Slowtrain

Oh no, you didn't! You don't even find Arcanum at the very least "comparable" to Fallout? I'm as big a fanboy of Arcanum as you're likely to find anywhere, and I give Troika a lot of credit for creating a marvelous game. More so than most do. It's not nearly as unified and well put together as Fallout though. Its more akin to Fallout 3: A lot of good ideas mixed with some major problems that is overall a fun experience.

HAmmer: 234 Dodge:140

He's pretty tough. I'll go back and try some more battles against him at some point, but they were seemingly so one sided that I kind of ran out of patience.

I got through the ordu fight with hammer dodge but it took me many many tries. I finally decided to go after the swordsman first because his hits were causing more damage, especially since he woudl get opportunity attacks eveyr time I move to chase the archer. Once I took the swordsman down I could deal with archer without suffering those dang opportunity attacks from the swordsman every time I moved to chase the archer. That seemed to help a lot. I tried using a light hammer/buckler combo for a while but I simply wasn't doing enough damage. I seemd to have mcuh better luck with the sledghammer. After that fight, the next bunch were pretty easy for hammer/dodge until I got to this fight with some guy named Dellar or something. He crtically hits my guy three times a turn for 10-30 damage each time and kills me by turn 2. Bleah.

I find it difficult to be OVERLY critical of Fallout 3 in a gaming world that gives us Oblivion and NWN OC and such. I could write up a huge laundry list of things I'd like to see changed or improved in FO 4, but FO 3 is still a mostly fun experience regardless. Yes, it may not equal the experience of Fallout 1 (or even come close) but what rpg does? Even the developers who worked on Fallout 1 never made a comparable game afterwards. Fallout 1 is just one of those games that from whatever confluence of factors captured lightning in a bottle.

Its the wink wink comments more than the humor per se that I have issue with in Fallout 2. And some of the locations are really bad. Broken Hills, for instance. I'm not saying that Fallout 2 is terrible, just that it doesn't work as well as FO1. Which is pretty much the same thing I would say about FO 3.

How many crpgs have been better than Fallout? Not many. I think expecting NV to rise to that level is somewhat harsh. Frankly I think a lot of how Fallout turned out was mostly luck. One of those games where everything just "clicked" And let's be honest: 1) Fallout 3 was tons better than Oblivion. 2) Fallout 3 was better than most games around today. There's lots of room for improvement sure, but there's still a lot of area between Fallout 3 and Fallout 1 that can make for an expectional, or at least very good game. Also, I don't get the love for Fallout 2. Its a goofy, low-rent version of Fallout 1. I'm not even sure I could say it is better than Fallout 3.

Thanks guys. I'll try a couple block and dodge builds and see how they work while ignoring critical for now. I still haven't tried any ranged builds.

So do you think those dodge or block are mreo important than critical? I'm trying to figure out how much value the critical skill has. This build worked very well for me. Except he seemed to get critically hit all the time. I still haven't been able to get him past the Ordu archer/swordsman combo despite multple attempts.

I just realixzed that some of the armor is more much protective of critical hits than others. WHich in some ways seems to be more important than anything else. dodge is badly hamped by any armor since armor reduces dodge by a percentage rather than absolute value, so the higher your dodge skill the more you lose by wearing armor. I took a guy and put all skill points into dodge and made it through the first six battles without dying while only fighting in underwear. Problem was he had such a low chance to hit that it took him a long time to kill people, and even though his enemies rarely hit him, when they did it was usually pretty news.

After several more playthroughs I would say that the combat is a little bit unbalanced, in that there is too much luck involved. I can go through one fight and get totally wiped out in just a few turns, reload a save and refight and cream the other guy in just a few turns, not really doing anything differently either time. Also, related to the above, critical hits seems somewhat overpowered. So far I've had the most luck with a max str/con hammer guy splitting his skill points between hammer and critical and ignoring dodge and block completely. Althougn now I am fight two barbarians and they keep criticla hitting me into oblivion. I'm not sure why since my own critical skill is pretty high and based on the read me notes should offset their critical bonus.

I played through with a few more builds. A dodge/dagger guy did OK, but had so few hitpoints that he couldn't make it past the barbarians, though the fight went on for a while. I had the most success with a high strengh/con hammer guy, but the dude with the spear took him out quickly. Same with my axe guy. I trieda spear guy but I wasn't as good as the AI spear guy. ANyway, its a very solid system. I think the graphics are fine. The camera view is a bit wonky though.

That was great. I played a sword guy with high str and con through until I got to the three barbarians who were too much. I kept discovering more options as I went along. The game looks very promising.

I didn't buy or play any new games in 2009. Just some Fallout 3 DLC. First time a year went by with no game purchases in a long time. Wasn't interested in much.

IMO, Publishers and developers know that gamers want immediate gratifcation and will pretty much buy anything the moment it's released if is hyped enough. So with that kind of captive audience why bother spending too much time on bug-fixing and fine-tuning? Just get the gane mostly running and kick it out the door. If it sells enough maybe do a patch. So I agree with Lare for the most part, except I don't think its worse now than it was before. Games have alwaya been released in various states of incompleteness and buginess. It's something devs and publishers can get away with in the software industry pretty easily. Someday maybe will see more quaility contro, but I wouldn't hold my breath. As an informed consumer all one can really do is not buy games at release. Wait a while and see what happens. Doing so has saved me quite a bit of money over the years.

It will be interesting to see if the developer has the courage to drop the silly cards and let the game stand on its own merits (which are considerable).

Siegfried is a pretty well done rpg character. I always found myself liking him despite the fact he worked for a bunch of racist jerks and on at least one ( and probably more) of my playthroughs I sided with the Order just because of the fact he comes off as so likable, if a bit misguided. Another thing I really thought was cool about the Witcher was the way the narrative had multiple plot lines, all of which were somewhat related, all playing out at once. It was much more entertaining and complex than the usual computer game story. Not so much in what the story was, per se, but in how the various narratives were presented.

It would be nice if there were some non-combat related skills added. That was really my only complaint about The WItcher; there was only combat and dialogue. And the dialogue rarely avoided combat. SOme enhanced diplomacy skills and some stealth type skills at least would be nice.

I heard really bad things about both of those bugwise and ended up never playing either one. Which was too bad since Dark Corner of the Earth was on my anticiptaed list for a long time. Not that the bugs were the only reason I didn't play them. but they were part of it.

That's cool.

It's a very crash-prone game though, regardless. having played pc games for a great number of years I expect every game to crash. Fallout 3 is exceptional in this regard however. Especially being from a "major" developer.

Because vampires are stupid and anything that involves them is inherently trash. 'salem's Lot and Dracula are both pretty good novels.

edit: doube post. sry.

I agree that the 3rd person POV is pretty much horrid; the animations especially are really bad. But as long as the game is playable in first person, which it is, the lack of a quality 3rd person doesn't really bother me. Sure, I'd rather have a great 3rd person pov than a terrible one, but there are other things I'd rather see changed/fixed first.

Arcanum was pretty good but it had some balance issues. Tech was seriously underpowered compared to magick, firearms were horribly underpowered compared to everything else, melee/dodge was the both the easiest build and the most powerful by far, rendering all other combat options/build unneccessary, Happily there was a lot of good non-combast stuff going on in the game, so al the various combat-related balance issues were tolerable. And in the end, of course, any character build was super powerful by level 40 anyway, so ultimately it didn't matter much whcih dorection you went combat-build wise.