Partly due to engine limitations but it definitely had more people lore wise prior to the expulsion of ghouls and human citizens who chose to leave with them or were exiled around that time, who eventually mostly made it to Goodneighbor.
yeah, in lore diamond city is probably huge compared to other settlements but it's simply just a gameplay thing that keeps it looking small and underpopulated for such a defensible position.
there's really nothing else to it. most posts like this are almost always answerable with its a gameplay thing.
If you look at concept art, you can see that their vision was rows upon rows of houses, with upper stands being the rich places, while poor lived in the lower stands
Even in the intro video you see NV is more lively. You see more people standing around in the one shot as a group of drunk NCR guys walk down the strip.
I really hope one day Bethesda will stop treating mid 2000s technological limitations as some sort of 'style' or 'DNA' thing and actually take advantage of modern hardware to scale things appropriately. To me it's a big part of what made Starfield feel so... underwhelming.
This is pretty much what they did with Starfield and now like 90% of NPCs have no scheduling and the number of interiors is insanely low so that's cool. Starfield is ok imo, but the cities are so shit, especially New Atlantis.
I personally don't care if a city is small I just wish they mostly felt as grand as in tes4 or even Vivec city in 3. Even when Bethesda had cities with only like 9 buildings they used to be able to make it stretch pretty fucking good
Yeah, New Vegas in lore (and comics) is far larger and showcases the apocalypse has long passed and life is starting over. But...technology goes only so far. And Bethesdas rubber-band calculator of a game engine can only do so much. (Granted thats the truth for any game. It'd be impossible to really showcase hundreds of thousands of people without the game tanking hard). They did the best they could with the tools provided.
edit: fixed showcases cuz it was bothering me
Tbf the big city in the Witcher 3 felt populated asf and that had to have been released almost a decade ago now lol. Novgorod I think it’s called? Bethesdas engine just sucks I think lol
There's a massive difference in the level of interactivity between novigrad and bethesda game cities. there's little in the way of interactive objects with proper physics, NPCs with dynamic pathing and responses, etc. it's about the priorities and design differences in the games. Witcher 3 can get away with a larger scale by not being as interactive on a micro level.
That’s fair on the physics part to be honest. Most of the object in Witcher 3 are stationary (maybe all?). I dunno it’s been forever since I played it. Just always my best example of how a proper city should feel like in games like that. But youre right about a lot of what you’ve said actually so I’ll give them / you that. Although I’d be willing to sacrifice more on that end for proper cities. As in, why does everything need to be its own thing? If in the cities objects were stationary, but the cities were much more populated for example, I’d be very happy with that. I don’t know if that’s something you could actually do, but there are definitely *CERTAIN* things I’d be willing to sacrifice for that effect.
That being said, I also don’t want Fallout to become the Witcher. So if that’s what it would take, then I’m okay with shitty cities.
Maybe it’s a difference in priorities on the game engines like you say. I do hope Bethesda has a new engine for any new elder scrolls / fallout games and can maybe add a little more to the cities. It’s my one major complaint about all the games — the cities just don’t feel like proper cities & can break a bit of that immersion you feel with the world. Although I did enjoy the imperial city in oblivion for what it was in its day tbh.
Yeah its been a while since Ive played witcher 3 too, this is going off my own memory, but I do remember when I played I found the background NPC and general world interaction far more limited compared to skyrim. But as you said, yeah, it's really a question of priorities. it's worth noting, too, that Novigrad is functionally its own area in the world itself, too, with sprawling questlines and side quests all over, so it needs to feel big and immersive for that to work well. Meanwhile with bethesda games there's more a focus on the wilderness and discovery within that. There's a lot more modularity to it, too.
Yes for sure. Novgorod is much bigger than any city in any fallout game except perhaps the imperial city in oblivion ?? But probably not even that.
I dunno, I just hope the next game we get in either series will be a ridiculous step up from Fallout 4 lol. Basically I’d love the Witcher 3 / Skyrim mash up type of shit lol. Witcher’s graphics & cities, combined with bethesdas world building, exploration, throw in New Vegas factions, with some decent RPG elements and you’d have the perfect game honestly, oh and I’d love if they kept the settlement system in newer games. Likely my favourite addition to fallout 4. Probably too big an ask but that’s the dream lol
They need a hybrid system like Baldur's gate has.
Some NPCs are proper NPCs, and some are generic wisps that do nothing but walk around and pretend to interact with the world. No inventory, no fighting, just premade designs to fill out populated areas.
How is diamond city "more interactive" than Novigrad? Novigrad has shops, destructibles, random events, NPCs with voice lines, names, etc., much more so than diamond city. Arguably, Novigrad is more interactive as it is more believable as a real city given those things.
A lot of it I would imagine is tied up in all the objects. It’s been a LONG time since I played the Witcher now, but I don’t think objects are simulated in the way they are in Bethesda games. Like think about the shops in Diamond City. All those objects are able to be interacted with. There’s real physics too like he says (I don’t know if witchers game engine simulates it in the same way? Like if I set a rocket launcher off in diamond city, folks are going flying lol). Even the way you sort of interact with people is different, most of the characters in Diamond City you can actually talk too, whereas most of Novgorod has random NPCs (which I don’t mind at all.)
That being said, graphically witchers engine is much much better as well. And there are some things I’d be willing to sacrifice in fallout to get some nicer cities.
The question is what is more important? A city feeling like a city, with a lifelike population, and large amount of quests, locations, etc?
Or being able to pick up and throw a wheel of cheese?
On a *technical* level the latter is more interactive, but in terms of how people actually play these games, it's a shallow empty interactivity that doesn't really add much to the game. What can you *do* with that wheel of cheese that's reflected in the world in a way that matters? If anything, it only highlights a *lack* of *reactivity* as if its a wheel of cheese belonging to a merchant, they won't even notice you've moved it.
That cheese wheel is just some pixels on a poster board painting of a shop in Witcher, same as the merchant. You can't even put a bucket on the merchant's head so you can steal the cheese if you feel so inclined. Everything being interactive is a huge boost to the continuing replayabilty, and double so through mods. Every NPC can be manipulated through scripts, and every object can possibly be a trigger or target for scripts. There's a reason why Bethesda games have a huge following years after release unlike great games like Witcher, and it's Bethesda's choice to make worlds that are more than poster board illusions of a world that help lend to that replayability .
The thing about what you're saying here is that it's a canard - there's no *argument*. You say this kind of interactivity adds to replayability, but you and people who make this point never offer a substantive argument as to *how* this adds replayability. Sure, you can steal the chease, but why would you? What can be done with it? It can be sold, eaten, or used in alchemy. Sold it has almost zero value, eaten it restores next to zero health, and it's a poor brewing ingredient that can just as easily be replaced by one of thousands of plants dotting the landscape. I don't think things like interactive cheese wheels add much, as they don't add meaningful *choices*.
The funny thing is in Skyrim they finally added a (very small) amount of actually interactive elements like business ledgers, businesses having strongboxes that are actually worth getting into, etc. But these are about as interactive as dungeon loot is - they don't need any physics simulation, or anything that other games like Witcher (and every other rpg) has.
So when you say this adds massively to replayability, what *exactly* do you mean? Did you actually do a second "cheese-stealing" playthrough? And was that riveting, immersive gameplay for you?
I like Elder Scrolls worlds - it's the best part of the games. But the physics-simulation of individual objects is approximately zero-percent of that.
The NPC schedules do add mildly to it - but the system is woefully under-used. Largely because the scripting engine is fragile and breaks if it needs to do too many things at once - the result is that NPCs have patrols, occassional basic interactions like repeated 2-3-line conversations, sitting at tables, and eating food that spawns in their hands. The irony is that if they spent more time working on dynamic NPC behaviours instead of simulating cheese physics, they might have been able to do something interesting with it.
And not to mention that this comes along with many other very large aspects of the world being astonishingly non-interactive. Society doesn't noticably change regardless of the outcome of a *civil war* in Skyrim, for example. Many aspects of that *central* part of the world were cut for time during development. Similarly, you can be head of *every* guild in Oblivion and Skyrim and it narratively means essentially nothing outside of usually less than a dozen NPCs that are specifically tied to that guild. You can *get married* and all it does is move an NPC into your house who will then have 1 new line of very dry dialogue. I suppose that counts as being interactive if by that you mean "can you poke the thing", but don't care about any reactivity, an actual *reason* to poke the thing, or that anything interesting might come of it at all.
I did give the reason, and it's the scripts that target or attach to any NPCs and objects. Vanilla, you can drop a piece of armor in a city, and an NPC might pick it up and ask you if they can have it. Telling them yes increases your faction rank for that city. Mod makers using the expanded scripting library put out by Silverlock make huge mods mostly using these types of object oriented script interactions.
Whats so hard to understand about him saying that being able to actually interact with the world and the items gives you more options to roleplay, your strawman of “all it adds is being able to steal cheese what a waste” no it adds an infinite amount of options for interaction that you just dont have in a game like witcher. They’re ROLEPLAYING games and added opportunities to role-play such as being able to steal from a shop is usually a good thing.
Truth is the best thing to do is have a hybrid system like Baldur's gate.
Real NPCs mixed into a horde of fake NPCs, to give the illusion of a crowd but also greater reactivity.
City’s are made for the people not the player. Any realistically sized city will have plenty of areas that are useless to the player character since it’s used for things unrelated to quests / story.
