this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Currently re-visiting Fallout 4 and reflecting on Skyrim, it's kind of weird how much work goes into them, to then make their stories terrible and have other problems.
I think about how when I played Skyrim without fast travel I really appreciated the way the land rises and falls and there's clear changes of biomes, with travelers on the road and inns about a days walk in between towns. Then you can just fast travel wherever ignoring that.
In Fallout 4 provisioners don't walk in a straight line from Settlement to Settlement, they tack cross country to the nearest road and then follow that as close to the settlement they can then again go cross country. It's such a nice realistic touch that 99% of players will never see.
The worlds Bethesda designed, outside of Starfield, are truly gorgeous and you can tell whoever made them put a lot of love in. The writing has been done by Emil Pagliarulo, who is an incompetent hack
wait what's wrong with the worlds on Starfield... bahahaha nevermind I can't even post that with /s
The trick is that they're all built on the same tech iteratively, so production load gets eased by the inhouse tools =) but it is still a lot of work to make a trash game...
Do people actually travel the roads organically in Skyrim? Dunno if I ever saw one, just random highway bandit encounters maybe. I love the Living Desert mod for NV so I dig that stuff.
I don't think they travel organically in Skyrim but if you hit an encounter spawn point you can generate a Noble or something travelling to a certain area. But in Fallout 4, provisioners and trade caravans do make their circuits, and you can follow them.
I've been playing a lot of Fallout 4 lately and honestly there's a lot of under-utilized good stuff in there, that had a better developer like Obsidan had a chance to make another Fallout game, it would have been phenomenal.
Instead, they made The Outer Worlds 😒
Obsidian are nowhere near the same company that put out new vegas.
Avowed got delayed to Feb 2025, it also looked poor the last time I viewed a trailer
Yeah I mean something like abducting the Obsidian team via time machine after they've finished New Vegas but before it was released, to make them make a sequel derived from Fallout 4's build.
Josh Sawyer is still making cool games. A lot of the other people who worked on FONV are retired or working somewhere else at this point.
Edit:
I mostly mean Pentiment lol
I'm not a Josh fan, the main writer left to write Horizon Zero Dawn after being forced out of Obsidian, Avelone well he's freelance still iirc.
Obsidian haven't really done anything great in a while and they lack good writing. It's also not a great place to work under as far as i've heard. I don't expect them to do much better after Pillars 2 was disappointing and a lot of their games under performing.
Avowed looks like a skyrim clone and I am not a skyrim fan
This doesn't surprise me at all
I'm pretty sure it's not even going to be a good Skyrim clone at this rate lol
It's going to be a cut down Skyrim, not sure if it's open world. The last reveal trailer looked like it's going to be poor, barely showed off dialog either and that's a bad sign when they crow on about choice and consequence in the marketing spiel.
I'm thinking Fallout 4:Starfield::The Outer Worlds:Avowed if that makes sense (not that I've played Starfield though, lol)
Don't the traveling salesmen in FO3 do that as well?
Probably I think the Couriers did it in Oblivion.
The amazing thing with Fallout 4 Provisioners is you tell them which two places to visit, and they will gowhenever possible via the roads on the map to get there. So, it's more dynamic than this guy walks from point A to B to C and so on.
Outcasts and traders do in 3. There are a few other roaming npc squads
Bethesda has really good environmental designers, they're the only department (idk if they actually have one organizationally) that has consistently delivered
i feel like sometimes this is meant disparagingly like they don't have respect for their work, but the tiny amounts of 'extra' illusion players see matter a lot for perception. i mean you're talking about it here, and if they'd use less 'immersive' solutions people would probably cite it as reasons they found it unconvincing
Mainly I'm just disparaging fast travel (the click on a map and instantly appear there version, Fallout actually has fast travel options that are good in the Vertibird and Institue relay). Like you miss the details in the environment layout or people going about there business if you just instantly appear at the mission site.
i'm fast travel agnostic, i appreciate well thought out trips between places manually but it's also hard to have patience for back-and-forth tomfoolery, depending on the size of the map. for example Vvardenfel is a pretty good size that fast-travel limits don't feel agonizing but the Tamriel Rebuilt map added on top of it? i've resorted to some mad transportation schemes (custom jump+slowfall spells, tricked out levitates) which also don't feel like you're respecting the journey and care put into the environment as you leapfrog through it
I'm not anti-fast travel. But I don't like the later Bethesda games version of just clicking on a spot on the map and instantly going there.
