By Mathew Kumar on July 19th, 2008 at 11:03 am.
I headline “Bethesda Softworks” to keep the format I’ve been using, but really I should just have put “Fallout 3” because that’s all they were showing and that’s all anyone cares about. I had a little bit of problem with this scheduled appointment – The time I was set to see it got confused by either PR or myself (we couldn’t decide) – so I didn’t perhaps get quite as much hands-on time as I would have liked (is there ever enough hands-on time at these kind of shows for hundred-hour RPGs?) But I got to stand and chat to executive producer Todd Howard while I waited, so it worked out for the best, really.
The most important things Todd told me was that there isn’t an Oblivion-esque “The World Scales With You” system. This is probably common knowledge, but lets write it anyway. There are easy areas, hard areas, and so on. There some bosses and stuff who do scale, but only roughly on the basis of when you first encounter them. Which is probably fair enough.
Talking about my hands-on experience of Fallout 3 actually feels a little dicey, because when I sat down to play I was given a long list of things I wasn’t supposed to talk about, which I promptly forgot. I know I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything the loading screens say (they feature background details on the world) which is a shame, as my reaction to one of them forms an at least mildly interesting anecdote. But let’s press on.
Fallout 3 is based on the Gamebryo engine and the modifications that Bethesda Sofworks made to it for Oblivion (I’m going to get this one right for sure) and the striking thing you’re going to notice as you move about the game world is that it feels very much like Oblivion. It doesn’t look exactly like Oblivion thanks to the urban decay, though there are some obvious markers – such as that weird, slightly wrong way that people look. But it kind of makes sense in Fallout 3 considering they’ve all been warped by radiation and stuff, I guess.
That it feels like Oblivion is a pretty important thing to note, I think. Because as a result (and I have to note that I played this with an Xbox 360 pad, not a mouse and keyboard) I didn’t like the real time fighting any more than I did in Oblivion. In fact less, because there was a great and immediate satisfaction to using Oblivion’s bows that the guns of Fallout (or at least, the ones from the early game) don’t have.
But that’s where the V.A.T.S system comes in. It is incredible. I refuse to believe anyone is going to play the game using real time combat when V.A.T.S is available. You see, V.A.T.S. turns every battle into an amazing cinematic event, and not in a lame way like a Final Fantasy game or something. The minute you spot an enemy, you choose your position to attack from, enter V.A.T.S mode, select the body part et cetera (classic Fallout stuff, you know the drill) and watch what happens. The cinematics are generated on the fly and delightfully satisfying. While shooting an enemy stalker (damn, er, just enemy) who is miles away with a pistol is a boring exercise in shooting at a dot, in V.A.T.S you’re able to watch as your bullets batter him with a pounding velocity, crippling his body parts or exploding his head [“or her head, obviously.” – Equal Opportunities Ed.]
During my play time, I had a fantastic battle with a feral dog using the V.A.T.S system, where I selected V.A.T.S the second he leaped for my throat, and popped him in the head repeatedly as he sailed through the air only to land as a sad little doggie corpse.
V.A.T.S removes completely the problem that we’ve all had with the Oblivions system of battles – that they look incredibly stupid – and turn it into something thrilling.
Anyway, after a few short battles, a bit of exploring and some interface fiddling (the Pip Boy 3000 is perfectly usable) my time was over. Before leaving I picked up one of the promotional bottles of “Nuka Cola” which was literally flat cola (and kind of nice for that, somehow) and asked Todd if they were going to include modding tools with the game for PC. His answer? That they haven’t announced anything, and they’re very focused on making a great game first and genuinely don’t know if they’ll include one or not.
It’d be a real shame if they didn’t as the modding community around Oblivion is pretty great, but it seems like at least the lessons they’ve learned from Oblivion might mean this is a game that doesn’t need patching by fans to make it actually playable.
I know, I know – I’m speaking too soon. I can’t help it – that V.A.T.S thing was awesome!
19/07/2008 at 11:11 Sum0 says:
Fallout 3 in “actually quite good after all” shocker! It’s Oblivion, with Fallout, with guns. Works for me, though I recognise that many will have problems with at least one part of that formula…
19/07/2008 at 11:20 Smee says:
What I want to know is whether or not people’s heads fall apart in normal real-time combat, or if the dismemberment effects are just seen in VATS combat.
19/07/2008 at 11:26 MasterBoo says:
It’s Oblivion, without Fallout. When was the last time you played Fallout, Sum0 O_o?
19/07/2008 at 11:30 John P (Katsumoto) says:
I really, really, really, really, more than anything else I hope about this game, really, utterly, completely hope they do get the modding tools out. I can’t imagine playing unmodded oblivion, and the things the community could do with Fallout 3 go way beyond the feeble limits of my imagination. They’d be silly billies not to release it.
19/07/2008 at 11:57 Pavel says:
So I guess you didnt have time to talk to some NPCs and see dialogue, take some quests and generaly do some interesting stuff? VATS has been tried out almost exclusively by every other journalist, and the info about the actual interesting RPG stuff has been pretty scarce.Too bad.
The only interesting preview from E3 has been posted on gamesradar, and the only interesting interview on gamevideos.com..the rest is just rehashing of good old killing and other uninteresting crap.
19/07/2008 at 12:01 register says:
Which is faster – real time combat or VATS? No matter how cool it looks I imagine after 3 hours I’ll be either going to real time or skipping the cinematics. If that’s possible?
19/07/2008 at 12:15 mpk says:
I don’t get the Oblivion backlash. It’s a perfectly decent game and sounds to me like a good basis to start from when designing a game like this. Was there this much vitriol when, say, Icewind Dale used the Baldur’s Gate engine? Honestly, it’s like someone announced a Planescape sequel using Unreal 3.
I’ve never played the original Fallout games, so I can understand why the collective that seems to hold them so close to their hearts are worried about a different developer designing the third game but honestly aren’t you all just glad there is a third game?
19/07/2008 at 12:26 Pavel says:
mpk – Oblivion was decent.I finished it and enjoyed it.But it had stupid minigame dialogue, nonexistant choices or consequences, the whole world was basically dead, Oblivion gates were aaaawful, and the level scaling idiocy killed any rpg progression system – you never felt rewarded.
Fallout had none if its flaws.It had great world, choices with consequences, proper dialogue trees, leveling system that made sense (but wasnt perfect, although infinitely better than oblivions), and the story was also pretty good (while oblivions sucked).
I enjoyed Oblivion for its nice atmosphere and quite a few very good quests – painter, dark brotherhood…but it was still much worse game than Fallout.
As for FO3, I am still positive, although Todds insistence on showing stupid combat and VATS and bloody mess perk and the same area over and over again dissapoint me quite a bit.But I have faith in a lead designer Emil Pagliarulo, so here is hoping it will be a good Fallout game, not just a game.
19/07/2008 at 12:34 Dexton says:
To mpk all I can say is: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.
It will very likely be Oblivion with guns rather than Fallout 3, of course that doesn’t mean it won’t be great but I am doubtful about it recapturing the feeling that made the original games so great. Then again I liked Tactics so maybe I am easy to please.
19/07/2008 at 12:43 SwiftRanger says:
Sounds optimistic but do enemies get to do something in V.A.T.S. mode as well (like, hurt you)? Otherwise it would be like putting easy mode on. While Fallout’s turnbased combat wasn’t perfect by any means it didn’t offer insta-win one-way battles either.
