The Outer Worlds - Will Obsidian Kick Bethesda's Rear?

With the Fallout.......(sorry...I had to do it) of Fallout 76 being raged about by vloggers on YouTube and various other sites, many of the videos I have watched and articles I've read show a LOT of fan concern over some of Bethesda's up coming games that they have in the works.....that we know virtually NOTHING about......and have absolutely NO release date at all.

Personally I think some of the concern is real after the dumpster fire that they released called Fallout 76.

When I first heard the rumors of 76, I was sort of excited about it. Bethesda had put out Fallout New Vegas not too long after Fallout 3, and most fans enjoyed that game very much, with some even calling it better than Fallout 3 (debate on that still rages even today!).

Unfortunately, when the actual information about the game was released by Mr. Todd Howard......I was less than thrilled. A Fallout MMO?

No thanks. A co-op add on might be cool.....but....yah. Just wasn't interested.

In the last few weeks, I'm not sure which fans are raging more: Fallout 76 fans or Doctor Who fan, about how upset and basically pissed off they are.

Well......guess there's not really going to be any RPG in the near future that I can look forward too. Bethesda most likely won't be releasing their Space RPG untill 2022 if I'm lucky.....and nothing known on it really.

Hold the boat. Guess what came out just a few days ago?

The official trailer for The Outer Worlds by....(drum roll): Obsidian. The makers of Fallout New Vegas.

Looks like Obsidian said: "So Bethesda......would you like to see how you really make a PVE Space game?" and beat them to the punch.

So give the trailer a watch......Not sure if I'll sign up for early release (game is set to be released some time next year), as I might wait and see how it reviews first.

But I must admit........I'm a bit excited:



The Outer Worlds Website

a reply to: eriktheawful

I haven't played it, but the griping over 76 reminds me of the griping over elder scrolls online.

Doesn't really bother me if they run out a profit generator while they work on other new projects.

If Bethesdas space game is anything like fallout and elder scrolls I don't think they have anything to worry about with obsidian.

If obsidian really wants to impress me, they'll get the blessing from disney to make a new kotor.

I'll give it a go...though I've never been a huge fan of fallout. Borderlands is more my thing. Speaking of new releases, Wildcard is launching a new game this week...Atlas. Sort of a pirate take on Ark Survival Evolved.

I think this is gonna happen! Fallout 76 tanked. Mass Effect 4 didn’t do so hot, either. And Outer Worlds scratches both itches.

That doesn’t mean that the ipcoming Bethesda Space game and Elder Scrolls 5 will be bad.

a reply to: eriktheawful

First off. Where the hell have you been?
I haven’t seen a game post from you in forever!

On topic - yes, I am looking forward to outer worlds!

a reply to: darkbake

I don't want either of them to be bad either.

What I hoping for is: Obsidian's game takes off and does really well.......making Bethesda take a step back and look at themselves. Go back to their grass roots, where they have almost always shined.

Nothing wrong with PVP games. Those that make them well know the business of making them well and in most cases making their players happy.

Experimenting with something is fine. Best to take baby steps though. I've been thinking for a while now that if Bethesda had make Fallout 76 into a PVE game.....but with a co-op multiplayer option, keeping actual NPCs who had story and character to them, I don't think there would be anywhere near the amount of rage that we're seeing now.

Sure, I think there would still be gripes about the bugs, the graphic issues, etc. But I don't think it would be anywhere near as bad as it's gotten.

There are a good chunk of players out there that are enjoying the game. I'm happy for them. But some of them are now starting to complain that their bored with it already, after only 30 or so hours of game play.

I've logged over 1,424 hours on Skyrim. 1,193 hours on Fallout 4. Don't even asking me about Fallout 3, New Vegas or most of the Mass Effect games. All because of how well the games were made, the DLCs and the modding community.

There's just something about sandbox RPGs that make me feel like I can spread my wings and really get my money's worth out of that game. Even the games that are not quite like a sandbox (Mass Effect, Bioshock come to mind), there are still plenty of different ways to play the game to where I end up playing them a lot.

