J.E. Sawyer

I understand that not everyone enjoys those aspects, which is why it's purely optional. In Call of Pripyat, I don't make food runs; I carry a small amount of food with me, regularly eat from inventory, and loot dead stalkers/bandits for food when I need to. When I allocate that weight in inventory, it's a trade off for more ammo, first aid kits, anti-radiation medicine, etc. I enjoy it, but I don't think people are bad/dumb for not enjoying it.

I haven't been libertarian - in any sense of the word - for several years.

Please critique those game play elements in your own words instead of modifying mine.

Eating/sleeping are in STALKER: Call of Pripyat and honestly it never feels annoying. It's just something you have to strategically plan for by carrying a small amount of food and returning to base occasionally. CoP also uses ammo weight, so inventory management is more involved overall.

Step up to the big leagues. http://cdn.gameist.com/static/contentimage...-controller.jpg

I'm pretty skeptical/don't think there's evidence to support suggestions that Ubisoft's losses are tied to their DRM policies. Assassin's Creed 2 was one of the best games of 2009 (IMO).

In F3 that was actually the result of a bad ragdoll constraint on the yao guai. A couple of other creatures had similar problems, I believe. But anyway, I think the ragdoll was causing creatures like yao guai to go shooting off into the sky sometimes even from mundane deaths.

The Super Mutant heads were remodeled and the body texture was mirrored so the artist could devote more space to the head texture.

I have never heard/seen anything about these games beyond the titles that would lead me to believe they have anything to do with Nietzschean philosophy. To quote the man himself, "Die mystischen Erkl

A DM who allows reloads = a bad DM.

It depends on the context, but whether or not we allow you to repeat has less to do with realism/plausibility and more to do with not penalizing the player for encountering a challenge at the "wrong" time in his/her build. If most of the safes you encountered in the wasteland wouldn't allow you to pick them after the first time they were examined, that would be kind of irritating. The "you're going to fail" options aren't present in dialogue so the player can select them and see the wacky response to their incompetence (although that does have some appeal), but to let the player know that there's a challenge there that they can't currently meet. Unless you're being directly confronted (e.g. the ambush scenario you described), allowing the player to return and attempt the challenge with a higher skill is less punitive and does reward players who choose to go and advance their skills -- whether that's through leveling up, using chems, or reading skill magazines. Magazines and chems only provide a small boost though, so if the threshold is 80 and you have 33 in the skill, you're not going to be able to bridge that gap without some serious time and effort (i.e., leveling up).

There is no "chance" of failure; they're all straight threshold checks. Either you have the required skill or you don't. I've never understood the appeal of random chance, no-contest failure in games with instant reload. And I mean inside dialogue and out. If starting up a reactor requires a certain amount of Repair or Science, as a player, I'd rather have that be a threshold check than randomized. If I can't do it, I'd rather the game just tell me I can't do it instead of allowing me to unwittingly end/reload the game.

Hey so it's red shield discussion tyme. *~ Imagine that there is an amount of damage that armor directly subtracts from damage... a "threshold" of damage, if you will. While a small percentage of damage may get through even the thickest armor, damage threshold can effectively neutralize a lot of small arms. Fallout 1 and 2 used numerical feedback to let the player know when their weapons weren't doing any damage. In F3 and F:NV, the player only sees enemy health meters that represent a percentage of total health rather than an exact value. This makes it difficult to tell how effective an enemy's armor is (as opposed to the target simply having a ton of health). In F:NV, the red shield appears next to a target's health meter when you hit it for damage that is equal to or less than the target's damage threshold. A HUD-colored shield appears next to the player's health meter when the player is hit for damage equal to or less than the player's damage threshold. High RoF weapons typically have a low DAM, high DPS. E.g. 10mm SMG. Low RoF weapons are the opposite. E.g. Hunting Rifle. F:NV's Pip-Boy Weapons tab now cross-fades between DAM and DPS so the player can make more tactical choices about what weapon to use in any given circumstance. Having both of these values visible has also allowed us to revise the calculation of DAM/DPS values to be less abstract and more accurate. Using the weapons previously listed, a 10mm SMG would be best against unarmored/lightly armored targets at close range. The Hunting Rifle is ideal against armored targets at long range. But if the player wants to get fiddly with numbers, the Cowboy Repeater (mentioned in the Escapist preview) is better than either weapon against unarmored/lightly armored targets at long range since it is accurate, has a decent DAM and a better DPS than the Hunting Rifle. Add ammo subtypes and mods into the mix and there are a lot of ways to optimize the gear you carry and use.

That's actually a modified animation, but due to how the foregrips are positioned on most rifles in the game, it's difficult to change the position of the left hand without changing all of the corresponding weapon assets and/or other animations like move cycles, etc. The right hand and wrist were adjusted in the aim and fire.

Jorge Salgado is Spanish.

Can you be more specific about what you dislike about it?

It's not irrelevant, since people who use that weapon will also have ammo for that weapon (or should, anyway). If you continuously fight people using 10mm Pistols when you're relying on a Laser Pistol, you either have to conserve your SECs or switch over to a different weapon.

The point in a game where a type of weapon is introduced is not equivalent to its scarcity. Fallout 1/2 easily could have had low-, mid-, and high-power energy weapons appear throughout the game but be a step more powerful/less common overall. No spoilers required. Fallout 1: "Uncommon even before the Great War, Energy Weapons were renowned for their power." Fallout 2: "Though the deeds of the Chosen One spread many powerful Energy Weapons into the wasteland, they are still uncommon compared to Small Guns." This sets the player's expectations properly: invest in this skill to use more powerful, less common weapons.

The number of skills shouldn't matter from a content perspective. Whether a game has five skills or twenty, designers should either support those skills (roughly) equally or let the player know what the relative imbalance is.

The only way to figure it out is to tag and/or advance skills for several hours and realize (maybe) that the game doesn't really support the use of those skills. I don't think it's unreasonable for players to expect that a game's content is going to actually support individual skills throughout the game (unless explicitly stated otherwise).

F3 skills start around 15% (on average). From 15% to 100%, weapon damage increases by about 55%. Situations being described where a rifle takes off "one dot" with a low skill or a mini-nuke being ineffective with a low skill aren't really an indictment of a game balance problem. "One dot" of damage at 15% becomes 1.55 dots at 100%. 100 points of mini-nuke damage at 15% becomes 155 points at 100%. A 55% increase in damage may be the difference between killing a target in two shots vs. three, but it's not going to turn a 10mm pistol into a death dealer. A change in spread will often have a much more dramatic/practical (and less predictable/scalable) effect on damage over time.

The engine supports weights down to the ten thousandths place in data but it only displays weights to the tenths.

Even if I'm not responding, I'm always reading these threads and the Bethesda threads.

I haven't played any games recently other than F:NV. Metro 2033 came out three weeks ago. I didn't play a huge amount of STALKER but I got a pretty good sense of its take on realism/survival.

There's plenty of criticism to level against BIS and Obsidian but Jefferson and Van Buren were cancelled because of licensing problems (for Jefferson) and Interplay's lack of operating capital (for Van Buren). I have never heard/seen anyone from BIS or IPLY dispute this.