Please Stand By

UPDATE: WHEEEE TRAILER!

So it looks like all the leaks have forced Bethesda to move up their announcement to tomorrow. While confirmation is nice, ultimately we’re still probably a year away from playing Fallout 4, if the Skyrim announcement is any indication. The original trailer was released on December of 2010.

In any case, you may have noticed yesterday I’ve put up some mods up on the forums for testing, so while this is sooner than expected, the timing works out. Here’s what I got so far. Now, eventually I’ll have a download page that’s much easier to peruse, as well as a Nexus page and a bundled download and shit like that. Right now, everything is still in construction, so you’ll have to download the files separately. You can find more information and NPC locations by checking out the wiki or the Fallout mod forum.

  • Cosmos – Rockbreaker’s Last Gas(NEW)
  • Dot’s Diner – Dot’s Diner north of the Dunwich Building(NEW)
  • Mortar – Jalbert Brothers Waste Disposal
  • Slasher – Rivet City
  • Spider – Seward Square Electronics Store (East of Broadway Cinema)
  • Zynx – Evergreen Mills Bazaar
  • Room 404 – Abandoned Building east of National Guard Depot

Of the seven, Cosmos, Dot’s Diner, Spider and Room 404 have quests at the moment. Of course, it’s not a coincidence that most of these mods are followers. Those are just easier to get voiced because it only requires one or two dedicated actors. The quest mods will probably take a few weeks more, but hopefully everyone will meet their deadline.

Anyways, these are all still in Alpha, so report any bugs in the appropriate section. I imagine some things can be broken deliberately as Fallout 3 isn’t designed for scenes, but hopefully everything is intuitive enough to where you know when to let a scene play out. Otherwise I’ll have to do like vanilla and freeze you in place and that can feel suffocating.

21 thoughts on “Please Stand By

  1. My guess is December 2016 for a Post-apocalyptic Christmas! xd

    As for the mods, I don’t have F3 installed right now so I think I’ll wait for the full pack of quests and companions since I don’t have much time to play at the moment anyway. But I am really eager to play the “Interesting NPCs” Fallout 3 edition before I travel to F4.

    1. Yeah, for now these releases are for testing only. One of the mods has NPCs that are there from the start of the game, so if you only want to play then you should at least wait for that:

      The followers have about 200 lines each, but most of it is base lines and backstory. Idles will come later. Right now I’m only interested in seeing if all the functions are working properly, like turning essential status ON/OFF, stuff like that.

      1. Thanks, Kris. I’ll wait for those.

        Regarding F4, I don’t think they are voicing the main character. That’s probably a trailer thingy. And even if they do, it will be only a few lines I guess, Skyrim style. Instead of FUSS your character will say FUCK! xd

  2. I still can’t understand why you post Fallout thing to here(skyrim mod).
    Just IMO, F:NV and F:3 are not funny. If these are recreated in Skyrim engine, I’ll replay them though.

    1. Because this is Kris’s blog, and he will post what he wants :P

      wheeeeee

      Buuut in all seriousness, I’d say the name Interesting NPCs applies to any npc/follower mod that adds a character that is, well, more interesting than what Bethesda’s vanilla games have to offer. And yes, those games aren’t funny. They are depressing to the point where they kind of put me off playing them to be honest, but they do have their humorous moments of which are overshadowed by all the negativity. So any added humor/lightheartedness is quite welcome.

      P.S: What you ask for is not an easy task.

  3. Just saw the official trailer for FO4 it is really a thing! Now waiting for release date, I wonder if I can trust the local retailer here in Czech republic, that it will be out in March 2016, probably not. :D Interesting Fallout NPCs – your turn.

  4. By the way, is the protagonist….voiced?

    If so, lol, so much for modding Fallout 4. I may have to stick with FO3 and FNV.

  5. The followers look like fun, as I’ve mentioned before. Will they have interactions between each other should you bring one close to another like how other INPCs will comment on Rumarin, or are they sorta in their own little bubbles?

    I’m hearing they used a different engine for Fallout 4, an improved version of the one used for Wolfenstein: The New Order. And I personally think it’s a little to early to tell if the protagonist is voiced, since it is just a teaser trailer. Even if he/she has a voice I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the first mods out would be to remove it. xD

    1. I’m hearing they used a different engine for Fallout 4, an improved version of the one used for Wolfenstein: The New Order.

      It does look different than Skyrim, more cartoony I think, cleaner surfaces and all that. But the animations look the same so I don’t know. That’s another thing modders are probably curious about. Change the engine, and people will have to start from scratch trying to learn it. So far every game from Morrowind to Fallout to Skyrim has had a very similar toolset. Fiddling with Morrowind’s Construction Kit years ago made it easier for me to navigate the Creation Kit.

      Even if he/she has a voice I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the first mods out would be to remove it. xD

      Yeah, but if it’s like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, it would be weird as hell to have the PC talk and gesture and having no voice come out.

      Either way, we’ll know on 6/14 for sure. Although knowing me, I might say fuck it and get a handful of actors to voice the players too, for the sole purpose of being able to make dialogue based mods. It would take a lot of work to get all the vanilla lines done for male/female, but it’d be an awesome asset for the modding community.

      Will they have interactions between each other

      I went modular with this as an experiment, so they’re all separate. But odd thing is, Fallout requires you to make everything an ESM aka Master File or else the skin textures are messed up.

      So with master files, it would be fairly easy to make an ESP that was dependent on those masters to allow for quests like Pit Dogs or Blood of Kings where multiple NPCs interact. If I ever broke down Interesting NPCs into bits, that might be the way to do it, make them all ESMs and then the quests dependent.

