Kjarista

Well, posed like that, yes, yes it does. What a surprise. maybe I'll ignore you here as well. Point is, no game is perfect, and some otherwise good games suffer from large flaws. Obsidian fans should know that just a swell as we Beth fans. The most exciting thing about all of this is, perhaps between the two of them, we can manage to get a stellar game. Heh so what did you want as a response then ? It does detract from the game. I know seeing Amata's reaction to my slaying of her father was underwhelming, although that was more VA related than anything (I'd expected her to try to kill me though). Are you interested in this new game, or are you grinding old axes?

Well, posed like that, yes, yes it does. What a surprise. maybe I'll ignore you here as well. Point is, no game is perfect, and some otherwise good games suffer from large flaws. Obsidian fans should know that just a swell as we Beth fans. The most exciting thing about all of this is, perhaps between the two of them, we can manage to get a stellar game.

In the category of choice and consequence, yes. One would hope that Obsidian can do better. That's the point of Beth approaching Obsidian to do a Fallout, don't you think?

Really? Even if you blow up Megaton you can still complete Moira's quests? ANd still shop with her and stuff? Yes, she just turns into a ghoul and moves into the Underworld. How convenient. If Simms get killed by Burke, his son will give you the reward for disarming the bomb instead. I'm glad he is doing that instead of vrying over his dead father gunned down in a bar. Isn't it neat how Bethesda has all the angles covered? Would it make any difference to you? Yes, ithat's exactly the way it is, and yes, it should have been done better. Does that make fallout 3 poopy? EDIT: Let me add this, before this starts a flame war: I'm not here to defend FO3...I tend to do enough of that on the beth forums. I figure most Obsidian fans are going to dislike beth games, so no surprise. I am here to talk about F:NV thought, and maybe we can do taht without trash Beth games. Everyone here probably knows the problems with FO3/Oblivion already.

The complaints were interesting too, in that many questioned the morality of it. "why did i get bad karma for this?" was most of it.

I agree, although shame that Megaton's demise is the most evil act in the game - as you said it'd be neat to join up with the Enclave and get an ending where you purge the BoS and the undesirables from the DC area (that's pretty fiendish an ending, in my mind). But, I can guess why they wouldn't go for that, heh. Ya, I'd like to see a "slippery slope" descent into abject evil. If you decide to go down this path, you better be in it for the long haul, because you will have a very hard time changing it. No cheap devices to "repair" the consequences of your choices.

Ya, and that could have been so easily fixed, but they went too far with the consolification. You want to be evil and blow up Megaton...the most evil act in the game? Then live with being evil: No Moira quest, no bobblehead, no dealing with the traders, no help from BoS, etc. All you really need there is a way to finish the main quest as an evil character...perhaps just bebopping in there with the enclave and firing up the purifier. The problem with many modern games is that it's TOO easy to be evil.

agreed. but i don't want the game telling me what's good or evil. this is why the karma system is crap. if there are people out there who disapprove of my actions that's great. but how do they know? well, they heard about it. how? people talk. but say it's long distance? well, there are travelers and caravans, right? so you walk into a bar and somebody recognizes you from the word of mouth description. they say to you "hey, you blew up that town, right? i might have a job for you." or they say "hey, it's the bastard who blew up that town! get 'em!" see where i'm going with this? the decision of "good" or "bad" or "neutral" is so juvenile it makes me want to vomit. Well, yes, "good" et al is relative. Looking at Fallout 3, there are exactly 2 Vault Dwellers running around...the PC and the father. Let's take that Megaton bomb quest for sake of example. I walk into town, ask the sheriff about the bomb. I go talik to Moira about it, and everyone in the bar sees me talking to Burke. I'm seen messing with the bomb itself. Megaton is not a closed place...people come and go. People gossup: "Hey, did you see that Vault Dweller??"...it dowsn't happend every day. Then BOOM, Meagaton is flattened. Must have been taht vfault Dewller...no, not the older one. I heard he was in Rivit City at the time. Must have been the young one, the girl, and I ehard she was in Tenpenny towers... People talk. Gossip doesn't need proof, and it travels as far and as fast as the quickest transport. What would be really interesting is WRONG gossip. Imagine showing up somewhere and being accoused of something you didn't do: "I heard she killed everyone in Big Town..." "Well, I heard she saved Red..." "Red is dead...her head blown off, and that Vault Dweller girl was seen around there the other day..." "Better watch out then...those vault p[eople seem unstable..." That kind of misinformation might just get you shot on sight at Rivit City, and it might be a quest in itself just to find out why.

