Designing coherent spaces is useful for game world designers to think about, but it could have been 5 minutes long and gotten the point across.

The atmosphere, taken moment to moment, or at individual locations was good. The coherency of the explanations behind a lot of things and the coherency of the world as a whole was pretty disjointed.

Both games do environmental storytelling, but with vastly different goals.

Obsidian approach is very constantly supporting a consistent tone and overarching setting. It is more desolate and feels more desolate because that’s what a lot of these in-between little areas are supposed to be. But the details in each area that are there so tell a story about what the area is like and how it function, they give a history to what you are seeing but it often isn’t over the top and full of little cute mini-stories you can follow. It isn’t bad storytelling, it’s telling a story you’re not into.

The Bethesda approach is often much more varied. Each settlement or location can have all these environmental stories, often will little miniature running plots. The variety extends to tone, and type of story. This does come at the expense of some coherence if you step back and start putting a critical eye to everything as a whole.

They are trying to give players different experiences. FNV a player can travel through a bleak desert, maybe only with hostile encounters as the Jungle Jangle radio plays until they finally hit a settlement and it feels like an actual refuge from the sun and rad scorpions to the player. The desolation builds that. Fallout 3 and especially 4 don’t want the player getting bored, so there is something interesting and different every ten feet to check out.

I suppose it says a lot about me that my Fallout 4 modlist turns the world into an extremely dangerous, ghoul filled place with dark nights, and rad storms. All of which makes travel on the overworld terrifying, and settlements feel extra secure in contrast.

Oh as a consumer I, personally, am not touching this thing with a ten foot pole.

I think the people who do continue to fund this thing are sucked in by the dream of what it could be and have developed a kind of personal ownership of the project in their heads. They are psychologically invested in seeing it succeed and you can’t convince them it’s never going to. And the developers are cynically sucking money out of them like cult leaders.

Well, you’re shifting from a fan POV to a developer POV here.

From the developer POV, it’s not wasted time. They are getting a constant stream of money. As long as they can tread water and make their motion look like progress they have an endless source of income.

Its supporters bounce between “It’s already out!” and “Developing such a huge game takes time.” depending on which stance is more convenient in an argument.

I dunno, seems incredibly competent to me.

I was just saying the Deus Ex thing.

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

It’s just a small multi-time fee of 500 morbillion dollars, jeez, just pay the redditorino CEO a fair price, you 3rd party bullies.

The Mass Effect series, specifically Mass Effect 2. The atmosphere, the scale, the characters. It’s the kind of thing where a AAA budget really bring to life things that AA or indie would have had to cut down.

Fallout 4. I have a lot of problems with the story, worldbuilding, and endless minor nitpicky complaints about this game. However it is an amazing accomplishment and when it does something right, it does it very right. The game is the foundation of mods that make it amazing, and while the game didn’t create the mods, they wouldn’t exist without the game. To me Fallout 4 is “I played this game for 800 hours and there’s nothing to do!” kind of complaining.

DOOM (2016). Wow. What a game. It took the mantle of the most iconic FPS in history and made it’s mark. DOOM (2016) is to the original DOOM what Fury Road is to Road Warrior. It distilled what everybody liked and remembered (or thought they remembered) from the original and pumped it up to 11 with insane confidence.

The most recently purchased game that I beat (aside from multiplayer only stuff like Deep Rock Galactic) would be Black Mesa. Motivation to see the overhaul of xen at the end of the game really kept me going.

I recently beat Fallout 1 again, but I was using a high intelligence, high luck gambing critical hit sniper so it was more like an experiment to break the game. I’m in the middle of a 1 intelligence playthrough and its challenging but becoming a bit routine now that I’ve overcome early hurdles.

There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.

I download a lot of videos when I watch on desktop. This gets rid of ads. It also preserves them, since videos can get taken down for very esoteric reasons.

I actually ended up getting a really nice and thoughtful gift. (And cookies which I absolutely did not eat.)

They’ll be right. The quality of everything, not the least of which is internet scrolling, that the general public accepts is horrendous.

Somebody else put it best here that Reddit won’t die, it will still be around for all those people. Hopefully the rest of us move on and Reddit becomes “Oh huh? That place is still around?”

Secret Santa was back when Reddit still had a semblance of community, which I realize now means trust. I’d never trust a Reddit secret Santa these days. Heck, I’ve done successful 4chan secret Santa’s and I’m still not brave enough to want a modern Reddit secret Santa.

They have very different approaches to designing worlds. Fallout 3 and 4 have much more tangential and almost self contained wackiness going on that can be tonally all over the place, and FNV tends to be built all in support of a single tone and while it has wacky elements a bit more grounded.

Different approaches. What this means for me is that while I find the Fallout 4 main quest incredibly poorly written, I can largely ignore it because there are so many unrelated tangent stories and locations to explore in a kind of themepark of a game world. Whereas FNV doesn’t quite have that themepark level of variety as it is building a world that’s trying to be immersive in support of the main story.

Grey? I supposed Fallout 3 is very dingy, but Fallout 4 is very colorful. In fact I personally find it too colorful and end up making more depressing with mods.

The game is kind of a chore at first when you have to manually water your crops. Once you’re more established and have sprinklers you can really put a lot of the farming on autopilot.