of the engine at this point should be pretty high, so doing things in the engine and working with it should be at least 2-3 times faster than it was with Skyrim.

        During Skyrim they had to learn to use the engine as well.
        With Fallout 4 they have been able to streamline the tools even further.

        So time is hard to guess due to this.
        I’m pretty sure the next E3 will have some announcement regarding ES VI.

        1. Zagzag says:

          I was always under the impression that the Creation Engine wasn’t actually new, but just a somewhat modified version of their previous engine with a different name, so familiarity with it may not have been a huge issue.

          They definitely figured out new things they could do in it at the end of Skyrim’s development, though. Apocrypha from Dragonborn seems to have been designed to show off as many things their engine hadn’t been perceived as capable of doing as they could manage.

          1. Eruanno says:

            As I understand it, the Creation Engine is new with old bits in it. If you tear down the old house, you might as well use some of the old bricks, right? Some of them are still in pretty good shape, and you think a brick wall for the garage would look pretty cool. Then again you’re also making newer rooms in the upstairs with better insulation, a nice new bathroom…

            Making improvements doesn’t necessarily mean torching down the entire neighborhood, salting the ground and buying all new stuff.

            1. WaytoomanyUIDs says:

              it’s pretty much the same as the heavily customized old version of old Gamebryo used in Oblivion FO3 and FO:NV. About the only thing that’s different is the scripting engine.

              I suspect they renamed it because the new owners of Gamebryo told them to stop using the name as they were giving the engine an undeserved reputation for instability with gamers.

              Hopefully they will have added DX10 and 11 support. I’m not expecting 64 bit support

    2. Wide And Nerdy says:

      Re: Your VR scenario.

      It would be really neat if that plastic pipboy they’re selling had motion tracking so you could wear it during play and bring up the options menu by putting your arm in front of you.

      Ideally, the menu would just be continuously available that way and its position would be tracked against the real pip boy prop in real time but I’d settle for a simple motion that activates the normal menu mode.

      Then again, I’m not sure I want to be THAT immersed in a scenario that includes Super Mutants and radroaches (someone needs to get a radroach replacement mod out quick for this one).

      1. AileTheAlien says:

        So, while in the future, we could have really cool games, which incorporate all of our phones, tablets, watches, etc, right now I think it’d just be too gimmicky. Like, a big part of an immersive experience, is not being interrupted. So, although hitting a button on your keyboard/controller may not use a device that mimics a real Pipboy*, those actions are basically foolproof, and don’t interrupt the player. A player that already has their hands on their input device of choice. Having to fumble around, to try and figure out where your other input device is, would be really jarring, and mess up the experience.

        Like, I can see, in 30 years or something this could work extremely well, when we’ve got dirt-cheap, ubiquitous: tablets, smartphones**, VR headsets or augmented-reality displays, smartwatches or comfortable arm-straps for your phone, and all of these devices work seamlessly with one another, and have a cross-platform programming library. Then making games that use all of this stuff would be easy, and the games we’d be able to produce would be super cool and awesome.

        * smartwatch / phone strapped to your arm

        ** Not everyone has or wants a tablet or smart-phone right now. They’re still rather expensive for people in a lot of countries. Also, the interfaces are very troublesome after you hit retirement age. :S

        1. Wide And Nerdy says:

          I don’t think its thirty years away. I think its more like 5 or 10 tops. VR and smartphones are already on the market and getting cheaper per performance.

          1. AileTheAlien says:

            Sure, but how many years will we have proprietary API layers, instead of an open standard, for programming the things? :P

        2. I really liked how he called it 2nd screen gaming at one point.
          Many these days have two monitors and most GFX cards can handle two screens.

          So you could have the game on the main monitor or display and stats/map/etc. on the secondary monitor or display.

  6. Irridium says:

    DOOM honestly looked boring. Not all that fast or interesting. All it really did was remind me how good the Shadow Warrior reboot was and that Shadow Warrior 2 is coming.

    1. Maybe the single player story will be pretty cool. Nothing said about that yet.

    2. Thomas says:

      It made me want to play Halo so I guess that’s a semi success?

      It’s just so boring to look at though. I was almost turning off after having to look at Doom for a while, it made Battlecry look like the best thing ever because at least Battlecry is visually interesting.

      All in all, I’ve got not desire to play Doom, but at least it’s going to be interesting to see if 90’s shooter tropes truly are out of date, at least for the mainstream. The demo looked like a game you might pay $15 for, it’ll be interested to see whose prepared to pay $60

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        but at least it's going to be interesting to see if 90's shooter tropes truly are out of date

        Out of date:Definitely not.Underused:Yes.

        I have no desire for the new doom,but then I wasnt a fan of doom 3 when it came out.

      2. Wide And Nerdy says:

        DOOM does at least have the charm that what you’re shooting absolutely needs to die. Also, if I were to ever go for a pure shooter, I favor this fast movement style over the plodding and cover hugging of a typical shooter.

        But this game probably isn’t for me. I’ve bought Bulletstorm, Serious Sam, and Wolfenstein New Order. If I ever get around to actually playing those through, I’ll reconsider.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          You still have to buy painkiller to complete that list you have there.Also serious sam 2.

          1. V8_Ninja says:

            Are you talking about The Second Encounter or Serious Sam 2? Because TSE is a legitimately good game while Serious Sam 2 should only be played by super-fans of the series.

            1. Daemian Lucifer says:

              Those arent the same thing?Huh,Im astonished.

            2. Evilmrhenry says:

              Serious Sam 2 should only be played by super-fans of the series who no longer want to be super-fans of the series. That thing was terrible.

    3. AileTheAlien says:

      I too, saw Doom, and couldn’t help thinking that other games have already done the “back to shooters’ roots” thing. Like, if Doom existed in a vacuum, it would be a refreshing reboot of the franchise, where they focus on shooty gameplay, and making it really fun compared to, for example, Doom 3.

      However, other games have already refreshed the FPS genre, because Doom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You had Shadow Warrior pop into your head; Me, I had Hard Reset and Painkiller. Plus Serious Sam, Tower of Guns, Ziggurat, and probably several other shooters I’ve never heard of, but which would all be better than the new Doom.

      EDIT:
      I even forgot about the latest Wolfenstein games, which are a good AAA comparison. Doom’s got a lot to compete against… ^^;

  7. I loved the new mini-settlement feature in Fallout 4.

    I guess this is a sort of camp building thing.
    So you get safe “houses” with (potential) merchants etc. and food/resources placed around the game map/area.

    And that you can utilize all the junk you find and recycle debris and “build” a house. That feels so fallouty. Explore, Survive, Find your path, rebuild.

    EDIT: During the interview the Fallout 4 rep said there is more stuff they did not show during the presentation. In the context of the interview I wonder if it was story related in how you impact the world (building and stuff).

    I wonder if the player can climb to a leader position in the story?

    1. Mintskittle says:

      The base building mechanic for FO4 is probably going to be the biggest draw for me. I’ve always liked the creative side of gaming, even though I generally suck at freeform creativity,but taking some prefab objects, and be able to arrange them as I see fit, sounds like it’ll scratch my itch. and that gun customization is looks like what I falsely hoped Borderlands would have. I shall be cautiously optimistic.

      1. Now imagine the modding community starting to add custom parts etc. that you can use.

        1. Talby says:

          Imagine modders working on the bandit attacks, too. What they showed looked like pretty simple rush and attack tactics, but what if they used snipers, artillery, flanking, attacking weak points… mods could turn base defense into a game all of its own.

          1. If the scripting for that is left open/easily modded so the AI can be tweaked then that will probably happen.

    2. Humanoid says:

      I feel it’s a make or break feature, in that, if executed poorly, it’s a far worse outcome than not having it at all. WoW has just introduced the concept of the player having their own base (“garrison”) with the current expansion pack, and I absolutely despise it and the attendant micromanagement it involves.

      I haven’t played DA3 or PoE long enough to find out how their respective stronghold designs panned out though. I’m glad The Witcher 3 opted not to include such a thing, at any rate.

      1. guy says:

        I feel pretty confident in saying that you’ll be able to totally ignore it and be just fine. They mentioned it was optional.

        1. Humanoid says:

          WoW’s garrison is nominally optional as well, mind. But granted, “optional” probably does mean more in a single-player game, and player-power inflation in Bethesda games probably mean you can max out your character regardless.

          1. I assume you can hire/get guards later on.

            It seemed like it could be upgraded a lot. And I liked that the guy said “or you can just ignore all this if you want”.

