Elder Scrolls 4 = 3rd Person !!!?!?

[brillo]

RT madness!

Huh? :confused2:

[Mismatch]

guess some sort of hex system would have to be implemented for special and turn based to work correctly. Unless anyone can think of an alternative?

I would say no... they don't really need a hex system.
I'm not sure how things work, but I suppose that they use summit...
Say that in combat you wish to move, you point the mouse, grab the coordinates of the ground underneath the mousepointer say (3,4,1).
The charachter is placed at (1,1,1)
just create a vector from this, calculate its length
sqrt(x^2+y^2+z^2) (not sure if i recall that algorithm correctly)
I cant be arsed now to perform the calculation, but yuou get an answer, a.
And, say that you have decidded that it costs 1Ap to move n
a/n = AP cost.

[T-900]

I would be truly shocked if FO3 had anything like a hexagonal movement tile system... If it's even isometric then the movement will likely be Neverwinter Nights style. Not that i'd complain... it would feel.. unfallout, but all game series must evolve.

As for the engine being -capable- of isometric third person, top-down, whatever... Easily, but that engine has been designed for a First/Third person game, it would obviously need to be tweaked, as displaying an area as large as each 'screen' of fallout with that level of detail would kill any computer made in the next five years...

To make a closing comment, staring at screenshots and sieving every letter of each statement made by bethesda representatives will not reward us with any likely assumptions, just confusion... which.. is.. actually the lifeblood of this community. Good point me. Right. Uh. Carry on! =D

[Mr. Teatime]

I could live without hexes, I think. If they made a good turn based combat system (no hybrid ) with a top down viewpoint like in classic fallout, i'd be happy.

[Saint_Proverbius]

I could live without hexes, I think. If they made a good turn based combat system (no hybrid ) with a top down viewpoint like in classic fallout, i'd be happy.

I'd be happier if they just sat on the license and didn't do anything with it.

As for what the other people have said about Morrowind's third person, yeah.. It sucked. Combat was way more difficult in third person because you couldn't quite tell what the hell you were wacking because your character was in the way of seeing what was going on and if you didn't have the crosshair right on part of the enemy, you weren't actually swinging at that enemy. If the virtual crosshair was just over the enemy's shoulder or under his armpit or something similar, you were just considered by the game to be swinging at empty air.

You also had a hell of a lot of trouble toggling switches and levers in third person for the same reason. If the crosshair for first person isn't right on that switch, you're not attempting to manipulate that switch as far as the game sees things.

Third person in Morrowind really just seems like something they implimented so you could check out your character's ass every now and then.

[T-900]

I ignored the third person bar to self conciously check my appearance every ten minutes... you can't aim with it, and there was no diagonal running animation... meaning you look like an elven michael jackson in an ice rink.

[brillo]

Third person in Morrowind really just seems like something they implimented so you could check out your character's ass every now and then.

It was. They even called it "Vanity Mode".

TES has always been a FP series and it's gameplay come from that viewpoint just the same as FO's comes from it's viewpoint.

[Araanor]

I have no idea if this is true for Bethesda's new engine and FO3, but it is for many other game engines/games today though.

Typically the game engine is fairly low level. It mainly handles graphics. Something like changing it between a first-person view and a 3/4 overhead view is fairly trivial. There aren't many graphics related things that would need to be different between ESIV and FO3. There are however many gameplay differences between ES and FO, which is where this next part comes in: Developers add to this low level engine the higher level stuff that makes up all of the game's actual gameplay and interface. And they do this on a game-by-game basis.

At least that's what I think he was trying to say...

Something like that. A game engine is typically abstracted into a number of different parts, one of them being the graphics engine. The graphics engine plays a pivotal role but is ultimately not responsible for more than actually displaying the world on the screen. Changing the viewpoint is trivial business. I imagine a simple variant could be hacked together with Morrowind in a few lines of code, even though the art content and gameplay would be totally unfit for it.

Now, let's image Fallout with this graphics engine. Changing the viewpoint is the easy part. In fact, the graphics engine probably doesn't need any major changes. They probably have components and tools for the interfaces, scripts and other stuff. However, in nearly all gameplay aspects, Morrowind is very different from Fallout. So the gameplay components they have already built wouldn't be very recyclable. They would have to implement the character system, dialogue, combat, the support structure and the interactions between these parts. They'd have to create most art content from scratch to fit for the perspective and setting.

"But, is it possible?" - *Anything* is possible, provided you spend enough resources on it. I've attempted to answer this question by alluding to the kind of effort that would be needed.

[brillo]

"But, is it possible?" - *Anything* is possible, provided you spend enough resources on it. I've attempted to answer this question by alluding to the kind of effort that would be needed.

So basically, you mean it'd be the same as making a whole new game, only a little less work because a few bits like the graphics and sound system would already be handled. Perhaps they could call this new game Fallout 3....

Seriously though, are to trying to say you don't think they're going to put in the amount of effort it takes to make a new game? Or am I just misunderstanding you? (And feel free to kick me if I am ) The amount of work you listed is how much work every company goes through when they license an engine to build a new game, and even less work than if they build a new game from the ground up.

[Araanor]

I meant exactly what I said, I tried to throw some light on the situation.

I don't doubt Bethesda would put in the effort for a new game. But until proven otherwise, I will doubt their intentions in making a proper sequel to Fallout.