Pop

Atari's in a bit of a spot right now. It looked like they were on the rise there for a few months but Assault on Dark Athena wasn't a huge smash and the Ghostbusters game has some time left to cook still. They sent Phil Harrison out to pasture, and they can't afford to attend E3. I wonder if they have the clout to get a BG3 off the ground, or if any developer would take the risk to build a game on the perilous foundation of Atari's support.

Oh hey what's up

Hurrrr

As indicated here, Wolff is contracted for another 2 months or so. Hopefully the arrangement will get renewed.

New sorta trailer. I'm reminded of how little I liked the male Shepard VA.

The rate of turnover in the gaming industry's pretty high as a rule.

womenz are gross (PS when I say "that's a start" I mean "maybe next time it won't happen", not "we should be quicker on the trigger")

That does seem a bit sexist, yeah. Admittedly the slash writers I happen to know are all women, but still. "poof"? "carth were gay" because of, what, his effeminate tendency to go on and on about his feelings? So your general feeling is that women are gaying up Bioware RPGs? Here I was thinking you were a cut above the game forum rabble. How disappointing.

and yet he ain't as good as the dog? I don't recall ever saying that. I would chalk up the love for Dogmeat to the general dumbnosity of the Fallout public. Or perhaps it was his tendency to live a bit longer than the other party NPCs. I thought Fallout had some interesting characters (ZAX would be another I liked in the original)

I thought Harold was pretty good.

I don't recall Ashley ever identifying as christian. She was a theist for sure, but no denomination was ever indicated.

You mean, a party civil war? I haven't finished NWN2 OC but I believe it was planned for KotoRII. Not intra-party, no, although that does happen. I was referring to the point at which you have to get into the Blacklake District and have to choose between the thieves' guild and the city watch. Depending on which side you chose you would conduct missions differently (raiding a warehouse vs. protecting it, etc.) and the people you reported to in one game might be minibosses in another.

That is kind of sort of what they did with NWN2 upon first entering Neverwinter. You had two distinct sides and you chose which one you sided with. In a new game your allies could be your enemies. Of course that only covered a small portion of the game. Ostensibly there's some of that in Alpha Protocol. Obsidz has talked about the Moscow mission playing out differently, fighting on different sides of a conflict depending on the choices you make.

I do not think this game is very good.

VATS is functional, but it presents clear balance issues that have been beaten into the ground by now. Design flaws are flaws whether or not you choose to put yourself in a position to encounter them or not. Developers ought to care about them, or at least, treat flaws that make a game needlessly easy in the same manner with which they treat flaws that make a game needlessly frustrating. VATS combat was fun but it could've been a lot better if it presented more of a challenge. The purpose of VATS seemed to be the minimizing of challenge. Both were sequels, a more appropriate example would be comparing NWN2 to MOTB. I wouldn't say that just yet. KOTOR2 was in effect KOTOR1 with a lot of bells and whistles added, bells and whistles that can easily be replicated for F:NV. In particular a more in-depth, perhaps skill-based crafting system, and improvements to combat strategy. I don't think Obsidz is going to settle for just making a glorified expansion - as has been pointed before, Fallout 2 was made in roughly the same time frame as F:NV, and it was fairly expansive. I wouldn't underestimate Obsidz, especially if the bulk of the company is going to be brought to bear on NV as soon as Alpha Protocol wraps.

Yeah, you have to make it a river rapids sort of situation where it's happening whether the player likes it or not and it happens quickly. You might have to have a character flat-out say "There's nothing we could have done" afterwards. Like Ame in the beginning of NWN2, but not totally a joke.

To an extent, that's what they did with the end of Fallout 2, though they didn't put a whole lot of effort into it, it was just a victory lap. Problem as I see it is that I've never really had fun playing games beyond the main storyline. This goes for Fallouts as well as the Elder Scrolls and all other games that offer the option. I stopped caring because the world stopped responding dynamically (in whatever small ways it did in the first place) to me, all that was left was grinding and combat. Making the conclusion of the game foregone halfway through has basically the same effect. The whole problem with most RPG endings is that the choices are binary and isolated, not that they take place at the end. Dragging the choices out to the middle of the game doesn't make it any better.

I don't really expect anything included in Fallout 3 to be removed for F:NV. People are calling for integral aspects of combat to be removed because, ostensibly, they sucked, but there's no indication of how the absence of things like VATS will actually make the game more enjoyable. There's a difference between changing something to one-up your predecessors and changing something to better the game. It should probably be stressed that Obsidz is not going to overhaul F3 for NV (unless they use Onyx instead of Gamebryo, which would be a screwball on top of the curveball that is this game existing in the first place) it's not going to be isometric, it's not going to be turn-based, it's going to use VATS. It doesn't make sense to subtract features and add new ones when you can cut out half the work and just add features. It's how Obsidz has worked before.

In the Paleolithic era I brought up the absurdity of groin shots at NMA and it was widely claimed that no, groin shots were not included for humor at all, but instead were included as an easier means of knockout when headshots were less likely to succeed. I found this reasoning to be a bit flawed as I had gone through the Fallouts with super-powerful characters exclusively groin-shotting people for fun (because it was a valid and useful way of doing battle more than anything, of course) and it seemed like I only got knockouts with massive crits. Most crits produced a knockdown with the enemy getting back to his feet directly after the shot. Some crits had recovery the next turn. But it was never as useful as an arm or leg crit. Tactics made groin shots marginally more useful in that they "winded" the opponent, knocking down their max APs.

If there's one thing to be learned from study of Obsidz' prior stints as stewards of franchises it's that they're intent on expanding the concepts behind the games. I would wager that Obsidz is going to add a lot to Fallout 3.

I would really like it if RPGs weren't perpetually calling upon players to endlessly replay the plot of Yojimbo going into every goddamn town on the map. But I don't think there's any way Obsidz is going to avoid that.

As with all other Fallout games, there ought to be a personal motive ostensibly driving the force of the plot. As with most RPGs the narratives in the Fallouts inexorably made out your reasons for striking out into the world as good ones - you had to save the vault, you had to save your village, you had to save your dad. I would hope I'm not alone in that I would like the personal motive at the heart of the Fallout story to be retained, but I would like it if the plot moved more towards the direction of Van Buren or Mask of the Betrayer - you're not out there doing stuff to save Location / Person X, you're doing stuff because your life is at risk. That opens up the moral universe of the game in ways that most RPGs can't manage.

I noticed that too. I chalked it up to a desire on the part of supafans to be against whatever it is that Bethsoft was doing. Perhaps the old Fallouts are too similar to the new ones in their structure. With KOTOR and NWN and other games of their type, when you're on the main quest you're on the main quest, whereas in the Fallouts, you're going to Navarro to pick up the key fob but there are 6 or 7 other different things you can do while you're there, and the steps you have to take to advance the main storyline aren't portrayed as being particularly important. I liked that about Fallouts 1 and 2 (it was more the case in 2 but whatever)

I don't agree with this. While VATS is functional it has the capacity to easily become a "win button" because in many situations it makes skill stats practically meaningless, something Sawyer pointed out some time ago. If you're in VATS melee, for example, you'll never really get below, what, 90 percent hit chance? And the damage difference between a guy with a 30 melee skill and a 50 melee skill is fairly negligible. What's the point of tagging melee when all characters are basically the same with it? Similarly, the real-time nature of combat outside of VATS allows you to close distances between you and your target and similarly negate skill deficiencies with whatever ranged weapons you're using. How do you balance something like that?