cronicler

Aristes I wasn't even talking about opinions there. The actual FPS part of the game has so many bugs and unpolished bits that nothing in the game's list of gimmicks felt useful. Trying to do anything other than taking a corner and ambushing the mob was chancy as hell. Half the time my long range rifle shots or close range meelee attacks were not working somehow. What I meant with the "gameplay were so... so... bad" comment is the little problem that half the time game could go apes* without any reason. I am not saying oh this is bad scrap that. I am saying that to get a polished and sturdy product Obsidian is going to do a lot of bug fixing. B. has not fixed most of the game botching bugs and glitches since the release and they just don't seem to care about the bugs. Sure the game sold ok, but as you might recall Age of Conan sold okay too at first. If FO3 title was competing on a MMO area where sub-par products are forgotten real quick then it would be a bust. My experiences with fallout 3 were similar to my experiences with oblivion: A super game once you disable the main quest, get the combat overhaul, general overhaul, AI overhaul, better textures, Open cities and some other "small" mods like Kwatch rebuilt, Village extenders, Ui and Map mods and finally quest and story mods... Sure the game is very enjoyable but I had to disable most of the Vanilla game and insert 6gigs worth of user made content. (Ok, I concede that 3,5 - 4 gigs of it was just textures and Goddess item shop ) There is a very capable foundation in there but B. didn't bother with creating anything or polishing or even seeing if the parts fit good. Now Obsidian has to use the same pile of stuff and create a game. I have faith that they will be able to fix the problems and create a nice/good product at least but it just irritates me to see them having to fix the damn game in the first place.

Vats is.. well... It isn't about vats exactly. When playing a detailed real time game (first person, a third person, isometric doesn't matter) you either base your gameplay on doing the right thing at the right time like commandos or you allow the player an option to pause the game and give orders and whatnot. As this game is (or supposed to be) an RPG with adventure/exploration flavor, the player needs a way to pause the game and asses the situation. By itself I think Vats is not enough to do this job at all. Without thinking about its buggy mechanics (increased critical hits is acceptable as you are targeting a specific body part but atm you only get the "cool" munckin criticals... Crippled limbs etc have no effect on the gameplay or AI. Heh the AI doesn't even have an option to act in groups or run away...) and buggy game play (Invisible walls, buggy pathfinding, being unable to hit if target is too close...) It only allows you to make targeted shots. If this was a game with decent gameplay the targeted shots would be good but the actual gameplay is so... so... bad that this option doesn't add anything to the game. In itself Vats is not a bad system to implement targeted shots onto a real time game. They will just have to remove the Dr bonuses, fix the line of sight issues, fix the damage calculations and make combat up to modern standards..... What this game needs is another system that is like Brothers in Arms or Mass Effect orders systems. If I have teammates then I need a way to tell them what to do. The system could even double as a perception/intelligence/level based 6th sense alerting you to enemies flanking you.... I mean IF they can get the AI to act coherently and use tactics like flanking, suppression fire... TBH a graphical engine is a graphical engine. Sure all of them have their own limitations etc but we are not talking about making a game that needs 100% correct hitboxes. I would have said just let he stats do the work and give us a graphical representation but I was bannd from B. boards more than I care to remember for asking things like are you sure this much gore is a good idea.... Anyway, B. has somehow managed to scramble all the physics in the game somehow so you are likely to get tons of errors just by doing normal things. (The problem with physics was also present in Oblivion as you can experience by putting 8 or 10 gems in a bowl and see them explode all over the room by gaining momentum via hitting each other....) The guys at Obsidian will probably have to disable a lot of code then write a simpler versions that work to get the whole show on the road. Ah well, If I didn't have a rough guess at how much fixing the guys at Obsidian were going to handle, I would have already be begging for new gameplay elements like improved stealth (lightning and noise based) to play like Thief 3; Team Controls like BiA, Mass Effect, Freedom Fighters to control squads of henchman; a tycoon game mode with which to manage the assets we will acquire in Vegas; a sims like interface to design my den and its defences and a very detailed crafting system that would make use of prewar blueprints that you could hunt in old computers and libraries...,

Oh boy... Please don't bait me or if you would like to really discuss this in a more lenghty way we should go to another topic. We are OT enough already...

