ViceMan

Surprised to say the least, it's almost as if Bethesda are purposely doing the opposite of what's expected of them (i.e new Elder Scrolls) and saying we do things our own way, which is refreshing. Something just doesn't feel right though, it's only three years since 4 which by today's development standards isn't that long, does this mean they were doing a Ubisoft and developing the next game before the current one releases? It would explain why 4 was so lacklustre I suppose. Why is the game called 76? Just to be different, shake things up a bit, or is it because this game isn't part of the main series which is what i'm worrying is the case. Didn't 'thesda do an interview recently where they stated they'll be the last bastion of single player gaming? There's also this vid they put out; I hope they don't go back on their word.

Thought we were due an Elder Scrolls? No way can this be a new game unless they rushed one out due to the antipathy surrounding 4.

I think the DLCs are better than the main game, the Commonwealth just feels so dead after the seventeenth playthrough. Far Harbour and Nuka World had a much better atmosphere, I wish Nuka World was part of the main game world that could be travelled to via monorail from central Boston, rather than an isolated area at the edge of the map.

To me that woman looks more Hispanic and she has brown eyes not blue. But yes they do look similar, wouldn't be the first time R* has retconned something.

I thought John was pretty loyal to the gang, I see him being the one to kill Arthur or at least force him into exile. As for Abigail it says on the wiki she was born in 1877 and fell pregnant with Jack at the age of 18, which would be around 1895 so she should definitely be around and married to John during the events of the game. (Saying that if she's caring for a baby she probably won't be riding on many bank robberies with the gang.)

Yeah I saw no resemblance to Abigail - like you say she's dressed too well. They say she was a whore, but was she a member of the gang who was just whorish, or was she a whore who later joined the gang.

I'm doing Far Harbour again at the moment, been hankerin' for it actually. Think 'cause I enjoyed Nuka World more than Far Harbour I tended to focus on it more to the point where I got burnt out on it and now enjoy the thing I enjoy less more. Yes, you read that correctly.

I think it was about the same size as the first Redemption map, so yeah by today's standards it could be considered small. However it's all about how that space is utilised, R* are always pretty good with fleshing out landscapes so they're just right, don't forget this area is a lot more mountainous than 'demption which also increases the size - or at least the feeling of size... also it's not as if we'll be racing across the map in a Lazer in two minutes anyway (i'm still worried however we might find a flyable Deluxo in a secluded cave, unlockable for the low low price of £50.) Maybe R* will add in the entire original Redemption map, not just West Elizabeth.

I don't think any games in the last 10 years qualify as revolutionary, however i'm very selective with which games I play. Still, a brilliant game doesn't necessarily need to be revolutionary; Skyrim definitely wasn't.

I'd say about two thirds of those people are gonna get killed or abandon the gang during the course of the game, a sixth is going to stay loyal to Dutch and a sixth is gonna join Arthur's gang when Dutch inevitably betrays him. Wonder if there's any hierarchy to the gang other than Dutch and Arthur, although Arthur is Dutch's right hand man i'm not sure if he outranks the other members.

Like I said in the other topic I doubt the AI will be that revolutionary, they lauded it in SA and V and it turned out to be nothing special. You might get that "wow that was special" feeling the first time you see an NPC do something unique, but after the 50th time it'll feel as robotic and scripted as it always has.

It'll be interesting to see what the city ends up being called, we already have Valentine and Annesburg confirmed from the map so those two obviously didn't get changed from the early drafts. Seems odd for Rockstar to choose a city from another game as a placeholder name though, but I guess we've not seen any rough map drafts for previous games so it could be a common theme that we haven't been privy to up until now. If it is New Bordeaux I wonder what Mafia references they'll festoon it with.

There's also a place called Adler ranch and one of the women is called Sadie Adler, so perhaps that's her family's ranch. The preview mentions New Hanover which doesn't appear to be on there though, might be the Cumberland Forest part.