            I’m guessing that one place (that is safe or scripted) will be part of the mains story (as a sort of tutorial) but beyond that building these camps/towns is voluntary.

            1. I’d love it if the guards could also be companions or more interesting NPCs than just “I hired a warm body with three greeting barks.” Giving old companions something to do and a place to live that seems more “active” than “wait here in the penthouse suite” appeals to me.

              1. Who knows. By the looks of it they’ve put everything in there.
                I was about to say “except a kitchen sink” but I’m kinda wondering if they did and you can break it down for parts.

    3. James Porter says:

      Okay, so while I like the base crafting stuff, but this totally looks like it is another push away from story depth and characters. The were talking about npc’s wanding into your settlement and setting up, and I cant imagine these guys being any more of characters than Skyrim followers.

      Really dig the weird alchemy/crafting stuff. that is a cool way to build your game.

      1. guy says:

        Yeah, I am up for Atelier Fallout. Though to be perfectly honest I will probably never actually make an informed and well thought-out decision on what to craft with what.

        1. In the interview he said that a certain horse toy (I think) would be desirable for certain things as it has lots of screws in it, so if you need screws then that is what you’d go looking for.

      2. Don’t have to worry about the story, he said “or you can just ignore all this if you want”.

        My guess is that building these mini towns gives massive benefits.

        I suspect may roleplayers will love it though, trying to rebuild the wasteland.

      3. Chris Davies says:

        Yes, thank you. This.

        I like minecraft as much as the next man, but I don’t want my RPGs to be minecraft, my shooters to minecraft, my realtime strategies to be minecraft.

        I just don’t understand the appeal of all this collecting and crafting they insist on putting in every game to the detriment of the actual mechanics that are supposed to make them stand out. Worse, I seem to be nearly alone in that opinion because whenever these things are announced the whole world seemingly goes crazy for them.

    4. ehlijen says:

      I’m also intrigued by the base building on Fallout 4, but I worry Bethesda will once again have the wrong idea about it. The Fallout universe, especially if they insist on moving the timeline forward again, is not one of scavenging to survive anymore. It should be about finding a place in the world that, yes, has a civilisation in it. You’re not rebuilding anything, you’re joining what others have rebuilt.

      Gathering nails and planks to build a shack that can hold of the feral ghouls at night is something I’d expect and want from a Walking Dead game. From a fallout game I’d expect either building a house inside an established settlement, or starting a new settlement including diplomatic dealings with all neighbours.

      1. Tmacnt08 says:

        Yes. Yes. Yes! I am terrified that this whole thing will be completely pointless, supplementary filler that doesn’t effect the world or your character much at all and the visitors will be bland skyrim followers. I mean what could I possibly do for fun in the place? Will there be some godo mini games or something? Can I set up a business? Can I build an actual settlement that is acknowledged in-game in some significant way? I really, really hope so because that would be great. It would also give perhaps a fun place where you can store all of your companions. For example, I like dogs a lot. I like owning Dogmeat. However, I dislike actually using him in the games because all he has is the cutesy factor which I only want little doses of here and there. So possibly being able to store him at my house in an actual dog house and treating him like an actual dog would be good for me. I like the sense of actually having an in-game life.

        I hope I can set-up my own sort of museum/display of my accomplishments. Especially since I collect one of every vault suit in each game and always wanted to be able to display certain things I find. Lifting them around though and messing with the physics engine can get really annoying real fast though. Except that Domino Trap from Fallout 3. That will always be amazing. Just phenomenal. Favorite part of Fallout 3 was that Domino Trap.

        On another note, I hope Wodsworth is a companion and a butler at your home that you can take with you if you want. Sort of like a really, really cordial RL-3. Like RL-3 meets C-3P0, y’know with that touch of old-world craziness perhaps. That could be fun. I was also hoping maybe they’d take the whole Skyrim relationship/marriage thing (I can’t put enough sarcastic quotations around the words relationship/marriage thing so I won’t even attempt to) a bit farther. Like how in the Fable games you can actually have a family and see them grow over time. That could be cool if they did it right. You know, unlike Fable who did it wrong. That migth clash with the whole “revenge blargh! Revenge! They killed my wife! Blargh!” thing they might have going that is making me face palm. I have always hated revenge stories. Mostly because I view revenge itself as an inherently evil act. Regardless of whether it is right or wrong or whether it is justified which is totally dofferent from whether is a good or evil act. Intention, your reason for doing what you do is what decides whether or not it is revenge or justice. There is a big difference between the two imo and revenge will always be inherently evil in my eyes.

        But I am really excited for this new playbox to run around in. Right now the whole revenge plot is probably my biggest turnoff, but hey, I can’t possibly hate it more than the Fallout 3 story and I still managed to have loads of fun messing around the game world despite it.

        1. Dude. Newlines, spacing, paragraphs, please.
          I’m not reading that brick of text.

          1. Thanks man.

            “Can I set up a business? Can I build an actual settlement that is acknowledged in-game in some significant way?”

            Since they showed off the build stuff a lot I don’t think there is too much more to show (they might have held some stuff back if it was story related though),
            if I’d guess, stuff like what you mention will probably be in a DLC/expansion of some sort.

            It’s also quite possible they did consider this but did not spend the time to add it, just made sure the capability/tools are there, and instead let the mod community add/create that stuff.

            It certainly makes sense if you think about them announcing their own mod network like that, for all their games.

            1. Incunabulum says:

              But the neat thing is, with all that other stuff in, even if you can’t open up a store – it will be modded in.

      2. It’s places 200 years after the nukes dropped. So the same time as Fallout 2, Fallout 3 (36 years after Fallout 2), New Vegas. And Fallout 1 is 84 years after the nukes dropped.

        So.
        2077 Nukes dropped.
        2166 Fallout 1 (84 years)
        2241 Fallout 2 (80 years later)
        2277 Fallout 3 (36 years later)
        2281 New Vegas (4 years later)
        ???? Fallout 4 (~200 years after 2077)

        Not sure if he meant about 200 years or if it was specific.
        So either Fallout 4 takes place “in” 2277 (same as Fallout 3),
        or it takes place during Fallout 2/Fallout 3/New Vegas time period somewhere.

        1. krellen says:

          Literally the first thing you encounter outside the cave in Fallout is a farming settlement of adobe houses built out in the wastes. No Pre-War relics to be seen. Civilisation Rebuilt was there from the beginning, the comparison timeline doesn’t change anything.

        2. ehlijen says:

          So it should be a time when all the nails have been scavenged and at the very least the profession of blacksmith has been reborn to provide their settlements with nails and metal tools.

          The quest for nails should involve the question ‘how much does the blacksmith sell them for’, not ‘I wonder if there are useable building materials lying around unclaimed’.

      3. Incunabulum says:

        This is why, when he said that you were starting *before* the war I was hopeful. Then there’s the 200 year jump and back to the future.

        I still think they could do so much more if they put it back around the same time as FO1 (within a couple of decades anyway). Its in a completely separate region so its not like what’s happening on the East Coast is going to interfere with already established Core Region canon.

        1. Humanoid says:

          The story will be about purifying Boston’s harbour. Not of radiation, but of tea.

          1. Incunabulum says:

            *Mutant* tea.

            1. Green tea certainly looks radioactive enough.

        2. Well. It’s possible Bethesda is being sneaky.
          Do remember the male player character said (in the dialog choice) “That’s not possible” when the bot said it had been 200 years.

          If that is the father (and you play as the father) then he had not aged at all.

          If you play as the son (inheriting your fathers genes/looks) then 200 years would still be oddly long. If it’s been a few generations then it would not seem odd.
          But the player character is shocked at hearing how long it’s been.

          They also skipped past the whole whatever-happen-inside-the-vault part, which clearly has something to do with the passing of time.

          Maybe you play as a clone? Who knows with Vault-Tec, they have done weirder things.

          It’s also possible the whole “before the war” thing was a simulation or memory replay of sorts.

          It truly hope they upped the ante on the story telling this time around.

          1. Thomas says:

            I’m definitely thinking there’s going to be some kind of cryo-stasis or time warp accident. It looked like you were playing the father and not the baby.

            It’s a fun angle because it means the father is going to be a mega outsider.

    5. MrGuy says:

      Just as long as the pitch was better than “Kids love Minecraft these days. Let’s find a way to put Minecraft mechanics into Fallout!” “Genius, Roberts! You’ll go far with ideas like that!”

      Ability to control the idea of what’s “settled” in the wasteland in a way that feels in line with the setting and story = good. Ability to make a music box to play arbitrary songs inside of Fallout = bad.

