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Videogames 2023: Dreams of the Sandbox Kings


IlyaP
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8 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Can someone please deliver @Luzifer's right hand some kind of award for what I have declared to be The Finest Post of 2023. They've earned it and I wish to give unto them the highest of high fives! 

:D 

Years ago I read a review which called Fallout 3 Oblivion with guns and that stuck with me. Although I feel Fallout 3 is a better RPG than Fallout 4 and Fallout New Vegas is the best one by far. 

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4 hours ago, Toth said:

Mmh... I don't think that's fair. You have to imagine that this is not our future, but an alternative world where society has never moved on from the 50s culturally and aesthetically. That combined with a heavy dosis of Jetsons future. Admittedly, if that's not your cup of tea, that's alright as well. I must admit, when looking at life action adaptations of the setting, I do find it exceptionally silly as well, but oddly when playing the games it didn't really strike me as that tonally out of place. However much Bethesda's take on the setting is "rubble themed amusement park".

Its exactly this, that time period is an outright turn off to me - not just something I don't really enjoy. If the gunplay or skill tree had grabbed me more it might have got past that, but so far it just felt like I was going to be starved for ammo or using weapons I wasn't enjoying so that didnt do it either.

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4 hours ago, Toth said:

Mmh... I don't think that's fair. You have to imagine that this is not our future, but an alternative world where society has never moved on from the 50s culturally and aesthetically. That combined with a heavy dosis of Jetsons future. Admittedly, if that's not your cup of tea, that's alright as well. I must admit, when looking at life action adaptations of the setting, I do find it exceptionally silly as well, but oddly when playing the games it didn't really strike me as that tonally out of place. However much Bethesda's take on the setting is "rubble themed amusement park".

I really like the kitsch 50's aesthetic of Fallout. Actually Fallout 4 doesn't really lean on it very much and I think it has been used far more effectively in previous games. New Vegas' setting was far more interesting and even bits of Fallout 3 really stood out as a good use the idea.

4 just seems like a hodge podge of ideas mushed together into a brown goop. Which ironically is what the world actually looks like. Its incredibly ugly. 

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13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

4 just seems like a hodge podge of ideas mushed together into a brown goop. Which ironically is what the world actually looks like. Its incredibly ugly. 

That's a more accurate description of Fallout 3 or New Vegas, which even had desaturation filters applied to them (green for the former, brown for the latter) to make the colours look washed out because that was supposedly more post-apocalyptically. Mods which remove them (and add modern lighting effects) make them look much better and much richer.

Fallout 4 and 76 never had that problem, they're both very colourful games which go to some lengths to make the reds, blues and greens pop in a way they never did in the earlier games. Graphically and in terms of visual design they're streets ahead of the two earlier games, even if the two earlier games arguably had better writing and storylines.

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2 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Fallout 4 and 76 never had that problem, they're both very colourful games which go to some lengths to make the reds, blues and greens pop in a way they never did in the earlier games. Graphically and in terms of visual design they're streets ahead of the two earlier games, even if the two earlier games arguably had better writing and storylines.

I'm not sure what game you are playing, I have put many many hours into Fallout 4 and it is overwhelmingly brown and grimy. It's hard to think of many locations that could be described as 'colourful'

Fallout 3 I would recall as being mostly kinda grey green actually. 

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4 hours ago, karaddin said:

I tried playing it recently as well and bounced off completely. I think for me part of the problem is the aesthetic of the technology just does not appeal to me at all. I looked at the TV during the opening and thought "this civilization has hovering robots but their TVs are still 14 inch fishbowl CRTs even decades in the future from 2022?" and it bothered me lol.

25 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Its exactly this, that time period is an outright turn off to me - not just something I don't really enjoy. If the gunplay or skill tree had grabbed me more it might have got past that, but so far it just felt like I was going to be starved for ammo or using weapons I wasn't enjoying so that didnt do it either.

Totally fair if the aesthetic doesn't work for you. The series does (mostly) justify it though. The first big point of divergence between our timeline and the Fallout timeline (though there are a few minor ones before this) is that the transistor was never invented until the 2060s. This meant that technology remained stuck at the analog level and never developed past that, except in odd bursts of ways that didn't involve digital computing. Granted, that doesn't really explain why fashion never changed either (there's some mentions that technological stagnation led to societal stagnation, which I don't really buy); but at the end of the day it's all just because the original game's developers wanted to satirize the 1950s vision of the future. 

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The intro to Fallout 4 did give some background, but if that particular detail was mentioned I missed it so that does give a little at least. But yeah, that doesn't address the aesthetic preference, just makes the development make a bit more sense. 

