I would say it’s “tedium” that sounds unappealing to me at higher encounter rates rather than “punishment”. And it’s not just my personal tastes but also what all of their peers were doing with encounter rates, including Wasteland 1 and 2, which I’m sure you know share a lineage with Fallout.

It’s the shoestring budget and development timeline that would leave me to believe that they didn’t intend for it to be dependent on clock speeds. It’s the tabletop roots that made me feel like I got the correct encounter rate while 8 times as many would feel wrong.

By cap, I mean lower bound. I see random encounters. 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 just didn’t have what that person experienced where it felt like too many. In fact, it felt so right to me that I didn’t question that anything might be wrong, but I would if I saw dozens. You’re right: there’s no way they could foresee how fast my CPU would be in 2024 or 2013/2014, so how would their logic still output what feels like an acceptable encounter rate that matches other games in the genre by accident?

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”

What would make sense to me based on how those games played for me, and feel free to contradict me with an interview or some other evidence, is 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. 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. Then again, that person in that reddit thread is playing the same GOG version I did and still recreated that higher encounter rate.

Look, I believe you, but I’ll admit I’m having trouble reconciling a few things about it. If it’s a CPU-bound problem, I’d expect it to get worse as the CPU gets faster, and my PC now is much faster than the one I played Fallout 1 on about a decade earlier, yet my encounter rates were remarkably similar. Not only were they remarkably similar, but they were remarkably similar to every other RPG I’ve played like it, such as Baldur’s Gate and Wasteland 2. Looking at heat maps of encounter rates on a wiki, I definitely had more in the red zones, but it was maybe two encounters per square rather than a dozen, and a dozen sounds miserable; I, too, would come to the conclusion that something was wrong if I saw significantly more encounters than I did. I ran Fallout 1 on Windows back in the day and Fallout 2 via Proton, so we can eliminate that as a variable that may have caused the game to behave differently. A streamer I watch played Fallout 1 for the first time via Fallout CE and had extremely similar encounter rates, and not only are we running very different machines, but surely that project unbound the encounter rates from the CPU. If we’re hitting some kind of cap on encounter rates, why do they all appear to be at about the rate I experienced? And why would we not assume that that cap was the intended design?

If we ignore the part where that person had so many encounters that they came to the conclusion that something was wrong, and 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 as CPUs increased in speed wildly in the course of just a few years back then, it would only make the random encounters in the overworld more of a deterrent against traveling too often.

The good: WB development studios have been limited to making games off of only WB properties for so long. Developers would come up with a pitch or a prototype, but it wasn’t allowed to be an original IP, which was bad for them and Warner Bros., since it made it harder to sell off the video game division by itself. Maybe this will give those devs more freedom.

The bad: We’re rapidly approaching that Bojack Horseman joke where there are only four companies with extremely long hyphenated names, and Netflix doesn’t seem to know what they want to do in the video game space or how to do it. They have an incentive to lock games exclusively behind subscriptions, which is what everyone was afraid Game Pass would do but Nintendo and Netflix are doing this already right now.

Show me a video of a normal encounter rate from the 90s, and I’ll tell you how my experience compared.

Eh, I doubt it, because it didn’t seem like I was seeing too few. They came at an appropriate clip, and the second game even gives you a car to see fewer of them after the halfway point.

Fallout 1 about 10 years ago. Fallout 2 about a year ago.

I’d consider the random events to be a pretty small part of 1 and 2, and a deterrent to frequent travel, alongside the built in time limits.

You could go to Moby games and start using Ctrl+F for the names found on the other Moby games page. That’s what I did. I found like 7 or 8 in common before I stopped. That’s enough on its own for a fun reunion on the set of the TV adaptation of the thing you built 15 years ago.

He’s on Outer Worlds 2 as “Studio Design Director”, as in duties that apply to the entire studio, a studio that works on multiple projects at any given time. He was game director on Pentiment while Outer Worlds 2 was being built. I’m sure he did plenty of actual work on Outer Worlds 2 the same way that my boss helps solve problems I’m having, even though they’re also working with other teams on other projects. He probably also got started on his next main project right after Pentiment wrapped, all while helping out on Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, and Grounded 2.

its pretty much just Sawyer, out of names people might actually know

I knew very few of these people’s names before looking at the credits just now, but I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. There are names on there that you probably didn’t know that worked on both projects.

I don’t think Sawyer was “demoted”. I think he’s just on other projects. Pentiment’s entire development probably fit within Outer Worlds 2’s timeline. I don’t think Bethesda said, “invite everyone who worked on New Vegas” expecting there to be no change in staff in 15 years, but there are still plenty of people from that old project there.

