I miss the day when Fallout 4 announced and then release in just a few months. Ever since FO76, they’ve been announcing stuff waaaaaay ahead of schedule. Kinda kill the excitement.
I would love for a big franchise or studio to just drop their next big hit some day with zero leadup. HL3 would be perfect for it - just pop it up on the steam homepage and see what happens.
I feel like FromSoft did that somewhat recently but I could be misremembering.
I don’t think it was quite a silent launch, but more like a game announcement the day of or the day before it came out. I could be thinking of a different studio though.
They just started on Fallout 5!? They should already be done with it by now…
Checks notes
Fallout 4 was released over a decade ago. What is wrong with these studious.
Bethesda is effectively 1 studio, and they all depend on Todd Howard to make creative decisions. A lot of their issue with output is based on how efficiently they can use Todd’s time.
Plus, a lot of the time since Fallout 4 was spent developing Starfield
That’s not sustainable. If something happens to Howard, the studio is fucked
From the official press release:
Our teams are now developing The Elder Scrolls VI and Fallout 5 on Creation Engine 3…
Fuck!
Well… At least it’s going to be moddable I guess, so we’ll wait a year after launch for the community to fix the game’s issues.
I don’t see how this is a bad thing?
It barely works and fell way behind competing engines. I don’t see them retrofitting it into something that feels appropriately modern and stable, because they couldn’t with Starfield.
But it’s what makes their games unique. I’d hate to see them lose that by switching to a generic, widely used engine like unreal.
The outer worlds 2 already exists if you want a starfield-like game on a modern engine with fancy graphics. As does avowed if you want the same for skyrim.
The charm of Bethesda games (at least for me) has always been that they’re these big sandbox games with huge levels of interactability and moddability. How almost every item has a physical presence with (albeit oftentimes janky) physics that can be toyed with and manipulated. That level of interactabilty is something you don’t really see often in games these days. (Its something I really love about Larian games also)
It’s always been what made a Bethesda game a bethesda game to me and I’m glad to see they’re sticking with it. I just hope they’re able to polish and further refine the creation engine without just blindly chasing better graphics. Graphical fidelity isn’t everything.
I did enjoy Outer Worlds 1/2 as the Bethesda-esque space-faring with stable code (and more of a soul, honestly). Avowed doesn’t really scratch that itch. It started life as an Elder Scrolls competitor but became more of a combat game taking inspirations from a few different places and landing on a whole new satisfying first person fantasy combat model.
I understand the fantasy of how systemic Bethesda’s games promise you that they are, but I personally never see it manifest beyond putting a bucket on a shopkeeper’s head so he can’t see you steal anything. Larian’s engine delivers on the sandbox nature that Bethesda games long promised, and I think Larian is now the one to beat. I’m not rooting for Bethesda to switch to Unreal, but I was rooting for them to time travel back to right after Fallout 4 came out so that they could start work on a new engine that doesn’t break in a light breeze, delivers on the sandbox nature that they promise, and holds up to semi-modern technology. As it stands, I think I’m far more interested in Warhorse’s new Lord of the Rings game, because they did design their tech stack to replicate the strengths of Bethesda’s design, and they had better quest design, too.
I can’t imagine a fallout game where I can’t fill a bathtub full of old world money or an elder scrolls game where I can’t fill an entire room with sweetrolls
Edit: Thought I’d leave this here - https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/eqg4eg/ever_wonder_how_many_sweet_rolls_can_be_piled_on/
Do you seriously think that Unreal Engine has gotten a complete rebuild with every version? Software gets upgraded and adapted, not thrown away. Get over it
Man, I’ve tried repeatedly to get into Fallout 4. I’m always stymied by the lackluster dialogue. Inevitably, I lose my motivation to play, and end up uninstalling it. It just doesn’t have what I’m looking for, in terms of story, characterization, and immersion. I was a big fan of the first two, and have fond memories of 3 and New Vegas, but I doubt I’ll be buying another Fallout game from Bethesda.
So new games are still ten years away? Five years away?
With no insider information, Elder Scrolls VI probably comes 2028 or 2029, as that’s about what Bethesda’s cadence is. That would make Fallout 5 somewhere around 2033 or 2034.
Whatever Fallout Obsidian is doing is happening now, not after the next Elder Scrolls game is done.
Might not be Fallout 5 — Obsidian’s last Fallout game was Fallout: New Vegas, which I’d consider mainline, even if it fit between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and didn’t get a number.
Todd finally looked up and saw the guillotine. Now he’s panicking and promising the world to the Xbox Deathsquad.
I bet it’ll be a live service 🙄
They’ve already got one of those, Fallout 76. They’ve kept it going, and it’s probably even profitable at this point thanks to the TV show, but I doubt they’ve got the appetite for another one of those right now.
I doubt that they’re going to do a live service thing either, but at least part of the problem was, as I recall from postmortems, that they didn’t have people with experience doing network games going into it and figured that multiplayer capability would be easy to retrofit in. That generally isn’t the case — if you want to permit client-side prediction, to keep the game responsive, which you probably do, then your engine has to support rolling back all state in the event of a misprediction. Like, say my client predicts that another player character keeps walking straight, doesn’t push any keys. Given that, it calculates that the rifle grenade I just fired sails past them and hits a monster and kills it, preventing it from afflicting me with a poisoned status.
Then it gets a new update. Actually, it turns out that a while back, that player veered to the right, right into the path of that rifle grenade, and it hit him and killed him. The player is no longer alive. The monster that my rifle grenade would have hit is not actually dead, and so it survived and afflicted me with poison. All of that world state needs to be rolled back and recalculated (and this rollback done efficiently). That means that you can’t just leave any state about the world anywhere that doesn’t get rolled back.
Plus, Fallout has a scripting engine, Papyrus, and if it has any state stored, that has to be rolled back too.
That’s not so hard to do if you think about it from the get-go, and are careful about how you store state. But if you’ve been writing a purely-single-player game for decades and not thinking about any of this, it’s easy to stick state somewhere that doesn’t get rolled back. And that’s gonna manifest in all kinds of unpleasant ways during runtime, when you occasionally hit corner cases.
IIRC, they had to bring in network game people to help out.
But my guess is that that’s also something of a one-off effort to fix most of that. Like, I doubt that doing Fallout 76 2 would be as bad technically as Fallout 76.
That being said, I’m not really looking for a live service game myself, and I doubt that it’s what they’re doing. Plus, from a business standpoint, if you already have a live service game, I suspect that you’re probably better off just extending the existing game and leveraging the existing player base than starting from scratch.
I could potentially be interested in a Fallout 3 Remaster. I know a lot of people prefer New Vegas but 3 was my fave and I’d love to revisit it sometime.
I’d play a remaster of 3. Hell I’d play a remaster of just about any Fallout game.
Or any Bethesda game in general really. I like what they do.
Honestly, if they just ported a lot of their games into newer versions of the Creation Engine like they did with Skyrim Special Edition but with higher end textures that’d be pretty sweet