Where's this about Minute Men and Musket Lasers from? The trailer or the e3 presentation, or did I miss some news?
You can see them in the inventory of the player, and the opening minutemen faction mission (which seems to double as the power armor tutorial and THIS IS A DEATHCLAW tutorial) is in this bit of
footage. I would also like to point out that, despite my rabid fanboyism, the minutemen squad leader's expressions look like they were carved from a block of wood, and then that block of wood was hot glued above a set of well animated lips.
Anyway, other fun little details...
The mod community has always been strong with Bethesda games. With Fallout 4 their creative ideas will reach beyond PC and into consoles. Modding tools are expected to become available on PC in early 2016, with Xbox One owners getting access to their creations shortly thereafter. Once the modding is thriving on these two platforms, Bethesda hopes to work on extending this content to PlayStation 4 as well, but Howard wasn't comfortable putting a timetable on that.
So the game will be out in four months, but it'll be at least six until we have full toolsets. Boo.
So far Bethesda has only shown off your trusty canine Dogmeat (who Howard confirmed will not be killed off in a cruel fashion)
So Bethesda hasn't gone for the 'Dog dies, everyone cries. We are totes genius at dramtic ritting!' camp of storytelling. At least, not completely. Granted, this probably means that all your companions are made out of giant sponge, but that can be tweaked along later through mods. A storyline death for the dog would have been more problematic.
As you could see in the trailer, Fallout 4 introduces new modes of transportation in the form of the gunship, but Howard says they aren't doing cars or anything as well.
Oh thank God. The way power armor moves will at least feel sort of similar to the way the player moves, so it'll only be as janky and unpredictable as normal walking. Considering Bethesda's track record with horses, I... I'm really glad they didn't try cars. Maybe in the next Fallout.
A list of your settlements will appear in your PipBoy. You can send caravans between the various bases to get your supplies where you want them to be.
This is interesting, not because of what it says, but because of what it doesn't say. It doesn't mention fast travel. This puts a tender bud of hope in my heart that fast travel will be more involved than tapping things out on the pip-boy. Granted, silt striders aren't going to fit, but it shouldn't be too hard to find something more immersive than tapping your wrist and saying ENGAGE in a commanding voice.
Bethesda is tweaking the way auto-scaling works for Fallout 4 to create more challenge. "We call it rubberbanding; we'll have an area [where enemies scale from] level 5 to 10, and then this area will be level 30 and above," Howard says. "You'll run into stuff that will crush you, and you will have to run away."
Translation: We have kept the level scaling pretty much the same. Reasonably good news. We shouldn't see raiders with power armor and
daedric battleaxes miniguns except potentially in areas that make a reasonable amount of sense. I'm not sure why it's called 'rubberbanding' rather than 'common sense in world design', but hey.
V.A.T.S. has received some slight overhauls. It no longer completely pauses the action, and critical shots are no longer random. If you look at the videos, you'll notice a "critical" bar on the bottom of the screen that the player fills. Once it is fully filled you can decide when to use it. Your luck skill determines how fast the bar increases, and there are perks that dig into how criticals work and how you use them.
I'm actually pretty cool with this. I think this sets up an interesting combat mechanic where you chain together kills on weaker mob units and use your critical charge to soften up the mob-boss unit(s). That being said, things could get odd if that crit bar is universal between weapons. Charging it with a normal weapon, then switching to a high power weapon or an AOE weapon for the crit could make for weirdness, exploitation, or epic combat. Have to play it for judgement to be passed.
With the new, built-from-scratch shooting system, Howard says Fallout 4 plays much more like a modern shooter. You can aim down the sights, use V.A.T.S., and play in first or third person.
Uh. Yeah. 'Grats on catching up to the ball as thrown by F:NV half a decade ago. I understand that it's difficult to describe shooting as more than pointing your gun and yelling pew-pew until everyone falls over, but this was a terrible sell. I've seen pistol whipping, I've seen bayonets, I've seen damn good looking recoil (particularly for scoped weapons), so you might want to emphasize that next time. Not "you can aim down the sights".
Fallout 4 has a full weather system that sends radiation storms across the world.
Huh, that could be either really cool or spectacularly annoying. If it's weather that we can see coming and is effected reasonably well by cover (not just loading screens, since he talked about minimizing those), then cool. If it's FO:3 weather, the kind that suddenly fades into storminess with no real warning on the horizon... That might suck. Still, play it and see.
Fallout 4's narrative has a lot more branching paths and overlapping of "if that than this" than Fallout 3. They want the game to handle all the fail states of missions instead of forcing players to reload saves.
Oh good, that seems like an excellent piece of common sense. Branching paths makes me a little suspicious, but I'll go with it. Maybe they learned a good lesson or two from New Vegas.
The extra graphical horsepower provided by the new console gave the team a tech backbone to iterate on its Creation engine and add more dynamic details. Physics-based rendering and volumetric lighting help create more atmosphere in the world, opening the game up to more environmental storytelling.
Translation 1: Dynamic dynamicism in all dynamic layers of the central gameplay dynamics will dynamically leverage player dynamics to create a more dynamic experience.
Translation 2: It means nothing.
Author
Topic: Fallout 4: It Just Works (Read 842361 times)