Slowtrain

How can someone not have time for a 100 hour game? That's like saying I don't have time for a 500 page book. AN entertainment takes as long as it takes. There's no reason to have to rush through anything. Even if you only play one single hour a day, 100 hours will be done in a little over three months. WHat''s the difference if you play one game or three games for those three months? As long as you are enjoying yourself.

Lessee. 2 nights ago I was on WIkipedia reading up on spiders. That led to reading about spider bites and then to venom and the then to venom treatments. WHich led to maggot therapy which lead to MRSA which led to antiobotic resistantce which lead to antibiotics which led to hand soap. Plus some other related stuff along the way. Somehow 4 minutes turned into 4 hours. :/ Also, maggot therapy is pretty cool.

while admiring all the pretty scenery as well.

The number of games I have been buying has been dropping every year. The two this year is probbaly the lowest total since the mid-90's. For the most part it is simply that I can't afford to take chances on games financially. If there is any risk of major bugs or just stuff I won't like, I really can't afford to part with the money. Especially bugs. Spending $50 on a game I won't be able to play is just out of the question these days.

Biggest flaw in the entire game, I fail to comprehend the rationale behind spending so much time on creating an immersive, almost sim-like physical world, and hen people it with a bunch of silly cartoon enemies. Two actually warring factions + plus non-combatants could have made this game a real classic. Second biggest flaw in the game. Not so much that they respawn, (whioch they kinda have to do in a non-linear world), but that they respawn so fast. It takes away from the desire of the player to ibnvolve himself in the game. Bad design choice. Doesn't make sense at all really. Sometimes I wonder if developers actually play the games they build, such are the many bonehead decisions.

I will be buying FO3 and STALKER: Clear Sky in 2009. Anything released in 2009 I will probably buy in 2010. I've decided it's best to stay well behind the new release curve of game releases. It means I always have something to look forward to at any rate. :/

I believe I bought 2 games this year. ALthough it is hard to remember all the way back to the start of the year. I know I bought Far Cry 2 and The WItcher Enhanced both for PC. Interestingly, I encountered game stopping bugs in both of them.

Drinking out of toilets is never a good thing. Even in a PA wasteland.

Really? They didn't fix that? Pretty poor. It was especially bad with female characters in Oblivion, since the female pc would have its hands and face "lightened", thus increasing the difference in tone from the body. This lightening process did not appear with the male pc avatars. One can only assume it was implemented to create a specific look for female avatars, ie females have paler hands and faces or something. Really, the entire face gen system in Oblivion was pretty poor and took hours of practice and experimentation to get to work well, especially with the skin tones. It was especially difficult since creating a darkening or shadowing of one area of the face would create lightening (or even more darkening) in another area. Plus, as Gorgon points out, due to the way face gen works, a tone that looks OK in one light looks awful in all others. Plus the 2 areas where one could officially use the face gen system in Oblivion were both problematic. The first area, the starter cell in the imperial prison, was quite dark and due to teh torchlight faces looked much redder than in other areas. The second area, just before you leave the sewer, was hideously overexposed due to the bright light sourcing from the sewer entrance, and any face created to look good there, looke dimmeditaely awful once you exited the sewer. The only was to use the face gen system well was to get your avatar into a neuteral light area outside the prison and use the SHOW RACE MENU console command to bring up the face editor. Bummer for console users. I was hoping, due to how bad the face gen system was implemented in Oblivion, that it would have been improved or even replaced in Fallout 3. No such luck, I guess. http://www.facegen.com/ Is this still the one Beth is using in FO3?

PC game devs and publishers appear to feel it is their god-given right to release buggy games and then ignore any gamer who purchases their product and has a problem. It wouldn't bother me so much if there was an avenue for getting my money back if I buy a buggy game, but there isn't. Once you buy the game, you have no options except to hope that a patch is released and that the patch fixes your problems. If not, you're stuck with a broken game. Best thing about console games is that a) you can often rent them first and b) you can sell your used ones back for at least something.