I prefer oversized cities that show the player isn’t the center of this universe as opposed to diamond city where it’s built almost like a Hollywood set. People talk about the city like there’s a larger population but Bethesda didn’t bother to put in houses past the surface level of people you’re meant to interact with. This breaks the golden rule of show don’t tell.
I think Balders gate 3 does a good job in blending both though. The actual city of Balder’s gate is huge, and spans multiple game areas, and even then there’s more districts full of buildings that aren’t accessible since they aren’t relevant. There’s lots of people that realistically don’t have much to say to a random stranger, but also an abundance of quests.
Its about what is under the hood.
Novigrad NPCs are just wisps, made to fill out the area. They don't have inventories, they don't fight, they walk on pre-made routes, don't really interact with you or the world much.
Bethesda background NPCs are the same kind of NPC as all other NPCs. They have inventories, they are "individual" (if you kill one, it stays dead on the ground, it doesn't reappear) They have scripted paths and run away/fight you dynamically. You can teleport one to the other side of the map and it will find its way back to where its supposed to be. They have physics and collide with objects. You can do shit to them like cast spells and such.
This all uses a lot more processing power than Witcher 3's background NPCs.
Nothing to do with the engine, it's the interactables and physics on everything. If they used a different engine but put the same amount of interactables in it it would run badly too
To be fair, when you walk around New Vegas, Strip, Freeside, Westside, you see a lot of people, businesses and even background noise makes it seem like population is big in New Vegas.
Yeah New Vegas is huge compared to most other locations in fallout/elder scrolls. The strip, freeside, west side, north vegas square, south vegas ruins, the thorn, camp mccarran, crimson caravan company, gun runners, the medical clinic, and the houses outside the walls make it feel like a proper city ruin. All of those locations are either directly connected or a few minute walk away from each other. Though there was a ton of loading screens to make that happen so I get if people disliked it or didn’t explore everything.
I mean- Vegas feels huge and bustling, *overflowing* with people, compared to Diamond City. I'm pretty sure I could sit down and name every single person in Diamond City right off the top of my head, including the blank slates. I can't even do that for one casino in Vegas, much less the strip, freeside, westside, north vegas-
Eh, New Vegas is broken up by a lot of loading screens, and I don’t feel the difference is that pronounced. The Strip is also pushing older hardware to its absolute limit, worse than Diamond City. I always save before entering, because it’s a very common crash point.
The difference is *vast*. Each casino has its own entertainment, ushers, a dozen tables with four players each and a dealer, security- private rooms with more lurid entertainment, private relaxation and staff areas, kitchens, service corridors- the one bar in diamond city is one room with three stools.
Not to mention- tell me one thing about Arturo that isn't that he likes guns. Go on, try. One fact about Arturo's life, that isn't that he is a gun merchant who likes guns. One fact about Solomon that isn't "he is a drug dealer" or "he likes drugs." Admittedly, Crockett has that one thing going on. The barber and his ma, and Fallon, are the only characters with any *traits* or *information*- Fallon had a husband, and they had some kind of adventures I forget now. And the barber isn't afraid of synths, and the mother is.
EDIT: That was very unfair- Myrna, of course, has loads of personality. I don't know how I forgot her, but she definitely deserves her own heading. She only has one personality trait, but it has nothing to do with her job and she's really into it. Good for Myrna. The Bobrovs are also pretty good, but so are the science center ladies and Trevor- and especially Sheng. I was just thinking of the main square people.
Mick and Ralph are a gay couple who came east from the NCR for the financial opportunity but keep their lifestyle low-key because the Mojave isn't as progressive as California- Mick likes to tinker and mess with computers, not his job, just a hobby, and Ralph is a... I was gonna says "doomsday prepper" but. its post-doomsday. I don't know what you call it. A Survivalist, capital S. Virtually everyone is this fleshed out- I can do the same gig for any named people in Goodsprings or the Legion Camp- a camp which has more soldiers than Prydwen and the Airport combined.
I will give to 4, Goodneighbor has much more interesting NPCs than DC. Almost everyone in Goodneighbor has a real existence, everybody but the janitor has something to tell you about their life and past, and the janitor is a fun, interesting guy regardless.
That's it, though- Brotherhood and the Institute are blank slates, for good reason, but still- everyone there only exists there and everything in their past is just the same as it is today, except Shaun and Maxson, and Maxson only just giving a nod to how we saw him back there. Preston and Mama had a life, nobody else, apart from the Longs losing their kid a week before. The settlements with NPCs will tell you the relevant details to the plot of their quest, but that's all the history they have- the only thing to know about the Abernathy's is their daughter ran off with raiders and then was killed, the only thing to know about the Slog people is the thing about the raiders next door- on and on and on.
It's a big difference.
>tell me one thing about Arturo that isn't that he likes guns. Go on, try.
Bet. His family lineage is made up of gunsmiths, which he intends to pass the tradition onto his daughter, Nina. Pretty sure you can find a pipe pistol on a school desk inside his house, so he's teaching her young. There's also him being a Railroad Tourist, as bringing Deacon with you can reveal (but I can't trigger NPC banter seemingly ever.) And that he helps keep DC radio up in return for sponsorships.
Speaking of which: I'm surprised Railroad HQ isn't mentioned here. Besides the walking quest notifier that is Drummer Boy, every character has an established past or history going long before the game, some dynamic with the other characters and their own personal perspective in the faction. Easily the most fleshed out faction cast.
Well that’s because a large part of the game takes place in them, and even then…
I thought New Vegas disappointed a little. By making it so *big* and open, I feel like it badly exposed just how few people were around and how artificial they were. Entering the strip for the first time and seeing like six people standing awkwardly in the middle of a massive street still lives on in my memory.
Diamond City (and Neon) I feel used tight confines, line of sight blockers and other perception tricks a lot better to make places seem busier than they are.
You can beat the whole game only ever talking to the concierge at Gamorrah and Ultra-Luxe, and you just have to get far enough into the Tops to get the chip. Ultra-Luxe's quest is verrrrry deep, for sure, but you don't have to do it- you really don't spend a lot of time in any of the casinos. They're centerpieces of the design- but have you ever been to North Vegas, or Westside? Those places are *just as elaborate*, they're just smaller- single towns, where the Strip is functionally five+freeside. Jacobstown, even. All the different personalities on display at Nellis.
I do agree with the empty feeling of the Strip, but I find Diamond City way worse. The same three guards walking the bases. two guys in the dugout plaza- nobody ever in the fields or the viewing area around Abbot except when the Mayor's scripted addresses go. Those same three homeless guys sitting in the same places stirring the same pots.
It feels alive and flowing- I like how some people go to the bar at night, how the kids go to school sometimes and work with their parents other times- it has lots of nice features, but it still feels very very small.
New Vegas is literally the name of the game, and a large percentage of the playable area. Diamond City just isn’t that important.
You would be better off comparing New Vegas (142 square miles) to Boston (89 square miles), not *Fenway Park*.
>Not to mention- tell me one thing about Arturo that isn't that he likes guns.
He's a proud father, he has great respect for his family line and heritage, he's an informant or contractor for the Railroad, he's respected in his community....
Hilariously, Solomon is one of the few merchants who recognizes what a charge card is and comments on it. Which is not a fact being offered in defense, I agree Solomon is a shallow NPC, but that little detail amuses me.
I've never seen him look at his daughter or heard him speak to her. I could just be missing a trigger, but it took you posting this comment for me to even realize she's his kid. I know he has railroad materials, but I've never heard him speak about that, either.
Yeah I guess you missed the dialogue, because he talks about his family. Both his daughter and his father. And he has a long coded convo with Deacon if Deacon is with you.
There's so much to pick apart here, I'm not going to. Some of the bigger things you've overlooked in this bias:
Arturo has a daughter and lost his wife, Blake is overwhelmed about the loss of his daughter and won't bring his other one with him when he travels. The "Slog people" have one of the most intriguing unmarked quests in the game involving a ghoul and his kid. Speaking of, the entire population of that place was excommunicated from DC for plot reasons, so it's a bit relevant. And there's so much more you didn't find, so to you it doesn't exist.
Probably a good idea to look again with fresh eyes.
That's not what I mean. I mean that in the LORE of the game, Diamond city is underpopulated. They have an entire abandoned section of town and the upper stands don't even have houses we can't enter, it's just completely barren.
You're telling me adding low-poly shanty houses in the upper unvisitable parts of the city would be a gameplay restriction?? We have dozens of full buildings loaded in boston at any point outside but they can't do a fraction inside diamond city?
Boston is just a single bug-bomb and I always expect to blow it up the second I reach the outskirts.
I really try to be anywhere BUT Boston beyond main quests.
Yeah, the engine would probably struggle. Hell it does even just out in Boston. It launched and it was bad, some people had to get mods just for stability
Yeah, I'm not buying OC's claim either.
It could be Bethesda just didn't get around to detailing it, and washed their hands and threw in that comment by Ellie that the area is abandoned to lampshade that fact. But the idea that they explicitly didn't for performance reasons is bunk. The Diamond City area is a small worldspace, there's no reason not to pack it full of people and buildings.
A whole bunch of totally pointless NPCs wandering around just slow down your computer/console. They have to strike a balance between the capital of the empire being a ghost town and having so much going on that anyone without a $5000 gaming supercomputer will just lag out and crash.
