bhlaab

I gotta say I think the stupid Total Recall-style latex models were much cooler than any engine could render

Iirc . I'll have to do that, bhlaab. I guess it's like Painkiller. No saves on hardest difficulty probably. *grrr* No, Oner, you're thinking of the first one. In 2, I guess I'm playing Max Payne 2 again. Luckily, I thought it was an awesome game. You're not missing much, just a slightly different ending comic

Fate of atlantis is worth getting excited over, the rest... eh. They didn't really pick and choose the cream of the crop (The tim schafer and monkey island catalogues are suspiciously missing...)

If you play through it again on the hardest difficulty

Oops. Little misunderstanding back there, I thought you were trying to be clever. Sorry. The game must have a narrative (not to be confused with a plot), obviously, since, regardless of format, it's a work of fiction. You are being told what's going on in a world somebody made up, who are the good guys, the bad guys, their motives and whatnot - the form in which this information reaches you is not important. But if you thought there's no narrative proper, that's a good indication of how different that is from the very central role the characters and story plays in FO3. Less room for freestyling, but in exchange for a more involved story and characters. If that's more involved, I'll have less next time please.

Well, the reason Paul Denton worked is because he was such a side character in the story that it didn't matter what he thought of you (or even if he survived) and his presence as a guiding voice didn't crush you under the weight of its sentimentality. The problem is, like Martin in Oblivion, the Dad runs the show entirely. You become the most evil person ever, he forgives you and keeps giving you quests that put the fate of the world on your shoulders. You tell him to go screw and vow not to help him with his stupid water project, you never finish the game. The game assumes that you love him and works backwards from there, which is a mistake. That's why the Fallout series relied so heavily on macguffin objects instead of a series of very specific narrative quests-- it gives a huge amount of freedom for the player to maneuver in.

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. fix it. am no more a fan o' fo3 plot than is most in this thread, but if you see busted, then fix... but keep in mind that you got a protagonist-centric, character driven story. now, make compelling. keep flexible so that Mikael can play how he wishes to, but gotta also work for vol and aristes and a few hundred thousand other folks. fix it. for the nonce, ignore whether or not a crpg needs to be story driven. also, assume that the player's character has gotta be more important to story simply acting as the means by which plot points is advanced. now, fix. find a way to make story compelling And universal flexible. o' and mere fact that player is the protagonist will not result in a compelling story anymore than story o' your pong paddle becomes inherent compelling. am not a fan o' protagonist focus in a crpg story, but most developers start with such stuff. assuming you start as does bethesda and bio and so many other developers, come up with a story that retains protagonist focus and considerable flexibility while achieving emotional impact. HA! Good Fun! If you're suggesting a complete TC mod for fallout 3, you're being unrealistic. That could take a whole HOUR to do.

no

Fallout was pretty good about this, having the text act more as a narrator than an external voice for the character. I'm sure it tripped up here and there, though.

It's true that text is more explicit, but there are all types of camera framing techniques to send a pretty clear message. And, as I was arguing before, with a subjective camera it's probably not best to be explicit with such things and allow the player to draw their own conclusions.

Oh my, how could I fail to notice that you can hear smell and see the feel of paper. And my point, if you had read my posts instead of trying to maneuver me into the most perfectly snarky corner you could, is that text is no more or less likely to make you smell or feel something. It can only describe it, which is exactly what visual and audio cues do.

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. Visual and Audio cues. Happy?

UH let's see... because I want to play it?

It's going to be grim fandango 2 except they'll mix it up to sell more to modern audiences. Instead of an adventure game it will be a fps with adventure game elements, and instead of a film noir feel you will play as a visibily older and overweight Manny fighting his way out of Renaissance-themed environments.

Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, or Full Throttle? God I hope not. Just stick to your awful star wars games you hasbeens

You said "How does it stimulate smell without audio or visual cues?" That's like asking "How does text describe something without using any words?" Unless the descriptions you read in books are so powerful that you can physically smell them, there's not much difference. What I mean to say is not that imagination only has a part in text-based forms. I'm using imagination here very conservatively-- Focusing the mind to construct a world out of descriptive text. My point was that words lack what video and audio cues have and vice versa. They're both completely means to the same end. The end being, in this case, describing a smell. I think that if the player is fully entrenched ("IMMERSED" is what i think the PR people want me to say) in a game world, or meant to be, I think it's awkward and pointless to try to construct an imaginary world with text that looks and acts exactly the same way If you pull out and increase the emotional distance, it's more appropriate. If New Vegas did turn out to be isometric, I'd be all for it. I'm not saying text is worse than cool grafix, I'm just saying that it's much less appropriate in the type of game Fallout 3 (and likely New Vegas) are trying to be. Do I wish they were trying to be an isometric game with lots of text? Yes, of course!

Text only stimulates the imagination. And when you're sitting inside of the world as opposed to above it, you don't want to rely on imagination to get a point across. Compare Fallout 1's "For the first time in your life, you see natural sunlight" to Fallout 3's blowing out your vision as you exit the vault. Same idea requires different execution.

If you've played Oblivion, it was an audio version of the black horse courier

"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. It's not the fact that it's 3D or HD or whatever. For example, Neverwinter Nights has text descriptions, and I think it works for it. Here's what I think the difference is: In Fallout 1 and 2, the player is looking at the world from up high. An objective viewpoint. For this reason, the player must be told what the character sees and how he or she sees it. Fallout 3 uses a subjective camera-- you're constantly looking at the world in relation to the character. What the player sees is what the character sees. Instead of panning and scanning around the environment, you're actively looking around. It's for this reason if, say, you put the crosshair over a chair and it said "You see a chair," I think most people would have the reaction "Duh, no ****." whereas it's something you can get away with in a top-down view (especially one without direct control like point and click RPGs) You have a good point about the dark irony, but I think that Fallout 3 does have those elements. But again, zoom the camera out really far and remove the player from the context of the world and something could be very darkly funny. However, put the player inside the world and that same thing will be dramatic and sad. This is one of the reasons I feel the Fallout series should have never made that jump to first person-- it changes the whole ballpark. The world of film and screenwriting isn't quite so far removed from games.

That is one thing Fallout 3 did very well. My favorite is going into a blown apart house and seeing two skeletons spooning on the bed. I think the text box was simply born out of necessity since a low-res isometric world is so abstracted. And you'll notice that Fallout 3 still has it in when it needs to in the form of popup boxes ("You notice bite marks on the neck of the corpse") I miss the extra gags as much as anyone, but as the rule goes: when you can, show don't tell. With the truncated item descriptions you're still telling, just less (which is even worse I'd say) So that's my beef with that.

You are well on your way to being massively disappointed by Max Payne 3

Whoa whoa whoa, Crysis was not a bad game! It's just a shame it was so short, I mean the world turns to ice and the game just instantly ends, right there, at that point, before you can even explore any ice levels.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not saying I'd go out of my way to read them-- I don't really care about the lore of the dumb sword. I'm just saying that even this: is better than in my book

Yeah, if there's anything I hate in an RPG its stats being described by nonsense acronyms, or worse icons. DAMs, CONDs, DRs, even Fire Resistance +10s... I hate feeling like the loot I'm picking up is there just to be loot

Can't you configure that? fyi in max payne 2 if you let the bullet time charge enough you get super bullet time where the bad guys are slowed down but you arent