First off, my argument about more realistic referred to making decisions based on incomplete, conflicting information. That kind of thing happens every day. I think I'm not understanding what Gizmo proposes, and maybe he thinks I'm being purposefully obtuse, which I'm not. Again, I ahve no problem with NPCs deciding, by whatever means of faction, fame, etc to present or not present quests. I am arguing, however, that after that quest is triggered, the ball is in the court of the player to accept or reject the quest, and to set that situation up, it seems to me that the most effective way to do so is to seed conflicting information among teh gameworld, and let the player build a picture of the situation and make a decision. The results of that decision can change questlines. Fallout 3 failed at Choice with consequence, and that needs to be fixed in F:NV. If you are an evil enough bastard to blow up a town, no one but very evil people should have anything to do with you. You should have that in the back of your head when some non evil looking NPC comes to you with a quest. The idea is to bring all aspects of gameplay into the player decision making process. Even with the transparant fame system, and all it's faults, it would still be possible to make morally ambiguous quests with real world consequences.

Uhh... no. Thanks for clearing that up :/ I wouldn't mind fame stats triggering quests, is that is waht you are getting at, but I don't see why stats should be used to trick players. Throw the information out there and lest the players trick themselves...or not.

Geez, then nothing in any game "works" at that standard. If people want to play taht way, then fine. The rest of us would head down there, make the best choice we can, given the way we interept the situation, and live with the consequences. That is the root of RP, is it not?

No... The point of it would be that its not a regular quest, and that the player might agree to it believing the lie, and depending on how they handle it, might well barge in shoot first, and ask questions later. *Only realizing after the fact that they were duped. What I'm suggesting is two fold. One, that the player be judged by their actions/answers (IE. the NPC figured the PC for a gullible do-gooder based on prior conversations), and also the hit to the player when they realize that not all is what it appears, and not every NPC is honest ~and that had they asked around they would have found the man's tale full of holes... If only they'd done that before killing the guards in the village. So you want to remove the responsibility of the PLAYER to make the right decision and rely on STATS for that? As a player, why wouldn't I want to make a difficult decision, based on the information presented me? If I make the wrong decision, so be it.

Seems to me that the "trick" isn't really needed. Let the player decide if they want to take the quest or not. You walk up to me, we talk, I say: " hey, I really need your help. Those people outside of town there have captured my daughter. I need you to bring her back. I can pay you...." You just might go running out there, shoot them all, and haul missy back. You might ask the fellow at the end of the bar, who claimes that I'm a slaver and little missy is a runaway, and that's her family out there. You might talk to the sheriff, who could say he know nothing about any of it, as he glances over his shoulder. You might walk away not knowing what to do. What do you do? This is more realistic, IMO. Situations are generally not black and white. When people have differing stories, which do we believe?

I hope it is much bigger. Preferably with more space in between the different hot-spots. Also, get rid of those little arrows showing you the way all the goddamn time! And bring back vehicles. Even Wasteland had a car and a helicopter. I don't see the usefulness in empty space. I'd rather see the entire playfield fully rendered, because I generally like to walk across the map. I would support a control to toggle on/off varisous helpers in the UI, which sould be easy to implement, considering it's XML (I think) based.

I'd like a system where the NPC could talk to the PC for a while, and based on the answers, decide that "This guy might just fall for it", and tell a convincing sob story that would set the PC off on a torch and burn mission against an innocent and defenseless village to return a "hostage" to her father.(unknowingly slaughtering the family of the boy she'd eloped with) It's interesting how many players don't like that sort of thing. We saw a taste of in in FO3 with the Tenpenny situation. Here's a whole building of people who basically need to be shot, and an outside group of folks who want to be like them. There are plenty of clues lying around as to what would happen if you make the obvious choice, yet we still had dozens of people on forum crying about the (minimal) repercussions of their decision. The problem with moral decisions is that it is difficult to quantify morality. The game designers must find a way to quantify this so that they can use it as a variable...which forces developers to maintain a sort of default morality...one which likely doesn't jibe with the morality of the player character. I'd rather not quantify it at all and just let the decision itself cascade consequences throughout the rest of the came. In the case of Tenpenny, one either helps one side or the other, helps neither, or finds a way to screw both parties to extract whatever personal benefit possible. How this decision affects the rest of the game...or not, is the key, not the keeping score. Fallout like end of game slides outlining events is good enough. The only other use of faction, and this should be hidden from the player as Gizmo suggests, is to frame initial level of favor with NPCs, and that would be a sort of faction score, with each NPC maintaining a threshold based on their faction. This global faction level could shut down, or make available large masses of content and quest paths.