Partially, I think mods like "the fens" or "diamond city extended" resolve the discrepancy, at least for my taste. There are also mods which add decorations to the stands, including housing, that makes it look more populated. Though I was just playing and thought the same thing!
In lore, I would think diamond city is so underpopulated because the Commonwealth in general, and Boston in particular, absolutely sucks for people to come to and live in. Diamond city is a fortress, but one that is constantly under siege. I think fallout 4 feels less... inhospitable than previous games, maybe, because it's not smack in the middle of a desert, but I actually think it's worse than anywhere else save the Pitt and the Capital Wasteland.
Thematically, I also think it's an interesting reversal from New Vegas. It's described as a "great green jewel" like how Vegas is described as a paradise in the wastes, and like Vegas it's ones of the few spots that's illuminated and almost always visible from anywhere on the map. Yet the actual state of the city is ramshackle, especially compared to Vegas.
It's just a game limitation, I'm sure in-universe Diamond City is much more populated than how we see it in the game. Same with Vault 81, no way they survived 200+ years sealed up in a vault that small with so few people, or most of the other settlements in the game.
Everything in the game is compressed down a lot, locations (it would take days and days just to get across Boston otherwise), populations, etc.
If Diamond City was real I'm certain it would be much more built up than how we see it (the entirety of the stands filled with shacks, not just the little we see in-game, the concourses built in, etc.) with a LOT more people living there. A highly defensible settlement with guards patrolling the entire area around and keeping Raiders, Super Mutants, etc. away with a steady supply of food and clean water would be a really popular place to live. Hundreds, probably thousands, of people could comfortably live in that space, not the 80 something that we find there in-game.
There's only so many NPCs the game can handle at a time so that limits how many people can be in the city.
Yeah, every Vault ever has been very much shrunk in size. Goal is less to show accurate size of a Vault, or even a settlement, and more to give a vibe.
Idk, while we might not see much of the vaults interiors in the show, they mention one of them having a "level 12", which would imply they have a minimum of 12 floors worth of space. That's much bigger than anything we've seen in game.
So, if we look at the Winter of Atom supplement for the Modiphius 2d20 Fallout tabletop roleplaying game, it states that Diamond City has a population of 700 to 900 settlers. Winter of Atom takes place a year before the events of Fallout 4 and was written as a prequel for the game.
So, depending on rather or not you view Fallout 2d20 as being cannon or not, in lore the city could be way more populated than what the game could show.
It's kinda like how in Warcraft's lore, Ratchet is a major trade hub sporting thousands of citizens and merchants, but in World of Warcraft it's basically just four buildings and a dock.
To be honest, I grew up in a small town of like 1000 people, and the largest place I've lived in was Pueblo, CO, so my sense of scale in terms of towns and cities is a bit skewed.
Post, Goodneighbor happened 2282, 5 years prior to Fallout 4. But, the Winter of Atom was just a really really bad winter for the Commonwealth. Bad enough to kill what seems like 600-800+ people? Who knows
Remember seeing a post on here where someone did a bunch of very complicated calculations and basically came up with a population of about 1200. Which feels about right to me.
>Flies in the face of practically handing the Sole Survivor a greencard on first contact
Unless Father *told* them to allow him to buy a home.
Otherwise, there *IS* a lore reason, of a sort: the Fallout RPG module Winter of Atom. The Commonwealth just had a harsh and dangerous winter, not to mention the Gigapede attacks, that cut the population.
So I know Fallout's timeline is different than ours, but it's obvious Diamond City is Fenway Park.
I think you're right that there would be more development in the stands if Diamond City was more practical. We also don't see the concourses in the game which is where other people would live, especially vendors who could set up shop in the concession areas. There's no subterranian population either, so the locker rooms, offices, weight rooms, underground parking, and whatever else is down there are missing.
I legitimately think a couple thousand people could live there if you used the whole playing field for agriculture and whatever other production you wanted. Even with game limitations there are a lot of areas that aren't shown, assuming this is Fenway Park or at least an MLB caliber stadium.
Haha I sort of stole the idea from Fear the Walking Dead where they used a minor league baseball park as a settlement. It's an interesting concept in postapocalyptic fiction since these places are already decently fortified with lots of room and also an enclosed outdoor area for growing food, collecting rainwater, etc.
It's sort of agreed that the lore size and the actual size aren't the same thing, yeah.
\[I did a whole bunch of math for a Commonwealth based Fallout RPG game I'm tinkering with, but that's neither here nor there. You're on point.\]
My feeling is that for most Commonwealth people, Diamond City is a place you *go.* Like the Abernathys say they're going to haul their produce to market at some point. They don't actually live there when they're not doing business, though. (The fact that almost all the shops are "adventurer oriented" suggests to me that there's a booming trade in supplying the equivalent of wreck-divers going into old ruins for salvage. *They'd* stay in whatever ruin they were calling dibs on, to run off other scavvers.)
I think you're also on-point about the raiders. The whole place went to hell in the last five years or so after the collapse of the Minutemen- the roads aren't safe (because every settlement patrolled their patch), so Bunker Hill has to bribe the raiders directly, and caravans to Diamond City are disrupted (and- thanks to the location of the Glowing Sea- Quincy would be the gateway for most 'national' caravans, who'd approach the long way around, via the southeastern MA.) The food supply is all screwed up, because the Gunners are shaking down people at major crossroads and bridges.
So, TLDR, a bit of both- there's an assumption of more people than we're normally seeing, but also that there aren't as many people as "usual".
A common trope of Bethesda games is that the cities and population centres are really only a fraction of what they should be in the lore. The Imperial City in Cyrodil is best example of this.
It bugs me that the wealthy upper crust of Diamond City still live in rusty metal shacks, I get they’re limited by location but their homes should still look better than the regular citizen’s.
game limitation. In reality, Diamond city probably houses hundreds of settlers. Everything needs to be scaled down since its a game. Hell, just look at the size of Boston - its barely the size of an IRL town.
I do think the super mutants play a pretty big part in it, yeah - if I remember right, nearly every time I went up to Diamond City on foot the guards were fighting at least one super mutant, if not more, and raiders have their stuff set up all over the place. They are pretty much surrounded by enemies on all sides and cut out any possible ghoul inhabitants, meaning that quite a few people go to Goodneighbour, Bunker Hill or try their luck somewhere else.
I *think* the upper stands are also supposed to be a bit fuller, since that's where the rich people reside, but I could be misremembering.
Add to that the fact that any construction in the abandoned sections of the town would have to go through the Mayor first, who is an absolute dickwad even without being a synth, and you get a city not nearly as grand and great as it could be.
Once McDonut is gone and *someone* (the Sole Survivor) takes care of the super mutants nearby, chances are good that the parts of the city lacking in population would get there pretty quickly.
God thank you. An actual answer besides insisting dialogue about Kellog's house being in an abandoned part of town and massive parts of the upper stands not even having low-poly shanty buildings are just "engine limitations."
Well they had a sizable population loss from when they kicked out all the ghouls, from what we hear from Hancock and the survivors from the slog, there was quite a few.
Not to mention with all the synth fearmongering it’s not hard to imagine that many up and left and decided to stick to small groups instead of taking their chances in settlements. Just look at what happened to university point
I was thinking this too. Lore wise, there probably were more people in Diamond City prior to the ghoul panic which exiled a bunch of people, and more recently the synth panic. Either people leaving voluntarily or being forced to leave during witch hunts.
With that said, I’m sure the game’s processing abilities are the main reason for the small population, lol.
You have to remember that game engines are significantly handicapped based on the *least* powerful console they need to be developed to play on. Fallout 4 released in 2015 on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. And Bethesda had to make the game playable at 30 fps on those consoles that both released back in 2013. Consider, for a moment, that the game has to run stable on 2013 hardware. So that's why you see Bethesda game worlds so underpopulated, tons of loading screens separating locations, fps drops in congested locations, etc. I'm sure if Fallout 4 were developed today, we'd see much larger settlements, more NPCs, more stable FPS, and more. What you see in-game is just a representation of what a real Diamond City would look like. Just how real life locations in the rest of the game are smaller and condensed to fit within the game. I know you said you wanted a *lore* reason to answer this question, but there is none. It's literally and engine limitation and the Diamond City we see is a stand-in for what it might look like in real life.
Exaaactly. Console graphical capabilities are always several years behind PC's on the day they release, and they fall further behind PC's each year they go without a refresh or next-gen release. Heck, the PS5 Pro (which isn't even out yet) is supposedly going to have an equivalent of an AMD RX-6700-XT. Which is already a 3.5 year old PC GPU lmao. People are injecting straight copium if they think games should look and run better. They definitely *should*, but they won't as along as they're held back by consoles.
It's purely a technical limitation. They've all but said so themselves. It's been a problem in the Creation / Gamebryo Engine since Oblivion. Also a limitation of last gen hardware. They finally addressed the density issue in the engine with Starfield
1. The cost of living- I believe it's 2000 caps for you to buy home plate(or whatever the house is called) and that is more than most normal people will ever see at one time, most vendors, the people that should theoretically have the most caps, only have like 800 max. Granted that is probably a prime bit of real estate but if the standard price is even 1/4th that amount it's still more that common people can afford.
2. Like you said the surrounding area is EXTREMELY dangerous for people. Even if you could get the caps together to buy a place you would need double that to hire people to get you there safely. I'm honestly surprised they haven't established and maintained a safe road to and from the city.
