Slowtrain

I have no problem with FO3 doing some sort of level scaling. Level scaling IS a workable way to keep a game challenging and interesting. Oblivions use of level-scaling was simply not varied enough, however. With everything from loot, items, monsters, rewards, npc levels, spell power etc being scaled, the game created a very stagnant and uninteresting world: surprise was virtually non-existent. Also, scaling npcs is fine with me, but it is stupid when their equipment scales as well: the classic sheepfarmer wearing a full set of glass armor and carrying a daederic longsword. Boost the sheepfarmers stats as my pc levels, sure, fine, but keep the sheepfarmers equipment the same regardless. If he is wearng a wood mace when I am level 1, he should still be weilding a wood mace when I am level 20. Especialy ifyou put books IN THE GAMEWORLD that tell me daderic and glass are so rare only thopse of great wealth and power could ever hope to own them. Honestly, I have little faith that Fallot 3 will overcome the design beliefs of its dev team. Morrowind was bad and Oblivion was worse. History gives me little reason to be hopeful of the future.

An unbalanced game can be just as unfun if it is a single player game. Its not one unit vs another unit kind of balance as in a mp rts, but single player crpgs require a lot of things be balanced: skills, classes, item curve, spell power, cash flow, encounter difficulty. They are not balanced for player vs player but for player vs game or player vs AI or however you want to say it. Still important either way.

Its true Daggerfall was ugly as heck. No question. Daggerfall is also the only crpg I've ever played where you could actually get well and truely lost in a dungeon, and while it was annoying at times, there was also a certain cool factor to it as well. But the dungeons weren't a problem anyway once you got the Recall spell, which wasn't terribly hard to cast. I fail to see any great improvement between MW quests and Oblivions quest. Yes, Ob has perhaps slightly more complex quests in some cases, maybe not quiote so much fetch and kill, but those OB quests are even more woefully empty of significance than the quests were in MW. I don't think I ever played a crpg where compeleting quests felt as utterly meaningless as Oblivion

COmparing Morrowind to Oblivion is like comparing a wart to a mole.

Daggerfall was awesome. Buggy though, but credit Bethesda for their 9 or so patches + assorted utilities for fixing and cleaning saves.

awesome new interface too:

Check out the new inventory for Jag 2 in the latest 1.13 build. *faints*

I hate it when people actually listen to me. crud. hi Di! *waves*

I'm still offended. The dirtiness of my mind offends me.

I have no issues with the vita chambers other than they could probably have been utilised somewhat more creatively, rather than just functioning as an in-game fail-safe for people who forget to save. edit: well, they do somewhat lessen the siginifance of the tactical struggle I guess, since they render medkits and other life-preserving tactics somewhat unneccessary since, as you point out, the damage done to an enemy remains and with no penalty of any sort to the player.

I wouldn't even have noticed it if you hadn't pointed it out. Now I am all offended.

I probably wouldn't have found it as disappointing if I hadn't played System Shock 1 and 2 to death. And disappinting is a key word here. I don't think Bioshock was a bad game, just a whole lot less compelling than I was hoping for. It's quite similar to my reaction to Deus EX and and its follow up Invisible War. Even though Bioshock isn't a "sequel" in the traditional sense, more like a remake. But let's be honest. The little sisters and big daddy AIs were cool at first, but when they kept doing the exact same behavior level after level with 0 variation, the initial thrill quickly passed into monotony, at least for me. Not sure that the waves of moaning zombies of System Shock 2 were any less repetitive, or displayed better AI, but you must think so I guess... you said it, not me. I picked the AI behavior of the sisters and daddies as an example only because Levine pimped it so much. And yeah, it is cool to experience for the first couple levels. So if Bioshock had been only 2 levels long, it would have been a great game.

True its ridiculously unbalanced. Similar to Gifted in Fallout games. My Brujah kicked so much butt it was sick. She loved smacking people around while they were spinning in the air in slow motion. But a lot of the other discplines were just fun to play with, Like using Bloodboil in Grouts sanitarium. Not as effective as celerity, but definitely a winner in the awesomness department. The best thing about celerity was that it was effective against everything, bosses, humans, vampires, werewolfs (as Sand foound out). ANyway, I am playing Jagged Alliance 2, an ongoing campaign that has lasted since January. Not much time for anything else at the moment.

I probably wouldn't have found it as disappointing if I hadn't played System Shock 1 and 2 to death. And disappinting is a key word here. I don't think Bioshock was a bad game, just a whole lot less compelling than I was hoping for. It's quite similar to my reaction to Deus EX and and its follow up Invisible War. Even though Bioshock isn't a "sequel" in the traditional sense, more like a remake. But let's be honest. The little sisters and big daddy AIs were cool at first, but when they kept doing the exact same behavior level after level with 0 variation, the initial thrill quickly passed into monotony, at least for me. I actually disagreee that the VIta chambers were the biggest problem. They really just function as autosave points, simply deactivating them in the game isn't really going to improve the experience of the gameplay.

