Slowtrain

Well, I didn't really mean that gamers are bettrer at game design, only that they may ghave a clearer understanding of what is fun. Another example would be when Reflexive was developing Lionheart and they admamantly refused to put a pause option in their realtime combat. A lot of people really got bent out of shape over that, saying that if Lionheart didn't have a pause feature the game would neither fun nor even really playable. ANd how did it turn out? IIRC, at the last minute Reflexive insitututed a pause feature because they're internal playtesting had revealed that, well maybe some of these gamers do know what they are talkign about. And maybe it is not such a bad idea after all. SO kudos to reflexive for doing that (not that it matters any more). SOmetimes gamers do know what they are talking about when they talk about the games they play and love.

Complexity is only good if it brings something to the game. The thing I'm hoping for is that Obsidian is removing unnecesary complexity as I outlined in my earlier post. Ammo is only usefull as a game mechanic if it is scarce and/or has great variation by design, if such a design vision has never been present in AP then it is only logical to remove it. The article that mentioned unlimited ammo also mentioned introducing things gradually to make the game easier to get inot, this suggests that there is complexity in the game, just not in the ammo department. I remember back in the days of the development of DX:Invisible War when it was first announced that IW was going to drop the skill system and aug system used by Deus Ex. A lot of people really screamed and whined that it was a horrible thing to do and would diminish a lot of what made DX such as interesting game. And at the time, I was one of the people who said: Trust the developers. They must know what they are doing. Even though they appear to be reducing the game from the original in a bad way, they will do somethign to make up for it. And you know what? I was wrong. And all the people who screamed and whined like babies were absolutely right. The developers design decsions completely hosed IW. Ever since then I've come to believe that gamers actually have a claerer understanding about what makes games fun and intersting than developers do. Mostly becuase gamers are generally only driven to desire fun games while develoeprs think about things like marketing and demographic appeal and maximizing sales potential. Does anybody think IW is a superior game to DX?

I think that's a good point. Having an actual hard level cap at a relatively low level say 10 or 12 would help to make your initial choices more significant. But we all know that the first thing people would scream for is a level cap remover. But that would then be a good choice for an optional mod. I am not saying that Oblivion should or should not be a ceratin way, btw. Mostly what I am saying is that much of Oblivion's design is not terribly logical. IE: If you want to spend the time to put skill choices into a game, you should make them meaningful; if you don't want to make them meaningful, just don't put them in. Rather in the case of Oblivion, it appears that the developers went to all the trouble to put skills in, but then went to all this trouble to make them not very meaningful to gameplay. That seems illogical to me. And it makes for a somewhat odd feeling gameplay experience.

If the game is being marketed as a rail shooter or something, then I guess unlimited ammo would be fine. ALthough even then I think having simple pickups would be better. Other than that I don't see why having unlimited ammo is any advantage in a game. To me it just seems like another example of games becoming streamlined and stripped of any possible depth. One of the paradoxes of much of next gen game design is that even as we develop the technology to create more complex gameworlds than we once had, we seem to be going out of our way to make our gameworlds less complex. @pop: No.

I assume by who you mean how. And yes, that is so next gen. Totally.

Infinite ammo? lol. Isn't AP suppsoed to be somewhat realistic, kinda like SYRIANA? lololol. Oh yeah, infinite ammo, baby, the height of realism and drama. The entire concept cracks me up. WHy not throw in infinte health and infinite lockpicks while were at it. Let's just make everything infinite and then no one has to worry about anything ever! And we can top it all off with a big helping of inifinite stupidity. Game design is going right down the crapper these days.

