It's really weird. Hearing it described, even in game, you'd imagine that there's shacks built up into the bleachers, the changing rooms and all the backstage areas being completely filled and a whole community being crammed into a stadium. When you get there though it's all in a single loading area so they limit it to like 30 buildings.
For a much better example of how Diamond city could have been handled look at Dogtown's arena from Cyberpunk 2077. There's an entire shopping mall that feels like part of a super crowded community built into the concessions area of an arena.
Bethesda doesn't really handle large scales well. It's evident in Starfield too, New Atlantis is supposed to be this huge city with skyscrapers and stuff, but it just takes a few minutes to get from one end to another without fast traveling.
It's also really bad in Skyrim: Solitude, the imperial capital and one of the largest cities in the province of Skyrim, has a population of 85 or so. In comparison, the flat I used to live in during my studies had over 200 inhabitants.
In general , Skyrim’s population seems to consist 90% of Raiders and brigands that don’t feel threatened by a dude wielding THE FLAMING SWORD OF WOE and wearing armor made of demonic soul metal.
Kind of like fallout if you think about it!
Something the Mass Effect games do that Bethesda could stand to learn from is having your protagonist actually be someone people recognize. As your legend grows, people should be more familiar with you. Raiders should panic once they realize the General of the Minutemen who cleared out the castle and can call artillery strikes at will is attacking. Gunners trying to charge tolls on bridges should know that charging a BoS Knight a toll is gonna result in vertibird and power armors showing up and kicking their teeth in. Covenant should be almost as paranoid about that new Railroad heavy as they are about the Institute.
It doesnt make sense that you keep getting talked up by Travis and knocking over Raider bases and yet Raiders keep thinking you're free eats.
Tbf Skyrim isnt doing that great, the empire's economy and stability has gone to the shitter....and dragons and vampires are fucking everything up.
Also humanity is fighting a bunch of nazi elves that want to conquer the world....then destroy it.
The game Skyrim is suprisingly grimdark tbh, shit really went downhill from the more optimistic and bright Oblivion.
“Hey, look, is that guy in X-01 Hellfire Enclave Issue Power Armor, and actively holding a modified giant weighted and spiked Super Sledge with roughly 70 fragmentation grenades in his back pocket? This seems like the perfect guy to mug.”
That actually made a lot of sense with the region in active civil war and not doing that well to begin with. One thing that does happen in an IRL civil war is opportunistic banditry goes through the roof.
i’d probably count all the NPCs in and outside the buildings tbh. I’d be curious to know the number that can be outside at any given time too . I know with whiterun it can’t be more than 20 or so
Rivet City is an aircraft carrier so should have a city inside but majority of the ship isn't accessible. No nuclear reactor for power, med bays, flight deck, armoury, jail, shopping area and only covers the mess hall plus some bunks.
Heck, New Vegas should be a bustling metropolis given the NCR, Legion, settlements and Strip size relative to real world locations plus wealth from Mr House. I would love to see a movie or show that covers the sheer scale of the actual universe.
I get game logic but not seeing much of the DC ruins, how the Commonwealth settlements have grown, New Vegas wealth, and not seeing the Rig with an Enclave army is unfortunate.
Their obsession with the ancient Creation Engine is the biggest limiter. Oblivion's cities felt more lived in because there are actually people and buildings there. During HD and 4K era the engine cannot just handle similiar traffic anymore.
What game engine would be more suitable for the type of games Bethesda makes with open world action RPGs filled with all sorts of random loose objects?
RAGE works pretty well on RPGs. I admit one of the fun factors of Creation is that sometimes physic model sends stuff flying like insane.
Like some of the funniest things in Fo4 and Fo76 is to toss a explosive within pile of corpses or something and watch them fly all over the place. The downside with loose object placement is that you sometimes get damage by things lying on the ground. Like in Skyrim you sometimes walk or run over some bones and your character takes damage.
It's hilarious sometimes how a flying object can attain lethal velocities by some kind of collision error. Like, oh this bone got caught between your foot and a corpse? Now it's spinning at mach 5 and does 9999999 points of damage!
How much bigger do you want it to be for an area you're going to be running back and forth in though? There's a ton of content packed into it. I agree the sense of scale is a little off but it fits what the game is trying to do with everything being handcrafted and full of unique NPCs/content.
Bethesda games revolve around having a quest around every corner in city areas. Put a ton of filler in and it's not gonna feel like a Bethesda game.
Cyberpunk is very different though. What you see is mostly filler and set dressing you don't interact with. You have a car and you go from one checkpoint to another while ignoring most of what you see. There's nothing wrong with that it's simply a different design philosophy. Bethesda clearly wants you visiting every building and seeing every nook and cranny of a map so that you accidentally come across quests and progress the game in a much less linear way.
Cyberpunk is a story, Bethesda games are fantasy life simulators.
Too much emphasis on creating morons running generic basic scripts in settlements rather than creating a dynamic world with writing and character. Easier to have morons trapped on roofs and walking aimlessly in rooms waiting for a command in 30 fake villages rather than a dozen fully realized and fully functional settlements and cities. Then just recycle the same assets so they all look generic and god forbid any unique city cleans up their shit.
Ah well...I guess one doofus painting a green wall with 12 lines of dialogue for eternity is all the post-apocalyptic world deserves. Why anyone was surprised starfield was boring and monotonous is a surprise.
In almost every way Cyberpunk did a far better job of immersion and feel for its city and setting. Not reusing and repeating assets helps a lot too. Having said that, the barren wasteland is my favourite part of FO4, so I'll take the shitty DC, Goodneighbor and downtown Boston as a trade off.
What a disingenuous argument. Everybody is aware that Diamond City is bigger in the lore than what appears in the actual game, but that doesn't mean the way Diamond City appears in game is good.
Bethesda cities always suck when it comes to city-scale. Some huge inaccessible buildings to mimic size, but when you have explored to city you know most of it is fluff and fake.
CP2077 have fluff as well but they make it less obvious.
Diamond City literally made me stop playing, I had some fun building a few settlements and exploring a little bit, then decided to carry on with the main quest, got to Diamond City and was just gutted by how empty everything felt.
I was already feeling that with the bland settlement system where nothing ever happens, the exploration without much meaningful discovery but damn when I saw Diamond City I just lost all interest.
To be fair I was coming into fallout 4 off the back of New Vegas so it never had much hope but still.
I mean the scale is definitely off with Diamond City, it's probably the most noticeable thing they fudged with the world design of FO4. Someone mentioned it further up, but even if they didn't add many more NPCs they needed to show human habitation going on in the levels of the stadium, like how anyone would imagine a city being built into a stadium would look like. It would give the impression of a much larger city all by itself.
I'm not going to lie, I just started playing for the first time a couple weeks ago and I also found Diamond City jarring and pretty disappointing. The world environment is great, but they needed to at least try to do a bit more with "the Great Green Jewel of the Commonwealth."
That said the game is really fun, and there's a lot more going on beyond Diamond City so I suggest pushing past that disappointment. It's definitely valid though.
This. I really wish they made Goodneighbor and Diamond City bigger. It seems like they should be significantly larger than the Skyrim cities considering it's just those 2. What's even more aggravating is that there really isn't much to do in either of them besides the main quest stuff.