Exaactly. Death in computer games isn't really about your player character(s) "dying" (unles you are playing an Iron Man type of thingie like in Wiz , it's about a game giving you some reason to avoid having your player character(s) die, ie the penalty. Bioshock not only had no penalties attached to pc death, but it really encouraged your pc to seek death (although not in an interesting way like PS:T might have) which just seems remarkably dumb in a FPS game. IMO, Levine simply wanted to make a game that was incredibly easy and simple. WHich he did. It was also boring. WHich probably follows logically, I suppose.

Totally agree, but I always have hope that when the same team (mostly) can make a sequel they will make improvements. Jagged Alliance 1 wasn't NEARLY (not even close) the awesome game that Jagged Alliance 2 became. When a different design team with a different vision picks up the rights to do a sequel, I think there is less opportunity for improvement. Bioshock had potential, it was just nerfed due to its desire to be the simplistic computer equivalent of knocking colored pegs through their matching holes with a bright red plastic hammer.

Finally! Not that the bad dice poker AI ruined the game or anything... but the AI was absolutely horrendous! I always thought that was intentional to make the bad players bad, like when they would reroll a four of a kind. heh. ANyway, that's pretty cool about the patch. I'll have to take another spin through the game at some point.

Jag2 still does a great job wityh tactical combat as well though!

Last I heard they were not implemting sectors, mines, income, militia. Just canned missions like Fallout:tactics. So as that is my favotire part of the game, I'm not to interested. Tactical Squad combat can be fun but without the larger strategic gameplay found in XCOM or Jag 2, I don't find combat games that appealing. edit: Without this screen the game wouldn't have lasted me through so many years.

Well, as far as the Morrowind -> Oblivion transition goes, there are REASONS, technically, why certain "dumbing -down" changes were made. For example, The much reviled Oblvion quest compass was added for 2 main reasons: 1) One of the most common complaints in Morrowind was that gamers could not find Caius in Balmora to start the main quest. I don't personally really understand how that is possible since the game gives you like 4 sets of directions on how to find him, but apprently a lot of people couldn't find him and got upset and quit the game. The implementation of the compass was a response to all the complaints the devs got in this area. 2) The devs wanted to implement NPC-schedules for all NPCS in Morrowind but playtesters found it too difficult to track down NPCS for quests since the NPCS wandered about according to their schedule. SO instead NPC schedules were removed and NPCS were locked down to specific location. WHich resulted in complaints from gamers that it seemed very unrealistic for the NPCS behavior to be set up in this method. SO again, the compass was added so that gamers could have an easier finding NPCS but npcs schuedules could also be added. So from the devs point of view the compass added a lot of "good" to the game and it WAS added SPECIFICALLY to address complaints from gamers on how to make the game better. I actually agree with your overall premise: that games are far more simplified now than they once were, but to be fair to the other side sometimes simplifications or ease-of-use features are put in from a genuine sense of good intentions toward making the gameplay better. Just to point out here that I am not defending Oblvion as such: I personally think Todd Howard is the Uwe Boll of crpgs.

Wow. So hideously ugly. Bad art. Some of it looks like simply poorly rendered pencils. Not that it is, just looks like that way. That head pop is terrible. A lot of this must be placeholder stuff. I can only hope. Actually I don't really care. FO3 isn't really on my list of must buy games.

That's totally true, but at least you once had to suffer the penalty of the annoying save/load function, and wearing out your F<whatever> key. Bioshock manages to eliminate even that penalty. I'm not sure if that is a good thing.

That's all needlessly complex. Just walk up and shoot them, they are not that tough. Death is irrelevant anyway.

In the early game the best way is the shotgun with the electric buck. The electric buck will freeze the big daddy momentarily. Circle strafe while you fire against the Rosies and you won't take any damage usually. The bouncers have a melee /lunge attack that can't be strictly avoided in a circle strafe

To me Bioshock is one of the best examples of how game developers are using reduction to make games that will sell more copies. It's perfect as an example because Levine basically copied his previous game, System Shock 2, and changed only the things he felt that would make the game too complicated for mass sales appeal. And al those changes seem to be mostly around reducing complexity or the need to make game-affecting decsions. For me, personally, complexity is an important part of a gaming experience: the more disparate pieces I have to struggle to put together to achieve "success" within a gameworld, the longer the game will interest me. In SS2 there are so many pieces to put together that not only did the game interest me enough to get me all the way through, it interested me enough to get me through about 50 replays. The experience of SS2 was like that of reading a novel where each reading uncovers more and more aspects and possibilities. With Bioshock however, due to its simplistic game design, I very quickly reached the point where I felt I had mastered (or near enough) all the pieces of the gameworld, exhausted all possibilities for a new experience within the game, and once that happened my interest dropped dramatically. Level 4 and Level 5 were basically just played in "grit your teeth and push through to see the end mode", sadly that failed to motivate me for very long and I went back to more compelling activities such as picking lint out of my naval. Bioshock is depressing to me because it shows that even game developers who have developed complex and notable games in the past, games that have become "classics" in their own right, are also taking thepath of least resistant and creatign simplified games that are much less tahn they ddi years before. I expect simplisitric games from Todd Howard, who appears to believe that gamers are troglydytes, I don't expect them from Ken Levine. Or at least, I didn't. Once. Biggest disspointment in a very long time == BIoshock.