Fallout 3

[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).

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Originally Posted by 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).

Oblivion was terrible about samey-same dungeons; they had ONE person literally design all of the dungeon maps. The only one that Oblivion had going on that wasn't a complete yawnfest was the "Mehrune's Razor" quest. It was a nice sign of "things to come" with Skyrim. Now that has some varied underworld exploration areas.

Again, with the Creation engine allowing world sizes as big as it does it is puzzling as to why they created a "world" that is literally smaller than my subdivision. :/

I felt like Skyrim's stories and side-quests were great, but even though I bought it months and months ago I just cannot get into either Dawnguard or Dragonborn. Maybe I'll feel different after futzing around with FO some.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I agree, with the land mass of Skyrim as big as it is, it's frustrating that they limited the size of the playable world. I have a couple of expansions that require removing the borders (i.e. the invisible walls) on the "edges" of the map. Before I was prepared to remove those borders I tried to collect some info on what it was all about and learnt that the guys who made these expansion mods, did not actually add any new land masses.
They placed their mods on the political borders of Skyrim and used the already in place land mass because the Bethsoft team had created miles and miles of map space around the borders with what appears to be no intention of the players ever getting to access it.

Now you probably know all this already but it was news to me and proved to be a bit of an eye opener. As I understand it, there were some ideas of expanding the playable land mass, hence the amount of mapped areas beyond the invisible walls of Skyrim's borders but the normal business pressures of release schedules & budgets stifled the plan. It's all hearsay but I wouldn't be surprised if it's correct.

There's one modder in particular that set about adding in a few Skyrim towns/villages from the TES Arena map that aren't in TES V. I haven't tried them because I still haven't been able to confirm if these locations conflict with some other mods I'm using. According to the blurb surrounding his mods, the TES V map of Skyrim has been reduced in size compared to the Skyrim that was in Arena.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Well, I think it speaks volumes when you go to the UESP.net site and look at even "smaller" games like Oblivion and see how many dropped quests there are, dungeons that look interesting but when you start looking around, you get the feeling there's supposed to be something there but there isn't, then you do some digging in the various FAQs and wiki pages and lo and behold: "This area was probably supposed to be for a quest, but you cannot open the door/go beyond this set area, and no key for it exists in-game." or they've dug up snippets of conversation that you can't have with people but are in the data files...

And it's not just Bethsoft that does stuff like that; a group of modders found a massive amount of game content in one of the Star Wars RPGs, too: nearly a whole complete questline, just dropped.

Don't even get me started on the material cut from STALKER. That'd be a second game all by itself.

I'd wager there's likewise things like that in FO3, FONV and FO4.

I for one wish the Capitol Wasteland was much larger and bleaker. I liked the "ghost radio stations" for example. Oh well.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

I don't know if you've seen the maps used for the Lost Alpha mod for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl (ShoC) but compared to those in vanilla ShoC, they are anywhere between two to four times larger. While the guys who put together the mod added some of their own maps, they used many of the maps from the ShoC 1935 build so you can see that the game was intended to be much broader in scope.

I remember some comment about the GSC team initially wanting to map the entire 30km² area of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone but of course we know how that turned out and they must have made some significant changes to the story to facilitate that (particularly considering the in game idea that you transition from Pripyat to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant from south to north when in the real world it's north to south).

I also vaguely recall that their original idea was that you actually had to sneak into the Cordon area from a separate map i.e. you would start in a "beginning" map and then infiltrate the Cordon map to locate Sidorovich.

Still love the game although I am playing it in modded form and as mentioned, 10 years after it was released (I've played it at least once every year - I'm an obsessed fanboy haha!) But yes, for an "aftermath of the Cold War era" vibe, it hits a lot of the right notes.

[Draq]

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Well, I think it speaks volumes when you go to the UESP.net site and look at even "smaller" games like Oblivion and see how many dropped quests there are, dungeons that look interesting but when you start looking around, you get the feeling there's supposed to be something there but there isn't, then you do some digging in the various FAQs and wiki pages and lo and behold: "This area was probably supposed to be for a quest, but you cannot open the door/go beyond this set area, and no key for it exists in-game." or they've dug up snippets of conversation that you can't have with people but are in the data files...

And it's not just Bethsoft that does stuff like that; a group of modders found a massive amount of game content in one of the Star Wars RPGs, too: nearly a whole complete questline, just dropped.

Don't even get me started on the material cut from STALKER. That'd be a second game all by itself.

I'd wager there's likewise things like that in FO3, FONV and FO4.

I for one wish the Capitol Wasteland was much larger and bleaker. I liked the "ghost radio stations" for example. Oh well.

Fo2 and fonv were rife with incompleteness and dropped/cut content. Still some of my favorite games.

[swaghauler]

Escape from Tarkov looks promising IF they keep developing it as an open world and DON'T go down the dark road to a competitive shooter.