jero cvmi

Ever since games were fully voiced, if the player character is not fixed, NPCs call the protagonist with a stupid nickname instead of their name. I have always found amusing how technological advancement can place such limits on creativity. I wonder why don't they utilize a text-to-speech software or something. That said, "The Courier" sounds funny -in the good sense- to me. Fallout has always been tongue-in-cheek with RPG cliches, FedEx quests being one of the biggest.

First of all i think there's some misinformation here: But there was no mention of a satellite in the preview demo: the laser was coming from the tower itself. Second, i still can't see the connection to the FartMan. Helios One is a game location, most likely with some quests attached, with a prewar tech solar laser that can be remote controlled. Fat Man is a Big F*ckin Gun with nuclear ammo that you just come across somewhere in the game. I don't understand how these two are comparable. A solar laser makes sense in a post nuclear world, while mini nukes just don't. Even if there is a satellite involved, it makes more sense to have awesome super-destructive prewar tech forgotten in space than in some mudcrabs' lair or a raider's locker or something like that (where Fat Man ammo was typically found).

It doesn't sound as retarded as the Fat Man. It's *post* nuclear, and it doesn't have a cheesy name.

On the other hand, in the nineties computer games had a less broad, more computer-savvy audience, so it wasn't uncommon for the player to RTFM before playing.

This whole "NO U R CHILDISH AND WITHOUT SELFCONTROL!!1!" argument is very telling: We're just talking about a different perception of roleplaying. In the original Fallouts, the system restrained your capabilities according to what build choices you made. Tagged skills gained double points at level up, so if you had decided you want to play a certain type of character, the game pushed you that way and you paid the consequenses. So, when you finally developed the character you wanted ant beat the game with that character, there was a sense of accomplishment coming from the fact that you were playing against the computer. In Fallout 3, there's no restraint from the game itself and if you want to stick to the character build you had initially designed, it's only up to you. Hence tag skills just give an initial bonus and that's all. You're practically playing against yourself. It's just a different philosophy. ps. Gotta love sawyer's style: saving it for the 500th post. <3.

+1 If they do well all that needs to be done and can't be modded, there will be enough motivation to mod in toilets and the like.

I would wildly and uninformedly guess that would not be before Alpha Protocol's release. I doubt AP plays into the F:NV hype campaign much. Different publishers-- Bethsoft is handling the PR for Fallout, and they're not going to care particularly about Sega's release of AP. Plus, as we've been told that AP is 'pretty much done' at Obsidian, it's not as if all the Obsids devs will be tied up in crunch time and unavailable to do F:NV press. Well, judging from the news in the AP forums the Obsids are doing a lot of AP interviews and the like, and as for the Bethsoft folk, I am already convinced it's going to be a good game and i doubt they will say anything more informative than that. In the couple of months that followed fallout 3's teaser, all we got was some concept art and some interviews from Bethsoft heads repeating how cool and fun fallout 3 would be and how we should trust them.

I would wildly and uninformedly guess that would not be before Alpha Protocol's release.

I found Fallout 3's inventory to be way more ergonomic than the originals'. But ergonomy isn't really relevant in a gameworld where everything is so trivialised that you find so much stuff all around the *wasteland* and you have to carry it all the time because *everything happens all the time in the wasteland*: Armor and guns break down all the time and you have to fix them; Enemies with ridiculus HP charge you all the time and you run out of ammo, you get damaged, poisoned, radiated and crippled all the time so you need a huge amount of meds etc. If my gun broke down, or i got radiated, crippled etc. few times in a playthrough and i had to search for needed items and they were scarce, i would consider it an important thing, an entertaining challenge, not the boring, repetitive chore it was.

How about being able to turn it off only once in a playthrough? that would compromise with everyone. But really, i think options are always good, and restrictions are always bad. There are many exploits in games, but they ultimately ruin your own experience if you do them, so it's just a matter of personal discipline. I see no point in trying to make a game (or any kind of software) completely idiot-proof. You can play Iron Man in any game that has saves, but i don't know of any game that has an "Iron Man" mode that you can't turn off. The option is always there for those that enjoy it. I see Hardcore Mode in that vein: It's there for those who enjoy it, and if you're enjoying it you're not going to turn it off.

In a democracy any minority is supposed to have the right to self-determination and disaggreement with the majority, otherwise its opinions will never have a chance to influence the majority, and then voting becomes useless. But they won't answer your question. They're republicans. They believe in shooting first, asking questions later. Did you forget to shoot first?

Here's my story: I served 12 months compulsory service, few years ago. It was the biggest waste of time, money and energy in my life. I feel very, very bad for not skipping it by pretending to have health problems or something. In the beginning there was a month of so called training which was basically marching up and down all day like morons, doing chores and shouting at eachother. Oh and we also fired a rifle once. The rest of the service consisted of things that are either a: unnecessary, like waking up late at night to guard absolutely nothing in the middle of nowhere, or b: should be done by paid workers, like waitoring in officers' clubs, paperwork, maintenance, digging, carrying, cleaning, mopping, brooming, etc. etc. There was also some spare time so we could invest our parents' money in the local "economy" of some redneck village near the camp that would otherwise just die off or get into agriculture or something, instead of strip clubs and fast food. Basically i've come to the conclusion that the closest thing to an army here is the part that's made up by paid soldiers, i don't know how good they are but at least they are soldiers not errand boys. Too bad they share the same lowlife officers with the conscripted ones. The rest of it is just cover up for getting work done for free, spending tax money, and supporting some (a lot of) lazy douches with political connections. As for how it changed my life, i most certainly didn't learn anything new, as i already knew how to mop the floor and do the dishes. Yay manhood!! I did get to watch a lot of pr0n and play a lot of games though, so after all it wasn't a complete waste of time *sigh*.