Can't possibly beat the Tiber Septim coin in the Oblivion CE. I'm going to Ebay mine someday and retire young.

Was it great to begin with? No. Does shrinking it make it better? At least it doesn't waste so much of the reader's time. SUbsitiute the novel of your choice then. My point wasn't the Lord of the Rings is good. Or not. Or whatever. My point was that this current concept of improvement by reduction is assinine.

It depends though on what is done to "streamline" something. On what is being removed. If one "streamlines" Moby **** by reducing a 500 page novel down into the bare 20 or 30 required for the basic plot elements, then the streamlined version will certainly be quicker to read and more accessible, but will it be better? Or if you take The Lord of the Rings and streamline it by removing all words over two syllables, it it better? Currently I think game developers are so obessed with getting big sales that they are reducing detaill and complexity way too much for my tastes.

It's interesting though that other entertainments do seem to be able to sustain both a mass market segment and a niche segment. Movies, plays, music, books, board games, newspapers, magaiznes, heck even comic books, seem to be able to have mainstream titles coexisting with niche titles. Computer/video gaming just doesn't seem to be able to do this for some reason. I'm hopeful that this is because computer/video gaming is still a relatively new entertainmen medium and as it settles into middle age will begin to broaden rather than continue to narrow. Agreed. And it is more than just movies that do this as well.

Of course if we compare those old games to even older games as well as current games, we'll see that they are anomalies, rather than typical of older games. I would say that the fact that they got made at all is pretty incredible and shows what a different world gaming used to be. XCOM, Jagged Alliance 2, PS:T could never even be made in today gaming enviornment. I think that's a good point and I do somewhat agree, but as I said above, just the fact these games got made at all says something.

I would only disagree in that I think that thread is more about how crpgs have changed. For some of us those changes wil be positive; for others not so much. As I said earlier, for me personally, I do think crpgs have become less interesting, but shooters have become much more interesting, mostly becuase some of the ganmeplay features that I loved in crpgs have begun to move over into shooters. I think we both would agree that genre classifications are a convenioent shorthand for describing some basic aspects of the core gameplay and not really that important as to whether a game is going to be fun or not.

I think that reducing a love of old games to a result of nostalgia is way to simple an explanation. A lot of us still play these games RIGHT NOW. Today. If we are playing an old game like BG and PS:T or Jagged Alliance 2 right now and we still think it is better than any other new game, then that is NOT nostalgia. We are playing it right now and comparing it directly in present time to current games. Nostalgia only works as a possible explanation on games you once played a long time ago and haven't played for years and years.

I'm not saying that gamer complaints are justified (or are not justified). I'm not passing judgement. I'm just saying that if you have spent time in the game community, you know that certain design decisons tend to get gamers irritated. Whether it is justified or not, I don't know. It is, however, very predictable. Time limits, forced shutdowns, and respawning enemies are three that immediately come to mind, but I'm sure there are more. Oh yes, unskippable cutscenes. Totally agree. See my repsonse to DR.

Actually I enjoyed those days. I still have some of my graph paper maps floating around somewhere. The thoroughness and exacting detail of early CRPG gameworlds was pretty amazing. Granted much, if not all, of that detail mostly came through in text, but it was still beautiful stuff. I don't spend my days pining for any of the above features, but at the same time I don't feel they were "bad" and todays games without them are "better". They were just part of what made the genre fascinating at the time. I think a lot of text detail has been able to be replaced by better graphics, but I do think some of it has simply been lost. And each successive generation of crpgs seems to lose a bit more. It was a lot prettier though. ANd less buggy. Of course, it was less buggy because it was a lot smaller and less comlpex. ANd it was prettier because a lot more time was spent on pretty-ing up the gameworld rather than making the gameworld interesting.