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19 minutes ago, karaddin said:

The intro to Fallout 4 did give some background, but if that particular detail was mentioned I missed it so that does give a little at least. But yeah, that doesn't address the aesthetic preference, just makes the development make a bit more sense. 

I really disliked FO4 myself, so I don't remember. I agree that it can get old fast if the '50s aesthetic is too prominent. Which is one of the reasons I thought New Vegas was the best of the 3D Fallout games. Sure the strip was all-in on it, but the NCR and Caesar's Legion were completely different vibes. I really appreciated the effort to show what a post-post-apocalyptic society going through a full rebuild might look like; as opposed to everyone just living in '50s rubble the way FO3 and FO4 are.

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4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I'm not sure what game you are playing, I have put many many hours into Fallout 4 and it is overwhelmingly brown and grimy. It's hard to think of many locations that could be described as 'colourful'

Perhaps something is wrong with your TV or monitor settings?

Calling Fallout 4 "brown and grimy" is simply incorrect, unless you've spent the entire game in the radioactive crater in the south-west. Some people bitched so much about how colourful FO4 was that they even went and made mods to desaturate the colours to make it look more like FO3. I can find dozens internet posts even now from people discussing how colourful it is and complaining it was too colourful.

Is it the most colourful, eye-popping game of all time? No. But compared to (unmodded) Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, it's a total acid trip through candy land. I did a full Fallout 3 replay followed by a full Fallout 4 replay a few months later and the visual difference between the two was staggering.

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2 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Perhaps something is wrong with your TV or monitor settings?

Calling Fallout 4 "brown and grimy" is simply incorrect, unless you've spent the entire game in the radioactive crater in the south-west. Some people bitched so much about how colourful FO4 was that they even went and made mods to desaturate the colours to make it look more like FO3. I can find dozens internet posts even now from people discussing how colourful it is and complaining it was too colourful.

Is it the most colourful, eye-popping game of all time? No. But compared to (unmodded) Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, it's a total acid trip through candy land. I did a full Fallout 3 replay followed by a full Fallout 4 replay a few months later and the visual difference between the two was staggering.

Honestly I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve played Fallout 4 on 2 PCs and a PlayStation and it’s a grimy experience.

Just go look at any screenshot in a google search and tell me the word that comes to mind is colourful. 

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9 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Honestly I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve played Fallout 4 on 2 PCs and a PlayStation and it’s a grimy experience.

Just go look at any screenshot in a google search and tell me the word that comes to mind is colourful. 

Or I can base that on thousands of hours of playing through the entire franchise multiple times, modded and not, and the many thousands of comments on the Internet all agreeing on the same, stone-cold inarguable fact, that Fallout 4 is a much more colourful game than Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.

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We’ve all played some of the fallout games, that’s why we’re here; most of us are familiar with fallout 4 it seems and it’s no secret that the game is very bright and very colourful. From the red of mass fusion to the green of the highway overpasses, it’s never taken on a bleak look...This is where fallout 4 comes in, in a genre defined by a lack of colour, it’s very bright. It plays for an atmosphere of misery in the wasteland and the game plays to develop a sense of hope though that feeling of disparity is lost when it feels like an arcade cabinet among all the fluorescent greens, bright reds and ocean blues.

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In summary, Fallout 4 felt like it went from a grimdark land of violence and war, to a big vomit rainbow junkyard of broken 50's appliances people just happen to live in.

 

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I really like the colors. The Fallout 3 vibe was that the world ended, but Fallout 4 feels like the world ended once, but the world just won't die, and is alive again.

 

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Fallout 4 was too colourful, Bethesda went from one extreme to the other with it really. 3 is fucked though sometimes I'm playing within the DC ruins & the entire screen is composed of grey, proper dull.

 

 
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18 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Honestly I have no idea what you are talking about. I’ve played Fallout 4 on 2 PCs and a PlayStation and it’s a grimy experience.

Just go look at any screenshot in a google search and tell me the word that comes to mind is colourful. 

Every Fallout game is an inherently grimy experience.

I agree with Wert that, of the three modern Fallout games, Fallout 4 is the most colorful.  A huge chunk of it is still drab wasteland, though, just like every other game in the series.

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21 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Arguing that Fallout 4 is more colourful than other Fallout games is not the same as saying the game is colourful. 

Fundamentally it's still a Fallout game.  I'm not sure what they could possibly do to make one of these games significantly more colorful when the vast majority of the plant life is dead and most of the buildings have been decaying for decades if they weren't outright destroyed.

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1 minute ago, briantw said:

Fundamentally it's still a Fallout game.  I'm not sure what they could possibly do to make one of these games significantly more colorful when the vast majority of the plant life is dead and most of the buildings have been decaying for decades if they weren't outright destroyed.

