Encrypt-Keeper
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You call it “tedium”, the developers and many classic FO enjoyers called it “immersion”, “living world”, and “fun”.
Wasteland 2 came out 16 years after Fallout, so naturally they aren’t really peers and their design philosophy will be a lot closer than to modern games in that they’re more forgiving.
Wasteland was more of a predecessor to Fallout 1, as the developers were big fans of it and they thought of Fallout as a spiritual successor to Wasteland. Fallout was also designed to be far more punishing in its early game with a steeper power curve, and had a higher focus on the player being a singular, fish out of water character, rather than a capable party like in Wasteland. They also wanted to put more pressure on the player, hence other mechanics like the time limit.
I also faintly recall the creative director of Fallout 1 talking about replaying Wasteland more recently and mentioned needing some kind of limiter to play it because of some issue with movement and other calculations being tied to CPU and/ or FPS. So it’s possible Wasteland has a similar issue, though I wouldn’t know as I’ve never played it.
They didn’t intend for it to be based on clock speeds, they were bound by it. Your subjective opinion and personal taste is what made you feel like you got the correct encounter rate, not developer intention, which as we’ve discussed, would be impossible.
Like what I think you don’t get is that it’s ok that you prefer an encounter rate lower than what the devs intended. They wanted the world to feel dangerous and hostile, and gave you the option to alleviate the encounters through acquirable items and skill point allocations. You prefer the scripted content and want the random encounters to stay out of your way for the most part.
The old Fallout games were meant to feel punishing, to a sometimes unfair degree. That was the style at the time and you’d be surprised just how many games were like that. It was a different time. To circle back, that’s why there is in fact so much debate over all these games. People like different things and the Bethesda games are far, far more forgiving than the originals. Thats why some people like you play the classic games and enjoy the lower encounter rate, and other install restoration mods to restore the higher one.
If random encounters go down as CPUs get faster, my CPU is so much faster than one from the 90s that my random encounters should approach zero, but I had plenty.
I mean some napkin math and averages would tell me that your base clock speed is roughly 8 times faster than the fastest computers they would have tested on. Is 8 times faster truly enough to bring the random event rate to “near zero”? Problably not. And with an old game like this it’s not as easy as just comparing clock speeds because it depends on which CPU you have, do you have Ecores? If so is your computer scheduling it on those or your p cores? And in either case is it using base clock speed or boost clock speed? How do your drivers fit into all this?
There’s also the fact that while the encounter rate is tied to CPU speed it’s not a 1:1 relationship either. The encounter system also factors in tiles, and in game days.
that they built and tested the game on higher end machines than many of their customers had, and that faster CPUs resulted in the correct encounter rate while slower CPUs resulted in dozens.
Like I’ve already said, they accounted for lower CPU clocks at the time. They designed the encounter rate for clock speeds between 200mhz and 450-500mhz, the whole range for the time. You’re also acting like fallout 1 wasn’t a cheap side project half made for free by people working off company hours. It wasn’t some big budget release. Or as if Fallout 2 wasn’t an incredibly rushed game shoved out the door by a financially failing company.
I’d sooner believe that the game working differently at different clock rates was an oversight rather than how they intended for it to work.
It was neither. It was simply an engine limitation they had to account for best they could because the first two games were functionally just tabletop RPGs under the hood that ran on a modified version of GURPS and relied on dice rolls for practically everything. As with anything else in life they designed around the problems they encountered at the time, not some hypothetical distant future scenario they’d have no way to predict.
cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced?
Well it’s clearly not a cap if you’re seeing people having more frequent encounters than you are.
And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?
Because they tied the encounter system to CPU frequency and the highest consumer CPU frequency at the time was like 500mhz. Why on earth would you assume that the developers designed the rate not around what hardware was capable of at the time, but what would be capable 15 years later?
You’re suggesting that the developers got into a room together and said “Let’s design this so that it won’t play the way we intend for it to be played until 15 years pass”
If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong
I wouldn’t ignore it at all, in fact, what they might even be experiencing is the games intended encounter rate which as I told you, is much higher than you think it is. A lot of modern Intel CPUs, especially in laptops, have efficiency cores besides their performance cores, and sometimes have insanely low base clock speeds, we’re talking as low as 200mhz. Given the games age, it’s very possible the game was scheduled on an E core and also wouldn’t boost the clock speed, resulting in the behavior they describe.
if we ignore the distinct possibility that people remembering a higher encounter rate could have been experiencing that due to their CPU spec not being what the developer intended even in the 90s
That’s not a possibility. The developers specifically designed the system with lower spec systems of the time in mind. They actually designed it in such a way that the encounter rate would be reasonable compared to their idea rate on systems with clock speeds as low as 200mhz (Just like our friend above).