PVP MMO games......feels like such a grind, doing the same things over and over. That's just how I feel about it.

One thing is for sure: Bethesda has always shined with their PVE games. I just hope they don't loose site of that when it comes to Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI

a reply to: eriktheawful

Saw this earlier this week.

It looks very much like Fallout+Mass Effect+No Man’s Sky. To me, anyway. Add to that the hinted at “decisions matter” aspect too and it should be a cracking game!

a reply to: Macenroe82

LOL!

I've been around. Stopped making the YouTube videos because: Life. Just don't have the time for it anymore.

Played a lot of Eve Online during the summer and fall, and of course messing around with other games, installing mods for them, trying them out.

Member Lysergic posted a thread last week about this found: HERE

Fallout 76 may evolve into something worth playing, in fact, it may end up being free. Give it 6 months.

READ THIS

The Elder Scrolls Online isn’t a fully free-to-play game. A subscription isn’t required, but you do need to buy the base title. Fallout 76 could follow that same format and quickly reduce its price to $20, but there’s a problem. Its received even harsher reviews, and it’s also not as large or technically ambitious. ESO’s story isn’t great, but it’s there. It’s not a fantastic massively multiplayer game, but it’s a solid entry in the genre, with the crowd, hub cities, and deep character progression that implies. Fallout 76 has none of that.

That, I think, will be reflected in the price. Fallout 76 launched with a cash shop that’s already populated with a fair stock of items. The free-to-play foundation was live from launch. I think Bethesda won’t hesitate to make the transition to at least a limited free-to-play incarnation within six months. Lowering the price to zero will also lure more players, which makes more sense here than most online games. Despite what you may have heard about its PvP elements, Fallout 76 is an almost entirely cooperative game that works best in a group, and a free-to-play option would remove a barrier that keeps skeptical friends from heading into the wasteland.

a reply to: seattlerat

Can't support a game like that. Makes players pay for a $60 dollar game that is worth $5 at most. Then implements a bunch of mechanics than can easily be turned into pay 2 play mechanics.

Why wait years for the corporate suits to allow the devs to devolope a awesome game>? So much better stuff out there. Nobody should pay for fallout 76.

No man's sky did the same thing. Pay a full $60 to wait 2 - 4 years for the PROMISED game to be realized. Utter BS. I'm sure devs don't like it either. It's the process of the corporate business men and women taking over the industry and turning everything into cash, without any integrity.

t'was the only xmas present I needed;

to know that fallout isn't dead it's just been renamed and given a bigger universe(punzboi) to play in, and that nightmare called 76, you can just totally forget about it, completely, maybe even ES VI the way things are going....

Bring back Wizardry. :p


WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I am beyond sick of microtransgression, stop microin me broh.

originally posted by: watchitburn
a reply to: eriktheawful

I haven't played it, but the griping over 76 reminds me of the griping over elder scrolls online.

Doesn't really bother me if they run out a profit generator while they work on other new projects.

If Bethesdas space game is anything like fallout and elder scrolls I don't think they have anything to worry about with obsidian.

If obsidian really wants to impress me, they'll get the blessing from disney to make a new kotor.

It’s much worse than ESO imo and a lot of the backlash is from how Bethesda is handling the criticism a great example of that is the canvas-gate and how bad they’ve failed at taking care of customers that shelled out $200 for the power armor edition and got bait and switched and then patronized for calling out Bethesda on it. They certainly aren’t doing themselves any favors. I have faith that obsidian will see how not to develop and knock it out of the park.

Ok I'm excited for this. Enjoyed all of the Fallouts... except had zero interest in 76 and even less after the reviews. Agreed about MMOs and the pointless grind they are. Besides, I'm too old to dawdle around with a bunch of 13yo kids. If I wanted to do that I'd play Fortnite.