Yes, you can. Any smith or armorer will repair, plus so will the fighter guild stewards and the Fighter's Guild smith in Chorrol. WHich is fine. I have no problem with that. Technically, you are correct. It is not actually required to use the armorer skill. You could choose to return to a smith after each fight and pay for a repair. However, due to the combat intensive nature of Oblivion, your armor will be pretty much totally broken within the span of a few combats, leaving you with a choice of either continuing with broken armor, breaking off combat after a few rooms and returning to town, or using your armorer skill. Unless you are really into LARPing, you are going to choose to use your armorer skill because its the least painful way to play the game. To me, that appears to be game design forcing ever character to use the armorer skill. But you are right, technically, you do not have to. I could say a lot on the whole lockpicking issue, none of it very complimentary to Oblivion. I'll just mention a couple points here briefly. First of all the lockpicking minigame is totally broken: I can pick any lock in the game with only a 5 skill and almost never break a pick. No matter how good I am at manipulating the lockpick GUI, that should be totally impossible. If it is not, what is the point of having a "skill" in the first place if it is totally unneccessary to actually suceeding? WHy can my character who is a Nord warrior with a brain the size of a pea and these enormous calloused hands that swing gigantic warhammers all day long pick every single lock in the game just as easily as my wood elf thief-specialized character? Shouldn't my thief character gain some special advantage from having a high agility and lockpicking as a major skill? ISn't that part and parcel of building charcters in a CRPG? Apparently not in Oblivion. On a side note, I will grant that the lockpicking in MW was pretty much just as bad, although in a different way since it was totally skill based. I'm not entire sure what this means. SO have I. And please not I am not criticizing Oblivion for having skill sets that aren't playable. I am criticizing Oblivion for having every character as a jack of all trades. Whether your lockpicking skill is major or minor, whether your starting agility is 30 or 65, whether you are thief specialized or mage specialized, none of it makes any practical difference to how your character deals with locks. I don't think it really has to do with attaining the same theoretical maximum in stats or skills. rather it is that gameplay is not significantly different for characters with different skill setups. Yes, you as the human player can CHOOSE to make it different by adopting "house rules" or LARPing, but the game itself doesn't do anything to make skill choices significant. WHich as I said several posts ago makes me wonder why there are major/minor skill tiers or even seperate skills at all. What do you mean? Well, I won't go through every skill here, but I basically just mean that most of the skills are either not well integrated into the game or are not well thought out in design. A couple examples: Speechcraft: Has no real use in game, either in general play or in story play. The speechcraft mingame is more broken than the lockpicking mingame. WHy is this stupid skill in the game at all? They cut short blade and spears and left this one? Ridiculous. Light armor/Heavy armor: They are for all intents the exact same skill and become more identical as they develop. They both end up providing roughly the same level of protection at roughly the same encumberance. WHy not just save time and simply have one armor skill? If you are goign to have 2 armor skills they shoudl be different. For example: as light armor skill increases the armor becomes less encumbering but never becomes more protecting; as heavy armor skill increases it becomes more protecing but never less encumbering If dones that way the choice would be more significant and actually have a major impact on your player characters play style. Needless to say this is all just my opnion, of course. I am not trying to say I am neccessarily right. (Though I probably am ) I just see these as the flaws that bother me while I am playing the game. I'm sure some people aren't the least bit bothered by them.

The DB story arc is absolutely the best part of the game. The whole DB aspect of the game has a feel and an atmosphere that the rest of the game is sorely lacking. And I also agree that the armor/weapon damage system is absurd. It basically forces every character to become a master amororer or spend most of the game in broken armor. WHich is my single biggest complaint about the unmodded game: that every player character basically ends up as the SAME character. The armorer skill shoudl have been better integrated into the game so that it was a valuable skill for a melee-based character to have, but it was not required for every type of player character to use it. Most of the skils are poorly realized, imo. I, personally, do not think that the Bethesda designers put together a well-designed game. It has a ton of logic flaws as well as just bad design implementations.

I think a better way to put it is: the bad things about Oblivion may bother people less or more depending on how important that particular aspect of a crpg is to them. Despite the many bad things I say about Oblivion, I have played it as a lot simply because I love exploration-heavy, non-linear crpgs. So when I play, I simply ignore or look past the bad things about the game. But I stil notice the problems. Every time I pass an NPC farmer who switches from fur to leather to mithril to elven to glass the moment my PC levels, I feel like banging my head aginst the wall. IT IS SO DUMB TO DO THAT IN A GAME. Talk about devaluing player accomplishment. I just can't stand it.

There are 7 possible endings to STALKER. One of which is the "true" ending. Actually the shotguns are pretty lethal, but only at point blank range. The sawed off is my weapon of choice until I get an AK74 with a scope.

Thanks for that info, Pop. It does sound like an interesting mod for those of us who have already played the game through a few times. DId you have any problems with bugs and stuff?

Just remember: if you are playing the vanilla Oblivion version, the rule of thumb for character design is to place the skills that are most important to your class in your minor slots and put the least important skills that you don't plan to use in your major slots and then use those unimportant skills to control your leveling speed. When the game was first release most people played it this way until mods started appearing that changed how the leveling mechanics worked.

I should just point out that I am referring to the unmodded game as shipped by the designers. The fan community for both MW and Oblivion did amazing things to both games. I should also point that, for both games, the unofficial fan patches fix thousands of problems that Bethesda never even bothered to correct in their own "patching" process. Once you start talking about a modded version of Oblivion I have no real opinion on the game since every gamers personal selection of mods creates a different experience.

