Aristes

Well, at least you always know where he's looking.

That was funny.

If you play Mask of the Betrayer backwards, it says, "Sawyer is dead."

Just my perception. Nothing to it really, other than I do recall him talking about shutting down the boards at one point and the fact that most of the official boards for their games are on someone else's server. Could just be because, except for Alpha Protocol, they've all been sequels or spin offs or whatever.

I would consider the xbox 360 version if I owned one, Killian. I'm just not a console guy. I owned an xbox for a long time. Actually, it's out in the garage, so I guess I still do. Anyhow, the upshot is that I just couldn't get into any of the consoles I've tried. No biggie. I think it's great that they exist and I'm glad folks enjoy them, just not for me. *shrug*

I actually asked to have this thread broken down into a couple of different threads a few threads ago. We saw where that went. Basically, I would like to have one dealing with writing, one dealing with gameplay, and one generalized discussion of the Fallout setting. We could probably make do with two, but I think three would be useful. Frankly, I think we're lucky to have this thread, though. That's my take on Feargus' attitude towards the boards. I don't begrudge that attitude, just sayin'. Anyhow, Fionavar, from what I can see having lurked here for some time and posting a lot more over the past few months, doesn't like to take draconian measures. Since he's not going to wholesale ban folks, it's probably in Obsidian's best interest to keep the Beth hating to one thread. After all, whether you bash Obsidian or praise Obsidian while bashing Bethesda, it's not good for Obsidian and it's easier for them to police a single thread than three. I hate that. I'm mostly interested in the story and NPCs. Pop said something that I thought was interesting some pages ago about a tight, story driven game where all of the loose ends fit into the main story path not being a Fallout game. I thought about it and I figured I'd respond. Hell, I wasn't even going to argue. I was just going to ask some questions. However, I had just finished responding to one of Gizmo's posts from the page before and I figured I'd just let the gun discussion continue. Some of this is going to happen anyhow, but if the discussion were generally about story, then the various topics in the thread would relate to one another at least. Oh well, the ship has sailed, I suppose.

I don't think the fat man is a setting breaker. I just think it's a bad design decision as a weapon. It's not a setting breaker, but it is an immersion breaker for me personally. Which is to say, like some others have said, the power of the weapon, the availability of the ammo, and the proximity of the blast all made me question the decision. Not for long, mind you, as I generally ignored the weapon after I found it the first time. ...But I can see why some folks don't like it. It's one of the common griefs with which I tend to agree. I don't have strong feelings about it, though. I mostly didn't care since my characters are small gun/fast talker guys. Well, in FO3, they're maxed in a lot of things by the end of the game, but you really only need a couple of weapon skills to take down any and all bad guys. A ton of weapons, since you lose so many to attrition. Hey, want to know something far more irritating than the fat man? How about carrying around an extra set of armor or two and a bunch of extra weapons? That is a pain in the ass!

I'm holding off on this one. Of course, I stopped buying Bio titles sight unseen a long time ago. Hey, no harm no foul. I don't expect them to care whether I buy their games and I don't hold it against them for making some games I don't like. If this one looks good and gets some positive reviews, I'll buy it. I've been thinking of buying Mass Effect for a long time. Geez, it must be years by now.

GD, dude, your back to kicking ass and naming names. Hot damn! Hey, Jesse, that's awesome, man! I'm jealous. Well, if I ever worked with photoshop I'd be jealous. Might as well be jealous of Gandalf from where I'm sitting. Nice work, bro.

Nerds, you say? NERDS?! Why, if I only had my fat man in hand! Um... I mean... never mind.