I really liked Morrowind, because while it had fast travel, it felt organic and you could play with it a bit. Like it makes sense for a powerful spellcaster to just mark and recall back to their base. Casting Almsivi intervention when you're lost in the wilderness or just finished a dungeon. Zapping instantaneously between cities via mage travel for important political business. Have to travel to an Island you've never been to? Okay time to plan an across land journey by Silt Strider and then boat.
The former means they often scrimp on the little details the later had. Like Skyrim had Wagons from hold and the odd boat. But there's no reason for example that Court mages couldn't teleport you from city to city. Having to have a stop in neutral Whiterun if you wanted to jump from Imperial to Stormcloak territory. Or that wagons couldn't stop at all the little Taverns and villages. That boats could sail you along the coasts to certain spots.
i like it when its diagetic to an extent but there's good reasons to not put an immersive way to transport at locations but still the player has to go there. balancing that with players not getting frustrated is a big pickle: 2 examples
Mojave Outpost in FNV, the corner of the map makes sense, not having a bus or teleporter makes sense, but you still have to go there a couple times and its a long fucking walk if you do it manually. i'd use console commands if i had to walk down/up that goddamn road more than once to discover the marker
Morag Tong headquarters in morrowind: ridiculous location that makes the finding of them kinda fun, but then your mark is going to live there on pain of going through 6 stupid vivec city areas to get back
I think the latter is something Bethesda has improved on. Most dungeons have a quick exit. But also, a lot of bases/settlement. Like Vault 88 in fallout 4. The main entrance is in the middle of nowhere in a radioactive quarry with a slow vault door, but you can unlock another exit that is slipping out of a Chemist shop, Northeast of Jaimaca plains.
that's a really interesting illustration of how weird the fast-travel conversation is, isn't it? like it's an infringement on "realism" if you can magically zap between locations, but a random convenient trapdoor that doesn't have to account for how big the vault map is or the geology of the area is totally accepted
when i fast travel i just think it's a cut in the film and nothing note worthy happens as i normally made a trip. it generally fulfills the believability for a food meter and game time to change. i can accept that not everyone will find that to be enough illusion, but my point is we're all functioning on a level of it, which has a relationship to real world circumstances. real places take hours to get between, it's completely unfeasible for a videogame, so we're all operating on a plane of 'what am i willing to believe'
I think could synthesize convenience with realism with smart fast travel. Like in the Mojave Outpost Example. A fast travel option might be asking the NCR garrison at Primm to escort you up. It makes sense it would be uneventful then. Silt Stridors make sense because Morrowind was a functional society and it was just like catching a greyhound bus.
Because I think it really ties also into what you're fast travelling about. There wasn't really montage in LOTR where Gandalf travelled back and forth from Edoras and Minis Tirith to buy alchemy ingredients from the same two vendors. Which is turn probably more a gameplay problem I guess.
I'm going to keep coming back to Morrowind, but zapping back and forth between Guild halls felt easy and cosmopolitan. Like I can believe this important person would utlize teleporting this way. But then having to go to Dagon Fel or somewhere felt like having to catch a series of connecting flights to the middle of nowhere, it did make it feel like a challenge.
i completely get this but it's felt weird for this to work on a magic-senseless barbarian character yknow? you can buy scrolls but it seems like mechanic creep into the roleplay kinda. i'm sure somebody has played morrowind as a nord magickless strength guy but if it isn't viable for everyone it feels like an imposition. giving me the option to accomplish the game with 4 hours more of walking is not what i consider good game design lol
I'm really jerking Morrowind off today. But that's another thing Morrowind did well. It had multiple redundant fast travels. You want to get to Vivec? You can arrive by boat, by magic or by Silt Stridor.
Also where Fallout 4 was almost getting there. The Brotherhood had the Vertibirds and the Institute had the Relay. The minutemen and the Railroad however were kind of lacking (unless you destroy the brotherhood with them). Like they should have had their own fast travel system too. Like the Railroad has underground tunnels to bypass thing. The Minutmen can transport you by wagon between settlements. Something like that. Especially as it had a survival mode without fast travel.
That makes me think about how ESO is the best post-morrowind Elder Scrolls content, because despite all its problems it has the creative freedom to do weird things and go to all the cool places that the mainline games rarely if ever touch on, without Emil and Todd mucking it up with their complete and utter lack of vision and taste.