Tycho of Penny Arcade had some comments on the Fallout 3 combat/viewpoint controversy:<blockquote>I have seen opinions running the rage on the Fallout 3 Teaser, but I brave those forums daily - I'm well over the DRI for franchise-related anguish. The clip is not designed to shock or startle people, it has only one purpose - to deliver a high-pressure jet of fan service. Of course, many of the hardcore fans are actually irritated by such brazen attempts to placate them. And thus we see the heavy stone, and also the steep hill, and look! There's Sisyphus, waving madly. Is he greeting us, or warning us?
I consider myself a fan of Fallout, at any rate I did before, and I was grieved to see it ransacked at the hands of an increasingly desperate Interplay. But it's become clear that what makes it Fallout to me is very different than it is for other fans. We ran into the same issue with Tribal War over Tribes 2, culminating in a brutal conflict that pitted gamer against gamer. As it relates to Fallout, I am distinguished from what you might call the Orthodox fan of the series. One is that I simply believe that elements like Turn-Based and Isometric were artifacts of their time. There is nothing wrong with them mechanically, they do not want for elegance, and the genre is still going strong in Japanese titles that I play and enjoy. But I'm not going to create a religion out of it because tiled environments happened to be expedient a million fucking years ago.
Fallout is not - for me - defined by its perspective. It's defined by the unique setting, and the meaningful, satisfying choices I can make to affect that setting. I don't care where the camera is. If those things are intact, they can put the camera in geosynchronous Goddamn orbit.
(CW)TB out.</blockquote>Turn-based and isometric are outdated? Not exactly original arguments. Since saying Brotherhood of Steel was terrible doesn't exactly give any Fallout street cred anymore, it's a shame that Tim of CAD didn't mention the topic in his post about the teaser, since CAD *does* have Fallout street cred.
Of more interest, Ricardo "socrates200X" Gonzalez commented:<blockquote>[twocents]
I can see where people are coming from when they say "TB combat is a relic" by looking at where TB combat is coming from. Fallout was TB because GURPS was TB because all the original PnP games were TB because...why?
Well, originally, people wanted to create some sort of interactive story whereby players could affect the outcome with their avatars, or "role-play", in an exciting world filled with adventures and bad guys. But, once you introduce bad guys, you introduce combat, and once you introduce combat, you need some way to represent it in an organized way that still preserves all the tactical decisions the avatars would make were they in said adventures. You couldn't have RPG players feverishly yelling out battle commands in the heat of the moment with sharpened pencils and Mountain Dew within arm's reach; that's a recipe for disaster, but more to the point, very difficult to organize on paper without over-simplifying things.
So, we have the players and baddies take turns, turn-based tactics being well-established from the days of Go. But, looking at it this way, the decision to go TB was a limitation rather than an innovation. It wasn't that TB "just fit" with what the original RPG creators were trying to accomplish. On the contrary, they were trying to capture the essence of real-time combat with the tools of pen-and-paper and they had no better options at the time.
Putting on our "What If?" caps, we can ask what would have happened if the original RPG creators had in their game design toolbox the resources of, say, a modern video game development studio replete with state-of-the-art technology and competent developers, including one very erudite and devilishly handsome programmer? With the ability to implement real-time combat, the desire to ground it in innovative tactical game design, and the computation power to tie everything together, would they have still used turn-based combat? Or real-time combat? Or something altogether different? What do you guys think?
That being said, I don't think Halo comes any closer to capturing the essence of tactical combat just by virtue of being real-time, nor does GURPS or Fallout not capture it by virtue of being turn-based. And the argument that removing TB combat from Fallout could very well destroy it is a valid one and worth asking. But I don't think that makes TB combat any less of a work-around than it originally was designed to be.
[/twocents]
(...)
Like most peeps, I'm not pro-TB or pro-RT, per se; just interested in the interaction between the two concepts and their ramifications. Thanks for the responses, guys; it's given me a veritable feast for thought!
