J.E. Sawyer

There is a bit of "using the Force" to it; lot of the guidelines are reinforced through lead critique and peer review. Even with an established "quest doc", the examples can never catch every angle of what a designer might want to do in practice. Obsidian's area design docs (or faction docs, or character docs, when quests aren't area specific) are required to cover quests, quest states, and repercussions for those states. If they start to get a little too fractious, I will ask the designer to consider revising how the quest develops, explaining the potential problems with their current plan. If something's outright nuts, I just tell them it's nuts, why it's nuts, and that it has to go away.

I do not think that manually aiming instead of using VATS makes you any better or worse of a player.

I haven't tried using the sniper rifle much on PC, but I do take more manual shots in general on PC due to the mouse.

Everything you wrote is true, but I would like to add that trade-offs in quest design (whether it's in Fallout, IWD, or another game) aren't always 1:1. I think where a lot of developers get in trouble is in x-treeeeeeme reactivity, where interconnectivity between quests and visible results becomes so entangled that two quests of N complexity require 4 times as much time as four quests with half-N complexity.

I feel confident that absolutely everyone in this thread can score a sniper shot against a STILL target (even on console) and can consistently score head shots in VATS (as you you yourself said in a previous thread, you can achieve this with a relatively small skill point investment). The reason I made such a brazen statement is because anyone can do that. Advance Small Guns to 100% (you can do this by 5th level, possibly sooner), put crosshair on motionless target, pull trigger. Unless they're way, way far away, the bullet will go exactly where the crosshairs are (ballistics seems to get tricky past a certain range). Scoring headshots while a target is moving, that's another story. I could almost never land sniper rifle hits against moving targets outside of VATS. Same thing with the hunting rifle. Once dudes started running around, it was shotgun/VATS time.

"It is worth noting that I believe there's some special critical modifier that goes on with scoped weapons fired "naturally" (i.e. no VATS). So if you do legit head snipes with the Sniper, Reservist's, or Victory Rifle, you tend to score crits a hell of a lot. With VATS... not so much." From this you inferred that I think VATS itself is an inherently illegitimate style of play. I clarified this in follow ups, where I stated that there is nothing inherently illegitimate about using VATS, but that using VATS does make the game much easier than firing manually -- especially on console. I also said then, as I will say now, that I used VATS in real-time a lot. The only sniper rifle shots I pulled off manually were against unaware, usually still targets. I never had a personal prejudice against people who use VATS. It would be pretty odd if I did considering that I've stated consistently that I used it a-plenty. EDIT: Hopefully my actual stance is clear even if my initial statement was not. Please replace "legit" with "manual" in my first quote and then read the rest of the stuff and hopefully that will clear up any remaining confusion.

Sweet.

I don't go hacking around in code with a machete, and VATS is fairly complicated. FrankK (our lead programmer) would have a better understanding of VATS code mechanics than I do. Your character obviously snaps around when making VATS unarmed and melee attacks when the camera cuts, but when it comes to movement rates/reload speeds/etc., it can be hard to tell from observation if one or more actors' speed is being altered. That's a gross exaggeration. The initial comment to which you are referring was differentiating scoped sniper rifle shots from VATS sniper rifle shots. You bound up an enormous amount of unintended prejudice from that in way that continues to bewilder me. I used VATS on and off throughout F3 and don't consider a player to be inherently any better/worse for using VATS or not. That said, the mechanics of the sniper rifle clearly reward people more for taking scoped headshots outside of VATS.

Yes, or at least it would alter the balance as I understand it.

I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that in VATS, your character is actually acting/moving/operating faster than everyone else. So going to "real time" would still create some problems.

Chris Taylor was enamored with 10mm Auto as a crazy moon caliber. But yeah, there is some overlap with this stuff. Modern assault rifles in .223/5.56mm and 7.62mm, miniguns, and all that stuff are also post-1950s, but they're still in all the Fallouts. EDIT: Oh and the 1944 Mauser K98k is mine, a Russian war capture.

I think 10mm recoil is even worse than .45 ACP. Then again, you carry around miniguns in Fallout so...

I ordered 300 rounds of surplus 8mm Mauser and UPS left it on my doorstep with no signature w00t. So Aram likes guns, CrashGirl thinks F3s guns were poopy, and SteveThaiBinh thinks guns are boring. Any other opinions?

I object to the presence of religion in this game with drug addiction, child slavery, prostitution, violent dismemberment, and cannibalism. You know why I think most people don't take games seriously? Designers can't even take their own games seriously. If they talk about a serious topic, they almost always do everything through impotent proxies, like racism through elves and dwarves. Or it's a mocking religious parody like the Hubologists. Parodies and simple proxies make things easy to understand, but typically fail to say anything of interest or explore anything in meaningful depth. The reason why Big Love (for example) tends to succeed where other representations of religious groups fail is that the show uses them as something more than a dumb punchline. This doesn't mean that religion needs to be part of Fallout or any other game, but if you want games to be taken seriously, you should demand that they deal with serious topics in a serious manner, not through abstractions and proxies.

In general, I think anything fun has the potential to be a good inclusion in any game. When a mini-game is part of the core gameplay (like lockpicking in Splinter Cell or F3), the mini-game needs to be short, fun, and must evolve over time. If it lacks those three qualities, it gets annoying very fast. Side games just need to be fun, IMO. Witcher's poker game wasn't long, but it also wasn't short. It didn't seem to change much over time, but it was fun and it was optional. As others have said, it was also beautiful. A beautiful interface can't make a bad game fun, but it can make a good game that much more enjoyable.

BoreSnake mini-game followed by a mini-game where you have to run brushes and patches through followed by a mini-game where you have to disassemble all parts of the action, clean it, and then reassemble the entire gun.

RE: the existence of electronics in a post-nuclear war world: It's true that nuclear blasts generate severe EMPs, and that EMPs can very easily destroy anything with transistors. One interesting thing about Cold War research is that it maintained interest in vacuum tubes for one compelling reason: unlike transistors, they are highly resistant to EMPs. In a world where the shadow of the Cold War never retreated, vacuum tube technology would continue to be used, particularly if the applications were military/government in nature. In our own world, for example, Viktor Belenko's MiG-25 had no transistors in it, only vacuum tubes. Of course, vacuum tubes also fit in nicely with the general aesthetics of the Fallout universe.

My responses were short, so I'm sorry if this didn't come across, but the only argument I was trying to make is that Bethesda did (in my opinion) a good job in setting up their environments/atmospheric tone in F3. I understand that this is part of a larger discussion involving storytelling in general, but I do feel that visual atmosphere is an important element of storytelling, whether it's in theatre, movies, or games.

Then why are you losing faith in my ability to make this a good game?

I've been found out. Because I think the development of atmosphere is valuable, I am inherently opposed to primary methods of traditional storytelling. Words, themes, and characters are my enemy. I am the destroyer of your dreams. Sorry it had to come to this.

That sounds pretty fickle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_sc%C3%A8ne

Malcador, there are way too many examples of mini-stories told through prop placement in Fallout 3 for it to be a giant series of coincidences. The skeletons embracing each other with a series of empty Med-X syringes on the nightstand next to them was nice. I also like the skeleton dangling at the apex of a jump from a ramp with a motorcycle embedded in the opposite wall.

@__@

For the most part, I think F3's walls were physical barriers (high fences, mountains, etc.) with invisible walls behind them as insurance. Personally, I only hit the edge of the world once.