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Skrekkur wrote: F3 perhaps doesn't have the strongest main story, but I don't think fallout 1 had it either.
Very much debatable. F3's story was poorly set together and the main elements were just ripped off from the earlier games (1,2,Tactics). Fallout 1's story, on the other hand, is generally highly acclaimed.
Skrekkur wrote:I really like the non-linear nature of Fallout 3, and oblivion, but I can understand why some people don't like it.
In which way does this 'non-linearity' of Fallout 3 / Oblivion manifest itself? And how do you perceive the non-linear aspects of Fallout 1 and 2?
There are a few interesting points in these posts. The most thing people seem to agree on is the voice acting. I must admit I haven't noticed this being subpar to other recent games.
The random encounters and lack of interaction with it I can agree on, were really fun in fallout 2 and added a lot of variety.
It is correct that fallout 1 and 2 very pretty non-linear, except for the main stories, so I guess on further thought f3 that much different in that regard.
The thing that this was made for xbox360 as well is true for most new games, and it is handled very differently. I don't like how this causes some games to be dumbed down, like a lot fewer weapon classes in oblivion, but it is understandable and if it is done well, (which I think it was the case with Fallout 3) this isn't too much of a problem for me at least.
I have also mixed feelings about the non-killable npcs, but it is also very understandable from a game design point of view, you don't want to make the game unfinishable unless you make it explicitly clear, but perhaps too many npcs are protected this way in fallout 3.
The argument that it feels like an oblivion mod I completely disagree on, sure it is based on same engine and some similar interfaces, but I don't think it shines through like in many other games. I think the guns feel right, and not like some boosted bows or something.
In my opinion though the arguments made against fallout 3 are in many ways understandable, but in my opinion no way a deal breaker. It is of course subject to taste and many of these issues can be fixed via mods.
My point is of course it could be better, but imho I truly enjoy this game and still play it, I have played it over 100hrs, with different kind of characters and I guess that is similar to the time I spent with fallout 2 at least.
I also think a lot of the dislike stems (as with many, many, many other things) from the nostralgia effect, that the new games that come out don't affect you as much as the first ones, for I really rember how awesome it felt to be able to kill everything in sight the first time I played fallout 1, so much freedom compared to what was already there.
I am not trying to alter your opinion, but just trying to explain it better and explain mine.
P.S. I have been playing PC games since the first 086 period, I just think it is unfair to judge games or movies as total crap even if you don't like some aspects of them
I don't have much time before work, but I did want to get a response out there to points I wished to comment or disagree with.
Fallout 3's story canabalizes most elements of 1,2 and tactics (as said by Kashluk) so really the strong points in FO3's storyline are FROM the other games. If you look at the individual points from FO3's storyline that are new, they don't make for compelling literature, especially since the storyline has holes of the size of the gap between Madonna's teeth. Lets not even mention the writing.
The main stories for FO 1 and 2 were far more non-linear than FO3's, to the best of my knowledge. If you know what you're doing in FO2 (for instance) you can be it in about 15 or so minutes by going directly to the end. Last I checked, in FO3, you still had to do afew mandatory quests for the ending to kick in at the Jefferson monument.
Killing NPCs - again bullshit. FO1 and 2 made it so no NPC was neccesary to complete the game. I neglect to see how it couldn't be similar here. An item or something to continue the important quest chains could easily be done provided a character died. In addition, most unkillable NPCs don't even seem THAT important to the plot.
FO3 was significantly dumbed down in comparison to even FO2. The dialogue system was horrible and so dumbed down that it made Mass Effect's dialogue system look like a work of genius. The combat, even WITH it being FPS was so fucking dumbed down it was ridiculous, with VATs essentially being a "Special move" and the actual first person gunplay being very stiff. The RPG mechanics were also REALLY dumbed down if you think about it. While I won't say they didn't influence your game, the effect felt barely there to me, especially in regards to skill percentages.
Oblivion with guns/mod of oblivion isn't neccesarily verbatim. The game is very much a carbon copy of Oblivion, BUT it did have improvements. The problem is that improving on Oblivion isn't hard as modders have shown.