And you know why that is? They gave Oblivion a negative review. The negative reviews were fine. What wasn't fine was the years of excessive negativity BEFORE the game came out. Nothing could be done to appease these folks. They were, and are entitled to their opinions, but for many of them the mere fact that Beth purchased the franchise meant game over for them. One does not continue to fight hopeless battles. You folks might start getting a taste of it here. If F:NV isn't a FO1 clone, you better man the ramparts.

I like Oblivion because it supports my preferred gaming style. If you prefer heavily scripted, story driven games, then you p[probably won't like it. If you measure modern games with games from 10 years ago, you probably won't like any modern game. But you not liking a game doesn't make it crap. It only makes it crap to you, and the two, of course, are not the same.

See, I just don't agree with that. I've played FO3 at least a hundred hours and I'm still finding places I haven't been before. For example, I recently came across a skeleton sitting in front of a radio, pistol in hand and a bloodstain on the wall. Now, I'm the kind of player who generally notices that kind of thing, and will ponder how this all came about. Who as he talking to on the radio, and what happened to them? Why did he finally end it? He seemed well protected and reasonably well supplied. It's a sort of subtile storytelling that Beth never gets credit for. There are other examples: Skel in bathtub with a toaster....skel in bathtub with empty booze bottles all around and a pistol nearby....holotapes and terminals that carry ongoing stories. These things are all over the place, waiting to be found, and waiting to be thought about. No doubt many players never see/find/think/care about things like this. That's fine: I'd like to see every player find fun any way they can, wherever they can. No, you don't get lead around by a story you can't get away from. You are required to decide where you want to go, and do want you want to do, and IF you want to follow the main quest at all. I currently have a level capped character that has done NO quests in FO3, and a mid level character in Oblivion with dozens of open quests. As I said before, clearly, the style of game play supported by these two companies are highly dissimilar...diametrically opposed even. That I prefer one style and you another is hardly surprising. That you would perfer an Obsidian game or earlier RRPS is also understandable. But it is this difference that's going to make F:NV a very interesting game...for both of us. Not trying to argue that Beth games are better then, well, anything else, including previous Beth games. Arguments like that tend to be subjective to the point of nonsense. I can, and will tell you why I like FO3 better than FO2, or better than NWN2 for that matter, but I'm not going to try to tell you why you should agree with me.

I don't really play the game for combat, so the "normal" setting is about right for me, although many find the game too easy. With the robust modding tools provided, however, there are plenty of mods out there to boost combat difficulty. One I would recommend is Marts Mutant Mod, which adds some really tough mobs.

There is the potential to fix these things, especially the dialogue, which I think Obsidan tends to do especially well. This is why I think it's going to be a perfect fit. What would fit my playstyle nicely is a FO3 with stellar dialogue and well developed quests, while still giving me plenty to explore on my own.

ummmm, which argument are we talking about? Not argument, discussion. Now, of you are going to play forum PVP with me, I'll ignore it. What do you think of this merger of game styles? Edit: For horrible typing

aw, crud. you? wassup, you miss our arguments since i been gone or sth? How nice. This advances the argument how?

NMA is hardly unbiased. Then again, no one really is when it comes to Fallout. I see my friends Asur and Gizmo precede me. I've been lurking the last couple of days, trying to decide if I want to be active here. I don't share most of the likes of this group. I'm a fan of all the Fallout RPGs, including FO3. I prefer the open, sandbox, freeform exploration style of RPGs over the story driven RPGs that most of you here favor. No surprise there: Obsidian excels at deep story driven RPGs, and Beth excels at Sandbox games. Most of the drama over the past several years have been over gameplay styles more than anything else. I hope that we can focus more on this new game than on the old, tired Fallout debate. And that is why I am excited about F:NV. With any luck, we will get the best of both of these RPG genres, and if we do, many of us will be happy campers.