See, this is the stuff I like about a game like FO4. Check it out.
For those who've played the game, you know that on the quest to capture Kellogg, you follow dogmeat, a doggie friend you can have as a companion, to the suspected hideout, Fort Hagen. I don't know if he always does this, but if you have brought a companion, dogmeat just stays outside of the front of Fort Hagen. I know this because after I first made it there there, I fast traveled out to gear-up and he was still there when I came back, in a non-interactable idle state.
That ends up being interesting, because the region spawns several types of roaming enemies. They could be all the way at the far boundary of the area, working their way towards you in the front, or go completely in a perpendicular direction. I'm not actually sure how deep the calculations go... if this is insular RNG or something continuously updated across the whole worldspace and based off of a random index, but the front of Fort Hagen is a spot where you can meet roamers occasionally, they spawn north and often head south down a circling road that descends to the front of the area. It just lines up that way. Though all of the roamers will straight up just fork into grass or even abandoned buildings at any time. I think there's really just a start and endpoint determined and then pathfinding ends up dragging them in different directions... combined with havoc physics, there is 'slop' in their positioning and tracking data that leads to variable pathfinding outcomes naturally. Compromises to AI must be made when said AI must constantly interact with and accept the output of a script system that is linked to frametime. You don't always get to have that level of accuracy, though they can add heuristics within reason without having actors snagging too much (though theirs still do because it really is that weak and inaccurate lol - hence why NPCs are super antsy to fail-out and teleport nearby.)
It just so happens that one of those came in the form of 3 super mutants and a hound, I guess they must've been on their way because by the time I got back to the fort from my spawn point, they were pretty much on me. I was dawdling outside, too. A few seconds slower to reach it and they'd have seen me in the street out front. I just heard the beeping of a suicider with his mini-nuke tucked under his arm close by and ducked further in to the little fortified-off entryway beneath the alcove. When I popped out and saw the red blinky of the nuke, I went to switch to my combat rifle when I realized dogmeat was honed-in already. I shouted, "NOOOOOO, DOGMEAT!" as he charged the band of mutants. The suicider detonated, blowing them all to bits instantly...
It's that stuff. The magic in these games, as much as it is bittersweet, is that Bethesda just sets a few parameters and then just lets everything happen. That whole 'letting things happen' thing is something I wish all game designers just understood implicitly. It's the thing almost every other game is missing out on in some way. Some of them are like, morally committed to just never allowing anything organic to ever occur. Bethesda doesn't even have *good* tech to throw at the principles, they are limited on how much they can execute on by the capabilities of their engine. Pretty much just enough to get it done, though perhaps they have more than most in certain areas. Try to imagine what could actually be possible for emergent gameplay right now, if there was a team out there with fully modern tech chops and a willingness to explore that sort of thing... just having more to work with in terms of technical complexity possible. The thing is, I think you still have to compromise on certain fancy things. But instead you get a uniquely organic and hopefully heavily curiosity-inspiring experience that does not fade the way that planned things fade, but instead expands over time. Know what I mean?
Man... I really do feel like it's a dying school of thought in mainstream games, and that bums me out, because for me it never really hit the peak I envisioned it could. I don't think anybody right now who makes any kind of open world games actually understands why people like the Bethesda games that they arguably do take after in at least some key ways. I just don't see that in the way they are constructed or the experiences they seek to offer, or especially in the way they present them to the player. That last one's the clincher. It's this obsession with specificized presentation of everything in the game. No mystery or surprise. And yet this game can still provide me that after 2000 hours. It's such a crazy rift to me. Sometimes I wonder if Bethesda themselves ever understood it, or if it's all just a happy accident beyond the realm of present understanding of games and game experiences.
In other news, it's a great night to crash a fort.
It does play differently, quite a bit.
and it's definitely up there in my top five.
'I'm somewhere around ilvl 950 with my gear so not much'
'This wont get me far in this game, harder Raids do require ppl who communicate and such cause of wipe mechanics'
