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

[Typhonis 1]

Now there are 275 perks, plus the fact you can raise your SPECIAL stats. Also I hear books and magazines may give special perks you can't learn.

[TheFeniX]

Grimreaper's Sprint is always a good decision. I think the most important thing about F4 is going to be how it affects the current DLC and mod scene. I'm betting it will affect both in a spectacularly bad way, but I'm always in the mood to get proven wrong. Experience has taught me otherwise though.

Oh well, nothing exciting here. Looks like I'll be waiting for a Steam sale to have another single-player game to mess around with during downtime.

[Typhonis 1]

Oh well, nothing exciting here. Looks like I'll be waiting for a Steam sale to have another single-player game to mess around with during downtime.

could always try Minecraft. Then again the Creepers.....

[TheFeniX]

Nah, Skyrim is my current hold-over. What keeps me coming back is the mods, such as one that changed the combat mechanic more akin to the Barbarian Rage generation of Diablo. That and the Dark Souls combat mod, but I had to hold off on that as swapping to W10 trashed my ENBoost and some of my other settings. Since I've been playing Sniper Elite with my buddy, I haven't taken the time to put my install back together.

Honestly, if F4 had any kind of co-op, I'd drop $60 on principle. But every possible open-world sandbox game ends up as a trashy themepark MMO and I can't get my buddies to even try the terrible co-op mod for Skyrim. Instead I'll just pickup Skyrim with guns (and a bit more customization) for $30 like I did Skyrim.

[Joun_Lord]

Fallout 4 PC specs have dropped.

Minimum

Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
Intel Core i5-2300 2.8 GHz/AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz or equivalent
8 GB RAM
30 GB free HDD space
NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti 2GB/AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB or equivalent

Recommended

Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent
8 GB RAM
30 GB free HDD space
NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent

Consoles will require between 28 and 35 free gigabytes of space

Not terrible. I should be able to play it probably on high especially once I drop even more RAM in. This will be the longest month in the history for me. Now I know what kids felt when I was growing up when they were waiting for Christmas.

[TheFeniX]

HA! F4s recommended specs are about 4 times the hardware equivalent you'll find in the Xbone. I guess pushing 60FPS and actual 1080p does take some semblance of hardware, but those tech specs are hilarious for numerous reasons.

But really, Skyrim couldn't touch a single-core of my 2.6Ghz i7, nor my GPU. It's dumb I even own an i7, but since it was the fastest core clock I could find (4Ghz) and PC games are notoriously shit at using multiple cores, I went with it. Though it DEVOURED VRAM, even before hi-res textures. I solved a lot of crashes just by getting a 2GB card. Obviously Fallout4 is a newer game, but I'm not really seeing anything, other than poor optimization, to justify that kind of hardware.

I'm just reminded of this old picture I saw on the Interwebs. It was the Vault boy smiling and it said something to the effect of "100 year old PCs.... crash less than this game." Get ready for more quality Bethesda programming as your 4.0Ghz i7 craters under the pressure of Beth's CPU dependent script fragments.

[Joun_Lord]

Yeah it does seem high but some recent games have been kinda weird when it comes to specs with some being CPU intensive while not needing alot of RAM or the opposite. Like Battlefront recommending 16 gigs of RAM while recommending an i5. The Phantom Pain recommends an i7 while only recommending 8 gigs of RAM.

I'm just glad that I recently got a newish computer so mostly I don't have to worry (yet). While my processor ain't all that (an i5 3.2 quad) I got plenty of RAM currently and a decent video card with plenty of room for upgrades. Probably will after I pay my bills and buy Fallout 4 if I got enough money left over next payday will bring my RAM up to 32 gigs.

I just really wish game makers would optimize their PC games better. Games don't look that great for the ridiculous levels of hardware they require. They don't look or run that much better then their console peasant counterparts despite the PC specs being several times higher then the Xboner or Playstation Quads specs.

And maybe its just because of being pre-release but Fallout 4 doesn't look that much better then Skyrim does and Skyrim's specs even with the HD textures wasn't that high all things considered.

[TheFeniX]

Battlefront is being made by DICE. I know times have changed, but those guys had a reputation of being able to actually use a GPU. Whereas, obviously, a faster CPU helped games like BF1942 and BF2, you were much better off dropping cash on the fastest GPU you could and finding a way to increase your HDD throughput (such as a RAID0 cutting map load times in half). And RAM in those games was always at a premium. 512MB was the minimum for BF2. I had the recommended 1GB and let me tell you: that shit wasn't cheap back then and you needed it if you wanted the game to look and run well. God damn, in 2005 I think a 512 stick of RAM cost you $100. And you had better buy the good shit (no Kingston) or you might be spending even more.

