Fallout

[Slowtrain]

they didn't really try

 

 

Maybe. But since I don't feel anyone has equalled the experience of Fallout as far as a crpg goes, it becomes hard for me to say no one is trying.

 

 

I've been critical of Bethesda for a long time, ever since they took a cyber-dump on the ES series, but I can't really say they don't try.

 

IMO, the current crpg design philosphy of Bethesda can be summed up as "More" rather than "Better". Rather than take a small number of ideas and develop them and make them work well; they take a huge number of ideas and throw them all out there in a half-developed state and figure that some have to work.

 

That's just my opionion based on what I have seen in the progress from Morrowind to Oblivion to FO 3.

 

Fallout 1 was the antithesis of that approach. It was a small, tight game that had a whole lot packed into a small package.

 

I personally think Bethesda tries very hard. I just personally disagree with where they put forth their efforts.

 

 

Otoh, I think in Fo3 they came the closest yet to making their approach work.

 

 

edit: I would also add that these large numbers of ideas tend to suffer from a distinct lack of unity and are just there because someone thinks ther are good ideas, not because they work well in an overall concept. Beth's crpgs have been gettign increasingly disjointed since MW. In my opnion, of course,

Edited January 5, 2010 by Slowtrain

[GreasyDogMeat]

no. see, i'm one of the few people alive *not* satisfied with inane **** like:

 

[intelligence] So you say this game is a ****ing joke while fighting the good fight with your voice on Vapid Galaxy Radio?

Who WAS satisfied with that? The game IS about 120 hours long with all 5 DLC and that 5 seconds, along with the latter part of the main story didn't kill the entire experience.

[bhlaab]

no. see, i'm one of the few people alive *not* satisfied with inane **** like:

 

[intelligence] So you say this game is a ****ing joke while fighting the good fight with your voice on Vapid Galaxy Radio?

Who WAS satisfied with that? The game IS about 120 hours long with all 5 DLC and that 5 seconds, along with the latter part of the main story didn't kill the entire experience.

 

That's sort of like saying "You have ONE tumor on your neck. The rest of your body is fine."

 

No, it's a symptom of a much bigger problem that ate Fallout 3 from the inside

[Endoxos]

So you're saying that instead of asking for better games we should just lower our standards immensely.

 

Pft, I've been asking for better games for 20 years now. I've only been satisfied with about 10-20 of 'em. People don't *want* War and Peace or Gone With the Wind, they want Transformers and The Day After. Nothing too deep, nothing too thought-provoking, but something to entertain them for a little while until they get bored and rush to wally-world to buy a new game. Developers feed them tripe, because the masses ask for tripe. We want top sirloin, so we have to hunt down the sole butcher shop in the next state to get what we hunger for.

 

Maybe. But since I don't feel anyone has equalled the experience of Fallout as far as a crpg goes, it becomes hard for me to say no one is trying.

 

I can think of only a few that rival FO- Wasteland (scope of FO's greatness 10 years prior to it, deep and intricate... erm... journal entries, excellent plot, unique system), Nethack (it thinks of everything for items, the way FO thinks of everything when it comes to choices), and Planescape: Torment (the utterly and individually epic storyline).

 

IMO, the current crpg design philosphy of Bethesda can be summed up as "More" rather than "Better". Rather than take a small number of ideas and develop them and make them work well; they take a huge number of ideas and throw them all out there in a half-developed state and figure that some have to work.

 

*grumbles* It's not just Bethesda... imho, every dev company who was not somehow touched by early Interplay, BIS, or Troika and their respective lead guys. Everyone wants a sandbox game where you get to do everything, but accomplish nothing. I mean, I like SimWhatevers, but it seems like everything tries to be Sim-Race-Farm-Hacknslash-Shooter with an army to back you up, stats to label your character with, and a pet for you to baby. No genre is sacred anymore, imho.

 

Fallout 1 was the antithesis of that approach. It was a small, tight game that had a whole lot packed into a small package.

 

Amen.

 

I personally think Bethesda tries very hard. I just personally disagree with where they put forth their efforts.