You guys are probably right. The outcry over the shutdown ending is pretty predictable though. Bethesda should have anticipated it. There are threee things that should be obvious to anyone who has played computers games pver the years. 1) Gamers will scream about respawning enemies 2) Gamers will scream about forced time limits in non-linear games. 3) Gamers wil scream about shutdown endings in non-linear games. If a developer plans to implement any of the above, they should be prepared for bellyaching. I would be less cynical if they released a small free patch that removed the shutdown ending. But tacking it onto what appears to be purchase-only DLC just makes me roll my eyes.

How so? If anyting it seems to me just the opposite. I don't really see anything in here that is trying to maintain an antiquated world view in the face of change. Rather I see a discussion centering around how the crpg has changed and how gameplay elements have crossed genre lines resulting in new types of games. Its not roclet science but if one is interested in games and has been playing them for a while, it is as valid a conversation point for a genernal gaiming forum as anything else.

I agree. I think part of it is simply that shooters have lifted a lot of elements from crpgs and people can now find some things in shooters that used to only be in crpgs. Shooters have come a long long way from Wolfenstein and Doom. This blending of genres has had the positive effect of giving shooters a bit more depth, but it has also sort of killed off the true crpg. I think most of todays crpgs are really shooters wearing some of crpgs old clothing. Even the Witcher, which I consider one of the most crpg-y of recent games, still feels more shootery to me than it does crpg-y. And STALKER:SOC, even though it is a shooter, feels a whole hack of a lot like a crpg. So really, I think the crpg has sort of been assimiliated into the shooter. I blame Deus Ex.

I still find myself going back to XCOM and Master of Orion, but eh nobody cares anymore. It makes me totally confused since they were such great games, but there isn't much I can do about it. I still do hold a slight hope that a larger market for niche games may develop, alllowing for a wider variety of game types to be developed. Its funny. I was never really a huge fan of PS:T and BG1 and 2. I bought them when they were released and played them all several times. AT the time I thought they were solid games, but not anything that I would ever really consider great. Now I look back on them and think that by todays standards they WERE all pretty deep and awesome games that offered gameplay on a scope that I don't really see today. I used to troll PS:T fanboys all the time, btu I quit that a while ago when I realized that it would in fact be pretty great to get another crpg similar to Torment. Otoh, while crpgs have pretty much flatlined, shooters are better than they've ever been, so there is still some positive stuff about the current state of gaming.

Probably I am just too cynical, however, I will say that allowing a gamer to simply continue in free play after the main quest has finished, doesn't seem to me to be very much in line with something that the developers wanted to do but didn't have the time for. What is there to do? Just don't stop the game when the quest is done. If gamers want to keep playing in a gameworld in which the main story arc is essentially "over" that can be totally up to them. As long as they don't complain that the gameworld isn't as responsive to them anymore, there's no good reason not to let them continue. Obviously in a linear game like half life or Deux Ex, there is no point to continuing past the ending because there is no "world" beyond the linear story. However in a sandbox game like Fallout 3 there is a huge world beyond the story and Fallout 3 even sells itself on that fact. To me, personally, it seems suspiciously like a carrot that was specifically and intentionally left out of the game just so it could be added in a DLC as a bit of extra incentive for people to purchase said DLC. Even if somebody wasn't really interested in the new DLC content, they might be more willing to shell out money for the ability to play through the world without worrying about the ending of the main story arc. Especially with all the potential mods on the inevitable horizon. But, like I said, I am just probably horribly cynical about things like that.

I'm not a huge fan of any of the IE games, but Icewind Dale was the IE game I enjoyed the most and the one that has stayed with me longest. Otoh, IWD 2 was apparently the game that killed any interest I have in ever playing a D&D crpg again. Its odd how I could find the first game pretty compelling and the second rather tedious and in places downright painful. The "clear mob from room/rest/clear mob from next room/rest wash rinse repeat" gameplay wasn't a whole lotta fun when repeated ad infinitum, and it seemed far more pronounced in IWD2 than it was in IWD. I do agree with Gromnir that Targos was a good start, but similiar to Lionheart, everything went downhill fast from that point on.