19/07/2008 at 12:45 espy says:
Did your character have the Bloody Mess perk as well? I found it a bit disturbing that all E3 videos show a character with that perk. Are gamers really so easily satisfied by a bit of gore? Pow, shot in the leg, head explodes, E3 crowd cheers stupidly. I’m baffled.
19/07/2008 at 12:51 Requiem says:
Why would anyone be glad there’s a third game if it has virtually nothing in common with the previous games? If the Hypothetical Planescape sequel still had the same level of writing, didn’t redesign the setting and characters and improved the combat then I don’t think anyone would care what engine it used.
But comparing Oblivion and Fallout is like comparing snooker and cricket just because they are both sports that use red and white balls and wooden sticks to move them around with.
19/07/2008 at 13:20 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Cautiously anticipating Fallout 3, because I’m well aware that this will play more like Oblivion than those top-downs from childhood memory, but Bethesda seems to be taking the bigger Oblivion complaints to heart.
But yes, I would prefer they release modding tools. Oblivion had some fantastic mods, especially as far as Make-Things-Prettier went. Because, let’s face it, everybody in Oblivion looked, well, off.
I recall some Oblivion mods from the far East side of the big map that let you make an honest-to-goodness pretty person in that game. And, as flexible as Oblivion’s character creation tools are, I’d honestly not thought such a thing possible.
Though… Mass Effect’s spoiled me as far as convincing real-looking people goes. That, and they can actually talk and “act” convincingly in those fantastic dialogue sequences.
I’m worried that this may have set my standards pretty high. Am slightly disappointed that your hands-on report indicated an Oblivion-esque level of “people wonkiness.”
…
And I’ve just now noticed this, but apparently there’s a NEW! and EXCITING! box to click under the html guide beneath the comment window. I’m tempted to test its mettle.
19/07/2008 at 13:25 Okami says:
I’ll just join all those people who complain, that all we’ve got to see from Fallout 3 so far was the combat and that there was no word about the quest, dialogue and skill system.
I can understand Beth focusing on the combat and gore bits, because it’s 2008, games are rather expensive to make and you need to sell a lot of copies to make some money and the best way to do that is to show off gore, explosions and combat.
Sad but true.
But the thing is: It doesn’t look good. For an action game I mean. The way they just focus on the action, the game looks like a really boring shooter with mediocre graphics. I don’t think they’re doing themselves a favor with their E3 presentation.
19/07/2008 at 13:26 MetalCircus says:
On paper (and acctually, in videos) VATS doesn’t seem all that remarkable… is it really that good?
19/07/2008 at 13:46 fearian says:
I guess I trust you guys as you’ve played the game and I have not, but I was initially dissapointed at how ‘samey’ F3 looked- although you have raised my hopes a bit more now.
19/07/2008 at 14:04 02sheslop says:
What I want to know is, have they hired more than 4 naff voice actors to voice every single character in the game?
19/07/2008 at 14:05 grumpy says:
Are you kidding?
Oblivion was plagued by gameplay flaws so basic that a 7-year old who’s never even seen a computer would have known to avoid them.
Honestly, the fact that the people who gave us Oblivion’s level scaling are now in charge of one of the best RPG series ever scares the crap out of me. Sure, they *might* pull it off, but I see no reason to count Oblivion in their favor. The best they can do is forget they ever made it.
Even if we ignore the flaws that made Oblivion unplayable unless you installed at least 5 different mods, we’re still left with a game that’s the complete opposite of Fallout.
Oblivion was a *huge* world devoid of content. All NPC’s said the same thing, all dungeons looked the same, and the plot was…. in there somewhere. You didn’t really notice it much.
It was a singleplayer MMORPG, really. Take the world from WoW or EQ2, and remove all players except yourself, and you pretty much have Oblivion.
Fallout? Smaller world, but *packed* with actual content. Every point on the world map had a purpose, any NPC you could talk to actually had something to say.
And the story really drove the game. You knew who you were, why you were there, and what you had to do.
And so far, Bethesda doesn’t really seem to have grasped these differences too well.
What they seem to be making is really Oblivion with the worst complaints fixed, and in a sci-fi setting.
I won’t even call it a post-apocalyptic setting, because, well, they seem to have missed the “post” part. Fallout wasn’t about juggling nukes everywhere. It was about surviving when other people juggled nukes a hundred years earlier.
But “hey, nukes are cool, so let’s add them as a weapon. And make the 200 year old car engines nuclear, so you can shoot them to cause an explosion. In fact, anything you hit should cause a nuclear explosion, because nuclear devastation is what Fallout is all about, right?”
Wrong.
That’s why I’m skeptical about Fallout. Not *just* because of Oblivion, but that certainly doesn’t inspire faith either.
19/07/2008 at 14:15 garren says:
We all know how promises made by Bethesda were kept after Oblivion was released ;)
Don’t buy the hype.
Plus, I don’t think raping franchises for the FPS crowd is a good thing.
19/07/2008 at 14:23 Pavel says:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=129
enough said.
19/07/2008 at 14:26 Frank says:
Thanks for the info, Pavel. The gamesradar thing has my hopes up now (though it seems not yours). Too bad the characters still look twisted and samey.
19/07/2008 at 14:36 Pavel says:
Well i am still positive – gamesradar preview sounds good and that gamesvideo interview game me some hope as well, but I am still careful.Oblivion, while I liked it, had so many design flaws (see that rpgcodex review) that it just seems incredible that they would be able to suddenly change 180 degrees and make an outstanding game.
On one hand, there is Emil as lead, which gives me hope, and on the other hand, there is FATMAN, exploding cars and Mutants that look like orcs.
19/07/2008 at 15:06 Pavel says:
And another thing thing that worries me – since all the dialogue is voiced, and the game has to fit to only one dvd (because of xbox), I don’t know how much text is there going to be (and I know Howard said 40000 lines, but that number doesnt mean anything).
Even Ken Rolston, lead designer on both Morrowind and Oblivion, prefers nonvoiced Morrowinds style –
“I prefer Morrowind’s partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I’m told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want. Fully-voiced dialogue is less flexible, less apt for user projection of his own tone, more constrained for branching, and more trouble for production and disk real estate. Voice performances can be very powerful expressive tools, however, and certain aspects of the fully-voiced dialogue — the conversations system, for example — contribute significantly to the charm and ambience of Oblivion.”
19/07/2008 at 15:09 tmp says:
Yeah, aside from the background, factions, underlying mechanics, even details like equipment… it has virtually nothing in common with previous games. Fallout 3 is polo simulation set in 19th century India, and starring haughty officers of British Empire.
19/07/2008 at 15:21 MasterBoo says:
tmp: Turn based combat? Proper understanding of the franchise? Emphasis on RP rather than combat? Getting the story right? (the Enclave shouldn’t exists for example)?
You missed these.
It’s easy to think about a game set in the Fallout world but make it completely awkward (Like Teddy Bears decapitating bodies…)
19/07/2008 at 15:35 No Problem says:
Fallout 3 will be excellent I’m sure, the only issue I have is with the total lack of lighting effects from this decade.
19/07/2008 at 15:41 Requiem says:
“Yeah, aside from the background, factions, underlying mechanics, even details like equipment…” Right same background, which they’ve then ignored or contradicted or even rewriten. Factions, considering it’s set on the other side of the continent isn’t a bit silly and unoriginal to have the same factions? And the equipment which has also been redesigned or replaced, so there’s nothing recognisable (shown so far).
Underlying mechanics? Other than they’ve streamlined SPECIAL to fit their LARP simulator environment rather than Fallout’s PnP simulation, seriously WTF?
