Tigranes

You got to stretch reality to make a game somewhere and I'm fine with having a suspiciously large amount of pre-war stuff lying around, whether it be 50 or 200 years after the war. But in FO1/2 each town and settlement had a plausible mechanism for survival and prosperity, with the exception of, say, New Reno. There were farms, Vault City had its GECK, etc. It didn't always make perfect sense and was exaggerated (I mean, how good is that GECK), but at least it kept the game of illusions up. In FO3 there are vague references to 'wandering traders' (which are a pale shadow of the Hub caravan routes and such) and... heck I forget exactly how Little Lamplight subsists (did they explain?), but FO3 makes so little sense on this front that, combined with the huge abundance of pre-war food, just stands out too much while not adding to the story or gameplay at all. Same deal with all that brown; sure the rocky wasteland is a FO trademark, but did the entire FO3 map have to come from the exact same two colour tones and rock types? How exactly would some foliage and nature have hurt the game? It's a question of degrees, and what purpose is being served by these decisions. If reality is bent to an acceptable degree, masked decently in order to serve a specific gameplay/story/setting benefit, yeah, go for it. In this context, asking questions like "but this isn't the real world so what?" or "other games bend reality too right?" makes zero sense.

Take me, Mr Flies! Take me now in your arms! OK, Good things never last forever, and it's all gone pretty OT now, so... (We really must revive TOMBS)

Yep. Though like the NWN series, I wouldn't want to be playing from that angle anyway.

Honestly, I hope they stick with the "+century after" timeframe then represent it properly this time - a lot of greenery and foliage grown back up, new forms of civilisation, society, government and culture growing that are not primarily based on scavenging and sucking off the fading remainders of the prewar world (because that's hardly possible anymore) but something truly 'post'-apocalyptic that now has a life of its own. New Vegas may not be able to bring us a completely new combat system or whatnot, but I'd be disappointed to find more sepia brown rocks, more abandoned buildings full of food and such.

Rosh was great. We need to get Rosh and Vince over here for a cataclysmic e-wrestling competition. We already have Volourn. I don't think anybody in the thread really disagrees about storytelling/vis.atm by the way... this is what happens when we do silly stuff like trying to define 'RPG' Oh god, no! Don't do it! Don't-

He was clearly holding auditions for his new harem. I finally bought a keyboard to get back into shape on that. Fishing around for some easy but fun-ish pieces to work on, classical. Any tips?

Which is fantastic, because it means the PC version may be able to show whatever keys you choose to select for the dialogue wheel.

It's super boring the second time you have to sit there and gaa gaa while your dad comes back. Temple of Trials was boring as hell as well, but you'd think Bethesda would learn from a publisher-forced, immersion-stretching, publicly-disavowed affair that was ToT. But then, even the best tutorials suffer from unskipability (Irenicus' Dungeon, Peragus, etc).

The way they did this was great. I just couldn't care about Amata because everything in her dialogue, voice acting and behaviour suggested a generic, honey-sweet, unconvincing "Really Likes You And Passively Accepts Everything You Do And Will Help You Out And Give You Tips" videogame invention. (Like our certain Bioware-engineered friend...) Then, you go to Moira and even though I couldn't stand the disgusting voice acting and half of what she said made no sense (nonsense is not always wacky, e.g. see Ctrl Alt Del's crazy chef = not funny, just crap), at least they tried to give her some sort of angle and personality. Nevertheless, the way they delivered Amata was good; I think most of the problem lay in the fact that you couldn't skip it in subsequent playthroughs, as you say.

The Shryke breed is interesting, I know a couple and it turns out that they really have no idea if what they're saying is right, or why they're popular with the ladies. Like the rest of mankind. Except whatever pops into their head works, I guess.

It's strange. Fallout is the perfect setting for a very personal and small-scale story about a guy in the Wasteland, without the need for regional/national organisations & factions being blown up, the world being saved and the ocean being de-radiated. Yet as we've seen with the latest BOS/Enclave love-fest, each game, to some degree, has fallen for that. I can understand how difficult it would be to make the game compelling without that stuff, at least in the traditional RPG narrative model, and the name 'New Vegas' screams 'New Reno' to me anyway, but... we can hope.

In Morrowind at least you could use Jump, Levitate, etc at higher levels to bypass the critters. In FO3 you just have to run like hell for ages (same with originals, really, up till the exit grid).

Perhaps the lack of reading comprehension skills 'Rohugh' laments in the screenie can also be found closer to home: Y'know we're pretty cool with whatever you guys want to talk about, but we don't want to be like the guy who have a party in their house, and couple of peeps come over and start slagging off this other guy you know from work, and you feel sort of bad that these peeps are sitting in your house taking pot shots at your colleagues, and then your colleagues listen in from outside the window and throw a particularly wet tomato aimed at your head, and you've got a date that night so you really did your hair up well and... Uh, okay. Just, common sense right? Different forums have different moderation policies. Discuss that if you like, but not the best place here to criticise or dig up dirt.

