They killed it. Damn, I am so pumped. The mod support on console is exciting too, although I don't have an xbone.
So rad it's coming this year. The graphics look better than what i expected based on the announcement trailer too, it looks great. Nice to see enemies staggering a bit and reacting to being shot also.
Here's another short video with a few more seconds of footage (Iron Chef confirmed!) if anyone's interested. Also has Todd talking about lovely stuff like the weather.
I for one am all for change since I enjoyed the perks more in Fallout3/NV/Skyrim than I cared about just upping an arbitrary number that magically made my bullets do more damage, but then again I'm sure there's some who will miss the skill system having been present in every fallout game before.
What I like about it conceptually though is it sounds like it'll place a lot more emphasis on how you choose to build your SPECIAL stats to create varied gameplay. Almost every new game I played I usually kept everything conservative, with a couple in the 4's so I can get a few 7's but now I might be trying out some more fun and risky characters so I can unlock the special lvl 10 perks right from the get go!
I actually saw someone who was posting Fallout 4 pictures on imgur, and was actually wondering where it came from, I guess he scanned it in. EDIT: Ahh it's not from the book itself, it's from the website examples, couldn't see the images until I got home (workplace firewall restrictions).
Some seriously impressive stuff in this article. Those comparison shots at different weather/times of the day excite me, the variation in mood is astounding. This generation of games really know how to play with colour, and you can just tell from the screenshots how immersive FO4 is going to be
Taking inspiration from Destiny for the FPS gunplay (awesome), and a settlement metagame so addictive the testers got distracted from doing their job and finishing the game, pretty funny insight
@Carabiner Maybe. Not sure most open world games would stand up graphically if the player was to shove their face in first person into the nearest low poly asset in such a poorly lit corner Doesn't help that people made assumptions based on blurry compressed images either. For me it's more about the overall high concept design and density of the world. When you see stuff like this you know they've really nailed it
Pretty excited for this even though I have a bad habit of never finishing open world games. It's cool to see how much the art & tech has evolved from Fallout 3.
Only got to play a few hours but it's awesome. It looks fantastic, the attention to detail is great. Having a lot of fun.
As a long time fan of the series though, the voice-acted main character is bothering me a bit. He's already imparting too much personality in the character, and I think that it may hurt potential role-playing options. It's fine for a first playthrough, but I'm the sort of guy who likes to make a ton of different characters with drastically different personalities. I always preferred imparting a voice of my choosing on the character in my head. Dialogue options have been simplified too.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm having a ton of fun, this won't hurt my experience in any huge way, and it's not even a bad design choice necessarily, it just feels distinctly un-fallout to me.
I got to play it two hours this morning and the first thing that came to my mind is that Bethesda has some really kickass environnement artists. Skyrim's landscapes looked great but Fallout 4 is just spot on!
I can't wait until this evening so I can play it some more haha ^^
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "method" of PBR, but we have some in-house tools that help the process. Mostly with creating smoothness/spec maps designed for the shaders.
Yeah, I would like to know some shader details as well. Are some of the reflection probes parallax corrected?
From what I can gather it's just a regular old normalized Blinn-Phong for the most part with a metallic map, a gloss map, and a secondary specular map for micro occlusion. The gloss and secondary specular maps are packed in the green and red channels respectively of the texture with the _s suffix.
I'm more on the world art/design side of things, with the occasional asset creation or kit piece. Mostly, for me, it's "this is our pipeline now, so make your art look prettier by doing this." ...and I do it. That being said, it's closer to your second assumption, than your first.
I must say, I've only been able top play the first few hours so far but from what I have played, YOU GUYS ROCKED IT.
Really really nice sense of place, looks great when you're playing it. And I must say the new game mechanics like the settlement building and weapon crafting are awesome, and it was no marketing BS when you guys said you worked alot on getting the combat right I'm also a big fan of how you guys made the environments more interactive with moveable platforms and the like. No spoilers of course, but one large raider battle that wasn't in the trailers in particular really showed me that while war never changes, combat has and for the better!
I knew it was going to be great, but I didn't think Fallout 4 would exceed my unrealistic expectations!
My only tiny negative and it's not really a negative as I'm starting to get used to it is the Voiced protagonist, but I think that's just me getting used to how the new dialogue system works after years of playing Bethesda's previous games. At times I do enjoy it and think it adds a bit more immersion such as when you call your dog. I'm curious to see if the way the voice actor delivers his lines changes/gets more emotional/insane/depressed/whatever as the game goes on. It's growing on me.
Super great game! The combat feels great and the world looks so good :O The overall feeling and mood is top notch!