      1. Von Krieger says:

        Fallout 4’s settlement builder reminds me a lot of the Real Time Settler mod for Fallout 3, I spent a lot of time tinkering with it, right across from the library

  8. Gunther says:

    What a relief to see robot enemies in Dishonored 2. Something like 90% of the weapons and abilities the first game gave you were lethal, then it punished you for using anything other than boring ol’ choke-holds and sleeping darts – “How dare you kill people in this game about a revenge crazed assassin!? I’m gonna hit you with difficulty spikes and a bad ending!”

    Hopefully robots mean we actually get to use the fun stuff without being guilted for it.

    1. The Rocketeer says:

      That’s a very good point. Also, robots means they can make basically any enemy they want.

      Of course, Arkane’s primary skillset is taking ideas that seem impossible to screw up and finding a way by hook or by crook, so we’ll see.

    2. Vect says:

      At the least, I hope that one thing they learn from the Daud DLC is more tools/abilities that let you deal with enemies non-lethally.

      That or rework the Chaos system so that it isn’t simply “Killing is Bad”.

      1. Humanoid says:

        Maybe the world is now too orderly, and you have to perform chaotic acts that you may not want to in order to restore the balance.

    3. Christopher says:

      That’s what MGS4 did. It helps to have robots around, in this context.

  9. Dragmire says:

    Oh hey, I remembered this time!

    What, it’s over? Damnit!

    Oh well, looks like no there wasn’t anything outstanding that I missed based on the breakdown.

  10. Male/female thing.

    If I’m to guess the husband/wife dies (depending on gender choice), the baby vanishes (potentially the story is a Find the Husband/Wife and Baby).
    So Maybe it’s a find the kid/descendants thing?

    Or they may be more adventurous/darker and have the Wife/Husband be the only survivor (the rest of the family died).
    Maybe it’s a revenge thing? The husband/wife and baby was not suitable for the vault, so it’s a revenge thing.
    That would open up for “The Survivor” to meet others (addressing the lack of a “other” option as pointed out by Shamus, as you could then romance/court any gender (wife/husband dead for 200 years after all).

    Also there is the possibility that you play as the baby (all grown up), the male/female choice at the start is the only impact you got on that and that the facial features you create is that of the parent (so you end up as a spitting image of the mother/father)?

    Or maybe there is more than meets the eye. Vault-Tech is creepy as hell so who knows what they are up to.

    Most likely (unless there are leaks) nothing more will be known about the story until release.

    I’m a tad surprised with “The Survivor of Vault 111” not knowing how long it had been in years.
    Wasn’t there a fault like that already? Or is vault 111 actually the vault I’m thinking of (several vaults was mentioned in notes/emails in previous fallout games).
    A vault where the inhabitants was lied to as you the time that had passed.

    Vaults was designed to not open, to open way too early, way too late. There where stasis vaults.

    1. Merkel says:

      Yeah, was it ever made explicit that this would be a revenge story? (My twitch was pretty spotty at points, so its possible that I missed it.) From the trailer, and what I saw of the conference, I assumed it was a wake up alone, see that your spouse’s and child’s cryo-pods are empty, and search the wide world for them (assuming the whole vault 111 is the cryo-sleep vault that the rumors say it is).

      1. I was toggling/tweaking the Spoiler warning gangs audio so I could hear the presentation (they talked over the presenter at times).
        But it seemed like they are really holding the story close to the chest.
        What you saw is what they wanted to show basically.

        “You do get in the vault” he said but he did not say what he meant by “you” (Mom/Dad/Baby).

        And he did say that there was some story stuff that they’d skip over for now, and then he continued by saying you emerge from the vault (can’t have a fallout game without that I guess).

        But again, he did not say if “you” was the father or baby (now grown up) in this case. For all we know you play a grandchild.

        Then again, if you where in some stasis thingy who knows (not sure if/how many vault wold have that).

        1. Syal says:

          I think the entire family gets merged into one person, Brundlefly style. Probably some kind of teleportation malfunction that delayed everyone’s arrival for like a century and then rematerialized all of them at the same time in the same place.

      2. Incunabulum says:

        It wasn’t.

        He specifically said they weren’t going to reveal anything about the story beyond you surviving and coming out 200 years later as the sole survivor of that vault.

        Which means that you’re the guy/gal that goes into the vault, not a descendant. Though they don’t explain how you survived two centuries.

  11. Bropocalypse says:

    Again, a city on the east coast that is now a damned desert. Come on, Bethesda…

    1. Nukes tends to do that.
      Though 200 years later nature would manage to recover a bit.

      http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/using-atomic-bomb-1945

      Hiroshima looked like a mix between desert and some sort of rocky tundra with the few collapsing buildings.

      If not for the building and somebody showed me pictures and asked what it looked like I’d probably say “a rocky desert of some sort?”.

      1. Here is a description of what happens when a nuke goes off http://www.fogonazos.es/2007/02/hiroshima-pictures-they-didnt-want-us_05.html

        “a blinding flash, creating a giant fireball and sending surface temperatures to 4,000C. Fierce heat rays and radiation burst out in every direction, unleashing a high pressure shockwave, vaporising tens of thousands of people and animals, melting buildings and streetcars, reducing a 400-year-old city to dust.”

        “Housewives and children were incinerated instantly or paralysed in their daily routines, their internal organs boiled and their bones charred into brittle charcoal.”

        And real life ghouls http://knowledgenuts.com/2013/07/17/forgotten-horrors-ant-walking-alligators-of-hiroshima/
        “Among the horrors witnessed by survivors were the “˜ant-walking alligators'””creatures of the blast that seemed neither human nor animal, neither living nor dead.”

        And considering that the premise of Fallout (3, New Vegas, and 4) is that there was not one but multiple nukes going off along all major US cities.
        The places that might still look green and lush are places where few people live at all (and where most likely there where no vaults either).

        The bombs dropped in 2041 in the Fallout universe (Fallout 3 was 36 years after Fallout 2, and Fallout 2 was 200 years after the bombs dropped, according to Wikipedia)
        And according to http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/
        There are 15000 nuclear warheads in the world.
        “Most are many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. A single nuclear warhead, if detonated on a large city, could kill millions of people”

        Now one can not compare the Fallout universe to ours directly. But drawing some parallels.
        (China is the enemy in the Fallout games rather than Russia, so I’ll assume the arms race is also shifted)
        Which means that thousands of bombs dropped over the US in 2041, everything looking like a wasteland is more likely the norm than the exception.

        Combine this with the drought that the US is heading into now (and which will get worse in the future), and add in the 1950s style of living that existed in the Fallout universe where I assume they just wasted all their resources without a second though (screw the environment).
        The result would mean environmental collapse. (nukes + drought + fires + lack of (clean) water, irradiated animals and food/plants, tornadoes/hurricanes) With no life/plants there is nothing to bind the soil in places so you end up with sand/dust all over in places that would not otherwise be like that.

        The places that would be lush and green almost guaranteed are lonely islands in the middle of the pacific or similar with next to no population. (Assuming they don’t get radioactive rain afterwards.)
        A Fallout game on a isolated island would not be Fallout. It would have more in common with Farcry or Just Cause instead.

        1. Incunabulum says:

          Interestingly enough though – the FO universe doesn’t have microchips so its entirely likely that ballistic missiles never achieved the accuracy they have IRL and that most of the bombs would be dropped by manned bombers.

          Meaning that, with China as the enemy here, the East Coast probably should be fairly *unscathed* compared to the western part of the country.

          A great circle route from China to the West Coast is all over ocean (except for a small part over the Aleutians) while to reach the East Coast you have to go through eastern Canada – with plenty of room to place a fairly extensive AD network.

          1. “FO universe doesn't have microchips so its entirely likely that ballistic missiles never achieved the accuracy they have IRL and that most of the bombs would be dropped by manned bombers”

            True and very good point.

            “with China as the enemy here, the East Coast probably should be fairly *unscathed* compared to the western part of the country.”

            But didn’t they have huge hangar ships?

            I’d have to re-watch the trailer to hear what the news broadcaster was saying on the radio, but it sounded like tensions was high and it’s quite plausible that the US was surrounded or that US/Chinese fleets was in both seas at the time.

            Large futuristic (per FO standards) hangar ships could easily have hundreds of jet bombers. (jets exist in FO3 if I recall, or was that new vegas? it was in some museum)

            A note on microchips. I think the Chinese had these? I seem to recall the stealth suit being that advanced. Then there was those simulators and such. (FO universe is really weird)
            Microchips certainly was not that much in use for everyday people.

