bhlaab

I'm playing through oblivion for the first time and I'm sooooo glad I waited until a ton of mods came out to fix things like lockpicking, speechcraft, level scaling, etc

It has a lot of broken pieces though. For example, the lockpick skill: My hulking 30 int/30 agi Nord with a warrior concentration and lockpicking in a minor slot can pick all the same locks almost just as well as my 60 int /60 agi Wood Elf with a stealth concentration and lockpicking in a major slot. So two completetly different, almost totally opposite, character builds have exatcly the same lockpicking ability in the gameworld. In other words: the lockpicking skill matters diddly/squat. IF so, why is it even in the game? If it isn't supposed to matter than just leave it out. But it is in the game; it doesn't matter, and it is therefore broken. SO many of the bad design choices in Oblivion stem from them not wanting the player to recieve a single ounce of negative feedback. Lockpicking minigames instead of a die roll Spells split up into levels instead of having a failure chance Enchantment altars instead of even having the option to try on your own I suppose the line of thinking behind it is "Casual players are SO DUMB they'll vomit in disgust and break the disc if they lose a dieroll" The reality is, it homogenizes everything, makes building your character pointless, reduces replayability, and the spell thing makes being a mage ridiculously difficult unless you sit in a field grinding Illusion for 50 minutes

It's been a long time since I played M, but off the top of my head, I'd cite O's stealth mechanic and its journal as things that were huge improvements over their M counterparts. I'll give you those.

I disagree, Morrowind was and is a fantastic game. The problem with Oblivion is, the only new things it brought to the table made the game considerably worse

Yeah, she's the only character in the game with a full arc. But, even that had some really sappy love scenes to awful pop music, bizarre coincidental relationships with other characters, and an ending that... well, "Huh?" is the word I'd use

-Good timing. Xbox 360 came out in Fall 2005. Oblivion came out in Spring 2006. People were done with their launch games and suddenly a game with incredibly impressive graphics and scope comes out. It's no surprise a lot of people are figuring out that Oblivion wasn't that hot only in retrospect after playing the marginally improved Fallout 3. -Most people who played Oblivion haven't played Arena, Daggerfall, or even (albeit to a lesser extent) Morrowind. Or probably any crpg for that matter. As far as many people are concerned, the game is just called "Oblivion", not "Elder Scrolls 4" -Reviews in this industry are very rarely based on the quality of design ideas and usually read like a checklist of "Good Graphics? Check. No bugs? Check." etc. Oblivion has so many inherent flaws that I couldn't possibly say that what was written in the design docs turned out good. But its broad ideas-- the ones carried over from Arena in 1994-- are so immediately impressive that reviewers cut it slack for failing misreably as soon as you scratch the surface away. And since it was the first of its kind for many people, Oblivion got a lot more credit than it deserved for "Legacy Ideas". -Pre-Release hype (most of which were outright lies like Radiant AI) pegged it as a AAA game from the beginning. This is an industry where an 8/10 on the wrong game can get you crucified. Reviews aren't about telling consumers how to shop, or to create an intellectual dialogue about a games merits and demerits, it's about appeasing the zeitgeist... And no review source wants to be the ones pushing against a zeitgeist by giving Halo 3 a (gasp)... 7/10!

I don't have any love for Tomb Raider 1 at all, but I found that in Anniversarry Lara often doesn't do what you tell her to e.g. jumping off of ledges at strange angles.

I think the story was pretty sub-standard as well. Like someone else said, nothing gets resolved and it feels like it takes place in the TLJ universe just to sell to fans of the first game. The entire storyline takes place in the 'real' world. Arcadia is there, but until a sequel comes around to wrap up the loose threads it serves absoloutely no purpose and the game would have only been improved by cutting those segments out. They set up a conflict in Arcadia but never follow through. Locations and characters from TLJ pop up but only to go "Hi, hello! Here I am! Well, bye!" People say its storyline is better than most games, but it's only in delivery-- not in content. Dialogue and VO work are extremely competent, but the plot itself is like a baby deer trying to walk around on its little stick legs, knowing that it can't possibly appease newcomers and old time fans alike. Okay, I lost track of my deer simile but my point stands.

With the bad AI, you can simply hide somewhere and wait til the bad guys with guns get close enough. Or lob some grenades. That's sort of true, but the fact that enemies have unlimited ammo and are not bound to AP-- not to mention the huge number of super mutants you face at once later on-- means they still have an advantage.