Damn, the computer I played BF2 on is sitting right next to me (Athlon64 3000+) nearly in pieces. I need to throw it out, but.... you know. Shit, it'd still work if one of the water-cooling pumps hadn't blown out.

And it doesn't surprise me Konami wants an i7 to just offload more work onto a few more CPU cycles and just dump shit into and out of RAM.

Beth, at least from what I've tracked from NV and Skyrim (Oblivion was so old by the time I played it on PC, there was no point even looking for bottle-necks as there were none) only really uses a GPU for it's VRAM. And it wants it's VRAM. Yes, I know NV was Obsidian, but same engine just new setting and Obsidian, for how awesome their storytelling is, manages to makes even more crash-happy heaps of code than Beth. I'm sure if you went crazy with Havok simulation mods, things might get hairy out in the world, but just playing the game takes like 10% of a 660. Even less for NV. And Skyrim actually looked decent out of the box, Fallout 3/NV was fucking hideous.

And the games still crash, get infinite load screens, and just generally run like shit, even on console. So, that's why I'm paranoid about the whole paid mods deal and it's release onto console. I'm not looking forward to paying money for QoL shit I should get from the developer. And since Beth plans to release a shit-load of updates, updates which usually break mods wholesale, as even they know the game is going to be broken as fuck at launch, I can't even be guaranteed the mods will be updated to work and/or if someone else takes over, codes his own, and I have to pay for that too.

This is why I'm much more interested in how Beth is going to handle the CK than anything. Will we have access to a functioning one? Animations? Actually decent scripting? If they want to monetize this shit, we need tools like what Epic offers with Unreal. But we're much more likely to get a kid's glove GECK so modders can shit out reskins and Beth just makes quick cash.

[InsaneTD]

Paid mods? I thought the community backlash killed that idea? Unless Xbox are pushing it to allow mods on the console.

[TheFeniX]

Profitable ideas don't die and backlash counts for dick in the long run. There's too many people who want their video games. For all the "Fuck you"s EA and Beth got for Dungeon Keeper and Horse Armor (respectively), they were extremely profitable ideas. Namely because when you spend so little time/money, even a few sales mean a profit. Fallout is a brand. The name, in of itself, has a lot of weight. Among the older crowd due to Black Isle. Newer guys because of Beth.

Beth just released a blog post defending paid mods right as valve tore the whole thing down. Since, valve (and Steam) was bearing the brunt of the backlash, and Beth next to none, it was an easy choice on their part. There were a lot of issues plaguing the Skyrim paid mod options, mainly that they already had a heavily established modding community with thousands of mods. Beth was also forcing end users to accept a modified EULA on what (as far as Beth was concerned) was a dead game. To expect the beg/borrow/steal nature of Skyrim modding to fit into a monetized system, especially when so many mods were reliant on QoL mods such as SKSE, FNIS, and SkyUI was an asshole move. Maybe if the CK wasn't a pile of shit and they hadn't been called out for allowing mods to be sold with free-mod pre-requisites, things would have gone better.

The fact is, modding is like 9% of the PC playerbase. And the PC playerbase on cross-plats, at least as far as the sales publishers care about (pre-orders and those when the game is new) is anywhere from 10-20%. We aren't getting a GECK until February 2016, maybe even later. This gives Beth a fresh start on a game built with a paid mod system from the start and the ability to cull all the money from those early sales. They can build the modding community exactly the way they want to: basically a replacer for shitty reskins the developers used to have to make themselves.

By the time the game has run it's course, they'll have their own DLCs and cross-platform mods to rake a few more dollars in. This shit is going to happen, it's just a matter of when. It's possible they could hold off on F4, but they are already working heavily on a cross-plat mod system and they aren't doing that shit out of the goodness of their hearts.

[InsaneTD]

So they released the companion app for this now. Those on Android need to search for fallout pip-boy. It's got a demo mode and it's actually kinda neat. It also has atomic command on it playable. Nice bit of retro fun.

[Enigma]

Don't forget that you can purchase Nuka Cola Quantum at Target on Nov 10.

[Starglider]

Yeah it does seem high but some recent games have been kinda weird when it comes to specs with some being CPU intensive while not needing alot of RAM or the opposite. Like Battlefront recommending 16 gigs of RAM while recommending an i5. The Phantom Pain recommends an i7 while only recommending 8 gigs of RAM.

