KG

As for not liking lightsabre combat, I’m with for most of the games, but the most recent one (Academy?) I thought did it pretty well. But I haven’t played enough of it to deconstruct it and try to argue the point.

To get back to Oblivion, I felt the swing/block dynamic was completely pointless, and you were better off manually dodging. Especially when your reward for getting better with heavy armour was faster movement. I played quite a bit of the game as a paladin style character, and ended up power-levelling my block skill by letting weak enemies attack my shield for a few minutes at a time, just because it had little utility in actual combat so it was falling a long way behind the skills getting regular use. So take that out, ignore the shabby power attacks, and you’ve got something very basic. Not necessarily broken, but that seemed to be Oblivion’s design mantra – it works, who cares if it’s underdeveloped?

It’s interesting that you bring up Morrowind and its to-hit rolls. I’m very interested to see how they reconcile the hit percentages in VATS with the player actually shooting/swinging a super-sledge in real-time. I can’t help but think they’ll wind up with either the same complaints leveled against Morrowind, or an imbalance between the two modes of play.

And I’m not sure I agree with the idea of an FPS having a bigger pool of games to compare unfavourably to, since it cuts both ways. There are a lot more sub-standard FPSs out there that Fallout 3 can compare favourably to, than quality titles such as Half-Life which may put it to shame. In the smaller pool of FP melee games, you have an undisputed king in Mount and Blade that shames everything in the same class, and that nagging thought of “how did dozens of guys with multi-million dollar backing manage to fall so far short of a husband/wife indie team working in their spare time?”

However, at the end of the day, Bethesda aren’t about beating Thief, or Half-Life, or Fallout, or Mount & Blade. They’re all about doing away with a tight, focused gameplay experience in favour of a much higher quantity of gameplay options. Personally I don’t think that’s a good philosophy, because sooner or later, the players work out that so much of their enjoyment of that sort of game is derived from imagined possibilities and being enamoured with concepts rather than actual quality of gameplay.

But, that said, Bethesda have carved out a pretty sizeable niche of player who want a DIY fantasy world that offers many options and few challenges. They’re like P&P players with a bunch of sourcebooks for pre-scripted adventures, but no core rulebook. I won’t begrudge them that, but I can certainly register my distaste in Fallout 3 taking a similar direction.

As Kieron said, it’s all in the execution, Bioshocks Vita Chambers made you feel invulnerable, you could just die, then run right back and finish off the still wounded enemies Somehow in the SS games you still felt frail (possibly because you emerged from the chambers with very little health on top of everything else).

(edit)

Yes, scaled encounters in Morrowind existed, but were much better integrated. So when you got high enough you’d encounter tougher enemies more often (or at all). But the enemies all had level ranges they’d scale to and not past for the most part.. and you’d still encounter the weak creatures when high up. Oblivion just did them very badly and it felt lazy and..crappy.

There’s few bad ideas in videogames, but many bad executions.

KG

And how the goblins in Mournhold are really hard when you bring a high-level character there, but that the Tribunal quests are somehow still doable if you go at them with a new character?

Scaled encounters aren’t a new idea, and aren’t a bad idea. They were just handled really badly in Oblivion.

Especially since, with the Oblivion gates already in the plot, they could have done exactly what Kieron suggested.

Having the landscape become increasingly overrun with daedra as you progress would have a) scaled up difficulty, b) made you feel like the Oblivion gate thing was actually a THREAT, which would have made the main storyline feel more legitimate, and c) given you some motivation for closing the ones you come across, if closing a gate would render the stretch of road surrounding it less demon-infested.

Missed opportunities, Bethesda.

Scaled Enemies, as executed, was really bad and actually what broke the game. But I’m not convinced it’s a bad idea per se in a more open world. The trick would be i) To make it actually scale to the combat ability rather than an actual abstract idea of non-combat level ii) make it actually tie to the plot. The idea that there are no trolls before you hit a certain level just breaks the illusion of a world, and that’s without even getting to daedric armoured bandits or whatever.

What I’d have done is to actively make it a punctuated plot element. So you hit a level threshold and a plot development occurs, where – say – vikings invade the land, and all of a sudden there’s harder people in the country-side… and there’s an actual *reason* for it. Perhaps have a plot where you can eventually deal with it, pacifying the countryside until you hit another threshold when an even bigger threat is unleashed on the land. The point of fantasy lands regarding quests is that they are *not* static, and you can get some dramatic and meaningful things by altering the threat level as player competence grows.

(One of the bits where Thief 3’s city actually worked okay was near the end game when the whole place was descending into anarchy. I’d have liked to see someone apply that approach to an open world fantasy game. Hell – look at how brilliant Pathologic’s clock-as-enemy approach worked. They’re all, basically, scaling environment to player competency.)

But – y’know – backseat designering.

KG

Let’s not talk about Oblivion any more. Every new idea in that game was horrible. They did nothing right there. Dialogue mini game? Scaled enemies? Scaled drops? Plot?
Seriously Bethesda, WHY NOT GIVE OBLIVIONS MAIN CHARACTER A ROCKET LAUNCHER WITH UNLIMITED AMMO? YOU COULD REALLY SCORE WITH THE MAINSTREAM GAMERS THAT WAY, STATISTICS SAY THEY LIKE ROCKET LAUNCHERS!

Priapist: I’ll give you mount and blade, which slipped my mind as I was thinking more mainstream. Thief’s sword-fighting was deliberately rubbish to discourage you from using it. I despised all the Jedi games’s lightsabre combats.

Oblivion’s melee combat was basic, but functionally robust – the block/attack sequence is rock solid. The special moves aren’t that interesting or useful, but the fogginess which creeps into close combat in the basic mechanics simply wasn’t there.

(Compared to – say – Morrowind, here you start getting misses which clearly hit due to the skill system rolling. When you do that stuff in first combat, it just fails)

I agree there’s probably a reason why there’s not many other First Person combat games… but that’s beside my point. Oblivion’s combat may be critiqued to be rubbish only really on its own merits and failings. Fallout may be critiqued as being rubbish compared to dozens of better First Person shooters. It’s a line about the danger of unfavourable comparisons, which Fallout faces, not absolute merits.

(There was a recent presentation by Robin Hunicke where she talked about how people are getting enormous thrills out of games which are nowhere near as advanced, just because it’s a new thrill. The Be-a-lawyer or be-a-doctor of Trauma Centre and Phoenix Wright is incredibly basic compared to even a third rate FPS like Turning Point’s simulation of combat and adventure… but they’re more appealing, because they are at the top of their genre rather than the bottom. They’re an easier fantasy to achieve, because they’re a new fantasy, so people’s standards aren’t as exacting. FP swordfighting, while nowhere near as novel a field as Lawyering, isn’t anywhere near as exacting as first-person shooting – and you’ll note that I didn’t defend the bow combat.)

KG

And then there’s the massive part of me that rebels at the removal of groin shots.

So to speak.