Slowtrain

punch the box then crouch. Its not even slightly hard.

I see your point, but I think you're trying to interpret AC too literally. (ie I wear heavy metal armor; therefore I am less easy to hit. WHich of course doesn't make sense). Rather, look at AC as being an abstraction of the dynamic battlefield. In a game like FO even though what you see is just 2 people standing there shooting at each other turn after turn, the combat engine needs to take into account that they are actually moving, sweating, panicking, etc. This can't be shown in the engine, of course, but needs to be accounted for as a number that can be applied to skill rolls, ie. AC. It's an abstraction yes, but its important since it gives a defensive response and counter to the offensive player's chance to hit. I've always believed that AC should be a number that is affected by a wide range of a player character's stats and statistics, everything from endurance, agility, intelligence, perception to dodge skills and clothing worn. I've never seen that in a game, but I loved that FO at least seperated AC from actual defensive characteristics of the armor itself. So look at the AC number in FO in depth: First: the base AC is determined by a characters agility. That abstracts a character's general ability move and react when in combat. Good, although I would rather see it affected by additional stats as well. Second: Unused APS roll over into AC. Again, good. Abstracting a player character's increased state of defensive awareness. I wold have liked to see it roll over at a higher than base 1 to 1 ratio, but again, at least it does something. Third: A handful of traits and perks that either lessen or increase AC. Again all of them are merely abstractions of a player character's battlefield awareness. I would have liked to see them have a more pronounced effect however. Fourth: Armor. Each type has a different AC bonus applied to it. Leather +15, metal +6 etc. SO we can see right away that the armor system does take into account that metal armor has significently less impact on AC increases than Leather, thus giving metal armor an AC penalty for its weight. But ALL armor is clothing which is specially created for combat. Professional athletes don't compete in jeans and loafers; they competer in clothing designed for the specific event because it gives them an edge. Same for armor, and that edge is what is abstracted in the AC numbers provide by armor. One of the few things that is disappointing about Jag 2, is that it has no AC abstractions in the game. The combat engine basically assumes that all characters are standing still when fired it and that ALL PENALTIES TO HIT MUST OCCUR WITH THE SHOOTER. WHich is ridiculous, of course. Different targets are more or less easy to hit even if all other conditions are identical. The FO approach is much more sophisticated and interesting and varied. More interesting and crpg-y, since it changes depending on the items and build of the pc. In a realtime first person game, having to abstract AC becomes much less important. Probably even unneccessary. Well, may not completely unneccessary, but less so.

I see this thread has deteriorated into some odd Voyeurs Anonymous club. Awesome.

Using the word "realistic" when discussing any version of D&D makes baby jesus cry.

If Oblivion can just be a slightly more interesting MW that will be good enough. Based on what I've read and heard ther are enough changes and improvements to make Oblivion considerably more than slightly more interesting. My biggest concerns are bugs. EVen fully patched MW contains more bugs than most games, and only the fan patches that have taken a loing time to create have finally squashed most of them. My second biggest concern is the beast of a PC that will be required to run it. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it, bt I won't be rushing out the door the day it is released.

EVerything in a computer game, ever stat, number, figure, is a representation of something, an abstraction of what occurs in the real world. I always think of AC as your ability to dode, evade, anticiptate, deflect an attack. In FO the leather armor was combat combat clothing that allowed you freedom of movement, camouflage, etc, whereas the metal armor gave you some deflection at the expense of freedom etc. I thought it made perfect sense as an abstraction. This of course coming in a game where I could get shot in the face by a rocket launcher and still get up afterwards

fark no. Excuse me while I continue to suck at the internet. :"> Is that linked off the main page? edit: I found it but I had to Google eve on-line access pass to do so. bleah.

I wouldn't have been opposed to tweaking some of the armor stats, esecially the PA, but I thought the concept of AC (% chance to miss completely) combined with DT and DR was outstanding. It really gave you a lot of flexbility on how you could choose to armor yourself, plus having 5 distinct damage types would often require a trade-off of one type of resistance for another. For example, Metal armor was good early againt bullets and laser but awful against fire and electricity,and the Tesla armor was a cool specialized piece of gear. Plus there was those in-games things you could do to yourself like get the implants in Vault City that would give you either a slight DT or Dr bonus at the cost of somethign else. To me it just added a great deal of possiblity into the game. Just from a personal note I disliked the power armors and never wore them. hmmm. I don't recall this being an issue. I once wiped out the entire Brotherhood of Steel with the MP5. One of the coolest builds in the game was the auto-weapon build which was 2 levels of bonus ranged damage, fast shot, bonus rate of fire, a few other perks. You could use either a small gun character or a big gun character and it was totally lethal. Or course the classic sniper/gauss rifle shooter using the finesse/sniper/sharpshooter build. Also lethal. Or you could just fast shot/ bonus rate of fire with the turbo plasma rifle. Or of course, bruiser and heavy handed combined with bonus rate of melee attack and the super sledge. oof! Again the ability of SPECIAL to create an almost endless possibilty of character builds was amazing. The game was really only limited by ones imagination. I agree with most of those points. And I think it is because BG2 worked more to limit the possibilities of what I could do than expand them. Just my personal take on that though.

