Was Oblivion soulless slop?

[rusty_shackleford]

Elaborate

He doesn't know, he's just using buzzwords.

SOUL

[Faceless_Sentinel]

tell lilura to undelete xer's blogpost about me

Can you tell this story, please?

What is the history of this conflict? I am not familiar with the terminology in this article.

[Lord of Riva]

The only good TES game is daggerfall and it is also the one with the most soul.

It's also still perfectly playable.

[rusty_shackleford]

What is the history of this conflict? I am not familiar with the terminology in this article.

I don't even remember but xir got angry enough to write a blogpost about me

[loregamer]

It was written on April 1 so it was just a prank

[Ryzer]

He doesn't know, he's just using buzzwords.

SOUL

[Tweed]

He doesn't know, he's just using buzzwords.

SOUL

SOY

[logincrash]

The removal of mark and recall is harder to justify. I believe they ran into problems with it breaking missions, such as some where you are only supposed to be able to be at a location once.

Interesting, considering how Morrowind had the Chad Dagoth Ur tell you how no Recall or Intervention can work at his place.

[Ryzer]

It might only require to tweak a boolean in some areas, canMark? TRUE/FALSE CanRecall? TRUE/FALSE. They didn't implement it because they chopped the development to release on time for the X360 not to mention that they had to cut conversation dialogues and AI because the console was not capable of running it.

[loregamer]

Didn’t Skyrim run on the 360, too? How would Oblivion be ****** by its hardware?

[rusty_shackleford]

Didn’t Skyrim run on the 360, too? How would Oblivion be ****** by its hardware?

skyrim has the same issues
bethesda has never been open about their development issues, but obsidian has detailed FNV's development rather extensively, and they had serious issues with console limitations. @Roguey can probably rattle off more than I can about it, but afaik originally there was never meant to be any separate outdoor areas but it had to be done because of consoles.

[rusty_shackleford]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too.

[Roguey]

Didn’t Skyrim run on the 360, too? How would Oblivion be ****** by its hardware?

skyrim has the same issues
bethesda has never been open about their development issues, but obsidian has detailed FNV's development rather extensively, and they had serious issues with console limitations. @Roguey can probably rattle off more than I can about it, but afaik originally there was never meant to be any separate outdoor areas but it had to be done because of consoles.

Numerous Sawyer quotes:

Why did you decide the split the strip into 3 parts? I felt it ruined the hype for the game; especially considering how it focuses around the city.

Because consoles would have run out of memory if the Strip had not been split up into separate load zones.

Why does everyone wear masks during the final battle of Hoover Dam?

FaceGen/FaceFX data can be expensive, so most "generic" participants wear full-face outfits to cut down on the memory required.

So working on New Vegas, and Van Buren. What would you say are the benefits, and drawbacks of Sandbox vs Node based maps? Map nodes are still used successfully by people like Bioware so I dont think they are totally archaic and something of the past.

Streaming open terrain maps have to be designed for exploration in (almost) any direction. They give a lot of freedom to the player, but can make memory management/performance difficult to optimize. Node-based maps are essentially tailored around a limited set of player navigation options. They remove a lot of the freedom, but the experience and performance can be more easily controlled.

Question from one of lesser knowledge... Is there a save game size that you would call "normal" for F:NV? Mine is 14mb, and i'm having intense lag in multiple sections of the Mojave/ all DLC lands. Just curious if that is/could be an issue!

That can easily be a big problem, especially if you're on the PS3. The longer you play a character, the more bit differences on objects (characters, pencils on tables, containers, etc.) get saved off and carried around in memory. I think we've seen save games that are pushing 19 megs, which can be really crippling in some areas.

If it's an issue why hasn't it been resolved.The pace at whivh game sellers basically dish an alpha or beta game to the marketplace is sickening. New V stopped being "beta" in mid-2011. I know as a dev my workplace wasn't AAA dishing but we had integrity.

Since you're a developer, you should understand the implication of what I wrote. It's an engine-level issue with how the save game data is stored off as bit flag differences compared to the placed instances in the main .esm + DLC .esms. As the game modifies any placed instance of an object, those changes are stored off into what is essentially another .esm. When you load the save game, you're loading all of those differences into resident memory.