Ty Mr Bob. I would also like an Iguana on stick please. As you might have noticed more than 3 quarters of the post is about the problems based on the FO3 engine Obsidian will have to handle if they want to create a decent game. I didn't even go into the story and style ideas we are rolling around at NMA. Obsidian have enough creative talent without me going too much fanboi on them ..... And the coin drops and this users blood pressure goes sky high. Those rat bastards... Who wants to bet we will see "every" correction Obsidian makes to the game play and engine used in the next B.soft title? Kind of clever I have to admit, let the professionals correct your mistakes and then have them pay for it too....

You know me, When I get excited; walls of text is the result. I even worked on this one a couple of times to make it coherent instead of my usual jumps from here to there style

Ot: Tl;dr? Edit: TG strikes again! Edit 2: It seems Obsidian boards use a time limited edit function as I am unable to edit my previous post. Anyway here is one last bit that I forgot to write about; Mini games: The mini games that we see in the modern games are a mixed bag. I think personally I encountered my first mini-game in Thief 3: Deadly Shadows. Personally Fallout 3's lock picking game wasn't so bad. It only lacked a way to bypass the game if your skill was high enough (force the luck isn't actually the same thing) and it was way over used. The Hacking game was on the other hand, plain boring. Find and Click the joker tiles then play mastermind was just plain make work. We have a pipboy on our arm. Why cant we mod it with some additional programming and input jacks and hard connect to the damn machine? Science could skill would regulate how complex hacking programming you could write for your pipboy and repair could be used to regulate what parts you can create to use as input jacks etc... Also I really missed the old Tragic Card Game. I know it is streching things a bit but i would love to build myself a tragic deck like pazaak (sp?) in Kotor. Similarly it would be nice if we could get our hands on some other games like the dragon-dice from Witcher or your regular checkers or chess... Thanks for reading