All that said, as far as space oriented RPGs go I'm also really interested in CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. Witcher 3 (CD Projekt Red) was a game that shook other RPGs to their foundation as they took combat (lessons learned from Dark Souls) and storytelling to a level that was unseen in Skyrim of any of the Elder Scrolls games. But we know the combat in the ES series were always clunky. So I'm excited to see what CD Projekt Red can do in this arena.

I enjoyed the Mass Effect series as well but also often found it to be too linear.

Either way, thanks for the link. First I've heard about it.

a reply to: eriktheawful

Let's be fair Obsidian make better game's most of the time and when they were allowed to make a fallout even half baked and released unfinished with only half the map done NV was and remain's the best Fallout (of the first person variety I never played the older ones 1 and 2) game of the lot, a hell of a lot of NV fan's were really upset and utterly gutted at how bad fallout 4 was compared to what they thought it was going to be.
Obsidian make better NPC's, Better Quests, Better Story's, Better Perk's you name it but they were always not so good business men so that explain's why they struggled from time to time it was not there games but there business ability's that let them down.
Also the old Gamebryo based engine is becoming an embarrassment when compared to for example the latest unreal engine so really speaking Bethesda need to move on as far as that is concerned, imagine what fallout 4 would have played like IF it had been built upon the far more capable and powerful unreal engine, draw distances to make your mouth water, effects that the gamebryo just can not handle and enough free NPC functionality to field army's of characters instead of tiny settlement's of a just s few and raider camp's that have hardly anyone home.

a reply to: LABTECH767

You don't just pull a new game engine that you designed and owned out of your rear end. It can take years of R&D, and that's money spent, that you may or may not get a return on.

Unreal: has to be licensed, which again would cost them money. A LOT of money (I know, I've worked with the Unreal engine and have seen first hand the legal comits on such a license).

So it's a Rock and a Hard Place for them.

Personally I think they should have done one or the other. But in the interest of the all mighty profit margin, the owners and directors of Bethesda decided they'd make more money with a game engine that they keep patching. Sort of like someone who keeps slapping a band aid on their really old car.

Insider info said that the Devs for Bethesda absolutely love their game engine and using it to make games. Any new engine they'd have to relearn how to do things (and trust me, I've used several different game engines in different designs......there are big differences and nuances that make huge differences in how you go about designing things. Everything from the meshes, to texturing, to the lighting.....and that doesn't even include the scripting to make things happen).

In any case: I want to see them do better. Not fail. I won't gleefully rub my hands together if they fail. Just as I'm really hoping Obsidian does will with this game.

The more gaming companies that can make good games and make fans happy, the better.

a reply to: eriktheawful

That is perfectly true, almost all Engines have to be licensed but there are a great many of them on the market and there is a reason why so few game's and almost all of them Bethesda use the flawed and old Gamebryo engine, even there updated version is literally crap.
It can not handle as much on screen as the more modern engines and has a lot of issues such as memory leak's - no matter how they try to plug them.
Also it can not handle vehicle physic's with any degree of success since fast moving across the map you would find even with an SSD in your rig that the buildings, textures and lod's take a long time to catch up, you might get there even before the NPC's do so that is why even though in the Fallout universe cars and trucks as well as motorcycles are a staple of the lore for traversing entire states that the later Bethesda game's simply can not handle them, there are mod's for it but they too are limited and run into those very problem's I outline.

To make there game smooth they even have to stoop to some techniques such as pre-combining asset's so that for instance a sky scraper may be made up of several hundred parts (just for the building) but once pre-combined the engine then treats that skyscraper as a single object - it's a good idea but if you want to scrap that item then in there settlement mode you have to scrap the entire object or may find that it is un-scrappable even with scrapping mod's.

I have been playing Bethesda game's since the day's of Morrowind, missed out on there earlier titles and back during the Morrowind day's they were legendary even though even then the character model's were - strange - and they were the one's that promoted and did the most to get mod makers to alter there game even giving away a bundled disc complete with all there in game asset's and a modding engine called the construction kit.