      I never liked chatter though for Bethesda games due to balancing issues. It incentivizes traveling with a small army and that breaks the game because the combat’s designed for 1 PC and 1 NPC max. The worst thing I did when playing FNV when it came out was download the multiple followers mod. My small army of companions killed everything in sight and I ended up being bored to tears.

      So while chatter is essential in a party-based game like Dragon Age, I’m not inclined to do it for games like Fallout or TES. The exception would be for mod quests where I control the enemy count.

  6. Oh, no when I say “Comment on each other” I don’t really mean chatter between party members as they follow the player, more like if they’re just in the same cell together. Kinda like how Zaijhirra will comment on how she kinda recognizes “Your wood elf companion” from somewhere, but can’t remember where when you’re in Frostfruit Inn and have Daenlyn as a follower. Or another example would be when talking to Valla she’ll recognize you have Valgus in your party and say something like “You can ask the priest yourself.” when talking about their brawl. Took me awhile to remember and dig up those examples.

    I totally understand about the party limit, I personally try to limit myself to two followers be it Skyrim or Fallout (mostly NV;) one for close range combat, and one for long range combat, with my player character being mid-range that switches between the two. Rebalancers, realistic damage, and more enemy spawn mods also help. I have a mod that adds the Super Mutant Behemoths to F:NV, Vincent sounds like he’s out of his goddamn mind while fighting them, laughing and threatening them as if they were just puny raiders. xD

    1. Not sure. With Skyrim, the NPCs came first. The potatoes before the meat.

      With Fallout, quests and followers have been the priority, so the NPCs are all part of a quest. So a shopkeep will interact with Spider because it’s part of the story, not for immersion’s sake.

      Although I am working on background and generic NPCs as well. But so far those have been for FNV, like Volt and the Antman.

      Those would be generic NPCs, and then background NPCs would be like these:

      1. Ooo, those NCR Troopers sound cool, odd as it sounds I like to just stand around and listen to NPCs shoot the shit like the troopers are doing. I just wish the dialogue would trigger just a little faster. It’s a proximity thing, right? It feels like I gotta be sitting on their shoulders in order for them to notice my PC is around.

        1. Yeah, I got impatient and added trigger boxes for these. So they fire the moment you get close.

  7. The first Skyrim video was posted a year-ish beforehand, but the first Skyrim video with actual gameplay footage was posted about this time in the year of Skyrim’s release. This video has game footage of FO4.

    1. Good point. The game could already be done and moving into testing phases, which I imagine is 4 or 5 months for a Bethesda game.

      We could be looking at an end of 2015/early 2016 release.

      Fuck I am giddy as a schoolgirl to play this game. Modding I’ll worry about when the tools come out and we know the boundaries the new game will expand or inhibit.

      1. Have your giggles been sounding like this?

        I bet they’ve been sounding like that, I know mine have. x3

  8. Posted this elsewhere, but it is in the FO4 spirit:

    Trying out a potential scenario: Vilja and the Dragonborn eventually settle down at a farmhouse they built just outside of Whiterun, since it is easy to forget about all the other problems of Skyrim in Whiterun.

    Time goes by, and eventually the 4th Era slips into the 5th Era and a direct descendant of Vilja and the Dragonborn, Nils Dovahson move to America and takes up residence in the Town of Waltham in Massachusetts.

    His family lives an idyllic life until reports of the Chinese invasion of Alaska. Being one of those science fellows, Nils is called on to help with the war efforts. He is valued so highly that it comes as no surprise when he and his entire family get an invitation to move into the Waltham Vault 001.

    Two hundred and four score years later, through a series of interesting adventures, young Vilja Dovahson emerges from the safety of her vault and peers with wonder and dread at the Massachusetts Wasteland.

    What’s a young girl with a proud Skyrim heritage to do? Why go exploring and perhaps find herself meeting another newly emerged vault dweller from a Boston Vault.

    1. Does Emma mod Fallout as well?

      Vilja is like the queen of all companions, I’m sure if she made a Fallout NPC it’d be awesome.

  9. I could see the game being released on Christmas or early 2016. Bethesda doesn’t need any more hype than they already have with F4. Anyway, we’ll know soon for sure. The E3 is around the corner. Also…gameplay! :)

  10. Forgot to add, Nils Dovahson left a note he was supposed to deliver at a conference held at MIT. Something about how the personalities of MIT Professors stored in floating robotic orbs would become homicidally psychotic over a period of a hundred years, but a few of them could be restored by a brave lass and her faithful companion collecting:

    Radroach wing
    Deathclaw hand
    Yucca root
    Book – The Wit and Wisdom of Governor Mitt Romney
    Blue Nuka Cola

    From that point they could begin the quest Untold Secrets of the Big Dig.

  11. Emma had indicated earlier that she is uninterested in Fallout.

    Maybe you could do something around the Untold Secrets of the Big Dig. Why was this the most over budget public works project ever? Because an MIT physics student named Albert Chan developed a method of time travel in the year 2059. His discovery was quickly absorbed into a project by the Club of Boston, which had predicted that a nuclear holocaust was likely. They did not have sufficient funds or time to build an adequate repository and shelter for what they wanted to preserve.

    The Club built the time machine going back to 1986 to purchase large shares of Microwidget stock in its initial public offering. Next they set out to create the largest public works project every attempted: The Big Dig. They created an automaton which they elected to office to oversee the Big Dig. Of course, with 2050 technology, moving that much Earth was easy. With the leftover budget monies, they were able to create the incredible Big Underground Terrarium to serve as that repository and shelter.

    But that is only the back story….

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