Which is why it’s so weird that Werthead seems convinced it’s a ‘colourful’ game.

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20 minutes ago, briantw said:

I'm not sure what they could possibly do to make one of these games significantly more colorful when the vast majority of the plant life is dead and most of the buildings have been decaying for decades if they weren't outright destroyed.

 

I'm not saying Fallout should borrow this vibe, but... we've all seen Fury Road, right. 


 

 

Anyway, I bought and started Roadwarden, a text-based (mostly- most areas are represented by a  ) RPG from last year. The premise is basically you're a newly hired travelling warden sent to an isolated area to, on the face of it, keep it safe, but actually also to scout it out for some merchant's guilds to bring it in to the fold, so to speak. Plus your own personal motive you can select. So throughout you balance your actions against those three things, how they might blow back on you, deal with the local prejudices and tangles of power, etc. Also: try not to die. Apparently it's pretty grimdark. 

 

Only just got going, but it's atmospheric at least. Not the kind of game I usually go for, but let's see. 

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I decided to check out Atomic Heart since it's on Gamepass, which I signed up for recently because I got an urge to replay the Gears of War games (sadly I forgot that Gears 2 and 3 are not on the service), and finally get around to finishing the fifth one.  My previous PC crapped out when I was about a third of the way through it.  

Atomic Heart is weird.  Visually, it looks incredible.  The art design is awesome.  The combat is a bit clunky, but reminiscent enough of BioShock, which the game is so obviously attempting to ape.  It very much feels like a Soviet BioShock.

But the writing...my god it's dog shit.  It's so bad.  Cringeworthy bad.  The main character sucks.  He's constantly quipping, which would be fine except they're never, ever funny quips.  This feels like Russian BioShock fan fiction written by a team of fifteen year old boys.  Also, would it have killed them to give the Russian main character in this game set in Russia a Russian accent?  He sounds so generically American that it's annoying.  I'd switch to Russian language with subtitles, but the subtitles are so goddamn small (and no, you can't change it) that I'd have absolutely no idea what the fuck was going on if I went that route.

It's just a shame that a game that's so visually gorgeous is saddled with such shoddy writing.  

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4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Arguing that Fallout 4 is more colourful than other Fallout games is not the same as saying the game is colourful. 

I do kinda get what he means. I've been mucking around with Fallout 3 and 4 recently, and F3's colors seem far more muted and desaturated than that of F4. This is perhaps a bit crude of a way to go about it, but I put two screenshots side by side, Fallout 3 on the left, Fallout 4 on the right. Megaton City, compared to Sanctuary, is almost id Software levels of brown circa Quake and Quake 2. Sanctuary by contrast has a bit more vibrancy and color variety. 

That would be how I would express the difference. Apparently, however, there was a lot of internal discussion at Bethesda over...uh...th-the color green. Imagine being the fly on the wall for *those* conversations. It's like going to a hardware store to get paint and discovering there's 189,000 different shades of white, because reality is cruel and confusing. 

As a recent newcomer to the Fallout games, I do find that Fallout 4 has a bit wider range of color diversity and vibrancy than Fallout 3, which, so far, strikes me as being rather muted and desaturated when compared to Fallout 4 (to which the only mod I applied was the dialogue fixer, to get rid of the weird native dialogue option wheel...thing, that I found unpleasant). 

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Can someone please tell me why Jedi: Fallen Order is such a highly rated game? The level design is SHOCKING. Like something I'd expect of a 90s game.

Every level is a goddamn labyrinth, it's like you need a ball of thread to find your way out. And the Holomap is USELESS.

Every hour or so you get some fun lightsaber combat but 90% is just running around trying to find your way out and constantly ending back where you started.

I'm gonna try YouTube to get out of this mess for the 2nd time, but if I get stuck a 3rd time I'm quitting. Thank naff I didn't pay anything for this game.

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4 hours ago, Darryk said:

Can someone please tell me why Jedi: Fallen Order is such a highly rated game? The level design is SHOCKING. Like something I'd expect of a 90s game.

Every level is a goddamn labyrinth, it's like you need a ball of thread to find your way out. And the Holomap is USELESS.

Every hour or so you get some fun lightsaber combat but 90% is just running around trying to find your way out and constantly ending back where you started.

I'm gonna try YouTube to get out of this mess for the 2nd time, but if I get stuck a 3rd time I'm quitting. Thank naff I didn't pay anything for this game.

The holo-map is admittedly fairly terrible, but the levels, from what I recall, tended to have a circular design to them, where going through the level would ultimately take Cal to a ledge or something that was near the entrance, and thus make it easier to get back to the Mantis. Interestingly, Shadows of the Empire and Jedi Outcast were cited as inspirations when making the game. 

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