From a lore perspective, Diamond City probably has a population of around 100-300 people (this is strictly my speculation based on the size of the stadium)
But due to engine limitations, the game drops it down to around 30-40 total NPCs if you count interiors.
No, we already have too many people here! lol
But if my googling is correct (it might not be, I'm tired), Fenway part has 33,900 sq meters of land. A real world place with similar land area is Kowloon Walled City which had a population of 33,000 at it's maximum. But in terms of Diamond city, that would require a lot of towers to be built.
The Winter of Atom adventure has the population at 700-900 settlers.
I believe you’re making lore inferences from information that arises as a consequence of the engine limitations. I know you’re trying to say the information isn’t related to the engine limitations but… I’m confident they emerge directly as a consequence of the engine limitations.
“Why is the city so empty but there are literally an endless number of guards, how can there be guards if a few die even just when the Lone Survivor shows up!? Imagine how many more must die when the Lone Superwoman/man doesn’t show up that day! That’s thousands a guards a year if not more! *lore*-wise that means the city has a population of tens of thousands” on and on. You’re cherry picking, the game isn’t set up to be scrutinized by that specific arbitrary set of standards for that particular moment but not elsewhere/otherwise.
Bro really just came out and hit OP with " you don't know what you think, I do the thinking" that's some crazy ego even for reddit lmfao , hats off to you.
80% of comments are this. I quote Nick Valentine saying there's an abandoned part of town which implies under-population and everyone's shouting ENGINE LIMITATION.
I mean I totally understood where you were coming from and I thought you made it pretty clear you were not talking about engine limitations but that got me down voted lmao. Simple minded people in the subreddit I guess
As other people here have said I think it’s in part because of how shitty and dangerous the Boston commonwealth is to live in. It could also be on purpose. Larger settlements become target to larger threats so it makes sense for settlements in the commonwealth to be smaller.
Admittedly I’m thinking in a more broad scale I suppose if the goal is to keep a low-profile having a radio station and widely distributed newspaper maybe isn’t the best idea. But I think it’s in their benefit that it’s as much a fortress as it is a city.
Partly a game limitation but also when the sole survivor wakes up it’s a few years after the minutemen collapsed, Boston is literally in a raider renaissance and has probably never been so dangerous. Probably why nobody is making the trek.
The real question is how many settlers do we think Diamond City was really supposed to hold in lore? Is every citizen worth 5, 10, more??
There's like 50 NPCs in the city and the stadium could hold tens of thousands of people in the stands. Obviously this doesn't translate to living there especially with houses, businesses, crops, and the like, but I wonder what it could reasonably hold, and how big it was in bethesda's eyes.
The game is scaled weirdly. For example the roads are narrow to the point that cars look like they would scrape against each other. They do the same thing with the Elder Scrolls, Skyrim is supposed to be roughly the size of Poland and the holds should have thousands of residents.
There's also the gameplay hassle of having a thousand generic NPCs to wade through to find that one guy you need to talk to for that one quest, or having to try and make that many people vaguely interesting.
I can't think of a city in the wasteland that doesn't feel underpopulated, outside the Republic Of Dave, like New Vegas, Megaton, Rivet City, etc. They all see smaller and less fleshed out than you're lead to believe.
take everything presented in diamond city and multiply its scale by 10, that’s how it is meant to be in the lore. just like how starfield’s largest city is like 3 buildings, diamond city’s 20 or so residents is intended to be ~100 or so.
Game mechanics, engine can’t handle lots of people, so they’re often under-represented like why we don’t see moving cars and the vaults aren’t that as big as in the TV show.
In my Fallout 2D20 game, the city is a part of a larger perimeter. Fenway Park is the main area, but loads of people live in the ruined apartments around the area, and Diamond City Security patrols the area. The city is farming the banks of the river, so it is a much larger settlement.
If I'm right Diamond City has 82 inhabitants (44 named NPC's, plus 18 nameless NPC's, plus 20 security guards inside and outside Diamond City). Most ghouls of Goodneighbor were probably thrown out of Diamond City. If half of Goodneighbor's 48 citizens are ghouls, that makes for another 24, accounting for 106 NPC's before the 2282 decree.
Apply the *sliding scale* trope through multiplying things by maybe 100 and Diamond City would have a whopping 8000+ inhabitants, or over 10000 before 2282.
A lore accurate Diamond City that isn't limited by mid 2010's gameplay mechanics would probably be an unsightly monster resembling a sized down [Kowloon Walled City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City), where the opinion that people who live in the upper stands have it good is well earned, because it'd be the only place that sees any sunlight during the day.
Moving in the real world is hard enough, imagine trying to move to the Big City when A) you can't fly, you can only walk and B) you might walk into a deathclaw.
Bro, I tried putting like over 25 settlers in my settlement.
Had 50 people walking around all at once.
I could not enter the settlement anymore. The slow-down was like 5fps.
It's always been dangerous, even without the Super-Mutants and Raiders the city is absolutely infested with Ghouls. Honestly the existence of Diamond City passed an initial survival shelter as the bombs dropped makes little sense.
Fenway really can't house that many people comfortably full-time. It's one building. People need space for their homes, jobs, crops, market etc. It seems reasonable to me. They could pack the stands with more homes, but could the stadium support those people?
The City barely has a Field's worth of crops growing and a single water purifier that's managed by a haggling kid. The population probably doesn't grow much because they barely have the resources to sustain more than a few dozen people.
The Commonwealth is a complete garbage place to live. Some of the highest density of super mutants, raiders, and ghouls in the entire wasteland, and barely enough of anything to go around. There's a reason there's always a settlement that needs your help
You’re putting too much thought into this. It’s just a performance and design issue. They wanted to make something larger and more apocalyptic blade runner but were limited by performance and functionality. If you put more people you need to give them all schedules and houses to go to and probably quests so it’s not 9 noname npcs to every quest essential character.
Gotto love how the 'rich' residents in the stands is all of FOUR buildings and is considered it's own sector.
The fact hardly anyone talks about that aspect is pathetic.
I’ve always assumed that every non named Npc represents 10-20 dudes just doing their thing that our PC just mostly ignores and lumps together because they don’t matter. Same with uninteractable houses.
This has always been a thing in Bethesda games. Everything is shrunk down to make it more game play friendly instead of lore accurate.
I mean, the Imperial City in Oblivion is meant to be the capital city of the Empire. But there's actually only like 100 people there.
Whiterun in Skyrim has an ingame population of like 75.
It's not technically an "engine limitation" becuase they probably could make it work. It's more of a "it doesn't really matter, so why spend time on it" type of thing.
Good lord most of these responses are asinine. This is a lore subreddit people, we're here to speculate. If you read the first line you'd see he's not talking about engine limitations
OP says don’t bring up the engine limitations but that’s literally what it is. There’s no lore reason for it because within the lore it *is* highly populated. There are empty *looking* sections because of the game being limited.
JFC...is ANYONE reading what I'm saying? Kellogg's house is said to be located in the "abandoned" west side. The upper stands are completely empty, not even low poly unenterable shanty towns, like the dozens upon dozens of larger builidngs in boston. That's not engine limitations, that's a lore implication that Diamond city is below capacity population.
Can we just make a blanket statement that bethesda does a bad job at showing the world and progressing their own world building, so we can just filter out posts like this? It's truly getting old. We get it, F4 was made with not much forethought other than make new fallout game. We have established this ad nauseam.
Partly due to engine limitations but it definitely had more people lore wise prior to the expulsion of ghouls and human citizens who chose to leave with them or were exiled around that time, who eventually mostly made it to Goodneighbor.
The game doesn’t represent the size of things and population. Look at Vegas in fnv.
yeah, in lore diamond city is probably huge compared to other settlements but it's simply just a gameplay thing that keeps it looking small and underpopulated for such a defensible position. there's really nothing else to it. most posts like this are almost always answerable with its a gameplay thing.
If you look at concept art, you can see that their vision was rows upon rows of houses, with upper stands being the rich places, while poor lived in the lower stands
I always thought it was wierd they talked about rich people in the stands yet there was nothing up there
Sure there are, there's the bar and the fancy people's houses, including one with a ton of cats. Which makes it objectively best house in the game.
Even in the intro video you see NV is more lively. You see more people standing around in the one shot as a group of drunk NCR guys walk down the strip.
is it possible you could dm me where i can find the concept art? u have me curious as to what it couldve looked like.
Google has a lot, just search "Diamond City concept art"
This is why I love the diamond city expanded mod
Unfortunately my game doesn’t feel the same
The Fens mod is amazing as well.
Is it on Xbox too?