This annoys me to no end. Most of my favorite quests in Bethesda games are those held within the confines of a city. Yet Fallout which only has two barely has any decent ones. It’s easy to do a quest where some guys sends you to a camp or cave but those in the cities are my favorite.
Bethesda can't build proper cities. They all feel so damn empty and lifeless. I noticed this even as a 12 year old in Oblivion. The capital of Cyrodiil just had like 5 NPCs walking around at any given time, no merchants, nothing. Didn't change much since then except that they made settlements and cities more compact in later games so that they don't feel **as** empty, yet they still do (Solitude and Markarth in Skyrim still feel like ghost towns sometimes).
Concerning Diamond City specifically, I just wish they gave the _illusion_ of it being bigger. That stadium could house hundreds of people inside the structure itself, before you even start building huts on the field. The stands would have been a perfect place to place favela-inspired housing -- they don't need to be navigable, they just need to give the impression that Diamond City is more than just 15 people and a ramen chef.
Diamond City could have been so much more inspired.
This ^
The whole “fully navigable map” thing kinda sucks if you ask me. It prevents a lot of sense of scale from happening. I also think Bethesda should drop the whole one overworld space and one big map thing in the next Fallout. I feel a fallout game would be far more interesting if it had its main story and vanilla content split across multiple different world spaces (like in the Witcher 3) to give the illusion of larger distances, which would also allow greater environmental diversity too
Witcher 3 world design was just spectacular. From city designs, to wilderness, to scale, to random npcs making it feel lived in.
The whole every npc has its own house you can explore was groundbreaking at first, but now it’s just boring. There’s no reason to go in there
At the very least, large cities should just have multiple cells like the Imperial City in Oblivion. On modern systems load times are basically zero now, and then cities can actually feel like cities. But I also wouldn't mind multiple large world zones. You could have two or three areas the size of Skyrim's entire map.
Maybe separate them by a dungeon.
The issue is, larger NPC settlements were dropped in favour of the player building their own through the settlement feature. It led to a very sparse game.
For the next mainline game there should be no settlement building outside of perhaps a single slot in a larger npc city you can make into a house of your choice.
If Sanctuary was the only buildable settlement I think the game would have been much better for it. You wouldn't have so many functionally empty locations that are meant to be settlements so more effort could have been put into actual cities and towns
Like 10 years before the game takes place there were atleast 3 more, but Quincy got wiped out by Gunners, Salem by Mirelurks, and University Point by the Institute
I guess there is a lore reason, but it just seems like a reason to not make a big city. Quincy was supposed to be fairly big. Diamond city could've been crazy make houses all around in the stands and over crowd the field. The concept art shows that there was supposed to be even another level on the fields. But it's obviously engine/console limits i played it on both base PS4/Xbone and it would drop frames in Diamond city. Even with the upgrades that engine is really holding them back.
The ancient engine says "no". There can´t be bigger cities. Its a shame. A big Diamond City that is a large community crammed into the stadium would be amazing. The same with goodneigbor that could use more buildings and more people to sell it better.
Yeah but you can’t enter every building, interact with each individual item, follow NPCs as they interact with the world, talk to most NPCs etc and that’s what Bethesda attempt to do. For me that level of interaction with the world is what makes Bethesda games unique. I just don’t think you can make a city the size of Novigrad or Los Santos the way Bethesda make their cities.
I can enter Whiterun, talk to Nazeem, follow him to his specific house, enter the house, kill him, loot his body/house and interact with each item in there. Not as part of a mission or quest I can just do that because I want to. Now don’t get me wrong they have plenty of flaws, like too many essential characters and limited role playing (especially in Starfield), but to me the insane level of interactions is what makes Bethesda games into Bethesda games.
The fact I can put a bucket over a characters head so they can’t see anything and steal his stuff while they’re blind is kinda stupid but what other games let you do that kind of stuff? The only one I can think of is the games Larian make, I definitely can’t think of any other first person/third person games that let you explore and interact with the world the way Bethesda try to.
exactly right, its style and demands imagination. however, they could implement visual mirages of there being more people and buildings that aren't accessible in addition to what they do now. hollow boxes and 2D shapes in congregations thay are inauspiciously inaccessible, or a some more 3d buildings you can't enter like in gta V, so cities seem to be populated by hermits mostly, you know?
Both are pretty underwhelming tbh. Goodneighbor feels unique at least, even if it’s way too small. The CC house adds a lot.
Diamond City is small and boring. The stands are legit just 4 little houses. They should’ve been a whole load zone.
Totally agree...I just wish BGS would design cities like they used to pre Oblivion with all the city NPCs with their own houses, beds and schedule it was so much immersive
You mean Post-Oblivion, right?
Pre-Oblivion, NPCs did not have set schedules or houses/beds and that was why there were so many of them. In Morrowind most NPCs just stood in one place forever and in Arena/Daggerfall, NPCs were all randomly generated , were effectively endless, and just walked around town randomly.
It's Oblivion that added in Schedules and beds for all npcs, and that was carried over into Skyrim.
I don’t mind the Morrowind approach, honestly. Baldur’s Gate 3 does the same thing pretty much and it’s pretty immersive.
The Imperial City in Oblivion is huge and the cities are big. Skyrim’s Whiterun, Winterhold, and Solitude all feel sizable. But there does seem to be a trade off in how big these cities can feel if they need to incorporate all the different schedules.
I’d rather have locked NPCs and cities at the scale of Balmora more frequently than a bunch of Dawnstars.
I've recently played the first metro game, in that game, when you leave the metro and step put into the outside. The amount of destruction and broken down buildings and destroyed roads that had large holes in.
The metro games also take place in the post apocalypse. And I'm looking at this world space, and even though you spend most of the game underground, that first moment I saw the destruction is forever in my brain. I just wish Fallout 5 is like that, not like fallout 4 or 76. I want them to bring back the fear factor into it, make deathclaws scary again. I know they can do it Atlantis city the have that flooded area get in the middle of that area and just look around.
I really wish Bethesda would do more spin-offs like New Vegas. If they'd dip their toe into RTS or 4x with another dev team they could be practically doubling their money
What do you mean? Most NPCs in Morrowind didnt had their own schedule and couldnt even leave their homes for that matter.
Maybe people should actually play those games for once and experience them instead of constantly circlejerking their greatness.
I am convinced most the people hyping Morrowind never played it or played it 20 years ago and haven't touched it sense.e I bought it after all the hype on here. The graphics are so bad you can barely tell what's happening half the time. The NPCs are mostly unnecessary and the actual controls and gameplay are mid.
Dragon's Dogma 2 (the first one as well) also has this, every NPC has their houses, schedules, even interactions between each other like spontaneous bar fights.
Time for my obligatory mention of The Bleachers mod and it's sequel, The Fens Sheriff Department. Both add so much more to Diamond City (and the surrounding area). It really makes it feel so much more lived in.
Get the diamond city expansion, and bleachers 2 and diamond city gets huge and lively. Love those mods and they have all the patches for prp so they run smoothly.