            Ironically enough. “simpler tech” is more likely to survive any EMP blasts from nuclear detonations.
            Probably a way for the FO authors to have their cake and eat it too. 50s tech would be more likely to survive than future tech when exposed to EMPs.

            My FO lore is pretty bad. But wasn’t Chinese tech ahead of the US in many ways? The US had sort of stagnated in the 1950s culturally and mostly technically.
            Was the same true for the rest of the world (like Japan, Norway, Germany)?
            So the US could have been at 1950s tech and the Chinese at 70s or 80s tech?
            So automated missiles could be possible.

            Oh wait. Didn’t they have a missile command like game on that mobile app pipboy thing they showed? So ICMBs are a possibility.

            1. Kamica says:

              It’s not that China was more advanced I believe, it’s that they advanced in different areas. China for example, had it’s stealth-suits, while the U.S. had it’s power-armour. I also vaguely remember something about the Chinese either having no energy weapons at all, or just no plasma weapons.

              Also note that they made advanced robots that could act almost human-like (Mister Handy for example) I’m sure they could make some sort of guidance for rockets.

          2. Wide And Nerdy says:

            What are you talking about? They had microchips. In New Vegas, the platinum chip contains a microchip. And whatever their computers are made out of, its good enough to support independently functioning artificial intelligence. In fact in Fallout 3 there’s an android made so perfect that neither he nor those around him realize he’s anything but human. Computers that good mean their missiles are as accurate as ours if not moreso*. They also have better power and battery tech than we do (which makes it all the more baffling that we haven’t fully rebuilt, sentient robot labor + superior power tech + power armor should mean we can go where we want and build whatever we need and quickly).

            *The VATS system on your wrist also indicates better real time scanning tech than we have with more precise sensors and faster computing.

        2. guy says:

          You do know that both nuked cities have a current population density exceeding 1,000 per square kilometer only 70 years later?

          The pictures on wikipedia are greener than my lawn.

          1. Yeah. But the Japanese people are also very proud and they refuse to give up.

            If you look at chernobyl that still looks like a wasteland. A reactor meltdown is far worse than a atomic bomb since a bomb is designed for precision strikes (even those old ones).

            Modern nuclear warheads are also designed for precision strikes inside/into caves or caverns. So precision is increased further today.

            1. guy says:

              Uh, Chernobyl is actually overrun with greenery. It’s pushing up through concrete and growing over the exterior of buildings.

              1. Humanoid says:

                It’s why I really liked some of that Wasteland 2 art, which instead of depicting barren rubble, had it all overgrown with greenery. That’s how you do green Bethesda!

                1. Ranneko says:

                  Interestingly enough there are some strange problems that the plantlife of Chernobyl does have. Radiation doesn’t affect all life equally. Things don’t decay properly in Chernobyl because the radiation kills off the creatures responsible for it.

                  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/forests-around-chernobyl-arent-decaying-properly-180950075/

                  1. Shit, look at that radiation map. Not really any safe places at all and the top part is all red. And considering they mention radioactive boars as far as all the way to Germany is kinda creepy (Germany has no border to Russia).

                    And the mention of the dead Red forrest is just creepy.

                    While Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be examples of what it looks like when a nuke drops and the immediate horrifying results.
                    Chernobyl is an example of the the possible results after a nuclear war.

                    I wonder how Chernobyl will look 150 or so years from now. I don’t think it would look that much different, it really depends on how quickly the remaining radiation dissipates.

  12. Tizzy says:

    I hope that the play as a woman thing dor Fallout 4 was Bethesda trolling. It would be a devious but smart move: get people riled up in advance (based on flimsy evidence at best, but when did that ever stop anyone?) And then get tons of applause by dispelling the carefully established confusion at the press conference.

    And see how masterfully they did it too! How it looked like the guy character was front and center and the woman just playing a supporting role. Until the switch. Crafty.

    If it was done deliberately throughout, it’s a great way to generate a lot of buzz and goodwill from players. Quite the coup there…

    1. Vect says:

      I’d be surprised if you legitimately could only play as a male. Cutting Character Customization in half seems like a poor choice for a game in which character customization and player choice is such a big deal.

      1. M. says:

        There was never any chance that rumor was true. But, ya know, Reddit gonna Reddit.

        1. Tizzy says:

          The “fully voice acted” bit got people worried. I’m not sure I understand why, given that it never stopped Mass Effect from supporting male and female protagonists.

          Cost or not, I knew they had way more sense than to alienate the players by leaving out such a fundamental choice in character customization.

          1. Wide And Nerdy says:

            There are other reasons. Giving the character a voice means you can no longer supply your own. It also limits the writing and rewriting that can be done because every line written or rewritten needs to be recorded or rerecorded by two voice actors.

          2. tmtvl says:

            Unless they’ve done the Wizardry 8 thing, where there are a bunch of available voices for our character(s), it still suffers from the Mass Effect problem where you play Shepard, not a character of your choice.

            1. AFAIK no game exist where you can make your own story.
              Even the most “open” RPG has a plot/story path to follow so you can’t make up your own dialog.

              There are exceptions though, Second Life and some other MMOs have no written dialog, the player has to provide their own narration in that case.
              And most tabletop RPGs let the player create their own dialog.

              So people complaining about voiced dialog but glossing over the fact that there is pre-written dialog is somewhat ironic.

              If the dialog is not my dialog then that is no different from the voice not being my voice.
              Also if playing as a female while you are a male (or vice versa) it would definitely not be “your voice” in the first place.

              As long as a game do not tell a specific character story like Adam Jensen in Deus Ex which is only male or Lara Croft which is only female, then I think having a male/female choice (like in Fallout and Mass Effect) is the right way to do it. The single male/female voice does not bother me.

              Although I do like it when games let you choose nuances (stoic, evil, whatever) a few games do this. In Dragon Age I preferred the American voice speaking pattern but I wished the voice itself was different (felt too nasal), the British voice sounded too bright.

              1. ehlijen says:

                It’s a question of degree. Mass Effect was a lot more freeform than Tomb Raider, but a lot less freeform than most pen&papter RPG campaigns.

                There is a natural limit on how free a story RPG run by a computer can get simply because it has limited reaction capability and the player had no say in creating the campaign the way most GMs would grant them before a new campaign starts.

                None of that’s bad (or gaming wouldn’t be popular enough to support an industry), and I find some computer games are amazing in how much freedom they do manage to give given those circumstances (FO 1 and 2 were amongst the best examples).

    2. Bropocalypse says:

      I don’t associate Bethesda with “devious but smart.” They’re really more like that bumbling, slightly slow uncle that you love anyway.

  13. During interview.

    13000 lines of dialog over 2 years recording, from the male and female actors.
    So player character is fully voiced.

    1. Cinebeast says:

      Not a problem for me (on the contrary, a selling point) but I’m sure that will hurt a lot of players’ verisimilitude.

      1. There’s always mods then I guess. (disable player voice and turn on subtitles) and tadaa you got Fallout 3 player character.

        Haven’t seen any settings stuff yet, maybe they’ll plop in a option to toggle voices player on an off?

        I don’t mind the player being voiced either.

        PS! I’m impressed with the name choice thing, they recorded thousands of names just to give more impact to the intro of the game.

        Sucks if you have a weird name though. And I assume other characters will not reference the player by the name later on.

        1. Kamica says:

          The only problem I’ve got with the voiced protagonist, is not that he’s voiced, but that the dialogue options do the Mass Effect/bioware thing, where the text gives a general hint of what you’re going to say, not the entire text, which is going to result at least once and probably more times, in your character not saying what you want them to say.

          1. If the guys did their job well then that should not happen.
            Now if you are not a native English speaker you will probably have issues anyway with choices like this.

            1. ehlijen says:

              That’s the problem: It shouldn’t happen, but it likely will.

              Given that Bioware, once the king of RPGs, didn’t do it right, how much faith should we have in the people who thought the speech skill pie game was a good idea?

              I don’t think a voiced protagonist adds much to the game, and yet it restricts writing, increases cost and limit character variety a lot.

            2. Kamica says:

              The simplest way they could have avoided it, is by actually writing down what the character is going to say… I guess that’s what mods are for… Wonder how long it’ll take for someone to go through all the 13000 lines of dialogue, meticulously writing all the lines =P.

              1. Von Krieger says:

                Usually you don’t have to write them all out. The fallout games have had all their captions packed as plain text files.

                1. Kamica says:

                  True actually, even though the dialogue choices aren’t the full text anymore, there would still be the subtitle files. Didn’t think of that.