Thanks! But I really do mean it when I say I haven’t come across defenders of 3 over New Vegas, so this was definitely all a new perspective for me, lol. I also think there are a lot of people asking for a new Fallout game that haven’t tried 1 and 2, and I’d love to point more people that way when the topic comes up, or at least to the Wasteland games as a close enough proximity.

A casual look down the MobyGames lists on New Vegas and Outer Worlds 2 still shows a lot of overlap, so probably. It would be weird to invite people who didn’t work on New Vegas to see the realization of a thing they didn’t work on.

Well you folks have been pretty quiet for 15 years. What’s the argument for 3 over New Vegas? Or 3 over 1/2?

I’ve been on gaming forums for a long time, and I honestly can’t recall a single time I saw anything resembling an actual debate that people might like 3 more than New Vegas. I have seen debates of 3 vs. 4 and New Vegas vs. 1/2, but I’ve never come across a debate between people who’ve played more or less the entire series and preferred Bethesda’s games. Maybe that’s you, but this would be the first time.

Just about any game is someone’s favorite, but that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of debate. Fallout 4 and 76 appear to have reached an audience much larger than the rest of the series’ usual standards for copies sold, so the sense I get is that if you’re calling one of those your favorites, you most likely haven’t seen most of the rest of the series. I think 3 and 4 get a lot of criticism that may go too far, but the long and short of it is that the consensus is that Bethesda’s entries are not among the strongest in the series.

“I think fans debate what their favourite one is, which is understandable,” Howard says. “I think it’s great that you can have a lot of factions and the fans say, ‘Oh, I like one or two or three or four, or Vegas or 76’ now, and so I think that’s really healthy for a franchise where people can say which one is their favourite.”

I’m sure Todd’s head canon is that there’s more of a debate than there actually is.

No Avowed or Outer Worlds 2 either, which are high on my personal list. And before someone wants to tell me they were divisive, they both reviewed far better than the likes of To a T or Lost Records.

This game didn’t stand a chance regardless of this incident.

They did a lot of extra work on it without charging for it, and it’s been a long time since they put out a hit. California salaries and real estate are expensive.

I would ordinarily put my top-level thoughts in the “Body” part of the link submission, but I’ve found that a lot of people here only read that box without reading the article, so I’ll put them in a comment here.

“Your company is only as strong as your last game,” says Celia Schilling, marketing director at Yacht Club.

This is true when you’re a single project studio.

By 2024, Yacht Club finally acknowledged that the two-team structure wasn’t working. It laid off some employees to cut expenses and paused development on the Shovel Knight sequel so everyone could work on Mina the Hollower, with Velasco taking over as director. What was once considered a less ambitious side project is now the company’s largest game ever.

My read on this is that the the two-team structure wasn’t the problem, but scope creep was, not to mention the bad fit for initial project direction that they acknowledged elsewhere in the article. I’m quite sure Mina the Hollower will hit their sales target of 200k copies. Hopefully they scale back up responsibly after that.

He’s not, but the context of the interview was him speaking for the team.

But lead level designer Jacob Mikkelsen says he doesn’t regret anything they’ve done so far

Not even the online requirement for accessing most of the game’s features? It’s so needless. To my knowledge, the game doesn’t even have an in-game microtransaction shop to give them an incentive to have you online. At least there’s a community server project, so I feel good about our chances of preserving the game in the future, but it doesn’t make me okay with giving them my money in the present. And it’s a damn shame, because the sandbox they made for Hitman is fantastic.

I would call Avowed the best action game this year, yes. I think a lot of people were let down by the ways that it’s light on RPG systems, expecting it to be a Bethesda style game, but I’d say that, while it’s not 1:1, that game has a lot in common with FromSoft games but without the tense feeling of being against tough odds. If you haven’t played it yet, you’ll see what I mean. There’s also Eternal Strands, which I haven’t played just because there was so much else to play this year, but it’s got some buzz and interesting design ideas behind it.

What do you consider Obsidian? They put out two bangers this year. Does Split Fiction count? They’re at least an order of magnitude under the budget of a marquis Sony game, let alone the likes of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. How about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? The Alters? Dispatch? Have you heard of a little game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? I hear people like that one. (I’m joking. I’ve played it, too. Budget estimates are still in the tens of millions of dollars.) I’m strongly of the opinion that AA is back right now.

Indie games have had a far better hit rate with me since about 2017 or so, but this year, bigger budget games have been more my speed. I agree; there’s no need to stick to those sorts of categories when your favorite can come from anywhere.

Check out Trail Out.

I’d argue live service killed the full package, where the full package used to be single player and multiplayer modes, sometimes multiple of each.