P.S. Given my NDA leash, it follows that anything I discuss probably has nothing to do with FO3. Using this handy fact, one could fairly accurately determine what is FO3 is definitely not and thus, as the number of dev posts approaches infinity, could reconstruct the game via process of elimination, given enough time and caffeine. Get to work!</blockquote>Link: thread on BGS forum
Thanks Briosafreak.
I consider myself a fan of Fallout, at any rate I did before, and I was grieved to see it ransacked at the hands of an increasingly desperate Interplay. But it's become clear that what makes it Fallout to me is very different than it is for other fans. We ran into the same issue with Tribal War over Tribes 2, culminating in a brutal conflict that pitted gamer against gamer. As it relates to Fallout, I am distinguished from what you might call the Orthodox fan of the series. One is that I simply believe that elements like Turn-Based and Isometric were artifacts of their time. There is nothing wrong with them mechanically, they do not want for elegance, and the genre is still going strong in Japanese titles that I play and enjoy. But I'm not going to create a religion out of it because tiled environments happened to be expedient a million fucking years ago.
Fallout is not - for me - defined by its perspective. It's defined by the unique setting, and the meaningful, satisfying choices I can make to affect that setting. I don't care where the camera is. If those things are intact, they can put the camera in geosynchronous Goddamn orbit.
(CW)TB out.</blockquote>Turn-based and isometric are outdated? Not exactly original arguments. Since saying Brotherhood of Steel was terrible doesn't exactly give any Fallout street cred anymore, it's a shame that Tim of CAD didn't mention the topic in his post about the teaser, since CAD *does* have Fallout street cred.
Of more interest, Ricardo "socrates200X" Gonzalez commented:<blockquote>[twocents]
I can see where people are coming from when they say "TB combat is a relic" by looking at where TB combat is coming from. Fallout was TB because GURPS was TB because all the original PnP games were TB because...why?
Well, originally, people wanted to create some sort of interactive story whereby players could affect the outcome with their avatars, or "role-play", in an exciting world filled with adventures and bad guys. But, once you introduce bad guys, you introduce combat, and once you introduce combat, you need some way to represent it in an organized way that still preserves all the tactical decisions the avatars would make were they in said adventures. You couldn't have RPG players feverishly yelling out battle commands in the heat of the moment with sharpened pencils and Mountain Dew within arm's reach; that's a recipe for disaster, but more to the point, very difficult to organize on paper without over-simplifying things.
So, we have the players and baddies take turns, turn-based tactics being well-established from the days of Go. But, looking at it this way, the decision to go TB was a limitation rather than an innovation. It wasn't that TB "just fit" with what the original RPG creators were trying to accomplish. On the contrary, they were trying to capture the essence of real-time combat with the tools of pen-and-paper and they had no better options at the time.
Putting on our "What If?" caps, we can ask what would have happened if the original RPG creators had in their game design toolbox the resources of, say, a modern video game development studio replete with state-of-the-art technology and competent developers, including one very erudite and devilishly handsome programmer? With the ability to implement real-time combat, the desire to ground it in innovative tactical game design, and the computation power to tie everything together, would they have still used turn-based combat? Or real-time combat? Or something altogether different? What do you guys think?
That being said, I don't think Halo comes any closer to capturing the essence of tactical combat just by virtue of being real-time, nor does GURPS or Fallout not capture it by virtue of being turn-based. And the argument that removing TB combat from Fallout could very well destroy it is a valid one and worth asking. But I don't think that makes TB combat any less of a work-around than it originally was designed to be.
[/twocents]
(...)
Like most peeps, I'm not pro-TB or pro-RT, per se; just interested in the interaction between the two concepts and their ramifications. Thanks for the responses, guys; it's given me a veritable feast for thought!
P.S. Given my NDA leash, it follows that anything I discuss probably has nothing to do with FO3. Using this handy fact, one could fairly accurately determine what is FO3 is definitely not and thus, as the number of dev posts approaches infinity, could reconstruct the game via process of elimination, given enough time and caffeine. Get to work!</blockquote>Link: thread on BGS forum
Thanks Briosafreak.
and I still do, although favorite systems are Cyberpunk and Rifts.
