Fallout 4... is coming (10 Nov 2015)

[TheFeniX]

The first game I played which, while technically allowing for a 32-bit OS, essentially required a 64-bit OS was APB in 2010. That was the wake-up call that slumming it with 32-bit XP was no longer viable for a PC gamer; from 2010 onward it's been "64-bit or go home." The Xbox360/PS3 generation artificially retarded the adoption of more modernized PC games because of the protracted length of that console generation and its utterly antiquated hardware necessitating that remotely modern-looking games be ridiculously optimized (Skyrim is a very good example of that, in fact).

If APB would run on 32-bit it wasn't a 64-bit game/app/whatever. What did that miserable failure actually prove? And calling Skyrim "optimized" is hilarious. Even as cut down as it was to fit on the 360, it's still a script bloated and unoptimized game. You'd be better off name dropping Gears of War because Epic made smart choices on what they could and couldn't accomplish on the hardware they had. Skyrim is merely note-worthy because, compared to their earlier titles such as Oblivion and Fallout: it wasn't fucking hideous.

tl,dr; 64-bit is the standard, and has been for 5 years now. Surely you remember "3d accelerators"? They were a novelty that added cute little things called textures to a special edition of MechWarrior 2. Now they're required for any serious game worth its salt.

Please list me the amount of games from 2010-2015 that are 64-bit native vs all the 32-bit. You can even bolster that by only listing AAA (whatever the fuck that even means) games. Hey look, Skyrim was right before 2012: 32-bit. Tomb Raider 2013: 32-bit. Fallout: New Vegas 2010: 32-bit. (LOOKING FUCKING FANTASITC FOR BETH, HUH?). Dark Souls: 32-bit. Dark Souls 2 is even 32-bit, with a 64-bit resale. Saint's Row 4: 32-bit. Borderlands 2? Payday 2? This is just shit in my Steam list off-hand.

I'm not exactly listing shit-heaps like APB here. These games are actually considered a success, not miserable failures. Saint's Row being probably the weakest in sales.

So, we got GTA5 and BF4. That's on me for not spouting immediately but I don't give Rockstar or EA money if I can avoid it. Sure there's others. Sure those aren't enough to consider 64-bit "standard." I know WoW has a 64-bit executable. In fact, Blizzard loves this shit. They make like.... 4 games.

It's just the nature of the hobby, and stubbornly insisting that we don't need no stinkin' new-fangled doo-dads just makes you look like some kind of Luddite.

What the fuck are you talking about? Me asking for some direct evidence that F4 is 64-bit when other 32-bit games require a 64-bit OS already is me saying "we don't need 64-bit apps?" And considering Beth's track record, I don't think I'm being entirely unreasonable here. So, to put it nicely: go get fucked.

[Executor32]

Arkham Knight is 64-bit only. So is ARK: Survival Evolved. And Assassin's Creeds Rogue, Unity, and Syndicate. And Battleborn. And Battlefield Hardline. And CoDs Ghost and BlOps 3. And Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. And Dragonball Xenoverse. And Far Cry 4. And Mad Max. And Mortal Kombat X. And Shadow of Mordor. And Star Citizen. And Star Wars Battlefront. And Titanfall. And WATCH_DOGS. And Witcher 3. And Wolfensteins The New Order and The Old Blood.

It's a list that gets ever longer.

[Jub]

Arkham Knight is 64-bit only. So is ARK: Survival Evolved. And Assassin's Creeds Rogue, Unity, and Syndicate. And Battleborn. And Battlefield Hardline. And CoDs Ghost and BlOps 3. And Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. And Dragonball Xenoverse. And Far Cry 4. And Mad Max. And Mortal Kombat X. And Shadow of Mordor. And Star Citizen. And Star Wars Battlefront. And Titanfall. And WATCH_DOGS. And Witcher 3. And Wolfensteins The New Order and The Old Blood.

It's a list that gets ever longer.

Those are still less than 1% of games that came out this year. Not even just among little $10 indy games either.

[Executor32]

Maybe, but it still covers most of the major titles this year, and it's by no means a complete list. It's just what I could think of off the top of my head.

[TheFeniX]

Holy shit, finally found something worthwhile. Though I mean, if this is the best I can find, things are fucking rough. Looks like 2015 actually is a good year for 64-bit games.

This list is compiled from game system requirements. 2014 saw a trickle of 64-bit games while 2015 saw a flood of 64-bit games. The trend for 2016 and beyond is clearly 64-bit.