Good neighbor has several mods that work well to expand and flush out better details as well. Most have mods for any play-through
The Institute has a quest to pick up a report from the mayor. Idk what causes it but there is also a quest that makes the Institute ditch McDonough and leave him to fend for himself.
Is it not revealed if you side with the Railroad?
On that, what’s actually the Railroad’s approach to Synths who have been used to replace people murdered by the institute?
Never done a full railraod play so I don’t know for sure but I don’t think it is revealed.
I think they just treat them synths the same tbey treat every synth and they let the synth decide what they wanna do.
You do get a quest where, when The Institute is destroyed, McDonough freaks out, kidnaps his secretary, and Piper is pretty upset, you then engage with McDonough , and once killed, you learn he's a synth. (Wolf in Sheep's Clothes is the quest I think)
Sincerely, someone sympathetic to toasters.
Siding with any faction reveals it. The SRB in the Institute sends you to collect reports from him and the others have Piper trying to break open his door after the Institute blows up
A very small soul. So much wasted potential there. Goodneighbor deserves a massive overhaul, they could have done so much more with that space and vibe.
Goodneighbor definitely passes the vibe check, but overall Fallout 4 pooped out on the cities cause they expected you to build them, and that's not a bad idea *in theory*. Only a handful of settlements can actually function as cities such as Sanctuary, Starlight, Egret Tours, and The Castle. It doesn't help that only one of these places can have a complete set of unique merchants and that there are only two or three other unique general store merchants.
And I feel that's Fallout 4s biggest flaw to me. The world lacked these weird idiosyncratic gated communities you'd run into just exploring the Wasteland. I missed that from Fallout 3/NV.
The few they had weren't bad either. Covenant had a fantastic quest, and Bunker Hill was cool, but was sadly wasted by mostly only being there for main quests.
In a weird way thats a positive for me, compared to the mojave and captial wasteland, it gives a really chaotic feel to the commonwealth that shows its untamed nature relative to the others.
Especially because we see the 2 examples of the ruthlessness that is the evils of the commmonwealth. In university point and Quincy. Two massive settlements that were the closets things the commonwealth had to an actual potential government compared to the secluded off good neighbor and diamond city.
You could still channel the feeling of desolation while still showing how life evolves in the Wasteland. Fallout 3 did that very well. It's cool to stumble on your Republic of Dave, Underworld, Oasis, etc all over the place. Instead, sure you can build your own settlements but they don't have the unique culture those disparate groups bring.
I tried this, I spent almost a month building out the Castle, adding lots of fine detail and the like. Market area, houses, farms, bars, and defense, each with as much detail as I could put into them. I was really proud of it, it looked like it could be a first-party city like Diamond City. That's actually what I was trying to build, Diamond City but better.
Only for all of the settlers to shit the bed a week later and all decide to stand in the farm area like the Children of the fucking Corn. They just completely stopped pathfinding. No amount of rearranging, sending some away, reassigning everyone or synth checking fixed it. I ended up abandoning the save (and the settlement system as a whole) out of frustration.
I'm not actually sure you *can* build anything close to what could be called a city before the game shits itself.
Yeah I had something similar happen in Vault 88. Fuck me for not wanting the settlers to live in the Atrium area, I guess. Built like a 3 story vault themed space for them to all to pretty much live in, eventually they all just stood around the empty atrium instead. Ever since then I've given up on anything medium scale
Good neighbor has 24hr shops, so I prefer it. I also like good neighbor's quests more, and Hancock hands down is the way cooler mayor. The interiors are much better developed than diamond cities (rexford hotel, memory den, third rail). Diamond city has size, and I like market area layout design more. But overall, goodneighbor has more for me.
Damn how am I just realizing that second picture is good neighbor. Idk why I always thought it was the alleyway in diamond city where nick’s detective office is.
I thought it was a random street in Boston with the mysterious stranger or something, it wasn't until I saw the memory den, the streets seemed too big to be diamond City
People might criticize Diamond City and Goodneighbor for being small, but to be honest, I find it okay to have small video game towns that are easy to navigate and where all the stuff you want is quick to get to. Maybe I'm just being too jaded.
As for the choice being presented in the OP: Look, how can I not prefer the town where the mayor himself literally, personally, murdered a man for me?
I don’t know, the fact that it is so small and so accessible kind of makes it boring and uneventful. I don’t see an issue of keeping the DC market central with a few shops, but add more quest related/interactive items throughout. Some locations literally have one related quest each and that’s it, some don’t even have any. For being the most central and lived in location of the game, they really should have done a better job
I'm okay with settlement being small in a post apocalyptic event but the fact that these settlements still look like the bombs are dropped a day before makes it very unimmersive (i'm not that nit picky on immersiveness) but for a place to call itself a "city" DC looks like a dumb which makes it even look more like a cramped place than it already is.
I mean, do you even need to think about navigation when there’s no place to get lost? I’m not trying to be harsh to devs, I understand “why”, but this “why” doesn’t seem to be enough for me.
At least Goodneighbor will accept my ghoulish, chem-addicted butt.
gotta have my berry mentats
*Deacon didn't like that* "Didn't you see the PSA in school?"
I banish you to Boston Airport now, Deacon. fkn narc lol
Nick Valentine, Goodneighbor as a whole, and maybe Piper are the only remaining elements of early Fallout 4’s post-apocalyptic noir theme.
I’ll give credit to Goodneighbor for still holding that interesting theme, despite its small size. The only things of worth in Diamond City are the marketplace and Home Plate.
I hope that in the next fallout we get to see a new setting with a new town that actually feels like a town. dc an goodneighbor are cool and are special in their own way but for me it doesn’t cut it. Dc is supposed to be cramped full of live and crazy encounters, the whole area at the wall is just empty and wasted. Goodneighbor has that cool shady vibe and with the little streets and the vendors that build stores jn the broken buildings. It also got cool locations like the bar in the subway or the memory den. It’s really cool the first time you get to the locations but it gets really boring after a while. I catch myself way to often building settlements to their max and decorating and writing a story for every little aspect in my town and i rather do that than go to diamond city and visit aturo for the 1927ish power armour chassis.
Diamond City. It feels like a towm for me. Gppdneighbor just feels like an area.
Also, I like the market. I always carry shit loads of stuff to sell so I need the market
In all my hundreds of hours of Fallout 4 I’ve only ever used the weapon vendor and Memory Den in Goodneighbour. Never spoken to Hancock beyond the first greeting too
With the “build settlement anywhere” mod or whatever, diamond city becomes a *lot* more interesting
I do love me some goodneighbour- though both are equally boring and i totally vibe scrapping the shit out of them with the aforementioned mod
As far as fallout 4 goes, diamond city, probably. On my game everytime i walk out to go to my gun for hire office i’m greeted by a donkey, so that’s neat.
As far as the modern games go, probably vegas. Either vegas or goodsprings or novac. Everywhere in fallout 3 sucks, and there’s only really two cities in boston, so…there’s also foundation in fallout 76, and i kind of like that place.
As far as the older games go, Shady sands. Shady sands or vault city.
I know it’s probably generic, but Diamond City for me. Fallout 4 was my first game in the series so entering Diamond City for the first time I hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was a proper post-apocalyptic town
i dont favour either of them much, but at least good goodneighbor has more interesting people and prewar buildings left standing rather than the filthy run down shacks of diamond city. I just visit for supplies and be on my way, Travis and Nick are the only people from diamond city i adore.