Something really needs to be done about melee combat, especially in regards to VATS. It's just a MESS. No targetable limbs, your character teleports all over the place, you either have a 0% chance of hitting or 95% with no in-between (which seems to be based on some sort of obscure juju instead of actual distance to the enemy) and lots of really awkward animations in where your weapon clearly doesn't connect but the enemy falls down anyway. Not to mention that you're at a severe disadvantage against enemies with guns since you have to close in while they open fire... but that can't be helped, really. It's just another line to the list of "Why Turn Based is Infinitely Superior to Realtime and That's What You Should Do Regardless of What The So-Called License Holders Demand". Just sayin'.

The difference is those real life kids aren't invincible. You could shoot a railroad spike through their heads if you really wanted to. Again, choice & consequence.

That's part of the problem. They should make logical sense. I'd have been able to shrug off if there were no children wandering around. You see that all the time in games and movies, where children and violence just don't coexist. It's an easy pill to swallow. What annoys me is that the game keeps telling me "Do what you want, do what you want" and yet at every turn I see "You can't go through this door yet" and "You can't pull this switch yet" and "This person is invincible". I agree, Little Lamplight felt like an insult. Like they were going "Yeah, you're not allowed to kill children. So guess what here's 20 of the most irritating characters you've ever seen in any entertainment medium ever and you can't do anything about it. And guess what, you HAVE to go here to finish the main quest!"

We aren't running for public office here, why soften the sell?

Every other npc you can talk, steal, kill Children you can talk, steal. How is it strange to call out the one thing missing?

I really hope they don't bother. Games are in the press much more than they were a decade ago, and it's simply an irresponsible decision to allow it. It doesn't add anything to the game. I just disagree with the way RPGs nowadays seem to be about "You can do ANYTHING you want-- except for this, this, this, and that" To me the fact that you're not allowed to do it is similar to Oblivion where you'd see a bunch of doors "You need a key" or characters that can only be "knocked out". It's just irritating to be walking around this allegedly realistic and reactive world and see the seams like that. I'd rather have no children around than have them be invincible. Elder Scrolls doesn't have any children in it and nobody ever seemed to notice or care.

The shooting in call of juarez wasn't great and what wasn't shooting was even worse stealth. The amount of grass decals all over the place also means it's surprisngly tough to get to run well. Right now I'm playing Oblivion. Never played it before, and I have a buttload of mods to make it palatable. It's okay.

I wonder if you'll be able to kill children in this one. Probably not, but I really think they'd get away with it if they made them die with less gore/decapitations than everything else.

nothing. and probably will stay as such until E3 or sth. Probably E3 next year

Yeah but Fallout 2's got an increasingly bad reputation so I need to jump in whenever someone is talking ill about it on the internet

The amount of silliness in the game actually seems to vary by which area you're in--apparently because different people were assigned to different areas. Take, just as an example, Broken Hills. There's an intelligent scorpion that knows morse code you can play chess with, and a talking plant just outside which tells you how to beat him. (talking animals are oddly common in Fallout 2--there's a superintelligent rat in Gecko named Brain who's trying to take over the world...yeah.) There's a super mutant that forces you to have implied rough BDSM sex with him if you lose at arm wrestling. A super mutant couple is having an argument about one of them looking at porn all the time and they're not having sex. If you walk through an invisible part of a wall you can find a direct reference to some pulp hero who's apparently been asleep since before the war and you get an exp reward for "finding yet another pop culture reference." That's just from a fairly distant memory of a fairly innocent little town. I don't even have the stamina to go through New Reno. Becoming a fluffer or a porn star at the porn studio is probably the highlight there. In any fifteen minutes of gameplay you can probably find as many lewd jokes, cultural references, and blows with a sledgehammer to the fourth wall. Not all of those are terrible, only the pop culture references and talking animals stand out to me as bad. Nothing in New Reno struck me as particularly canon-shattering, either. I quite liked Broken Hills, actually. Take away the talking plant and intelligent scorpion and you have an interesting idea of super mutants trying to eke out comfortable lives after the death of the master. I liked the uneasy race relations between the mutants and the humans, and I liked how some mutants were still master sympathizers and explained their ideaologies to you. It was a great peek behind the curtain of the idea of the "bad guy" that you don't often see in games. The one thing you listed, the arguing mutant couple, is part of that. The BDSM guy, maybe not so much, but it's revealed in a pretty well-done 'grey area' quest that he's a bit of a bastard anyway.

