Good man, have some cake 🍰

You're a goddamned hero!!!!!!! :)

This video was made 6 years ago and it's still the most comprehensive I can find on modular kit building. Very thorough and generous in the variety of information given.

Um, yeah? I did.

Not only it was limited, it was also incredibly restrictive and had no flexibility until modded.

Perhaps the limits were put in place to maintain system stability, particularly on the console versions, or to reduce the possible number of configurations to make performing QA on the system more manageable?

@@PlebNC or the devs were trying to protect the settlement system from fobo (fear-of-better-options) aka Pickle Barrel menu paralysis syndrome :P

also makes it a little clearer how little effort actually went into 76... Compared to other Bethesda games I mean.

haha yeah, but I prefer to see someone like him drinking, than that people by nerves gets his mouth dry and makes that disgusting sound while speaking

I prefer zucc drinking water

Great presentation but that was fucking annoying

@@ohmm8891 Yes, it is rude to do that to the audience.

He's given multiple times to speak throughout the video lol As an environmental artist this was incredibly interesting, I have to watch this 2 or 3 times through Because this information is great.

Awesome joke :)

"Our next talk will be on how to create modular presentations."

I quite enjoy hearing the talk again. The progression of their design is interesting to look at.

tfw "kit" means whale in Russian

“Visual consistency” is a nice way to say recycled assets

@@HieronymousLex every game ever made recycles assets

@@HieronymousLex As someone else mentioned, every game ever has recycled assets. No one wants to code every basic shack from the ground up. And when push comes to shove, game looks fine and no one notices. Not everything has to be made from scratch.

I challenge you to name a single game that doesn't reuse assets. Some studios are just better at dressing them up so you don't notice. Some big popular games even reuse assets from older games. You can get quite a but of variety from clever, creative reuses and applying different materials and texturing.@@HieronymousLex

Dracolych69 betheseda may have too many problems , but they talk abou what they do best in their presentations

We can only hope! That was the only part of the presentation that was outstanding to me.

Ryan Martin sure you could do it in ue4... with blueprints even

i only have ck crash when i'm dropping one of every piece of a kit into a cell to go shopping. maya knows how to crash-on-save ;)

Laffter, hahaha, that pic they showed was so random. ^^

😂😂 True

Your comment is ridiculous because they make a video game based on demographic appeal. You saying that they "should" make their worlds/levels smaller to make everything more distinct is like saying that McDonald's should shut down half their stores so they can make what stores remain sell higher quality food. Turning a small local store into a huge franchise is what made them famous. Likewise Bethesda's epic scale of world building is what put them on the map. Most people that go to McDonald's don't want high quality food. If they wanted high quality food they would of gone to health food cafe or a very nice restaurant. There's truth in what you say, that one has to make smaller and more distinct worlds to achieve more appeal visually, but the problem is in reducing the size you also reduce game-play and immersion. Scale is their unique selling point that enable them to ship so many title. I think simply getting them to focus on concept over art at the same scale is what would make everything more distinct.That way you have more variations and just one or two settings lower for graphics (no big deal). I can completely agree with you on the animations/movement feel though. Their combat designers and animators are god awful at keeping up with the quality of combat and movement in other games. In 2006 dark messiah came out. 5 years later: Skyrim turned out to be one of the most disappointing combat experiences I've ever had the mis-fortune of experiencing.

wait now... i can't. climb. a. ladder. ?

@@The_Eno Scale is nothing without quality, ther is not much quality here. Mcdonald are selling better quality food than before. Everyone should learn of their past experience to better themselves. Bethesda are not in my opinion. Now i wish this company would disapear so the right to fallout could be sell to a more worhty company.

@@ebelley Learning from past experiences is a truth I can't deny. We are blessed to repeat that which we don't learn from. However regarding your stance on quality, keep in mind that quantity is a quality in itself. Have a deep think about what mine craft is. The quality of assets, animations, sounds. Everything is so low quality. But there is a sense of scale. There is also an en-thesis on environment interaction. If what you say is true: mine-craft would be nothing. But it's not. It's something. Something very important. Because there is no "better" just different. It's this mindset that separates regular people from game designers and you from me. It also separates free thinkers from sheep and spiritual people from those stuck in their ego. I hope you can remind yourself that no one in the world owes you anything. Perhaps this way you start wishing for things that are in your control :)

Ace there are many different meanings to “should” in terms of feasibility yeah sure, changing a fundamental studio design principal is unlikely to happen. In terms of what would make a better game, hard disagree. Mankind Divided had the best open world in the last decade and it was tiny. Also your comparison to McDonalds is pretty ridiculous and digging into it even a little reveals how shallow the comparison is. First of all, the games market is obviously supremely different to prepared food (an industry which has been around almost as long as society itself). Consumers don’t give a shit about the innovation of a cheeseburger but they sure do want better graphics, gameplay, story every single year, even if the games are taking exponentially longer to make. People want experiences that are good, even if they don’t know what Is going to be good. Look at Breath of the Wild: complete departure from one of the longest running and most well established series, but it has sold almost DOUBLE the lifetime record of any other entry in the series. In conclusion, make good games. BGS will probably only start to change their design philosophy if a “regular” sequel flops. I doubt the failure of 76 will change their minds as they probably just see it as a failed experiment.