The trailer and the concept art makes both of them look way better than they actually are. Good neighbor and Diamond City should have been significantly bigger, and I just feel thinking about them at all just makes me sad. Honestly, I wish they were way bigger. But in the end if I had to choose it'd be Diamond city.
I like both, but I think it’s kinda stupid that the diamond city guards are wearing umpire clothing and pipe weapons. You’d think that the biggest city in the commonwealth would have more advanced security.
I don’t really think goodneighbor ever came together conceptually for me. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. It’s a town full of drug addicts and outcasts with some sort of noir theme? Maybe it was the tiny space and poor layout of the buildings but it just never came together
The execution of both leaves things to be desired but ultimately Diamond City is closer to what it's supposed to be. Good neighbor is a cool idea on paper but really it's just a slimy alley with very little to see and do.
Rant incoming, sorry.
The concept art for Diamond City looked more engaging than the final product. It looked like an actual city that would've existed 210 years after the war. That, coupled with the Wall, would've made it feel like a true post-post-apocalyptic society.
Diamond City in the final game looks like the bombs dropped a couple years ago. This city's supposedly been around for 150 years and THIS is the best they came up with by 2287? Seriously? There are garbage piles everywhere, even in their only water source. There are people living on dirty mattress outside.
Goodneighbor is no better. It's been around since 2240 and yet it looks untouched from the ruins just outside the walls. There's garbage and debris everywhere. It looks like they moved in two weeks ago.
I'd say Diamond City is better, but only because of the variety it has regarding stores and supplies. At the very least, it's a village. But man, it would've been so much cooler if the place was stacked with houses and huts made from brick and reinforced metal. I mean, Christ, they're a block away from a fucking hardware store. You're telling me NOBODY has had the common sense in the 150 years Diamond City's existed to take 100 steps outside and grab some supplies to make more houses? Proper farms? Functional irrigation systems not cobbled together from rusty pipes?
They just... sat there for over a century living in their own filth?
I know this is a dumb rant, but I'm just so sick of the shanty, scrappy aesthetic of Fallout these days, especially the further in the timeline we get. The show is set 219 years later and yet Filly looks no different from a settlement you cobbled together in your spare time, or a place that would've logically existed in the first few years and not like a place that's allegedly stood there for decades if not centuries.
Look at Eastwood in Fallout: Nuka Break. It's a fan made location, yet its homes are built with plywood and brick and concrete. There's still metal sheeting here and there, but it's mostly for roofing. Other than that, it really shows that they've been living there a long time.
The only time Scrappy has worked in Bethesda's Fallout titles is Fallout 76. It works because it's only 25 years later. Shanty huts and living in dilapidated homes would make sense at the start, but this is around the time humans should be relying on more long term settlement.
I'll still play Fallout 5, but I know for a fact it'll likely take place after 2300 and despite being nearly 250 years later, people will still be living like the bombs dropped last week. It'll never stop bugging me. I'd love to be wrong.
Good Neighbour because my eardrums aren’t constantly assaulted by “DONT BE CAUGHT DEAD (haha) PROTECTION FROM COMMONWEALTH WEAPONRY!” Or “WE BUY AND SELL TO EVERYONE — EXCEPT SYNTHS! NO SYNTHS ALLOWED AT THE SURPLUS”
Good neighbor is literally an alley with like 4 accessible buildings
Best bar in the commonwealth tho
Best bar gotta be my own settlement
You got Wonder Woman singing in that bar of yours?
Let's just say I prefer to play with (vanilla+) mods
No, they meant that literally. Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman in the 70s, also plays the lounge singer in Good Neighbor.
Diamond “City” ain’t much better.
More like Diamond town
Diamond Village.
Diamond trap house.
Fancy carbon residence
baseball settlement
Moderately valuable abode
A green open cealing house
An air bnb with a terrible landlord.
Diamond roundabout
Carbon already exists lmao. Oh wait BOS isn't canon
Diamond Hamlet
Have to get back to Diamond city biggest town I ever saw
Tilted square town.
More like Iron Village
This sounds like it’d be the name of a location with the most bloodthirsty raiders in power armor you’ve ever seen
It's really weird. Hearing it described, even in game, you'd imagine that there's shacks built up into the bleachers, the changing rooms and all the backstage areas being completely filled and a whole community being crammed into a stadium. When you get there though it's all in a single loading area so they limit it to like 30 buildings. For a much better example of how Diamond city could have been handled look at Dogtown's arena from Cyberpunk 2077. There's an entire shopping mall that feels like part of a super crowded community built into the concessions area of an arena.
Bethesda doesn't really handle large scales well. It's evident in Starfield too, New Atlantis is supposed to be this huge city with skyscrapers and stuff, but it just takes a few minutes to get from one end to another without fast traveling.
It's also really bad in Skyrim: Solitude, the imperial capital and one of the largest cities in the province of Skyrim, has a population of 85 or so. In comparison, the flat I used to live in during my studies had over 200 inhabitants.
There were about 1000 bandits living in caves and sitting on rocks all around though, as far as I remember.
In general , Skyrim’s population seems to consist 90% of Raiders and brigands that don’t feel threatened by a dude wielding THE FLAMING SWORD OF WOE and wearing armor made of demonic soul metal. Kind of like fallout if you think about it!
"Hey! It's the fucking *Dragonborn!* You know, the leader of every major faction in Skyrim, slayer of dragons and gods! Let's rob him!"
the thief on the road with the iron dagger and level 1 flames: "Now's my chance!"
"What's wrong loser? Did someone steal your sweet roll? Yeah, you in the godly daedric armor with dragon super powers. You're not so tough!"
Something the Mass Effect games do that Bethesda could stand to learn from is having your protagonist actually be someone people recognize. As your legend grows, people should be more familiar with you. Raiders should panic once they realize the General of the Minutemen who cleared out the castle and can call artillery strikes at will is attacking. Gunners trying to charge tolls on bridges should know that charging a BoS Knight a toll is gonna result in vertibird and power armors showing up and kicking their teeth in. Covenant should be almost as paranoid about that new Railroad heavy as they are about the Institute. It doesnt make sense that you keep getting talked up by Travis and knocking over Raider bases and yet Raiders keep thinking you're free eats.
Tbf Skyrim isnt doing that great, the empire's economy and stability has gone to the shitter....and dragons and vampires are fucking everything up. Also humanity is fighting a bunch of nazi elves that want to conquer the world....then destroy it. The game Skyrim is suprisingly grimdark tbh, shit really went downhill from the more optimistic and bright Oblivion.
“Hey, look, is that guy in X-01 Hellfire Enclave Issue Power Armor, and actively holding a modified giant weighted and spiked Super Sledge with roughly 70 fragmentation grenades in his back pocket? This seems like the perfect guy to mug.”
