cogar66 said:
Looks pretty good so far. The fact that they say it's less combat based is a huge plus. I really hope they make it look a lot better though. It looks like a PS2 era game.
Yeah, that was a major concern of mine. While Obsidian has a pretty good track record as far as good writing and non-combat gameplay is involved, I was still really worried that Bethesda would worm its slimy fingers into the game design in some way.
Sadly though, this one really doesn't tell us alot about any major changes to the engine Obsidian might be attempting. They seem to be returning to the series alot of options that were missing in Fallout 3 (emphasis on dialogue trees and skills, modifiable weapons and increased difficulty) and that's a great thing, but the Oblivion engine is pretty buggy and Bethesda never really worked to hard to iron out the kinks in it. The vanilla version of Fallout 3 was buggy and prone to crashing. So I'm actually really curious if Obsidian's doing any work to make the software run any smoother.
I was interested in one thing in this article though. The comment that at first level the super mutants were "worse then Deathclaws any day" kinda stands out. The difficulty scaling system in Fallout 3 made super mutants a joke. At first level you could take on a pair of minigun wielding super mutants while armed with only a hunting rilfe and a few stimpacks, and you'd have a good chance at sucess.
By indicating that the super mutants were extremely difficult at first level, that might imply that Obsidian has either toned down, or completely ditched the scaling difficulty system.
If they'd be willing to do that, then it might open the door for other significant changes to the gameplay. For instance, the scaling nature of weapons in Fallout 3. As you leveled weapons would do more and more damage, which helped you deal with enemies that grew in power as well. But this also meant that laser pistols (which were available at 1st level in a store) were almost as weak as the starting pistols, just alot more expensive. But if you're ditching a scaling difficulty setting, it would also make more sense to ditch a scaling weapon damage system as well. otherwise you'd end up with a situation where high level players were easily killing supermutants armed with nothing but a .22 rifle, which would make the exciting mid to end game weapons alot less impressive.
Any thoughts?
