How to Build on Fallout 3

Brother None

Brother None

This ghoul has seen it all
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There's a lot of "wishlist" type articles out there and they're not all worth posting. Our pappies at atomicgamer gave us their €.02, and it's worth a read if for nothing else than it's refreshing to read pieces by writers that actually know something about the subject they're writing on.<blockquote>So now, the roles are reversed in the community; Bethesda fans are unsure of Obsidian, while the old-school Fallout fans, who generally disliked the third game, are happy with the decision. It's hard to take sides on this matter, but I think that if we look at how LucasArts basically crippled Obsidian's development of KOTOR2 by giving them only a year to complete it, we can forgive them a bit. To me, it's a pretty major feat to get even close to completing an epic RPG in only 12 months, and the fact that they got it good enough to get generally B-ish scores from most review sites shows that Obsidian got really close to their lofty goal.

What today's Fallout is and isn't
Some of the hardcore fans of the original games said that Bethesda may find some success in turning Fallout into a first person game, but that it'd be a hollow shell of its former self. It's true that the developers made a vastly different game than the originals, leaving behind the old turn-based, isometric view and changing up the storytelling to match their style of game. My contention is that the team left behind some of that depth on purpose with the intent to add it back in in entirely different ways: visceral combat, immersive 3D environments, and more storytelling through voice acting and level design rather than text-only dialogue options. In that respect, the game was a huge success.

It seems clear, then, that a merger of the two styles can at least partially be done. Increase the production values overall to cover some of Fallout 3's shortfalls and flaws, work on the dialogue, find ways to bring back some of those classic RPG elements, and then sensibly apply those new mechanics whenever appropriate.</blockquote>The "merger of two worlds" paradigm sure seems to be amongst the most popular. Discuss.
 
Makes Obsidian look like the little back alley dope pusher the big boys use to sell their leftovers while they work on the next big hit : the big boys get their money's worth and keep their names out there as the little dope pusher tries to sell as much of the cheap crap he's asked to work with...
 
Since they have the engine already, a year is just fine. Could be a nice game, except, if they keep VATS, in all honesty, I won't be able to play it.

VATS is the most jarring, immersion-killing gameplay subsystem I've ever had the displeasure of using.
 
Verd1234 said:
Sadly, Fallout New Vegas also has only a year of dev time...

I smell another KOTOR 2 here....

:(
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Actually at least 18 months, probably closer to two years or a little over.

We've seen comments on what Obsidian is doing to improve the dialogue system while still working inside the boundaries of having to have voice acting for every word. (And let's face it: anything less than full voice acting would be seen by modern gamers and reviewers, at best, as quaint and old-fashioned - and at worst, dated and cheap.)
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Very true. Honestly, no sizable budget game these days should be partially voice-acted. It's the company cheaping out or, in the case of companies that pull in big name actors, a misallocation of voice acting budget.

This means we won't see massive, sprawling dialogue trees for every character in the game to cover contingencies like your character having too low an intelligence to speak in complete sentences. In the first two Fallout titles about a decade ago, doing this was just a matter of adding some extra writing since nothing was voice acted, but that's just not feasible with today's demands of super-high production values.
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BS. Fully voice-acting a game with the amount of dialogue that Fallout had these days wouldn't be unreasonable. In fact I'm sure that you can find games with as much dialogue voice-acted, it's usually stretched over a longer period of time and much more linear, but the volume is the same. If you're making a B-list game and doing partial voice-acting then presenting a false reason for it, like Fallout did with the talking portraits, you could probably get away with it. The trick is the make the partial voice-acting not look arbitrary (look at Final Fantasy games (maybe Square games in general) since FFX and you have an example of how not to do it).

I'm all for smaller budget games with more targeted audiences but one needs to properly allocate their budget, truly going big or truly going affordable. Honestly I think that there is a greater return on good voice-acting than there is on the latest and greatest graphics, just like i think there's a greater return on proper animation than super high polygon models and ultra-high res textures. VtM:B may not have the sexiest graphics but it's animations are still top-notch.

Nor are we likely to see any major changes to the combat. The first/third-person action will return for sure, and it's not really feasible to try and vastly overhaul a successful feature like VATS.
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VATS was fucked, it was riddled with problems, the main one being how massively unbalanced it was. Also, they have added special attacks and I'd hope that they've rebalanced VATS (granted it's not a "vast overhaul").

Glad they beat on Fallout 3 for it's animations, if too late. Glad they suggested using voice actors instead of Hollywood talent, though they failed to go into dedicated VA's being more talented at that type of work than big name Hollywood stars.

All in all, glad to see that he seems to have an idea what he's talking about and acknowledges the old fanbase in a non-derogatory manner.
 
It would be more balanced if you could only take actions inside of vats, and if it let you use points to move, etc.. and force you into vats, during combat. Kinda like the original Fallouts except that all NPC characters would take their turns all at once, while the player is stuck (not able to move or anything) regaining their AP. Outside of combat the free-play mode would be fine.
 
That's easily fixed by mods. FO3 mods fix it, you can have a VATS with no damage immunity, no immobile enemies, no super-slow-mo and no following of bullets. But you still get a cool called shots system. Just like the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, it can be modded back to fit the original FO.

But an awefull storyline, childish dialogs and bad world designs can't be modded. So I hope they focus on the important stuff, and not minor technicalities that a cheap modder can fix.
 