So yea, I'm pretty out of the loop for this year and Fallout 4 seems to be on the list. So, this is a good thing. Being on a 64-bit CPU since around 2003 and seeing nothing but games going into the x86 folder got old years ago.

Guess I need to turn in my MW2 CDs because, you know, I'm a technology hating retard and all. Or maybe I'm just still mad my MW2 CD got cracked before it could make it into the new case. Who knows?

Either way, it's a sad fucking day when a console forces developers into current technology.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Dude, dial it down a couple thousand notches. I get slinging an invective or two, I do (I'm on SDN), but you're having a nuclear meltdown over the minutiae of tech specs for a video game. Go take a walk.

Executor32 beat me to the punch on the list of 64-bitters, but I'm not even sure that's the salient point here. What is the salient point? I'm not even sure what you're so damned upset over. Fallout 4 is 64-bit, but not 64-bit enough for your standards?

Anyway, I stand by a new argument: Chill the christ-loving fuck out. You're acting like a 12-year old.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

And as for the list of 64-bit games not being "representative" enough, you can also find entire piles of games which do not require a proper GPU and/or which run on DirectX 9 (or which even run on OpenGL!). That doesn't mean that proper graphics cards or DirectX10-12 aren't standard. That's what I was getting at with MechWarrior 2 - just because not every game takes 100% advantage of some new tech doesn't somehow make it reasonable to be baffled and shocked when a new game does take advantage of it.

In other words, Fallout 4 being 64-bit is about as interesting as the flavor of styrofoam.

[TheFeniX]

Dude, dial it down a couple thousand notches. I get slinging an invective or two, I do (I'm on SDN), but you're having a nuclear meltdown over the minutiae of tech specs for a video game. Go take a walk.

You call me a troglodyte after I point out that just requiring a 64-bit OS doesn't mean your executables actually need to be 64-bit, and you take this as me saying "hur hur, 64-bit is for chumps" then cry foul when I use a few curse words. Man the fuck up. Protip: you don't need words like "fuck" and "shit" to be incredibly insulting. Comparing people to technology hating morons will do the job just as well.

Man, and I was actually stoked to find out 2015 is a good year for 64-bit even if that's due to shit-heaps like Unity, Arkham Knight, and all the other garbage Executor32 posted. He meant well and I do appreciate his post, but most of those games make me want to roll my eyes with the exception of The Witcher and Dues Ex. So, forgive me for not dumping money on the PC version of Titanfall when playing the wife's version on Xbone about put me to sleep.

Fallout 4 is 64-bit, but not 64-bit enough for your standards?

Please point me to an official statement that Fallout 4 is 64-bit. Hell, show me a gameplay video with a performance manager up. Just using more than 4GBs doesn't mean your game is running at 64-bit, because you can split that shit across multiple processes. And if anyone was going to try and jury rig some bullshit like that, Beth would be the one to do it. I went through this shit with Bioware and SWTOR, so excuuuuse me.

At this point, I'm pretty sure F4 will be 64-bit. And that actually IS pretty important, and that's all I really wanted to know because Howard has been to busy jerking it to hilariously shitty animation and graphic work I couldn't find a fucking thing on it. I still haven't found anything official, but the evidence is there.

To take that as I'm somehow adverse to software advancing and want me nothing but 32-bit goodness is... well, I already said "go get fucked."

Anyway, I stand by a new argument: Chill the christ-loving fuck out. You're acting like a 12-year old.

When I was twelve, I was beating MW2 with a hammer to get it working on our 486SX because I needed a boot disk and we were all out of floppies. So, I'll take that as a compliment. Oh man, you would not believe how grounded I was when I edited the autoexec.bat and config.sys on my dad's computer. Or was that from trying to get expanded RAM working for Wizardy 7 years before?.... I don't know. It's been a while. I do remember the anger. There was lots of anger... and yelling.

Or maybe I'm "acting like a 12-year-old" because people get a little bent out of shape when you accuse them of being fucking morons. Even if you don't use the word "fuck."

And as for the list of 64-bit games not being "representative" enough, you can also find entire piles of games which do not require a proper GPU and/or which run on DirectX 9 (or which even run on OpenGL!). That doesn't mean that proper graphics cards or DirectX10-12 aren't standard. That's what I was getting at with MechWarrior 2 - just because not every game takes 100% advantage of some new tech doesn't somehow make it reasonable to be baffled and shocked when a new game does take advantage of it.

