GameZone's Steven Hopper shares his picks for top 10 sandbox games. "In a great sandbox game, simply horsing around in the environment and exploring for hours on end can be just as fun as going through the rigmarole of the game's storyline and campaign."
The artist behind Fallout 4’s Deathclaw reveals just how bad things got back when Bethesda took over the series
People are stupid I get it. No one should feel unsafe,
But I think they need to talk about why they cut so many corners during the development process and why none of their games ever look current. And why they think all of this is okay while they charge full price.
As much as Bethesda deserve criticism, that's not really relevant to the reveal of Fallout 3 in 2007.
The default angle Kotaku always go for is to highlight the worst in gaming.
I would’ve focused on the creative.
Bethesda's post-apocalyptic RPG remains an unabashed classic, more than a decade and a half on from its launch.
For me its the fact that I could put hundreds of hours into it and still find areas I missed in my earlier runs. It was also my first FO and despite what I had to put up with at times such as overall crashs and killing my orginal PS3 with the YLOD it's still my favorite entry to this day.
Tons of reasons
But my silly little one…hunting for unique weapons and armour
Something Fallout 4 just didn’t really have as much because they replaced most of it with randomly generated customised weapons. Even Elder Scrolla doesn't do it as well.
I remember during my first playthrough of Fallout 4 back in 2015 I somehow got an automatic combat rifle that shot explosive rounds by defeating a legendary creature. Unfortunately that was the only playthrough I ever got that weapon. It's a shame because it was absolutely epic!
Sense of exploration. That was why older Bethesda games were so good. They might have had glitches, broken mechanics, meh visuals, etc., but they were some of the best around when it came down to the sense of exploration. You could go wherever you wanted and you would find something cool; it might have been a faction, a weapon, an enemy and much more. And that is what they are lacking now. Skyrim still had a lot of that, but Fallout 4 dropped it by focusing on an interconnected world and more randomly generated rewards. Fallout 76 just kept that trend and added multiplayer, and Starfield went even further in killing it by creating a whole universe with parts completely isolated from each other.
I think the retrospective of Fallout: New Vegas' existence has somewhat diminished the view of Fallout 3 in the eyes of many, but it getting out of the vault in Fallout 3 was, for me, the most remarkable experience I've had in a videogame.
I was 12 when it came out, and I remember I just saw the score it got in Gamemaster magazine (remember those!? 😅), and I just went to the shop and bought it with my pocket money.
Not knowing anything about the game, I thought the whole thing was going to be about growing up in a vault, especially given that I'd spent about 2 hours in it....I literally could.not.believe it when you got out and it was just this wasteland on every direction. Amazing.
Probably because these Bethesda games were hand crafted so that exploration meant something. Unlike Starfield where this sense of exploration is replaced with the illusion of scope and procedurally generated worlds. A player can always appreciate when they wonder into an unforgettable new encounter by accident or stumble across a new questline that becomes their favourite. Just like a player can always tell when they're ploughing through filler on auto pilot, that they'll forget the moment some resource numbers go up and nothing worth remembering occurred.
I mean, in Fallout 3 you could nuke an entire town as a SIDE QUEST. In The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, the Dark Brotherhood questlines were my favourite in any RPGs and you could completely avoid them if you didn't care for them. In The Witcher 3 side quests take you on ridiculously dark and mysterious storylines that are some of the best I've played in RPG history. There's a reason why people still talk about KOTOR to this day. Difference between a developer creating something or just padding a game world with stuff.
There were some side quests that could yld have been developed into an entirely separate game. Some great writing there.
Virtuos is currently working on a multiplatform Unreal Engine 5 remake, which is rumored to be The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
I thought they’d go for Morrowind first to be honest but this is a welcoming surprise to tide us over before ES6
Unreal Engine isn't efficient for open world games, so I question the reliability of this story.
Yeah, 1st thing that came to my mind too, although i CAN see it being likely for ease if use, but it's not going to run very well if so
I'd wonder if it would just be exploiting Unreal for graphics but the underlying engine/logic is still the original framework.
Like how we had the graphical remakes of Halo Anniversary, Tomb Raider I-III, and Demon's Souls.
Could also end up a disaster like the GTA Trilogy
"remake will run both an Unreal Engine 5 project and the old Oblivion project. For instance, new graphics are rendered in the Unreal Engine 5 project, but most of the gameplay and physics are still done on the original Oblivion engine"
So with this logic it'll run just fine using UE5 tool sets on top of Gamebryo's engine or maybe even Creation Engine, who knows.
Hopefully modders can fix the aged combart in this game if this is true. Enemies leveling up with you broke and defeated the whole purpose of leveling up.
Yeah it could use some tuning for sure hence the need for a Remake not a Remaster. I'm surprised it's even a conversation within them group which makes me skeptical it's Oblivion. I wouldn't say they shouldn't level up at all though maybe just a leave them a couple levels behind to appease the masses.
GTA IV? No wai! GTA 3 and San Andreas were better.
So glad Crackdown wasn't included!
I agree with the list, GTA4 offered the player alot to do compared to the other games on the list which had you basically do the same thing over and over.
nice list!
Agreed San Andreas is where it's at...also think Saints Row should get some love!