In my opinion
Well now that we recognize this is your opinion. Please understand that we have ours and we have logical and valid arguments (by your own volition) to back it up.
nostralgia effect
Those two words are just bullshit people come up with to disregard people's opinions. By now FO3 suffers from the nostalgia effect, and would do so more for me since I've played 1 and 2 far more since the almost 2 years ago since I played FO3. Even at that, my first time playing the original Fallout (actually) was in about 2005 (only a 3 year difference, hardly time to be nostalgiac), and despite the interface being worse than FO2's, whose interface I'd been used to since 1998, did not conjour up any similar complaints as FO3. There is no nostalgia effect if I can back things up - don't ever use that fucking term or any of it's brothers around me again.
I completely agree the story in FO3 is not very strong, and it is not the reason I like it and NPC killing protection is far overused.
However if you make a story which depends on characters (mostly your father though) , which they did, it would be problematic to make them die.
Otherwise I agree with you and with default settings you will become really too powerful no matter what skills you pick first, and that is a huge flaw. VAT also makes things a bit to easy at times.
The nonlinearity argument, was not meant as a comparison to FO1 and FO2, it is just something I've seen come up from first comers into that genre, and we seem to be in agreement that it is really fun and was very much present in 1 and 2.
Ok, I might have patronized you a little with the nostralgia effect element, and I apologise for that, but I have experienced it myself, and have to remind me not to go there.
The only thing I must disagree on is the oblivion carbon copy argument, although it has the same engine and very similar interface (not including the pip boy)
That being said I understand your arguments and your oppinions and respect them. Thank you for enlightening me on them.
Fallout 1 and 2 are both great games and will never be replaced, they continue to be in my favorite rpgs of alltime along with baldur's gate 2.
okay everyone new here, you now have a list, summed up by kashluk, about our grievances. (I apologize for the length of this post)
NOW CUT THE RELATIVIST BULLSHIT
It's people like you who are ruining this world. Rather than thinking that there is anything wrong in this world, or that things are okay 'compared to other things going on now in other parts of the world', or 'compared to other new games'.
Do you not understand that we're NOT comparing it to new games, and that it SHOULD NOT be compared to new games?
Let's look at it this way: at least losing all of your limbs isn't as bad as aids because, hey you COULD survive. But your quality of life will be pure shit, but at least you're alive. So hey this game is better than newer games, but is still a piece of absolute, unoriginal garbage compared to any RPG worth it's salt from about 10 years and backward.
You're ruining our industry. You're fucking up our world. While you were sitting there jerking off to hello kitty island adventure for the past 10 years, we were looking to find meaningful dialogue, social commentary, as well as a killer, driving story that has been profoundly absent in our culture as a whole recently.
Guess what? I've clocked about 16 hours straight on several old FPS games and didn't even get 3/4 of the way through...and this is back when games came on a single CD, or even diskettes. I beat fallout 3 and did several side quests as well as fucking around for quite a bit within 10 hours, easily. Do you not see this as a problem? Look at it as amount of entertainment per hour.
Even by that scale, the stories do not stick with you, you do not have to think on the consequences of your choices or the complex framework of a town or it's place in the world. While you're sitting there reading guns and ammo, masturbating in your own feces, do you ever stop and think 'wow, i'm fucked up'? Do you consider your place in the world and your actions?
Put it this way: you probably went out and bought fallout 3, without giving a shit to the fact that you're helping to buy out and destroy several game review sites, you're helping to push forward mediocre crap, and helping to destroy a medium for meaningful artistic expression. We're in the shit age of PC gaming. Fallout 3 is the Mike Tyson of games...it's all been going downhill, and it will continue to, but this(and WoW for some reasons) is the destruction of the RPG genre.
That thought line though? Think of a game with that complex of a trigger system in place? Imagine the wastes: you're walking along, come across a caravan, and ambush and destroy it. It was carrying precious trade goods along a route including water, food and supplies. You've killed it before its two final destinations. The first, which relied on the food and water, riots as a growing plague spreads, burning down a town and murdering an NPC that could tweak some of your armor, giving you crucial radiation resistance. The second, which was simply waiting to sell goods, and becomes a desolate and poor town, resorting to thievery and terror to survive, ruled by a despot who throughout the game pushes out his territory.
And it could go on from there. The game could spiral out from that consequence, thousands of independent variable shaping the world around you by your single actions....lives change, available quests and opportunities constantly arising and disappearing, the economic climate directly shaped by your decisions. So you beat someone close to death, but don't kill them....and they go out and kill someone who helped you. Awesome, now you've lost karma, are blamed for the death, and must seek vengeance. Witcher had it half right when NPCs could die for your actions...but they didn't take it far enough.