            3. Ayegill says:

              Sure, but the Bethesda writers doing their jobs well was never really in the cards.

    2. Humanoid says:

      For my own hypothetical playthrough, eh, whatever. But putting a voice to Reginald Cuftbert, well…. maybe we can make a mod with Josh rerecording all the player character’s lines?

      1. Assuming it’s easy to mod in a replacement male dialog, then sure (it’s 13000 lines of dialog though).

        1. Humanoid says:

          Didn’t catch the actual press conference so I’m not clear whether that’s for all characters or just the player character alone. Nonetheless one could probably fold all the combat taunts into a single “STOP SHOOTING ME!”

    3. Menegil says:

      And then I point at The Witcher 3, and shake my head at Bethesda. This is your benchmark, gentlemen. If you cannot match, I can only say ‘ohhh dear’.

      1. Even CD Projekt Red will have issues to live up to Witcher 3’s level for their Cyberpunk game.

        If Fallout 4 is more along the lines of New Vegas than Fallout 3 then I’d say that
        Skyrim and Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 will be the benchmarks for open worlds.

        Few have the resources or talent to pull off huge projects like that.

        Trying to match Witcher 3 is also not a good thing, that game has problems on it’s own in various ways.

        So if you are saying Witcher 3 is the benchmark then that, means you are ok if other games replicate he flaws in Witcher 3 as well?

        That’s the issue with any benchmark, the lowest common denominator is really the only thing you can base anything on.

        It doesn’t matter if a game can reach 200 FPS if it keeps dipping down to 4 FPS every few seconds.
        A game at a constant 30 FPS would end up playing/feeling better in that case.

        It would be better to use a bullet point list of things Witcher 3 does great.
        If the guys at Bethesda are smart that is exactly what they are doing now (which options should we expose, should this be tweaked more like this or that).
        I also hope hey look/looked at New Vegas despite it not being made in-house.

        Technically (from what has been seen so far) I’d dare say it’s the best Fallout game so far. Storywise I got no clue.

      2. Incunabulum says:

        Depends on *what* you’re benchmarking.

        TW3 is a fairly linear, narratively driven game that, IMO, is going to have limited replay value if people don’t take up the modding torch and add in new questlines. There isn’t a whole lot to *do* in that game beyond fight.

        It looks good, but there’s little interactivity with the world.

        FO4 looks to be trying to be an open-world *sandbox* game – and it looks like it will succeed at that like all its predecessors – with a lot more world interactivity.

        *If* Bethesda paid attention to the complaints about Skyrim (shallow stories, no appearance that your choices have any effect on the world) then FO4 will kick TW3’s arse, no problem.

        1. During the interview the guy said that in Fallout 4 it’s truly open, so you can do all the quests at the same time if you want, rather than have to do this or that first before you can do that.

          As to Witcher 3 and modding. If CD Projekt RED actually releases some modding tools later (near end of their DLC/expansions launch marathon) then it might give Skyrim a run for it’s money to some extent.

    4. Incunabulum says:

      Which is going to suck (IMO). Sort of.

      I like that you’re not locked into conversation mode, but I read soooooo much faster than people talk.

      So subtitles and (hopefully) as skip line button – skip *line*, it had damn well better not skip *all* the lines to the next convo choice though.

      1. Witcher 3 did that pretty well. The skip dialog button skipped the current audio/dialog only.
        And the skip button was not the same as any dialog choice buttons.

  14. Grimwear says:

    Whelp it’s begun. Every company trying to make their own digital platform. All aboard the bethesda.net train. By that I mean I’m sorry I currently only have a gog and steam account and that’s all I’ll ever have. Should bethesda start ONLY selling their pc games on their digital distribution server I guess I’ll just stop playing their games all together. While steam may be too big for their britches the convenience is undeniable in having all your games in one place. If companies start branching…I’m not going to follow it’s just too much effort. I remember back with Dragon Age: Origins I had to make an EA account? Bioware account? To get special armour. If you think I still remember my user name, password, or which email I used, you’re crazy.

    1. Humanoid says:

      As long as it’s not a Bethesda account on top of a Steam account I won’t fault it. The worst outcome for the games industry in my mind is Steam gaining a monopoly through inertia.

      1. Grimwear says:

        It’s not so much a fault as an inconvenience. I mean if my games library all of a sudden starts jumping between multiple platforms it becomes a hassle trying to be all ok I feel like playing game x now is that on steam or origin? Uplay? Bethesda? And the list may go on. Having it all in one place is easy and convenient. I mean steam pretty much has what? I’d say easily over 90% of the market already and whiel recently they’ve had some problems they also made a step in the right direction with refunds. Now I’m not sure how much of that refund policy is due to outside influence (notably EU and AUS government going after them for not having refunds) but overall I’m happy with them. I’m not saying change is bad necessarily but I’m all about convenience. Needing to log into multiple accounts to play the games you own is not convenient. Steam works precisely BECAUSE it’s the big one.

        1. Humanoid says:

          Fully understand the convenience angle, but at what cost? Bethesda may not be exactly short of cash, but it doesn’t sit right with me that no matter what they do, the majority of their PC units sold will involve paying a 30% tithe to Valve, just because of that convenience. For a small publisher it’s worthwhile because the greater exposure results in extra sales that make up for the lost net revenue, sure. But I trust that the bigger companies have done their sums correctly and have deduced that going it alone is better for the bottom line, and I can’t fault them for following through on that.

          Yes, it’s a hassle to have to maintain multiple accounts, but it’s a sacrifice I’ll willingly make every time, because I feel strongly about my money going towards the parties that actually deserve it. And besides, my frequently played games all have desktop shortcuts anyway, which if required will launch the correct DRM client for them.

          1. Supahewok says:

            That 30% cut is no different than the old distribution costs of printing discs and shipping them all over the world. Actually, its worth more. A PC release doesn’t have to worry about over- or under-printing anymore. They don’t have to worry about setting up a download platform. They don’t have to worry about money transfers from umpteen different companies at irregular intervals (by which I mean, they don’t have to worry about replenishing stock for all the different physical retailers for however long the shelf life lasts for the game and receive payment from all those different sources). They just put the game up on Steam and receive either one or two bank transfers or checks or whatever from Valve per month. Steam and Valve earn their cut.

            Now, whether all that is worth 30% to the publisher is up to the publisher. I’d say that its a toss-up; maybe the costs of running their own distribution and hiring on the people to run the platform and handling the bank charges will be offset and then some by getting to keep that 30%. But I think that the start-up cost for that would be better spent elsewhere.

            But I would honestly rather that all games were under one umbrella, held by an impartial mediator, because I think that that encourages a different kind of competition that’s actually more consumer friendly.

            I got a personal anecdote. I bought the ME trilogy package off of Origins awhile back. The complete set, they said. And even though I already owned ME1&2, the sale actually had the trilogy price below or right by the ME3 standalone price. I figured, why not? Whole series means DLC included, right? Sign me up.

            No. No. No DLC included. And even though it was a store wide sale at the time, guess what? DLC was still on Bioware points. And Bioware points don’t go on sale.

            When I counted up to $40 for story DLC (yes, I wasn’t even counting cosmetic or multiplayer DLC), I threw in the towel. It was going to at least $50 or $60 dollars to complete a couple of games from a few years ago. And I didn’t want to try to get a refund, because I was afraid that they’d yank out my old copies of ME1&2 with it and I didn’t want the headache.

            They can get away with that because its their store, and its the only place to get Mass Effect. Its damn exploitative. And they’d never be able to do it on Steam, pressure from other publisher’s games having sales on their games would force them to relent.

            And how about some correlation? Blizzard is known for keeping their prices up. Diablo III is still $40 to this day, and they rarely hold sales. I’ve heard you can find it for cheaper at retail, provided you even want a physical copy and you actually have a retail store by you that actually stocks PC games.

            So no, I do not like to envision a world where every publisher has their own castle, and I must knock on their gate and pay whatever they decide their toll is. In an ideal world, all games would be on 2 or 3 platforms run by impartial distributors, to ensure competition at all levels. So far, Steam has been the only one close to that qualification, and although they can’t possibly be completely impartial, as they are developers themselves, they’ve been pretty damn benevolent, if not always competent. GOG may rise to be their competition if Galaxy takes off, which is about as good as I think we’re realistically going to get.

