Slowtrain

I'm not as big a fan of either game as you are, but I totally agree that the improvement between the two is huge. Oblivion may well be the worst crpg ever made; Fallout 3 still has a lot of problems, but it does some things well also. I'm curious to see what happens with ES 5. Will Bethesda stay with an Oblivion-style game and leave its FO3 improvements for its FO series? Or will the improvements of FO3 be brought over to ES 5?

BG2 is a pretty linear game. It's designed so in the very first part of the game, you can do a bunch of stuff unrelated to the main story in any particular order. Most of the content in the game is front-loaded to this area. Once you make that trip to Spellhold though, the game becomes so linear you can use it as a straight edge. STALKER: SOC is a shooter designed along the same paradigm. A lot of front-loaded content unrelated to the main story that you can do in pretty much whatever order you want, but once you hit the Red Forest, it becomes a straight shot to the end. Even the critical path stuff located in the begining is totally sequential; it is just hidden by the "illusion" of freedom becuase you can do some things not main story related in whatever order you want. Fallout's main story is pretty flaccid, but the game does have a lot of freedom in how you choose to do things. There's really only two critical plot points in the first part of the game: 1) leave the Vault 2) find the waterchip. There is really no plot critical story beyond that. There are a couple things you can do that affect the critical path, such as hire the Water Merchants to bring water to the vault, but those don't affect the main path in any sigificant way except for changing how much time is open to you. The second half of Fallout's story, stopping the mutant invasion, only has two plot critical points as well. A) Destroy the source of the mutants B) Destroy the mutant leader, and iirc A) is even optional if you do B) first. ANything else you do has no effect on the critical path except in a really tangential way, like getting a couple Paladins to help you assault the military base. Fallout does a lot of things well. Creating a dramatic and engrossing story is not one of those things however. Personally, Fallout IS my fave crpg ever, but I'm not going to claim it does stuff well that it doesn't do well.

Why the heck would "Chinese Assault Rifles" fire the 5.56 NATO round?

Umm, it exists already. Let's also not forget such classics as "Superman and Batman versus Aliens and Predator", "Green Lantern versus Aliens" and "Judge Dredd vs. Aliens" It's like professional wrestling, only worse. Monster cage matches and hair pulls and foreign objects. I played the first game. It was all right.

I think its prety gross that aliens vs predator has somehow eclipsed both Alien(s) and Predator in terms of popularity. What we really need now is Aliens vs Predator vs Terminator. That is just a license to print money right there.

Wait, you mean its a little weird to use up in excess of a thousand rounds of 5.56 ammo in just a few encounters?

They appaer to have based the shotgun design on the ppsh-41. Unless the similarity is just a massive coincidence. Why would one base a shotgun design on a submachine gun? Very odd.

Maybe they are afraid some other developer will steal their recycled ideas? "OMG. We we're going to put a shotgun in our game! I can't believe they stole our idea!"

It's just as quiet over there, with the same sort of speculation. This is the worst time in the development cycle for us....we know it's coming, but we don't know anything about it. I hear you. Personally, I think its kind of silly the way game development is treated like its about super-secret world changing stuff. I always wonder if the devs have their meetings beneath a cone of silence, lest any important secrets escape to the internet.

Well, if somebody goes over there feel free to bring back news, if you can. thx.

There's not much more to say without having at least some sense of what the game's scope and basic design will be.

New Perk: Deadly Breath Your breath contains a common terrestrial virus that is harmless to you but toxic to aliens. If you sneeze on an alien while in VATS mode, it explodes into a great fountain of purple and orange chunks.

Wanamingos aren't aliens, you do know that right? I always thought they were. If not, then I suppose it is worse. Does Keanu Reeves get some VO in?

Well, it's no worse than Wanamingos, I suppose.

Ian was some starting help for the pc through Shady Sands and Vault 15, plus provide the location of the Hub. Tycho was an extra gunhand for dealing with Gizmo and the Skulz. Katja was um....I don't know what she was really, but she had green hair. err..purple hair? Can't remember, really. Dogmeat was a Mad Max easter egg. Why the last became the most popular was probably because a) people always like animal companions, b) people like dogs, c) no romance options in the game.

IIRC, the npcs in FO were initially intended as disposable tagalongs. The pc was supposed to start and finish the game alone. It was ony after seeing the popularity of the npcs in FO1, that they got a more robust treatment in FO2.

Leonard from Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

I think its pretty cool. We obviously won't know the actual magntiude of the significances until the game is out. But more conseqeunces to decisons in crpgs is always a good thing, I think. Carrying them forward to a new game adds an interesting continuity to the ramifications. It would be cool if the Elder Scrolls games did that. Their world is such a well envisoned gameworld, that it would be pretty suitable for that, if Bethesda chose to go that way. edit: Just speaking personally, it makes me much more interested in purchasing ME and giving it a play through prior to the next game's release. And I think I probably will.

What do you mean? I've replaced my drive once and formatted it at least once, maybe twice, since ME was released. So any save from the original playthrough would be long gone at this point. Rendering the whole thing kinda moot, unless I wanted to play it again. Which people might want to do anyway, of course.

Interesting. I may go buy this. I didn't realize. I thought ME was just kiddie sky-fi shoot-em-up with cheesepuff combat. Perhaps I was gravely mistaken.

I did think the red and black armor was pretty ugly. But truthfully I ddin't like the look of the power armor in general. Actually, I really didn't finding any armor in the game particualrly appealing from an aesthetic pov. Also, the male human avatars, at least the ones for the pc you played, had heads that were slightly too large for their bodies resulting in a slightly scrawny appearnce

Awesome. That's pretty ccol. Although with a 2 year dev cycle between games, I don't know how really useful it is. But still, I like the thought. Did ME really have player choices that were significsnt enough to warrant this sort of treatment. If so, I may go buy it.

Now, Casey Hudson seems like a nice guy, but he tends to blow smoke up the customer's ***. He's the marketing dude; that's what they pay him for. The question is: How much of this is accurate? I don't understand. Is Casey saying that each choice an individual player made in playing ME1 is going to have an effect in ME2? It sounds like he is. But how is that going to work? Will you have to import a final save from ME1 into ME2 so ME 2 knows what choices you made? What if you never played ME1? DO you have to answer a questionaire about what your choices would have been? Does the game make up some default choices for you?

I don't really agree with that, but its pretty subjective, so not worth arguing.

The only problem with that relates to what Pop mentioned briefly earlier. It is hard to balance the game for both RT combat and for VATS. WHat works well in one area, works not so well in another. And what you end up with is two competing systems, neither of which really works. If the game was actually dedictated to VATS-only combat and a lot of effort was put into making VATS-only combat balanced and enjoyable and interesting, it would probably be pretty fun. The gam, to me anyway, seems that it is balanced for non VATS combat. Using VATS makes the game much easier. Since I don't much care for VATS, I like it that way, but tastes differ. TO me it seems the opposite. In the sense that it is SO much harder in RT than in VATS, that I can't help but think it was balanced for VATS. I remember the first time I attacked Evergreen Mills. I was playing a melee only character and never used VATS. As I recall I burned close to 200 stimpacks and a whackload of medx taking that place out. It seemed....excessive. I was just glad I had that many stimpacsk to burn. If there hadn't been a Behemoth there, I wouldn't have burned nearly so many though. Tring to fight a behemoth and 10 or so raiders in rt melee is a bit nuts.