Oh expert of gaming, have you ever played Dwarf Fortress? It's not even an rpg, and it's done by, I believe, one person. Look at the complexity, look at the AI, sure...it's done in ASCII text, but there are tilesets available. How much time do you think they put into game play design or even the choices/consequences system that was touted for months in FO3? Probably minimal, while they decided exactly which rending engines, lightmaps, skyboxes, and how many polygons to use.
So, compared to new games, how does it matter? None of these newer games are doing anything but sucking on the teet of the cash cow that is the American populaces quickly searching hyperactive eye for distraction. If Halo wasn't such a commercial success, if television had remained as interesting as it had previously, there would be no Fallout 3. Hell, there would be no oblivion, army of two, or many other shit games that have come out that are simply sub par.
Do you know what passion is? It used to fuel games, not money. Game studios were small, with limited resources and it was an almost barren market. Fallout 1/2 were full of literary references, not even the jokes and random encounters that often times fans, at least in FO2, considered a bit over the top. But get this, that world was full of poverty, drug addiction, problems, and survival…brought to life as much as was able by the surroundings, the scenery, the dialogue, and every part of the game. The holistic world that was fallout 1&2 was destroyed and missing in fallout 3. What you had, was a grab bag mix of semi fitting pieces, shoved together(all too closely) and made to ‘fit’ for the fans.
But back to relativism…Sure, things are great if you compare them to ‘contemporary factors’, but is it the goal to simply do a little better than everyone else? Or is perfection an ideal worth striving for? Would you rather play 5 minutes of a perfect game, akin to the artificial conversation models that were created that let you have a realistic discussion with an ai but maxed out at about 5 min, or would you rather play 5 hours of bland garbage that you’d seen time and time before? Everyone cheers avatar for its innovation, a new movie for its plot twist(sixth sense comes to mind) but what do we get from gaming? A new setting, prettier explosions, something stranger, but it’s nothing new. The level of interaction with the world is lessening for the most part, and that’s what we’re handed: shallow shit to provide just a simple distraction: nothing more, nothing less. But I guess that’s what happens when retards such as yourself comprise the audience: you don’t want anything new, you want to watch someone getting hit in the groin repeatedly for as long as possible, with a new color palette added every 4 hours. So who the fuck cares if it’s better than something else that just came out.
By that logic…all we need is to have every person donate one single dollar to one company to churn out the worst fucking garbage that you can imagine, and for every other company to do just slightly better. That way, we can go to sleep at night, feeling well and content that we’re doing better than those other fucks, that we’re not DIRECTLY carving out the eyes of our fellow men, but only throwing shit at them. Do you have any aspirations? Or do you just simply want to get by. Ever had layoffs at work, so you work slightly harder than those around you, just to save your own ass or do you actually work hard for the sake of working hard?
Hell, I’m sure if you ever managed to have a girlfriend, that attitude worked just great. So have you stopped beating her? Or just not as badly, to let her know that it could be worse. Fallout 3 could have been worse, but I’m sorry, something went wrong with gaming along the way: you. You fucking inbred, retarded fans have ruined gaming. Do you live your life? Or do you just sit there, wallowing away without a thought, trying to race to the next day as quickly as possible. Do you find new meaning in the same garbage every night? Do you constantly sit there, too lazy to search for the meaning that you’ll never even care to find?
Well here’s a message from Duck and Cover: Put a shotgun in your mouth, and pull the trigger. It’ll make the world better. This could have been, and may turn into a much longer post. But I figure it’s tl;dr already.
hahaha, sorry Caleb but you are just too angry at the world.
Sure i've played dwarf fortress, and been playing video games since the last 20 years, multiplayer on a modem, and still old games on occation because there is just no replacement for them.
You sound like an old bitter angry old man, and I am sorry for you in that regard. Of course we should hold up the bars made by great things of the past. But from this lengthy post of yours, you seem to view the world in all too much black and white. And that you could beat F3 in 10 hours doesn't say anything. You could beat fallout 1 in about 15 mins, and fallout 2 in a whole lot less than 10 hours if you really knew what you were doing.
Originality in gaming is sadly less common than it was, but it happens occationally and you can't invent the weel everyday.
But seriously chill out. I don't think you will change hatred or your oppinions because they seem as cut in stone as a brainwashed religous person. But this isn't so black and white.
