Open Forum: A Challenge

[williamnixon]

What about Arcanum? That was turnbased, but the again you could choose to have the active battlesystem.

I know it had a few flawds but I thought well of it.

[S4ur0n27]

And it flopped.

[ilcattivo13]

Damn, pardner. You are right MRhappy!

I'm still waitin' for game with:
- living world
- Quests a'la Fallout 1&2,
- SPECIAL (or something similar),
- TB combat a'la FOT or JA2,
- destructible environment.

And I won't buy "Oblivion with guns", I'll spent that money on Afterfall or something.

[ilcattivo13]

But I can't show them because you can't buy either fallout 1 or 2 from our local retailers.

Yes You can. In Poland there's a DVD with Fallout 1 & 2 & FOT. It costs about 5 Euro. But those are Polish language versions. This edition was published couple moths ago.

And it's selling good.

[williamnixon]

And it flopped.

Well, that's just what YOU think...

...

[Wolfman Walt]

Mr. Nixon - You have to grade my papers for Federal Criminal Law, please get to work and stop wasting time at my hang out.
Your student,
Walter

[wamingo]

How is the market declining ?

They produces simply arnt making anything but clickfests and crappy xbox ports these days.

Yeah, it isn't declining. That's just total bullshit.
The amount of personal computers is most certainly increasing every month.

The issue here is that devs try to release games on every platform which leads to crappy games.

There are lots of reasons to the decline of pc games altogether.
Games are costing more to make today than ever before.
It's hugely a hit-driven market. Hit games are sucking up a large portion of consumers. Sequels of proven games are near the only games that get proper funding.
Publishers are scared of the markets that doesn't put joe's as #1.
Regular joe gamer tends to prefer the couch to game in.
Joe's who own a pc often still prefer the console as a gaming platform.
Joe's hate the pc hardware race, they much prefer the ~$500 package. And the much easier second hand market is making sure anyone with $200 can play console games too. $200 won't get you much pc at all.
The expansion of the console market is giving back wheel to pc's. Booming markets are where the money is.
PC's are no longer the only online capable equipment. Console online gaming is soaring.
Developers are scared of not getting funding from publishers and are willing to do whatever it takes. In other words they're forced to make games that runs on consoles, which means 8 button controls and indeed mostly crappy games.
And then there's developers who actually loves consoles... and those who just wanna make money...
And probably tons of other reasons.

The most popular pc games today are the most casual drivel ever... The Sims, World of Warcraft, Oblivion, GTA, BFwhatever, a pile of mostly online asian games, and assorted sports and Star Wars rubbish... Sure some of these are cursor driven and some of them really needs mouse precision, but none of them are far from being mistaken for a console game, and all of them surely could be if they had to.

And whatever increase in global pc gaming revenue is showing is probably swallowed whole by WoW and various asian MMO's with millions of subscribers.

[crossmyheart]

Here's the deal.

Turnbased works, and is fun. (Most) people that have a problem with turnbased I have a feeling have slightly lower attention spans. (This doesn't necessarily make them stupid, I like to play Burnout sometimes when I wouldn't want to play Fallout). Or! they haven't really tried a good turnbased game.

However, I don't really feel like Fallout needs to be turnbased or third person isometric.

What really makes Fallout is the gritty scenery, the hidden easter egg jokes/references to pop culture, retro future, vulgarity and violence.

Wouldn't you all agree that the combat and graphics are so low on the scale of what is important to a game like this?

Granted, the graphics will have to lend toward making the scenery /feel/ gritty and all those other things I mentioned -- but with a decent art/concept art team it is doable.

Do I have complete faith that Bethesda is going to make something to live up to this? Hell no. Will making it real time and first person with a killer graphics engine make it more difficult to achive these things? Absolutely.

-----

So I guess I'm not trying to prove that turnbased, third person isometric can't work. Actually I would say that it definitely could -- as long as it gets the cult following that the old Fallouts pulled off.

I think it would be harder now that the videogame industry has really whored itself out to energy drink guzzling, tweaked out, action-driven high school kids, but hell why not.

I'd just like to say that it is possible to get best of both worlds here -- give us some fast paced action first person as long as we still get long dialogues, lengthy NPC interaction to develop storyline, free roaming non-linearity, long quests and tons of funny/violent/vulgar crap.

[Bradylama]

However, I don't really feel like Fallout needs to be turnbased or third person isometric.

Needs to be? I guess technically not, but it certainly should be. The SPECIAL system is designed for turn-based combat, because Fallout was developed to re-create the pen & paper experience, pen & paper games being almost as a rule turn-based.

The use of an isometric perspective is also intentional, because it affects the way that information is conveyed to the player. Designing the game around an isometric viewpoint allows the player to see everything, and enables him to focus solely on the action on-screen instead of having to fight a camera. It also makes it easier to implement item-spotting based on character traits, such as certain items not being grabbable with a low Perception. I say that, because it reduces the chance for the player to miss that item, even with a player character who is capable of seeing it.

Wouldn't you all agree that the combat and graphics are so low on the scale of what is important to a game like this?

Combat and "graphics" are quite important to the feel of the game, only not in the linear TB->RT 2D->3D Engine mentality.

Fallout's combat and SPECIAL can certainly be improved upon, but if you made the combat real-time then so many aspects of the system become useless to the point of creating a new ruleset for the real-time. It's why NWN2 isn't really an honest translation of the D&D ruleset. Too much is reliant upon player input, and the alternative, having the AI completely control the characters in Real-time as per their character stats and values, is not very fun at all.

"Graphics" go beyond just the setting. The methods used to create the sprites and environments in Fallout, as well as any of the other isometric Infinity Engine games involved an effort of artistry that you just don't see in modern games. (things like stop-motion animation) If a 3D game can't re-create that level of artistry, it's going to be clearly noticeable.

[williamnixon]

Mr. Nixon - You have to grade my papers for Federal Criminal Law, please get to work and stop wasting time at my hang out.
Your student,
Walter

Well, you're damn right dear Walt, you're damn right.
Parents night coming up, so bring yer mama!