Now that user will be experiencing more encounters than even the average player in the 90’s, but it still wouldn’t be outside of the realm of what the devs decided was intended.
Nope, the opposite. From your casual search:
playing unpatched vanilla Fallout 2 will likely REDUCE the number of random encounters (and the time you spend on the map screen, lic) because the game originally tied the travel rate to your hardware.
There’s a reason why most fan restoration patches include logic to increase the number of encounters, to make the game play more like it was when released.
The reason is because they tied to travel system to clock speeds, and modern processors cause your travel speed to be too fast which the random encounter timing system doesn’t account for. People were complaining about this 15 years ago, the problem only would have gotten worse since then.
The GOG versions do not include any fixes for the encounter system.
Your doubt isn’t a factor, it’s just how the game works. Unless both 10 years ago and 1 year ago you replayed them on a computer from the late 90’s, you didn’t get as many random events as were intended. The very fact that you think random events were such a small part of those games also confirms you weren’t getting as many as you were supposed to lol.
Not quiet at all. Lots of people loved 3. I’m old enough to remember when NV was the red headed stepchild of the series. I don’t think you’ve picked up on the fact that New Vegas is a cult hit. It didn’t become “everyone’s favorite “ for close to a decade at least after its release.
“What does FO3 have over New Vegas”? Well at the time New Vegas was regarded as a cheap knockoff of FO3. It didn’t do much to innovate from FO3 and played like more of a Fallout 3.5 which people resented. It also had a less bleak and more “Zany” tone to it than FO3 did which people weren’t a big fan of. Also by that point Bethesda had a bad reputation for releasing buggy games and NV somehow managed to be buggier and more broken than any Bethesda game had been, and what’s worse is it was never even to this day fixed as several major components of the game remain completely broken without fan patches.
Like being able to return games? That was to comply with an Australian law, and it was just easier to implement it for everyone than just do it for Australia specifically.
Well you say that but Sony also has an online game marketplace that operates in Australia.
I don’t know how it works in Australia, but in the U.S. their return policy is not nearly as generous as Steam’s. In fact it Sony’s return policy only really exists on paper. In reality they don’t really do returns at all.
Well an assassin kills his targets. He doesn’t kill every innocent bystander he sees. In the first game, the guard enemies you see are your colleagues who are fully under the impression that you are a traitor who killed the empress. They are functionally your enemies during the game, but they are ultimately the good guys.
The rebel leaders, especially the admiral are going to complain about you killing who are also basically his men.
It was unfortunately a product of its time where moral systems ultimately amounted to binary good guy/bad guy outcomes which was the style at the time. The system was designed to make you want to play it twice. If you’re used to the more modern moral ambiguity in today’s RPGs I don’t think anyone can blame you for disliking it.
Little Nightmares 1 & 2. Cosmic horror very well executed. No real lore is ever given to you besides what you are shown through your travels and what little environmental storytelling exists.
Everything is vaguely familiar but off. Distorted, but in a way that you’re never quite sure whether everything in the world is supposed to be like that, or if something happened to make it that way. In fact, it’s not even officially cosmic horror. There is no Cthulhu-esque big bad revealed to be behind it all. The visuals of the games could even just be interpreted as on -the-nose allegory and metaphor, with a fairytale like quality, if not for the subtle hints at a prior normality in the background.
Who seriously believes that?
If an artist consents to the use of their song in a specific way, it’s not a matter of belief at all. It just is tacit approval. So when the government does this without consent, until the moment the artist responds, the implication is that the artist has approved it. Which isn’t as big a deal if a private entity does it, but it’s a much bigger deal when the federal government does it.
The current government strategy of illegal use of copyrighted materials, often with the full understanding that the artist/IP owners will not consent to it should really have a harsher punishment to it. The DHS social media pages in particular keep using songs without artist permission because they know it will be taken down but by that point it doesn’t matter and they just steal another song. Given that the use of these songs implies tacit approval from the artist, this should absolutely count as the rights of the artists to free speech are being infringed upon.