I played Fallout 3 and NV for the first time, with a billion mods, only a few weeks ago. It was two amazing experiences and they made me super hyped for Fallout 4. What I loved about Fallout 3 in contrast to Skyrim was the option to solve problems peacefully. You often get cued into a dialog instead of just getting shot on sight. I loved that, and played full Charisma and Speech characters and had so much fun. Utilizing different skills to help people out to earn EXP instead of killing. It was frankly mindblowing to have a modern AAA game that was playable without resorting to violence!
Fallout 4 feels much less like a role-playing game than Fallout 3. I think it's mainly because of the new dialog system and the fact that the main character is voiced. I played maybe 2 hours before I realized that my pacifist character was just not going to work in this game. It's kind of like trying to play a pacifist in Skyrim, it' just not going to work.
So I'm super sad to see that aspect thrown out the window for a more action oriented experience, but that's fine! Just not what I expected after playing Fallout 3 so recently ^^ And I can totally understand wanting to show off more of that super juicy combat xD
Congrats on finally releasing, can't believe almost 450,000 people were playing last night As for me I simply can't put it down. There's so much life and interest in the world and the settlement system really lets you make a home for yourself among plenty of other things, great diversion from the exploration. The biggest change for me has to be the controls though - I'm hardly using VATS now, the aiming is so good. I guess I'm more of a gameplay than story kind of player, which is why I find the voiced protagonist and streamlined conversation UI to actually get me more engaged. I'm playing on survival and honestly recommend it, it's a shame enemies become a little spongy but you really feel like the world is out to get you and as a result you start hunting to cook food, using the right weapon for the job and even an ammo hoarder like me starts popping off rounds, but at the end of the day you pay more attention to the world and its workings.
It's just the kind of game where you can't stop finding the best situation to take a picture (I won't spam the thread though haha)
So I've been playing with the settlements and I decided to see if the navigations better than the previous games, so I place a guard post on top of one of my rickety custom built wooden houses with corridors, doorways, and a wooden staircase built to the roof.
The AI walked through the doorway, up the stairs, onto the roof, and stood at the guard post without once slamming into a wall or falling off. Yaaaay!!!!!
TBH this was my biggest fear of the settlements, that the AI navpaths wouldn't work. I guess they added in some dynamic navigation to support it
@JedTheKrampus Those are our model space normals, that are used exclusively for our terrain LOD. I don't do much with that system, though, so I don't know much past that.
@dustinbrownGeneraly speaking, I think the face models look great. It's just that sometimes a character stands in a corner with very flat lighting and it really kills the work done on the face because once you see it with a better lighting you can see it's just as good as the others.
Another little thing that bothered me was the lack of occlusion cast by hats and hoods. It's really hard to integrate these kind of accesories to the face without some AO but I understand that you need to be able to swap heads so can't bake any AO on them.
I absolutely loved the texturing work on the clothes/armors. I just wished the textures were of higher res, but I think it's just because I keep sticking my nose on them, haha.
Murder, death, kill! Murder, death, KILL!! Better be a mistake, if I don't get the game as originally sale as (friday or saturday), I will cancel this order and get it somewhere else... whats the point of preorder something, if it doesn't arrive.
Same... I have sunk a lot of time into building junk in settlements.
Do you ever get new designs for settlement building or do you just build the same wood/metal structures forever? Would be cool to have some painted buildings.
I am loving how much color and variety there is in the environments this time around
Replies
So rad it's coming this year. The graphics look better than what i expected based on the announcement trailer too, it looks great. Nice to see enemies staggering a bit and reacting to being shot also.
[ame]
Oh and Bethesda went back to armor mixing versus one-piece suits and hats? woo woo!
[ame="
[ame]
It's nice to see a hint of NPCs having some more different types of animations versus sit, stand, and smoke a cigarette
[ame]
I for one am all for change since I enjoyed the perks more in Fallout3/NV/Skyrim than I cared about just upping an arbitrary number that magically made my bullets do more damage, but then again I'm sure there's some who will miss the skill system having been present in every fallout game before.
What I like about it conceptually though is it sounds like it'll place a lot more emphasis on how you choose to build your SPECIAL stats to create varied gameplay. Almost every new game I played I usually kept everything conservative, with a couple in the 4's so I can get a few 7's but now I might be trying out some more fun and risky characters so I can unlock the special lvl 10 perks right from the get go!
What do you guys think?
[ame]
https://bethesda.net/#en/events/game/the-art-of-fallout-4/2015/10/28/41
its absolutely gorgeous, nice to see all the internals to the robots, the new designs, the modular designs, and a load of awesome concept art.
EDIT: Ahh it's not from the book itself, it's from the website examples, couldn't see the images until I got home (workplace firewall restrictions).
