Tagaziel

Fallout 2 was inconsistent, yes, but not nearly enough as you make it out to be.

Ugh. The world's an amusement park, not a living space. Tell me, where do the settlements get basic necessities, like food and water (except for Rivet City, which has a farm)? How come the Raiders outnumber regular humans 100:1? Why 200 years after the war nobody bothered to salvage the local shop? etc. The story wasn't bad if you're not paying attention to it. Problem is, their "vision" is composed of plot devices borrowed from previous games hammered into a gaming space made from a scaled down geomap and elements from various post-apocalyptic movies transplanted into the game verbatim.

We got over that a long time ago. Classic gameplay is not coming back, fine. What we cannot forgive nor forget is the total abandonment of great storylines, dialogue, a plausible world and that feeling of immersion. I've been thinking and came to the conclusion that Bethesda simply failed to understand Fallout.

Given that it's done by some of the original developers (before you ask, yes, J.E. Sawyer counts as a developer, since he worked on Van Buren) and Obsidian has a track record of awesome, deep games, I'll ban every self proclaimed "purist" everywhere I have the power to do so, because they are too stupid to exist.

I squealed in delight. Seriously.

Call me old fashioned, but the original Settlers 2 is far superior to the 10th anniversary version.

Good things come to the patient.

I think he's referring to the quality of Fo3 as set against modern titles. Fo3 is not even a contender, with its nearly a decade old haphazardly modified engine. And yeah, Fallout 1 and 2 were better in terms of variety. In Fo3, you have only two models for adult humans (ghouls, blacks, whites, yellows, greens, cyans etc.) with absolutely no variations in anatomy. Everyone is of exactly the same height, muscular build, cup size etc. whereas Fallout 1 had (I think) around ten or twenty different models.

I'm just surprised, as through my several complete replays not once did I suspect it of having a narrative, defined as a pre-defined way the story unfolds in. With the amount of freedom granted to the player, there's no real narrative, at least to me.

Which results in (or perhaps stems from) a much weaker and less cohesive narrative, with possibly less involvement from the player, both explicitly and motivation wise. Which is, if I understood correctly, the point Gromnir was making. Tastes. Fallout has a narrative? That's new.

Then how come the only dialogue options available to the character are the ones that are, at worst, neutral towards dad? You can't tell him you hate him, you can't tell other characters you hated him or don't care that he kicked the bucket because he's an idiot, every character is written with the assumption that the player at least liked the Father character and that the big, dramatic moment at the Memorial somehow affected him. For me, it was the worst desynch between me and my character in a game, ever. So, yeah, the player can hate Dad, but his character has love for dad hardwired. And yeah, the storyline is weak. A good example of how to do protagonist/character driven storylines is KOTOR2, where your dialogue choices and actions determine your character's feelings, not an arbitrary decision by a writer. That and the option to side with the Enclave and convince dad Autumn knows best (which he does).

Fallout 3's major failing: the game is built around your love for your father and doesn't even try to act as if one could feel anything else than unrestricted, completely compassionate love for that character.

Oh my, how could I fail to notice that you can hear smell and see the feel of paper.

In Fo3, the cell-based engine is a limitation. The loading screen jumps in abruptly and affects the end result. If I made that scene in, say, Source engine, I'd make damn sure to use HDR or a similiar, fake effect in the scene. Basically, when the player exits the Vault, he is greeted by the entry hallway littered with skeletons of those who didn't quite make it. They make crunching sounds as he goes by towards the bright light at the end of the entry tunnel, the contrast slowly sliding all the way up, until all he can see is the light itself and slowly, as he walks out, his eyesight gets accustomed to the light and the surroundings fade in. Fluidity of the scene is key - no abrupt loading screens, no pause to load, just the player walking out with the Vault blast door sliding in with a loud clang. Contrast is key, the natural surroundings, sounds and sights of nature reclaiming the wasteland juxtaposed with the sterile, clean corridors of the Vault.

Did you play Fallout at all? It accounted for both day and night when coming out of the cave. In Fo3, that moment was pretty much pointless to me, as the previews ruined every bit of surprise it might have had.

No, I asked "And how would the game show off smell? Texture? Softness? Visual and audio cues only stimulate two of our senses (although only four are relevant, unless you lick every item you find, Jack Sparrow style)." You have failed to answer that question.

Answer. The. Question. How?

And how would the game show off smell? Texture? Softness? Visual and audio cues only stimulate two of our senses (although only four are relevant, unless you lick every item you find, Jack Sparrow style). It's called 'life' and 'need for sleep'. Something rubs me the wrong way about this post, the end result is "Fallout 3 is subtle and deep, Fallout is shallow and primitive", which is clearly not the case, it's more like the other way around. Fallout 3 has nice setpieces and vignettes, but those alone a deep game don't make (especially if they don't make sense).

Uh, in-built PIP-Boy 2000 encyclopedia? Scanner? Read the manufacturing stamp on the weapon? There's a myriad of possibilities, all fitting in with the universe. "Show don't tell" is an axiom you hear most commonly in the world of film and screenwriting. When you work in an interactive medium, especially when you make a 3D first-person game, you abandon the tools of cinema. Composition, movement, montage are out of your hands and the control ceded to the player is not equivalent to the control you would possess as a filmmaker crafting a linear visual sequence. The low-res worlds of Fallout and Fallout 2 were abstract, but I don't see Fallout 3's as significantly less so. These are still modular dollhouses made from the same few pieces of furniture and architecture that you'll see copy-pasted with great frequency everywhere. I can see objects sitting on a shelf instead of "examining" a shelf to open a separate window; I still understand that I can't interact with the shelf in any other meaningful way. It won't tip over, it can't be destroyed, it looks identical to every other shelf of its specific type in the world. It's no less a "symbol" of a shelf than Fallout's isometric shelf sprite. If the text box was a necessity before, it still is now. The black humor and irony in Fallout were conveyed through text, and not just the text in the dialogue screen. It was a pervasive presence that colored every location and encounter, prompting the player to apply imagination in order to "see" details that would not be depicted visually. It takes no less imagination to "see" a living world in Fallout 3's wilderness of randomly spawning robots, samey industrial areas, or its stiff, patrolling NPCs. Abstaining from flavor text in favor of an "invisible" interface only removes the ability to supply additional detail, additional context, or a unique voice behind the narrative. If I wasn't taken, I'd be booking a flight to your location to have sex with you, you're that awesome.

Bull****. No storytelling device is inherently superior to another, and especially not showing over telling. Please, enlighten me, how would descriptions from Fo1 and Fo2 be shown in the gameworld without being unnecessarily contrived: And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Textual descriptions are meant to complement what's seen in game, to create coherency and aid suspension of disbelief, so that you feel that you're using something that exists and belongs to this world and wasn't just arbitrarily added to provide a thingamajig for your amusement.

Something else I'd love to see make a return - item description. Those in Fo1 and Fo2 were great and gave that little extra bit of complexity and versimilitude to the world. It'd be even greater if some of the vintage descriptions (Glock 86, Wattz 1000 etc.) made a return. Because they're awesome.

Awkward, yes, but certainly not impossible. If it has a trigger, humans can use it.

This is an example of how to fail at making references. Guns were prized possessions in Mad Max and Humungus' gun was one of a kind. In Fo3, instead of being a unique, powerful weapon, it's scattered all over the place, thus losing sense.

Silent Hunter is a sub sim. Sarchimedean Dynasty, well, is not.

Now that was something awesome.