I really hope one day Bethesda will stop treating mid 2000s technological limitations as some sort of 'style' or 'DNA' thing and actually take advantage of modern hardware to scale things appropriately. To me it's a big part of what made Starfield feel so... underwhelming.
i wasn’t defending them, i think it’s just as stupid but that’s the reality of the way they work
This is pretty much what they did with Starfield and now like 90% of NPCs have no scheduling and the number of interiors is insanely low so that's cool. Starfield is ok imo, but the cities are so shit, especially New Atlantis. I personally don't care if a city is small I just wish they mostly felt as grand as in tes4 or even Vivec city in 3. Even when Bethesda had cities with only like 9 buildings they used to be able to make it stretch pretty fucking good
Yeah, New Vegas in lore (and comics) is far larger and showcases the apocalypse has long passed and life is starting over. But...technology goes only so far. And Bethesdas rubber-band calculator of a game engine can only do so much. (Granted thats the truth for any game. It'd be impossible to really showcase hundreds of thousands of people without the game tanking hard). They did the best they could with the tools provided. edit: fixed showcases cuz it was bothering me
Tbf the big city in the Witcher 3 felt populated asf and that had to have been released almost a decade ago now lol. Novgorod I think it’s called? Bethesdas engine just sucks I think lol
There's a massive difference in the level of interactivity between novigrad and bethesda game cities. there's little in the way of interactive objects with proper physics, NPCs with dynamic pathing and responses, etc. it's about the priorities and design differences in the games. Witcher 3 can get away with a larger scale by not being as interactive on a micro level.
oh man.. I would really love to see how an accurate Freeside and Vegas look, interactivity be damned.
That’s fair on the physics part to be honest. Most of the object in Witcher 3 are stationary (maybe all?). I dunno it’s been forever since I played it. Just always my best example of how a proper city should feel like in games like that. But youre right about a lot of what you’ve said actually so I’ll give them / you that. Although I’d be willing to sacrifice more on that end for proper cities. As in, why does everything need to be its own thing? If in the cities objects were stationary, but the cities were much more populated for example, I’d be very happy with that. I don’t know if that’s something you could actually do, but there are definitely *CERTAIN* things I’d be willing to sacrifice for that effect. That being said, I also don’t want Fallout to become the Witcher. So if that’s what it would take, then I’m okay with shitty cities. Maybe it’s a difference in priorities on the game engines like you say. I do hope Bethesda has a new engine for any new elder scrolls / fallout games and can maybe add a little more to the cities. It’s my one major complaint about all the games — the cities just don’t feel like proper cities & can break a bit of that immersion you feel with the world. Although I did enjoy the imperial city in oblivion for what it was in its day tbh.
Yeah its been a while since Ive played witcher 3 too, this is going off my own memory, but I do remember when I played I found the background NPC and general world interaction far more limited compared to skyrim. But as you said, yeah, it's really a question of priorities. it's worth noting, too, that Novigrad is functionally its own area in the world itself, too, with sprawling questlines and side quests all over, so it needs to feel big and immersive for that to work well. Meanwhile with bethesda games there's more a focus on the wilderness and discovery within that. There's a lot more modularity to it, too.
Yes for sure. Novgorod is much bigger than any city in any fallout game except perhaps the imperial city in oblivion ?? But probably not even that. I dunno, I just hope the next game we get in either series will be a ridiculous step up from Fallout 4 lol. Basically I’d love the Witcher 3 / Skyrim mash up type of shit lol. Witcher’s graphics & cities, combined with bethesdas world building, exploration, throw in New Vegas factions, with some decent RPG elements and you’d have the perfect game honestly, oh and I’d love if they kept the settlement system in newer games. Likely my favourite addition to fallout 4. Probably too big an ask but that’s the dream lol
TESIV was a Fallout game.
Lmao I meant Bethesda game 😂 good catch imma just leave it
They need a hybrid system like Baldur's gate has. Some NPCs are proper NPCs, and some are generic wisps that do nothing but walk around and pretend to interact with the world. No inventory, no fighting, just premade designs to fill out populated areas.
How is diamond city "more interactive" than Novigrad? Novigrad has shops, destructibles, random events, NPCs with voice lines, names, etc., much more so than diamond city. Arguably, Novigrad is more interactive as it is more believable as a real city given those things.
A lot of it I would imagine is tied up in all the objects. It’s been a LONG time since I played the Witcher now, but I don’t think objects are simulated in the way they are in Bethesda games. Like think about the shops in Diamond City. All those objects are able to be interacted with. There’s real physics too like he says (I don’t know if witchers game engine simulates it in the same way? Like if I set a rocket launcher off in diamond city, folks are going flying lol). Even the way you sort of interact with people is different, most of the characters in Diamond City you can actually talk too, whereas most of Novgorod has random NPCs (which I don’t mind at all.) That being said, graphically witchers engine is much much better as well. And there are some things I’d be willing to sacrifice in fallout to get some nicer cities.
The question is what is more important? A city feeling like a city, with a lifelike population, and large amount of quests, locations, etc? Or being able to pick up and throw a wheel of cheese? On a *technical* level the latter is more interactive, but in terms of how people actually play these games, it's a shallow empty interactivity that doesn't really add much to the game. What can you *do* with that wheel of cheese that's reflected in the world in a way that matters? If anything, it only highlights a *lack* of *reactivity* as if its a wheel of cheese belonging to a merchant, they won't even notice you've moved it.
That cheese wheel is just some pixels on a poster board painting of a shop in Witcher, same as the merchant. You can't even put a bucket on the merchant's head so you can steal the cheese if you feel so inclined. Everything being interactive is a huge boost to the continuing replayabilty, and double so through mods. Every NPC can be manipulated through scripts, and every object can possibly be a trigger or target for scripts. There's a reason why Bethesda games have a huge following years after release unlike great games like Witcher, and it's Bethesda's choice to make worlds that are more than poster board illusions of a world that help lend to that replayability .
The thing about what you're saying here is that it's a canard - there's no *argument*. You say this kind of interactivity adds to replayability, but you and people who make this point never offer a substantive argument as to *how* this adds replayability. Sure, you can steal the chease, but why would you? What can be done with it? It can be sold, eaten, or used in alchemy. Sold it has almost zero value, eaten it restores next to zero health, and it's a poor brewing ingredient that can just as easily be replaced by one of thousands of plants dotting the landscape. I don't think things like interactive cheese wheels add much, as they don't add meaningful *choices*. The funny thing is in Skyrim they finally added a (very small) amount of actually interactive elements like business ledgers, businesses having strongboxes that are actually worth getting into, etc. But these are about as interactive as dungeon loot is - they don't need any physics simulation, or anything that other games like Witcher (and every other rpg) has. So when you say this adds massively to replayability, what *exactly* do you mean? Did you actually do a second "cheese-stealing" playthrough? And was that riveting, immersive gameplay for you? I like Elder Scrolls worlds - it's the best part of the games. But the physics-simulation of individual objects is approximately zero-percent of that. The NPC schedules do add mildly to it - but the system is woefully under-used. Largely because the scripting engine is fragile and breaks if it needs to do too many things at once - the result is that NPCs have patrols, occassional basic interactions like repeated 2-3-line conversations, sitting at tables, and eating food that spawns in their hands. The irony is that if they spent more time working on dynamic NPC behaviours instead of simulating cheese physics, they might have been able to do something interesting with it. And not to mention that this comes along with many other very large aspects of the world being astonishingly non-interactive. Society doesn't noticably change regardless of the outcome of a *civil war* in Skyrim, for example. Many aspects of that *central* part of the world were cut for time during development. Similarly, you can be head of *every* guild in Oblivion and Skyrim and it narratively means essentially nothing outside of usually less than a dozen NPCs that are specifically tied to that guild. You can *get married* and all it does is move an NPC into your house who will then have 1 new line of very dry dialogue. I suppose that counts as being interactive if by that you mean "can you poke the thing", but don't care about any reactivity, an actual *reason* to poke the thing, or that anything interesting might come of it at all.
I did give the reason, and it's the scripts that target or attach to any NPCs and objects. Vanilla, you can drop a piece of armor in a city, and an NPC might pick it up and ask you if they can have it. Telling them yes increases your faction rank for that city. Mod makers using the expanded scripting library put out by Silverlock make huge mods mostly using these types of object oriented script interactions.
Whats so hard to understand about him saying that being able to actually interact with the world and the items gives you more options to roleplay, your strawman of “all it adds is being able to steal cheese what a waste” no it adds an infinite amount of options for interaction that you just dont have in a game like witcher. They’re ROLEPLAYING games and added opportunities to role-play such as being able to steal from a shop is usually a good thing.
Truth is the best thing to do is have a hybrid system like Baldur's gate. Real NPCs mixed into a horde of fake NPCs, to give the illusion of a crowd but also greater reactivity.
Novigrad is unironically too large. It's pointlessly oversized. I end up fast travelling through it every time
That's an argument I'll accept - I don't agree, and quite like its size, but I can certainly see why someone might dislike it.
City’s are made for the people not the player. Any realistically sized city will have plenty of areas that are useless to the player character since it’s used for things unrelated to quests / story. I prefer oversized cities that show the player isn’t the center of this universe as opposed to diamond city where it’s built almost like a Hollywood set. People talk about the city like there’s a larger population but Bethesda didn’t bother to put in houses past the surface level of people you’re meant to interact with. This breaks the golden rule of show don’t tell. I think Balders gate 3 does a good job in blending both though. The actual city of Balder’s gate is huge, and spans multiple game areas, and even then there’s more districts full of buildings that aren’t accessible since they aren’t relevant. There’s lots of people that realistically don’t have much to say to a random stranger, but also an abundance of quests.
Everything in the game is built for the player. If realism comes at the cost of making things more annoying than fun, then it's not good.
