Slowtrain

Fixed. You like F3 as a shooter. you have no right to "fix" me lol. I like FO3 as a GAME. As a shooter, its right on Bioshock's level. WHich is to say. Not so good. Besides which, I don't like FO3 that much. Its OK at what it does. But I would hardly wave it about as an all time classic.

I think this is a very good point. Cosmetic/feel good options can be fine in limited numbers, but I personally always want options to offer me something distinctly different from the other things already on the table. Rainbow Six: Vegas was full of guns that were marginally different: dozens of assault rifles with one pip more or less in their six (I think) different categories. Ultimately, those stats were pretty irrelevant compared to the attachments (especially scopes) on the guns. I totally agree on weapons. Having 10 different handguns in a game that all do with 12 points of damage, all have a 12 hex range, all have 15 round magazines, all have the same ap cost, and all use 9mm ammo is silly. Maybe it does provide some variation, but aren't there better ways to give variation that are actually meaningful? Even if you start playing around with the handguns a bit and make some with 12 round magazines amd some with 7 round and some use .45 acp and some use 10mm etc, are these very minor variations worth the time to implement? Do they add anything meaningful? Are you even going to use a handgun if you have a MP5 or Ithaca 12 gauge available?

No, it wasn't meant to be absolutist in the sense that having more options will ALWAYS mean more interesting gameplay. There would be two problems with that: 1) If the basic gameplay is flawed then options probably won't save it regardless of how many options there are. 2) badly implemented or unneccesary options are still badly implemented or unneccesary. And while they may not hurt gameplay, they probably wouldn't help it much either. However, often the ability to have additonal options (such as leaning) does in fact make for more interesting gameplay. ANd as I said earlier:

Well, speaking only personally, of course, I have no problems with playing a bloated grotesque supermutant with bad breath, smelly amrpits, and stainmed underpants. That sounds awesome; I never even considered it otherwise. No. That's not the way rpgs work. You can't be the monster; you're supposed to fight the monster. It'd be like stepping into the underdark with a mindflayer pc... You're only a monster when seen from from the other side. BOS paladins would be the monsters to me. I would hurl my poo at them.

Thank you for the decsriptions, KK. These 2 sound interesting. I might try them once I finish the game for the first time. The perks in the default game are really pretty bland. I've been taking mostly skill increasing perks, because none of the others are particularly interesting, at least up to the level 7/8 area where I am currently at.

Well, speaking only personally, of course, I have no problems with playing a bloated grotesque supermutant with bad breath, smelly amrpits, and stainmed underpants. That sounds awesome; I never even considered it otherwise.

KK< what do your mods do, btw? Some of them aren't immediately obvious.

I agree. It was not my intention to single out FO3, it's been an ongoing problem for as long as crpgs have been around. I never finished Baldur's Gate for the same reason, (I hit the cap before I even entered Baldur's Gate) and that was long time ago. Level caps are generally a bad idea. But this mod I am using for FO3 is really really helpful.

For me, I just know that if I hit the level cap before I finish the game, I won't finish the game. Without the carrot of leveling my character held in front of me, the game isn't interesting enough to keep playing through. I'm not generally a big fan of level caps for precisely that reason. edit: If a game does have a level cap, then it should be way out of reach of what a player might reach under normal playing. FO1 had a cap but you had to farm xp big time to reach it. SO that one was OK. I think I finished my first play through of FO1 6 levels under the level 21 cap.

The only mod I am using is one that slows leveling by slightly reducing XP rewards for combat and by greatly increasing the amount of XP required to gain new levels. Given how much combat and exploration there is in the game, I can't imagine playing without it. The default scheme must bring you to the level cap pretty fast.

This seems an unneccessarily snarky response given that I was only stating that I would enjoy the opportunity to play a supermutant in a Fallout MMORPG. It smells like youi have an anti-Fallout MMORPG agenda at work, but perhaps I am mistaken.

Fixed. Bioshock was interesting. Story was pretty good, I never saw the twist coming. Also, finding the voice recordings and figuring out what went down in Rapture was pretty fun too. I'm not going to knock Bioshock's story. It was as good as story gets in action video games these days, so I can't complain. For me the bigger problems were in the gameplay itself. Did you ever play System Shock 2? If you haven't, you need to understand that Bioshock is almost an exact copy of System SHock 2, even including large parts of the story, so for people like myself who played a lot of SS2, much of Bioshock feels somewhat like a rehash.

Fixed.