I know, because video cards were standard in PCs for over a decade before developers started taking advantage of them. Right? They didn't hold back games like MW2 or Rainbow 6 at all. Even as good as those games were, "I can run on a toaster" games like Warcraft 2 and Command and Conquer (PC loved RTs back then) clobbered them in sales because you only had to hit your soundcard drivers with a hammer to get them working.

Tell me, do you talk shit about all the people who played Duke Nukem 3D without a VESA card?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

See, this is why I amended my argument to "chill the fuck out." You are blowing this far, far out of proportion. If you take my suggestion that your refusal to believe that Fallout 4 just might be 64-bit (which is what you were doing at the time, even if you've since amended that stance) is rather Luddite-like to be that offensive, then I sincerely apologize. I'm not here to be an asshole to reasonable people - but then, you're really, really not acting like a reasonable person right now. You're blowing your top because someone called you on a rather stupid stance to take ("A 64-bit game?! Unpossible!"), which is pretty par for the course for this site. You can cite the intricacies of 1990s IRC-fiddling and batch file editing all you like, but I'm not sure that's helping your case.

I'm not really sure why your response to "Hey, dude, you've missed the mark on this one," is "go get fucked," but hey, maybe you're having a bad day or something. Chill out.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Now my quandry is whether to go find 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and hang onto my Q9550 or put off the notion of running modern games until I can do a full system upgrade. I'm loathe to upgrade a processor (and motherboard) that can be overclocked to run on par with modern AMD parts and thus is unlikely to bottleneck the rest of the system for a couple of years, but also hate spending good money on outdated tech like DDR2.

[TheFeniX]

See, this is why I amended my argument to "chill the fuck out." You are blowing this far, far out of proportion. If you take my suggestion that your refusal to believe that Fallout 4 just might be 64-bit (which is what you were doing at the time, even if you've since amended that stance) is rather Luddite-like to be that offensive, then I sincerely apologize.

What I originally said

That said, if F4 does actually make the jump to 64-bit, I'd likely buy it on principle and to see a 64-bit in action as I've never bothered with Crysis.

So, me saying (twice actually) I would consider buying it if it's 64-bit is somehow a complete refusal to believe it could be 64-bit.

I was working under the assumption that F4 was going to run off a modified Skyrim engine (likely still is) and at 32-bit. That said, after a few back and forths with Mr. Bean, I realized it's also likely the game could be 64-bit. I honestly don't know where you got the idea of my "refusal" to believe F4 could be 64-bit. You could have, you know, maybe, just maybe, provided something more concrete than spec requirements or shown how getting 5-7 GBs of RAM usage out of a 32-bit game was impossible even with my explanation.

I'm not here to be an asshole to reasonable people - but then, you're really, really not acting like a reasonable person right now. You're blowing your top because someone called you on a rather stupid stance to take ("A 64-bit game?! Unpossible!"), which is pretty par for the course for this site. You can cite the intricacies of 1990s IRC-fiddling and batch file editing all you like, but I'm not sure that's helping your case.

When the Hell did I say anything remotely to the effect of a 64-bit game being "me fail English" levels of stupid? I read back through my posts and you just seem to be putting words in my mouth I never fucking said to try and show I'm some kind of tech hating retard. You honestly don't get why someone would consider that insulting, even if you didn't use naughty language? Do you interact with people on a normal basis?

I'm not really sure why your response to "Hey, dude, you've missed the mark on this one," is "go get fucked," but hey, maybe you're having a bad day or something. Chill out.

Translation: "u mad bro."

Now my quandry is whether to go find 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and hang onto my Q9550 or put off the notion of running modern games until I can do a full system upgrade. I'm loathe to upgrade a processor (and motherboard) that can be overclocked to run on par with modern AMD parts and thus is unlikely to bottleneck the rest of the system for a couple of years, but also hate spending good money on outdated tech like DDR2.

A Quad-core at ~3Ghz with that much RAM running like $40? Not exactly a steep investment. What's your video card? I don't see any reason dropping $40 or so to give you another few years out of a PC is a bad investment. Any video card you dropped money on (if you even needed it) would be transferable.

[Executor32]

$40? When the hell was the last time you looked at DDR2 prices? 8GB of DDR3 (DDR4, even) may be that cheap, but 8 GB of DDR2 is anywhere from ~$80 to ~$160, depending on how many RAM slots you have to work with.

[TheFeniX]

Weird, swear he said 4GBs. Teach me to respond to an updated post while writing another and spamming fireballs at my party members in NWN2. That's on me, sorry.