19/07/2008 at 15:43 sinister agent says:
What I want to know is, have they hired more than 4 naff voice actors to voice every single character in the game?
Oh god, don’t. If they haven’t learned how atrocious that was and do the same thing for Fallout 3, they really do deserve to drown in cat vomit.
“I prefer Morrowind’s partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I’m told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want. Fully-voiced dialogue is less flexible, less apt for user projection of his own tone, more constrained for branching, and more trouble for production and disk real estate.”
That quote made me want to hit him a couple of years ago, and it makes me want to hit him even more now. By his own logic, you’re better off taking out all the dialogue entirely and letting the IMAGINATION WOW fill in the blanks.
And the nicely passive-aggressive response in Oblivion was to include voices, but make them all uttery horrible, so you get the worst of both worlds and I suppose he thinks it proved his point. Idiot. Morrowind was utterly lifeless, and Oblivion was less so, but still empty of character. Fallout’s key characters with voices and faces were packed full of character, and still gave you room to play around and create an impact.
Someone needs to beat into him that creating a colourful, interesting world full of characters does not mean just leaving it empty because you can’t be bothered/don’t have the talent to do it and hoping the player will do it for you. We’re more than capable of using our imaginations, thanks.
19/07/2008 at 15:50 Real Horrorshow says:
We should show someone from Bioware that quote about voice acted dialogue, maybe he’ll head over to Maryland and smack some sense into Bethesda.
19/07/2008 at 15:54 heartless_ says:
I never minded the Oblivion with guns comparison, as I never played Oblivion (there are a 1,001 fantasy games to play). Fallout 3 just needs to be a good post-apoc RPGish action game to satisfy me.
19/07/2008 at 15:57 SanguineLobster says:
Hmmm, someone should make STALKER with bows.
19/07/2008 at 16:25 kadayi says:
*News Alert*
Strange as it may seem, but it’s rumoured that contrary to popular game enthusiast perception, Game developers don’t in fact all live in Ivory towers on faraway planets, but in fact do read game forums/press previews/fan sites & even emails they receive. I’m pretty sure that Bethesda are well aware of the mistakes they made regarding Oblivion and won’t be repeating them in Fallout 3, that’s not to say the game will be ‘perfect’, but whatever mistakes they make with it are far more likely to be new mistakes, not repeats of old ones.
19/07/2008 at 16:26 Caiman says:
There’s more historical revisionism in the gaming industry than there is in politics. Oblivion was greatly enjoyed by a heck of a lot of people when it first came out, and saying that it was “unplayable” without mods is pure bile. It was certainly improved by mods (well, some of them), but the levelling system wasn’t *that* bad for goodness sake. It was “different” however, and how we have learned how dangerous that can be in games.
As for Fallout, it was a pretty good game back in the day but I can’t for the life of me figure out the religious fanaticism that surrounds it these days. Of course, it wouldn’t be fanaticism if anyone could figure it out.
Of course, I may as well be pissing into a cyclone for all the good my comments will have. But it made me feel better.
19/07/2008 at 16:32 Noc says:
I’m sitting this one out, guys. Have fun.
(Clarification: I’m sitting out this argument in the comments thread.)
19/07/2008 at 16:36 Volly says:
There is nothing remotely remarkable about VATS. It’s just a fancy name for REAL TIME WITH PAUSE (remember the Infinity Engine games???)
Anyway, Fallout 3 is going to suck as a fallout game and will probably be a half decent shooter with maybe 3 or 4 interesting quests. It will be forgotten after 3 months.
19/07/2008 at 16:50 Roman says:
I find it unbelievable that Bethesda was able to crush even my very, very, verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyyy low expectations with a single gameplay video. And this was then only based on the combat in the game something Bethesda normally is OKish at. But this was just… UGH
19/07/2008 at 16:59 King Awesome says:
“…It will be forgotten after 3 months.”
[snark] Like 99% of all games?
[\snark]
19/07/2008 at 17:09 cyrenic says:
Just to throw out an assumption, the RPGish stuff (NPC dialog and whatnot) was probably the stuff journalists couldn’t talk about after playing it.
19/07/2008 at 17:10 Juvenihilist says:
Its a short video showing a fraction of something. Here´s hoping for something mindblowing.
19/07/2008 at 17:12 terry says:
The more I hear of this game being Oblivion-esque the more I think it will stand or fall on the VATS. The classic turn-based games like Laser Squad, UFO, Jagged Alliance etc allow for far more immersion and tension than a mash-the-butan!!1 combat system like Oblivions. I guess the best of both worlds would be to have Mount and Blade’s realtime combat with UFO’s turnbased shenanigans.
Now I am thinking of a turn based Syndicate and I am sad :(
19/07/2008 at 17:16 sinister agent says:
As for Fallout, it was a pretty good game back in the day but I can’t for the life of me figure out the religious fanaticism that surrounds it these days. Of course, it wouldn’t be fanaticism if anyone could figure it out.
Mm. Fallout was fun and novel, but the praise is a little over the top. I think though, that it’s basically because good RPGs are extremely rare, and good RPGs that aren’t about elves and bloody prophecies are almost unheard of.
Plus it’s more replayable than most games, even RPGs. Where most will give you the option to either stab someone in the head, stab him in the back or ask someone else to stab him, playing a radically different character in Fallout could entertain you in a whole new way – the first time I tried playing through it as a hulking great ox with no brains, he was literally too stupid to speak, and all the dialogue was replaced with childish nonsense. Returning to the desperate, dying people and answering their grave “please, tell me you can help, we can’t hold out for long” with a gleeful “Nuh uh!” was oddly liberating, and the effort that had gone into setting up the game to offer a different experience that most players would never bother to do was commendable, and pretty unusual.
Plus, you could shoot people in the clackers and have your dog gore them to death. Most RPGs take themselves far too seriously for that.
19/07/2008 at 17:55 mulayim says:
Fallout “is” a good game, not “was”.
19/07/2008 at 18:38 Orange says:
I hope V.A.T.S. redeems it, if it really is just Oblivion with guns then I’m steering well clear.
19/07/2008 at 18:48 Mr Wonderstuff says:
The problem I’ve had with Oblivion and seeing Fallout is really simple but never been fixed. Floaty Walking (TM). There has never been a sense of weightyness to Bethesda’s walking style. It all seems like a floaty camera without any headbob. COD4 and Dark Messiah seem to get that right but not here which is a shame.
19/07/2008 at 19:57 Stromko says:
I always shut off headbob personally, makes me a bit nauseated. Just shotgun a bag of sugar before you start playing and you can provide your OWN headbobs!
V.A.T.S. is going to be a love or hate thing I think, personally I like what I’ve seen of it so far. I like that everything sort of stands in place while the bullets are rattling off — yes it is ‘easy’ mode in a way in that it makes twitch reflexes less important, but I’m sure your chances of hitting will depend on your character’s skills and therefore it’s vital to it being a ‘real’ RPG.
The scaling system in Oblivion irritated me a lot until I started to enjoy what it allowed me to do, mainly wandering the countryside at will and investigating any abandoned fort or dungeon or quest that I liked. I /hated/ Morrowind’s system where some dude would just randomly tear me in half, but I understand how some would see that as a lot more realistic. The only way to succeed in Morrowind for me was to sneak into a high-level ruin and steal some awesome gear.
Oblivion’s system was equally awful in that a character that wasn’t well-designed would always suffer and a strong character would always be strong, and also you could opt out entirely by just not using your ‘tag’ skills, but … well I thought the twitch controls were good and thankfully I stayed the hell away from the console version so I was able to get tons of mods for it now and then and play it with fresh eyes.
