Weekend Question: What do we want from Fallout 5?

PCG Jody

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Dec 9, 2019
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I ask the PCG staff a regular Weekend Question and post the answers on the site. If you'd like to throw in an answer here, I'll squeeze the best into the finished article!

This week's question is: What do we want from Fallout 5?

Todd Howard says Fallout 5 is coming after The Elder Scrolls 6, if we all live that long. And with those words, the speculation engines began turning. Sure, we'll probably be a decade older by the time Fallout 5 comes out—assuming someone doesn't drop the bombs for real by then. Distant as it may be, it's still fun to start wondering what shape the next Fallout game could be. Like war, should Fallout never change, or will it finally be time for a radical redesign? What technological advancements would fit a post-nuclear RPG? What Bethesda clichés should it avoid, or embrace?
 
Seems to be more or less the same question posed in Shodan's FO5 thread, but phrased what do we want in FO5, vs what will it be like. So I'll just copy and paste the reply I posted there, as it can pertain to both.

Hopefully building will be a bit more user friendly, with more things to build. Starfield seems to show that. However they also need to focus on better voice and model diversity in their games. Seeing the same old faces and hearing the same old voices over and over again can really break immersion. Other than that, their game endings are often lackluster, and they need to reflect character choices better.

What Fallout 4 had going for it mostly was the spontaneity of what happened just traveling through the game world, so I certainly wouldn't want to lose that if the story and choices are more structured and tangible. I have high hopes for Starfield, unlike many whom seem overly critical and skeptical, but after the disastrous launch of Fallout 76, I worry Fallout 5 will be burdened with more problems.

I just hope they've learned their lesson that you can't have a massively larger game world and still use the same old tired engine tech. Engines need to be updated regularly to account for new effects and features and keep the rendering as efficient as possible when game worlds expand. I think the response to Starfield once it releases will give them a lot to learn regarding the next Fallout.

If Starfield ends up having a lot of obvious cookie cutter copied and pasted structures on those 1000 planets they've made, that will no doubt be a main source of criticism.
 
if it were too organised over there, no one would come here to ask :)
The thing is though, people don't generally flood the PC Gaming board here with performance related questions, and I can't help but think it's partly because here it's wisely called PC Gaming Discussions, vs just PC Gaming. It's become a real problem over there to have that forum flooded with such posts. They have other forums that are more appropriate for such threads, but they let them post them in PC Gaming. I think most are posting there thinking it will get more exposure.

I brought it up in their Feedback forum, and it was recognized as an ongoing problem by one of their more prominent PC gaming mods, but he said he has no authority to redirect the threads or tell people not to post them there. He said all he could do was notify an Admin of the thread I made in the Feedback forum, but did not know for sure if anything would be done about it. He btw said he would take action if allowed to. So basically things are too bureaucratic over there. :rolleyes:
 
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What do we want from Fallout 5?

I think the majority would like a good game, myself included, even though I don't necessarily have the highest of hopes. I loved the exploration in Fallout 4, it was just as with the other Fallout games (not played the first one though) amazing! The feel of the world is something that has for me always been a landmark for the Fallout world. You know where you are, there is something cozy about feeling at home again. That is why I hope they do not change up the formula when it comes to the whole post-apocalyptic theme at least.

I want it to stay"falloutie" with sand, rocks, radiation, pills, nuca cola, deathclaws, abandoned buildings with skeletons in them smoking a cigarette, and so on. Maybe one thing would have been cool though: Perhaps Fallout 5 could have an even deeper subterranean system with its own kind of species growing. Having a deeper system, perhaps with semi-radiated sulfuric water, could have been interesting to explore as creatures would not have been fully mutated and for example, if they were also living in pitch black they could have been given some unique and terrifying looks.

I would have loved the see some of the creatures being a bit more intelligent and harder to kill. Perhaps the Deathclaws could mutate a little more into really terrifying creatures, not as brainy as the Xenomorph from the Alien movie, but more of a dangerous adversary, a thing you have to be very careful off, maybe even throughout the game. It would be a big step from one-shotting them with the Abilene Kid LE BB gun in Fallout: New Vegas with a few perk skills in crit and stealth.

What they really need to do is to bring back much, MUCH better dialogue options. Dialogue options in Fallout4 were really bad and if the developers don't believe we are moving into an idiocracy, it's pretty safe to say that a few more dialogue options would not make our brain collapse on itself. The base building and weapons customizations I would love with much more in-depth design, I think they got a lot to go on there. Overall, staying Fallout would be the best thing. Not trying to reinvent the wheel too much and not repeating mistakes from the past.
 
I hope I'll be alive and healthy by the time of FO5 releases, but I think we're looking at a minimum of it being eight years away. A lot of what happens with FO5 will depend upon the success and reception of both Starfield and the next Elder Scrolls game.