I won't spent much more energy arguing with you but i am truly curious what your most favorite games are, expecially in the 5-10 years or so if there are any in our corrupted world filled with evil people.
Read the rest of our forum, then post something like that. favorite fps: blood, favorite adventure game: sanitarium, favorite squad based rts: syndicate wars, favorite recent squad based rts: dawn of war 2, also if you want a recent
Also, the bitterness stems from having seen so many of you come to these forums and asking us to sum up the conversations for the past year or two, without even taking 5 minutes to use the search function. My world is not black and white, but many of the problems I see in the industry are. Knowing people in game design, and seeing the motives behind the designers is a way to develop those opinions. Here's a good writeup which furthered my opinions: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/f ... ukem/all/1.
Yes I'm angry at a lot of things, you're just one of many who came here asking the same stupid shit. If you wish to argue, do so logically and from an informed position. I've been told I'm an old man from the time I was 5, so, that's nothing new to me. Oh, and don't feel bad for me...I just end up seeking out things that are worth value and are a joy to experience. It's a nice life.
A good list, I can understand it and I should have browsed the forum instead of being lazy and post it. Perhaps I have played so many games over the years that I have become to accept lesser things as ok or good, although I never forget the truly great ones and truly appreciate originality when it shows it head.
Must say I really miss the level of bullfrog's originality, It continues to be my favorite game company so far. Almost every single one of their games was really original and well made.
Syndicate wars was so much ahead of its time and I have yet to see a game even remotely similar with as much variety, options and polish.
I think that when critisizing games and other things, it should be a balanced and fair criticism, highlighting the good and the bad, but not just focus on the bad things.
It is a huge undertaking making a modern game in terms of art, programming, design etc. I just think it is far to common to just say things are shit, and not recognising what was done well and what not.
But of course for a game to be truly great all those aspects do have to be done with passion and by capable people although it can be enjoyable even if everything isn't perfect.
I agree with you in principal. And yeah...bullfrog was truly amazing. Dungeon keeper, to this day, is a true joy to play, as well as the quirkiness of Theme Hospital...and gene wars was also fun as well.
The problem I have with Fallout 3 is that it received perfect scores, game of the year, etc etc and has been placed so highly that it seems a little hard to give it any sympathy. When you've been deemed the best, should we not expect the best? Especially with the acceptance of bugs in games now, and the absolute plethora of them, it's hard to imagine it could have been given a perfect score. It also sets up expectations and tells the management/sales/research/marketing teams who and what they should aim at. From a relative in the game industry...the design team is constantly questioning 'what's popular and why, and how do we work it in' into a game...and setting a golden standard like that seems fairly damning to gaming in general. Not exactly the beacon of hope in gaming that we'd like to see i'd wager.
I can completely understand that angle, the gaming press should continue to keep their standards up, and recently the scores given seems to be really relative to things that have been released in the last couple of years or so.
The console scores I think also reflect that even more because more often than not console versions of games are rated higher than their pc counterparts or a game of similar quality on the PC, just because nothing better has been released for that platform at all, let alone recent years. I think this has caused halo to be one of the most overrated series of all time.
Also there is the fact that some marketing departments pay for reviews (most often indirectly in ads) or treat reviewers like kings in exchange for better scores which is truly distracting and sometimes shows in a whole lot worse user ratings for some games than the reviewer ratings.
About game of the year awards, that of course can be really difficult because that rating is only relative, and I think the only people even capable of giving out such a rating are people who have played all the non-really crappy games of that year, which I think are not so many.
I won't defend F3 top ratings but I think it should be rated at least something over 80 and on of very few new games that has given me over 40 hours of gameplay.
I've always considered these rating systems more of a guideline than holy truth, and scores alone don't say anything, just might highlight games worth checking out for the time-constrained.
Just out of curiosity what games would you like to have seen as game of the year 2008,
Oh lord...that requires me remembering what games were released then(I don't really keep up with modern games, as you can tell). Was Dark Athena 2K8? If so, then that. And yeah, I also understand your perspective about the time that you can get out of a game, but I guess that's one of the problems: 40 hours now is a god send...rather than fairly standard. It also just keeps the bar going down...and the price, somehow, going up. Doesn't make too much sense to me.
If you are referring to chronicles of riddick dark athena, then it came out 2009 . I think the only big games I played 2008 were gta IV and fallout 3 and I guess world of goo and rollercoaster tycoon 2 as well.