Recently just bought 2 GBs of both 667 and 800Mhz to bring two old desktops up to speed to run W7 pro. Was priced at around $10 a GB if you went with 2GB sticks, doubling for 4GBs sticks.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

stuff

I didn't call you a "tech hating retard," I suggested you were being silly. But this argument gets dumber with each response, so hey, whatever, you win. Good job.

Again, I sincerely apologize for calling you a Luddite. My bad.

[Mr Bean]

$40? When the hell was the last time you looked at DDR2 prices? 8GB of DDR3 (DDR4, even) may be that cheap, but 8 GB of DDR2 is anywhere from ~$80 to ~$160, depending on how many RAM slots you have to work with.

Was that a response to me? Because I can totally find DDR3 with that kind of price. DDR2 is a lot more expensive because no one is making it anymore. But DDR4 can still be had for less than Fallout 4. Sure 48$ plus shipping is not THAT much less but it's still less.

[Executor32]

No, that was a response to TheFenix's post, right above mine. I know DDR3 and DDR4 are that cheap because I checked when I was pricing DDR2 for my response.

Also, if you go to GreenManGaming you can get Fallout 4 for $48 with the voucher code SAVE20-NOVEMB-GAMING ($24 for the season pass with the same code).

[Mr Bean]

Fun fact, I've spent the morning talking with Euro friends who gotten their Collectors editions, the size of the wrist grip for the Pip boy is sized XXX-Large so it fits women up to super beefy guys but unless your name is JOHN CENA (Confirmed Valid name that Cogsworth will address you as) your wrist is still not beefy enough to feel discomfiture from wearing it. However if you are of average proportions it looks silly over-sized.

Look at Image one and Image Two to get an idea of how huge the pipboy is. It's likes 30%-40% bigger than it needs to be as if their hand model was Sultan Kösen.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Now my quandry is whether to go find 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and hang onto my Q9550 or put off the notion of running modern games until I can do a full system upgrade. I'm loathe to upgrade a processor (and motherboard) that can be overclocked to run on par with modern AMD parts and thus is unlikely to bottleneck the rest of the system for a couple of years, but also hate spending good money on outdated tech like DDR2.

A Quad-core at ~3Ghz with that much RAM running like $40? Not exactly a steep investment. What's your video card? I don't see any reason dropping $40 or so to give you another few years out of a PC is a bad investment. Any video card you dropped money on (if you even needed it) would be transferable.

True, which is why I favor upgrading the RAM and GPU and leaving the CPU and MB. I could also sell my 4 x 1 GB sticks for $10-20 and I already have a Hyper 212 Evo that I haven't installed to aid with overclocking so it would be a small investment. I'm currently running a GTX 460 768MB, but I'm looking to get something in the ballpark of a GTX 970 or 780 that I can swap over when I finally join the DDR4 world in a couple years.

[Typhonis 1]

Fallout 4 Pegi 18 commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivStn8l6_9w

[biostem]

Fallout 4 Pegi 18 commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivStn8l6_9w

The shorts on the various SPECIAL stats are pretty funny as well...

[TheFeniX]

I could also sell my 4 x 1 GB sticks for $10-20

Ouch. Yea. I mean, you could spring for 2x2GB, and scrape by with 6GBs as most games range from 3-6GBs. Only other game besides Fallout4 I can see off-hand wanting 8GBs is Battlefront and I don't know of DICE being big on padding their requirements. That said, the Xbone and PS4 have 8GBs, so I wouldn't be surprised to see that much becoming standard in the near future. Maybe a bit more as a PC does have more overhead and with 64-bit being the future (I learned something today... errr, yesterday): they're going to want all the RAM they can get because they can actually use it.

Considering you're posting this in a thread about Fallout 4, I don't think it's too far-fetched to assume it's a game you plan to play. So, dropping $80 still doesn't seem like a bad idea considering your CPU should skate by the minimum, even more so if you OC like you plan to. And since the current console CPUs are already pretty gimped, newer games can't really demand that much more power out of them.

I just don't know what kind of FPS you'll pull with your hardware. Console is shooting for 1080p at 30FPS, but I get the feeling the biggest work-out a CPU gets out of the Creation Engine is trying to upchuck Papyrus script fragments.

Fallout 4 Pegi 18 commercial.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivStn8l6_9w

As much shit as I give Beth, I have always enjoyed their Fallout trailers. There's a combination of camp, violence, and chuckles that make them great. The Elder Scrolls trailers have always been way to serious for my tastes, though I do admit: unintentional hilarity through horrific violence has always been a staple of Fallout, unlike Elder Scrolls.