Actually, I firmly believe that every game should have its own -Kart spinoff.

What's simple?

The long term effects have got to be the worst GD, I'm really sorry to hear that you can't make a complete recovery. Are there going to be any other things that'll knock you over later on? I hope it doesn't affect your new job (how is that?) and such.

Yep. Long since confirmed fact - FO3 engine.

CrashGirl: This is aaaaaaages ago, but I was saying that I thought if you stop after the big explosion then you can avoid the endgame. I didn't realise that is too late though? I suppose Vault 112 really is the point of no return? I had in fact become bored of the game after about 25 hours; I had found about 100 locations and I could tell that though there was a lot left to the world, ti was going to be exactly the same. Additionally, from ~level 12 (despite mods to nerf VATS and SPECIAL and bobbleheads) combat broke and you became a God in true Elder Scrolls tradition, so I wasn't having as much fun. So I decided to check the key areas I really wanted to see before I finished, which included Harold-land, those satellite dishes and the Republic of Dave. Harold basically epitomised the limitations of Bethesda storytelling / quest design for me. There is an element of choice, there are clearly branching storylines and 'consequences', but it always is let down by (a) the fact that stories don't make sense on close inspection, (b) everything is so fast, so speeded up, and the dialogue pretty much screams the conclusions at you, so that you feel like you're playing a speeded up version of an RPG; © the dialogue quality is poor. Even if Harold becoming the 'Tree-God' thing is really really silly, there were silly cults before in FO and for me, even if it doensn't fit the setting, it could have been a very sad, emotional dialogue with Harold, or those wastelanders who are out there clinging to this weird ritual. Instead it's just... 'what the hell'.

Hurlshot, Arcanum is extremely unbalanced and has a ton of exploits, glitches and weird situations that are nearly impossible to ignore. For all that it is a wonderful game... and of course nothing like the Witcher. Would like to see CDP do well and be in for the long haul, but 3 Witcher projects sound like one too many. Hopefully Witcher 2 will continue the franchise and they can do some other things, too.

Usually the funniest LPs are from 'funny' games, games that provide funny situations, screens, lines or such. e.g. Arcanum is not the best IMO because you have to spend so long explaining. FO2 is decent because of all the wacky stuff; strategy LPs are obviously suitable. Oblivion/FO3 could work too, actually.

Codex has somehilarious LPs actually. I keep thinking of doing one but forget, then end up playing too far ahead (and now my internet is too crap for screenies).

Called shots are a good addition to any Fallout, but not having groin/eyes is not a big loss. If anything I'd like the recent trend of excruciatingly annoying slow motion + physically nonsensical every-time-a-bloody-mess to be reversed. A bigger focus on things like crippling legs, shooting weapons to disarm (which was present in FO3 but often harder to do than head-shotting) would be cool. Wombat: It makes sense to me. If Obsidian were building their own engine for NV, for instance, I would argue for both an old-school World Map travel style over seamless world, and a new combat system without VATS. But realistically I don't see either happening. And without major overhauls, my opinion is that you're better off preserving the fundamental pillars of gameplay that are built into the engine - seamless worlds and RT/VATS combat. Just modifying and tweaking. Comes from using Fast Reply all the time... oh wait, I did it again.

Mom just called me at work, apparently it was one of the first items on the prime time news here in NZ. Which is fair enough, given that a few students have possibly brought the flu to the country. There is cause for worry, certainly, and it doesn't hurt to be careful (including irrational fears of pork, probably)... but as LC says it's not a huge outbreak yet.

Once again, the 'problematic' part I refer to is not just 'getting it done'. I fail to see a net advantage in the gameplay experience if you strip out the seamless wandering in a game & engine built around the concept of seamless wandering, introduce random encounters in a closed map to a game which generates fun through finding enemies and encounters within that seamless world, and provide the singular benefit of being able to provide a more diverse range of areas (which is a pretty big +, though).

Still going through IWD2 pretty slowly. Really feeling like there isn't a good game to excite me at the moment, since MOW is hung up by DRM, AP/DA is a while away and... well ETW will probably take longer than those 2 to be fixed. Forgot just how tough those dwarf thrall fighters can be when you fight the illithid guarding the twin gates to the illithid citadel. They take a while to go down and keep hitting you for huge chunks of damage. Pretty good will save as well from what I remember. After a couple of reloads took down the illithid and the mages quickly, holed up in a corner and used a lot of flame strikes. Now about to do the Chult Dragon, which would be a great fight if it didn't lag every single time.