Slowtrain

Thanks. I played Syndicate Wars for a bit many years ago but never really got into it, so my memory of it is vague at best.

Yup, but was the gameplay different?

Obs developer forum presence -100.

I remember Syndicate Wars, sorta, but not Syndicate. Were they different?

Are skills going to have more impact in NV than in FO3? I think it would be great if the game went the route Alpha Protocol appears to be going in which your skill choices and point assignements make a really significant difference in how the player character can deal with problems. I always felt that in FO3, not only were skill points way too common and skills way too easy to raise, but also there wasn't nearly enough of a difference between a 0 skill and a 100 skill. a 100 skill should be hard to achieve but have a profound impact on gameplay.

IIRC, Farcry 2 began life as an unrelated fps and got the Farcry name slapped on it and some point in development. XCOM: Interceptor (anybody remember that one?) began life as a non-XCOM space combat game and at some point in development got an XCOM tag slapped on it. Obviously, that's the way it works in the game biz. Nonetheless, I do believe it is somewhat sleazy to take a previosuly existing Name that has built up a sort of mythos or following and then slap it on to some unrelated IP just to make a few bucks. But it works. Look at this thread. All this attention to a game that would probably not even get mentioned here if it wasn't called XCOM.

It's like all these PR guys go to the same school to learn how to use the same words in the same order. Utter drivel as usual.

I'm waiting for Deus Ex, the MMORPG.

Critically it was pretty good, it also sold buckets of money, the old fans hated it but it also created new fans. From what I understand though, it focused on the arcade shooter elements of the gameplay and didn't another much (or at all) with the developing or expanding on more serious story-telling aspect of BS1. Doesn't give me much faith that they can create a intense, narrativedriven game based on the XCOM IP. What it tells me is that XCOM FPS will be an arcade shooter. Personally, I don't care much what they call. XCom is just a name, it doesn't mean a game will be good or bad. But a developer's track record is a lot more indicitive of how the game will turn out. No one says you can't like a game. Liek is personal. I liked STALKER a lot more than Bioshock. You didn't. That's fine.

Nope. Bioshock was a terrible game. Wasn't going to spend my money on BS2 after the wretched experience that was BS1. But I'm not talking about me, just recalling what the general take on BS 2 was when it was released.

No it didn't. News at 11. Seems to me I recall a concensus that while the combat was better, pretty much everything else was much worse. The game brought nothing to the table except arcade powers and stuff.

Didn't Bioshock 2 pretty much suck?

wait, what? I haven't even posted my response to this bit of news yet.

Weapon damage is an abstraction though. A higher skill simply indicares that a charcter is more proficient with using a weapon and so the attacks will be more damaging. While I agree it doesn't make sense in a "real world" sort of way, neither does teh idea of suriving a direct hit from a rocker launcher or charging directly into a firing minigun and surviving. Its all about using abstraction to support the gameplay.

Going all the way back to Morrowind, Bethesda seems to have a real problem with creating character models and faces that aren't pretty weird looking. The "exploded faces" (as Tep so accurately calls them) of Oblivion are hopefully the low point of this sort of thing. FO3 was a big improvement anyway, though still plenty wonky with the faces and character models in many ways.

My guess would be there won't be any crash fixes. I'm fully expecting the NV to be just as crashprone for me as FO3 was. Some people don't have problems with crashes, so it's not a universal issue that would need to be addressed. Those of us who have the problem are just going to have to keep dealing with it. My guess, anyway.

Yeah, for me, both Oblivion and Fallout 3 crashed with annoying regularity. They are the only 2 games I've played in quite a while that hardlocked the entire system sometimes when they crash. I hate having to power cycle the pc when its still running; it's a sure way to mess up the OS, if you're just a bit unlucky.

I'd say simply using the same sequence that was used for other water sources (which is what Bethsoft did) was the opposite of "spending development time". I would even call it..... lazyness. No offense. Btw drinking from water hydrants didn't make much sense either, but I'll let that one slip... lol. In my desire to be brief I failed to be clear. Typical of me. What I actually meant was that for Obs to spend addtitional time beyond what Bethesda has already done working or reworking the gameplay useages of toilets seems to be a less than optimal use of a limited development cycle. I enjoyed Fallout 3, but it has a lot of fairly significant issues that need (or hopefully will) be addressed. The whole toilet/sink, etc implementation doesn't seem a large or important enough issue to warrant further developer time. It works OK. Best for the developers to leave it be and address other issues. imo.

Drinking from toilets seems a petty way to spend development time though. No offense meant. I'd rather see the time spent on larger gameplay issues.

Hardcore concepts are interesting, but really I'll just be happy if Obs can upgrade the quality of the writing/characters/story/npcs and change the reapir system into somethign less time consuming and annoying. I mean, what's wrong with just carrrying a toolkit in your inventory and clicking on it to repair things. It achieves the same result and is much less annoying.

I'm somewhat looking forward to it. Which is more than I can say about 99.9% of games currently in development.

That would definitely help. Having to carry all that spare "for-repair-only" gear definitely made the inventory more annoying to use. Anything that woudl cut down on the scrolling would be great.

*shrugs* For me, the Fallout 3 inventory system had too many tabs and filters and required way too much reptitive clicking to do things. It was also difficult to tell what was equipped since you had to scroll through a logn list of items to find the one item that was highlighted. Plenty of other crpgs have shown that there are easier wyas to do inventory. It's not a game killer, but it's a valid issue.

The inventory system in Fallout 1 was horribly clunky. Fallout 2 made a few improvements that made manuipulating inventory a bit easier. I can't really say that Fallout 3 had an interesting inventory system, but at least it was less painful than than Fallout 1/2. I think it would have been nice if there had been more of a rpg-standard paper doll plus inventory slots where you could place your equipped gear and instantly get an oveview of your character setup just by looking at your paper doll.

Higher, dumber, same difference. ANyway, mostly I agree, BUT, both the assinine repair system and the low damage weapons meant that you pretty much had to have a high carry weight PLUS weightless ammo just to get by. As a Big Guns character, I always had a 10 str + strong back and I still had to leave a lot of crap behind because I had to carry multiple sets of combat armor + a bunch of miniguns and whatnot just to keep things repaired. In addition, the crappy damage meant that I could blow throuigh 5000 rounds of mingun ammo in just a few short battles if I wasn't careful with my ammo usage. So while I agree, the way FO3 was balanced kinda forced both weightless ammo and a high carry weight. I'm all for rebalancing NV so that is no longer neccessary.