Geez, man, there is no need to go into that much detail! haha Just ribbing you. I've got limited experience with firearms, and that was all at least a decade ago. On the range, I've fired a variety of pistols, including the .45, .22, and 9mm. Hunting, I've used anything from a scoped .22 rifle to a 30.06. However, I'm not really a gun nut. I guess, if I were, I would have kept the guns I had back in the day. I haven't ever really gotten into modifying any guns. Probably the closest thing to modding I've done is taping the magazines together so I could flip them easier. It seems kind of stupid now, but I've never claimed to be very smart. So, the upshot is that I'm impressed by the knowledge folks around here have and I think sporting a wide variety of firearms and melee weapons in the game would be cool. I especially like the descriptions if they're accurate and clever. However, if I read a description and it's wrong, I'm probably going to distrust the rest of the flavor text I see, which is a real bummer. I would like to see the hand held nuke removed, but it's not a big deal for me. Finally, I would like to have a more robust crafting system, not only for firearms but also for tinkering with other stuff. Obsidian has a history of enhancing the crafting component of existing game engines, and I'd really like to see that in New Vagas also.

That Fallout 3 box art is exactly the sort of thing I was thinking when I said talented. Anyhow, I'm torn a bit. I like the game and I think it really revolved around good exploration. I spent a lot of time wandering the wastes. In terms of excitement, I was not excited to get a Fallout 3 game and I didn't even consider buying it until I saw Killian and Hell Kitty's reviews. As more folks played it and had positive reviews, I decided to purchase it. I don't regret it at all. I think I was in my 20s when Fallout shipped. At any rate, I'll be 40 in July, so that should date me somewhere on the adult side of things when it shipped. I thought it was a great game. Played the hell out of it. Spent even more hours in Fallout 2. On the other hand, I'm going to come clean with you. I like most games I buy. If there's something there to enjoy, I usually enjoy it. I guess I'm even more hoi pollio than the polloi. I generally like games. I generally get along with other gamers. Go figure. So I rarely think of games as a work of art. I still consider Planescape Torment a work of art, even though those "educated" folks have been making fun of me for years since PS:T is just a pretentious work of fluff. I dunno. I think it's a work of art and I've loved every minute I've spent playing the game. I guess the thing is, I tend to accept games for what they are and play them. For that reason, one of the worst things I can say about a game is that I didn't finish it. I finish nearly every game and try to find something good in before I'm done. EDIT: Sorry, the conversation switched to guns during the interim. Carry on. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

But for a name! haha (only two) Seriously though, I just don't see the issue here. Fallout 3 is Fallout 3. You don't like it, too bad. I really mean that. I'm not just scoring points in some weird internet argument game. If the fact that Fallout 3 sported a 3 at the end rather than DC causes you grief, then I envy you the sort of protected and happy life you must have lived. I don't mind the fact that this board has become a haven for so many Fallout Fans. I think it would be good if some of you stuck around. After all, since it appears Feargus has absolutely no interest in the OEI message boards at best, and perhaps even finds them contemptible, any new blood we get here is good. Anyhow, I actually find you guys entertaining. Crazy as hell, but entertaining and sometimes talented. In the case of combat difficulty, the center of discussion at the moment, you guys also have hope. I remember Sawyer talking about tightening up combat. I think there would be some ways to make it a little more difficult without going over the top.

Actually, six. You miscounted.

Quit being a Beth/FOpologist, entrerix. Folks are going to think you're part of hoi polloi like me! haha ...But, whatever you do, don't group people together based on their attitudes! I'm telling you, nothing is more offensive than branding folks something like, say, Fallout Fanatic just because they parrot the same line as a whole slew of other folks. hahahaha

I think that FO3 on easy can be harder than FO3 on hard. That's because they changed the XP rewards based on setting, which is absolutely stupid. What were they thinking? Idealy, if you want to speed through combat, you kept the game on hard until you reached 20, then put it on easy. On my next run I'll probably do that since I really don't care about combat difficulty anymore. I just want more exploration. Of course, my next run uses VATS perks, which means it will probably be easy anyhow.

Yeah. I agree. The process is fun. That's why simple with increased difficulty is better. Kind of like puzzle games where the basic idea is really easy to grasp, but then new concepts are added that increase difficulty and force the player to think.