 

I have a general line of thinking: "As individuals, people are highly intelligent and work very hard. As a collective, the total IQ and effort put forth drops exponentially as their numbers are incremented. Bureaucracy and peer pressure is to blame." I feel that, yes, the people working for the "head honchos" try very hard. It's just the "head honchos" who ruin it. IMHO, Daggerfall, despite its massive amount of bugs and the ever-constant threat of The Void, was Bethesda's Magnum Opus. At least Daggerfall was a sandbox *RPG*, that merged the various sub-types of RPGs into one: roguelike, hack-and-slash, adventure, and tabletop-styled CRPG. Unfortunately, they kept the bad (almost solely "fed ex" and "kill the foo" quests) and dropped the good (detailed information, randomness, stats taking precedence over skill, the cart, etc) through the next incarnations of TES. Now, their games feel more akin to FPSes (either first-person-shooters or first-person-slashers) with a handful of numbers for good measure.

 

Otoh, I think in Fo3 they came the closest yet to making their approach work.

 

Meh. See above. FO3, while it does have its good points, still does not feel nearly as broad in scope as what Daggerfall was, nor as open to choice as FO1, or even 2, was. However, admittedly, I have yet to attempt to blow up a jammed door with a mine or bash one with a sledgehammer, so I could be proven wrong. ...well, I have yet to jam a door at all, so I'll cross that bridge when I burn it.

 

edit: I would also add that these large numbers of ideas tend to suffer from a distinct lack of unity and are just there because someone thinks ther are good ideas, not because they work well in an overall concept. Beth's crpgs have been gettign increasingly disjointed since MW. In my opnion, of course,

 

Agreed wholeheartedly.

Edited January 5, 2010 by Endoxos

[bhlaab]

I wonder if there's been any major changes within the company since Morrowind was released that could be potentially correlated to this dive in quality. HmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMmmmm

[TwinkieGorilla]

I personally think Bethesda tries very hard. I just personally disagree with where they put forth their efforts.

 

i agree. also, see my signature.

 

Who WAS satisfied with that? The game IS about 120 hours long with all 5 DLC and that 5 seconds, along with the latter part of the main story didn't kill the entire experience.

 

yeah. and the game is filled with about 120 hours of the most inane dialogue i've ever ****ing had the displeasure to groan my way through. it completely destroyed the experience for me (to the extent that i've long since uninstalled it, lent it to a friend and am entirely unconcerned about ever getting it back. which is an interesting note considering that i've always had FO1 & 2 installed at all times on every desktop build i've owned since '98 because i play each one at least once a year).

 

No, it's a symptom of a much bigger problem that ate Fallout 3 from the inside

 

Bethesda is to Fallout what cancer is to an organic body. I just hope the chemo Obsidian is attempting works.

[Nepenthe]

Not trying to be snide here, but I honestly can't remember a single dialogue from FO3. In fact, when I read the post above, I had to think for a second to actually remember that there was some in the game, and it didn't actually just consist of VATSing supermutants and Enclave troopers.

[Enoch]

Not trying to be snide here, but I honestly can't remember a single dialogue from FO3. In fact, when I read the post above, I had to think for a second to actually remember that there was some in the game, and it didn't actually just consist of VATSing supermutants and Enclave troopers.

The only thing that comes to my mind is "Tunnel Snakes Rule!"

[TwinkieGorilla]

The only thing that comes to my mind is "Tunnel Snakes Rule!"

 

ugh. ****ing groan.

[Slowtrain]

My argument would be that while there are things in the game, such as dialogue, that are poor, there are other things that are quite well done. This is in sharp contrast to Beth's last effort Oblivion where pretty much everything was awful, the dialogue in Oblivion was even worse than in FO3.

 

SO for me, the (very) few positive aspects of Oblivion weren't enough to balance out the horrible aspects and it left me with a very numbing and tedious game to play.

 

In Fallout 3 though the positives are more than enough to outweigh the negatives. For me personally.

 

Was it is an enjoyable rpg experience as Fallout 1? Of course not. But no game has been as an enjoyable an rpg experience as Fallout 1, so I really can't hold that failure against Bethesda.

[TwinkieGorilla]

But no game has been as an enjoyable an rpg experience as Fallout 1, so I really can't hold that failure against Bethesda.

