Stag said:
I don't want a discussion, at least not until I get a good amount of responses.
I would like to know your stances on Fallout 3, and specifically:
Fallout and Fallout 2 are among my favourite games of all-time, and I played both of them extensively when they were first released. Wasteland was one of my favourite games on my old C-64 (along with Bard's Tale III and Pool of Radiance), and I grew up playing "traditional" CRPGs -- on both computer and console -- throughout my teenage years and my twenties.
I am pretty excited about Fallout 3, and everything that I have read and seen so far about it -- which includes everything linked to on this site's news page -- indicates that it's going to be an amazing game and that Bethesda has nailed the style, tone, and themes of the original Fallout almost perfectly. Will it be an identical experience to Fallout 1 and 2? Of course not, nor do I want it to be; if that's what I wanted, I would play Fallout 1 or 2 again.
An extremely trivial "feature" from the game, most likely mentioned by the developer being interviewed simply to lighten the mood, and has now been taken drastically out of context and blown up to ridiculous proportions by the fans.
Nobody said that stimpacks and "traditional" ways of healing in Fallout are not in the game. Drinking water will heal you a small amount (which is far better than having to monitor a "thirst meter" such as in Dark Cloud on the PS2), and giving the example of being able to drink from a toilet demonstrates the level of consistency in the world design and the amount of thought that goes into trying to cover everything that a player might try to do in the game.
Looking good so far, and seems very much based on the dialogue system in Fallout 1 and 2. The fact that there isn't an entirely separate branch of dialogue options for characters of low Intelligence doesn't bother me in the least. It was good for a cheap laugh in the original games, but certainly wasn't a way I wanted to play the entire game.
Unless they are going to penalize low Intelligence characters in other aspects of the game, such as forcing you to fail to solve a puzzle even when you, as a player, have figured it out or forcing you to make stupid tactical decisions in combat -- you have to stay in-character, after all -- then it's an inconsistent and ultimately pointless "option" to include.
I don't think that traditional dialogue trees are the ultimate evolution in interactive conversations, either. Honestly, the dialogue system that Bioware has been previewing from Mass Effect is far more intriguing than what we've been seeing in RPGs since the early 90s. The conversation system in the Elder Scrolls games is utterly dull and uninteresting, however; but from what we've seen, the conversations in Fallout 3 are not going to be like that.
Don't see the problem with it. So it's a slingshot/catapult/whatever that launches little nuclear grenades. It's probably an amusing but rather inaccurate weapon that may very well damage you or bystanders. I highly doubt it will have a prominent role in the game; it's just a fun and slightly amusing weapon to run around the demo with.
An amusing novelty weapon like the Fat Man, above. I don't see it playing a prominent role in the game. Just a cool way to show off the physics engine and dispose of extra junk that you're carrying around in a useful manner.
G.O.A.T. character creation.
I honestly like this sort of in-game character creation that doesn't explicitly remind me that I'm playing an RPG. It's more fun if you just answer the questions honestly rather than try to play the system to get the results you want (i.e. the gypsy fortune-telling in Ultima). The previews said that you can skip it or override it if you want and distribute your attribute points and skill points on your own, so I don't see why any reasonable person would object to it being an option. I thought that we liked options, as Fallout fans?
I think it's a cool idea to have your character's father reflect your choices in character creation. He's a good actor with a voice that players might actually want to listen to and not skip over. I like voice acting in RPGs, as long as it's done well and the writing doesn't suffer. Good examples: Knights of the Old Republic I & II, Jade Empire. Bad examples: Ultima IX.
I don't see how having your father's disappearance as a plot device to get you out of the vault is really any different than sending you out in search of a water chip or the G.E.C.K. They're just a game-world incentive to get your character on his or her way, and at least this time there is a more personal nature to your quest.
Weapons being degraded over time.
So long as it doesn't happen too quickly and you can repair them (which you can), I'm okay with it. It wasn't a problem in Betrayal at Krondor and it wasn't overly irritating in Morrowind. Other games made it a huge pain in the ass though (The Summoning, Drakhan II)
How the environment has been translated.
I think it's a pretty faithful translation of the old 256-colour mode tilesets into a full 3D environment. The look of the environments so far feel very faithful to the themes and styling of the originals, as far as I am concerned.
One major problem with the original games' environments is that they were extremely repetitive, as is often the case with tile-based games. In any given town, every building looked pretty much identical but conformed to a slightly different rectangular shape. Oh, and they were different sizes, too. It is a challenge to really convey a sense of scale in a 2D isometric view engine, particularly in terms of vertical scale.
-Kharn/Brother/Sister Nun mentioned that I left ou the VATS. This isn't intentional, though I think it's been discussed a lot already. If you want to to talk about that, that's fine.
The VATS is a way of incorporating the targeting system from the original games into a real-time combat interface.
"Twitch-based" gameplay is largely a matter of pacing rather than the simple fact that it takes place in real-time. Your accuracy with ranged weapons is still affected by your weapon skills, and from the previews I see ranged combat very much like the original Deus Ex and the ranged combat in Daggerfall and Morrowind. You make the decision to act in real-time, but your success rate is largely determined by your character's skills.
Not having specific "Eyes" and "Groin" targets doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Choices are really only meaningful if they give different results, and in actual play shooting your enemy in the eyes or in the head in the original games didn't generally have very different results. The only times that I ever really blinded opponents was when I had a lower skill level and weaker guns. As soon as my Small Guns skill hit 150+ and I found better weapons, the vast majority of critical hits to the eyes simply killed the opponents instantly.
The point isn't to make it "realistic," which isn't really possible, but to give the player meaningful choices.
I make a similar argument when referring to the elimination or combination of some skills from the previous game (likewise in the consolidation of skills from Daggerfall to Morrowind to Oblivion). A greater number of skills is not necessarily better, nor does it necessarily translate to more choices for the player. When there are choices that are obviously stronger and more widely useful and choices that are obviously weaker and less widely useful, then the meaning of that choice is diminished.
"Traps" in Fallout 1 and 2 was not a skill that I ever found worth taking. "Lockpicking" was a lot more useful, but was still a bit on the weak side. Combining the two into "Security" creates a much more meaningful choice as now you have to seriously consider "Security" on the same level as a skill like "Small Guns." I noticed that the Van Buren demo had combined these two skills into "Security," so I'm not alone in that thinking.
"Bartering" was similarly a rather weak and rarely useful skill. Folding it into "Speech" is logical, and while "Speech" was already one of the more useful skills, having it affect prices when trading doesn't make the skill unbalanced.
"Doctor" and "First Aid" are both on the weak side, particularly "Doctor." The two are highly related, and it would make much more sense to me to combine the two and simply have the features of the "Doctor" skill only be available at high levels of the "First Aid" skill.
Given that Fallout places a higher emphasis on guns and ranged combat than hand-to-hand combat, I could make a compelling argument to combine the "Melee" and "Unarmed" combat skills, but it looks like Bethesda has chosen to keep them separate.
To my way of thinking, having a dozen skill choices of relatively equal strength and usefulness provides far more meaningful choices than having two dozen skills where six of them are clearly more useful and are overall stronger choices and where another six are not useful enough in the game to warrant spending points on them.
Choices and consequences are very important concepts in Fallout, but if you aren't really sacrificing anything that useful to pick the stronger options, then there really aren't any consequences.