PICS OR IT DIDNT HAPPEN . . . Seriously, posting about the awarding of a "screenshot of the month" without posting the screenshot itself? Bethlogic never stops to impress me deeper and deeper.

Your script fails due to lack of B.O.O.B.S. It's Megan Fox who plays Space Invaders all day etc. etc.

Well it's a game about explosions and shooting so it won't be hard to make a movie out of it, the hard part will be to fit in a love story, but it the script writer is talented they'll manage. I'm all for a Pong movie though.

I don't know where you're getting this. Community survival missions in the Fallouts are macguffins, generally - Through them, you stumble upon the real threat. Super Mutants, Enclave, etc. There are a few "secure water / gold / power" quests, but they have little or no bearing on the actual survival of a community. Fallouts aren't really about surviving in the wasteland, most people in the game seem to get by more or less fine. They're about defeating the Big Bad, same as any other game. Main quests are about defeating the "Big Bad" like in most rpgs, but how different communities survive is hinted constantly, from the importance of water and safety from raiders and scavengers to politics and how different communities perceive law and order. Maybe you can see these as background stuff, but they're good enough to justify the "Post nuclear" in Fallout's title.

I think it depends on the game, your expectations and what you're comaparing it with. I didn't care what Nazis ate in Wolfenstein 3D, and i wouldn't enjoy it any more if i knew. But fallout's setting has a theme where survival of communities and scarcity of recources after a nuclear war play a central role. If a game (or a film or a book) had some humans, mutants and robots in a radioactive desert, providing some explanation on how they survive there is important if you want to call it a "post-nuclear" game/film/book, because it is inevitable to compare it with others of the same genre that do it. The first example that comes to mind is the crop rotation dialogue in shady sands, that was awesome because it added to the survival theme. I think it would be boring if the game was set in another universe.

I hope this is the point where J.E. Sawyer pops in and sais it ain't so.

from teh vault:

I think this post gets at the heart of the conflict between folks who love Bethesda games and those who don't. What is "peripheral, unimportant stuff" to some players is a source of delight to others. In principle you are right, but that's not what i meant. A nice perk, a beautiful vista or a funny pop culture reference may be a source of delight for me as well, but it's still peripheral. I meant i would note bigger things as pros of fallout 3. And cons, of course, as i have done to a ridiculus degree here and elsewhere.

Proudly presenting My own free game. Screens and download here. Instructions and devlog here. None of this Flash internet crap, it's a good ol' Win32 game written in C++ with OpenGL and SDL. Basically it's a 3D FPP Arkanoid clone. It's still in "beta" and i've only tested it on like 2 PCs, a laptop and a netbook, with Windows XP on all of them, so: a. The video mode is fixed at 640X480 resolution windowed, at 50 FPS. b. There's bound to be some issues, especially if you don't have enabled any hardware graphics acceleration. c. If anyone plays it on Windows XP64, Vista or 7, and/or has any graphics issues, please feel free to PM me with their PC build. (hardware/OS/drivers/OpenGL version)

Judging from the blog post, i think he hates it more than i do. If i had to write down 5 good things about fallout 3, they would be less peripheral, unimportant stuff. Thankfully, i don't have to write good things about fallout 3.

also, Wasteland. IIRC you controlled all your squad members equally, there was no main character.

I'm not sure if anyone mentioned that yet. For me, a key word in defining CRPGs is detachment. In CRPGs, the players and their skills are detached from their character and his/her skills. You're not playing yourself, you're playing someone else, and his/her choices are not necessarily your own. That enables you to roleplay characters with abilities and traits you don't have, for example you may be a fat old man and play a female ninja, or a total dumba$$ and play a nuclear scientist. This may happen to a degree in other games, but usually some player skill is attached to an avatar skill, for example you may be playing DOOM and not be a space marine (duh) but you still have to have good aim and reflexes (like your on-screen avatar). Come to think of it, detachment is the opposite of immersion. Also, detachment is something CRPGs do better than PnP RPGs, because for example it's really hard to come up with what your character would say, if your character is smarter than you, isn't it? From that point of view, an CRPG in its purest form would play like Football Manager: It would let you do all the strategic and tactical decisions, like dialog choices, inventory management, skill points alignment and battle formations, and auto-play the rest. Actually the game Tigranes posted a while ago with the Dragons was kind of like that, all you did was choose your dragon's stances and it told you the outcome. I think it's the CRPGest CRPG i've played. Dungeon Keeper. It was everything an RPG is, except you played the dungeon.

So, after 532+ posts on this thread do we get a new official thread or what?