UncannyGarlic said:
BS. Fully voice-acting a game with the amount of dialogue that Fallout had these days wouldn't be unreasonable. In fact I'm sure that you can find games with as much dialogue voice-acted, it's usually stretched over a longer period of time and much more linear, but the volume is the same. If you're making a B-list game and doing partial voice-acting then presenting a false reason for it, like Fallout did with the talking portraits, you could probably get away with it. The trick is the make the partial voice-acting not look arbitrary (look at Final Fantasy games (maybe Square games in general) since FFX and you have an example of how not to do it).
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Dude. Why go on a tangent and rant if you can just point to KOTOR2? Uses the same mechanic (silent protagonist with just writing and a ton of fully voiced characters). Obsidian might be smaller than Bethesda, but they can hire real voice acting talent.
 
I call bullshit on the merger of two worlds idea.

visceral combat
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Visceral as in cartoony exploding heads and people made of wet paper? Yeah.

Visceral as in genuinely disturbingly violent, God of War style? The kind of (I hate that word) immersion that makes you feel you're right there holding the gun and feeling it's recoil? No, I wouldn't say.

In fact, I'd say the combat was pretty boring. That isn't neccesarily a bad thing, as combat in Fallout 1/2/tactics was boring by it's own right, which was however compensated by high difficulty. Fallout 3 has combat mechanics that try to combine twitch gaming and virtual dice rolls and in my opinion that fails horribly.

I'll be honest here saying that I don't have anything against twitch gaming - in fact I like that kind of mechanic. Aiming at the enemy, clicking and seeing your gun recoil is definitely more immersive and satisfying than clicking a character in turn-based combat and seeing all the action done for you. FPS mechanics aren't bad, unless you implement them badly. Bethesda implemented them not badly, but horribly. I haven't seen such a boring FPS in ages. While the general satisfaction of shooting virtual enemies is a very complex formula consisting of many variables, bethesda got very few of them right. And it's not as if there wasn't a BAZILLION games that got it right before. It's really not that hard, damn it. Deus Ex managed to, and it had a fraction of bethesda's moolah.

more storytelling through voice acting and level design rather than text-only dialogue options.
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Fallout 3 had more voice acting indeed, but it's quality was shitty. Apart from Liam fucking Neeson most characters I remember were voiced hilariously bad. This was regrettably inevitable - it's either quality or quantity. Back in the old days, barring the lack of compression and limited disk space, full vocie-acting could be done for each and every character in-game. But instead voice acting was done only for select characters, but in considerably higher quality.

If voice-acting is good, people tend to listen and enjoy the whole spoken line, if only because some of them sound very authentic and laden with emotion. If voice acting is bad, people will just skip it. In such case, as Fallout 3 proved, it's better to voice only certain characters but make them sound alive than voice every single person and make Washington DC sound like uncanny valley.

Compare this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpcuiWR4Y_8

with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Dk4ps_Oc8

Urgh.
 
Well, Fallout 3 WAS a return to their terminator shooter series. They are very old...
 
archont said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpcuiWR4Y_8
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Anyone know who voice acted this guy? I always loved the conversations with the Enclave guys the best in Fallout 2.

And I was indeed very disappointed at the quality of voice acting in Fallout 3. Holy fuck, the voice acting in this is really, really horrible. Especially when the guy goes "I'm alive, you did it!", it's just so bad.
 
i always compare F:NV to kotor 2.

the are using all same that bethesta use to create their game like bioware, and Obsidian are correction the mistakes and given a better story.

i always thought kotor 2 was better than kotor, even with its fault (broken ending, bugs). so if the Obsidian team can make a story better than bioware i think they will manage to do a better story than bethesta (a easy task XD).

i only hope they try to make the game in better quality than kotor 2, i dont have a problem but some people do.
 
Part of what make Fallout 3 voice-acting sucks is their non-existent facial animations.
Geez, they even got it right in VMTB and it came out back in f*ing 2004.
 
Tremer said:
i always compare F:NV to kotor 2.

the are using all same that bethesta use to create their game like bioware, and Obsidian are correction the mistakes and given a better story.

i always thought kotor 2 was better than kotor, even with its fault (broken ending, bugs). so if the Obsidian team can make a story better than bioware i think they will manage to do a better story than bethesta (a easy task XD).

i only hope they try to make the game in better quality than kotor 2, i dont have a problem but some people do.
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That's all very good and fine, except KotOR was actually a solidly designed game. Unlike it's counterpart in your analogy.
 
Morbus said:
Tremer said:
i always compare F:NV to kotor 2.

the are using all same that bethesta use to create their game like bioware, and Obsidian are correction the mistakes and given a better story.

i always thought kotor 2 was better than kotor, even with its fault (broken ending, bugs). so if the Obsidian team can make a story better than bioware i think they will manage to do a better story than bethesta (a easy task XD).

i only hope they try to make the game in better quality than kotor 2, i dont have a problem but some people do.
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That's all very good and fine, except KotOR was actually a solidly designed game. Unlike it's counterpart in your analogy.
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yea, i know...because of that i think F:NV is going to be much better than F3

if Obsidian can make a better game than a solid designed game(KOTOR), they will have no problem to make a great game compare to F3
 
Santoka said:
Yea, turn based combat is full of immersion....
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You don't have a clue what "immersion" is. I can be immersed by a well written book. That's just black words on a white piece of paper. The entire room around me can be replaced by the images conjured by a well written book.

The style of combat in a game has no bearing in "immersion." I find Fallout 1 to be every bit as immersive as a game like Half-Life 2, or Final Fantasy 6.
 
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