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

[TheFeniX]

Don't you worry about the CK working fine, let Beth worry about Blank:

So it appears we've been hit with an impenetrable roadblock in the workshop system. Bethesda, for reasons unknown, has made some rather... bad changes to how things work.

If you don't want to read through the details, the summary of the situation is this:

Settlers recruited via the radio beacon (basically all of them really) or settlers placed via console commands (shame on you people!) will begin to exhibit gear, appearance, gender, and even race changes after a certain amount of time. My own testing shows this is tied to how long the respawn timer is for the game. Cut it to one hour, you can get the problem almost immediately. Raise it, and you can probably delay it, but it will cost severely in performance elsewhere. In the end, it's an engine issue we cannot solve. Eventually, just standing around in the cell WHILE THE SETTLERS ARE WITH YOU will result in them changing if you turn your back on them, even for just a few seconds.

Anyway, here's the details, as explained by Sclerocephalus:

Full thread contents not posted. Essentially, 1.6 broke games with modifications to the settlements system, possibly due to them trying to come up with new resource saving concepts. By refusing to use aliases, Fallout will dump settlers out of memory immediately after looking away from them (and old 3D trick). Since the information concerning them (looks, equipment, task) isn't stored in an alias, it's recreated on the fly. From what I've read, this will actually lead to more script bloat, so it really only improves performance in the short term.

[Vendetta]

If only the entire settlement system could be more than a glue farm?

To be honest, I think the settlement system is one of the core reasons why Fallout 4 wasn't very engaging. It replaced all the unique characterful towns from old games with bland glue farms most of which didn't mesh well with the building system because of their inherent architecture and which never did anything interesting for the player, they just generated dull procedural quests that had no good rewards or interesting engagement because all they were for was to shuffle you to a maybe new location so you could find another thrilling tale of life before the war (because fuck all happened in the 200 years after it).

[Darth Nostril]

Resource saving concept that actually uses more resources.
Yep that sounds like Beth alright.

Thankfully it looks like the Skyrim port happened way before they came up with this particular brain spasm, but we've still got to wait til October to find out how badly they fucked it up.

[TheFeniX]

To be honest, I think the settlement system is one of the core reasons why Fallout 4 wasn't very engaging. It replaced all the unique characterful towns from old games with bland glue farms most of which didn't mesh well with the building system because of their inherent architecture and which never did anything interesting for the player, they just generated dull procedural quests that had no good rewards or interesting engagement because all they were for was to shuffle you to a maybe new location so you could find another thrilling tale of life before the war (because fuck all happened in the 200 years after it).

You assume they had anything to replace. Fact is: what did Fallout 3 have? Megaton and Rivet City. Obsdian did New Vegas and time was put into the overall theme. Beth did F3 and that game was a joke from a narrative stand-point.

Beth just.... I guess they don't really give much of a shit about Fallout since every Elder Scrolls game, even Skyrim, is just chock full of so much more world. Laugh all you want about Solitude (the capital of Skyrim) being like 10 buildings: it demolishes anything Beth has ever done with a Fallout game. To them, Fallout seems to be about scrounging the wasteland for bullshit. Beth Fallout games have always felt small and the Workshop system is so tacked on, I'm sure Beth is so fucking glad they added it because they can release more cash-grab DLC for a mini-game.

I honestly don't mind it that much, but the interface to use it is 90% of the reason it takes so long to get anything done and why I only build a few prefabs and move on with my life.

Thankfully it looks like the Skyrim port happened way before they came up with this particular brain spasm, but we've still got to wait til October to find out how badly they fucked it up.

Unlikely to affect anything for Skyrim. I'm just spitballing here since I have little time or desire to dig into it, but here goes.

Take Lydia, your faithful housecarl. Her attributes are pretty much set in stone in the CK. In fact, once you've seen her once, many of those attributes become baked into your save. If you spawn 100 Lydias from the base actor ID, you'll get 100 identical characters all sworn to carry your burdens. Nearly every NPC in Skyrim is setup this way. Now, bandits and other enemies might apply, but many of those are still static. The CK lists tons of unique BaseIDs for Bandits alone.

From what I can find of F4, they seem to have made randomly generated characters actually work because there seems to be very few BaseIDs for given actors. Like, Diamond City Security has one BaseID, but there's all types of them in my city: men, women, black, white, big, small. Meanwhile, "help Solitude Guard" in Skyrim would like 2 pages of NPC BaseIDs.

Settlers are randomly generated off of one BaseID (00113341) during the intervals the Settlement Beacon is spawning them. To have those characters maintain their consistency when spawned, then moved off-screen, you'd have to have something storing the info. This is where the alias would come in as I guess ReferenceIDs won't hold this information alone.... which makes sense. So, when you look away, then look back, the game is pulling another random assortment of stuff from the Settler BaseID.

This isn't likely to affect Skyrim since it doesn't rely on randomly generated NPC at all from what I know. Even if it did, the characters you mostly interact with outside of combat have their attributes set in stone in the CK. Respawning Lydia every time you looked at her would suck for performance, but you'd still get a Nord in Steel Plate, walking like a robot.

[Vendetta]

You assume they had anything to replace. Fact is: what did Fallout 3 have? Megaton and Rivet City. Obsdian did New Vegas and time was put into the overall theme. Beth did F3 and that game was a joke from a narrative stand-point.

Oh yeah, I mean everything was wrong with the narrative of F3, but at least it had a few more places, Tenpenny, Republic of Dave, Arefu, Andale, Girdershade, Little Lamplight, Paradise Falls.