It's not the silliness that's the problem. Fallout 3 probably could have been a lot sillier IMO. That's what I was talking about, Fallout 2 felt right with its general atmosphere (a good mix of silly & serious) but a lot of times the individual jokes themselves fell flat because of its Family Guy style riffs. The problem with Fallout 3's humor is that many of the punchlines were either labored over to the point of being watered down or botched in the delivery. Plus there's a tendency to go "too big" with their gags like with Liberty Prime. Talk about one joke that was sort of smile-worthy the first time it was told drawn out and repeated dozens of times. They also tried to make the atmosphere less pulp and more depressing, which makes the silliness a bit harder to swallow. I guess what I'm saying is that the Fallout games tend to be at their best when they're being charming, not when they are specifically going for laughs.

I love Fallout 2's humor, sadly missing in Fallout 3. Now that Obsidian is doing Vegas, perhaps they can bring that humor back. dunno. lead developer has expressed some conflicting views on game humor... particularity the fo2 kinda humor. also, as you note, much o' the fo2 brand o' humor were missing from fo3, and that means the largest group o' current fo fans probable don't get the fo funny. and keep in mind that the Faithful still criticize fo2's humor as something approaching sacrilege. personally, we would loves to see some humor directed at the fans... throw in a furry, talking deathclaw dual-wielding desert eagles... have her explain her surefire, no-lose gambling strategy while lamenting that she can't get access to any casinos... drive away in a toyota prius with 1950's styling. HA! Good Fun! The Fallout setting is supposed to be pulpy, and that can be done with a more sensible style and wit than Fallout 2 managed. I appreciate the lighter tone of Fallout 1/2, but the jokes themselves tended towards the computer nerd variety. You know what I mean: Monty Python references, intenet jokes, 'wacky' monkey cheese sort of stuff. The kind of humor that wore out its welcome in about 1999. No harm in smartening it up and having the humor come more from the attitudes of the characters and the ironies that play out in a post apocalyptic wasteland instead of quoting The Goonies for laughs.

Why is 200 arbitrary and 100 isn't? With a max level of 20-30 you're just asking for people to hit that wall, especially in "New Fallout" free-roaming sandbox style. Hitting the level cap is supposed to be for overachievers and grinders! And if you really think raising the value of the skill point tender is going to fix the balance-economy you've got another thing coming. Raise the skill max to 200 and you are going to do one of two things. 1: Double the ability you had previously. Don't want to see this... a skill of 100 is already powerful enough. 2: Halve the effect of the skills. Again... whats the point? If you want to slow the rate of reaching skill max simply lower the points you earn per level up etc. Raising the skill level to 200 is pointless. You can simply prevent hitting the 20-30 cap too soon by lowering xp awards. Just look at NwN 1 vs. NwN 2. Both OCs had max levels of 20. NwN 1 was quite a bit longer but going above level 15 was very difficult. NwN 2 was shorter and you could reach 20 quite a ways before the end. It is all about how much xp you give out. It's not about slowing the rate of reaching skill max, it's about the level of variation possible and how you balance specialist players against jack of all trades/masters of none. I'm not saying turn 100 into the new 50, that would be silly and change nothing. Clearly, if they raised the skill ceiling they'd have to rebalance the whole system. Lowering the amount of skill points at each level is also no fix because that would completely alter how the player approaches levelling. If you only have 5 points to work with, and it's the beginning of the game, are you even going to consider putting that into anything but your "main" skills (probably combat)? It puts too much pressure on the jack of all trade players who would prefer to dabble in the more 'useless' skills and potentially narrows the focus of the game altogether. Meanwhile, a wider breadth would allow the specialists to get a healthier taste of the huge benefits and deficiencies of their build.

Why is 200 arbitrary and 100 isn't? With a max level of 20-30 you're just asking for people to hit that wall, especially in "New Fallout" free-roaming sandbox style. Hitting the level cap is supposed to be for overachievers and grinders! And if you really think raising the value of the skill point tender is going to fix the balance-economy you've got another thing coming.

And it shouldn't. Games aren't books. You try to create a super-strong linear narrative and you've thrown out so much potential for a game to be a game. The story of Fallout is engrossing, because it's the story the player is creating as he or she plays. That's why people are attached to the NPCs-- because they don't NEED to be over-written and be the stars of BS unskippable cutscene melodrama. You protect Dogmeat because he's your doggie buddy, or because he's useful, or you don't care and let him die. The gameplay feeds the story and the story feeds into the gameplay.