 

perhaps not, but what you can and should hold them accountable for is some of the worst dialogue, writing and juvenile storytelling a popular franchise has ever seen. you're partially right that they did enough things decently to warrant one full play-through but that's actually pretty piss-poor for a relationship between a Fallout obsessive fan and a Fallout game. better than POS but that's not saying much at all. hell, i still get the urge to load up my FO:T every now and again, ffs.

[Endoxos]

hell, i still get the urge to load up my FO:T every now and again, ffs.

 

FO:T wasn't that bad at all, imho. It does to FO what WoW does to Warcraft, just... in reverse. I mean, I have no probs seeing FO spin off into other genres, as long as they wholly embrace what FO is within that genre, and FO:T did that pretty well with squad-strategy (well, the only other games I could relate to it is Jagged Edge, and XCom, and while it's no Jagged Edge, it does well enough, I think).

 

Problem with FO3 is it asks itself "what genre do I fall in?" and winds up having an identity crisis. FPSes and RPGs are too distinct from one another to mesh well in a hybrid. Add the pathetic writing (well, pathetic as far as a FO game goes... it's exceptional compared to TES games overall, though), and it was bound to not reach our standards.

 

I can't help but wonder if the dialogue writers down at Bethesda speak in only two-sentence blocks. I mean, in 2nd grade English, I was taught that a paragraph should have at least 3 sentences at minimum- a topic sentence, a body sentence, and either a header or a footer sentence. The only NPCs I can think of offhand that actually speak in paragraphs are Moira and Vance.

[Gfted1]

...

Edited January 5, 2010 by Gfted1

[Slowtrain]

I can't help but wonder if the dialogue writers down at Bethesda speak in only two-sentence blocks. I mean, in 2nd grade English, I was taught that a paragraph should have at least 3 sentences at minimum- a topic sentence, a body sentence, and either a header or a footer sentence. The only NPCs I can think of offhand that actually speak in paragraphs are Moira and Vance.

 

 

Part of it, I think, is simply that the current design paradigm for A games is one that attempts to limit text as much as possible. Partially because now that full voice-over is pratically a requirement is would be too expensive to have large amounts of in-game text, partially because, imo, devs and publishers believe that most current gamers don't want to be bogged down by too many words. So I don't really blame Beth, but rather just the current climate of game design.

 

 

I installed Morrowind again a few days ago, after many years away from the game. One can certainly criticize aspects of the MW style dialouge system, but its quite amazing to see what a huge amount of text there is in the game. I mean it has massive quantities of text on par with PS:T. It just reminded me how staggering the shift from MW to Oblivion was.

 

SO Bethesda can do text and dialogue and complexity if they want to, they obviously just don't feel that such will make a game that sells. And I guess they must be right sionce Ob and Fo3 have apparently done better than MW in sales.

[Pidesco]

As far as I can remember the guy who wrote most of the stuff in Morrowind was the same guy that did the writing in Daggerfall. I think he left Bethesda before Morrowind was finished.

[Slowtrain]

As far as I can remember the guy who wrote most of the stuff in Morrowind was the same guy that did the writing in Daggerfall. I think he left Bethesda before Morrowind was finished.

 

 

IIRc Julian LeFay was the mover and shaker on both Arena and Daggerfall. I've heard he had a limited role in MW and left during or soon after development because he didn't like the way things were going. Whether that is true or not, I don't know.

 

But regardless, MW, which had a lot of problems, was still, I think, a much more complex and interesting game than what came after.

[Pidesco]

As far as I can remember the guy who wrote most of the stuff in Morrowind was the same guy that did the writing in Daggerfall. I think he left Bethesda before Morrowind was finished.

 

 

IIRc Julian LeFay was the mover and shaker on both Arena and Daggerfall. I've heard he had a limited role in MW and left during or soon after development because he didn't like the way things were going. Whether that is true or not, I don't know.

 

But regardless, MW, which had a lot of problems, was still, I think, a much more complex and interesting game than what came after.

 

 

I think Ted Peterson was the writer of all the best stuff, though. LeFay is a programmer (and designer?).

[Slowtrain]

As far as I can remember the guy who wrote most of the stuff in Morrowind was the same guy that did the writing in Daggerfall. I think he left Bethesda before Morrowind was finished.

 

 

IIRc Julian LeFay was the mover and shaker on both Arena and Daggerfall. I've heard he had a limited role in MW and left during or soon after development because he didn't like the way things were going. Whether that is true or not, I don't know.

