Aug 28, 2015 10:09:10 GMT -6 Cyonan said:

Aug 28, 2015 9:48:00 GMT -6 Barbarossa said:

Twice as many assets as is in Skyrim? That's pretty much...Wow. If you've ever looked in the Creation Kit, there are tons of assets for Skyrim...literally, so many that it is difficult to navigate if you don't know what you've looking for. I hope they have a good menu system for the new tool kit. The difference is, I memorized just about all existing assets in New Vegas over the period of a year and know exactly where to go, to get what. In Skyrim, there is no way to memorize the number of assets, but unfortunately the menu system is not that much different than the Fallout GECK. I hope they give more granularity to the new GECK if they are going to balloon up assets like they say they are. Otherwise most mod time will be dedicated to looking stuff up and not editing.

I have more than a little faith though. Bethesda has shown themselves to be infinitely more reliable than Bioware.

It's nice to hear that since even with all the assets of Skyrim some things still felt like they were showing up a lot, like how half the inns in the game were exactly the same.

I'm still curious about that main quest line though since they're seemingly going bigger with that. Mostly because the main quest has typically been regarded as the weaker part of a Bethesda game in the last decade or so, and I want to see what they do when they put more into it.

Yeah, the asset thing is interesting and totally dependent on perspective. We definitely see recurring interiors, but there are so many interiors spaces over such a large map, (often attached to each other--like how many interior spaces there are in Dragon Reach alone--short answer, a lot) that while we see examples of copy paste, especially with common themed interiors like inns, there are innumerable examples of differing interiors. Some are wildly different. Some only have only a single instance of use within the whole game. Bethesda can easily be forgiven for the relatively few instances of asset reuse, when taking such a large geographical game area into consideration. Something like DA2? It's really difficult to overlook that embarassing affair of copy pasting over such a small game space.

About the main quest. I think they are going big on the MQ. They're making a big deal of it, and added in a voiced PC, and are not sharing much of anything about it. They speak in terms of emotional impact. Those are good signs to me. I think the weak story arc criticism is something they've seen as a recurring one, and unlike Bioware, they seem to listen and actually want to improve on things over time, but keep on doing the things that players expect of them...and not simply revert to the 'destroy it' option. Many have always said, that if Bethesda ever started "doing" story and companions...well, it would be virtually over for everyone else in the RPG business. Their world's have always been superior and almost overwhelming, the environmental story telling second to none; but add in deep characters and deep personal stories, and you have the hat trick.

FO4 could be that game, but I am content to remain cautiously optimistic.