Tagaziel

There's this wonderful invention called e-mail. So apparently adding a single button for displaying a text description is apparently of the same magnitude as rewriting game mechanics, rebalancing SPECIAL or adding ammunition subtypes. Uh, okay. I want a feature. So I'm arguing in favour of it. I don't know who's the thick one here.

I can relate to that. However, I'm still convinced that writing item descriptions would be an actual trivial task. It doesn't involve coding, 3D modelling, dialogue tree creation etc. By the way, did I say that I love your method of presenting games? I think the NV presentation was the only worthwhile one. In my land, QA is done on stuff that's actually supposed to have proper quality on release. And it's done once the core tasks are finished. No that means "instead of coding in three buttons, code in four". You're talking about item descriptions as if they were entire locations. Hypotheticals. Hypothetically, the world will end tomorrow, so why should they bother making any game at all? You mean now people just pour in sheets of paper into a machine and ready games come out? Wow, my neck of the woods must be stil in the stone age! The fact that teams have gotten bigger is exactly the reason why writing small features should be easier now. So smaller teams... could make games with more features... than big teams. That's kind of... an interesting logic. That'd be true if we had game publishing megacorporations that publish titles on their own in every country in the world. Only then would translation costs would be such a major problem as to affect the size and scope of a game. Generally, translating games rests on the local publisher (like CD-Projekt or Cenega here in Poland) and they incur the costs on their own. The original company that funded the development process is not going to be affected by this. I also have a hard time imagining Cenega (or CD Projekt, can't remember who publishes the game in Poland) calling Mr Sawyer with "Oh, hi, we have to ask you to scale the game down, because we're going to pay too much money to have this game translated to Polish, so, yeah, you can't write too much stuff." I doubt a grunt in the trenches is going to concern himself with the amount of money the Army is willing to pay for his ammunition and MREs. Or have problems about killing additional enemies.

The problem with bugs is an interesting one - I only experienced a handful of bugs in my Obsidian games, whereas according to reviewers, I should've experienced a veritable truckload of them. That said, I find it hard to believe every member of the team, including writers, will be bug fixing everything so hard they wouldn't be able to write text descriptions, a task which isn't nowhere near the scale of the rest of the game. Ah well, if all else fails, I'm just going to mod them in after release.

Content that isn't immediately pertinent to the gameplay. Same reason why Obsidian used placeholder supermutants and nightkin. Let's see: you assign the task to the guy who is making other interface buttons, like "open weapon mod menu"? Writers. Leads. Generally anyone willing to do so. In practice, most of the descriptions are probably readily available in design docs, or can be reused with minor tweaking. It's not a lot of work. Once the game ships for QA (which is done by a separate team), there's going to be a lot less workload and the writers can do it then, hence the reason for using placeholder text as long as more important matters are being done. Really, item descriptions aren't rocket science, which is how you make them sound. By the way, your claim about the decade of difference is silly. Game developing hasn't changed tremendously over the past decade, in fact, I say it has become easier, with better computers and better software. What T. Isaac had to painstakingly create in primitive 3D modelling software can now be created much faster and much more efficently. Hell, the developers even have a complete game design suite (the Developer GECK), which makes it that much easier. If over thirteen years ago, with much more primitive software, smaller team and less resources the lead designer for Fallout could write the item descriptions pretty much singlehandedly, then it's not a stretch to assume that any writer on the New Vegas team is capable to do so with a lot more resources at his disposal. Problem of the publisher, not the developer. Again, not the developer's concern. As I wrote before, it's a task that can be done once the gameplay and other features are set and off for QA and the workload lessens. It's really a no brainer, you just have to stop thinking like a bean counter, Bobby Kotick.

The real gun names mod? Yes.

Canonical weapons mod for Fallout 2, translating item descriptions for Call of Pripyat (which basically amounted to writing them from scratch) and work on my still unreleased Fallout: Tactics "let's make it more sensible" mod, rewriting descriptions for every single real world weapon and replacing them with in-world ones.

Generally, yeah. Been there myself.