I think we can safely assume that it will be a first-person perspective game and not a return to the isometric style, though I love both styles of gameplay. What I mainly want is a return to FO5 being a real RPG with an in-depth conversation system, real consequences from your character's choices and actions, as well as a reputation system as it relates to the people and factions. A more detailed leveling up system (as well as character creation) that is more than just selecting a single perk each time, like in FO4.

All the Fallout games that I've played, FO1-4 as well as FONV, had their own merits and that post-apocalyptic atmosphere, which still remains unique to me, and I wouldn't want to lose that element of immersion. I don't really have a preference as to where the next location that FO5 is set, but it would be a dream if Bethesda could take all (or most) of the positive elements of those games and incorporate them into Fallout 5.
 
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I'd like to not be looking for a relative while fixing up a giant robot. These Bethesda storylines are getting old.

I really don't mind coming out of a vault for the millionth time though, that experience can be updated with each gen and still amaze me, it's the going downhill after that turns the games into a slog.

If they can make the rest of the game as engaging as the early game I'll be happy.
 
Rather than a proper Fallout 5, I can't help but wanna see a spinoff series that might not even use the Fallout brand name. Rather, I think it'd be worth it to have a new IP that takes place in the Fallout universe, but focuses on Europe rather than the United States.

Reason being is that the Great War in the Fallout universe was mostly focused around America vs China, and I imagine that most of the nuclear exchanges were isolated to that conflict. Obviously, said exchange would've affected life in Europe for the worse, though I imagine that since they were well away from the blast radii of America's nukes, I imagine the countries of Europe would've more or less rebuilt itself by the time Fallout 3 and 4 happens, albeit with a significant societal regression, although at a much more backwater state compared to modern Europe.

Basically, I think "Europe in the Fallout universe" would be a nice way to introduce people to a medieval schizo-tech world that is a mix of medieval "fantasy" (air quotes cuz the medieval stuff still needs to be grounded in realism), the familiar early modern architecture of Fallout, and the 60s sci-fi that RobCo has brought to the world.
 
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Sarafan

Community Contributor
Back to isometric perspective? I guess that's not an option. Then they should focus on the story because Fallout 4 had some serious holes (it's a good game though!). F4 also had problems with evil path. It was practically non-existent until Nuka-World DLC was released. There's no karma system, you can steal all you want without consequences (unless someone sees you that is). Proper evil path would be awesome.

I would also like to see choices that bear consequences, even in side quests. Wasteland 2 and 3 show how this should be done and although I'm aware that it's harder to implement it in an open world, I don't think it's impossible. To sum up, I want a smaller open world, but with more interactivity based on quests built on the rule of branching trees.
 

Sarafan

Community Contributor
F4 turned me off by giving a suit within 10 minutes of leaving the vault, whereas in NV it was one of last things you get. I know there were other aspects they expanded on instead.

Keep in mind that although you get the suit early, you don't have enough fuel to use it nor resources to repair it in early game. :) Besides that, it's an early model. I don't think that it spoils the game in a meaningful way.
 
Keep in mind that although you get the suit early, you don't have enough fuel to use it nor resources to repair it in early game. :) Besides that, it's an early model. I don't think that it spoils the game in a meaningful way.
That's the only time I ever use power armor in Fallout 4, rescuing Preston, Marcy, Sturges and the rest from Concord. By the time I finish off the Deathclaw the suits beat to hell anyway, so I just leave it there. I always found it clunky to move around in and the HUD too restrictive.
 
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Sarafan

Community Contributor
That's the only time I ever use power armor in Fallout 4, rescuing Preston, Marcy, Sturges and the rest from Concord. By the time I finish off the Deathclaw the suits beat to hell anyway, so I just leave it there. I always found it clunky to move around in and the HUD too restrictive.

On the contrary, I actually used Power Armor a lot. Its damage resistance is hard to beat. If someone is planning to clean Nuka World from Raiders on hard or very hard, I can't imagine doing it without Power Armor. Besides that it looks cool which is opposite to standard pieces of armor that look horrible (I wonder how these small pieces of armor can give any kind of resistance to bullets...). In my last playthrough I ended up with 70 fusion cores and I didn't hesitate to use Power Armors. More limiting than cores was finding enough scrap to repair the thing. :D
 
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@Sarafan - I balance that out by using several armor mods, as well as heavily modifying the crafting system which allows my character to add various protections, such as ballistic and radiation protection. I also modify the companion system to allow more followers, adjust their equipment, and tweaking their AI package to change to appropriate weapons and how to attack (and when). I also have to max out the base difficulty, and sometimes mod that to make to more challenging, as traveling as a group (I usually only take 2 with me, as anymore and traversing cramped interior spaces is too much of a pain) you can become quickly over-powered, and the challenge is gone. Just two different playstyles, but that's one of the things I love about FO4, is that there's so many ways to play it.
 
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