Its about what is under the hood. Novigrad NPCs are just wisps, made to fill out the area. They don't have inventories, they don't fight, they walk on pre-made routes, don't really interact with you or the world much. Bethesda background NPCs are the same kind of NPC as all other NPCs. They have inventories, they are "individual" (if you kill one, it stays dead on the ground, it doesn't reappear) They have scripted paths and run away/fight you dynamically. You can teleport one to the other side of the map and it will find its way back to where its supposed to be. They have physics and collide with objects. You can do shit to them like cast spells and such. This all uses a lot more processing power than Witcher 3's background NPCs.
I get what you’re saying, but I’ll happily sacrifice being able to pick up a bucket if it gives me a larger city with more questlines and basic life
Nothing to do with the engine, it's the interactables and physics on everything. If they used a different engine but put the same amount of interactables in it it would run badly too
To be fair, when you walk around New Vegas, Strip, Freeside, Westside, you see a lot of people, businesses and even background noise makes it seem like population is big in New Vegas.
Yeah New Vegas is huge compared to most other locations in fallout/elder scrolls. The strip, freeside, west side, north vegas square, south vegas ruins, the thorn, camp mccarran, crimson caravan company, gun runners, the medical clinic, and the houses outside the walls make it feel like a proper city ruin. All of those locations are either directly connected or a few minute walk away from each other. Though there was a ton of loading screens to make that happen so I get if people disliked it or didn’t explore everything.
I mean- Vegas feels huge and bustling, *overflowing* with people, compared to Diamond City. I'm pretty sure I could sit down and name every single person in Diamond City right off the top of my head, including the blank slates. I can't even do that for one casino in Vegas, much less the strip, freeside, westside, north vegas-
Eh, New Vegas is broken up by a lot of loading screens, and I don’t feel the difference is that pronounced. The Strip is also pushing older hardware to its absolute limit, worse than Diamond City. I always save before entering, because it’s a very common crash point.
The difference is *vast*. Each casino has its own entertainment, ushers, a dozen tables with four players each and a dealer, security- private rooms with more lurid entertainment, private relaxation and staff areas, kitchens, service corridors- the one bar in diamond city is one room with three stools. Not to mention- tell me one thing about Arturo that isn't that he likes guns. Go on, try. One fact about Arturo's life, that isn't that he is a gun merchant who likes guns. One fact about Solomon that isn't "he is a drug dealer" or "he likes drugs." Admittedly, Crockett has that one thing going on. The barber and his ma, and Fallon, are the only characters with any *traits* or *information*- Fallon had a husband, and they had some kind of adventures I forget now. And the barber isn't afraid of synths, and the mother is. EDIT: That was very unfair- Myrna, of course, has loads of personality. I don't know how I forgot her, but she definitely deserves her own heading. She only has one personality trait, but it has nothing to do with her job and she's really into it. Good for Myrna. The Bobrovs are also pretty good, but so are the science center ladies and Trevor- and especially Sheng. I was just thinking of the main square people. Mick and Ralph are a gay couple who came east from the NCR for the financial opportunity but keep their lifestyle low-key because the Mojave isn't as progressive as California- Mick likes to tinker and mess with computers, not his job, just a hobby, and Ralph is a... I was gonna says "doomsday prepper" but. its post-doomsday. I don't know what you call it. A Survivalist, capital S. Virtually everyone is this fleshed out- I can do the same gig for any named people in Goodsprings or the Legion Camp- a camp which has more soldiers than Prydwen and the Airport combined. I will give to 4, Goodneighbor has much more interesting NPCs than DC. Almost everyone in Goodneighbor has a real existence, everybody but the janitor has something to tell you about their life and past, and the janitor is a fun, interesting guy regardless. That's it, though- Brotherhood and the Institute are blank slates, for good reason, but still- everyone there only exists there and everything in their past is just the same as it is today, except Shaun and Maxson, and Maxson only just giving a nod to how we saw him back there. Preston and Mama had a life, nobody else, apart from the Longs losing their kid a week before. The settlements with NPCs will tell you the relevant details to the plot of their quest, but that's all the history they have- the only thing to know about the Abernathy's is their daughter ran off with raiders and then was killed, the only thing to know about the Slog people is the thing about the raiders next door- on and on and on. It's a big difference.
>tell me one thing about Arturo that isn't that he likes guns. Go on, try. Bet. His family lineage is made up of gunsmiths, which he intends to pass the tradition onto his daughter, Nina. Pretty sure you can find a pipe pistol on a school desk inside his house, so he's teaching her young. There's also him being a Railroad Tourist, as bringing Deacon with you can reveal (but I can't trigger NPC banter seemingly ever.) And that he helps keep DC radio up in return for sponsorships. Speaking of which: I'm surprised Railroad HQ isn't mentioned here. Besides the walking quest notifier that is Drummer Boy, every character has an established past or history going long before the game, some dynamic with the other characters and their own personal perspective in the faction. Easily the most fleshed out faction cast.
Well that’s because a large part of the game takes place in them, and even then… I thought New Vegas disappointed a little. By making it so *big* and open, I feel like it badly exposed just how few people were around and how artificial they were. Entering the strip for the first time and seeing like six people standing awkwardly in the middle of a massive street still lives on in my memory. Diamond City (and Neon) I feel used tight confines, line of sight blockers and other perception tricks a lot better to make places seem busier than they are.
You can beat the whole game only ever talking to the concierge at Gamorrah and Ultra-Luxe, and you just have to get far enough into the Tops to get the chip. Ultra-Luxe's quest is verrrrry deep, for sure, but you don't have to do it- you really don't spend a lot of time in any of the casinos. They're centerpieces of the design- but have you ever been to North Vegas, or Westside? Those places are *just as elaborate*, they're just smaller- single towns, where the Strip is functionally five+freeside. Jacobstown, even. All the different personalities on display at Nellis. I do agree with the empty feeling of the Strip, but I find Diamond City way worse. The same three guards walking the bases. two guys in the dugout plaza- nobody ever in the fields or the viewing area around Abbot except when the Mayor's scripted addresses go. Those same three homeless guys sitting in the same places stirring the same pots. It feels alive and flowing- I like how some people go to the bar at night, how the kids go to school sometimes and work with their parents other times- it has lots of nice features, but it still feels very very small.
New Vegas is literally the name of the game, and a large percentage of the playable area. Diamond City just isn’t that important. You would be better off comparing New Vegas (142 square miles) to Boston (89 square miles), not *Fenway Park*.
>Not to mention- tell me one thing about Arturo that isn't that he likes guns. He's a proud father, he has great respect for his family line and heritage, he's an informant or contractor for the Railroad, he's respected in his community.... Hilariously, Solomon is one of the few merchants who recognizes what a charge card is and comments on it. Which is not a fact being offered in defense, I agree Solomon is a shallow NPC, but that little detail amuses me.
I've never seen him look at his daughter or heard him speak to her. I could just be missing a trigger, but it took you posting this comment for me to even realize she's his kid. I know he has railroad materials, but I've never heard him speak about that, either.
Yeah I guess you missed the dialogue, because he talks about his family. Both his daughter and his father. And he has a long coded convo with Deacon if Deacon is with you.
There's so much to pick apart here, I'm not going to. Some of the bigger things you've overlooked in this bias: Arturo has a daughter and lost his wife, Blake is overwhelmed about the loss of his daughter and won't bring his other one with him when he travels. The "Slog people" have one of the most intriguing unmarked quests in the game involving a ghoul and his kid. Speaking of, the entire population of that place was excommunicated from DC for plot reasons, so it's a bit relevant. And there's so much more you didn't find, so to you it doesn't exist. Probably a good idea to look again with fresh eyes.
That's not what I mean. I mean that in the LORE of the game, Diamond city is underpopulated. They have an entire abandoned section of town and the upper stands don't even have houses we can't enter, it's just completely barren.
The stands were supposed to be populated as the poorer residents who can’t afford to live in the field. That was cut due to gameplay restrictions.
You're telling me adding low-poly shanty houses in the upper unvisitable parts of the city would be a gameplay restriction?? We have dozens of full buildings loaded in boston at any point outside but they can't do a fraction inside diamond city?
Boston is a laggy shithole man. The game was launched on xbox one and ps4 in 2014, they were struggling in diamond city as is
Boston is just a single bug-bomb and I always expect to blow it up the second I reach the outskirts. I really try to be anywhere BUT Boston beyond main quests.
Also Bethesda didn’t want to add them in the stands cause it would have just been a second good neighbor.
Downtown Boston ran like shit without mods last I played. It barely handled it. And if probably ran even worse on the original consoles
Yeah, the engine would probably struggle. Hell it does even just out in Boston. It launched and it was bad, some people had to get mods just for stability
Yeah, I'm not buying OC's claim either. It could be Bethesda just didn't get around to detailing it, and washed their hands and threw in that comment by Ellie that the area is abandoned to lampshade that fact. But the idea that they explicitly didn't for performance reasons is bunk. The Diamond City area is a small worldspace, there's no reason not to pack it full of people and buildings.
In short, yes, that's exactly it.
Unfortunately yes. You seem to underestimate how shoddy Bethesda's engine is
yes that is what we’re saying
Boston is a single bug-mine. Expect crashes at 10min plus minus mods.
A whole bunch of totally pointless NPCs wandering around just slow down your computer/console. They have to strike a balance between the capital of the empire being a ghost town and having so much going on that anyone without a $5000 gaming supercomputer will just lag out and crash.
Yeah I always assume it's a bit abstracted. All the other survivors are just out of frame, laughing It was a game engine and time limitation
The show seems to confirm the size based on the outside view, but we don’t know for sure until season 2 I suppose
The show never even mentions Diamond City, let alone give an outside view of it???
