Slowtrain

Is it worse than Witcher 1? That would seem difficult to believe. I would love to have given you an informed opinion, but the game was/is so boring that I didn't make it past the prologue I'll probably end up uninstalling it and write it off as a loss. It's trying too hard to be "contemporary" (interpret that as you will). oofff. That's harsh. Did you like the first one?

Nice. The face doesn't look like a bag of gas.

Totally agree. I'm just accepting that the writing is goign to continue on par from the last couple, hopefully a little better, but no expectations. But Bethesda seems to be very consciously overhauling a lot of the game mechanics, some of which appears to be due to things learned in FO3. SO over all, I'm reasonably positive. Not going to preorder it though!

At this point I'm pretty sure Skyrim will be pretty decent. As good as FO3 at any rate. I'm actually looking forward to it. WHich is kind of surprising considering how much I disliked Oblivion. But FO3, imperfect as it might have been, earned Bethie a lot of credit. I'm willing to write off Oblivion as some kind of horrendous blunder on the part of Bethie's rpg dev team. Daggerfall, Morrowind, and FO3 have all been good to great. So 3 out of 4 is pretty good overall.

I'd have to agree about the lack of consequences, a new building in the waterfront is all you really get for completing the TG quest line and I can't even remember what happens after the the DB quest. The majority of the quests themselves were fun though, I especially liked the subtle way the DB were introduced, a few rumours, a man put in the dungeons for performing rituals and eventually if you happen to murder an innocent, you get the visit from Lucien. The Mages Guild had to be the most atrocious quest line, utter derp from start to finish as I recall, though I suppose that resurrect staff you get from Mannimarco was a decent reward, I remember going into dangerous (OOO) dungeons and using it to build little armies of undead, leading them on massive rampages into the deeper areas, good clean chaos. I think the FG quest line was just as "good" as the DB and TG; it was different but suited the guild appropriately. The problem is that the whole damn world is so bland and unegaging that nothing is particularly interesting. FO3 had the same problem to some degree with its quests, though there were improvements. Bethesda just hasn't shown itsef to be very good at making quests that are engaging. I'm not expecting that to change with Skyrim. But as long as the world is reasonably interesting, a la FO3, it should still be fun to play around with.

Being sued by Bethie will probably increase their sales by a huge amount; it's great publicity. ALl they have to do is change the name from scrolls to scrulls and they're good to go and then they can email Bethie a thank you note. It's still a petty move by Bethie, but it shouldn't hurt the developers at all.

Well, in an emergency you could use it to repair your plumbing. I recognize that the idea that the DB quests and TG quests are better than the rest is a commonly held concept regarding Oblivion, but I've never seen it. ALl the quests are equally ****ty. It's not a problem with them quests themselves, per se, but the utter lack of consequence or excitement to anything in the game world.

I like the visual look, and the trailer itself had a nice feel. But eh, the gameplay seemed pretty unremarkable. Shooting, blowing up, gratuitous exploding heads and decapitations. Not the kind of things that have much interest for me without some context to add interest.

That's an excellent idea. How's the wait for the Mass Effect 2 Ultimate Edition going? Everything gets an ultimate edition eventually: it's a sign that the very last drops of cash are being squeezed out of an IP. ME2 just isn't into the squeeze stage yet.

Actually it makes perfect sense in the current AAA game development environment: a big name IP that focuses on extreme violence and lots of guns in a paramilitary-type setting. It will likely be a suckfest, but a solid IP choice. Waiting for Missing in Action to get its own game as well.

I don't know if I'd use the word insane. Exploitable resource is probably better.

As long as Bethie sticks with what made FO3 work and doesn't revert back (too much) to Oblivion-esque game design, Skyrim should be decent enough. Most of the info they've released seems to indicate that they recognize a lot of the problems of Oblivion are going to attempt to fix them. Even if it doesn't work, I can't fault the effort.

Won't having actual real money, and perhaps not-so inconsiderable sums of it considering how addicted some people are to Diablo, at stake really make so many of the interaction problems of online games much much worse? Hacking, fraud, even more generally obnoxios behavior by some players would seem to be utterly inevitable.

What happens when your character dies? DOes an angel bring him an bag of peanuts and get him back on his feet?

OOO is definitely better than vanilla Oblivion but yes, the initial difficulty is ridiculous. Slaughterfish were the bane of my existence. I found the biggest problem with OOO was that it made some of the early quests, especially those with NPCS, extremely difficult. For example, if you want right to Castle Kvatch at level 1 or 2, the quest could spawn in full-fledged Clannfears who would proceed to rip apart all the guards and were mostly unkillable at that stage of the game. But still, overall, it was such an improvement on Bethie's handholding and dull gameworld mechanics that I can't really complain.

If there was ever a more awesome name for a computer game protagonist than Groove Champion, I can't possibly imagine what it might be. That name just knocks the awesome ball right out of the stadium.

Same in Oblivion. Sort of, +10 player level isn't the same as a hardcoded level 20. Oblivion was a lot more fun playing with OOO when you could be walkign down a road at level 2 and suddenly come face to face with a minotaur king. Ooops. Suddenly running into a high-level creature out of the blue is ridiculous, it just means you die and reload. It's pointless. There should at least be a warning that there are high-level creatures around, like in Gothic 1/2 and FO:NV, where there are deathclaws not far from the starting area. Sometimes my characters would die, sometimes they wouldn't. Like I said, it's the never knowing what might happen that makes open world exploration fun. The only moments I really remember from playing Oblivion are those times something really nutty happened. Like one time a super powerful sorceror chased my level 2 character all around the giant lake around the Imperial City. He killed about 10 guards in the processs and finally blew my char up with a single fireball. It was awesome. I'm not the only one who enjoys that type of thing. OOO was a super-popular mod, and it made the lower level game MUCH harder.

As if there weren't awesome driving games. Have you tried Carmageddon, Flatout, NFS: Most Wanted, Burnout: Paradise? Interstate 76. Seriously. Nothing that awesome has been released in the last 10 years.

For me, in an open world rpg, a big part of the fun is never knowing when my character is goign to turn a corner and come face to face with something utterly terrifying. Oblivion's vanilla mechanics completely destroyed that feeling, there was neither risk nor reward wandering the world. Which made the whole experience rather dull. Oscuro's had a few problems, but overall, it really helped the gameplay for me.

Same in Oblivion. Sort of, +10 player level isn't the same as a hardcoded level 20. Oblivion was a lot more fun playing with OOO when you could be walkign down a road at level 2 and suddenly come face to face with a minotaur king. Ooops.

It's still level scaling, just somewhat less annoying. Also FO3 did have classic ES level-scaling in part: what were molerats at player level 3 were deathclaws at player level 20. The big difference between FO3 and Oblivion was that in FO3 there were high-level enemies in some parts of the world even when the player was level 1.

Wow. That made Bioshock look like a work of unadulterated genius.

wouldn't be surprised if the collector's edition comes with your choice of femshep blow up dolls.

I usually only notice on screenshots or in games with many cutscenes, like most recent BioWare games. Unless the clipping is really extreme, its pretty hard to notice while I'm playing. I mean, you kind of notice it when things like hair clip into the back but it's just part of the deal with games. I can understand programmers paying close attention to it, but the typical gamer, not so much.

Looks great, but they've some nasty clipping issues with weapons, should be easy enough to fix though... lol. I don't even notice clipping problems. It's just the way games are. edit: I hear people complain about clipping a lot. I'm curious if its really a big deal to people or do they just complain because its the thing to do.