Normally I wouldn’t give a game a pass based on how its flaws have been modded out, but the toolset did make it pretty easy to do what I needed to do with it. I thought levels advanced too fast so I modded it so I needed 15 skill-ups per level, and then I thought magic was too weak so I doubled magicka and (somewhat unsuccessfully) changed how soon I could cast high-level effects. Then hundreds of mods came out that did things too awesome for me to figure out, and I could totally transform the experience if I wanted.
If Fallout 3 at least lets us easily change numerical parameters and is essentially stable and plays well, it will be great, there wouldn’t be much that wouldn’t be fixed by each user and tons of skilled and rabid fans. Too many games without good SDKs and toolsets expect people to mod them so they don’t suck (I’m looking at you, Crysis, even though I didn’t like you enough to even try) and there aren’t enough dedicated and skilled people to actually do it, but if they make it accessible to people with just basic word-processing skills to mess around with then I’ll be able to fix my own playing experience no matter what anyone else does.
19/07/2008 at 20:17 Jochen Scheisse says:
Fine, you wrote about 5 oft the 6 games that really interest me. Now if you could dig up some news on Brütal Legend, that E3 would be finished for me ^^
19/07/2008 at 20:45 oilypenguin says:
Did I miss an opportunity to complain by playing oblivion on the 360? The fact that I had to wade hip deep through bile to get through the thread posts makes me think I’m missing something.
Yup, only 8 faces, 4 voices, weird character models, and strange animations… these were all there. But once you get past that, suspend a little disbelief and get into the game, I felt it was very entertaining. Also, progression kept things from being boring for completionists. I still got to the point I was killing things as soon as I looked at them, it was never a grind.
I wonder, if people judged (the man who refuses to be called) Cliffy B by Jazz Jackrabbit, would Unreal have ever been made? I know, Unreal wasn’t the long-awaited sequel to many people’s favorite game of all time (TM) but it bears thinking that developers, especially people who care about their IPs as much as bethesda, learn from their old games and build on that. Rein in the vitriol a bit and let’s see what happens, shall we?
19/07/2008 at 20:53 Cephalocidal says:
Pavel, quoting Ken Rolston -
“I prefer Morrowind’s partially recorded dialogue, for many reasons. But I’m told that fully-voiced dialogue is what the kids want. ”
I’m going to go ahead and side with the kids on this one. I, like, god damned near everyone else who was into gaming back around 2000, loved me some Diablo 2. I’ve gone back and looked at that unflappable affection many times since, and I always come to the same set of conclusions about why it stuck with me when so much else didn’t. There’s the whole being first thing, and that’s definitely worth a lot. But there’s something else, too – the voice. I remember Charsi’s name because I remember Charsi’s annoying-ass voice. All those creepy bastards in Kurast, the psychotic necro-peddler and the weary merc captain. They set the mood for an entire act of the game in a way that elevated it above what it really was, under the shine and voice-gifted mystique: A very generic and notionally evil swamp full of annoying pygmy spear-spastics. They made it matter, and they made it memorable. They didn’t make it less annoying, but that’s beside the point. Without voice D2 would not have been what it was, and without voice to set the tone Fallout 3 would really be nothing more than a slightly less engaging (hah!) Oblivion with guns.
19/07/2008 at 20:55 Al3xand3r says:
If you have the right to be positive about Fallout 3 because you liked Oblivion, then people have every right to be negative about Fallout 3 because they disliked Oblivion. Equal rights for everyone and stuff.
Also, Unreal wasn’t a sequel to anything, people had no expectations of it to be a platform game or an RPG and got a FPS instead…
Sorry to break it to you, but I doubt Diablo 2 fans still play it thanks to the voice overs… It was/is just a mindless fun game.
Try playing a game with actual story (I’d recommend planescape torment) and you’ll see voices have little to do with being able to deliver a grand story. It’s like saying books aren’t as good as movies because they have no sound…
Anyway, the implementation of voice added to Diablo 2 in some ways, but forcing voice overs forces limits to the design of what’s supposed to be a grand, open ended RPG since you really can’t do voice overs for as many lines as you’d be able to simply write. You could code a quest line with 10 different outcomes depending on the approach the player takes and easily write the text for it, but it’s a lot harder to voice all of those outcomes, and Bethesda didn’t show any effort with Oblivion to have faith in them this time.
Really, the best option is partially recorded, for main story NPCs and main events and such, with just text for everything else, assuming you justify that design with the sheer sweet epic scope of everything you create. Obviously if you’ll just make a Diablo 2 clone, then you don’t have much reason to not voice everything, though it’s still up to how fun the game is if it’s that kind of game anyway.
19/07/2008 at 21:05 sinister agent says:
People have the right to be as cretinous as they like as much as others have the right to call them out on it.
I thought, and still think, that Oblivion fell ridiculously short of its potential, and ended up being an okay, fun-ish game that frequently looked terrible simply because it kept reminding you of how good it could have been. I am ambivalent about Fallout 3 at this point, though gently nudged towards suspecting it’ll be a bit disappointing.
There’s just not enough so far for us scummy commoners to say for sure what it’ll be like to play – most of the footage so far has been shooty shooty, but it’s possible that it’s merely being presented as such and everything else is being repressed.
It could go either way. Either way, if they do make it just like Obliv, to the extent that they don’t fix all of its relevant faults, I think they’ll manage to piss off absolutely everyone.
Try playing a game with actual story (I’d recommend planescape torment) and you’ll see voices have little to do with being able to deliver a grand story. It’s like saying books aren’t as good as movies because they have no sound…
Nice false dichotomy there. People who play and like Diablo 2 must have never played anything else, ever. Nobody’s saying voice-overs are necessary to tell a story, but people are disputing the idea that adding them will somehow detract from a story or game. They’re a powerful tool, and will only make a game/story worse if they’re badly done, as they were in Oblivion.
Although having said that, Obliv could possibly have overcome this with better writing and characterisation – Deus Ex, for example, had some atrocious voices, but the characters were consistent (you didn’t get every citizen saying exactly the same thing, or male elf face#3 switching awkwardly between ‘plot critical voice’ and ‘carefree townsman’ voice every other sentence) and the dialogue was generally pleasing.
19/07/2008 at 21:26 sinister agent says:
I do think that partially recorded may be the way to go, too – there’d be a precedent for it set by the first two games (not played tactics, don’t care), and it’d certainly be better than fifty people all having the same ridiculous campy voice.
Trouble is, that might not gel very well with a first-person view. Reading text appearing over someone’s head or muted subtitles may look a bit weird in first person. I suppose it depends on what form the conversations will take place – will the game pause for them, or will you be rendered invincible a lá Deus Ex, or something else entirely?
Go on, someone. Spill! You could be the next RAM Rai… oh.
19/07/2008 at 21:32 oilypenguin says:
@ Cephalocidal
Diablo2 almost made a friend and I flunk out of school. We still use Decard’s voice when we talk about games, “Ah the Horodric Cude.” Good times. Though I don’t think that is enough to include voice acting in everything. WoW would be terrible if everything was voiced (and god help us, unskippable) because in a epic setting, with hundreds of quests, unless you’re on a quest chain, few things tie together. One guy’s lost puppy isn’t part of the main story-line but because everything else is voice acted the dev needs to record him too. This runs into the same problem Oblivion faced: voice acters are freaking expensive. You can’t get people for every part, the game would cost $200 and they’d still have to sell big to make it up. And even if you did find different voice actors for every part, with that many people you increase your odds of one of them (and it only takes one) sounding silly and taking the player out of the moment.