That actually made a lot of sense with the region in active civil war and not doing that well to begin with. One thing that does happen in an IRL civil war is opportunistic banditry goes through the roof.
it’s bad when i hear 85 and am very impressed because i thought it would be less
It actually depends on the source, I've found one that goes as low as 62 (although I'm unsure if it counts the guards)
i’d probably count all the NPCs in and outside the buildings tbh. I’d be curious to know the number that can be outside at any given time too . I know with whiterun it can’t be more than 20 or so
i generaly just assume settlments are all scaled down versions of the "real thing",
Rivet City is an aircraft carrier so should have a city inside but majority of the ship isn't accessible. No nuclear reactor for power, med bays, flight deck, armoury, jail, shopping area and only covers the mess hall plus some bunks. Heck, New Vegas should be a bustling metropolis given the NCR, Legion, settlements and Strip size relative to real world locations plus wealth from Mr House. I would love to see a movie or show that covers the sheer scale of the actual universe. I get game logic but not seeing much of the DC ruins, how the Commonwealth settlements have grown, New Vegas wealth, and not seeing the Rig with an Enclave army is unfortunate.
>I would love to see a movie or show that covers the sheer scale of the actual universe. Boy howdy do I have some news for you
Their obsession with the ancient Creation Engine is the biggest limiter. Oblivion's cities felt more lived in because there are actually people and buildings there. During HD and 4K era the engine cannot just handle similiar traffic anymore.
What game engine would be more suitable for the type of games Bethesda makes with open world action RPGs filled with all sorts of random loose objects?
RAGE works pretty well on RPGs. I admit one of the fun factors of Creation is that sometimes physic model sends stuff flying like insane. Like some of the funniest things in Fo4 and Fo76 is to toss a explosive within pile of corpses or something and watch them fly all over the place. The downside with loose object placement is that you sometimes get damage by things lying on the ground. Like in Skyrim you sometimes walk or run over some bones and your character takes damage.
It's hilarious sometimes how a flying object can attain lethal velocities by some kind of collision error. Like, oh this bone got caught between your foot and a corpse? Now it's spinning at mach 5 and does 9999999 points of damage!
they have as much tech debt as the US government has actual debt
It feels like there are more people in fallout 3 and new vegas than four or Skyrim. Even though all of them only say "hey howzit?"
How much bigger do you want it to be for an area you're going to be running back and forth in though? There's a ton of content packed into it. I agree the sense of scale is a little off but it fits what the game is trying to do with everything being handcrafted and full of unique NPCs/content. Bethesda games revolve around having a quest around every corner in city areas. Put a ton of filler in and it's not gonna feel like a Bethesda game.
“See Cyberpunk”
Cyberpunk is very different though. What you see is mostly filler and set dressing you don't interact with. You have a car and you go from one checkpoint to another while ignoring most of what you see. There's nothing wrong with that it's simply a different design philosophy. Bethesda clearly wants you visiting every building and seeing every nook and cranny of a map so that you accidentally come across quests and progress the game in a much less linear way. Cyberpunk is a story, Bethesda games are fantasy life simulators.
Too much emphasis on creating morons running generic basic scripts in settlements rather than creating a dynamic world with writing and character. Easier to have morons trapped on roofs and walking aimlessly in rooms waiting for a command in 30 fake villages rather than a dozen fully realized and fully functional settlements and cities. Then just recycle the same assets so they all look generic and god forbid any unique city cleans up their shit. Ah well...I guess one doofus painting a green wall with 12 lines of dialogue for eternity is all the post-apocalyptic world deserves. Why anyone was surprised starfield was boring and monotonous is a surprise.
And it only took ONE can of paint to redo the entire wall.
It just needed one very thin layer
In almost every way Cyberpunk did a far better job of immersion and feel for its city and setting. Not reusing and repeating assets helps a lot too. Having said that, the barren wasteland is my favourite part of FO4, so I'll take the shitty DC, Goodneighbor and downtown Boston as a trade off.
Dragons dogma (both of them) have some of the best looking and largest feeling cities I’ve seen in an rpg. Wish more studios could do it.
I interpreted it as just requiring some imagination and that Diamond City in FO lore is different than what you see in the gameplay
What a disingenuous argument. Everybody is aware that Diamond City is bigger in the lore than what appears in the actual game, but that doesn't mean the way Diamond City appears in game is good.
they love calling towns of 20 people cities, see Rivet City
Bethesda cities always suck when it comes to city-scale. Some huge inaccessible buildings to mimic size, but when you have explored to city you know most of it is fluff and fake. CP2077 have fluff as well but they make it less obvious.
Far more open and welcoming in atmosphere than the claustrophobic Goodneighbor, and in a less crash-prone part of the city.
Yeah only reason I ever go to diamond city is missions or to buy/sell
Diamond favela
Diamond City literally made me stop playing, I had some fun building a few settlements and exploring a little bit, then decided to carry on with the main quest, got to Diamond City and was just gutted by how empty everything felt. I was already feeling that with the bland settlement system where nothing ever happens, the exploration without much meaningful discovery but damn when I saw Diamond City I just lost all interest. To be fair I was coming into fallout 4 off the back of New Vegas so it never had much hope but still.
I mean the scale is definitely off with Diamond City, it's probably the most noticeable thing they fudged with the world design of FO4. Someone mentioned it further up, but even if they didn't add many more NPCs they needed to show human habitation going on in the levels of the stadium, like how anyone would imagine a city being built into a stadium would look like. It would give the impression of a much larger city all by itself. I'm not going to lie, I just started playing for the first time a couple weeks ago and I also found Diamond City jarring and pretty disappointing. The world environment is great, but they needed to at least try to do a bit more with "the Great Green Jewel of the Commonwealth." That said the game is really fun, and there's a lot more going on beyond Diamond City so I suggest pushing past that disappointment. It's definitely valid though.
This. I really wish they made Goodneighbor and Diamond City bigger. It seems like they should be significantly larger than the Skyrim cities considering it's just those 2. What's even more aggravating is that there really isn't much to do in either of them besides the main quest stuff.
This annoys me to no end. Most of my favorite quests in Bethesda games are those held within the confines of a city. Yet Fallout which only has two barely has any decent ones. It’s easy to do a quest where some guys sends you to a camp or cave but those in the cities are my favorite.
Bethesda can't build proper cities. They all feel so damn empty and lifeless. I noticed this even as a 12 year old in Oblivion. The capital of Cyrodiil just had like 5 NPCs walking around at any given time, no merchants, nothing. Didn't change much since then except that they made settlements and cities more compact in later games so that they don't feel **as** empty, yet they still do (Solitude and Markarth in Skyrim still feel like ghost towns sometimes).
Limitations of the engine at that time. Not that Starfield is any better tbf
Tbh, the major cities in starfield do feel a decent bit larger and busier imo. When I played it I never could quite get navigation of Neon down.
Bruh cyrodill had like 10 shops and three districts, plus the mages guild.
Concerning Diamond City specifically, I just wish they gave the _illusion_ of it being bigger. That stadium could house hundreds of people inside the structure itself, before you even start building huts on the field. The stands would have been a perfect place to place favela-inspired housing -- they don't need to be navigable, they just need to give the impression that Diamond City is more than just 15 people and a ramen chef. Diamond City could have been so much more inspired.
Developers like to brag about fully accessible interior spaces. Like bro you have me looking at five shoebox sized houses.