I think that's a good point. Doing scary can be pretty risky for a developer. But still, lots of movies and books try to be scary and fail, yet directors and writers keep on trying. Do you think so? I've certainly experienced fear in real life, where I had control. Hmmm. I've certainly experienced games, such as System Shock 2 about which I feel similar to mkreku, that had me quite scared, though I could always reload if somethign bad happened. ANd the first time through the Haunted Hotel in Bloodlines was pretty scary, and again, a reload was always possible. Like mkreku says, its probably hard to do, and if the developers don't suceed.... I remember that. That was one of the best parts of the whole game. Do scary movies and books scare you and you just not like to be scared? Or like DN, do scary books and movies generally bore you?

So I was creeping through the metro tunnels in FO3 with my shotgun and just enjoying the rather scary atmosphere, thinking how it almost felt like System SHock 2, and then I started thinking about how few games really try to be scary. Even in the FO3 metro tunnel kind of way. Sure there are a few here and there: the aforementioned SS2, Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, Dead Space, a couple Clive Barker games, that Lovecraft game, the most incredibly awesome They Hunger HL mod, the Haunted Hotel mission in Bloodlines, but compared to the huge number of scary movies and books that are released, the number of scary games seems pretty small. People obviously like being scared in their entertainment: scary movies, books, and campfire tales have been around forever. But games seem to rarely delve into this area, mostly eschewing creeping terror for straight forward action. I'm curious if people have any thoughts on why? DO you all like scary games? Maybe there have been a bunch that I have missed? What are your favoitre scary games?

But they felt male, dang it. They just did! Maybe because they were called Big Daddys and not Big Mommas. The latter would have some interesting connotations, of course.

There were Big Mothers in BioShock. Rosie the Riveters. I always thought of Rosie as a male. Sure, its a funny name for a guy, but are you going to tell him that? What were the opther Big Daddy variations called? I can't remember. I think there were four variations. Two base types, each with a high end and low end version.

I pretty much cut my gaming teeth on flight sims, starting with Falcon 3.0. Most of them pretty much used all 128 keys plus some that were mapped to shift and/or alt as well. In that sense, I just look at a console and laugh. But to be fair, very few pc games (other than flight sims) ever really make use of more than a handful of keys anyway. The mouse is much more important than the keyboard to most pc games.

Well, I think it depends a little on how much of a difference there is between "sorts". If it is just a change of attack mode, then meh, I can't really see it as interesting. What would make the Big Daddys intersting is giving them personalities. Do they like their role as protectors? Do they wish they could take a vacation? Are there rebel Big Daddys who have gone to the corner store for cigs and never returned. Bioshock did nothing with them except for that one basic routine. And it was sorta interesting the first time I saw it. It was not interesting at all when I saw it the 50th time. And of course, from a combat point of view, any threat factor was removed because I had infinite free rez. WHio cares how tough they are. I would just blast them at point blank range til they killed me, get rezzed, run right back, attack again, get killed again, wash rinse repeat until the Big Daddy was toast. How the heck is that fun or interesting? They should at least have given the Big Daddies fairly fast health regen. COmbat would have been much tougher and interesting.

The problem with making 'iconic' characters is that you're oblidged to put money and effort into them long after they should be put out to pasture. See: Wolverine. Well, here's hoping they spruce the Big Daddys up a bit. Give them some different behavior routines. Make Big Daddy factions. Maybe have Big Daddys that will join with the player or vice versa. A world filled with Big Daddys! Imagine that. There's nothing inherently wrong with Big Daddy's. They are just too one-dimensional to be, as you succintly put it, iconic characters. Really, if all Bioshock 2 does is regurgitate all the stuff from Bioshock 1, it's not going to be very interesting. Hopefully, Levine's next project will be a return to form for him. Whatever that project turns out to be.

No argument there. I can't believe too many people would seriously make that argument though, outside of trolling purposes.

Some poorly thought out choices already. Such as? edit: Barracuda beat me. :/

mmm. Wasn't Fort Frolic the level on which you had to push the buttom to blow the smoke to stop the bees then run around and collect the honey and get out beofre the smoke disappeared, fight the spawing splicers at the control, then wash, rinse and repeat the exact same steps until you had colelcted enough honey to proceed? If so, color me unimpressed.

I enjoyed the first 2 levels. After that though it just began to feel terribly repetitive and uninspired. I eventually stopped in the fourth or fifth level and never went back. I think the potential for a fun game was there if nothing else.

I agree. Its funny how games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls always seem so small and underpopulated. When NPCS refer to a "town" that has 2 houses and 2 people for example. Even the Imperial City in Oblivion seems rather small and sparse for such a supposedly grand location. The only city in a crpg that I can think of at the moment that really felt like a crowded populated city, was Baldurs Gate in the first BG game.