This is where Al3xand3r has a point: just hire people to do important quest lines. The sidequest stuff can still be read by people who do those things (I have WoW-related click-thru syndrome) and the world still has enough flavor for people who want to blow through stuff.
Regardless, our opinion on voiceovers is a bit of a digression. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing what bethesda manages to do with fallout and I’m optimistic that, if nothing else, the experience will be better than oblivion, no matter what your opinion on oblivion was.
19/07/2008 at 21:35 Jochen Scheisse says:
What all the discussion always boils down to is that Fallout’s game model was totally different to everything Bethesda has ever done. Bethesda are good in open world models and in having a big influence on character development, which are the pure basics for RPGs since the 70s or something. Most Bethesda games could easily be roguelikes.
Fallout was a game that invested heavily in dialogue and storyline. And most people, including me, doubt that Bethesda can carry on that tradition.
However, I like to hear what Bethesda have planned for Fallout 3. Many of the features they include are very good. A played out character generation that is also a tutorial: Clap Clap! What I like about the game is that Bethesda are obviously trying to push the boundaries with this. They are trying to do something new and exciting, while also acknowledging that from the dialogue and story part their games were largely atrocious, and working on that. I’m pretty certain that Fallout 3 will be a good game. It might just disappoint me in ways no Black Isle title ever has.
19/07/2008 at 21:56 malkav11 says:
Bleh. As little voice acting as possible, for me. Or if you must voice lines, do it alongside text and let me skip to the next line when I’m done reading. I read so much faster than anyone could ever voice act, and the acting is never good enough to be worth the wait.
Plus, it’s much easier to have lots of lovely, world-fleshing out dialogue when all you need is a writer, not a writer and six voice actors, and far, FAR easier to do decent mods. I’ve experienced some “voice acting” from Oblivion mods, and…well, you thought the original game’s voices were bad? Y’ain’t heard nothing yet.
19/07/2008 at 22:18 Ragnar says:
@Jochen Scheisse
What? Roguelikes (at least the ones I have played: Nethack, Angband, ADOM) have very often a very detailed game world. Everything you do will matter. You need to think about every step you take and think of the consequences of your actions. That is not at all like Bethesda’s games. In Oblivion, nothing you do seem to have any negative consequences at all.
19/07/2008 at 23:42 Sam Combs says:
@Ragnar:
It’d probably be more fair to say that nothing you did had any consequences. Sure, if you stole or killed someone, the guards would fight or arrest you, but outside of the main quest, none of the side quests made much of an impact on the world, with few exceptions. Looking back at Fallout, it seemed that the player’s actions did have that impact, that you could screw up and doom an entire vault full of people, and even side quests could change the entire power structure of a town (Junktown). Every town involved the player, s/he wasn’t just another adventurer passing through, you felt like a unique person that really mattered in the great scheme of things.
I don’t know, it’s hard to qualify this stuff with hard facts or figures, I just got a better feel from the Fallout world and quests than I did with Oblivion, and I’m afraid that element of impactful quests and important decisions that was present in Fallout 1 and 2 will be gone from Fallout 3. Oblivion never gave you choices – you either did a certain quest, or you didn’t, there wasn’t a whole lot in between.
20/07/2008 at 00:13 Nate says:
What would Portal be without the voice actors?
Of course, subtitles are probably better than sub-par voice acting.
20/07/2008 at 00:17 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Sam basically nailed my worries about Fallout 3, and put just about half of my complaints about Oblivion’s immersion level, or lack thereof, in a more polite way that I could have mustered back in the old posts–and I’m still actually looking more forward to Age of Decadence than I am F3, but that’s because there’s a degree of trust in my fellow Fallout fans, some of whom happen to be making a game. About post-apocalyptic Rome-alike.
But yes, my main complaint with Oblivion, even more than the poor progression design choices, was the lack of substance to the world. It felt like GTA with swords. Which, while fun in occasional doses, had very little sense of impact or purpose. It was an issue of breadth versus depth, and Oblivion went too far on the sliding scale to the former.
But! I am still cautiously optimistic. Fallout 3 is going to have a smaller, but apparently much more detailed gameworld than Oblivion, and a character creation system you play is a brilliant idea. While combat and movement still sounds a bit floaty and “off,” I’m looking forward to trying the VATS system in action.
But if it’s modding-unfriendly, I’ll be a lot more apprehensive, to be honest.
20/07/2008 at 00:47 Real Horrorshow says:
Oblivion was a freaking great game. Sorry I guess I just don’t have it in my heart to be a die hard PC elitist, I can’t hate a good game because the menus are consolerific or other trivial things, all of which are fixed within 5 seconds by a mod, and don’t even say it.
Unless you’re a reviewer for a commercial website, it’s a little ridiculous — and yes, biased — to intentionally ignore mods when judging such a mod friendly game like Oblivion, with mind-bogglingly simple yet incredibly effective mod tools included by the developer for free. Modding is at the core of Oblivion PC, pretending it doesn’t count is just asinine. They didn’t include the mod tools just because they felt like it — it’s part of the game, and they knew that just like Morrowind there would be 100′s of mods within weeks.
When I first played Oblivion I did so with literally 5 mods and I enjoyed the HELL out of the experience. UI mod, a mod that made windows glow at night from candle light indoors, a shader tweak, and not much more.
Yeah the voice acting was bleck and it’s rather dry as an RPG, but it’s a huge leap forward from Morrowind, which most people who hate on Oblivion seem to still love. Morrowind was awesome for it’s time but come out, Mournhold was basically a gigantic wax museum. People just stood in the same place FOR ALL ETERNITY, nothing ever changed. The combat was ridiculous — either make it old school turn based or make it totally free like Oblivion — it was so stupid “hitting” someone square in the forehead with a massive warhammer and getting a “pfft” sound because you “missed.”
Frankly, except variety of factions (of which Morrowind had what seems like twice as many), Oblivion was a giant leap forward in pretty much every single way. The one or two areas it took a step back are fixed in 10 seconds with a mod — they’re free, they’re out there, go get some.
There’s of course no problem with just not liking a game, but 90% of the Oblivion hate comes off to me as very contrived, calculated, deliberate, willfull hate for a game simply because it gained a few console traits.
This isn’t directed at anyone with valid criticisms of Oblivion (or Fallout 3 for that matter), just the mouth-foaming hatemongers who think it’s the WORST GAME EVARRRR.
And Fallout fanboys, just get over it already. If you expected a game developer to release a turn based isometric RPG in 2008 you’re out of your minds. I don’t care how great the old games are, no one’s going to play that shit. If you don’t like Fallout 3, then don’t play it. I mean, if they named it Nuclear Wasteland, called it a new IP, renamed all the factions, no one would be going beserk over this game. All you’re really pissed about is that they’re using the name Fallout 3, so it’s almost like you’re angry that they’re using the lord’s name in vain, or writing the word Mohammad over the drawing of some average Arab guy. I think you know what I’m getting at :). Just forget about it if you don’t like it and play something else, cease the hyper fanboy fanatic zealotry, it’s quite pathetic.
Phew, that was about 10x as long as what I’d set out to type. All the hypocricy, bias, fanboyism, and fanaticism is just grating on my nerves as I read some of these replies (here and in the previous F3 thread) and it makes me wish people like that would be forbade an internet connection by law.
20/07/2008 at 00:50 Nick says:
GTA had a more living world feeling than the lifeless Oblivion.