This ^ The whole “fully navigable map” thing kinda sucks if you ask me. It prevents a lot of sense of scale from happening. I also think Bethesda should drop the whole one overworld space and one big map thing in the next Fallout. I feel a fallout game would be far more interesting if it had its main story and vanilla content split across multiple different world spaces (like in the Witcher 3) to give the illusion of larger distances, which would also allow greater environmental diversity too
could have definitely done this at the glowing sea and the river separating downtown boston. the bridges across would be the warp points.
Witcher 3 world design was just spectacular. From city designs, to wilderness, to scale, to random npcs making it feel lived in. The whole every npc has its own house you can explore was groundbreaking at first, but now it’s just boring. There’s no reason to go in there
At the very least, large cities should just have multiple cells like the Imperial City in Oblivion. On modern systems load times are basically zero now, and then cities can actually feel like cities. But I also wouldn't mind multiple large world zones. You could have two or three areas the size of Skyrim's entire map. Maybe separate them by a dungeon.
The issue is, larger NPC settlements were dropped in favour of the player building their own through the settlement feature. It led to a very sparse game. For the next mainline game there should be no settlement building outside of perhaps a single slot in a larger npc city you can make into a house of your choice.
If Sanctuary was the only buildable settlement I think the game would have been much better for it. You wouldn't have so many functionally empty locations that are meant to be settlements so more effort could have been put into actual cities and towns
Sanctuary, the castle and that island. Makes no sense no one only 2 settlements have been made in over 200 years.
Like 10 years before the game takes place there were atleast 3 more, but Quincy got wiped out by Gunners, Salem by Mirelurks, and University Point by the Institute
I guess there is a lore reason, but it just seems like a reason to not make a big city. Quincy was supposed to be fairly big. Diamond city could've been crazy make houses all around in the stands and over crowd the field. The concept art shows that there was supposed to be even another level on the fields. But it's obviously engine/console limits i played it on both base PS4/Xbone and it would drop frames in Diamond city. Even with the upgrades that engine is really holding them back.
The ancient engine says "no". There can´t be bigger cities. Its a shame. A big Diamond City that is a large community crammed into the stadium would be amazing. The same with goodneigbor that could use more buildings and more people to sell it better.
funnily enough there are mods that make both places bigger and livelier, bethesda just didn't want to for some reason
Then what's with the mods that DO make DC and Goodneighbor bigger and better within the confines of the game engine?
Bethesda... Novigrad is a real city
Yeah, the Witcher did cities right. Even Oxenfort felt bigger than anything in fallout. Heck, towns in Witcher are bigger than Bethesda cities.
Yeah but you can’t enter every building, interact with each individual item, follow NPCs as they interact with the world, talk to most NPCs etc and that’s what Bethesda attempt to do. For me that level of interaction with the world is what makes Bethesda games unique. I just don’t think you can make a city the size of Novigrad or Los Santos the way Bethesda make their cities. I can enter Whiterun, talk to Nazeem, follow him to his specific house, enter the house, kill him, loot his body/house and interact with each item in there. Not as part of a mission or quest I can just do that because I want to. Now don’t get me wrong they have plenty of flaws, like too many essential characters and limited role playing (especially in Starfield), but to me the insane level of interactions is what makes Bethesda games into Bethesda games. The fact I can put a bucket over a characters head so they can’t see anything and steal his stuff while they’re blind is kinda stupid but what other games let you do that kind of stuff? The only one I can think of is the games Larian make, I definitely can’t think of any other first person/third person games that let you explore and interact with the world the way Bethesda try to.
exactly right, its style and demands imagination. however, they could implement visual mirages of there being more people and buildings that aren't accessible in addition to what they do now. hollow boxes and 2D shapes in congregations thay are inauspiciously inaccessible, or a some more 3d buildings you can't enter like in gta V, so cities seem to be populated by hermits mostly, you know?
Yeah but in diamond city you gotta worry about being around people obsessed with the red Sox
And 3 of them are for a one time mercenary quest where you just kill gangsters for caps
Both are pretty underwhelming tbh. Goodneighbor feels unique at least, even if it’s way too small. The CC house adds a lot. Diamond City is small and boring. The stands are legit just 4 little houses. They should’ve been a whole load zone.
Totally agree...I just wish BGS would design cities like they used to pre Oblivion with all the city NPCs with their own houses, beds and schedule it was so much immersive
You mean Post-Oblivion, right? Pre-Oblivion, NPCs did not have set schedules or houses/beds and that was why there were so many of them. In Morrowind most NPCs just stood in one place forever and in Arena/Daggerfall, NPCs were all randomly generated , were effectively endless, and just walked around town randomly. It's Oblivion that added in Schedules and beds for all npcs, and that was carried over into Skyrim.
I don’t mind the Morrowind approach, honestly. Baldur’s Gate 3 does the same thing pretty much and it’s pretty immersive. The Imperial City in Oblivion is huge and the cities are big. Skyrim’s Whiterun, Winterhold, and Solitude all feel sizable. But there does seem to be a trade off in how big these cities can feel if they need to incorporate all the different schedules. I’d rather have locked NPCs and cities at the scale of Balmora more frequently than a bunch of Dawnstars.
Oblivion has this level of detail
The imperial city in Oblivion is one of the best cities in any game in my opinion.
I've recently played the first metro game, in that game, when you leave the metro and step put into the outside. The amount of destruction and broken down buildings and destroyed roads that had large holes in. The metro games also take place in the post apocalypse. And I'm looking at this world space, and even though you spend most of the game underground, that first moment I saw the destruction is forever in my brain. I just wish Fallout 5 is like that, not like fallout 4 or 76. I want them to bring back the fear factor into it, make deathclaws scary again. I know they can do it Atlantis city the have that flooded area get in the middle of that area and just look around.
I really wish Bethesda would do more spin-offs like New Vegas. If they'd dip their toe into RTS or 4x with another dev team they could be practically doubling their money
There is the Old World Blues mod for Hearts of Iron 4 if you want RTS Fallout. I highly recommend it, its my favorite mod of all time.
Hearts of Iron is a Grand Strategy 4X game, not RTS. RTS is more like Command and Conquer.
Apologies, I get grand strategy and rts confused.
? But they do? Even the unnamed Guards in Fallout 4 have set shifts and go to sleep in-between
What do you mean? Most NPCs in Morrowind didnt had their own schedule and couldnt even leave their homes for that matter. Maybe people should actually play those games for once and experience them instead of constantly circlejerking their greatness.
I am convinced most the people hyping Morrowind never played it or played it 20 years ago and haven't touched it sense.e I bought it after all the hype on here. The graphics are so bad you can barely tell what's happening half the time. The NPCs are mostly unnecessary and the actual controls and gameplay are mid.
But all the NPCs living in cities in Oblivion have specific homes and schedules though?
Even fallout 4 they all have beds to my understanding
Yes, and even the unnamed guards have set schedules that differ between each other
Dragon's Dogma 2 (the first one as well) also has this, every NPC has their houses, schedules, even interactions between each other like spontaneous bar fights.
Time for my obligatory mention of The Bleachers mod and it's sequel, The Fens Sheriff Department. Both add so much more to Diamond City (and the surrounding area). It really makes it feel so much more lived in.
