Fallout 3

[.45cultist]

Tale of Two Wastelands lets one play Fallout 3 using Fallout New Vegas' more modern programming and gear. With a mod that lets Honest Hearts' weapons in the Mojave, I'm stalking the Capitol Wasteland with game canon Colt .45 autos and .308 hunting rifles, the AR-15 style Service Rifles, Browning 9MMs.

[swaghauler]

My godson Kevin has Fallout 4 and says it's great. IDK about that game, but if the DEVs put as much into it as SkyRim, it must be pretty good.

[Draq]

Fallout 4 is great. But honestly fallout new Vegas could've been the best. My main complaint is the map, and how incomplete it felt at times. I've put a grand total of over 700hrs since I first got it years ago. 4 is proving exceed my expectations.

[LBraden]

I have to agree with you a bit on the Fallout New Vegas map, though it is suppose to be the Nevada desert, so there wouldn't be many actual communities, though with the map compression it did feel odd.

But I still say FNV was one of the better of the newer Fallouts, 4 had potential but it just feels lacking, probably because of how compressed the cities are, and the amount of disused buildings there were in the cities, and the fact of that it felt more like it is "build a Commonwealth" rather than there be active life in the area.

Oh and the Raiders, always the raiders, if it's not a faction (who are genocidal maniacs) then they just want to kill you ...

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I like sandbox games that have a little direction to them, something like Minecraft just didn't grab me but Empyrion - Galactic Survival did even though the later game is just a more sophisticated version of Minecraft, (while Empyrion has creatures that will attack you much the same as Minecraft does, it also has the need for finding/making food otherwise your character starves to death so there's a constant pressure pushing you on).
Story-driven games that take place in a sandbox world (or even partial sandbox) are the kind of games I like best.

I've kinda been holding off on this thread because I wasn't that fussed on F:NV (stopped playing it before I even finished it) and while I have F4, I haven't installed it yet because absolutely nothing about the game convinces me that it's worth playing any time yet - I'll wait 'till there's more mods made for it. I really disliked all the damned "invisible walls" in F:NV but I wouldn't say it's a bad game, it just didn't have the sandbox elements I would have liked in a Fallout game.
Fallout 4 is... well, uninspired, at best. I've done a lot of checking to try and find the reason why I'm not fired up to play it and talked to friends who do play it. The worst aspect of F4 to me is that it seems the story is secondary to the base building and while a lot of fanboys crapped on about how fantastic the inclusion of base building was, it was just a copy of someone's mod for F3 and I'd already played it in F3, (pretty much the same thing happened with Hearthfire for Skyrim, it was a copy of someone's mod but at least it was improved a little, the base building in F4 seems like they just copied the basics of the F3 mod, shoved it in, called it "major content" and hoped the fans would not notice the lack of story.) And I really hate F4's dialogue system and voiced protagonist - they'll be the first things modded out whenever I do decide to play it.

I'm still playing a heavily modded version of F3 and also a heavily modded version of Skyrim. I'm also still playing STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl 10 years since it was released - albeit in modded form as well (the OGSE 2 mod and a second game with the Lost Alpha mod) - as well as STALKER: Call Of Pripyat with the SGM 2.2 mod.

Sad to say, nobody seems to be interested in making a post-apoc type game for the computer that doesn't have mutants, alien space bats or zombies 'cos I'd really love to have something that was closer to the T2k scenario. One of the few that is somewhere close is the MMO The Division. It's limited in scope as it takes place exclusively in Manhattan, NYC and is pretty much Diablo style play but set in the modern world and isn't as sandbox as I'd like but it's still a lot of fun.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

What gets me about the Creation engine based games that Bethsoft makes is that maps can be ANY size, practically. Before it was shut down there was a fan project to make the entirety of Middle Earth that Tolkien had mapped out using the Creation engine (the engine that Skyrim and Fallout4 use). That's an area of thousands if not tens of thousands of square miles!

Now, granted, there's something to be said for brevity but it really takes me out of my sense of immersion when someone says "Go all the way to Whiterun" and it's a five minute in-game walk, and this major hub of traffic and trade has seventeen NPCs in it.

Also, if you're looking for more to do in FO3 and FONV there's a mod called Fallout 3 Interiors and Fallout New Vegas Interiors that takes the inaccessible buildings (well, many of them) and makes them able to be explored, with loot and various unique items in them. For example, there's a now-accessible ruined department store in downtown DC that has a toy department where you can scavenge action figures of the various combat robots you encounter out in the wastes!

Little touches like that are great.

Here's some trivia about the Creation engine. It actually dates back all the way to 1999 with Morrowind. Bethsoft licensed a new engine called Gamebryo, and used it to create Morrowind and the various expansions for that game. When they created Oblivion, the next Elder Scrolls game, they switched to a newer edition of the Gamebryo engine called The Creation Engine. It was modified by increasing texture details and adding in a more detailed physics engine. All the various add-ons for Oblivion used that. Then Fallout 3 came in 2008, and New Vegas in 2010 and they too used Creation as their codebase. Skyrim and its add-ons came in 2011 onward, and of course now we have Fallout 4 and its add-ons, all still using The Creation Engine which is 12 years old. Ancient in terms of computer software!

Having played Far Cry 3 and 4 which use the Dunia engine I can honestly say that while I prefer the stories and sub-plots and side quests of The Elder Scrolls series and now the various 3d/first-person Fallout games, graphically they pale in comparison to the Dunia Engine games that Ubisoft has.

One final note about world-size: Daggerfall (the game that preceded Morrowind) has a game world of about sixty two thousand square miles! Compare this to the 15 square miles of Skyrim!

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Hehe yeah Daggerfall, it's the game that really got me started on PC gaming (before that I'd only ever really played consoles). Every time a new TES game came out I was hoping for a repeat of Daggerfall's world and randomly generated dungeons but as the graphics improved, it seemed word size decreased
As for the F3 mods, yeah I got most of those expansion type mods already, including the train carriage interiors

I agree with you about the Dunia engine, I played Far Cry 3 for a bit but lost interest in it about mid way through the story for various reasons that I won't bore everyone here with.
While Bethsoft were really great at world creation, they seem to have lost the ability to craft stories.
I suppose some of the signs were already there, their early dungeons were too "cut & paste" and their storylines could be a little same-same after a while and they really, really, really, REALLY needed to hire extra voice actors instead of overusing the three or four (sarcasm) that they have!

Having said that, Skyrim is a fun world space to wander around in but yes, five minute walks to a major town make it seem very small (pretty much the reason I don't bother with the horses, with a backpack mod and a couple of followers I don't need a horse for carrying extra loot and they don't offer any real advantage in speed when town is five minutes walk away).