Slowtrain

http://ja2v113.schtuff.com/

System Shock had a flechette gun which could take either hollow or solid steel needles. An autofired hail of hollow needles was lethal against organics. But only slightly damaging to cyborgs and totally useless against robots.

True. Not for combat alone. But combat can always be a part of it. That's more how I feel about Arcanum, which I don't think haad good combat, but had a ton of other neat stuff going on, so I could sort of tolerate the combat for the sake of the game. Jagged Alliance 1 or 2? Jagged Alliance 1 isn't anywhere near the game Jag 2 is. I'm assuming you mean Jag 2. Which is awesome

Ah ha! Silent Storm isn't a crpg! Of course one would expect the combat of a game whose focus is tactical combat to be superior. But for a crpg, I thought Fallout did combat better than most other crpgs.

Exactly. System Shock especially was a huge game, or at least it felt huge with all of Citadel Station to explore, but you had to opne it level by level as you accomplished each "mission". I thought it was quite well done in that I never felt like I was on a linear path. WHich of course, I was, but the devs did a good job of hiding it. WHich is fine for me. Not every game needs to be Oblivion or X Universe-level wide open and free-roaming. A nice variety is good.

*touches kroney's stuff* *runs*

Wow. I'm surprised at the huge negative take on Fallout combat. I personally think it was one of the best combat crpgs I've ever played. I never found it boring. Ever. Weird.

I think Arcanum was one of the best single player crpgs. If it hadn't been so buggy and unbalanced and had such poor combat it could have been the best. Even in that state I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. Definitely not minor. Arcanum was so buggy upon release it was almost unplayable for many people. It took them seveal months to finally got out the 1.74 patch, which fixed many of the bugs, but still not even close to all, but by then most people had moved on.

Bighead!

Well, that makes it all good then!

Certainly all combat systems are different. I thought Dungeon Siege was pretty boring myself. To eahc their own, I suppose. I don't understand this concept of "waiting as a flaw" or whatever some of you seem to be saying. In a game of turns, you wait your turn. Its not a flaw; its the rule. Or a rule anyway. If you don't like the rules of the game, it doesn't mean the game is flawed.

I agree. I'm not saying it won't be a good game, just that its not particularly new or innovative from a gameplay style, which is what Levine seems to be pimping it as. I mean, he should be at least giving a little credit to System Shock and Looking Glass since hs is ripping them off so badly. But yeah, its not a question of being original that makes a game fun anyway. Its a matter of redoing old things in a slightly new and better way. SO here's hoping Bioshock accomplsihes that.

Turnbased combat is something you learned to enjoy if you were playign computer games years ago. Its like playign chess and moving pieces. Waiting for your turn is not bad; its just part of the game. One of the rules. You either like it or you don't. Arguing about it is silly. If you don't like it; don't play it.

I watched about half then got bored. Nothing in there I haven't seen before. Up to the point I watched it was turrets, security cameras, security bots, patches, hack, run, fight. Absolutely nothing original. That was a video aimed at kids who don't realize this has all been done before. The AI bit was interesting but until I see it in non-dev-controlled environement it doesn't mean much.

Yeah, but critical hits with the sniper rifle totally rule.

Was Troika under some kind of contract with Valve that Troika couldn't release their game until HL2 shipped? That woudl make sense if Valve wanted to make a bigger splash with their engine. IIRC, BIS was not allowed to do certain things in the Infinity Engine for IWD because Bio wanted to be the first to do them in BG2.

True, it does have a use, in that it saves you some money, especially early when you are really poor, and with the perks can make you a bit later. But as usual with crpgs, once the daedric longswords start falling out of the sky, money becomes, um, not so much of a big deal. If the money had been tighter throughout the whole game and the if mercantile skill really made a big difference, it might have been actually really useful. Speechcraft has absolutely no use throughout the game as far as I can tell, other than in a few information quests it can save you a bit of money on bribes. Every once in a while I make a character with speechcraft as a major skill just to see what I can do with it. Those characters usually don't last very long.

Without spam posts, gaming boards like this would barely be worth visiting. spam is your friend. and it tastes good, too.

Quite true. The dialogue in ES games has always been horrible, both in writing and in implementation. MW actually has overall the best dialogue and dialogue system of any game in the series by far. The speechcraft skill actually is useful and a lot of the dialogue is fairly interesting. Oblivion's dialogue is wretched. The speechcraft mini-game in Oblivion is quite puzzling. I've yet to come up with a reason why it ever woudl have been considered worth including with the actual game. My only conclusions are that either the devs couldn't come up with anything better or tha they were all having a huge crack fest the day they put it into the game and were too embarrased later to remove it. It really just should have been left out. If the devs wanted to focus on the action side of a crpg, fine. Drop Mercantile and Speechcraft as skills and add back short blade and some other skill more related to action. Keeping in token skills that are essentially useless, both in and of themselves, but also to the game as a whole seems pretty questionable to me. edit: speeling

I think a game needs to be judged on its graphics relative to when it was made. I still play XCOM and MOO and System Shock and Daggerfall and Fallout, and even though yes, by today's standards the graphics of all those game are horrible, I don't think of them by today's standards. I think of them by the standards that existed at the time they were made. All those games, with the exception of Daggerfall which was well-behind the graphics curve even then, were considered good-looking games at the time. System SHock especially was the Oblivion of its day and wouldn't really run well on anything at the time. If you are a kid coming to them for the first time, then yeah, you're going to think they are pretty awful, but when I was a kid and played them they looked great, and that is still how I judge them. Fallout isn't supposed to look lie DUngeon Siege 2, and to judge it against such a standard is pretty absurd. Inevitable, perhaps, but still absurd. edit: removed some caps cause they looked yucky.

Well, I suppose it depends what you look for in your game experience. I had just the opposite experience from you, Fallout VS BG2. I mean BG2 didn't bore me, I rather enjoyed it actually, but I didn't enjoy any of it nearly so much as Fallout. To each their own.

I bought Fallout the day it was released. I had been anticipating that game for a long long time, although I had no idea how they were going to make a game about finding a waterchip interesting. Anyway, I was eh somewhere in my twenties give or take a vague number of years at that time.

If you wait a couple weeks you can probably pick it up in the bargain bin for $19.99 though.

crud. foiled again.

Hey, even I have standards! Now I admit they are pretty low, but they DO exist. Believe it or not!