13-14k draw calls in Lexington loading in all at once, it destroys any computer.

They address this in the Q&A.

The object combination tech saved them from a lot of performance issues. If you disable it via mods, or by changing the relevant INI setting, the game becomes completely unplayable in some areas. We're talking single digit frame rates. Even when working, it still breaks down in some places because it was made with typical Bethesda QA (i.e. not much).

in cryengine a unit of 1 = 1m instead of 512 = a person. you can't even imagine how much easier that makes the math xD

you should start with a block-out. refer to 38:02

i disagree. it was too much. some is okay. but f3's tunnel system was imo uninspiring and overkill. really bored alot of players. too much of a good thing is bad.

FO3's tunnels were annoying and too much because you were forced into using them to get anywhere downtown until you get fast travel markers open. In FO4 you wouldn't be forced to use them so they would be like another dungeon to explore except the entries are in different locations in the game world.

Walking around tunnels that looked like a maze, trying to remember where you came from and trying to define where you should go was definitely not fun

I've been using 3DS Max for about 13 years and dabbled in games design for just as long. From what I can tell there seems to be higher poly and lower poly models and also possibly LOD models too It's always best to work forwards than backwards. If they need to change something then it's easier to work with the original higher poly model than you manipulate the low poly. Besides, perchance he just threw this together for the presentation to get his point across lol.

I too thought they could be the higher poly models but the extra geometry on them doesn't seem to add any detail to the model. Honestly the models look like low poly models with a tonne of extra edge loops. Only reason I can see for adding extra edge loops like that is to allow more detailed vertex painting. But they don't touch on vertex painting in this presentation and I would of thought that would be a pretty key aspect of modular design as it helps you break up repetition on your assets.

I'd say it's most likely for texturing purposes.

No reason other than minor aesthetics or simply lazyness due to having to create a lot of items in a short amount of time.

+DigitalPimp Ether for tiling uvs amd cpmtrping smoothing groups and those arent lods, or incompetence. Sine you are right, those dont add anything to the shape, and wouldnt have any other justification as fallout 4 dosnt do tessellation, or vertex painting as you said

and some others... well... could have easily been replaced by procedural shaders and saved a ton of memory xD

It's really really sad when Obsidian gets a short amount of time to make a fallout game, and they make a masterpiece. But then Bethesda gets to make a new one with a new engine and everything, and they just make a minecraft/CoD clone. It was a good game, just not a good fallout game, and certainly not an RPG?

Satanjugend yeah i'm flagging this for misleading thumbnails

By turning it from a DEAD franchise to a billion dolar one?

DEAD? They were the ones who killed it. Van Buren would've happened.

Im sure nostalgia plays a pretty big role, i went back to play the old ones and they were absolute trash.

Kevin Walter every presentation Bethesda gives seems very sound , and they have talked about how to reuse assets to reduce development time and use iterative design to improve gameplay , yet their titles take 5 years and 90 percent of fallout 4 quests consist of go here , kill enemies and retrieve item .

There's context for this. Bethesda's games are larger than most other games on the market. Bethesda has a development team of around 100 members... they've hardly hired new developers at all over the course of the 15 years. These two things explain long development costs. My problem with the statements made in this video are with the fact that Fallout 4 runs so poorly, and at the same time, isn't exactly the best looking game on the market. They have serious issues with optimization, and considering Skyrim had the same issues but to a lesser extent, and some of those issues were fixed when they updated the game to run on DX11... it seems to me that they're focusing on the wrong aspects of game design here. They're focused more on the form than the function, and the games are suffering for it.

I think that fallout 4 lack of graphic complexity and performance doesn't have to do with Bethesda's workflow , but rather with the creation engine . I have been fiddling with a ue4 plugin that implements modular game design using a massive number of meshes , but It can run cities fast , because it uses instancing and performant occlusion culling , about the graphical complexity , let me quote one of my earlier comments :

the game may be visually appealing , as the models have a good art direction and be based on a good material system , but to have good PBR games also need a realistic context ( ilumination ) and f4 doesnt have one (there is no bounce lighning and the reflections are fake as they are always the same , don't change depending on the location ) without it the game would have been better using a more artist controlable non pbr system .

