Slowtrain

Meta, that must have been an awesome laptop three years ago.

Psst, your butt is hanging out. Thank those lovely boys at Troika for all the vampire T&A.

Gads. It's like a steampunk version of System Shock 2. Item descriptions were a lot better in SS2 though. I hope those are just placeholders. My pc slides in somewhere between minimum and recommended specs, so I'll probably be OK at 1024*768 for the most part.

I remember when you couldn't turn around without running into a new space game, either a explore, exploit, expand, exterminate game like MOO or a freewheeling sim like Privateer. Nowadays you don't see very many of them. Sad.

A fourth patch is about to be released. It is almost done but was suspended due to E3. Work should be resuming shortly. You may want to wait before starting a new game.

Horde your pistol ammo, buy up hacking, cyber affinity, and small arms.

New STALKER game in 2008: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=167570 A little odd. Sounds like sort of a cross between an expansion and a new game. a prequel with 50% of it occurring in the same space as S:SoC and 50% in new territory. ANyway, its nice to have a game o actually look forward to.

That is why they shouldn't make it Fallout 3, but an original Post Apocalyptic title. The only people who would know about Fallout would be the old hardcore gamers which is obviously not the target audience of this game. You're fab, Sand, but discussing things with you always make me dizzy cause of all the circles we go around in.

By the time FO3 is released, almost half a human generation will have passed since FO1. There's a chance that there wil be kids playing FO3 who weren't even alive when I bought my copy of Fallout back in 1996 or whenever. If someone has the expectation that a game called FO3 must in some way imitate, duplicate, replicate, or regurgitate a game that old, made by different developers, funded by a different publisher, in a different time then they need to understand that their expectations are what need to be examined because they are flawed.

I thought the fact that it is not being released 10 years ago is what makes it not Fallout. Silly me.

Out of those 4 choices I would vote: 4)Bioware: They've never made a game I particularly liked. I would have no hope of enjoying a game by them 3)Obsidian: They've yet to make a game I particularly like though I am hoping it will happen someday. So I would have some hope of enjoying a game by them. 2)Blizzard: They've shown they understand how to develop and support games to an extremely high degree. I would be interested to see what they would come up with for FO4. 1)Bethesda: Though the current development team under Todd Howard isn't my favorite, Bethesda has made a lot of games I've really liked. So.

Change is always a hard sell. People reacting negatively to things that are different that what came before is pretty predictable.

If Oblivion with Guns == STALKER with XP and skills then I am already sold on FO 3. And I will buy 2 copies since the first one will undoubtedly wear out.

Well, in fairness to Bethesda, I've never seen a really great lockpicking minigame so it must be pretty hard to make one. The best one from gameplay standpoint that I can think of was Thief 3, but that worked well because it fit with the gameplay: After carefully counting out the guard's patrol round, you would know you had 30 seconds to open the lock and be through the door before the guard came around the corner again and the mechanics of the mingame were just complex enough to make you sweat under the time pressure. If the Thief 3 lockpicking minigame had taken place in "frozen time" like Oblivion's did it would have been quite boring. I think both of Oblivion's minigames would have fared better with some sort of built in time pressure or other limitation. If you only had one chance to make the persuasion minigame work then a higher skill would definitely be useful, but since you can click the wheel a million times without penalty, who cares. You would think that the poor NPC would eventually get tired of hearing the same dumb joke over and over again and clout you with a mace just for the heck of it.

The problem with the minigames is not just the mechanics though. The problem is that the skills they represent have no real point. Persuasion has no real purpose in Oblivion, ergo, the minigame isn't going to feel like it has much of a point. If bribery was not an option or was really freaking costly and money was scarce AND there were a lot more situations where you needed to get a specific emotional reaction from an NPC then the skill would actually have a use and playing the minigame would feel somewhat more purposeful. Granted, the persuasion minigame is totally b0rk3d since all you need to do is make sure to click the smallest wedge on the two negative reactions and you will always come out ahead regardless of skil level. Raising your persuasion skill isn't even useful as a stat modifier since personality has no real point either in the game. I can only imagine that there was some huge crack party going on in the developer offices the day the persuaion minigame was developed and then everybody was too embarrassed to take it out afterwards. The lockpicking minigame isn't quite as bad, but again the lockpicking minigame has no real required use. Yeah, you can pick a bazillion locks and get some bread loafs and repair hammmers and a handful of gold. W00t. At least it counts toward your agility modifier though. The lockpicking mingame is also pretty broken since once you get good with the minigame, skill is irrelvant. I crack very hard locks with crap skill all the time and breaking a pick is so rare that I am always surprised when it happens. One game I had 200 or so lockpicks and just stopped collecting them. Minigames on the whole are fine just makes sure they a) work and b) have a purpose.

l There's actually a mod that fixed that by lowering the armor rating of the Dark Brotherhood armor and decreasing its value. However, in a way the Dark Brotherhood armor wasn't so bad since the other light armors, fur. leather, and chitin were so awful.

For good or for ill, Fallout 3 is most likely going to sell a ton.

The unofficial Morrowind patch (ie the one made by fans) fixed something over 1000 bugs that Bethesda couldn't be bothered to fix. Most of them were minor, true, but still....

Well, I would be up for that. AN end to the Fallout syndrome of being attacked by a unarmored thug with a knife when your avatar is wearing hardened power armor and carrying the turbo plasma rifle. ooops. BAD IDEA, SIR.

I dunno, Tale. Regardless of the difficulty of instuting such a system in a crpg, which is generally a considerbly more complex environment than an FPS (I never played Emergence so I can't compare directly), such a dynamic system would seem even worse han Oblivion's level scaling at creating a bland environment. It doesn't sound very fun to me anyway. I would rather have a game where hard is hard and as you get better, you do better. Doing worse because you are doing better sounds hideously tedious.

Not really though. FO3 is using an XP based system not a learn by doing system. Big honking difference to leveling and gameplay in either MW or OB right there. Learn by doing system are incredibly hard to balance and almost invariably result in broken games.

Bethesda's polls are level-scaled. They are not edited.

That's a really good point. There was a lot of cool free standing loot in Morrowind. I had forgotten that. Plus if you managed to beat some high level npcs early you could get their cool stuff as well. Oblivion dropped all that. The environment just feels too controlled.

What do you mean? that sounds interesting, but I'm not entirely sure what it means. In Oblivion/Morrowind, a level is gained because a certain number of major skills are increased a specific number of times. It doesn't matter what major skills at all or how much each is raised. If someone gets to level 20 off the skills sneak, alchemy, and short sword his combat ability may have gone up anywhere between 20 to 60 points. There's too much variation in what it takes to obtain a level and the benefits from a level to judge combat ability by level. Oh yeah, I totally agree. Good luck finishing the game if you spend all your time in Oblivion leveling by increasing your acrobatics and athletics and speechcraft. They'll be blotting your player character up with a mop.

Free standing loot did. But container contents changed as you leveled; loot was taken from leveled lists same as Oblivion. Encounter monsters were also pulled from leveled lists. You're right though that humanoid NPCs did not level, at least most of them, that is probably a big difference right there. No more bandits in glass armor wielding Daederc warhammers.