That's cool, bro. Some silver lining to make a bad situation bette.

I think there's a lot of room to adjust difficulty without losing sales. In fact, I think complexity is perfectly legit as long as the essential elements are easy for the player to understand. You want a system the player can grasp quickly, but takes longer to master and then to perfect. Make sure that there is plenty of gameplay feedback to teach the player how things work and reinforce good tactics. As far as game difficulty goes, folks should not keep in mind that games can be more or less difficult, but that difficulty in and of itself is not an end goal. Otherwise, just plug in a chess game program, take your beating, and then lick your wounds. The idea is challenging enough without being excessively difficult. 'Cause the design team can make a game that's too difficult. It's actually easier to make an impossibly difficult game than an easy one in terms of risk reward. Yeah, you can make a game where all that's entailed is entering your name in a field on the sign in screen. You can also disable the keyboard. Arguing that a game should be commercially viable is perfectly legit. However, creating new products and trying to create and capture new markets is also legit. The best argument against soemone advocating from a sales point of view is not, "Shut the hell up!" It's saying, "How do you know it wouldn't be commercially successful?" And then pointing out why it could be. Troika didn't make great games that failed because of some inherently great quality that players just. couldn't. get. It failed because they made mediocre games with a lot of bugs. I liked Arcanum, but it was not only buggy but also empty. Bloodlines, my favorite Troika game, is probably the one I liked best, but it was too little too late and even it had problems. Troika failed because they put out inferior products. Some folks might like to think that Troika was too godlike for those "casual gamers" to enjoy, but that's not true. They just got beat out by other folks making better games that appealed to more people.

What's the balance? "Hey, these guys here suck for doing this." "Yeah, well these guys over here suck for doing this!" I think the balance should be in the attitude towards the environment rather than towards political groups.

Yeah, but is anyone suggesting that the Witcher is harder than Fallout 3? 'Cause I've played both and it seems to me that the Witcher isn't exactly a real toughie. Weren't they 'consolizing' the Witcher? Too bad that went under. I was hoping to test whether my current game of Witcher would suddenly suck because they managed to 'consolize' it. haha I don't mind the idea of changes. I just don't want remedies that suck worse than the disease, so to speak. ...And, of course, I enjoyed Fallout 3, so I'm not going gonzo over changing stuff. On the other hand, as long as it works in the long run, I'll be happy.

I don't think games need to be easy these days. With a reload button, most hard games aren't really that hard anyhow. ...And much of the greater difficulty of the earlier Fallout games stemmed from the broken crit table and such. I mean, I don't know which is worse, that you can take a critical hit to the eyes for no damage, or that you can take a critical hit to the groin for three times your current health. In the same battle. Don't want to be 'consoled' though. haha Seriously, making the combat a little harder probably wouldn't be all that bad, but I'm leery of some of the suggested changes for things like stimpacks. I find it particularly strange that some folks think the game has become more 'consolized' because of things like the stimpack use when stimpacks were so easy to exploit in the first two games.