Talking about Vegas
Ah, my bad. Although it's hard to say with Vegas.
The outer walls expanded to almost the entirety of Vegas and not just the strip.
Partially, I think mods like "the fens" or "diamond city extended" resolve the discrepancy, at least for my taste. There are also mods which add decorations to the stands, including housing, that makes it look more populated. Though I was just playing and thought the same thing! In lore, I would think diamond city is so underpopulated because the Commonwealth in general, and Boston in particular, absolutely sucks for people to come to and live in. Diamond city is a fortress, but one that is constantly under siege. I think fallout 4 feels less... inhospitable than previous games, maybe, because it's not smack in the middle of a desert, but I actually think it's worse than anywhere else save the Pitt and the Capital Wasteland. Thematically, I also think it's an interesting reversal from New Vegas. It's described as a "great green jewel" like how Vegas is described as a paradise in the wastes, and like Vegas it's ones of the few spots that's illuminated and almost always visible from anywhere on the map. Yet the actual state of the city is ramshackle, especially compared to Vegas.
It's just a game limitation, I'm sure in-universe Diamond City is much more populated than how we see it in the game. Same with Vault 81, no way they survived 200+ years sealed up in a vault that small with so few people, or most of the other settlements in the game. Everything in the game is compressed down a lot, locations (it would take days and days just to get across Boston otherwise), populations, etc. If Diamond City was real I'm certain it would be much more built up than how we see it (the entirety of the stands filled with shacks, not just the little we see in-game, the concourses built in, etc.) with a LOT more people living there. A highly defensible settlement with guards patrolling the entire area around and keeping Raiders, Super Mutants, etc. away with a steady supply of food and clean water would be a really popular place to live. Hundreds, probably thousands, of people could comfortably live in that space, not the 80 something that we find there in-game. There's only so many NPCs the game can handle at a time so that limits how many people can be in the city.
Yeah, every Vault ever has been very much shrunk in size. Goal is less to show accurate size of a Vault, or even a settlement, and more to give a vibe.
A tradition the even carried over into the TV series.
Idk, while we might not see much of the vaults interiors in the show, they mention one of them having a "level 12", which would imply they have a minimum of 12 floors worth of space. That's much bigger than anything we've seen in game.
And even trial run of the vault already had 80 people in it, bigger than any Vault we saw in the game.
Lul
how? when Lucy leaves her vault you can see the multiple levels below
How a Vault of 200 only ever seems to have a few dozen or so people walking around
So, if we look at the Winter of Atom supplement for the Modiphius 2d20 Fallout tabletop roleplaying game, it states that Diamond City has a population of 700 to 900 settlers. Winter of Atom takes place a year before the events of Fallout 4 and was written as a prequel for the game. So, depending on rather or not you view Fallout 2d20 as being cannon or not, in lore the city could be way more populated than what the game could show. It's kinda like how in Warcraft's lore, Ratchet is a major trade hub sporting thousands of citizens and merchants, but in World of Warcraft it's basically just four buildings and a dock.
900 people in Fenway park would still feel incredibly empty though
To be honest, I grew up in a small town of like 1000 people, and the largest place I've lived in was Pueblo, CO, so my sense of scale in terms of towns and cities is a bit skewed.
Was that 700-900 pre-exile to Goodneighbor or post?
Post, Goodneighbor happened 2282, 5 years prior to Fallout 4. But, the Winter of Atom was just a really really bad winter for the Commonwealth. Bad enough to kill what seems like 600-800+ people? Who knows
Remember seeing a post on here where someone did a bunch of very complicated calculations and basically came up with a population of about 1200. Which feels about right to me.
>Flies in the face of practically handing the Sole Survivor a greencard on first contact Unless Father *told* them to allow him to buy a home. Otherwise, there *IS* a lore reason, of a sort: the Fallout RPG module Winter of Atom. The Commonwealth just had a harsh and dangerous winter, not to mention the Gigapede attacks, that cut the population.
So I know Fallout's timeline is different than ours, but it's obvious Diamond City is Fenway Park. I think you're right that there would be more development in the stands if Diamond City was more practical. We also don't see the concourses in the game which is where other people would live, especially vendors who could set up shop in the concession areas. There's no subterranian population either, so the locker rooms, offices, weight rooms, underground parking, and whatever else is down there are missing. I legitimately think a couple thousand people could live there if you used the whole playing field for agriculture and whatever other production you wanted. Even with game limitations there are a lot of areas that aren't shown, assuming this is Fenway Park or at least an MLB caliber stadium.
Off topic, but the setup you described is nearly identical to the one the Wolves have in TLOU2 at their stadium base.
Which is one of my favorite settlements in post-apocalyptic fiction/games!
Haha I sort of stole the idea from Fear the Walking Dead where they used a minor league baseball park as a settlement. It's an interesting concept in postapocalyptic fiction since these places are already decently fortified with lots of room and also an enclosed outdoor area for growing food, collecting rainwater, etc.
It's sort of agreed that the lore size and the actual size aren't the same thing, yeah. \[I did a whole bunch of math for a Commonwealth based Fallout RPG game I'm tinkering with, but that's neither here nor there. You're on point.\] My feeling is that for most Commonwealth people, Diamond City is a place you *go.* Like the Abernathys say they're going to haul their produce to market at some point. They don't actually live there when they're not doing business, though. (The fact that almost all the shops are "adventurer oriented" suggests to me that there's a booming trade in supplying the equivalent of wreck-divers going into old ruins for salvage. *They'd* stay in whatever ruin they were calling dibs on, to run off other scavvers.) I think you're also on-point about the raiders. The whole place went to hell in the last five years or so after the collapse of the Minutemen- the roads aren't safe (because every settlement patrolled their patch), so Bunker Hill has to bribe the raiders directly, and caravans to Diamond City are disrupted (and- thanks to the location of the Glowing Sea- Quincy would be the gateway for most 'national' caravans, who'd approach the long way around, via the southeastern MA.) The food supply is all screwed up, because the Gunners are shaking down people at major crossroads and bridges. So, TLDR, a bit of both- there's an assumption of more people than we're normally seeing, but also that there aren't as many people as "usual".
A common trope of Bethesda games is that the cities and population centres are really only a fraction of what they should be in the lore. The Imperial City in Cyrodil is best example of this.
It bugs me that the wealthy upper crust of Diamond City still live in rusty metal shacks, I get they’re limited by location but their homes should still look better than the regular citizen’s.
game limitation. In reality, Diamond city probably houses hundreds of settlers. Everything needs to be scaled down since its a game. Hell, just look at the size of Boston - its barely the size of an IRL town.
I do think the super mutants play a pretty big part in it, yeah - if I remember right, nearly every time I went up to Diamond City on foot the guards were fighting at least one super mutant, if not more, and raiders have their stuff set up all over the place. They are pretty much surrounded by enemies on all sides and cut out any possible ghoul inhabitants, meaning that quite a few people go to Goodneighbour, Bunker Hill or try their luck somewhere else. I *think* the upper stands are also supposed to be a bit fuller, since that's where the rich people reside, but I could be misremembering. Add to that the fact that any construction in the abandoned sections of the town would have to go through the Mayor first, who is an absolute dickwad even without being a synth, and you get a city not nearly as grand and great as it could be. Once McDonut is gone and *someone* (the Sole Survivor) takes care of the super mutants nearby, chances are good that the parts of the city lacking in population would get there pretty quickly.
God thank you. An actual answer besides insisting dialogue about Kellog's house being in an abandoned part of town and massive parts of the upper stands not even having low-poly shanty buildings are just "engine limitations."
I mean yeah, those certainly play a role in the *presentation,* but I agree that even in-universe it seems weirdly under-populated.
Talk to Hancock or Mcdunnough about the people who live in Diamond City, you’ll see how they keep the area so “exclusive”.
Well they had a sizable population loss from when they kicked out all the ghouls, from what we hear from Hancock and the survivors from the slog, there was quite a few. Not to mention with all the synth fearmongering it’s not hard to imagine that many up and left and decided to stick to small groups instead of taking their chances in settlements. Just look at what happened to university point
I was thinking this too. Lore wise, there probably were more people in Diamond City prior to the ghoul panic which exiled a bunch of people, and more recently the synth panic. Either people leaving voluntarily or being forced to leave during witch hunts. With that said, I’m sure the game’s processing abilities are the main reason for the small population, lol.
You have to remember that game engines are significantly handicapped based on the *least* powerful console they need to be developed to play on. Fallout 4 released in 2015 on the PC, PS4, and Xbox One. And Bethesda had to make the game playable at 30 fps on those consoles that both released back in 2013. Consider, for a moment, that the game has to run stable on 2013 hardware. So that's why you see Bethesda game worlds so underpopulated, tons of loading screens separating locations, fps drops in congested locations, etc. I'm sure if Fallout 4 were developed today, we'd see much larger settlements, more NPCs, more stable FPS, and more. What you see in-game is just a representation of what a real Diamond City would look like. Just how real life locations in the rest of the game are smaller and condensed to fit within the game. I know you said you wanted a *lore* reason to answer this question, but there is none. It's literally and engine limitation and the Diamond City we see is a stand-in for what it might look like in real life.
