Fallout 3 Hands-On Preview

[Smiley]

Sure, when your truck/jeep wasn't flying half a mile because it hit a rock.

[VasikkA]

Realism and good gaming rarely go well, hand in hand.

That's true. However, there are only a few examples of games that try to imitate reality to the fullest. STALKER went a bit too far with requiring you to eat regularly. Those kind of features are nothing but redundant annoyances and add nothing to the entertainment value.

I think the keyword here is believability, or creating an illusion of reality. That is, making everything look and behave as you'd expect them to. Elements that clearly contradict with reality, such as invisible walls or 'magically' locked doors, screwed physics etc., should be well hidden or excluded from the game. The trick is to make the world seem to function independent of the player and not having every person or location simply waiting for the player to appear. If everything in the game has an agenda with you, it doesn't really feel right, or does it?

Even flight sims (intentionally) leave out some features of reality, yet still manage to create a captivating and seemingly realistic gaming experience. Just take a look at Falcon 4.0 or IL2-Sturmovik. Sadly, the flight sim scene is pretty much dead at the moment. :\

[Smiley]

A good definition that I can only applaud. Well said.

[cazsim83]

The most encouraging aspect of Fallout 3's dialogue is the number of options available. Oblivion's simple approach to dialogue trees would not suffice here, and as a result, I often had up to five or six options at any given time.

that's the most optimistic thing about the game that I've read in ages!

but it goes on:

dialogue clearly eclipsed Oblivion's writing, but did not quite match the effectiveness of Fallout. (...)But none of the characters caught me off guard or engaged me in the same way that Fallout did, and the voice acting was sometimes rather wooden.

oh well.

One thing I kept hearing was that they had *vastly* improved on the voice acting because there were so much fewer (grmr?) NPCs in F3 than Oblivion - to read something like this was pretty ... well ... not surprising, but disappointing anyway.

It also didn't surprise one bit that the scripting for dialogue wasn't neary as good as the true Fallout games - but hey, I really liked the writing for F1 and 2...heck, even Tactics.

"Do not underestimate the tenacity of these raiders..."