            1. Grimwear says:

              Just to comment on your anecdote with my own. I own ME1 and 2 on Xbox and was planning to get the 3rd on release but when they had the day 1 dlc I swore it off and decided they wouldn’t get my money. I had heard Origin was having a sale (I can’t remember how many months back) and decided to check ME3 and the dlc. I’d never played any dlc for any ME game since I don’t really buy dlc off the Xbox marketplace since again sales don’t really exist there and it would have cost me over a hundred dollars to get the ME1 and 2 story dlc and ME3 with dlc. So I was going to look to see if I could buy ME3 on Origin and their search is impossible! I’m not sure if it’s better if you use the actual client but I refused to download it unless they actually had ME3 cheapish with dlc. Except using the site you literally cannot search the dlc. I type in Mass Effect 3 and it shows the base game and digital deluxe (which has a note about the From Ashes dlc) but I couldnt for the life of me find any other dlc. I have no idea if I have to type in the name of the dlc? This shouldn’t be so hard. Steam site you type the name of the game click on it and there’s a list of dlc along with it and prices. Origin actively disssuaded me from even bothering with them the one time I was willing to give them a chance. So annoying.

              1. Supahewok says:

                Yeah, I remember that now that you’ve mentioned it. Its probably why I thought the trilogy would include DLC.

                But no. At least for Bioware games, the way they handle DLC is that it’ll give you a menu for it in your library. You’ll click a game, and underneath the options to install and stuff will be a list of available DLC. And prices are listed only in Bioware points. You have to look up the price for points yourself, and then do the math to figure out how much the DLC costs.

                And you have to buy the points in certain allotments, like 500 or 1000. So if you only want 800 for this 1 piece of DLC priced at 800, fuck you, you have to pay more than the DLC’s worth.

                Fuck Origin. Competition my ass.

                Now I’ve gotten angry about it again.

        2. “Having it all in one place is easy and convenient”
          Create a game folder with shortcuts. Of wait, Windows Vista/7/8/10 has that already doesn’t it :P

        3. Grimwear says:

          “But at what cost?” I’ll openly admit I don’t hold to any ideals about these parties getting what they deserve. It’s not my place to worry about the best interests of a company. Mine is to look out for my best interests as a consumer and make my decisions as a consumer. If developers happen to also make money off the situation then I won’t complain I don’t wish any ill on them. Obviously they have been making money or they would have gone out of business but now they don’t like Valve taking a cut and so plan to make their own service. Again, not a bad thing but one that does affect me the consumer and one which I personally feel affects me negatively. I already have to keep track of my Guild Wars account, 2 battlenet accounts (I got banned in WoW in my younger and dumber days back when I thought being able to swear made me cool and made a second one only to miraculously get unbanned but not before I leveled some chars in the new WoW account), Steam account, GOG account, SWTOR account (I think this also counts as Origin? I’m not sure it was super weird and had me make one but not needing the client?), and my greenmangaming account. Granted gmg isn’t for playing games but it’s already more than I want to deal with. I just have a file that has all these accounts and passwords and it’s tedious. I don’t trust these companies in any way shape or form. What have they done to deserve that trust especially when they’re now making their own personal DRM services? Uplay is a joke, Origin hasn’t been much better. As a consumer I don’t want it and don’t care about their bottom line. They don’t pay me to care. In fact I pay them so I’m tired of making sacrifices and being treated like a criminal. The only people I DO like are GOG cause they treat me like a person. Bethesda? No thanks.

          1. Thomas says:

            What would be best for consumers is if digital goods were transferrable, so I could take my games off steam and onto GoG or vice versa (where both platforms sell the game). Then they’d have to compete on the services they provide.

            If Steam isn’t powerful enough to bully publishers, it’s just about possible too. Because publishers would just have to waive their right to earn royalties on GoG ‘giving’ people a copy of their steam games.

            And it’s actually in the publishers interests because Valve already has far too much negotiating power. With multiple sites publishers could begin to negotiate royalties more etc.

            But it would still take a lot of negotiation and effort to implement and I’m not optimistic about it happening. Apart from anything else I imagine Valve might try and make it impossible for other platforms to verify if a person owns a copy of the game on Steam.

      2. This all seems to be only a mod network thing.

        I think the people this will impact the most will be modders and those who use mods (i.e. Nexus crowd) as it will compete with modding sites.

        The big modding sites will survive, and for the smaller ones (if specialized for just a particular game etc) the modders may just find it easier to use Bethesda’s modding network/site.

        I can’t imagine gamers being able to more easily use mods (rating system, upvoting/downvoting, comments)

        I’m pretty sure donations/pay what you want (with Bethesda taking a cut for the payment system) as being a model that is more palatable than the Valve+Bethesda curfuffel recently with paid mods.
        And premium “pay” mods will probably appear later as well.

        This is probably what they had in mind originally, but using Valve’s services. But that backfired.
        Now with a system made especially for this things will make more sense.

        Maybe they’ll do a premium account thing where a small monthly fee grants you access to premium mods. (where the modders get paid)

    2. Incunabulum says:

      Bioware account. Not even to get special armor, just to fething play.

      Can I remember that account today? Not to save my life.

      But apparently people think that a game needs a *social* platform to connect players.

      Maybe its for those damn kids but unless the game’s multiplayer then I don’t need an ‘integrated’ platform – just put up a forum.

      But, in this case, this time around it looks like the console peasants will be getting them some mod loving – that’s supposed to be one of the features of this platform.

      OTOH, I hope its not a *curated* mod library (though it probably is).

      Personally, I think they’d have been better off working some partnership with Nexus – who’ve been a major reason BGS’ sell well years after release – to work up a mod installer for the consoles.

  15. Menegil says:

    The best thing about the stream were the people.

    Thank you all for a very fun evening. I’ve been a lurker for years, never commented much at all on Twenty Sided, but I shall henceforth certainly begin doing so more.

    1. James Porter says:

      So even watching the stream of another youtube guy I like was infuriatingly annoying, so I also appreciate how classy everyone was. Made me feel good for being a part of everyone here.

      1. Tmacnt08 says:

        I only saw the comments for the first like ten minutes but everyone seemed really nice. Then all of a sudden the comment section was just a blank white wall. No more text. I tried to type but it didn’t pop up in the comment section. It was weird. Shame really as everybody was pretty civil and seemed like a fun crowd to comment with live. Oh well. Maybe next time the comments will work for me.

        1. Humanoid says:

          If in doubt, hit refresh. Twitch is like that.

          1. Possibly a issue with Flash.

            I had major issues and didn’t bother with the chat at all (have to manually enable the flash plugin instances in Chrome).
            So I only bothered with that for the video streams.

          2. Tmacnt08 says:

            I tried refreshing twitch a couple of times, but I started to miss a bunch of the commentary and t was getting hard to keep track of both streams so I just decided to focus on the streams instead.

            1. Humanoid says:

              If you have the chat as a pop-up window instead, you can refresh it independently of the stream at least.

    2. Aitch says:

      Seconded, and I hope the crew ends up doing more through Twitch. Always a great chat that springs up too. There’s only a few small enclaves of intelligent discussion to be found on Twitch, so I cherish any time spent hanging out on one.

      Keeping my fingers crossed for live-action spoiler warning in the future. I know streaming comes with its own set of headaches and hurdles, but as a fan at least, what it offers is worth the hiccups and technical stumbles of getting used to the format.

      Also, thanks for the show, guys – you helped make a sunday night so much more entertaining than the options otherwise.

      1. Humanoid says:

        There’s already the stated intention of doing a monthly hangout, first week of each month or somesuch. Maybe rebranding it as Spoiler Warning Live would help with brand awareness though. :D

      2. Shame they can’t re-broadcast Gamespot though. http://www.gamespot.com/e3/live/
        That Deus Ex part would be cool to have the gang comment on.

        But I liked Josh’s “idea” of doing it Rifftraxx style.

        (note to Shamus/Josh) is to do a Diecast type recording of the gang watching the video.

        At the start of the recording have somebody (Josh?) do a countdown 3..2…1…click.
        That way listeners can start the “Diecast” and has about 3 seconds to switch to the video and wait to click the play button until Josh says “click”.

  16. Tmacnt08 says:

    Congrats on guessing when it would come out Josh! You’re reward is now Fallout 4 is coming out around your birthday! Although as punish for all the horrible acts you/Reginald cuftbe/urt will commit in Boston you are hereby sentenced to play through Little Lamplight twenty times straight, no stopping, and the entirety of the deep roads 25 times, no saving. :)

  17. Incunabulum says:

    “Some parts look stupid. (World-building.)”

    Stupid as in not interesting or stupid as in poorly implemented?

    Because I can tell you that Real Time Settler and Wasteland Defense are among the more popular mods available for New Vegas – here it looks like they put that right into the base game instead of having to wait for a modder (and a coder to create F4SE) to do it.