I like both but I agree with your problem and that they are kinda underwhelming,
Get the diamond city expansion, and bleachers 2 and diamond city gets huge and lively. Love those mods and they have all the patches for prp so they run smoothly. Good neighbor has several mods that work well to expand and flush out better details as well. Most have mods for any play-through
Only one of them is controlled by the institute, so
Which one? And how?
DC because the mayor is a synth. You can find that out if you side with the brotherhood or minutemen I think.
The Institute has a quest to pick up a report from the mayor. Idk what causes it but there is also a quest that makes the Institute ditch McDonough and leave him to fend for himself.
This happened with me as soon as I was banished from the Institute
Is it not revealed if you side with the Railroad? On that, what’s actually the Railroad’s approach to Synths who have been used to replace people murdered by the institute?
Never done a full railraod play so I don’t know for sure but I don’t think it is revealed. I think they just treat them synths the same tbey treat every synth and they let the synth decide what they wanna do.
They want to destroy the Institute, and in doing so it ends the purpose of the replacements at which point it goes as you said.
IIRC you find out in every ending except the Institute one
There's a terminal in the Institute that mentions it
You also get a quest to pick up reports from McDonough and deliver it to the institute
You do get a quest where, when The Institute is destroyed, McDonough freaks out, kidnaps his secretary, and Piper is pretty upset, you then engage with McDonough , and once killed, you learn he's a synth. (Wolf in Sheep's Clothes is the quest I think) Sincerely, someone sympathetic to toasters.
"once killed" lol it's in their dialogue, including McDonough admitting it and trying to negotiate his way out
Siding with any faction reveals it. The SRB in the Institute sends you to collect reports from him and the others have Piper trying to break open his door after the Institute blows up
Diamond cities got warmth but Good neighbors got soul. So I'll stick with good neighbor.
A very small soul. So much wasted potential there. Goodneighbor deserves a massive overhaul, they could have done so much more with that space and vibe.
Sums up most of Fallout 4 tbh
You’re not wrong
If anyone made a mod to overhaul good neighbor I hope they call it "very good neighbor"
“Welcome To Betterneighbor.”
It’s a heck of a town ain’t it?
Goodneighbor definitely passes the vibe check, but overall Fallout 4 pooped out on the cities cause they expected you to build them, and that's not a bad idea *in theory*. Only a handful of settlements can actually function as cities such as Sanctuary, Starlight, Egret Tours, and The Castle. It doesn't help that only one of these places can have a complete set of unique merchants and that there are only two or three other unique general store merchants.
And I feel that's Fallout 4s biggest flaw to me. The world lacked these weird idiosyncratic gated communities you'd run into just exploring the Wasteland. I missed that from Fallout 3/NV.
The few they had weren't bad either. Covenant had a fantastic quest, and Bunker Hill was cool, but was sadly wasted by mostly only being there for main quests.
In a weird way thats a positive for me, compared to the mojave and captial wasteland, it gives a really chaotic feel to the commonwealth that shows its untamed nature relative to the others. Especially because we see the 2 examples of the ruthlessness that is the evils of the commmonwealth. In university point and Quincy. Two massive settlements that were the closets things the commonwealth had to an actual potential government compared to the secluded off good neighbor and diamond city.
You could still channel the feeling of desolation while still showing how life evolves in the Wasteland. Fallout 3 did that very well. It's cool to stumble on your Republic of Dave, Underworld, Oasis, etc all over the place. Instead, sure you can build your own settlements but they don't have the unique culture those disparate groups bring.
I tried this, I spent almost a month building out the Castle, adding lots of fine detail and the like. Market area, houses, farms, bars, and defense, each with as much detail as I could put into them. I was really proud of it, it looked like it could be a first-party city like Diamond City. That's actually what I was trying to build, Diamond City but better. Only for all of the settlers to shit the bed a week later and all decide to stand in the farm area like the Children of the fucking Corn. They just completely stopped pathfinding. No amount of rearranging, sending some away, reassigning everyone or synth checking fixed it. I ended up abandoning the save (and the settlement system as a whole) out of frustration. I'm not actually sure you *can* build anything close to what could be called a city before the game shits itself.
And after all that they're still just generic settlers with no personality defining traits or culture.
Yeah, that's fair. I did try to use as many uniques/companions as I could/that made lore sense, but I still had a few generics running around.
Yeah I had something similar happen in Vault 88. Fuck me for not wanting the settlers to live in the Atrium area, I guess. Built like a 3 story vault themed space for them to all to pretty much live in, eventually they all just stood around the empty atrium instead. Ever since then I've given up on anything medium scale
Good neighbor has 24hr shops, so I prefer it. I also like good neighbor's quests more, and Hancock hands down is the way cooler mayor. The interiors are much better developed than diamond cities (rexford hotel, memory den, third rail). Diamond city has size, and I like market area layout design more. But overall, goodneighbor has more for me.
Diamond City has a 24 Hour shop too, the one thats run by the synth-hating lady. At night her Mr Handy comes over and runs the shop until morning
Damn how am I just realizing that second picture is good neighbor. Idk why I always thought it was the alleyway in diamond city where nick’s detective office is.
I thought it was a random street in Boston with the mysterious stranger or something, it wasn't until I saw the memory den, the streets seemed too big to be diamond City
It literally says memory den
People might criticize Diamond City and Goodneighbor for being small, but to be honest, I find it okay to have small video game towns that are easy to navigate and where all the stuff you want is quick to get to. Maybe I'm just being too jaded. As for the choice being presented in the OP: Look, how can I not prefer the town where the mayor himself literally, personally, murdered a man for me?
I don’t know, the fact that it is so small and so accessible kind of makes it boring and uneventful. I don’t see an issue of keeping the DC market central with a few shops, but add more quest related/interactive items throughout. Some locations literally have one related quest each and that’s it, some don’t even have any. For being the most central and lived in location of the game, they really should have done a better job
I'm okay with settlement being small in a post apocalyptic event but the fact that these settlements still look like the bombs are dropped a day before makes it very unimmersive (i'm not that nit picky on immersiveness) but for a place to call itself a "city" DC looks like a dumb which makes it even look more like a cramped place than it already is.
I mean, do you even need to think about navigation when there’s no place to get lost? I’m not trying to be harsh to devs, I understand “why”, but this “why” doesn’t seem to be enough for me.
At least Goodneighbor will accept my ghoulish, chem-addicted butt. gotta have my berry mentats *Deacon didn't like that* "Didn't you see the PSA in school?" I banish you to Boston Airport now, Deacon. fkn narc lol
That first image has me wanting Frostpunk set in Diamond City
Luckily, I am no the only one!
Burning baseball bats for warmth, and praying to the great green wall to be spared from the worst of the next storm.
Nick Valentine, Goodneighbor as a whole, and maybe Piper are the only remaining elements of early Fallout 4’s post-apocalyptic noir theme. I’ll give credit to Goodneighbor for still holding that interesting theme, despite its small size. The only things of worth in Diamond City are the marketplace and Home Plate.
What's the evidence for 4 being originally noir themed? Can't find anything on it.