20/07/2008 at 01:17 Mo says:
I should add that as a reasonably hardcore PC gamer, even I won’t touch that shit. :) I tried getting into Fallout 2 recently, and simply could not get over the fact that I was killing rats for three floors in the second “dungeon”. I loved all the other aspects of the game (dialogue, setting, SPECIAL, etc) but it seems the fans forget about how tedious the game could get.
20/07/2008 at 01:21 MetalCircus says:
Oblivion, while fun, was a step backwards for many reasons. As Nick says, the living world in games like GTA 4 are far better than that of Oblivion – there was such a massive potential for the Radiant AI to do some wonderful things but it was stripped down to giving NPC’s basic script patterns to work out. While this in itself was probably a half-step forward for RPG’s, it could have done a lot more.
The open world was admitadly awesonme. The feeling of standing in the imperial city, looking at a mountain and saying “I can go there” is great. But that’s about the only freedom you have. If you do a quest, it’s do it the right way or not at all. Not in the best RPG interests. There should really be multiple ways to “complete” a quest. Fallout and deus ex is a good example of this, the latter isn’t even a proper RPG.
The voice acting was stale as all hell. The dialogue boring and dull and samey. Animation is ropey as hell. The main quest, also, I noticed, PALED in comparison to the Dark Brotherhood quest, which was brilliant.
At least the guy who made those quests is on board for Fallout 3 ;)
And no; Oblivion isn’t a bad game. I mean, I played it right through to the end, but it has a lot of flaws that frankly you’d be foolish to overlook. One epic flaw being the whole leveling creatures thing, something which Todd admited in the 1up demo was a mistake.
20/07/2008 at 01:32 Al3xand3r says:
Real, for someone who looks past trivial things like inventory menus, you seem pretty easily impressed with other trivial things, like random generic NPCs wandering around in nonsensical ways that don’t add to anything other than perhaps giving a better “city” feel for such places. But when everything is devoid of character, that doesn’t help much.
People critiqued Morrowind for many of the same things as Oblivion, it’s just that Oblivion was worse in so many ways that now people look up to Morrowind as better, mainly for its imaginative and varied world design and the more depth in the lore (though it was still badly, boringly written imo).
Not to mention the game was deeply flawed at its core, mainly with the skills and overall combat (which is like, the biggest part of the game since the story is so linear and most of the quests so unimaginative, that voice really doesn’t help them). Sure there are mods that get rid of it, and try to add fixed levels for areas/monsters but then you’re trusting some amateur to properly balance a game that wasn’t even made for such balance, but for a go anywhere at any level type of gameplay.
As for being stupid to expect a turn based RPG, you’ll be surprised to know turn based is actually rather popular even nowadays, see the recent sequels of Heroes of Might & Magic, see the success of Silent Storm, the anticipation over the new King’s Bounty and Disciples III, and many more… It’s also a success on consoles, most recently with the Fire Emblem series, but also many of Atlus’ Strategy RPGs.
Similarly for isometic, some of the games above use it, but also look at Diablo 3 and Dragon Age (sure it has ots cam also, but iso is still included and looks grand), Drakensang, Dropship, Reluctant Hero, Space Siege, Not the Time for Dragons, Hand of God, Age of Decadence, Broken Hourglass, NWN2 & expansions (yeah it’s been out, but expansions still coming). Oh and every one of the countless diablo clones.
But really, people are long past the point where they critiqued Fallout 3 for not being iso or turn based, and they’ve moved on to critiquing (from the little info we get in interviews etc) the game for being as flawed, or worse than, Oblivion. Only Bethesda and fanboys still flame them over the iso/turn based deal.
If you liked Oblivion fine, be excited over Fallout 3, but many people didn’t, and you can’t tell them they’re wrong, I mean, I imagine people are capable of knowing what’s enjoyable to them or not without someone beating sense into them.
20/07/2008 at 01:51 Vasara says:
Real Horrorshow: I really don’t see what the point of that post was. Oblivion’s greatness is highly subjective. Y’know, opinions and all that. You think Oblivion improved on Morrowind, fine. I think Oblivion was a major step backwards from Morrowind. See? Differing opinions. You’re coming off like you’re trying to convince everyone that they’re wrong to think Oblivion was bad. There’s no right or wrong here, it’s all subjective.
Fallout 3 looks like it’ll feature Oblivion-style gameplay, which does not appeal to most Fallout fans. That’s why they’re so pissed. In my opinion, a sequel that bears no resemblance to it’s predecessors is not a sequel at all. If Valve made Half-Life 2: Episode 3 a third-person shooter a la Gears of War, do you seriously think people would be like: “meh, I just won’t buy it”? Fans tend to care about their favourite series getting decent sequels. It’s what fans do, Fallout fans are just more… enthusiastic about it.
It’s pretty hypocritical to claim all the people who don’t like Fallout 3 are overzealous fanboys in the same post where you praise Oblivion and claim it’s a huge leap forward in every area. Different people like different things, maybe some people just, y’know, don’t like Oblivion. Maybe some of the people you speak of actually think Oblivion is the worst game evarr and genuinely hate it as much as you hate them. To each their own I suppose.
20/07/2008 at 02:03 Real Horrorshow says:
I’m the furthest thing from a Bethesda fanboy, I guess I just haven’t followed the latest bitchings of Fallout fanboys to know that the turn/iso thing is out of style now. Please forgive me (sigh). It’s kind of funny and sad though that a certain point of fanboy rage has taken on such a life that it actually has coming and going trends.
The NPC behavior in Oblivion wasn’t groundbreaking but it certainly was a MASSIVE leap forward from Morrowind. People ate, went to the store, closed up shop at night, slept, etc. Compare that to Morrowind where, no matter if you played for 10 or 1000 hours, Fargoth would still be wandering around in circles in Seyda Neen, inceasantly, the entire time, until the end of time. About the only major thing Oblivion lacked in this respect were NPC’s travelling between cities. But again, there’s a 300kb mod that fixes that. You honestly think having NPC’s carry out daily activities in an RPG is trivial? Are you serious? It enhances immerision in the world, one of the most important things a developer could possibly accomplish with a game world, especially in a RPG.
Overall combat was a massive leap forward from Morrowind, I’ve already explained this. I can’t fathom someone actually preferring the dice-rolls-disguised-as-actual-combat system in Morrowind, it was totally ridiculous. If you’re going to put me in first person and have me hack and slash at people, I want to actually hack and slash them when I clearly did, instead of some random number generator going “Oops, I’m sorry, I know you actually did just stab that person in the forehead, but your dagger rating is too low, I’m going to have to count that as a miss.” Either go one way or the other. I would have been happy if Oblivion went with either way, but I’m just glad it went with one, and it works fairly well.
All those turn-based games you listed probably sell 20,000 copies each. Just because there’s enough people buying extremely low budget games to justify making more doesn’t mean they’re “popular” by any means. If Fallout 3, a big budget title from a major developer, was isometric and turnbased, it would be laughed at by everyone in the gaming world besides Fallout zealots.
I don’t think the GTA4 comparison is fair, either. For two reasons: 1. GTA4 came out two years later, and 2. GTA4′s “city feel” isn’t any better than Oblivion’s or any other game. Think about it: what do NPCs do in GTA4? They walk around aimlessly. Sound familiar? Unless they’re driving, then they drive around aimlessly until the game randomly decides that this NPC will pull over and get out, at which point he will then begin walking aimlessly. They go in and out of buildings sometimes, stop at Burger Shot, etc. but don’t Oblivion NPCs behave in the exact same way? The idea that GTA4′s NPC is so much more advanced than any other game is ridiculous.
