Tagaziel

In Fallout, the world is an onion, in Planescape: Torment and Planescape: Torment IN SPACE! the plot and characters are onions. The post-nuclear world is damn complex and multilayered, important elements are often but a single sentence in the mouth of an NPC, like Lydia further emphasizing Vault City's hypocrisy - their hatred for mutants doesn't prevent them from buying Uranium ore from Broken Hills to fuel their Vault's nuclear power generator. Or Decker, when asked about Far Go Traders, mentions that Butch Harris is just a figurehead while he is really the one who calls the shots. This puts the hit on Daren Hightower in perspective - the Water Merchants would disintegrate with their master merchant dead and allow the Far Go Traders to estabilish themselves as the masters of the Water Tower and, by extension, give the Hub over to the Underground. There's a proverbial crapload of little details crammed into the game.

I had the same at first. I attribute it to laziness and not wanting to read through everything at first playthrough. To be honest, as I work on the wiki, more and more things click, even now, twelve years after release. It's incredibly rich, detailed and requires research to put together. It's awesome.

Fallout is one of the most immersive games ever created. If you have trouble connecting with the game, well, the problem is on your side of the keyboard.

Caesar III Anachronox KotOR2 and the Restoration Patch

Sammu never failed so hard.

Obsidian do a MMO? No... I'd rather they stick to excellent story driven CRPGs than grindfest poop. The only thing MMOs are good for is generating income that a company can spend on real games (IE WoW generating its own economy so they can pump so of that ka-ching into Diablo 3 & StarCraft 2). Let Obsidian do KotOR 3. That was what I meant. The third Old Republic game, not the third Old Republic game as an MMO. Also. I lost my copy of KOTOR2 :<

Obsidian should be doing this, not a cliche-repetition-expert-studio.

Looked at the Valve/Steam forums? Official forums always attract whiners. And stupid people, but that's a different matter entirely.

Wishful thinking at its best. It's propable that we will get a look at it, actually. Valve has no other big projects going on currently.

I'd love for it to happen too - unlike Fo3, vB was expanding the universe in a creative and consistent way. And the Reservation. <3 Reservation.

Except Fallout isn't real life, it's a nuked out wasteland. So I want to be able to shoot irritating people in the face.

Lamplight has the dubious distinction of being THE most annoying location in the game. Not only are the kids unkillable (which is a minor problem), you are FORCED to go through a kid-infested cave and play nice with them, just because the devs want to rub the fact that you can't kill children in your face. It's evident in the dialogues, the kids inside KNOW that the game prevents you from killing them, so they can freely spew badly written insults at you. Thankfully, there's GECK. Fo3 is the only game in which I slaughter children. I took the time to hunt down every single of those goddamn pieces of brahmin of crap and splatter them all over the cave, MacCready being the first. You know what's amusing? Both Cross and Jericho said "Good riddance" the moment his head came off. Life's good.

Little Lamplight is the biggest insult a developer can give to a gamer. First, make children unkillable and then make a full city full of kiddie retards that all serve to rub in your face that they're unkillable. And it doesn't make a single speck of sense.

And this is precisely why most games will remain shallow. The primitive concept of absolute good and absolute evil, right and wrong. It's this very notion that dooms a writer.

Meh, not so much a dissection as a brief analysis. I'd like to see some examination of the assets used, like the police and their XM8s.

There was the end narration of course. I think one of the reasons is that some choices don't have much immediate consequence to them and it's present in Fo1. Killian doesn't acknowledge? That's an obvious oversight. Hub has better scripting, just kill Decker (or any of the bigger factions) and talk to people. Word actually travels around :]

I've never felt there was any kind of narrative in either of the Fallout games, just a world out there and me to mess it up as I please. That was the greatest strength of Fallout, the ability to do as you please, something quite similiar to the feeling of a PnP session (not identical of course, as the number of possibilities is always limited in a computer game). It's an RPG benchmark to me and I always found the lack of such freedom in cRPGs... frustrating. Gothic, Wizardry 8, Baldur's Gates... KOTOR2 rectified it with the ability to freely choose the order of the planets and a lot of freedom in interacting with characters, especially Handmaiden's mom. But none ever reached the level of Fo1, where I was truly writing my own story. With blood most often.

Given that it aims to emulate the P&P RPG feeling, it's the player that creates the "dramatic and engrossing" story, not the other way around.

Radscorpions? What's so Rad about them?

Do you honestly think Obsidian would continue something like that? Doesn't hurt to state my opinion.

Another point: make the factions make sense in the context of the universe. Quite frankly, one of my greatest sources of annoy and amuse is the Lyons / Outcast debacle. It seems to me as if Bethesda tailored Lyons' Brotherhood to be that likeable faction, one every good gamer wants to be a part of, with knightly armours, guns, a giant robot, a citadel! But to me, it end ups trying too hard to be likeable, with medieval overtones, middle ages speech and that gung-ho attitude so cliche nowadays. Outcasts on the contrary, seem to have been made with evil in mind - gruff attitude, black/red power armours... but in the end, they come off as most professional and most useful, since it's them, not Lyons, who patrol the wastelands and nuke creatures that might hurt you or others.

Just replayed Fo3 to refresh my memory. I hope FNV includes a main quest that actually makes sense, rather than Fo3's drivel, where the only justification for attacking the purifier is "it doesn't feel right".