Perhaps they've invested all their shark card profits into an AI so smart, so advanced... what am I saying of course they haven't. Also on a different subject, I would like a game to not 'wait for the protagonist' for events to happen. In Skyrim the world was frozen until you entered the scene, I can just imagine the people of Solitude standing around for weeks by the front gate to execute Roggvir waiting for the dragonborn to show up, muttering "he/she'll be here soon" to each other. I know R* handles such events differently to Bethesda and R* games are a lot less buggy in that regard, but I think part of a believable world is one that does not revolve around the protagonist. It's a difficult thing to balance, you don't want a player to potentially miss important story events and at the same time you don't want a situation where for example "oh don't worry this wagon full of bullion will hang around in town for as long as it takes, even if you spend weeks getting here because you're picking flowers and hunting deer." Finally I hope the fucking railway makes more sense this time, in the first Redemption it was ok and had an actual purpose but in GTA V there was little point to it outside of a few missions, there were no passenger trains and no actual stations (well one if you can call it a station.)

Yes RDR wasn't too bad in that regard, like you say the less population the easier trick it is to pull off. But the article made it sound like a new, revolutionary way of handling AI which I very much doubt it'll be.

The whole "NPCs have lives, you can follow them around and watch them do their thang" thang has been going on for years, I seem to remember they touted it in San Andreas and GTA V but at the end of the day it really wasn't anything spectacular. NPCs were still dumb, mindless robots who were obviously obeying a predesignated set of commands, they didn't feel like humans - Follow a car in GTA V and it just drives around a few blocks going in circles aimlessly. I'm very skeptical about this now but as AI gets smarter perhaps each NPC will become an individual who you'll learn to recognise, know their routine etc. Until NPCs each have unique faces (or in Skyrim's case they don't all have the same voice) they won't be anything more than car/wagon fodder. Also it seems it is Javier in the bowler hat after all.

I'm just looking out for obvious signage, i'll leave the intense geological surveying to Dup.

So from the look Arthur gives John I get the impression there might be some sort of resentment between them, i'm guessing Dutch will betray/frame Arthur who forms his own gang. Hence Dutch's "stay with me." He always was paranoid.

Yep, told ya he'd make an appearance... bet R* are jizzing their pants at us jizzing ours. They really want my money. Made a few notes in the map topic, fake map now looks real.

Think we can assume the fake map is real now since there's a sign for Annesburg in the trailer, plus many others probably. Blackwater looks much bigger now, weird how 12 years later it's shrunk so much. At the 1:15 mark the sign on the right looks to say Valentine, which is also on the map in square L9. Van Horn Inn apartments at 1:52. - J17 on the map.

That was my initial assumption, don't think R* would let John's appearance in the game be revealed in artwork advertising a trailer. They like to tease us, if he's going to be in the game we might get a single frame of him in the trailer so we can all cream our collective pants simultaneously.

I don't recall there being any mention of siblings. Given that his mother was a prostitute and died during his birth I doubt he has any unless his father had previous relationships, which would make more sense actually because this game takes place earlier, meaning his siblings would be somewhat older than John.

I think the pose makes it very Marston-ish, harking back to the artwork for the previous game. But no, I doubt it is John.

I've used Spectacle a few times, didn't have any issue with mirelurks after the initial population. My problem was always the half destroyed buildings that you couldn't remove, luckily there are workshop mods now that mostly solve that problem. I tried to make an arena there once but it never came to fruition, think the furthest I got was a few gunner cages and an enclosed ring of concrete walls... I used to use those trap cages just to increase the attacks on the settlement as it got boring after a while. As with most Bethesda ideas the concept is good, but it's usually clunky or very buggy. I'm sure if I had FO4 on PC there are hundreds of mods on nexus that do a much better job than Bethesda did with their content.

The raider settlements were good the first time, but by the second time I was just sticking down the basic necessities in the settlements to keep them happy and moving on. Having to keep returning to Nuka World to speak to Shank when setting them up was annoying too, trekking all the way across the map to the monorail station and back again several times... couldn't move him to the Commonwealth soon enough. One thing I never got round to doing was setting up a deathmatch arena with the Wasteland Workshop stuff, only settlement I can think of with a big enough flat space is Starlight drive-in, and i've built there so many times already. I hope they refine and streamline the whole settlement thing for the next Fallout/ES, maybe allow us to build anywhere and not be confined by annoying green borders.