It's not like someone wrote a function and put a decimal point in the wrong place or declared something as a float when it should have been an int. We're talking about how the engine fundamentally saves off and references data at run time. Restructuring how that works would require a large time commitment. Obsidian also only had that engine for a total of 18 months prior to F:NV being released, which is a relatively short time to understand all of the details of how the technology works.

Is the inflating save file just an issue for the PS3 (I've seen lots of lag/crash complaints from PS3 users) or does it happen on all platforms? I'm just wondering if other platforms handle it better than the PS3.

As with Fallout 3 and Skyrim, the problems are most pronounced on the PS3 because the PS3 has a divided memory pool.

(Same fellow you just answered) So....basically, every time I manipulate an object, it fluctuates the save file up or down? I've noticed files can get rather huge, is there no way this could have been greatly diminished in a game as big as New Vegas?

It almost always goes up. Some areas will reset contents after three (game) days, but a lot of stuff lingers. Additionally, we also have to deal with "persistent references". These are objects that are immediately loaded with the game because we need to be able to reference them anywhere/everywhere in the world -- even if the player is nowhere near the object. Characters are the most common example. All of the companions need to be able to move around the world even when they are not in your current area, so they are all persistent references.

All object data (excluding art assets like .nifs and audio assets [VO]) for persistent references is loaded at all times, so that's more-or-less a permanent chunk of resident memory. The number of persistent references invariably goes up with each DLC, so as the number of DLCs increases, the system has less and less memory available. Of course, the player's save game file only gets bigger and bigger, since he or she is going through more or more areas manipulating an increasingly large number of objects.

This is why some of our later patches actually removed content from the core game (e.g. Primm). Even though we had balanced the memory footprint for the core game, DLC content was pushing down the available resources.

But why did the patch remove content from the PC? Most PCs nowadays have 2-4GB of RAM, plus 500MB-1GB of GPU memory. So I doubt the DLCs negatively impacted most PCs to justify content removal...

If we had generated .esms per-platform, that would have been a crazy nightmare for a lot of reasons. A slightly less risky approach could have been to script the removal of assets using the IsPC/IsXbox/IsPS3 functions, but that also introduces its own host of potential problems, especially if objects are attempting to reference something as the script removes it.

We ran into a small but non-trivial number of crashes in F:NV involving persistent references attempting to interact with an object as the player transitions out of his or her current area. E.g. Chief Hanlon attempts to sit in a chair. The player leaves the area, the chair Hanlon wants to sit in is unloaded, and the game crashes.

why you can't have more than one companion in FNV/F3, unlike the older games?

Game balance and console memory. Balance-wise, adding one humanoid companion makes the game much easier. Adding multiple humanoid companions makes it trivially easy. Memory-wise, companions are some of the most expensive characters that can be loaded.

He ended up getting in trouble over these because a number of games journalists pulled these up when Skyrim was having the same issues on PS3 and it broke the marketing lie that Creation was a totally 100% brand new engine.

[rusty_shackleford]

Thinking back on it, actually surprised that they allowed FNV to be released on consoles. Bethesda must have pulled some strings, consoles used to be much stricter on games that have serious technical issues

[loregamer]

Kvatch: first part was the only good quest in vanilla, and they managed to screw that up. Fixed by the mod.

Fun fact about this I just learned while doing the Nexus Content Curator script.

The author of Kvatch Rebuilt is the same fat janny who patrols the post sections of Plus Sized Character mods.





Their pfp used to be themselves in real life but I assume they removed it after this

[Xenich]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too.

Which is why I have issues with most games when they started developing for consoles as their template. It ruined PC gaming in that respect.

[Rand]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too

It's not like Obsidian was given much of a choice.
New Vegas uses the consolized Fallout 3 engine, which comes directly from the consolized Oblivion engine.
And they were obliged to use it per their contract with Toddco.

[rusty_shackleford]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too

It's not like Obsidian was given much of a choice.
New Vegas uses the consolized Fallout 3 engine, which comes directly from the consolized Oblivion engine.
And they were obliged to use it per their contract with Toddco.

[Nessa]

Fun fact about this I just learned while doing the Nexus Content Curator script.

The author of Kvatch Rebuilt is the same fat janny who patrols the post sections of Plus Sized Character mods.

Yeah, the Nexus was bad way back in the Oblivion era too. This is hilarious though. Rightly calling fat unhealthy is bigoted now!? Count me in with the bigots!

[Nessa]

As good as FNV was, it was woke before the term existed. They just had better writing and dialog. Mostly. The Gay™ was everywhere.