[TheFeniX]

Game is already cracked and pirates are playing. Seems the refund feature of Steam is also being abused: Buy game, pre-load, move files, refund game, unpack files, crack, yadda yadda.

I don't know why this wasn't showing up in my previous google searching for F4 benchmarks. That said, here we go:

But what about Fallout 4 on PC? Games based on Bethesda's Creation Engine have historically fared better on the PC platform, and our initial tests suggest that this trend continues with Fallout 4. We've been playing the game on our budget gaming PC, pairing a Core i3 4130 with a GTX 750 Ti and 8GB of DDR3. We used the game's high preset as a base, then dropped shadow quality and distance down to medium, with lighting pared back to high - this gives us a visual experience on par or better with console. We have enough horsepower left over to put its object fade setting on par with actor fade (in excess of the high setting) and the end result is improved performance and marginally superior visuals, still at 1080p.

What we lack is a decent 30fps cap, which sees performance lurch - Nvidia's half-rate adaptive v-sync produces ungodly stutter here, and it's down to Riva Tuner Statistics Server's frame-rate cap to level performance, though frame-pacing is still an issue. Even so, this is a great experience overall on cheap hardware, boding well for those with quad-core processors and better GPUs. As an aside, we can say that even ultra level textures still fit comfortably within a 2GB framebuffer at 1080p. VRAM utilisation isn't a problem for Fallout 4.

And they're running a 750, so I think you could make up a lot of dropped FPS with a higher-priced video card. I just wish I could see a performance output.

HDD access speed also seems to be a factor against consoles. Guess they saved a few bucks on those 5400 spin HDDs.

[Jub]

Game is already cracked and pirates are playing. Seems the refund feature of Steam is also being abused: Buy game, pre-load, move files, refund game, unpack files, crack, yadda yadda.

None of this is surprising in the least. With the high costs of games and no guarantee of quality, along with pirated versions offering features such as earlier launch windows, no-DRM, ad other goodies piracy isn't going anywhere.

[bilateralrope]

It seems that polyamorous relationships exist in Fallout 4. Though it could be that Bethedsa just forgot to put in any code to deal with the current relationship if you try to start one with another character.

Game is already cracked and pirates are playing. Seems the refund feature of Steam is also being abused: Buy game, pre-load, move files, refund game, unpack files, crack, yadda yadda.

Lets see if Valve enforces their policy on refund abuse:

Abuse
Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.

It also raises a question: Why is Fallout 4 the first title that this is happening to ?

The obvious answer is that previous titles that preloaded didn't preload everything. The other developers did something so that the preloaded files would be useless to pirates until the game was released. Maybe have the preloading be everything except key files which wouldn't be downloaded until release, maybe heavy encryption on those key files with the key being shared at release time. Then Bethesda came along and skipped those steps, making Fallout 4 ripe for piracy.

[TheFeniX]

It seems that polyamorous relationships exist in Fallout 4. Though it could be that Bethedsa just forgot to put in any code to deal with the current relationship if you try to start one with another character.

Yea, most likely relationships are handled per NPC with no checking to see if you're already in one with another. Do the other NPCs even reference your other relationships? If not, I'd assume it's just "who cares?"

The only romantic options in Skyrim were for marriage and all that did was set a flag to 1. So, if the flag was 1, wearing an Amulet of Mara still wouldn't bring up the dialog option for marriage. I heard you could bug it, even without mods, by just using the console commands, but my Dragonborn never had time for such fluff. Too many dragons to slay.

The obvious answer is that previous titles that preloaded didn't preload everything. The other developers did something so that the preloaded files would be useless to pirates until the game was released. Maybe have the preloading be everything except key files which wouldn't be downloaded until release, maybe heavy encryption on those key files with the key being shared at release time. Then Bethesda came along and skipped those steps, making Fallout 4 ripe for piracy.

From a few screenshots I've seen, even people who've pre-loaded can bring up the pre-launch config menu, set graphics options, etc. But clicking play seems to make Steam pre-empt the launch and say "too bad." Everything is already there from what I know, so yea: pirating the game is probably stupid easy. EDIT: I don't know if those getting the launcher were pirates or legit users. They said they were legit, but.... yea...[/edit]

I could just say Beth was stupid lazy, but considering their pre-order numbers (which are likely astronomic) and they way they have seemed to setup their DLC and new mods system (and the hostility of the current mod community to pirates): they could just not care as they will still be making all the money and pirates who want updates, DLC, and mods are probably going to have it as rough as those who pirated Skyrim.