Well the game uses cubemaps for all reflections, so there's that. Would be nice if Bethesda brought in id to help update the Creation Engine. But yeah, that's basically what I'm saying. They're trying to push these larger, more cluttered environments and the engine is being crushed under the weight of it. It's destroying performance and the game's visuals don't support the impact, so the average player just looks at it and thinks "well this game sucks because the framerate is all over the place and it looks like it was released in 2010..." As I said, Skyrim had similar issues running on DX9.5/10. The pushed the API to its limits and the game suffered for it... especially if you tried to pile more and more mods on top of it. When SSE was released updated to run on DX11 and given a 64 bit process, many of the issues that 32 bit Oldrim had were nearly eliminated. The memory issues are gone and you can easily spawn in dozens of NPCs without crashing/freezing the game or destroying the framerate, there are a bunch of graphical updates that run better than ENB and give Boris more efficient ways of hooking into the engine... the list goes on. It's an issue of Bethesda putting the cart before the horse. They're piling more and more on top of the engine and it's being crippled in the process, which flushes performance right down the toilet.

David Ville can only find incomplete slides and a more complete transcription ( with images thankfully )

Dude I salute you. While I can see why fallout 4 may look like a bad game to most, I thought it was very very very fun. In my book I call that a good game.

there is a mod called Mercy for skyrim where npc behaviour doesn't foster a sociopathic distrust of people begging for their lives. i would be happy if raiders chased you off for stealing, took pot shots on your way past them if you killed one of them, and went full-on bloodlust if you actually attack them personally. but going 0-60 for walking through their camp is just mental.

i opened one of the workshop shack balcony pieces in nifskope, and a tiny hole that could easily have been alpha was meticulously cut out of the 1"x8" plank, maybe so that projectiles could occasionally slip through that gap?

The holes in Fallout 4 are mostly actual geo as far as I know, and it's also how I would do it myself. 1. It's very easy to create gaps or holes in the geometry itself, especially for flat walls. 2. You don't need a new alpha mask for every different looking wall piece if the hole is modeled, saving vram and draw calls. 3. If a wall has thickness and you use an alpha, the inside perimeter of the hole would not be filled. 4. Using alpha masks results in overdraw in games, which can negatively affect framerate. So actual geometry would be the way to go imo. I'm just a student tho so take all that with a grain of salt c:

Except it really isn’t. You really need to learn to differentiate between different rpg mechanics.

+Monitoria Chris I assume he means a custom asset for this a particular scene, building style. Like a unique sculpture or pair of elaborate staircase. Its a bad approach, i mean not having them. Other studios will often build entire levels around such assets. Like a giant world tree in Zelda or a very unique looking building in any other game.

It's the "set piece" objects. I.e. unique specialty objects that really define a place. An example might be the rocket engine found in Arcjet Labs in Fallout 4. Only 2 of those engines exist in the game; the other is found on a flatbed truck south of that location. Another might be the giant metal globe within the Gunner Plaza.

the best visual effects / CG are the ones people don't think are effects. people equate kits with bethesda because they are so noticeable.

So what do you use instead nowadays?

I mean this technique is also used in Daggerfall and Morrowind. The point of conference to tell your experience with it, I presume.

Wow. Did we play the same game? The game is trash sir

⁠@@chriss1672 people are allowed to have different opinions, and there isn’t a clear consensus on “is fallout 4 bad or good”. Many different people loved fallout 4, even if many other people also hated it.

Nothing wrong with that. ^^

Oh, and I bought both of the first 2 games and won both many times.

People simply wish it would have proper writing with signature rpg elements that made previous games great. New Vegas was a proof that you can make a proper open world game with excellent stories to be told while still on dated engine and development cycle that was cut short by Bethesda and it forced Obsidian to rush the game.

Peon Greenjoy THANK YOU! And David Medlock, I'm judging it based on FO3 and Skyrim. Namely that FO3 was a brilliant entrepreneurial move that managed to pay homage to the original and utilize a preexisting engine while innovating enough to make something distinctive from both the previous Fallout entries AND Oblivion. I tried Fallout 4 for the free weekend, and I expected to be playing it at least 24 hours, since I loved Fallout 3 and Skyrim. But a few hours in I realized that I might as well just be playing one of those games, or Rust, or Minecraft even. I made 3 trips to scrap all the shit I got from clearing out the raiders and Deathclaw outside the Freedom Museum, and in the middle of scrolling through crafting options and thinking about how now apparently I had to build a settlement, I thought, "isn't one of the most viral songs from this game talking about being a wanderer? All I've done so far is stayed mostly in two places. And if things are going to be as uneventful as the trip from Sanctuary to Concord, what's the point in wandering?" Granted, these are just my first thoughts, but very quickly into Fallout 3 I had already stumbled into enough sidequests to get me engaged. The "Them!" quest with the mutant ants, Moira's work on the Wasteland Survival Guide, deciding whether to obey or narc on Burke, hell, fixing the leaks in the water pipes! My first thoughts in Skyrim? "Ooh! where does THIS lead? What's THAT? What's up THERE?" And usually I got satisfactory answers. FO4, perhaps in part because of the "modular" approach of populating levels with many copies of similar objects, seemed more time-consuming and tedious. I was giving in to my OCD, breaking stuff down, storing it. I wouldn't have said it was particularly FUN, though. I was expecting maybe a letter from vault-tec in one of the mailboxes in my now-ruined suburb I had all of 10 minutes to get attached to before it got nuked? Nope. I DID find an auto shop with entries about car repairs that, SURPRISE! stop when the bombs fall, and as far as I can tell offer NO relevant information to anything else, no sidequest where I have to inform the dead employee's next of kin, who happens to be a ghoul or something. Emotional stuff, something more than "this was a business until NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST BECAUSE WAR WAR NEVAR CHANGES!!" But nah. Actually, to be fair, I DID find a dog, and it helped me kill lots of mole rats there. So there's that. 10/10 Excuse me while I pay the discounted price of $36 to get the game in its entirety.