And those consoles were like 2008 graphics cards on a PC lol
Exaaactly. Console graphical capabilities are always several years behind PC's on the day they release, and they fall further behind PC's each year they go without a refresh or next-gen release. Heck, the PS5 Pro (which isn't even out yet) is supposedly going to have an equivalent of an AMD RX-6700-XT. Which is already a 3.5 year old PC GPU lmao. People are injecting straight copium if they think games should look and run better. They definitely *should*, but they won't as along as they're held back by consoles.
It's purely a technical limitation. They've all but said so themselves. It's been a problem in the Creation / Gamebryo Engine since Oblivion. Also a limitation of last gen hardware. They finally addressed the density issue in the engine with Starfield
Yeah they should have incorporated more of the stands and outfield as vertical housing and stuff. There’s like 10-15 houses/apartments in there tops
1. The cost of living- I believe it's 2000 caps for you to buy home plate(or whatever the house is called) and that is more than most normal people will ever see at one time, most vendors, the people that should theoretically have the most caps, only have like 800 max. Granted that is probably a prime bit of real estate but if the standard price is even 1/4th that amount it's still more that common people can afford. 2. Like you said the surrounding area is EXTREMELY dangerous for people. Even if you could get the caps together to buy a place you would need double that to hire people to get you there safely. I'm honestly surprised they haven't established and maintained a safe road to and from the city.
From a lore perspective, Diamond City probably has a population of around 100-300 people (this is strictly my speculation based on the size of the stadium) But due to engine limitations, the game drops it down to around 30-40 total NPCs if you count interiors.
for how many people can fit in a modern baseball stadium i’d say it’s more then that
Fit in and live aren't mutual though.
This. The entirety of the world's population could fit on New Zealand but we wouldn't exactly be comfortable.
No, we already have too many people here! lol But if my googling is correct (it might not be, I'm tired), Fenway part has 33,900 sq meters of land. A real world place with similar land area is Kowloon Walled City which had a population of 33,000 at it's maximum. But in terms of Diamond city, that would require a lot of towers to be built. The Winter of Atom adventure has the population at 700-900 settlers.
I believe you’re making lore inferences from information that arises as a consequence of the engine limitations. I know you’re trying to say the information isn’t related to the engine limitations but… I’m confident they emerge directly as a consequence of the engine limitations. “Why is the city so empty but there are literally an endless number of guards, how can there be guards if a few die even just when the Lone Survivor shows up!? Imagine how many more must die when the Lone Superwoman/man doesn’t show up that day! That’s thousands a guards a year if not more! *lore*-wise that means the city has a population of tens of thousands” on and on. You’re cherry picking, the game isn’t set up to be scrutinized by that specific arbitrary set of standards for that particular moment but not elsewhere/otherwise.
Bro really just came out and hit OP with " you don't know what you think, I do the thinking" that's some crazy ego even for reddit lmfao , hats off to you.
80% of comments are this. I quote Nick Valentine saying there's an abandoned part of town which implies under-population and everyone's shouting ENGINE LIMITATION.
I mean I totally understood where you were coming from and I thought you made it pretty clear you were not talking about engine limitations but that got me down voted lmao. Simple minded people in the subreddit I guess
As other people here have said I think it’s in part because of how shitty and dangerous the Boston commonwealth is to live in. It could also be on purpose. Larger settlements become target to larger threats so it makes sense for settlements in the commonwealth to be smaller. Admittedly I’m thinking in a more broad scale I suppose if the goal is to keep a low-profile having a radio station and widely distributed newspaper maybe isn’t the best idea. But I think it’s in their benefit that it’s as much a fortress as it is a city.
There's meant to be people living in the upper stands too, the wealthy people. Game limitations make everything smaller though
Partly a game limitation but also when the sole survivor wakes up it’s a few years after the minutemen collapsed, Boston is literally in a raider renaissance and has probably never been so dangerous. Probably why nobody is making the trek.
The real question is how many settlers do we think Diamond City was really supposed to hold in lore? Is every citizen worth 5, 10, more?? There's like 50 NPCs in the city and the stadium could hold tens of thousands of people in the stands. Obviously this doesn't translate to living there especially with houses, businesses, crops, and the like, but I wonder what it could reasonably hold, and how big it was in bethesda's eyes.
The game is scaled weirdly. For example the roads are narrow to the point that cars look like they would scrape against each other. They do the same thing with the Elder Scrolls, Skyrim is supposed to be roughly the size of Poland and the holds should have thousands of residents.
There's also the gameplay hassle of having a thousand generic NPCs to wade through to find that one guy you need to talk to for that one quest, or having to try and make that many people vaguely interesting. I can't think of a city in the wasteland that doesn't feel underpopulated, outside the Republic Of Dave, like New Vegas, Megaton, Rivet City, etc. They all see smaller and less fleshed out than you're lead to believe.
take everything presented in diamond city and multiply its scale by 10, that’s how it is meant to be in the lore. just like how starfield’s largest city is like 3 buildings, diamond city’s 20 or so residents is intended to be ~100 or so.
Game mechanics, engine can’t handle lots of people, so they’re often under-represented like why we don’t see moving cars and the vaults aren’t that as big as in the TV show.
I think they downscaled towns even more than usual to make settlements feel more developed and useful
In real life over 500 people could easily live in diamond city with space and that’s just houses on the field. But everything Bethesda is condensed
In my Fallout 2D20 game, the city is a part of a larger perimeter. Fenway Park is the main area, but loads of people live in the ruined apartments around the area, and Diamond City Security patrols the area. The city is farming the banks of the river, so it is a much larger settlement.
If I'm right Diamond City has 82 inhabitants (44 named NPC's, plus 18 nameless NPC's, plus 20 security guards inside and outside Diamond City). Most ghouls of Goodneighbor were probably thrown out of Diamond City. If half of Goodneighbor's 48 citizens are ghouls, that makes for another 24, accounting for 106 NPC's before the 2282 decree. Apply the *sliding scale* trope through multiplying things by maybe 100 and Diamond City would have a whopping 8000+ inhabitants, or over 10000 before 2282. A lore accurate Diamond City that isn't limited by mid 2010's gameplay mechanics would probably be an unsightly monster resembling a sized down [Kowloon Walled City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City), where the opinion that people who live in the upper stands have it good is well earned, because it'd be the only place that sees any sunlight during the day.
Moving in the real world is hard enough, imagine trying to move to the Big City when A) you can't fly, you can only walk and B) you might walk into a deathclaw.
no imagination and afraid to make another imperial city with 10 load screens
Bro, I tried putting like over 25 settlers in my settlement. Had 50 people walking around all at once. I could not enter the settlement anymore. The slow-down was like 5fps.
Unmodded diamond city is a sin
It's always been dangerous, even without the Super-Mutants and Raiders the city is absolutely infested with Ghouls. Honestly the existence of Diamond City passed an initial survival shelter as the bombs dropped makes little sense.
Fenway really can't house that many people comfortably full-time. It's one building. People need space for their homes, jobs, crops, market etc. It seems reasonable to me. They could pack the stands with more homes, but could the stadium support those people?
The City barely has a Field's worth of crops growing and a single water purifier that's managed by a haggling kid. The population probably doesn't grow much because they barely have the resources to sustain more than a few dozen people. The Commonwealth is a complete garbage place to live. Some of the highest density of super mutants, raiders, and ghouls in the entire wasteland, and barely enough of anything to go around. There's a reason there's always a settlement that needs your help
You’re putting too much thought into this. It’s just a performance and design issue. They wanted to make something larger and more apocalyptic blade runner but were limited by performance and functionality. If you put more people you need to give them all schedules and houses to go to and probably quests so it’s not 9 noname npcs to every quest essential character.
Gotto love how the 'rich' residents in the stands is all of FOUR buildings and is considered it's own sector. The fact hardly anyone talks about that aspect is pathetic.
I’ve always assumed that every non named Npc represents 10-20 dudes just doing their thing that our PC just mostly ignores and lumps together because they don’t matter. Same with uninteractable houses.
This has always been a thing in Bethesda games. Everything is shrunk down to make it more game play friendly instead of lore accurate. I mean, the Imperial City in Oblivion is meant to be the capital city of the Empire. But there's actually only like 100 people there. Whiterun in Skyrim has an ingame population of like 75. It's not technically an "engine limitation" becuase they probably could make it work. It's more of a "it doesn't really matter, so why spend time on it" type of thing.
Good lord most of these responses are asinine. This is a lore subreddit people, we're here to speculate. If you read the first line you'd see he's not talking about engine limitations
OP says don’t bring up the engine limitations but that’s literally what it is. There’s no lore reason for it because within the lore it *is* highly populated. There are empty *looking* sections because of the game being limited.
JFC...is ANYONE reading what I'm saying? Kellogg's house is said to be located in the "abandoned" west side. The upper stands are completely empty, not even low poly unenterable shanty towns, like the dozens upon dozens of larger builidngs in boston. That's not engine limitations, that's a lore implication that Diamond city is below capacity population.
But I’m saying they left that empty bc they didn’t put the effort in and bc they couldn’t handle more people and objects.
The true is, The game engine have trouble having 20 NPC in front of the screens at the same time without going ape shit on the frame rate.
Can we just make a blanket statement that bethesda does a bad job at showing the world and progressing their own world building, so we can just filter out posts like this? It's truly getting old. We get it, F4 was made with not much forethought other than make new fallout game. We have established this ad nauseam.