RPG Discussion: Fallout, Morrowind, etc
One-Eyed Kijin wrote: »I have not played Fallout 3, because I know I'll be dissappointed. I grew up playing Fallout 1 and 2 - those games are absolute classics, and in many ways Fallout 3 defiled them.
Sorry - you simply can't say that if you haven't played it.
I can't exactly say I "grew up" on the first two Fallouts, because I first started playing games on the ZX Spectrum, a long time before any Fallout game was even conceived (before even Wasteland, the spiritual ancestor of the Fallout franchise). But when I first played them, they were undoubtedly the best games I'd ever played.
A long long time later, Fallout 3 was announced, and I was really very excited. I, for one, was not disappointed, and loved every minute of the month I spent wandering awestruck in the wastes.
Of course, you might not love it - but to condemn it as a defiler of its precursors, without even trying it, well - that's just mean!
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Out of curiosity, have you played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?
I'm personally a bigger fan of Daggerfall and Morrowind, but that's just me.
Same here. It's just that Fallout 3 is cited to have more than enough resemblance with Oblivion. Both games use the same engine, I know, but the resemblance is so much that I can't personally find Fallout 3 a project that took so much work. That, and Fallout 3 brought unexpected (yet unneeded) changes to the franchise. You know...
...I just wanted to say Fallout 3 sucked.
Please, I must find out why Fallout 3 sucked, because I own all 4 games, and wanted to know what was so different about it?
Because it was soooo boring
No sarcasm towards me, please.
It wasn't boring, I mean sometime walking was but I still think it was the best game, other than MGS4.
Try playing a character with 10 intelligence. Then try playing one with an Intelligence lower than 4. Even though it's perhaps the game's most powerfully affective attribute, you can more than half the stat and play through the game without a problem. On the other hand, in Fallout 1 and 2, the way you set up your character mattered. You set your intelligence below average, and your communication with the world is crippled. It's even a fun extra game in itself, an extra challenge to play through the game as a retard(in a game world that recognizes and creates new interactions for characters with particularly low intelligence).
Another thing about Intelligence, the dialog options. In Fallout 1 and 2, an Intelligence option meant your character made an interesting observation, saw a flaw in something, or otherwise was being INTELLIGENT. In Fallout 3, it means you can repeat what the other person said in simpleton speak.
And the problem isn't just Intelligence, it's the entire damn stat system. The numbers are just about pointless, as their effect is extremely watered down in comparison to the original games. I have several characters of EXTREMELY different builds, but they all play more or less the same if I give them the same equipment, because the numbers have surprisingly little bearing. In Fallout 2, one point in a stat makes a world of difference. In Fallout 3, you could put no thought into your stats at all and make it through just fine. In fact, I worked to *intentionally* gimp a character in skills and stats. He played more or less fine, with the largest effect being locked out of rooms and computers, and getting less skill points per turn.
Speaking of RPG elements that are so watered-down that they could just toss them out entirely and nobody would notice, tag skills. You get +10 to three skills. This is NOT going to create a character whose expertise in those skills. In Fallout 2, your tag skill doubled the points you added to that skill at level-up. This drastically changed your character and defined how they played almost as much as their stats.
Combat. I actually kind of like Fallout 3's idea of a combat system enough, but I will always be more of the type to play a turn-based system on a grid. And the combat in Fallout 3 is topheavy and clumsy. While VATS provide accuracy percentages, shots in "real time" always hit. Headshots are so ludicrously overpowered that going for anything else is stupid except in a couple extreme circumstances.
You can't kill kids. Fine, you're making a mainstream game, and it's far less controversial for me to kill their parents and Old Violin Radio Lady than them. I guess I can understand that. But then why do you take the town of the most ANNOYING people in the whole game and make them KIDS? Or are kids just meant to be written in the most annoying fashion possible? Because I hated those kids. Yes, I did want to open fire on those bastards. They're HORRIBLE LITTLE JERKS.
Hey, how about those companions?
They're idiots.
These guys will run in front of my bullets while I'm sneaking, and not realize I'm there. This nets me an insta-kill sneak bonus, apparently. This sucks. And apparently, they were a more or less last-minute addition, despite how they hurt the final mission of the story, because somebody thought they were cool. I'll dig up the interview if pressed, but do I really want to? Not particularly. It's ancillary anyway, it's part of the bigger problem of THE AI IS DUMB. Enemies are dumb. Friends are dumb. Citizens of small towns miles away are being dumb while I'm gone, hurling themselves off bridges for no apparent reason. EVERYONE IN FALLOUT 3 IS AS DUMB AS YOU ARE.
The quests are easy. The compass is easy. The combat is easy. Leveling up may just as well randomly assign everything outside of perhaps the perks, because the game is easy and the equations at the core of the game are built to coddle you and make sure you don't screw up.
The canon. They've raped it. Outside of the Mothership Zeta shit that was the last straw for me, there's the factions. They not only picked up factions from the West Coast and compelled them by stupid non-logic to come to the west coast. They then CHANGED these factions, so that they might as well have been some other group of people ANYWAY. The Brotherhood of Steel is the worst offender, and sadly we see a lot of these guys.
See, I think Bethesda's writers were sad that they couldn't write for Oblivion's Imperial Knights anymore. Then they thought, hey, these guys are in big metal suits. Like suits of armor. They could totally pass for fantasy knights.