The gamebryo engine also handles physic's poorly, AI is very limited as well.
Take a comparison to the now aging engine behind the old stalker call of chernobyl, it is ancient now but still far more powerful than the gamebryo engine.

We are consumers, we pay them for a product and they should deliver on quality with less flaw's but sadly they are far from the only one's in the industry to deliver flawed and faulty product's almost always on launch, still as a consumer I want them to remember the customer is always right and even if it bites into there profit's by about half a percent they really do need to get a new engine on board.

worldofleveldesign.com...
www.panda3d.org...

The reason they Love there engine is because they know it inside out simple as that, they created the original version after all for Morrowind - and while severely dated it remain's one of gaming history's great's even if it is a bit of a Marmite sandwich since you loved it or hated it.
Because they know there engine they know how to optimize it, how to squeeze it for every last drop BUT even if they supercharge it over and over it will remain an old engine with a lot of flaw's.

Also you know it is down not only to the engine but how that engine was created, these day's most programmers behind 3d game game rendering engines create there engines using high level languages, which is not so bad since Our PC's are pretty fast but there is a definite difference between custom code and compiled code - think back to Jeff Minter the guy that brought you Mutant Camel's on the commodore 64 and several other great's of yesteryear - he did all of his programming in his head in numbers - in machine code and yes it was only a 6502 he was dealing with but hey the modern PC's mostly for legacy reason's are still using 8086 code in there CPU which is of course almost identical to 6502 code.
Compilers get it wrong, they create bloated excess code line's and they miss opportunity's to reuse the same sub routine call's for several completely different function's so if you sit down and de compile the code of almost everything we are using today from our operating system (even Microsoft get it wrong) to that very game engine you will find JUNK code, unnecessarily repeated sub routines and dirty edit's everywhere.

Imagine though if Jeff Minter or someone like him had been given all the processing power and memory of a modern PC and just imagine what he or a team of equally talented guy's could have created, what our PCs are struggling to do due to that bad code they could have done with good code 10 or even 15 years ago even faster than they do it now and that is taking into account clock speed's and memory sizes.

Love the band aid analogy, made me chuckle and it is sadly all too true.
Actually remind's me of - well there were pterodactyl's flying around back then but back in my college years a friend over here in the UK had an Alpine Sunbeam, it was a pure rust bucket but we went places in that thing - broke down all the time but he could always get it running again somehow.

a reply to: watchitburn

It's worse than the griping over ESO. There are major issues with Bethesda's Creation engine. It has never looked great, but it now looks really, really dated. It's a modification of the Gamebryo engine, which is over 20 years old. Bethesda has already announced that ES6 and Starfield will use the Creation Engine. That's not good news.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

What they are doing instead of fixing the engine problem is putting up the hardware spec's instead and that makes it look like it's our hardware that is struggling when in fact it is that ancient engine.

a reply to: burdman30ott6

Reminds me of Cyan Worlds.

Their Myst games (1, 2, 3, 4 ) used a special engine for pre-rendered scenes. Pipmak if I remember correctly.

After their 2nd game, Riven, they invested the money from that to create their very own 3D rendering engine with real time rendering. It was called Plasma.

Plasma was used for their game Uru (aka MOUL, Myst Online, Uru Live), and also for Myst 5. At that time, computer hardware GPUs were no where near up to snuff to do the realistic real time rendering like we have now (and going back just the last 5 to 10 years). However, people loved being able to walk around instead of point and click movement.

I took a lot of the meshes used in Uru, and ported them over to the Unreal engine and and the difference was amazing.

I showed Rand Miller what it looked like and he said he'd have to give the Unreal engine some serious consideration if they ever went back to making games.

A few years later, Cyan Worlds made Obduction ....using the Unreal engine.



I still chuckle over that!

This article is encouraging Obsidian is saying no micro transactions will be in it.
www.techpowerup.com...