 

But regardless, MW, which had a lot of problems, was still, I think, a much more complex and interesting game than what came after.

 

 

I think Ted Peterson was the writer of all the best stuff, though. LeFay is a programmer (and designer?).

 

 

Possibly. Peterson has credit on all three, though on both Arena and MW it's "additonal design" credit, whatever that means, while on Daggerfall he gets "design" credits along with Lefay and Nesmith.

 

Regardless of who did what though, Todd Howard IS credited as "Project Leader" on MW and MW is the most complex and text-heavy of alll the ES games.

 

Make of that what you will.

[Pidesco]

I'm not sure if MW is more complex or textier than Daggerfall. Daggerfall had a lot of unique content, despite the randomness.

[entrerix]

Not trying to be snide here, but I honestly can't remember a single dialogue from FO3. In fact, when I read the post above, I had to think for a second to actually remember that there was some in the game, and it didn't actually just consist of VATSing supermutants and Enclave troopers.

 

awesome

 

the only dialogue i remember was that ****ing godawful dj dog and those wonderful [intelligence] moments. the dialogue was a total mockery of everything fallout dialogue should be.

 

that said, the exploration gameplay was very fun and the world was large and contained plenty of cool things to find... for the first few levels, before you became an overpowered god with 500 stimpacks and a nuke launcher....

 

obsidian has the chance to knock this game outta the park if they fix all the stuff that was wrong with f3. it still wont feel like a real fallout sequel, but it could be a fantastic first person rpgish sort of exploration action-sim type deal

[TwinkieGorilla]

As far as I can remember the guy who wrote most of the stuff in Morrowind was the same guy that did the writing in Daggerfall. I think he left Bethesda before Morrowind was finished.

 

unsurprising.

 

IIRc Julian LeFay was the mover and shaker on both Arena and Daggerfall. I've heard he had a limited role in MW and left during or soon after development because he didn't like the way things were going.

 

unsurprising.

 

the dialogue was a total mockery of everything fallout dialogue should be.

 

not that i've ever felt alone in this regard (whoo boy have i not) but i am so glad to continue seeing people who expect more from a game in this regard. cheers to you and all your kind.

 

that said, the exploration gameplay was very fun and the world was large and contained plenty of cool things to find... for the first few levels, before you became an overpowered god with 500 stimpacks and a nuke launcher....

 

agreed, but i've always deemed the concept of larping to be hilariously sad...so it doesn't say much when i say without an actually consistently well-written game mixed in (there isn't, trust me. there *are* flashes but the overwhelming majority is simply mind-bogglingly retarded) how long can you really justify virtual-larping? i mean, that is if you're not the sort of lad or lass who has ever thought anything but "oh, you poor thing..." if you know somebody with 2nd Life installed.

[bhlaab]

I don't agree that the exploration gameplay was very fun. You go around and find, what exactly? More subway tunnels? A little settlement with nothing in it but more super mutants to kill?

[Syraxis]

You go around and find, what exactly? More subway tunnels?

 

Yeah the amount of filler content (subway tunnels, sewers), was ridiculous.

[entrerix]

i never really spent much time in the tunnels, i avoided the dc area like the plague since it didnt seem very wastelandy to me. i liked the vast stretches of radscorpion filled badlands, pockmarked with dens of raiders or bloodthirsty mutants. i liked finding little messages from people in the past or whatever, basically playing wasteland archaelogist for the first 5-10 levels. i just wish that the few settlements you did find had the kind of meatiness to them that could be found in f1 or 2. lots of people to talk to, a smattering of quests to accomplish, maybe help them with their crops or fix their well etc etc

 

fighting in tunnels has been a weakpoint in many a game

[Starwars]

I think I liked the urban areas the most in Fallout 3 probably, though I definitely agree that having to navigate the city through the subway tunnels was extremely boring.

 

I loved how much of the wasteland outside looked, I think they did very well visually on the environments. But encountering the goddamn radscorpions, giant radscorpions and later on the deathclaws (once the level scaling seemed to drop them in) it got so incredibly annoying. On my first playthrough, I was still enjoying exploring the wasteland and finding locations, but eventually I quit because it seemed like I couldn't walk 100 metres before encountering some annoying critter that wanted to kill me.