I looked around the web site for some kind of limited time free demoish thing but couldn't find anything. Maybe I just missed it though. The game does seem pretty cool, but I'm a little skittish about giving up money and a credit card for an automatically renewing monthly subscription for a game I've never actually played.

Download the free trial, then. It gives you fourteen days to play around with everything and decide if you like it. I'm still on mine, and if I don't get bored in two weeks, I'll likely go ahead and buy it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I dl'ed the Eve client but they want my cedit card number and 19.95 just to set up the account. I don't know if I want to give that up for a game I'm not even sure I'll like. I was thinking of looking for the retail box, which give me thirty days free with the purchase of the cd.

Because the things that were good about it weren't the fact that there were two medical skills and a broken armor system. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> heh. OK. Everything can stand a little tweaking. Although I thought the armor system was one of the best I've ever seen in a crpg, except for the fact that AP rounds weren't useful enough. Just my take on that though. But I just remember thinking that many of your proposed changes seemed more to have the result of reducing the possibilities in the game rather than expanding them, whioch to me is the core of the crpg experience: possibilities. What about BG2 bothered you, do you think? That seems to me a pretty classic crpg-style game, I'm surprised yiou didn't enjoy it so much.

The Realms of Arkania series gave you a total of 8-9 levels across THREE seperate games. That was a little unsatisfying let me assure you.

My Brujah loved smacking those things around with his bare fists. Punching bags. lol.

I'm running about 30 mods in my current install. They make the game awesome. But I don't think you can critique a game based on a modded install. You have to look at what the devs shipped.

Oblivion is not going to be substantially different from MW. If you didn't like the one; you won't like the other. I've seen lots of claims to <insert_cool_name> AI, I've never seen one that even remotely lived up to its promise. SO, of course, I hope Oblivion improves a lot of things over MW however, I'm not holding my breath. It should be noted in MW that the devs originally were planning to give the AI varius tasks and behaviors but quickly gave it up. Their reasoning was a) too much work involved and b) too confusing for players who are looking for a certain NPC. I guess they changed their minds about A) and solved b) by adding the little "quest-pointer" on the compass.

awesome! So you're good at running... :S ANyway, I'm not trying to convince anybody to like the game. I learned long ago not to bother with that. We like what we like. No point in arguing it. I was merely inetersted in discussing the flaws of MW, of which it has quite a few, if anybody wanted to.

That's f%@& awesome. Even reading that got me so excited I almost wet myself. I love space sims. I want this game. This is my kind of game.

Don't worry about it. Your English is better than most people who have English as their first language. I don't know the answer to your question though. I;ve played many games but not that one.

I will take a moment to point out here that learn by doing skill systems are inherently hard to balance and put some onus on the player not to exploit the system if you don't want to level too fast. So: Point A: You don't have to spend five hours raising your block skill and level by blocking against a harmless mudcrab. Its your choice as a gamer Point B: Even if you gain twenty levels and raise your running skill to 100 just by running from place to place, all that means is you some extra hit point and you cna run really fast. AFAIK, you can't kill monsters in MW by running over them. I have no problem with a serious discussion on the failings of MW as a crpg. But spamming anti-MW crap is no more interesting or useful than spamming anti-PS:T crap. WHich I've been known to do from time to time.

To me that's a huge plus. Being bound to quests just to get better is silly. Its an accepted standard of many crpgs of course, but that doesn't change the silliness of the practice. That being said, skills in Morrowind were too easy to increase and levels came too fast. Daggerfall had a much better balance here. I really wanted MW's character creation and skill system to receive a total do-over in Oblivion, but that's not going to happen.

Have faith! I'm quite sure Fallowind will be a work of brilliance. And if it falls short of brilliance, well, I'm sure I can find some loose change in the couch to buy it with. OK, maybe it won't be so great, but I'm at least going to wait and see before I bury it.

I love both Fallout and Morrowind, so whatever happens to FO3 in terms of design it will probably be my favorite game ever. I'll take two, plz.

If you like games that are big with a lot of exploring and leveling and gear and spells and a first-person non-party interface and give you a lot of freedom to do what you want when you want then you'll probably like Morrowind. If you like games with a tightly wired story and colorful NPCS and isometric party-based interfaces then you probably will not like it.. Personal choice really. Base on the games you played and like, I would say no, you won't. I love MW, but I've been a fan of ES since Arena, so its obviously a style of game that appeals to me. I wish there were more games like it.

lewl.

I work out 2 hrs a day 6 days a week plus I eat mostly spinach and oranges. Weird, huh. People think I'm a freak. But I'm a healthy freak! ANd I play computer games. EVen weirder.