    1. Tmacnt08 says:

      Yeah, I’m not quite sure what he meant by that given before he mentioned the base building as interesting. That and the fact I didn’t really hear much about the story of the game or the post-nuclear world of Boston in the conference. Though I might have lost it in the shuffle, listening to both the cast and the conference. Maybe the lack of them really showing any in-game moments of the settlements/societies/cultures is kind of foreboding, especially considering how Bethesda have fallen flat with that stuff in the past time and time again. I mean seriously, Fallout 3 DC wastelanders . . .

      WHAT DO THEY EAT?!?!?!?!?!?!

      The game forces me to draw the conclusion that everyone is eating the strange meat from Mumbles’ Cannibal Sales-People buddies.

      1. Wide And Nerdy says:

        You know what bugs me more than “what do they eat?”

        This protagonist went into a pod and woke up in a wasteland. If I woke up to a Fallout style wasteland in real life, I’d take my life. But this protagonist seems to take it all in stride apart from apparently wanting to avenge his wife.

        To me, the protagonist should spend most of the game trying and failing to come to terms with the world he’s lost, possibly being coopted by one of the movements that tries to preserve or reclaim the past, and hating ghouls and super mutants. Maybe it will turn out he has some drugs on him that make him ok with everything.

        1. Wide And Nerdy says:

          Its like Shamus was saying about being true to your central premise. This time around the premise is that someone who was living a happy suburban life has been thrust into an apocalyptic wasteland. He shouldn’t be in any way ready for this and should have considerable difficulty coping.

    2. Yeah the mod community will go apeshit over this.
      If the mod tools/plugins/system is improved on top of this as well there’s going to be a ton of weird stuff popping up.

      My guess is there’ll be a DLC or expansion down the road that ads a whole new area where you can build a small city of sorts.
      Dependent obviously on how well the mod community (and other players) like the build your own house/mini-town thingy they added.

      If this becomes a hit with Fallout 4 then who knows. Maybe in Elder Scrolls VI you’ll be able to build your own castle? Be a Lord over your own lands? That would kinda rock.

      1. Incunabulum says:

        Can already do that in Skyrim.

        Thanks modders.

        1. Yeah. So if modders inspired Bethesda to make that Hearthfire thing. And the response to that inspired this build thing in Fallout 4.
          I can not even imagine what will be in the next Elder Scrolls.

          I said build your own castle. Maybe you can amass an army and outfit it to you liking and have it “clash” with some other troops.
          Become emperor and build you own palace?
          Create a tavern and run it?

          1. Incunabulum says:

            Or, wonder of wonders, have the NPC’s actually *react* to your in-game accomplishments.

            No more head of mage’s, fighter’s guild, Morag Tong, senior leadership position in half the houses and still greeted with ‘I’m watching you!’

    3. Ayegill says:

      I don’t think he was talking about the base-building stuff, since he went on to say “some parts look intriguing (base-building)”. Granted, I’m not sure what he did mean by “world-building”, since we saw almost nothing of the setting.

      1. Incunabulum says:

        Well, he said this in the part talking about crafting – so its confusing as to what he’s talking about.

  18. Spammy says:

    I am not a fan of the Dishonored 2 trailer. Specifically, I am not a fan of making Emily the protagonist. She’s the Empress. I can believe that the Empress’ personal body guard/ agent can travel stealthily and carry out secret objectives. I can less believe that the Empress is doing that. So what, she was just deposed and then disappeared to start doing assassination stuff? How do you lose an Empress, and then how does an Empress start running around rooftops in secret? If she’s been deposed but not captured, why is she doing this cloak and dagger stuff instead of creating a resistance and fighting the people who did this? Is this the only thing they could do with Emily’s character, make her a carbon copy of Corvo?

    I’m kind of reminded of how in Mass Effect 2 we discovered that Liara went from a somewhat shy researcher to a generic “Look at how tough I am” badass.

    But aside from the fact that I’m already not in love with this premise the trailer looks alright. It sounds like they got the Outsider to actually speak with some inflection, maybe we’ll even get some emotion out of him.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Dishonored 2 will actually be a court intrigue simulator with lots of balls,backstabbing and debauchery.

      1. Kamica says:

        I’d actually be interested in that… First Person Crusader Kings? =D.

      2. But no ballstabbing? I am disappoint.

    2. Galad says:

      I haven’t seen any videos of the conference. Have they confirmed Emily will be, as you say, a carbon copy of Corvo?

      1. Spammy says:

        Going off the trailer, we see Emily as a silent protagonist running over rooftops and looking at people dead because of an epidemic and having been given Outsider powers to amuse the Outsider. She’s apparently been dethroned/dishonored and is out to kill the conspirators. She has a sword, she has a crossbow, she has mines you stick onto walls, she’s got neo-Blink, she’s got Bend Time.

        But I guess she’s not a carbon copy because she doesn’t have a roboskull mask.

        1. Akuma says:

          So what your saying is she’s a Gender Swap of Corvo.

        2. Thomas says:

          The word is that she has a different powerset to Corvo (although you see her picking up Corvo’s mask so she probably uses that). I don’t know how they’re going to balance that/write that. I’m always very suspicious of games where you can choose your character and different characters have different powersets.

  19. Zak McKracken says:

    Elder Scrolls Online: I’m driving past a huge ad for ESO every morning. Apparently there’s some extension coming out?
    I’m fairly certain there must be some amount of player base around here or they wouldn’t invest in that sort of thing.

    1. Humanoid says:

      It’s for the release of ESO for consoles, which happened last week.

    2. Michael says:

      Ironically… or not, ESO has a pretty substantial playerbase. There’s a lot of people… like Shamus, that wandered into the betas, went, “yeah, this is more interesting as an act of schadenfreude to me,” and keep hoping and praying it will fail… and yet, here it is, a year later.

      I mean, Shamus’ literally went off on the game for not being colorful enough. Because… that’s a real metric, I guess? And, then you look at the screenshots, and all I can think is he wanted something like Kingdoms of Amalur vomiting bright colors everywhere?

      In fairness, the launch was pretty rough. The betas had some serious issues. A lot of broken quests. A serious bot infestation, to the point that chat, and the in game mail system were non-functional… Vampires literally locking entire factions out of some Cyrodiil campaigns for days at a time.

      But, as MMO launches go? ESO actually had a pretty strong one. Not perfect, but none of them are these days, and a lot of the bugs have been dealt with. There’s still some residual issues, and it’s not a perfect game. But it’s not surprising that there are people playing it.

      It’s also not surprising that people who got upset with their pet MMO’s failure set their sights on ESO. Hence stuff like The Escapist crowing about how ESO is going F2P… which… yeah, that didn’t happen. I don’t mean in a, “there is no Resident Evil 6” kind of way. I mean, it’s not a free to play title. But, hey, getting the facts right is secondary to pure schadenfreude, right?

      Now, there is a legitimate question of, should this have been released for PC at all? This feels like an MMO aimed at consoles first. Sort of like how DCUO is. (Though, the ways they tailor to the couch crowd are quite different.)

      1. Shamus says:

        “I mean, Shamus' literally went off on the game for not being colorful enough. Because… that's a real metric, I guess? And, then you look at the screenshots, and all I can think is he wanted something like Kingdoms of Amalur vomiting bright colors everywhere?”

        “Real metric?” what, if I can’t fit my opinion on a numeric scale it doesn’t count? It was visually boring. “Washed out color” is a nice shorthand way to refer to the overall lack of vibrancy, contrast, distinctiveness, detail and texture.

        I wanted SOMETHING interesting. The story is standard Elder Scrolls tropes, stripped of their vestigial roleplaying and then watered down through MMO mechanics. The quasi-action mechanics are an also-ran compared to Guild Wars 2 and Tera. The character designs aren’t unique, interesting, or even true to the Elder Scrolls lore. The soundscape was basically mute. (People often overlook the WoW soundscape. It’s actually pretty amazing.) So having drab, washed-out colors was just another strike against it.

        I also NEVER NEVER “prayed it would fail”. I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to show some spark of creativity or life to make this look like something other than a late-period “me too” subscription MMO. This isn’t schadenfreude, it’s exasperation over wasted potential and missed opportunities.

        1. Michael says:

          To be honest, it’s entirely possible I’m more cynical about the current state of MMOs than you are. That’s mostly due to the transition to F2P business models from games like STO and TOR… which might be part of why I’ve got a soft spot for ESO now, more than before.

