Bethesda at E3

FO4's release date was a nice surprise, and all the custom stuff looks fun.

But Doom looked horrible to me. Wayyy to many over the top animations and the character models looked too detailed to have more than a handful at a time. Also, that snap map looks over simplified. What about you all?

 

Doom looked amazing! Gameplay looked very smooth. Gore was plentiful. Animations were fluid. Basically top notch development there (plus lots of millions into assets ). This is very necessary for a classic doom like game. However, Fallout 4 was the biggest shock ever. The amount of surprising features..... wow! Totally redefined RPGs and they are really setting the bar high. (DID YOU SEE HOW THE AI CALLED HIM BY HIS NAME?!!?!??!?!?!?!?!)

Also, Dishonored 2 looks like a disappointment only because it was all CGI and the gameplay looks exactly the same. There will probably only a few new abilities. Other than that, it should be an expansion pack for Dishonored. I could be wrong, there could be a lot of new content, but for now, it looks like nothing new.

 

FO4 looks absolutely amazing. The "build your own lair" and weapon customisation are OTT. It's my fave IP of all time on any platform - I'm really pleased they took their time to make a worthy successor to FO3.

Not interested in Doom at all. It's nicely rendered, but it reminded me of Destiny - just another shooter, not too much soul. Just my personal preference of course - I realise it has a huge, loyal fanbase, so it must be doing something right.

 

Agreed that Doom 4 looked pretty close to ready. I think they captured the ultra violent shooting gallery nature that has always been Doom's gameplay roots. I commend them for not trying to make Doom into Fallout, as they are different games that should target different gameplay.

Fallout4 has a feature scope to the sun and back, so we'll see how many bugs there are on release. Regardless, they now have a release date to crunch to. Whenever I see these massive scope games I always just turn my brain off because I will never spend the time to complete them to my satisfaction. I know I am not in the majority though, so I figure they will do well and get many GOTY awards. It just isn't my type of game.

After downloading the fallout app (Fallout Shelter) I have a sneaky suspicion that it was made with Unity btw. I wonder if we can get confirmation.

 

Oh well.. It was one of the few games I was really looking forward to. I will still buy a glorified expansion pack anyway, because Dishonoured is one of my favourites and most of the expansions were really good.

Does Doom4 have lights?. Doom3 was near unplayable it was so dark.. Being practically blind made it a little scary, but it was much more frustrating than scary. It wasn't a game that stood out for me. I didn't enjoy it.

 

That Doom trailer isn't very impressive to me for some reason. I guess the Doom games have always been technical feats but it just looks so fake, like it was rendered on rails or something and it doesn't feel much like a game. Pretty, i suppose, but not much meat to it otherwise.

Fallout 4 looked absurd. Do want.

 

Wait, what? Bethesda release a game with bugs? They'd never have you carry around a quest item for a quest that mysteriously can't be fulfilled and have you stuck with its weight sucking up your inventory (and undroppable) would they? Or my favorite from Oblivion with the witch that can cure Lycanthropy... but also has a main quest associated with her, and if you get turned into a werewolf she won't talk to you, yet she's the only one that can cure it... no, not Bethesda.

Or, in Fallout 3 where I picked a lock that I wasn't supposed to be able to pick, and got the Geck before ever doing the mission under the garage (way early in the game) and it warped me right to the end of the game...

But seriously though... Fallout 4 has me more excited than any game... it's by far my favorite series and even with the bugs, it has always been an absolute blast (no pun intended). As much as I'm loving The Witcher 3 right now, to steal a line from Gru: "There are pins and needles that I'm sitting on" waiting for Fallout 4.

 

I checked out many of the "game" trailers from today at E3. It's too bad they are not making many actual games. I mean they might be but it was very hard to tell since I mainly saw just a bunch of CGI movie crap. Doom 4 and FO4 looked like they might be good games. It kind of sucks that even the Indie stuff I watched was mainly focused more on the movie crap than anything else. Sometimes I wonder if these people want to make games or go to Hollywood. lol Hopefully tomorrow there will be some interesting stuff!

 

Come on that's super easy. Got a game_Data folder and a sharedassets0 in it? That's a unity game. Got a giant game_windowsnoeditor.pak somewhere? That's an unreal 4 game. The list goes on for other known engines.

 

Yeah Fallout Shelter is made with Unity

 

One thing that I forgot to ask, does ANYONE think that the Doom stuff was actually "in-game"?

I remember just a few months ago we had people on the threads talking up FC4's terrain with tons of amazing "screen shots". And it was all lies. All of it. Every last image was pre-rendered.

Don't get me wrong, the game was good, but why do we keep doing this cycle of "OMG! Look at these screen shots!" to immediately forgetting about them and not holding the companies to their lies?

 

There were several gameplay videos and in some you can notice easily its console guy playing. Also there is nothing in the quality that wouldn't be possible runtime.

 

It's in-engine at least. I doubt it wasn't scripted (including the character controller). Just the way the camera was tracking suggests it wasn't a person with a controller/mouse. The multiplayer demo looked a lot more representative for the actual combat speed.

 

I think it was actual doom gameplay - perhaps running on a high end PC at max graphics settings, and perhaps with most of the events pre-scripted to occur (as with even released games...) - but prerecorded before the show to ensure things came out good (not played live in front of the audience where bugs could pop up and ruin it).

Regardless of all that I think it looked pretty impressive as far as a shootemup goes (besides seeing the same "fatality" melee kills several times over against the same kind of enemy - which I was hoping they would have had more variety and avoided letting the same animated kill play more than once at the least), and it looked like a lot of fun! I probably won't buy it, but maybe it might get a rental so I can beat it in a few days and get rid of it, haha.