They were small and shit, but at least they were distinctive and had varied populations of named individuals with one note personalities and distinctive architecture. F4 has Goodneighbour, Bunker Hill, and Diamond City and everything else is a generic settlement full of generic people called "settler" with no personality who only exist to extrude procedural quests. This is full circle back to the qualities of Daggerfall.

[TheFeniX]

Oh yeah, I mean everything was wrong with the narrative of F3, but at least it had a few more places, Tenpenny, Republic of Dave, Arefu, Andale, Girdershade, Little Lamplight, Paradise Falls.

I should have given Beth SOME credit for those. Tenpenny actually did give me pause. When Ghoul man murdered all the residents and dumped them in the basement, the loss of Karma I took for blowing his ugly head off was very satisfying. Fallout 3 at least had characters, not collections of code that spouted dialog and quest markers at me. Sure, they did stupid shit and seemed to do little without the Lone Wanderer getting involved, but at least they felt real.

I was just counting actual cities/settlements and that wasn't exactly fair to the point you were making. That's on me. There was also Big Town..... ugh.

They were small and shit, but at least they were distinctive and had varied populations of named individuals with one note personalities and distinctive architecture. F4 has Goodneighbour, Bunker Hill, and Diamond City and everything else is a generic settlement full of generic people called "settler" with no personality who only exist to extrude procedural quests. This is full circle back to the qualities of Daggerfall.

I agree, but with the addition that Diamond City is basically an MMO quest hub. There's 1-2 interesting quests to do, but the rest are "collect bear ass" levels of MMO bullshit. Many of the residents may as well be called "Gun dealer" "Junk Dealer." In fact, it pisses me off how casually my PC talks to many of them, calling them by name the first time talking to them. All I do is swap ammo types from many of them. This is not first name basis shit.

There's not even anyone worth hating in F4 (at least IN GAME). Skyrim had Nazeem. It had "Greymayne or Battleborn?" and my response of "shut the fuck up." It had so many things to love/hate. Nick Valentine is really the only character worth a shit because he actually feels like he built a relationship with you. Everyone else are these dialog spewing script bots. The game constantly reminds me it's a fucking videogame. CONSTANTLY.

New Vegas damn sure didn't. Even Fallout 3 didn't do that. And even the most cutdown Elder Scrolls game didn't. And this isn't just age doing this to me since I still get that feeling in Skyrim AND New Vegas. I feel like, even if in short sprints, I'm walking around talking to people. Fallout 4 fails to create an illusion of realistic characters and it's due to a lot of different things, but I would say mostly due to the crutch of the settlement bullshit and them just not wanting to do anything more. Even just naming the fucking settlers would have been a step in the right direction.

[bilateralrope]

Not sure if this should go here or in the Skyrim thread. So I'm posting it here because this thread was posted in more recently:

No mods for Fallout 4 or Skyrim on PS4

PS4 Mod Update

After months of discussion with Sony, we regret to say that while we have long been ready to offer mod support on PlayStation 4, Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition.

Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive. We consider this an important initiative and we hope to find other ways user mods can be available for our PlayStation audience. However, until Sony will allow us to offer proper mod support for PS4, that content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim on PlayStation 4 will not be available.

We will provide an update if and when this situation changes.

So no mods on PS4 because Sony doesn't want them.

If you want a laugh, consider that Bethesda announced this on the same day that Polygon put up an article titled Sony boss: PS4 Pro is going after the PC audience.

[streetad]

That's disappointing.

That pretty much kills off the Skyrim remaster as far as I am concerned. There's no point rebuying something I have already sunk so many hours into unless it is offering something substantially different.

Also raises serious doubts about the future viability of the Playstation for playing this kind of game that has such a heavy dependence on mods for replayability.

[TheFeniX]

Weird actually. I've been wracking my brain trying to think why Sony would fight this. They've got the system, Beth already has the capability built into the game and would handle everything. The only thing I can come up with was the amount of "adult" (read: Sex/boobs/dicks, because Skyrim and Fallout are already comically violent) mods. There was already a small fuss made when someone uploaded a nude mod for Xbox under a false name.

And Sony was at ground zero for the GTA "Hot Coffee Mod" fiasco. Even though the mod was for PC (though, I heard of some Playstation hacks), PC gaming had no one to "go after." Windows is just an open platform. But Sony (to be fair: Rockstar, Sony just got the backwash, but there was a lot of it) took shit from the ESRB, and even Clinton got involved in a bunch of Jack Thompson levels of crying.

Sidenote: Consoles really are "kiddie" platforms. We've got our socially acceptable levels of violence on them, M rated games are sanitized enough to be sold to children, and the ESRB is a joke, both in application and lame-ass parents who don't actually parent.... at least Nintendo has embraced this.

Also raises serious doubts about the future viability of the Playstation for playing this kind of game that has such a heavy dependence on mods for replayability.

People have put thousands of hours into the console version of Bethout/scrolls games for years. There's still more than enough loyal Sorny guys out there who will chose it as their platform. Even still, Fallout 4 is faltering right now. The game couldn't live up to it's own hype and the amount of effect put into modding it has dropped off. It seems to barely be more popular than Skyrim. And Skyrim was a top-played game for years after it's release.

Although I'm sure Enderal is pushing a lot of people to reload Skyrim, but Skyrim had to survive long enough as a modworthy game to get where it has. It's iffy if Beth will learn anything from Fallout 4, but I doubt it will have the type of modding community Skyrim does. So, I bet the remaster is more important to Beth than ever.