The reason for that of course is that all "classes" and any player character that you custom design are functionally identical and they become more so the longer you play. During development, we were told that this problem, which also plauged Morrowind, would be fixed so that different characters would actually be different. This of course didn't happen and the problem was actually made worse. In Oblivion's design there is really no need for skills. It would have been more efficient for Todd Howard to eliminate the major/minor seperation of skills since the difference is cosmetic only and has zero effect on gameplay. Rather simply start all skills at the same level and let them all develop at the same pace. Or, even better and more in line with Oblivion's design, woudl have been to eliminate skills all together and simply approach it as an FPS: players can do whatever they want and skill numbers are not neccessary. Oh please, that's a piss poor analysis of the games design. You've convinced me!

The reason for that of course is that all "classes" and any player character that you custom design are functionally identical and they become more so the longer you play. During development, we were told that this problem, which also plauged Morrowind, would be fixed so that different characters would actually be different. This of course didn't happen and the problem was actually made worse. In Oblivion's design there is really no need for skills. It would have been more efficient for Todd Howard to eliminate the major/minor seperation of skills since the difference is cosmetic only and has zero effect on gameplay. Rather simply start all skills at the same level and let them all develop at the same pace. Or, even better and more in line with Oblivion's design, woudl have been to eliminate skills all together and simply approach it as an FPS: players can do whatever they want and skill numbers are not neccessary.

Just install OOO (which is bundled with a bunch of mods) and the unoffical Oblvion patch. Together those two do help the game somewhat.

If you like playing poorly designed and broken games, you'll probably enjoy it quite a bit. You can't really compare it to Morrowind, Oblivion is far more broken than MW ever was. It's pretty though.

Thank you for you clarification. I tried to read carefully through the posts but there was so much going back and forth that I probably misread something and did not take the fully correct meanign in your posts. ALso, I guess I am used to hearing "its just there for titilation" as a phrase almost always used pejoratively, as if either a) titilation is by defintion a bad thing or that b) pretty much most films don't use technically unnecessary imgaery to get reactions from viewers. Ergo: Saving Private Ryan. We Americans also seem to have a lower tolerance for gratuitous sexual imagery than we do for gratituous violence imagery and tend to be more condeming of the foermer and less so of the latter. For whatever reason. Anyway, so I guess I do pretty much agree with you then. Actually I am still confused as to who is arguing what.

I tend to agree with Tale here, however, I would caution against being to literally tied to the idea that an overt sex act must be directly integral to the narrative in order to have a purpose. Often filmmakers use imagery that is "beyond the narrative" so to speak, which is to say imagery that is not techincally required by the narrative, in order to generate a particular reaction in the viewer. And in some cases that reaction might be one of purposeful titillation, but that does not make the imagery any less valid. For example, was the imagery in the opening 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan truly integral to the narrative? Of course not. There have been excellent movies made about Omaha Beach (The Longest Day for example) that did not use such imagery. In fact, it is perfectly reaonable to argue that the openign of SPR is gratutious to an extreme, since the bulk of the narrative has jack all to do with the Omaha Beach landing in the first place. But it is also perfectly reasonable to argue that the imagery is there for a specifc purpose, though not to futher the narrative in and of itself, but rather to engender viewer reaction outside of the narrative. IN fact, the opening of SPR is the only part of the movie that is in any way "different" for a war movie, the actual story that unfolds over the remainder of the film isn't much different from a bazillion war movies ever made. SO my point would be that imagery whether sexual or otherwise does not neccessarily have to be integral to the plot to have a valid place in a film (or a game). And, titillation itself may be a valid enough reason for the extistance of imagery. SO there I guess I somewhat disagree with Tale.

Someday we'll reach a pont where system requirements stop advancing and we can just make and play games that look fine and always run, where the technology is simply a given and developers no longer have to concentrate on developing cutting edge egines that wil be obsolete in a year, but can just focus on making the game instead. It will be a great day when that happens and we can put all this technology stuff behind us.

I found it quite boring. But I never finished it, so maybe it got better?

I think I'll give DOSBox another shot. It beats setting up an old computer just to play old games.

I'll be buying it. Haven't bought any new games for a while, so I'm kinda looking forward to having something new to play. I'll probably hold off a week just to see if the pc version is buggy and if so, how much. I don't mind a few small bugs but if there are any major problems I won't buy it until a patch is released first. Given that it has already been released, one woud think the bugs would be minimal, but you never know.

How is DOXbox working for you? I had much trouble with it several years ago and had to reinstall XP to fix all the damage it caused. That was a much older version obviously, but I've been rather gunshy about trying to to install it again. Any problems or issues for you?

I'm still pushing on with my game of Oblivion. I'm having a problem really making much progress though since I play for about 10 minutes and promptly fall asleep. Seriously, Oblivion is great for those nights I can't sleep. It's like an instant binary coma.