Hello Obsidian Boards! I know of a couple of guys who have been discussing their wishes over new Fallout titles at the Glittering Gems of Hatred site. Anyway those boards had become a bit desolate but then we heard Obsidian somehow got the rights to produce a spinoff to Fallout 3 and a lot of ferrets on sugarhigh came out of woodwork wondering if a spin-offs spin-off could be a real sequel. Anyways I tried to compile the Needs, Wishes and Hopes we had to be inserted into the new Fallout Flavored toolbox. Enjoy and Hate. Needs: The 3-D game play elements of Fallout 3 are sorely lacking: (Need)-The hit boxes are just plain buggy and firearms can go ape* hitting invisible barriers everywhere. (Need)-The combat also lacked depth. There were no alternate ammo types, Damage Resistance system or any difference between weapons. You just went Vats and headshotted this mob. then the other then the other. All you needed to win the game is a pistol. (Need)-The AI or more precisely the lack of AI. The combat AI was equvalent of a Wolfenstien 3D Enemy AI. They saw you and they run at you and fired endless number of bullets. If they had any Launchers or similar area of affect weapons then they were likely to kill themselvesas they too suffered from invisible blocking things. (Need)-The meelee was supposedly carried over from Oblivion but somehow it was gutted down too much. The game had a location based damage system but you couldn't control your meelee attacks so it was just bash bash stimpack... (Need)-The Numerical system that supposedly defined your character was broken too much. The game just gave you 10(Bobble Head)+ 25*2 (Skill books and Perk)skill points for every skill. The Stats themselves had no influence over the game except determining is you could carry endless ammo or endless ammo... (Need)-The Perks were... weird. There were about 6 or 7 perks that affected game play in some ways (Black Widow, Child atr Heart, Action Boy...). All the rest were in grades pf +1 statpoint, +15 skill points, +30 skill points,+45 skill points... (Need)-The Talking heads of Fallout 1-2 were nice because you could see how the guy felt trough their mimics and tones (Most of the time. it still had the mood:happy lines when NPC was angry/mad at you. Still It was 1998!). The Facial Zoom in Fallout 3 is not working out well due to a combination of factors like wooden faces, zooming and being fixed on the guys face etc. Alternating the camera angles now and then,zooming to the scar on the guys cheek or gals rack or a tatoo on the tribal's chest or the ornate cup on the shelf behind the salesman now and then would make the conversations a bit less static (Need)-The NPCs were overdone in useless/cosmetic areas and underdone in important/game play areas. It is impossible to give NPC's appropirate tones for every line. And this leads to you asking a normal line after the npc is crying you get a normal response which breaks the thing. The speech really needs to be rare and tailored to the conditions instead of using "Mood: Normal/Happy" lines in the middle of crying for dead parents/friends.. On this issue Less is more approach would work better. Only giving Major Npc's direct and detailed voiced conversations and giving the normal Npc's a maybe few generic voiced lines that and maybe "speech bubble" style speech would be better. (Wish)-Also on this topic, the Information box of old Fallouts is sorely missed. Trying to cram everthing visually onto the player doesn't work well. People miss most of the stuff that is going on when it is only represented visually. "The raider was hit for too much damage kicking the daylight (and a lot of organs) out of him" is actually more funny than seeing the said action over and over and over again. (Need)-This brings us to the V.A.T.S. system. Something to give the player more control over the situation is actually needed in a game that wants to be more than a shooter. However there are much better examples that this can be achieved. Just look at Mass Effect or Brothers in Arms games to see how a pause system could make the game more tactical and deeper in combat side. As it stands now, Vats is just an embedded cheat key that allows you to skip combat and see gory animations. (Wish)-Speaking of gore, whats up with the over the top blood in the game? Look I am aware of the North American hypocracsy of gore and spleen is ok, tities are evil but the amount of critical death animations just become a "yawn" factor after the 50th head burst you see before you reach levl 4... (Need)-Back to Combat, The game does not have "ANY" cover mechanics beyond invisible barriers projected by the props. A way to implement controllable cover mechanic into the game would be real nice. (Wish/Rant)-The surviving buildings in the game were... Look I just cant wrap my head around how a wooden prewar building survived athe bombs and 200 years worth of weather. I really hope you can balance the cool factor with acceptable factor when you build your cities. It doesn't have to bee 100 logical, It just needs to be unnoticed or covered by the awe factor like: City Ruins sure this is streching the boundary of realism but the art factor does cover its problems.... Man what a wall of text. And up to now I have only listed the limitationsi Obsidian Developers will have to deal with. Anyway onward to the list of wishes about the game: Time what is time: We don't really konw if you guys (Obsidian) will be able to choose when your game takes place or if you will have to build your story at/near the same time FO3 takes place. Most of the Glittering Gems of Hatred have commented that they would like to see your game taking place some time after Fallout2. A lot of us would love to continue the saga of NCR that we created by mistake :D There has been a lot of material from fallout Bible, Old Fallout 3 and Van Baurren scripts. Is there any chance of you using these background materials in your game? The City: I guess it is inevitable for the "New Vegas" to be considered as "New "New Reno"". New Reno of Fallout 2 was the most detailed and complex part of the game. From a gaming stand point it was the pinnacle of the game. However from the story standpoint it was a sore tooth. It just didn't fit in. It just Existed unrelated to other parts of the game and was criticed for it a lot. (Then again we got a sequel which didn't have any part related to others and it was considered.... All right, all right I am shutting my trap.) I really hope you guys do take into considerations the lessons learned from New Reno. We would love to see a place as complex and satisfying as New Reno but this time supported by the story and the game itself. (a relevant Thread at NMA: New Reno . Note: If it is no go to post links then feel free to remove it or warn me so i can remove it.) Generally people (over at NMA) have been mentioning that they would lke to see a city like LA/Boneyard of fallout 1. A Ruined City with pockets(oasises :D) of life among the ruins. A Hub of trading that has grown around the bases of long range trader companies, A couple of Fortresses belonging to different para-military organizations (Some can even be called borderline raiders) and other odds and ends of civilisation on the ruins of Vegas. This way you could create a desolate empty city without having to overfill it like the Fallout 3. To give the illusion of vast emptyness, you could make the whole city only a small dot on the main world map with sattralite areas that contain other small settlements / quest locations which are outcide the "City". This way you could implement random encounters, give the feeling of vast emptyness and still have a compact well designed play area for the game. Before I close off this wall of text I would like to voice 1 more opinion. We really don't need the old Factions like NCR, Bos, Enclave etc as primary players this time. Sure it would be cool if the "Giant" NCR or the "Fabled" City (A.k.a. Vault City) had some trade missions at the NV and you could obtain their backing by doing "business" for them. I know the storry is going to tie to these guys sooner or later but I would love to pass the first half of the game trying to save my own bacon out of the chain of troubles I am going to find myself in before being a pawn in the power politics of those guys with questionable parentage. (Oh and just a forward observation post with a handfull of personnel for BoS that are after some reamains please. No more paladins pretty please! :D)