The problem with shortness + more expensive is a difficult problem, and movies suffer from similar effect.
As Technology gets better and expections in regard to models, textures, sound etc.
It requires a whole lot more people to make content that lasts as long as previous tech iterations made possible. This also requires more capital and less freedom for game designers to roam free, and more games get made as sequals. I think this is also the reason why most games don't have the soul so many had back in the day when the teams where no bigger than max 20 people.
These problems have been approached by just throwing massive amounts of money at it, use procedural generation of content , crowdsourcing it or make subscription MMO to pay for content generation, focusing on multiplayer or just making the games shorter.
Procedural generation of decent content is extremely difficult if not downright impossible at least in many cases.
Games like elite with decent graphics and variation are almost impossible to make nowadays, (although Elite IV is supposedly being developed) and a game that has come to closest to that is Eve online, which is an MMO.
Some exceptions are to this rule and I think modern warfare 2 (which was like 8 hours and costs 60$) is just cashing out, because they had a lot of money and made a whole lot more.
In all this however an interesting thing has happened and that is indie developers (or well comeback since almost everyone met that criteria in the earlier days of gaming).
Since they are not bound by requirement of capital holders, they can experiment more and I must say some really interesting games have been made in the past years by indie developers. Braid, world of goo and uplink are just a few examples of those kinda games I have enjoyed the past years.
I truly hope really good voice synthesis and just true AI will become available in the next years to make developers make larger games at lesser cost.
Uplink was simply amazing...played it way back when(something like 2002) when it first came out, and am pretty impressed with the most recent incarnation. I agree with you on all of those issues...and yes, EVE is probably the best example of a game that doesn't fall to those issues.
However...for FPS/Adventure/Similar types of games...it seems the best choice would be episodic releases for about $20 per release where development could truly focus on creating a single experience or chapter in a game...hell even $10/release would be nice. That way they could continue to use the same engine system and just design new assets each 'expansion'. It would also make things a lot lighter on the review side as the audience would know what to expect, the general expected length, and could get a good idea of what further episodes would be like. It also avoids a lot of the common 'game ended in a rush' scenarios where a studio just ran out of time...and it seems a lot more honest with itself than DLC. Sam and max seems to have paved the way for this, and I wouldn't be surprised if more developers followed, especially with current gen consoles by default being network platforms.
Yup that might be the right approach, but I would like to see more developers try it out. I think valve had that in mind with the hl2 episodes, only they are taking what more than 2 years per episode, have no idea why that is though. But yeah so far it seems that sam and max is the only game successfully keeping this up.
I really don't like when DLCs are integraded into the game like with Dragon age origins, that way it just seems greedy, and totally breaks the immersion when an NPC asks you to buy a DLC!
Edit: come to think of it doom and lot of the old shareware games kinda used this model successfully
That they did...the shareware model is gone...the difference between then and now mainly being that they would finish the game right away, then sell it piecemeal out as different expansions.
Just like DA:O, an issue i have with bethesda is things that were even showcased for oblivion didn't appear in the game and were later put in as DLC. Fallout 3 wasn't as bad(at least I don't think) with selling individual items and sets as DLC, but still, it just feels like kind of a rip off to say 'if you want to keep playing buy this'.
As with MMO's, I have a feeling over the next several years we'll see many other either subscription models or game release models...honestly the most impressive thing I've seen in the past few years was that CD Projekt patched the witcher, added in a fair bit of more content, and released it as a free patch if you'd already bought the game...you don't see that often enough now.
Frater Perdurabo wrote:Skrekkur's probably the most intelligent poster that has joined the forum in a while.
I don't know, people who like Syndicate Wars and hail them as being something new and wizz bang kind of make me shake my head Syndicate did it first; Syndicate Wars copy pasted, and was all the more poorer for it.
Frater Perdurabo wrote:Skrekkur's probably the most intelligent poster that has joined the forum in a while.
I don't know, people who like Syndicate Wars and hail them as being something new and wizz bang kind of make me shake my head Syndicate did it first; Syndicate Wars copy pasted, and was all the more poorer for it.
I never played Syndicate, only the follow-up. Come on, that was back in the days of dial-up. I don't think I even had internet then. In fact, I probably spoke barely any English. Thus, I probably wouldn't have been aware of a sequel or a predecessor.
Syndicate did it first; Syndicate Wars copy pasted, and was all the more poorer for it.