 

I liked the DOOM footage myself - it felt like a return to the very action based game play that DOOM / DOOM II had.

I do wish it had more of the 'hellish' feel to the level design and less of the 'space station' feel - but maybe they will have other levels... to me they lost their way artistically in the level design of DOOM3 and continuing on that path is not necessarily a good thing.

 

So many conferences at E3 - but the best seemed to south park, ff7 remake. Although I guess thats just carried by the IP and nostalgia.

 

Well damn you boyz and girlz I'm going to have to fork up some cash soon and get me a new graphics card...

 

I really like the Xbox One backward compatibility announcement. Good thing I haven't sold my old 360 games yet.

 

I'm wondering about that one myself.

It seems like the thing was either built up to be backwards compatible and they're just now turning it on for marketing reasons, or they're releasing an emulator.

If it's an emulator, I still haven't forgotten the same claim on the 360 which turned out to be completely broken with the exception of a small select few titles (Halo 1 and 2 mainly).

I don't know, I lost all faith in the XBox when my 360 spent the better half of its first year broken from over heating. Then sending it out for repairs again and again until my warrenty expired and they told me to buy a new one, but they never fixed it in the first place.

Sorry I get so damn cynical.

I'm just so sick of the lies, the false promises, and the customer abuse. Or, at least from a few companies.

 

If memory serves me correctly Bethesda is generally pretty good about their gameplay trailers. I don't remember any instances where they've been called out for "bullshots" or notable graphics downgrades. Ubisoft, on the other hand...

In any event, if in doubt about any upcoming games I like to refer to this chart:

They showed gameplay?

 

So it is going to be something like 100 titles to start with and keep growing and users can request additional ones. Microsoft has to work with the developers so who knows. There probably is some conversion process that will take place and probably still an emulator. I only have a few games that id want go back and play like Bioshick: Infinite

 

Well, that 100 titles comes with a huge astrix. Namely that with the 360 it seemed that over 9 out of 10 "supported" title could barely function past the start screen. Forza comes to mind as a good example of that, the game dropped frame rates drastically and froze constantly.

I'd rather have no backwards compatibility than that.

 

I like how people act like backwards compatibility is something special. Pc has it since forever and you go praise console manufacturers for adding a basic feature that should have been there since the beginning...

 

Well you gotta remember that the hardware of pc's has only gradually shifted each generation - while the hardware (and software) of each console generation is drastically different. And since not everybody would even use the backwards compatibility, it's been on the back burner of priorities for them.

I do agree though that it's a little silly to bring it out now, when if it's capable of it, it should have been there from the get go.

 

It sounds like it's only capable with coordination with developers. Another important note is that now that consoles are standardizing and using x86 processors we should enjoy the same incremental changes and backward compatibility as PC with more minimal effort in future generations.

 

Maintaining backwards compatibility isn't an automatic process. It requires additional effort on part of both the hardware and software manufacturers. The caveat to maintaining that compatibility is that it restricts the changes you're able to make to the platform without bloating it with compatibility layers.

The Wine project shows this off the best. They actually have to emulate the bugs in the Windows API because some older programs expect them to be present.

 

What the hell are you talking about? What exactly is a "pre-rendered image"? If you are thinking this is the correct usage of a technical term ...

The two gameplay clips you saw of Doom are perfectly legitimate. Certain compromises have to be made for demo purposes, sure. That included controller input instead of mouse/keyboard and playing on Easy instead of Hard. id has already confirmed this on Twitter. Maybe prerecorded instead of live (note: the Uncharted 4 demo was played live). It can also include some minor scripting details like a camera transition replacing a trigger (see: the demo for Guerrilla's Horizon). But other than that it's legit.

Do you really think that a game to be released in 9 months can afford a fake demo at this point? "Fake", as in Halo 2 @ E3 2003? That's what we call a "fake" demo. QuakeCon will be in a few months an it will be the last before the game releases, which probably means there will be a hands-on demo there. Singe Player though, not Multi. That's the reason you didn't get it for E3.

If you want to level criticism at this game you can talk about composer Mick Gordon pushing the music a bit too much in a dub step direction. The music you heard during the demo is pretty much the Doom music through a dubstep / drum & bass filter. You can also talk about color correction.

Do you even know the history of this game? The development hell this game has been in? The brown military shooter footage that recently leaked? The reboot they had after a period of lacking direction? I had long given up hope for this and I am thankful for everything I get here.

Also notice how pretty much the entire internet - including industry pundits - didn't get the bigger picture here. This hole Snapmap thing is more than just a level editor, it is visual scripting. You could re-build the entire single player campaign of Doom 1 to 3 in this, as long as the existing assets suffice. Next they talked about expanding Bethesda.net into a community and games content hub. And what publisher was it that recently experimented with charching money for mod content on Steam?

Now run the numbers and you get the picture. When Doom releases Spring 2016 they will either immediately or a few months later charge for user-made mod content, that's what's going on here. The Kotaku article that revealed the background of the Doom reboot quoted some Bethesda/Zenimax managers saying that Doom should be as big as Skyrim. This is what they meant. Mark my words.

 

I think he was trying to say it was an FMV rather than actual gameplay live on some machine you know. In either case you could say technically it was pre-rendered because it was a captured video, whether it was actual gameplay or not, lol. I doubt a machine was actively running that gameplay but rather just playing back carefully selected gameplay - so, I guess he was using the term sort of kind of correctly

 

I can't speak to whether the images were or were not pre-rendered, but I can assure you that pre-rendered is indeed a correct technical term.

That's a pretty big caveat, isn't it? It can do anything you want, as long as what you want is something it can do.