Not really a separate staff member. This statement means you have no idea what you're talking about. It's pretty simple. 1. Have the interface guy add a button to the inventory screen labeled "Description/Examine". Make sure it works. 2. Have the interface guy code it, so that it calls a string in a text file in the .esp/esm 3. Fill it with placeholder text until the game is set for QA. 4. Once the game is set for QA, write clever item descriptions for the items. Check with spellcheck, have another guy proofread it during lunchbreak. 5. Done. Fallout 1 descriptions were created mostly by Chris Taylor, who, if you didnt notice, was also the lead developer for the game. It's not rocket science.

Pride And Prejudice on Gutenberg.org has thirteen thousand lines. So, yeah, I guess that's a lot. That amounts to a 2000 page book. That's certainly... a lot.

Because those additional lines of text are context that make the weapon not an arbitrarily placed thingie that kills people, but a thingie that kills people that was made by a specific manufacturer in the universe, that might have a story to tell and fits into the universe. That's what I loved about Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, System Shock 2 (and 1, even if the descriptions were in the manual), KOTOR2 and several other games. I understand that some people like to play with generic guns and don't care about their place in the world, just the fact that they look kewl, but that's why I said optional. Those people can just ignore the window and never press the button. And I seriously doubt there are people that suffer fatal cardiac incidents upon viewing an item description. That'd be about the only reason why item descriptions shouldn't be improved. Yes, it's flavor. But for some (quite many) it's a very yummy flavor. Text descriptions are a way to convey that, which cannot be conveyed simply through graphics or sound. Like the material the weapon is crafted out of, or the manufacturer name, various little details that can't be seen in-game. Fallout has a long standing tradition of doing that - only FoBOS and Fallout 3 refused to add proper text descriptions. Every other game in the series (Fo1, Fo2, FOT, VB) had text descriptions. Or maybe there's some weird technological limitation in the Gamebryo engine that makes it inferior to Fallout's engine in terms of descriptions?

What makes me sad is the lack of item descriptions. Really, Mr Sawyer, is it that hard to mod them in? I mean, you've already put in ammo subtypes, created a separate, much better dialogue editor and overall reshaped Fo3 into something playable. What's with the general hostility towards something so simple as a few lines of texts in an optional window?

TURN UP THE RADIO Just kiddin'. What's your character build?

I prefer it as it is - this isn't Thief, where pitch black shadows can be excused, this is a game set in the modern world, where illumination is cheap and ever present. Stealth based on LOS is more realistic and in keeping with the general aesthetic of spy fiction, more than magical pitch black shadows that consume all light and perfectly hide you, even though in reality, it's pretty easy to see what's in shadows. Especially an animal as big as Mikhail Thorton.

I think it's generally reflected by forums - Alpha Protocol was at first bashed extensively for broken gameplay etc., but pretty soon, the same people started praising how addictive it is or how awesome characters, story and C&C are. It's a slow burning game, yes.

Those are weapons that have a Promo tag in their string names.

It's probably the old build, if you look at newer, released screenshots, everything looks better.

The enemies all use weapons already usable by the player or unique ones, listed with the prefix AI at the top of arch_weapons.int. Occam's Razor: FN P90 etc. are fossils from a time period in which Alpha Protocol had those guns.

Those are guns that were cut from the game.

[generichardcoarrpgermode] It's because of the.... consoles. [/generichardcoarrpgermode] Seriously though, while I would have very much liked them, I don't think there's a way to fit them considering the enormous text size. I'm pretty sure they'll make a mod just as with Fallout 3 though. Yeah, there's absolutely no way text descriptions can possibly fit on the screen.

I'm disappointed that there are no text descriptions for items. I really don't get why developers think its more fun to play with generic guns.

Thanks for the correction, uploaded an updated version and credited you with finding this omission: http://www.mediafire.com/?mymwajytyji

Hey guys, thought I'd drop this here. I finished a 1.0 of my real guns mod and it's up for the taking: http://www.mediafire.com/?y2ztn2cmzey Content added by me is under CC-BY-SA. Content not added by me belongs to Obsidian Entertainment, who all deserve a cookie.

By the way, Hamilton is an FN SCAR. See for yourself: http://world.guns.ru/assault/as70-e.htm

The Hamilton pistol is a SIG-Sauer P250, with altered dimensions: The UC SMG is an AKS-74U, except its dimensions and looks are way off. The Hamilton shotgun looks similiar to the Benelli M4 shotgun, albeit with proportions altered.

No, yes, and learn to spot a joke. There is no sarcasm on the Internet