Hyperbole much, Vasara? I didn’t say all people who don’t like the look of Fallout 3 are fanboy zealots, I said the fanboy zealots are fanboy zealots. It’s not about liking or not liking, its about bias. It’s like anti-Americanism. It’s perfectly fine to not like the American gov’t, strongly oppose it’s foreign policy, think the brand of capitalism is too brutal, the crime rates are too high, etc. Those are all opinions based on available facts about the country. It’s when you get into burning flags, calling the U.S. a fascist state, calling it as bad as nazi Germany, saying the military willingly slaughters civilians in Iraq, calling it a great satan etc. is when you get a problem. Those aren’t opinions based on facts, it’s blind zealotry based on hate. Oblivion was a flawed game with also lots of good areas and whether one likes it or not is up to taste and preference, it’s not the worst game ever made like a lot of my more elitist fellow PC gamers make it and it’s certainly not unplayable. Subjectivity only goes so far.
Bioshock is the worst game ever made!
No, it’s not.
20/07/2008 at 02:17 Al3xand3r says:
I never said Oblivion’s schedules were worse than, whatever other game’s. I just said it adds nothing when the world is devoid of personality meaning I would prefer imaginative visuals and good writing over glitchy buggy schedules and stupid random dialogues which take from the immersion as much as the “living city” look adds.
As for the combat, I never said Morrowind’s was better, but the dice rolls is the least of it, and is another trivial thing which you’d think you can get over. After all, dice rolls exist in Oblivion also, it’s just that instead of doing a “miss”, you will do a tiny amount of damage instead. But a better battle system doesn’t mean much when it’s so broken in regards to skills and balance and you can finish the game on level 10, without having met 50% of the already limited amount of enemy types thanks to level restrictions, and without any real effort or thinking involved. Not to mention they excluded imaginative spells like floating, thanks to their further botched world design.
Extremely low budget turn based / isometric games? Sure, I listed a few of those, but I wouldn’t call Ubisoft’s Might & Magic games or Bioware’s Dragon Age or Nintendo’s Fire Emblem, square’s Final Fantasy (yeah, it’s not console dumbing down that they do it real time, popular console games are turn-ish based also), low budget, or as having the potential for just 20000 sales. Not to mention it’s more about marketing, hype, and high tech visuals than what camera or battle system you’re using. Get a grip, learn your games…
Also, if sales were the be all end all factor for making a game, then Bethesda should have been making something like a post apocaliptic sims/city builder or some mini games collection for the Wii.
20/07/2008 at 02:22 Jochen Scheisse says:
As much as I agree that turn based doesn’t seem to be selling at the moment due to it being so tedious, I’m always a bit disappointed that this seems to be the end of the line.
In that interview with the developer of Dwarf Fortress I won’t link now, the guy said a smart thing along the lines of: I didn’t want a hitpoint model. At some moment in time, people seemingly agreed that this is as good as it’s going to get and they all stuck with it. I don’t think so, it’s just lazy.
I’m not a developer, and even I can come up with ideas how to improve the TB or RT with Pause model. How hard can it be to make it look awesome and not be tedious? How much more complexity of interaction can you put into these models?
In my opinion, the main reason why everyone uses real time is IMMERSION(TM). People who need both hands to play are drawn into the game because it demands more of their attention, and raising the immersometer that way is of course easier than presenting people with meaningful choices, a believable world and realistic characters. But the older I get, the more I feel conditioned by that kind of tricks, the same way that boobs or an explosion can’t trigger something if they don’t happen in the right context.
20/07/2008 at 02:22 Real Horrorshow says:
If you read correctly (which you did not), I specifically said turn-based, I didn’t include isometric games. Also, this is a PC gaming forum. I’m under the assumption that we’re discussing games from a PC gaming perspective. When I say turn-based, I mean PC RPG’s. There’s not going to be a need to preorder Disciples III in order to make sure you get a copy on day one.
Dice rolls in Oblivion exist but it’s not as bad, hence better, my entire point. Morrowind’s combat wasn’t a trivial issue either — You could fire an arrow at someone’s face at 2 feet away and it would pass straight through them. That’s just stupid and makes combat stupid, which is like, the biggest part of the game since the story is so linear and most of the quests so unimaginative
;-)
20/07/2008 at 02:27 Al3xand3r says:
Oh okay, so you can dump on turn based and iso games, but then when countered you can ignore half the points and just respond to what suits you.
Anyway, I’m sure Fallout 3 fans would be happy with a real time with pause system along the lines of Bioware’s games, which are both iso and rtwp, and you can’t argue those aren’t popular and only sell 20000 copies… And no, not done half assed like the VATS we have seen here…
As for stupid dice rollls, that would be very subjective again. What’s the point of raising character skills if you want player skill to be the only factor as much as possible? You’ll consider it an improvement if they get rid of dice rolls alltogether is what I gather from your attitude, since making them less prominent was an improvement to you. I guess you’ll love Fallout 3 since it seems it will be even more about player skill and not character attributes. Maybe you can once again hack/unlock everything without investing points in the skill, huh? That’d be sweet, right? But all that doesn’t make the games good RPGs, regardless of how much you enjoy them, and as long as they’re touted as RPGs, fans of the genre (and not just Fallout specifically) will backlash.
And what of PC/consoles? we were discussing battle systems and camera views I thought. Not to mention Oblivion sold more on consoles than on PC, and sales do matter, like you said, right?
20/07/2008 at 02:30 Jochen Scheisse says:
But he’s right. Turn based gaming is alive in Japan. For some reason, the Western Industry has given up on it. You assume that a turn based game with the budget of CoD4 wouldn’t be as successful. Outlook at the moment: We’ll never know.
20/07/2008 at 02:34 Real Horrorshow says:
Well this whole discussion is stemmed from the hate some PC gamers have for Oblivion and the hate some fans of the PC game Fallout have for Fallout 3. Yeah, Final Fantasy is totally relavent to the discussion, yawn. It’s not me ignoring half the points, its you grasping for straws by talking about console games that have no bearing on the discussion at all. Get a grip.
Bioware’s games of the past 5 years aren’t turn based in the classic Fallout style by any stretch of the imagination. Keep grasping them straws man, it really helps.
I said sales matter to major developers owned by corporations, corporations exist to make money. I dare you to challenge the logic there.
Jochen: Western game developers don’t market their games to Japan. Japan just straight up does not play western games. It’s not a market for Bethesda to tap. Turn-based would be a disaster no matter what.
20/07/2008 at 02:37 Al3xand3r says:
Well Jochen, we still get the odd succesful turn based strategy, like civilization or galactic civilizations, but we don’t see it in games that are closer to RPGs. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t work.
Real, you’re once again ignoring half the points, when I said that, I was talking about the iso games I mentioned. I mentioned PC titles for both turn based and iso, you only responded (or didn’t really) about the turn based ones even though you critiqued both aspects as outdated.
I never said Bioware’s games are turn based, I stated they’re real time with pause (can you read? no? try!), and that it would be preferable to twitch based FPS or hack & slash combat for every RPG fan, since the mere fact it’s party based with control of your party (and they’re not just AI henchmen) adds to the strategy involved. You’re still ignoring the actual posts.
In fact, you’re the one grasping at straws, by talking as if all Fallout fans want is an exact replica of Fallout 1 & 2 and wouldn’t be happy with anything less or anything more modernised (like Bioware’s games). Nobody stated that in this thread.