[Roguey]

Thinking back on it, actually surprised that they allowed FNV to be released on consoles. Bethesda must have pulled some strings, consoles used to be much stricter on games that have serious technical issues

Sawyer's also mentioned that they were forced to fix engine bugs that were present in Fallout 3 to pass certification. But yeah, Zenimax had a lot of pull and were able to get away with more than a smaller company would.

[Roguey]

As good as FNV was, it was woke before the term existed. They just had better writing and dialog. Mostly. The Gay™ was everywhere.

Games are typically written by liberals. Tim Cain said Fallout was as woke as it could be for its time.

Wokeness didn't happen yesterday - games have always had a perspective, they've always had things in there, but I want to be clear, it's been a subtext of my games, not the context. I never made a game saying "let's talk about racism," instead it was a subtext of Arcanum portrayed in different ways.

[Tweed]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too

It's not like Obsidian was given much of a choice.
New Vegas uses the consolized Fallout 3 engine, which comes directly from the consolized Oblivion engine.
And they were obliged to use it per their contract with Toddco.

Rusty has a high quality print of this framed next to Belle the Sheep from Arcanum.

[Nessa]

Games are typically written by liberals. Tim Cain said Fallout was as woke as it could be for its time.

Wokeness didn't happen yesterday - games have always had a perspective, they've always had things in there, but I want to be clear, it's been a subtext of my games, not the context. I never made a game saying "let's talk about racism," instead it was a subtext of Arcanum portrayed in different ways.

I noticed it in my one playthrough of FO2 as well. Just not nearly as bad as we have it today.

[Acrux]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too

It's not like Obsidian was given much of a choice.
New Vegas uses the consolized Fallout 3 engine, which comes directly from the consolized Oblivion engine.
And they were obliged to use it per their contract with Toddco.

You know, everyone talks about FNV in that picture, but I never hear Rainbow 6 brought up. Having only read the original book and not played the games - did it become about ****? Is it because of the RAINBOW name?

Tom Clancy when he was alive wouldn't have been happy (he was quoted once as saying "you can't hate black people any more and you can't hate homosexuals any more"). However, considering he was an ultimate boomercon, he might have been okay with it were he still alive today.

[A Chinese opium den]

It's not like Obsidian was given much of a choice.
New Vegas uses the consolized Fallout 3 engine, which comes directly from the consolized Oblivion engine.
And they were obliged to use it per their contract with Toddco.

You know, everyone talks about FNV in that picture, but I never hear Rainbow 6 brought up. Having only read the original book and not played the games - did it become about ****? Is it because of the RAINBOW name?

Tom Clancy when he was alive wouldn't have been happy (he was quoted once as saying "you can't hate black people any more and you can't hate homosexuals any more"). However, considering he was an ultimate boomercon, he might have been okay with it were he still alive today.

Its the multiplayer aspect, became an esports twitch streamer shooter full of women operators. A multiplayer game having cosmetics is the touch of death.

[Oyster Sauce]

You know, everyone talks about FNV in that picture, but I never hear Rainbow 6 brought up. Having only read the original book and not played the games - did it become about ****? Is it because of the RAINBOW name?

Tom Clancy when he was alive wouldn't have been happy (he was quoted once as saying "you can't hate black people any more and you can't hate homosexuals any more"). However, considering he was an ultimate boomercon, he might have been okay with it were he still alive today.

Its the multiplayer aspect, became an esports twitch streamer shooter full of women operators. A multiplayer game having cosmetics is the touch of death.

I think Siege is on its second or third playable ****** special forces operator by now

[maidenhaver]

[buttfucker 3000]

Kvatch: first part was the only good quest in vanilla, and they managed to screw that up. Fixed by the mod.

Fun fact about this I just learned while doing the Nexus Content Curator script.

The author of Kvatch Rebuilt is the same fat janny who patrols the post sections of Plus Sized Character mods.





Their pfp used to be themselves in real life but I assume they removed it after this

[Wretch]

reminds me, practically every criticism of "oblivion was a console game" applies directly to FNV yet it gets slobbed on. It was console-first too

It's not like Obsidian was given much of a choice.
New Vegas uses the consolized Fallout 3 engine, which comes directly from the consolized Oblivion engine.
And they were obliged to use it per their contract with Toddco.

Post of the year