That's not weird, that's just different design choices, in terms of what effects to enable, physics model complexity, asset detail, level size etc. Factor of 2 difference or less is trivial.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I'm just trying to figure out how the minimum and recommended RAM amounts can both be 8 GB.

[TheFeniX]

Yea, 4GBs would be the minimum. MAYBE 6GBs. 2GBs for the OS and 4GB for the cap. But I don't see F4 using near 4GBs of RAM. Let's face it, it's just a reskinned Skyrim game. The addition of Sprint, the loading screens. Even the horrible facial animations have the same weird deformations depending on the head model.

Then again, most of Skyrim's crashes and low performance were usually (at least for me) during cell transitions where the game was dumping loads of assets in and out of RAM. Could be Beth is just deciding to load up RAM with as much as they can to cut down on data transfers.

[Mr Bean]

Yea, 4GBs would be the minimum. MAYBE 6GBs. 2GBs for the OS and 4GB for the cap. But I don't see F4 using near 4GBs of RAM. Let's face it, it's just a reskinned Skyrim game. The addition of Sprint, the loading screens. Even the horrible facial animations have the same weird deformations depending on the head model.

Then again, most of Skyrim's crashes and low performance were usually (at least for me) during cell transitions where the game was dumping loads of assets in and out of RAM. Could be Beth is just deciding to load up RAM with as much as they can to cut down on data transfers.

There's strong indications from reviewers that previous generation consoles were not helping Bethesda games because their engine by it's nature wants to have as much ram as possible. From what's leaked the game is sitting at between 5-7 gigs of memory usage consistently and I can tell you from Skyrim experience the tweaks to give the game more ram greatly enhance how stable the game is. I'm perfectly fine with 8 gigs being the new minimum if only because eight gigs of ram costs less than the average Fallout 4 these days.

[TheFeniX]

Read: the engine is horribly optimized. No real surprise there as Beth has never been known to do anything all that exceptionally well, yet still somehow makes enjoyable games.
There IS a reason even the exterior of Skyrim is divided into small cells and the cities are depressingly small. Though the loading of these cells is done adaptively and mostly on the fly, unlike older games in the series working with little hardware (Morrowind). A big part of Skyrim's problem from what I know is papyrus has stupid amounts of overhead and can chew up cycles due to the way it processes script (in a word: poorly). If Fallout 4 relies on less scripting and shunts more into RAM as a matter of course, it might actually run better than the hundred year old computers you find lying around in-game.

I think if they just quit relying on a bajillion script fragments, they'd probably solve a lot of their own problems.

Question: how is a 32-bit game breaking the 4GB cap (which is a patch in of itself)? I'm not a coder. Are they splitting it into two separate processes like Bioware did with SWTOR and which also caused a metric shit-ton of problems since they apparently knew dick about actually working with that build of the Hero engine?

[Mr Bean]

Question: how is a 32-bit game breaking the 4GB cap (which is a patch in of itself)? I'm not a coder. Are they splitting it into two separate processes like Bioware did with SWTOR and which also caused a metric shit-ton of problems since they apparently knew dick about actually working with that build of the Hero engine?

My understanding of the New Vegas and Skyrim fixes is that it isolates the game from the OS as far as memory goes because 32 bit programs can only use up to 4 gigs of memory the game itself will only ever use 3.5 gigs because that's the internal cap (It reserve .5 gigs for the OS because that was the old XP/Vista standard). The modified exe remove that internal cap giving you the entire 4 gigs to play with.

[TheFeniX]

Yea, they built the 4GB patch into SKSE a few builds ago. I think it was built into NVSE as well. From what I know, this interupts the .exe for those games by launching SKSE/NVSE first, with all it's fancy plugins and extensions, then launches the game app through itself. So, there's no need to patch the game exes.

But, unless F4 is actually 64-bit, how can it access 5-7GBs of RAM? That would require two separate processes. Do you have any links to the leaks concerning the hardware usage of F4? I can't find squat and I'd love to look at them as I won't have to opportunity to test this game out for some time. Not until the price point is $30 or lower.

[Mr Bean]

But, unless F4 is actually 64-bit, how can it access 5-7GBs of RAM? That would require two separate processes. Do you have any links to the leaks concerning the hardware usage of F4? I can't find squat and I'd love to look at them as I won't have to opportunity to test this game out for some time. Not until the price point is $30 or lower.