I’ll have to check this out when I return from the holiday weekend. Timesplitters 2 was the game we played when we didn’t have access to Halo, and while that style of FPS was commonplace back then, the industry basically doesn’t make anything like this anymore.

Source? You say I need to provide sources. Where’s yours for this.

It’s in the article that we’re commenting on right now.

“I think some of that work, by nature, because it’s so close to the platform, will have to be SteamOS specific… some publishers or some game developers will have to decide at their own rhythm if they want to do that work for SteamOS or not. But we’ve been trying to help in any way we can along the way.”

I don’t know how this works with Linux software licenses, but it seems to be something that they’re acknowledging they might have to do, somehow.

It is not, on PC at least.

You’re right, I’ve got some double-counting going on in there. According to Mat Piscatella of Circana, 40-50% of all gaming hours on PS5/XS are spent on just the top 10 live service titles. Surely a target demo for the Steam Machine includes a portion of that, but these games really do represent a huge portion of the market, including on PC. You only need one of those games to be a deal-breaker for someone to make them decide that it’s not worth it to use a Steam Machine or switch to Linux. For instance, I’ve got friends that play primarily games that work on Linux, but if Destiny 2 doesn’t work, then they’re out, full stop. For another friend, it might be Battlefield, or what have you.

This number is bullshit probably. If their AC can detect cheaters then they wouldn’t have this issue in the first place. You’re trying to tell me you believe they can accurately count cheaters but are also incapable of stopping them? Yeah…

I don’t know Facepunch’s methodology, or that of their anti-cheat vendor, but often times they like to do bans in waves so as to not give away how the cheaters were caught. Again, given that they’re not the only developer to come to this conclusion, I have no reason to doubt their write-up. I can certainly disagree with how they’ve responded to it though. If it were me, I’d sooner put Linux users on a prisoners’ island or something than to outright just not let them play.

I understand the desire, but then that might have implications on support tickets, advertised system requirements, separate maintenance and optimizations for only one platform, etc. It might be that turning up the FOV even a smidge over their maximum requires a super computer that doesn’t even exist yet, depending on what it has to render and how it works under the hood.

Quite famously, Unity had a reputational problem because of this. Free users were required to show the splash screen, but companies with larger war chests could pay the higher rate to skip it. It led to Unity being associated with low-budget and amateurish games, while higher quality games running on the same engine, which would be better advertising for Unity, tended to not show the logo.

Anti-cheat is not heading toward more support without the intervention described in the article. Whatever that results in. Valve is talking about potentially a SteamOS-specific fix, which I take to mean that they might have to do something at a kernel level that other Linux distros would find unacceptable. “Only” EA, Riot, Epic, Roblox, and Call of Duty is grossly underselling this: that is most of the video game market. It’s not most games, nor is it most publishers, but between those games and publishers, it represents most players, most dollars spent, and most time spent playing video games (at least non-mobile, anyway). It is an enormous hump to get over if you want to make a gaming device appealing to more customers.

The one thing they always say is how few users are on Linux. If that’s true then most of the hackers can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.

Sure it does. As an example, let’s say there are X players for a game in a month, and 3-7% of those are on Linux. If, as Facepunch says, more than half of that 3-7% are cheaters, then including them is doing more harm than good to your cheating problem.

To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they’re culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.

Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game’s composer, as I understand it.

Monopoly has been one of the most popular board games for about a century, and hardly anyone plays by all of the official rules. Once I buy a game, if I want to play with house rules, I should be able to. Putting the sliders and such in game, even with the warning message mentioned above, just makes it easier to do so without having to rely on the community to make mods.

I’m generally with you, but there are implications for the online game and matchmaking in the likes of Dark Souls games. By the time they got to Elden Ring, they seemed to care way less about things like invasions.

All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players’ machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don’t do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.

As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I’ve seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we’re looking for them.

I’m no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who’s red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.

If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)

So the only thing that’s allowed to be speculated is that the companies are perfectly honest and never lie? Yeah, maybe you’re not that reasonable.

A bit of skepticism is healthy, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that independently reporting the same thing from multiple different unaffiliated companies is the truth compared to making up stories about executive meddling or that banning Linux increases the percentage of hackers, based on nothing except your own feelings.

I daily drive Kubuntu. I hate Windows. I have a Windows partition, but I haven’t booted it since December of last year. My next PC won’t have Windows at all. The operating system I use doesn’t change what is actually happening in the real world.

If they can’t stop the hacking on Windows then what the hell is blocking Linux going to do?

It’s going to prevent a more potent vector, which is exactly what they said.