They are inherently a sweat fest by their very nature and they appeal to a crowd that enjoys high risk high reward gameplay. Theres nothing wrong with you for not being into it. Not everybody’s dream job is being a fireman and running into burning buildings before lunch either.
But it’s one of those niche genres that scratch an itch that more casual games don’t.
I hear the game is supposed to be fun so I suppose I should give it a shot. But styling they give the characters and weapons, essentially junk weapons and raiders from Fallout wearing whatever goofy scrap they can find puts me so far off. Like not everything has to be perfectly tacticool but like, something closer to the Metro series would be dope
I saw a post saying it’s untrue but their only evidence seemed to be that their Target had not removed anything g last time they checked. Meanwhile I have seen a half dozen posts from employees and customers showing the Xbox stuff being removed. A month from now I’m sure it’ll be clearer on what’s happened.
The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.
I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.
Company gets a cut of every game sold, gets exponentially more customers that use your infrastructure on a day to day basis, meanwhile the price of games stays the same for 20 years and game development cycles get longer while games and infrastructure gets more expensive to make.
I wonder how Valve hasn’t gone bankrupt.
I don’t. Valve is in a super sweet spot in the market and their near-monopoly on PC game sales and lean business model gives them a lot of breathing room that Companies like Sony don’t have. Some benefits Valve has:
- They don’t need to worry about R&D of exclusive hardware often sold at a loss just to capture a user base. Valve has dipped its toes into hardware now, but even if its competitors eat some of its market share, those users will still buy games from Steam. On the other hand If people buy an Xbox instead of a PlayStation, Sony just loses out on the customers.
- Valve doesn’t have to operate a number of first and second party game studios to churn out increasingly more expensive games.
- Steam being a storefront on another company’s operating system means it can rely on external infrastructure to handle user services in many of its games.
- Valve is a privately owned company so they have a lot more wiggle room to tread water and “stay afloat” when necessary and aren’t being driven to an ever-increasing profitability targets year after year.
Valve literally can’t charge you for their user services because you’re not stuck on their hardware. The very moment they do, they’ll lose all the user goodwill that has made them the default in their space and everybody can just pack up and move to another storefront or even just pirate their games. Valve has to eat those costs at the expense of everything else.”, they have no choice.
Sony didn’t need that infrastructure in the first place. Things worked great before they charged simply for you to play online
What you’re both failing to grasp here is that the infrastructure existed when it was free. They always needed the infrastructure, and it always cost money. There is no “before”. They were just eating the costs as a marketing strategy to attract Xbox players who at the time had to pay for Xbox Live.
As console adoption increased, so did the cost of the infrastructure and the salaries of the many people it takes to maintain it, it just wasn’t feasible to provide those services for free when it cost so much money to maintain.
it was foolish to start paying PS in the first place when literally every other console had free multi-player
Every other console did not have free multiplayer. Xbox Live always cost money.
You don’t buy… the fact that infrastructure that has to scale to millions of users globally, and the salaries of the many employees who maintain it cost money…? Buddy that shit costs literal millions a year.
Nintendos online user services were never free. They went from not having them, to having them and charging money.
And yes Steam is eating a metric shit ton of costs to give you those services for free. Because PCs are an open platform, they have to compete to keep you on their storefront. They eat all those costs because you don’t have to buy new hardware in order to switch.
These are very, very simple concepts you’re failing to grasp.
Yes, charging customers for a product that costs you money to maintain is an excuse, and a valid one. Sony and Nintendo were giving away an expensive service for free to the user. It was generous, and a way to reduce friction with onboarding new users.
They jumped on board because maintaining that infrastructure has become exponentially more expensive to maintain today than it was 20 years ago.
I don’t even know why you’d have a problem with Xbox charging more for their subscription when you already argue for paid online.
Because unlike paid user services, game ownership is not something that costs them any money. They aren’t recouping their costs for a service they provide, it’s just rentseeking.
I remember when GamePass was first announced and everybody lauded Microsoft for being “pro-consumer” and outright cheered when they started buying up independent studios.
I remember being downvoted to oblivion for pointing out the very obvious 5 year plan for GP and the fact that it would go… exactly the way it’s currently going.
I’m so glad my medieval loving brethren are getting their so long awaited game.
But the bad news for me is this means probably yet another decade of trying to finish a game of Empire before the crashing brings my campaigns to a halt lol