It requires a 64 bit operating system Windows 7 or higher so I'm guessing the engine finally jumped from 32 bit to 64 bit. From what I've heard the engine while not new has got a significant face lift and thanks to the jump to 64 bit we finally lost those remaining bits of Morrowind code even Skyrim still had. (If I remember my offhand comment correctly mapping code was identical between games when making maps only icons changed and the ability to show things were simply added onto the Morrowind code base for how to show map icons on the ingame minimap).

[bilateralrope]

I'm just trying to figure out how the minimum and recommended RAM amounts can both be 8 GB.

Is there any definition for minimum and recommended requirements more specific than "runs" and "runs well" ?

[TheFeniX]

I haven't seen anything on a 64-bit release though. If anything, the RAM requirements would force a 64-bit operating system due to the memory addressing limit of 32-bit of GB total (4GBs: VRAM included from what I know). My video card alone would put me over that cap. Skyrim on the other hand required a comparatively measly 2GB, which you could easily pull off within a 32-bit OS.

There just aren't many 64-bit games out there. I plan to pickup the Dark Souls 2 64-bit re-release just because. 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.

[Mr Bean]

Again TheFeniX, the game lists "requires 64-bit operating system" right in the title along with "needs 8 gigs of ram" both of which are pretty unlikely on some sort of hack 32 bit executable. In fact as far as I know once the PS4/Xbone hit shelves we officially moved over into the 64 bit era since both consoles are and double check me purely 64 bit machines.

[TheFeniX]

Witcher 3 and BF4 have native 64-bit support from what I've read. Been a long time coming because the only game I own with native 64-bit support is UT2k4.... and I guess Half-Life 2. Those games are old as Hell though, so that's telling.

There's actually very few 64-bit games out there. Even though the 360 had a 64-bit CPU, I don't think any game ran 64-bit natively. This seems to be changing with the Xbone and PS4, but I haven't heard anything directly from Bethesda on this. Now, they did say a "test" for their team at working with the Xbone was porting Skyrim/the Creation Engine over to it (and to not hold your breath for an Xbone release) so maybe the game is 64-bit. But games like Arkham Knight require a 64-bit OS but are running at 32-bit, same with GTA5. EDIT: this I didn't mean to post, only preview and god damn info is hard to find. Seems GTAV is 64-bit only? Google is just bringing up so much useless speculation posts and old junk from like 2006. Oh well, I'll let the post stand as is /EDIT

This is most likely because they need access to larger amounts of RAM and (like I said, from what I know) 32-bit addressing in the OS can only handle 4GB total. So Windows has only that total to work with for any memory addressing, including VRAM, of 4GBs. And that just won't cut it. So, if your game needs 3GBs+ of RAM, you require a 64-bit OS system as a matter of course, even if your game runs 32-bit.

GTA5 needs 4GBs of RAM. On a 32-bit OS, it would need everything the OS could address just for the RAM. There would be nothing left for the OS or the VRAM addressing. Anyone who has the game is welcome to check the processes to see if I'm wrong. wow64 or just a *32 is what you're looking for.

To sum up, based on what I know: there's no way Fallout 4 running at 32-bit could address more than 4GBs of RAM at once on a single process. A 32-bit program is just not capable of doing so. The game is either actually 64-bit native or they're splitting the game into multiple processes. If the game actually is 64-bit, which I'm skeptical to believe without seeing something official: then none of my post matters.

If the game is actually 64-bit native, I might buy it at full price on principal because it would be Bethesda actually doing some kind of progression and it would probably fix 90% of the crashing bullshit their bloated engine has.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Fenix, dude, bro, guy, man. I ask this with all respect, but are you permanently living in 2008? 64-bit apps have been (very slowly, I'll grant you) taking over. 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).

And a word on optimization itself: It's not all roses and sunshine. Optimization, by its nature, is only occasionally a case of just making a given bit of code run "better." Usually, it's made to run "better" by re-writing how it uses resources, generally with inevitable trade-offs. If your renderer is eating the GPU alive, you re-write it to use less GPU cycles... at the expense of considerable amounts of VRAM. If you're using ungodly amounts of RAM and choking on the page file, you re-write it so the game "forgets" all that stuff that surely a player would never notice (except of course we do). And so on. Optimization isn't a magic bullet; it invariably necessitates side-effects, and the trick is finding the right balance of memory usage, CPU usage, and what actually ends up on the screen.

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. 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.