Except that's not what they're supposed to be, and now everybody's perception of the guys is completely wrong. Now, there is a small, out of the way group of REAL brotherhood out in the middle of nowhere. In fact, when they DO speak, they're probably the best-written characters in the game. But they're so much of a side-element that everyone's perception of the Brotherhood of Steel from now on is going to be warped beyond repair. It hurts the franchise. The Enclave has its own smaller set of issues, but I generally feel like letting them slide a bit because I really liked Eden on the whole.
There's a novel's worth more of text I'm sure I could give, and a ton more examples that are a good deal more precise, but these are some broader issues that keep the game from being great. And this is just the vanilla game, which I overall think is OKAY. We aren't even getting into the DLC, which I outright hate.
In any case, continue to discuss the topic here, but it's no longer relevant to Sam and Max!
I enjoyed Fallout 3 none the less, although I haven't played that Mothership Zeta DLC and I don't plan on it. I enjoyed Oblivion too.
I enjoy most RPGs really, it's the only genre I'm quite tolerant with.
First of all, when I'm sneaking, my ally is sneaking with me. They should know that I'm there. When they run in front of me like an idiot, they should not get killed because my sneaking is so amazing that taking an eye off me for a second renders my pal completely incapable of knowing where I am. I could understand if I nicked some damage off them, but I get a sneak-enhanced SuperKill.
Secondly, my friends should be in the same state as I am. When I shoot while sneaking, they should not see this as a cue to go running into the battlefield like a suicidal maniac. They should take that as a cue to try shooting while sneaking as well.
Thirdly, this was in VATS, and it happened more than once. Yes, my shot that was aimed through VATS to hit my enemy went through my pal's head. The computer KNEW where my shot was intended to go, I told it where to go. When I chose to shoot someone in Fallout 2, my turn wouldn't come just to have my bullet go zooming toward someone else entirely. The characters didn't just rearrange so that my pals would end up with a bullet in their head. This is essentially what I got.
Ah, yes. The DLC that says "Balance? Who the fuck cares about THAT? YOU'RE BADASS here's some cheat codes". You get to max out everything no matter HOW retarded your stat sheet is set up, and while they were at it they completely ruined the ending because they have absolutely no balls whatsoever.
Mass Effect tried my patience in that aspect. It made some areas which had alot of enemies in really tough.
Oblivion on the other hand I was less keen on. While Fallout 3 felt like a streamlining of the older games, Oblivion was straight up dumbing down. They removed so much of the exploration, freedom and adventuring it was almost insulting to consider it an Elder Scrolls game.
The lore and backstory elements also held up pretty well.. but I was just very disappointed with the game. I really hope they follow the recent trend of games like Dragon Age and Demon's Souls. Games don't need to be simple to be popular, people really aren't that dumb. Please no regenerating health and arrows pointing towards every single objective.
As for Oblivion, it was my entry into the Elder Scrolls universe (had heard of Morrowind but it just sort of passed me by) and I have to say it was the simplicity of it that got me hooked on it. I'm not in a position to compare Oblivion with past Elder Scrolls games but personally I enjoyed it even though I'm not really a fan of 'fantasy' RPGs (swords & magic & stuff - much prefer modern/post apocalyptic settings like Fallout or just plain good SF like KotoR).
Otherwise, it's a great game, and in many important aspects, better than Oblivion. But I loved Oblivion for its setting and atmosphere, the graphics were great, the fighting was excellent and revolutionary for its time.
I think a lot of the 'no killing kids' actually comes from government censorship boards rather than Bethesda itself. The European releases of Fallout 1 and 2 removed all the children from the game because EU censors were so worried by the thought of virtual child murder. While this does mean there's no risk of getting pickpocketed in the Den, it also means that finding the tanner's kid in Fallout 2 is impossible. I can only assume that these censorship boards believe that killing a child in a video game = killing children in real life. Apparently they'd rather have us believe that children are bulletproof.
Actually I'm sure that still happened as I seem to remember being very puzzled by items occasionally just disappearing from my inventory at random. It wasn't until a fair while later that I read on the internet that kids had been removed from the game, badly as well, especially with leaving a whole quest line undo-able (I just originally thought that it was a bug in my game, same with the disappearing items) - seemed to me they just stopped the game rendering the sprites of the children leaving all their scripts and related quest lines intact. Ever since I've always used a patch to put the kids back in just so that some parts of the game made sense.
I understand why they had to do that, they just could have done it better like the way Bethesda did it in F3.
I don't want to get into an argument about the moral implications of it all but it is a bit daft to basically ban the killing of kids in video games (not that I'm saying I'm all for that mind you) but to then still allow the selling of kids as slaves.
Well, actually, i'd rather HAVE A GOAL you know? Open ended bores me in an rpg.
But yeah, gotta play fallout... if I can get it running on my pc.
Is Dragon age any good btw? Baring in mind, I consider Baldur's gate 2 and Planescape: Torment to be the greatest rpgs ever, which should give you an idea of the style of game I enjoy from my rpgs. NWN managed to redeem itself via expansion packs, the main campaign was... bitty and muddled. The expansions were awesome.
I suck at rts games... if there's rts elements, the likelyhood is i'll die a lot and get annoyed and give up. Sad isn't it? I'm such an uncoordinated gamer.
Yet in NWN, nope.. immortal... and they chase you across the map and hit you. It's ANNOYING.
If I want to kill kids in a video game, i'll damn well do it. Stupid censors, video games do NOT EQUAL REAL LIFE!
And if the kid attacks me because I murdered their annoying dog, why must I then reload the bloody game because the kid wont leave me alone!??
If you like Baldur's Gate and Planescape, you'll *love* Bioware's stuff. Dragon Age, Mass Effect, KoTOR... all stellar examples of storytelling in RPGs.