Putting religion aside, we have to ask ourselves, what do we want as gamers? Do we want our bad guys to remain cardboard cut out shapes of badguys? I ask that question sincerely. Hubologists are a safe target because Scientology doesn't have enough of a voice to defend itself. Shall we use them as our stereotype? Like my Gorilla friend says, maybe we don't want real social commentary in our video games. Fair enough. ...But gamers and game designers see the industry as the surging new art form like film, but it's not even close. By using those impotent tools that Sawyer cites, paradoy and proxy, games have remained a parody in and of themselves, aping film but never aspiring to reach the same status. Hey, maybe it's simply a matter of sales. Maybe we have these sorts of stories in the computer game industry because that's what sells. Having made the argument for the commercial dominance in publishing, I have to accept the argument when it turns against me. ...But I don't think it's that games can't convey more meaningful social commentary. I just think that most game designers, when they put any commentary in the game in the first place, tend towards simplistic ideas with easy targets. We haven't tested the commercial viability yet. The publishers might resist the idea, but designers haven't even asked them in the first place. In terms of bad guys, who can we consider "bad guys" in the game? -Raiders --This is tricky because some raiders might consider themselves a more of less legitimate group that's simply trying to survive. However, a lot of raiders will not have any pretense at all. They're cold, heartless killers who want to take what others have and are either completely willing to kill in order to take it or enjoy killing for its own sake. We don't have to call any such group bad, the players will simply know they're bad. -Slavers --Put the best argument you possibly can in the mouths of slavers and you still have someone the majority of current games will instinctively know is bad. -feral ghouls --impacable enemies of normal humans who simply try to kill you. I would almost consider these folks as simply animals instead of bad guys, but I suppose their former humanity can put them in this category. I can't, at the moment, think of another bad guy group. Everyone else should have the case to make for themselves. The players can simply gravitate towards one or the other or maybe even habitually test and question their own preconceived notions. I don't even think Stereotypes are bad inasmuchas there are people who fit stereotypes in our world. Maybe most of the raiders are stereotypically bad. You know, cannibals, murderers, almost the same as our feral ghouls. I don't think it's necessary for the design team to reform the stereotype of raiders. However, that doesn't mean it's impossible. Most raiders can be twenty kinds of ugly, bad to the core, etc. However, some raider groups could be different. For example, one group of raiders started because they were part of a settlement that was in contention with another settlement for decent crop lands. Since good, arable land is scarce, the two settlements fought over it. There just wasn't enough land for both and each fought for survival. One group wasn't good, the other wasn't bad. However, one group won and the other lost. Now, the first settlement did take in some of the losers of the first group, mostly children but also some young women. There were brutalities and cruelties on both sides. The remnants of the losers pulled back and resorted to the only thing they could do in the situation. They raided. The winning settlers have created a town and have successfully beaten back the raiders, but some of the raiders have managed to survive and even taken in other outcasts. Because of the nature of a raider group that takes in stragglers, there is a lot of variety and contention in within the raider group. Meanwhile, there are other groups in the vicinity. One group, raiders who are being muscled out of the larger metropolitan settlement area, has come into the struggle. This new raider group is our stereotypical bad guy. Just like ugly assed raiders have existed in human history, this group has no moral or ethical compulsions. They aren't just out to survive. They're happy to murder folks. While the question of 'good' and 'bad' might not enter into the discussion, these folks are just plain cruel and nasty and, of late, desperate. So, we have one group of raiders (displaced settlers), one group of raiders (thugs), and one group of settlers who fought for and hold the arable land (the town). There could be all sorts of ways to deal with these groups. The PC could simply work for one group to destroy the others. The PC could negotiate a deal between one of the raider groups and the town wherein the town pays off one group of raiders in return for killing off the other raider group. The PC could negotiate a deal between the raider groups wherein the thugs help the displaced settlers kill off the town, the new settlers take the arable land and provide a base for the thugs to operate. The point is, stereotypes are fine, but no group need necessarily be depicted as a stereotype. If a player sees slavery as inherently and irrevocably evil (as I do), then that world view will govern his judgement. It won't matter what argument the design team puts in the mouth of NPC. Even slavers need not be stereotypically evil, even though some of us will never accept any argument, no matter how clever or well crafted, that springs from the mouth of a slaver.

The Ghost in You -- Psychodelic Furs

I think that it would dramatically change. There might be some smaller cults that arise and some major religion might actually pop up, although things like that are hard to anticipate. Anyone who says that it was clear that a small Jewish faction would someday be Christianity or that some Arab trader/raiders would give rise to Islam is probably a bit nuts. So, some cults, perhaps some major religious presence, depending on the size and stability of the population, and then varying degrees of deism, spiritualism, atheism, and who gives a crapism would be my guys. While I don't like reductionism, I also understand that religion does serve a function as part of society, so I don't think it would be terribly insulting to present it as such.