bhlaab

The original fallouts had really borked armor/damage formulas. For example, every now and then late in the game a super mutant or enclave officer would somehow pull a 635 hp crit out of his ass that one-shots even the most high-endurance builds. If your die rolls are doing that, something is wrong.

I say extend the level cap to a point where it will take a very dedicated player to reach it (like, 100) And then allow the skills themselves to be leveled up to 200-300.

Why's that?

Katja was a contingency plan for those who didn't put any points into lockpicking.

yeah and they're undoubtedly inferior

Paradise Falls was a blast for me. I didn't feel like losing karma with the slavery quest so I had to sneak my way in. Using the stealth boys I had stacked up I went in and pick pocketed everyones weapons from them. Then when I finally revealed myself I had about 17 guys running after me trying to punch me to death so I just tossed grenades into the mob. It was the only time through the whole thing that I felt like I was playing a fallout game.

the lyons/outcast thing could have been really interesting had the outcasts actually done anything. I spend so long trying to find their base and then when I get there "Bring us all your scrap metal and we will give you stimpacks" UGH. I've got about 20 standing orders already for random scrap metal already, buddy.

You're not a fan of Generic Black Man?

I hope the 3rd person camera is reworked. Something where you can rotate around your character, like in Mass Effect but with the ability to pan in and out with the mouse wheel. You could go to standard RE4 style when you have your weapon drawn. Or at the very least a diagonal running animation so you don't ice skate. One thing that really needs to be fixed is the way the third person camera can't be obstructed. If it hits a wall or something it tries to zoom in to get around it. For example, when I had fawkes following me the camera would go insane because it wasn't allowed to clip through him.

I was bashing bethesda (and a bit of bioware) not you. Calm down. What I recall hearing about Jefferson was that the amount of dialogue required for its reputation system was insurmountable. Everything you're saying sounds like a great system, but as far as implementing it... If it was my game I'd rather the time and budget be spent somewhere else. But then again, I also buy the off-brand cereal.

From what I've heard about Jefferson it was entirely unreasonable from a development perspective. Choice and Consequence is best left as something that comes naturally from the gameplay. Like if you kill a brotherhood of steel member you're no longer allowed into their fortress. That's a simple "Flag ON" and "IF Flag ON..." It's unobtrusive, it makes perfect sense, and it sends the message that every small choice you make can dig you into a hole. The problem is if your choice and consequence system is that low key, it's not something that can be put on the back of the box. So what we end up with is a binary choice where you walk into town and someone says "Disarm the bomb!" and someone else says "Detonate the bomb!" and you're picking between linear sequence A or linear sequence B. Or worse, a karma system where you can nuke a town but make up for it by giving one hobo 800 glasses of water. I think that's what rope kid was saying earlier with developers tending towards "x-treeeeeme reactivity". You don't need huge pillars of flame to mark your evil deeds or people running after you to give you gifts if you're good. Just set up the parameters and let the player find his or her way around inside of them.

Well what is there to say about the story besides posting our own awful fanfic-type ideas

Yeah, I DEFINIATELY want a main quest that has to be uncovered like in the original games. I want to be able to skip 90% of it if I know where I'm going and I'm good enough to get there. None of this nancy hold your hand "Go where we tell you and the plot will be revealed when we feel like it" business. I want to miss important stuff the first time I play through, and then in my second playthrough miss stuff that I found in the first one. The first time I played through Fallout 1 I had no idea FEV even existed. If you wanted explainations you had to look for them, damn it. Also: There should be a canned food item in New Vegas called "Chef Boyarsky"

Should have been in the game by default. What, you mean johnny mercer? Yeah, totally.

VATS without slowmo (theres an HD version) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fpHAcUl-as

I'd like to see VATS heavily expanded-- pull out to a sattelite view and from there you can spend ap on movement, reloading, non-targeted shots, item use... I'd also like to see enemies have limited amounts of ammo and have to spend action points to move so they can't just charge you and unload

I've got a mod that turns off VATs slowmo. There's still a slight "slow mo" feel to it, but only about 3% of what's usually there. It looks fine (except for when it awkwardly jumps to FP view in close quarters, but that's awkward in slowmo as well I guess) I've got another mod that attempts to simulate turn based by slowing down all the enemies even more so that they are more or less frozen as you take your shot-- then you're forced to stand still and do nothing as your ap recharges. It doesn't work very well, but it's proof enough that the variables can be altered. And hey! Wait a minute! Aren't you of all people supposed to be "positive" about this stuff???

The whole game I was wondering "I wonder how they'll explain the super mutants being back!" I was honestly intrigued. And then Vault 87 crapped all over that. "They're vault experiments!" is such an awful and cheap explanation. For one thing I killed about 800 of them up to that point, for another thing how is that a social experiment and where in gods name do the centaurs fit in? These aren't even little nerdlinger details I'm harping on! That's basic, "You obviously thought this through for about 5 minutes", awful writing. Talk about plot holes. My favorite part was the Codex/NMA review that more or less started out with "Radiation in water will be filtered out through soil in less than a year" About 10 minutes of looking on wikipedia and they've DESTROYED the entire plot. That's what annoyed me the most about the game's story. they set up so many intriguing questions and then all the reveals were either lame or nonexistant. The president was a computer all along? Wow, that would be a really unpredictable twist if I hadn't predicted it almost immediately.

I'm so glad you don't decide the future of Fallout. I was joking. It'd be an interesting mod though. If I did decide the future of Fallout everything would be right in the world, though

I would like to see Max Payne 2 remade in the Daggerfall engine

I would like to see Fallout 3 remade in the Fallout 2 engine

You and I have very different ideas about what constitutes "cool." A game wasting my time because it gave me awful directions doesn't count in my book. For morrowind, sure. It's a game that's about wasting your time. The trick is to play it over summer break when you're in high school or college.

Oblivion is actually a little bit bigger than morrowind, but it feels smaller just because you aren't constantly going from swamp to desert to sea to town to prarie to ashland whatever like in Morrowind, you've pretty much just got Grassy, Snowy, Beachy. And with all the thick forests and well-defined landmarks they don't play with negative space in quite the same way. The compass pointing directly at each goal doesn't help as the aimless wandering was part of Morrowind's charm-- the fact that the world was "so big" that you couldn't find the stupid cave you were looking for was frustrating but cool. There's a mod to play Morrowind with distant land on and yeah it does make things feel a little bit smaller, but it still feels like "the possibilities are endless!" in a way oblivion just doesnt. Fallout 3 is actually a lot smaller than both, hough to me it feels about the same size as Oblivion. They work with the space better, but I can't help comparing it to the previous Fallout games instead of the previous Elder Scrolls games. And in that regard I feel that it should be a bunch of hub areas like towns connected by vast emptiness. The fact that Megaton and Rivet City were the only substantial towns bothered me, and even then they weren't quite as substantial as any of the towns in the previous games.

You know what? Just stop already. Stop.

I think if anything they could sell them on DS and keep in mind everybody in the first world has a computer than can run Fallout