          Your photoshop with the saturation tuned up has always rubbed me the wrong way. There’s not liking a game’s aesthetics, and then there’s saying, “When it really ought to look like this”. Fair or not, that article has colored my perception of your take on the game. With that in mind, your line, “I guess they haven't shut the game down yet” came across as very passive aggressive. Especially given, and you know this, very few MMOs fold in their first year.

          There is some interesting stuff buried in ESO. It’s a good example of why getting big name actors for your MMO is a terrible idea. Both The Prophet and Molag Bal change voice actors during the tutorial. This is even more jarring because they’re switching from Michael Gambon and Malcolm McDowell to someone who is clearly not Michael Gambon and (I think) Christopher Corey Smith.

          The game’s writing acknowledges that the player characters are immortal, and in a few cases, presents villains who realize this, and work to find other ways to neutralize them. The downside is, this usually comes after three zones of paint by numbers villains.

          This is also, I think, the first time we’ve seen any developers outside of Bethesda Game Studios actually working with the setting. The result seems to be more of the Kirkbride fueled weirdness than Skyrim delivered. Though, if they succeeded in that is probably a legitimate point of debate.

          I had to log in to check, but, yes there is a soundscape now. I think it got added in the same beta that added enemy collision, but I’m not completely certain. It does have some nice details, like thunder having more reverberation in mountainous zones. I think all the animal noises are actually sourced to specific critters, but I didn’t take the time to verify that. Ultimately, if a soundscape is working correctly, you shouldn’t notice it, which is the case with ESO.

  20. Mintskittle says:

    For what its worth, I tried a bit of the Fallout ios game, and it’s pretty standard F2P fare with a Fallout skin. It’s not great, but it isn’t bad either. Just a mildly amusing time waster.

  21. Christopher says:

    Nice conference overall, I thought. None of the guys on stage were embarassing, and a couple were really good. Managed to sell a phone game, even. Skipped over the ESO part, mind, but that’s hardly their fault. Fallout 4, Doom 4 and Dishonored 2 is a great lineup.

  22. Disc says:

    I’m kinda hoping the voice acting actually improves the general PC dialogue. It might never be stellar but it at least ought to make the really retarded lines more obvious and hopefully sanitized.

    1. Chris Davies says:

      Did you see the gameplay demo?
      Not only are the lines bad, but since it’s now a dialogue wheel you can’t even see what stupid thing you’re going to say now before you say it.

  23. DrMcCoy says:

    Called simply “DOOM”

    I really hate that…

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      Everybody hates that.

      1. Galad says:

        At least it’s not called DO4M :D

        1. Humanoid says:

          Surely it should be DOOOOM.

    2. Kamica says:

      I thought about this when I saw the title, and I suspect that it’s done because if it’s called “Doom 4” Then new people will go “Erm… It’s a sequel, I don’t want to play it without having played the first three” *Goes and plays the first DOOM* “What the fuck is this shit!? I’m not going to play this!”

      Though… Fallout doesn’t seem to have that problem =P.

  24. Zaxares says:

    *perks up* Doom 4?? Gotta check this out.

  25. Thomas says:

    I thought Bethesda really hit that out of the park. Doom was a surprise, Fallout 4 managed to surprise with a lot of the things it was doing, even before they revealed who the (potential) protagonist of Dishonoured was I was thinking “even gender aside, we’re finally getting better at designing interesting looking protagonists”. Everything was colourful.

    I can see why gaming is still going to have these cultural crisis’ because we haven’t really struck a nice balance yet between what games are and how we present them to the world. Every PR and exec guy you have up at E3 is total cringe as they try to say “tons of gore” in their fancy suits. It’s funny to hear the PR men read of the back-of-the-box bullet points in an utterly toneless voice. They don’t believe what they’re saying.

    And in the same way, I’m guilty of groaning inside whenever you hear a room full of journalists whooping because in a game they’ve just ripped someones arm off and used it to open a door.

    But the developers always know how they fit with their games, and the developers almost always talk in a way that’s non-cringey and really speaks to why we love their games. Bethesda made a really sensible decision by putting them front and centre for most of their talk, avoiding a lot of the E3 fuzzyness.

    In particular the Bethesda Studio guy, Tod, was incredible. Perfect speaker.

    I think people are going to find it hard to keep up with the mark Bethesda set in their conference.

  26. Lame Duck says:

    “YES your protagonist is voiced.”

    Oh, well it’s a good job that Bethesda has a proven track-record of incredibly good, well directed voice acting then, right Dr. Li?

  27. SoranMBane says:

    I’m not a fan of the Fallout 4 protagonist being fully voiced. Being able to imagine for myself what my character sounds like and how they speak added to roleplaying potential, helping me feel like my character was truly mine (like, if I have two different characters choosing the exact same dialog options, I could imagine them saying it in different ways, or with different intents). Voice acting removes that small element of player agency, and limiting player agency is the last thing Bethesda needs to do more of right now, especially where Fallout is concerned.

  28. Talby says:

    My impressions/ideas/hopes for the story;

    We seem to be playing as someone who actually lived in the old world instead of just another descendent who’s emerged from the vault. (whether it be due to cryogenic freezing/cloning/brain swap/whatever) This hasn’t been done in a FO game before and has a lot of potential. Let’s say our character refuses to just accept that the old world is gone, and wants to rebuild and make things just like they were before. After all, they lived there for their whole life up to this point and aren’t just waxing nostalgic like the folk of the wasteland.

    The wastelanders just want to move on and survive, but our “hero” is going to drag them kicking and screaming into the past he remembers. He’ll MAKE them see how wonderful it was before the war ruined everything, puts us in a position of the villain instead of hero, and anyone who gets in his way is a dead man. This would mean a story that’s driven by the main character rather than outside motivations, and ties in nicely with the base building feature.

    I know Bethesda won’t do it because they hire horrible writers, but I can hope.

    (Also, the series really needs to move back in the timeline a bit. Just set it around the same time as Fallout 1 where the post-apoc setting can still be justified, 200 years is too long, society would have rebuilt)

  29. Talby says:

    My impressions/ideas/hopes for the story;

    We seem to be playing as someone who actually lived in the old world instead of just another descendent who’s emerged from the vault. (whether it be due to cryogenic freezing/cloning/brain swap/whatever) This hasn’t been done in a FO game before and has a lot of potential. Let’s say our character refuses to just accept that the old world is gone, and wants to rebuild and make things just like they were before. After all, they lived there for their whole life up to this point and aren’t just waxing nostalgic like the folk of the wasteland.

    The wastelanders just want to move on and survive, but our “hero” is going to drag them kicking and screaming into the past he remembers. He’ll MAKE them see how wonderful it was before the war ruined everything, puts us in a position of the villain instead of hero, and anyone who gets in his way is a dead man. This would mean a story that’s driven by the main character rather than outside motivations, and ties in nicely with the base building feature.

    I know Bethesda won’t do it because they hire horrible writers, but I can hope.

    (Also, the series really needs to move back in the timeline a bit. Just set it around the same time as Fallout 1 where the post-apoc setting can still be justified, 200 years is too long, society would have rebuilt)

  30. 4th Dimension says:

    Shamus: “BRING ME THE HEAD OF TOD HOWARD!”
    And him groaning at the stupidity.
    Oh Shamus, one day, one day.

    Anyway I was able to watch the saved streams post facto by syncing Twentysided commentary with bethsoft stream.

  31. Groboclown says:

    This is only mildly on topic (talk about future game releases), but I thought this would be a suitable group of folks to ask. Does this look like trolling to anyone?

    http://forums.perforce.com/index.php?/topic/4085-p4-copy-and-warning-message/

    An appropriate question thread and answer, but with very interesting path names.

    1. Incunabulum says:

      Its trolling – my non-expert opinion.

      The OP is probably bouncing up and down in his chair with frustration that the responders didn’t take the bait.

      No-one at Valve working on HL3 is going to an outside board to pose a technical question when they could just talk to their colleagues right there.

      That’s something somebody working on a tiny team (or alone) who can’t ask his colleagues because their specialty lies elsewhere.

      But, if not, there’s someone who had better be getting his resume updated.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        I’m even less of an expert, but I had a look at the guy’s posting history, and it did seem like one of a number of genuine questions. There’s even one which is an absolute ‘nvm figgered it out’ best practice!:

        http://forums.perforce.com/index.php?/topic/3668-p4net-api-timeout-during-unshelving/page__fromsearch__1

        Not the kind of thing you’d expect from a troll! That said, I agree: I can’t believe anyone working on HL3 would be allowed to casually post something like that externally. An odd one!

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