Yeah it is an actual screenshot. Ars Technica reviewed the game and they said it looks like ass
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/...your-next-gen-expectations-at-the-vault-door/
Doesn't look like this will be a great Fallout game but by the time I buy the game and all of it's DLC for $20 the mod community will have given it a facelift, patched it and made the game better all around. Bethesda really does depend on the mod community to make Fallout games and Elder Scrolls games better.
Wow.
I can't even put into words.
Wow.
The article you've linked to basically makes all of my worst fears absolutely prudent.
1) The story is standard fare, with the kidnapping of a child being the kick-off. Jesus, it's like somebody at Bethesda just recently read Hero of a Thousand Faces and decided that their game was going to be that.
2) The graphical fidelity is...I think they favorably called it not next-gen. Problem is, "next gen" is our current generation. That's depressing.
3) Base system is a shallow add-on, without any need to defend it should you have built defenses. I was criticized when I said this was likely the case, but I really regret being right here.
4) Crap progression. The term "bullet sponge" used in a game where bullets are a big part of conservation efforts is frightening. I hate it when enemies get "more difficult" just by increasing their health bars.
5) Poor leveling through SPECIAL. This is what kills me most. They set up a false dichotomy between specialized characters and a ROLE PLAYING experience. The reality is that you need high strength to be able to carry things. You need things to craft other things. This means that being a Ninja or a Mad Scientist isn't a possibility. You need a substantial chunk of those starting 21 points in strength which means you're playing the game handicapped, or you aren't able to play a role. Consider me severely unimpressed.
I'm focusing on two paragraphs, which make me look forward to the inevitable complaints of those early adopters:
"If you don't spend all those points, you'll be stuck either ignoring a lot of craftable loot or fast-traveling back to a settlement and emptying your backpack of useful junk every 20 minutes. And if you decide to get into crafting—which is a good idea, considering that it yields the best weapon and armor options in the game's early portions—you'll probably spend a lot of time scrounging through every bookshelf and cabinet in the game's buildings, homes, and offices, looking for rarer materials like adhesive and nuclear material that you'll need to put the finishing touches on that particularly powerful scope for your 10mm pistol.
In all,
Fallout 4's new "use junk to build stuff" system gets hugely in the way of the series' long-standing "play however you want" philosophy. I didn't necessarily hate it, but I think it added a lot of unsatisfying minutes of resource management, obsessive item-hunting, and level-up anxiety without a rich payoff in terms of cool quest, weapon, or gameplay opportunities."
I think it's time to kick my feet up, and watch as people try to explain away all of the bad decisions from Bethesda, and try to retroactively be happy with what is a fundamentally flawed game. I look forward to this, while having no doubts that this will be exactly the same as Bulldozer fans telling me how they're still happy with their investments. Those same fans that a few years later are happy to see AMD sued over "false advertising" over core count.
Is it just me, or does anyone get the weirdest sense of deja vu?
Edit:
Allow for some positivity.
1)Minimal reported bugs and crashing 40 hours in. That's...Wow. I wasn't expecting that. Kudos Bethesda.
2) No mention of Hard Core mode. This is a personal preference. Hard core mode made some of the DLC a chore, rather than just fun. I'm sorry, but the Sierra Madre was better when I only had to worry about ganking the ghost people, not getting stuff to convert to coins, to convert to food and water; because everything I used to have "had traces of radiation," despite the in-game items also having regular radiation.
3) No complaints about the guns. I always hated that guns were either impossible to find ammo for, or did no damage. That hasn't been touched on in the article, so fingers crossed that it isn't an issue.