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Fallout-Bethesda-Softworks/dp/1616559802
Some seriously impressive stuff in this article. Those comparison shots at different weather/times of the day excite me, the variation in mood is astounding. This generation of games really know how to play with colour, and you can just tell from the screenshots how immersive FO4 is going to be
Taking inspiration from Destiny for the FPS gunplay (awesome), and a settlement metagame so addictive the testers got distracted from doing their job and finishing the game, pretty funny insight
@Carabiner Maybe. Not sure most open world games would stand up graphically if the player was to shove their face in first person into the nearest low poly asset in such a poorly lit corner
Doesn't help that people made assumptions based on blurry compressed images either. For me it's more about the overall high concept design and density of the world. When you see stuff like this you know they've really nailed it
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/11/05/fallout-4-review-embargo-gets-embargo
I think I'm going to go to sleep early for 6 hours just so I can play it for a few hours at 12am before work
As a long time fan of the series though, the voice-acted main character is bothering me a bit. He's already imparting too much personality in the character, and I think that it may hurt potential role-playing options. It's fine for a first playthrough, but I'm the sort of guy who likes to make a ton of different characters with drastically different personalities. I always preferred imparting a voice of my choosing on the character in my head. Dialogue options have been simplified too.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm having a ton of fun, this won't hurt my experience in any huge way, and it's not even a bad design choice necessarily, it just feels distinctly un-fallout to me.
I can't wait until this evening so I can play it some more haha ^^
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "method" of PBR, but we have some in-house tools that help the process. Mostly with creating smoothness/spec maps designed for the shaders.
From what I can gather it's just a regular old normalized Blinn-Phong for the most part with a metallic map, a gloss map, and a secondary specular map for micro occlusion. The gloss and secondary specular maps are packed in the green and red channels respectively of the texture with the _s suffix.
Really really nice sense of place, looks great when you're playing it. And I must say the new game mechanics like the settlement building and weapon crafting are awesome, and it was no marketing BS when you guys said you worked alot on getting the combat right
I knew it was going to be great, but I didn't think Fallout 4 would exceed my unrealistic expectations!
My only tiny negative and it's not really a negative as I'm starting to get used to it is the Voiced protagonist, but I think that's just me getting used to how the new dialogue system works after years of playing Bethesda's previous games. At times I do enjoy it and think it adds a bit more immersion such as when you call your dog. I'm curious to see if the way the voice actor delivers his lines changes/gets more emotional/insane/depressed/whatever as the game goes on. It's growing on me.
Anyways, back to playing my dream game come true
I played Fallout 3 and NV for the first time, with a billion mods, only a few weeks ago. It was two amazing experiences and they made me super hyped for Fallout 4. What I loved about Fallout 3 in contrast to Skyrim was the option to solve problems peacefully. You often get cued into a dialog instead of just getting shot on sight. I loved that, and played full Charisma and Speech characters and had so much fun. Utilizing different skills to help people out to earn EXP instead of killing. It was frankly mindblowing to have a modern AAA game that was playable without resorting to violence!
Fallout 4 feels much less like a role-playing game than Fallout 3. I think it's mainly because of the new dialog system and the fact that the main character is voiced. I played maybe 2 hours before I realized that my pacifist character was just not going to work in this game. It's kind of like trying to play a pacifist in Skyrim, it' just not going to work.
So I'm super sad to see that aspect thrown out the window for a more action oriented experience, but that's fine! Just not what I expected after playing Fallout 3 so recently ^^ And I can totally understand wanting to show off more of that super juicy combat xD
As for me I simply can't put it down. There's so much life and interest in the world and the settlement system really lets you make a home for yourself among plenty of other things, great diversion from the exploration. The biggest change for me has to be the controls though - I'm hardly using VATS now, the aiming is so good. I guess I'm more of a gameplay than story kind of player, which is why I find the voiced protagonist and streamlined conversation UI to actually get me more engaged. I'm playing on survival and honestly recommend it, it's a shame enemies become a little spongy but you really feel like the world is out to get you and as a result you start hunting to cook food, using the right weapon for the job and even an ammo hoarder like me starts popping off rounds, but at the end of the day you pay more attention to the world and its workings.
It's just the kind of game where you can't stop finding the best situation to take a picture (I won't spam the thread though haha)
edit: waheyyy
The AI walked through the doorway, up the stairs, onto the roof, and stood at the guard post without once slamming into a wall or falling off. Yaaaay!!!!!
TBH this was my biggest fear of the settlements, that the AI navpaths wouldn't work. I guess they added in some dynamic navigation to support it
Another little thing that bothered me was the lack of occlusion cast by hats and hoods. It's really hard to integrate these kind of accesories to the face without some AO but I understand that you need to be able to swap heads so can't bake any AO on them.
I absolutely loved the texturing work on the clothes/armors. I just wished the textures were of higher res, but I think it's just because I keep sticking my nose on them, haha.
Was going to head out on a wasteland adventure but lost hours looking for the right materials to build my shack with, you guys have done great work!
Do you ever get new designs for settlement building or do you just build the same wood/metal structures forever? Would be cool to have some painted buildings.
I am loving how much color and variety there is in the environments this time around