“Not all games need to be the same” Yes and no. Games in the same franchise do need some level of consistency. The Zelda games differ significantly from each other, but there are several core things that connect them. They all have dungeons that revolve around the games core mechanics, such as the vehicle mechanics in totk. Fallout 3 differs from the previous games with the implementation of the 3d world and combat. But the rpg mechanics were basically copy pasted from the first two. It’s different, but not so much that it feel like a different game. It’s still an rpg, even if it moved a dimension over. Fallout 4 differs in how it’s not an rpg. I mean it’s still technically one, but how dialogue is implemented speaks for itself. You can’t decide the outcomes of quests in the same way you could in the tenpenny tower quest from 3, or the quest with gizmo from fo1. A general lack of player agency in other words. And the lack of the generic skills in favour of perks makes it harder to make your character your own. It feels like your playing different versions of Nate or Nora rather than your own character. It’s a role play game with the ability to role play cut down. That’s the issue with 4, that’s why so many people dislike it. When people expect it to be like fallouts one or two, it’s because they expect it to be of the same genera because it’s part of the same franchise.

Yeah how tf is recycling assets anything new or revolutionary? It’s an unfortunate byproduct of games getting too large to be hand built

savage

This is probably coming from someone without a degree in anything and almost no skills in any kind of video game development right?

James Binnie Irrelevant. But nice try. Telematics engineering.

i know that was your attempt at a burn, but you kind of self-sabotaged by expanding the standard quest plotline to: travel to location. take in 1000s of hours of painstaking lookdev. kill enemies. retrieve item. that's a 33% plotline buff :P

World crafting is probably the better term.

Get over it

@@fraundakelmbrilpondaprost90 no u

Pretty sure it would have been faster to create entire room in 3D instead of slapping modular pieces until "it just works".

@@HyborianYT see: Megascans ;)

It's a great video on modular design flow. He talks about all the concepts level designers should be aware of that companies have been using for years. So it's good for students of level design like myself to become more familiar and write down concepts I haven't read enough about. But yeah Totally agree with you. Extremely dull atmosphere, but the story and level design over-all are excellent. I would blame the engine and art director for the dull atmosphere. I'm sure the artist would make it much prettier if they had it their way.

I must say that I miss Morrowind and Oblivion, Fallout 2,1, classic, tatics more than them.

@@thanatosor I swear Oblivion even with its kits still felt like it had more varied dungeon design than Skyrim. Skyrim dungeons = "linear circle with unlockable quick exit". Even so this talk does have a lot of useful information.

satellite964 not really , the models may have a good art direction and be based on a good material system , but to have good PBR games also need a realistic context ( ilumination ) and f4 doesnt have one (there is no bounce lighning and the reflections are fake as they are always the same , don't change depending on the location ) without it the game would have been better using a more artist controlable non pbr system .

Diego Antonio Rosario Palomino Which game has the best in your opinion?

If you're looking for super awesome PBR, Uncharted 4 did it extremely well.

*****​​​​ are you studying how games work ? , If that is the case I would recommend against studying how specific ones implement lightning , level creation and such , but checking how game engines do it , then go back to what you are doing now ( checking gdc )

Ryan Martin​ it would be much better to check games avaible on pc , and then , ones that use a publicly avaible engine ( I don't know if this is the best example , but gears of war is on pc and uses ue4 Edit : I remembered , ark would be better , it also uses ue4 and offers modding support)

AAre there always macbooks at GDC?

no you idiot.

Game companies are doing that RIGHT NOW. Bethesda is infamous for re-using assets and avoiding custom levels whenever possible. They would rather build a world of premade pieces than take the time and effort to build more interesting environments.

please give one example of an open world game that doesnt reuse assets

It would require an entire new engine to be great. Slapping basic connectivity on top of an outdated engine for single player game is not the same as building a new one dedicated to multiplayer.