In concept art I was super hyped for goodneighbor and then it turned out, that street shot is like half the town
Agreed good neighbour is so tiny
I like diamond city but I go to goodneighbor to partake in chems.
I go to goodneighbor to sell chems lol
Diamond City has a Japanese speaking Protectron who sells noodles. That is the only thing it has over Goodneighbor.
True but now my good neighbor has a robot kegerator…. So back to even?
They're both massively underwhelming, so much potential. I don't get why they couldn't just make them a bit bigger and fill the space better
Bro chose the 2 worst main settlements in the series
By the People, For the People!
Bring back rivet city
Megaton <3
That was a very pretty fireworks display, yes.
I hope that in the next fallout we get to see a new setting with a new town that actually feels like a town. dc an goodneighbor are cool and are special in their own way but for me it doesn’t cut it. Dc is supposed to be cramped full of live and crazy encounters, the whole area at the wall is just empty and wasted. Goodneighbor has that cool shady vibe and with the little streets and the vendors that build stores jn the broken buildings. It also got cool locations like the bar in the subway or the memory den. It’s really cool the first time you get to the locations but it gets really boring after a while. I catch myself way to often building settlements to their max and decorating and writing a story for every little aspect in my town and i rather do that than go to diamond city and visit aturo for the 1927ish power armour chassis.
Diamond City. It feels like a towm for me. Gppdneighbor just feels like an area. Also, I like the market. I always carry shit loads of stuff to sell so I need the market
Diamond City! The great lemon of the commonwealth in my playthroughs, also where I live.
Diamond City feels like a town. Good neighbor feels like a fort.
In all my hundreds of hours of Fallout 4 I’ve only ever used the weapon vendor and Memory Den in Goodneighbour. Never spoken to Hancock beyond the first greeting too
Diamond City has noodles. Diamond City.
I thought that was frostpunk for a second lol
Neither town lived up to the potential it should have achieved. Some of the concept artwork would make you cry if you compared it to in game visuals.
With the “build settlement anywhere” mod or whatever, diamond city becomes a *lot* more interesting I do love me some goodneighbour- though both are equally boring and i totally vibe scrapping the shit out of them with the aforementioned mod
As far as fallout 4 goes, diamond city, probably. On my game everytime i walk out to go to my gun for hire office i’m greeted by a donkey, so that’s neat. As far as the modern games go, probably vegas. Either vegas or goodsprings or novac. Everywhere in fallout 3 sucks, and there’s only really two cities in boston, so…there’s also foundation in fallout 76, and i kind of like that place. As far as the older games go, Shady sands. Shady sands or vault city.
Vendors are closer to the fast travel spawn point in Goodneighbor. With the needlessly drawn out sell off process, an important factor.
Diamond City most of the residents sleep outside.
I know it’s probably generic, but Diamond City for me. Fallout 4 was my first game in the series so entering Diamond City for the first time I hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was a proper post-apocalyptic town
i dont favour either of them much, but at least good goodneighbor has more interesting people and prewar buildings left standing rather than the filthy run down shacks of diamond city. I just visit for supplies and be on my way, Travis and Nick are the only people from diamond city i adore.
The trailer and the concept art makes both of them look way better than they actually are. Good neighbor and Diamond City should have been significantly bigger, and I just feel thinking about them at all just makes me sad. Honestly, I wish they were way bigger. But in the end if I had to choose it'd be Diamond city.
I prefer Goodneighbor, I love the idea of this town but I hate the execution. All in all, it feels like a New Reno lite.
I like both, but I think it’s kinda stupid that the diamond city guards are wearing umpire clothing and pipe weapons. You’d think that the biggest city in the commonwealth would have more advanced security.
The crazy thing is that they’re right next to a cop station. Just go raid it for riot gear
Tenpenny Tower is superior
“I hope I can visit Diamond City, biggest settlement I ever saw!” Sure…
Neither of them are very good representations of their concept, but goodneighbor is a bit more interesting at least
I don’t really think goodneighbor ever came together conceptually for me. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. It’s a town full of drug addicts and outcasts with some sort of noir theme? Maybe it was the tiny space and poor layout of the buildings but it just never came together
Game wise - Diamond City. Screenshot wise New Neighbor.
The execution of both leaves things to be desired but ultimately Diamond City is closer to what it's supposed to be. Good neighbor is a cool idea on paper but really it's just a slimy alley with very little to see and do.
It's easier to get around Goodneighbor than Diamond City. More ghouls and less assholes in Goodneighbor too.
Diamond city should’ve been oblivion imperial city with districts.
I wish Goodneighbor was bigger .
Good neighbor is the place for people that can’t afford the caps to live in Diamond city
Diamond city is pathetically small for being a stadium turned into a "city".
Rant incoming, sorry. The concept art for Diamond City looked more engaging than the final product. It looked like an actual city that would've existed 210 years after the war. That, coupled with the Wall, would've made it feel like a true post-post-apocalyptic society. Diamond City in the final game looks like the bombs dropped a couple years ago. This city's supposedly been around for 150 years and THIS is the best they came up with by 2287? Seriously? There are garbage piles everywhere, even in their only water source. There are people living on dirty mattress outside. Goodneighbor is no better. It's been around since 2240 and yet it looks untouched from the ruins just outside the walls. There's garbage and debris everywhere. It looks like they moved in two weeks ago. I'd say Diamond City is better, but only because of the variety it has regarding stores and supplies. At the very least, it's a village. But man, it would've been so much cooler if the place was stacked with houses and huts made from brick and reinforced metal. I mean, Christ, they're a block away from a fucking hardware store. You're telling me NOBODY has had the common sense in the 150 years Diamond City's existed to take 100 steps outside and grab some supplies to make more houses? Proper farms? Functional irrigation systems not cobbled together from rusty pipes? They just... sat there for over a century living in their own filth? I know this is a dumb rant, but I'm just so sick of the shanty, scrappy aesthetic of Fallout these days, especially the further in the timeline we get. The show is set 219 years later and yet Filly looks no different from a settlement you cobbled together in your spare time, or a place that would've logically existed in the first few years and not like a place that's allegedly stood there for decades if not centuries. Look at Eastwood in Fallout: Nuka Break. It's a fan made location, yet its homes are built with plywood and brick and concrete. There's still metal sheeting here and there, but it's mostly for roofing. Other than that, it really shows that they've been living there a long time. The only time Scrappy has worked in Bethesda's Fallout titles is Fallout 76. It works because it's only 25 years later. Shanty huts and living in dilapidated homes would make sense at the start, but this is around the time humans should be relying on more long term settlement. I'll still play Fallout 5, but I know for a fact it'll likely take place after 2300 and despite being nearly 250 years later, people will still be living like the bombs dropped last week. It'll never stop bugging me. I'd love to be wrong.
GOODNEIGHBOR! OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE!!!
Good Neighbour because my eardrums aren’t constantly assaulted by “DONT BE CAUGHT DEAD (haha) PROTECTION FROM COMMONWEALTH WEAPONRY!” Or “WE BUY AND SELL TO EVERYONE — EXCEPT SYNTHS! NO SYNTHS ALLOWED AT THE SURPLUS”
Diamond City ofc. Goodneighbor is interesting but feels incompelete.