20/07/2008 at 02:44 Jochen Scheisse says:
The point was that these Japanese games are successful on the Western market. There are enough people who play Advance Wars or every second JRPG. I know Bioware hasn’t done turn based for ages. I’m just saying, pretending like a market for a slower game experience isn’t there is as stupid as saying that the majority of people would today buy a game model from 98.
For me, TB/ISO isn’t the main aspect of a good Fallout RPG – it’s about the complexity of the social model. Bethesda have never done that to my satisfaction and that is what I’m afraid of.
20/07/2008 at 02:44 Real Horrorshow says:
And you see, that’s where the bias and fanaticism step in: You already have real-time with pause — Hello!? Have you forgotten VATS? The real-time with pause battle system included with Fallout 3? It has that and you’re not happy. You just completely contradicted your entire argument. Just amazing.
It seems like you can’t even remember why you hate Fallout 3. It doesn’t matter why, you just do, don’t you?
20/07/2008 at 02:45 Al3xand3r says:
I already addressed Vats in a previous post, and emphasised the party aspect, and the “like bioware’s” aspect in the last post. Do you read? No? Try! Or do you honestly think those are similar enough to VATS? And you tell me I’m the one grasping at straws? Seriously, lol.
As for why I hate Fallout 3, the combat is the least of it, it’s just what you felt like discussing when you crapped on the iso/turn based deals. Try reading what I wrote as negative over Oblivion, you quoted one of those points already.
20/07/2008 at 02:48 Real Horrorshow says:
I will once you give it a try yourself.
“In fact, you’re the one grasping at straws, by talking as if all Fallout fans want is an exact replica of Fallout 1 & 2 and wouldn’t be happy with anything less or anything more modernised (like Bioware’s games). Nobody stated that in this thread.”
You say Fallout fans would be happy with a real-time/pause system of combat.
There is a real-time/pause system of combat in Fallout 3.
You and other Fallout fanboys are still not happy.
Flawed logic 101.
Maybe we should both wait to respond until we’ve edited in an -OVER- at the end of the post, the spontaneous editing is getting very annoying.
Anyways, how is VATS unlike the Bioware system? I’ll use KotOR as an example.
You see enemies. You can pause. You can queue up attacks. You watch the attacks take place.
And here’s VATS:
You see enemies. You can pause. You can queue up attacks. You watch the attacks take place. Not only that, you can pick specific body parts to attack. There’s even a % chance to miss in VATS.
Your hate of Fallout 3 has no basis whatsoever in facts, just fanaticism.
20/07/2008 at 02:51 Al3xand3r says:
And you’re still not reading… I’m the furthest thing from a Bethesda fanboy my ass.
20/07/2008 at 02:53 Real Horrorshow says:
Nope, not even close. I sure am a fanboy of logic, though, which is what really gets me irked about illogical, fanatical, fanboys (of games, like say Fallout) people like you.
So are you going to try and deny my undeniable logic considering the similarity to the Bioware system and VATS? Or will you just continue to shove your fingers into your ears yelling “LA LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU.”?
It wasn’t a big post, and I got all day. Or you could just concede that you’re an angry fanboy who hates Fallout 3 just because.
20/07/2008 at 03:09 KruddMan says:
Oblivion 2: Backlash !
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117223/
I read that and I just had to confirm that I had heard those words before…
20/07/2008 at 03:09 Nick says:
I think if we substitute fanboy for nazi we can evoke godwins law here.
Is there an equivelent that I’ve missed?
I maintain my cautious nature, but I think it looked quite entertaining from the video well, the combat part anyway as we’ve yet to/never will see the other part. I’ll probably end up buying it just to see for myself how it turns out.
I thought Oblivion (*sigh at this discussion again*) was a decidedly average game, it had many improvements over Morrowind but it also had many steps backward in other areas and some frankly awful design choices that stopped it being as good as it should have been – btw, there is nothing immersive about an NPC hoeing a cobbled pathway or having the most pathetic excuse for a coversation with each other in the same poor voice. That’s immersion *breaking*.
20/07/2008 at 03:15 Albides says:
That’s because eastern turn-based is shit and the Japanese are masochists. And while I’m on the subject, anyone who thinks frequent unavoidable random encounters in an RPG are a good idea should be shot.
Ahem. Sorry, just had to interject. Carry on with the wounded rhetoric of a jilted lover, betrayed by another man who was a decent – if somewhat distant – friend up until Oblivion was released. Backlash is pretty much all I can see here. An earnest desire to punish a company for its past failure(s).
Personally I couldn’t care less about what sort of combat it has and in which place the camera is in. Long turn cycles broken up by people taking potshots at each other and the novelty of interesting death animations are good and all. But what’s really going to make the experience are two things: dialogue/quest strength, and the setting with its dark humour in a post-apocalyptic setting with a 1950s aesthetic. From what little I’ve seen, the setting looks convincing enough, and the dialogue/quest choices have yet to be really shown. That it hasn’t been shown isn’t surprising, as without the emotional investment of the player, it’s just going to come off as boring for anyone except those vocal people who seem to pad out every Fallout thread with their complaints. Or, more accurately, every Bethesda thread.
20/07/2008 at 03:17 nerd rage lol says:
The only thing more futile and ridiculous than having a strong opinion about an unreleased game is attempting to have a serious conversation over the internet with someone who has a strong opinion about an unreleased game.
20/07/2008 at 03:23 Powerhaus says:
As a fallout-lover, oblivion-hater, hopefully things turn out well.
20/07/2008 at 03:53 Noc says:
I know I said I wouldn’t get involved, but something occurred to me when I was thinking about the VATS thing:
I’d like to have a chance to play it, and see if the choices the pause-time gives you are meaningful. Is it worth it, say, to shoot at someone’s arm and cripple their aim, if the same shot would just kill them anyways? Does aiming at the head decrease the chance of hitting sufficiently enough to make attempting one a gamble, and is the extra damage enough to make the gamble worth it?
The problem, I think, with a lot of turn-based games (especially the JRPG variety) is that the choices aren’t especially meaningful. On the other hand, take a game like Mechwarrior: it’s in real time, but when you point your guns at an enemy you’ve got a bunch of really meaningful choices. Shoot at the torso? Shoot at the arms? Legs? Should you unload with all you’ve got and risk overheating or running out of ammunition? Or can you take your time?
You could EASILY turn Mechwarrior into a turn-based game with a similar system as VATS and have it be just as fun. Because the choices are there, and they’re meaningful, and because each choice means something the process doesn’t get tedious.
And I think the VATS thing will hinge on how meaningful the choices it gives you are. Or whether each encounter will just degenerate to “Sigh, activate Vats, point at the head, fire, and repeat.” And that’s nothing we’re going to know until we’ve played it.
20/07/2008 at 03:57 Nick says:
Didn’t mechwarrior originate from what is essentially a turn based system? (BattleTech)
20/07/2008 at 03:58 Jochen Scheisse says:
I for one also like RPGs where I’m able to do combat with one hand and drink coffee with the other hand. That, among other things, is why I like RTwP and TB. Bethesda seemingly tries to have both action combat and pause, but I guess it’ll be more RT than wP, because you’ll have limited pause time as far as I heard, and from what I’ve seen it’ll rather be a way to do more damage more efficiently against a large number of enemies. Would be nice if I’m wrong.
Yes, I’m a fan of the old Fallout games, and I like TB/RTwP/ISO. But I think I’m trying to stay reasonable and adress the points in the order they are brought up. The same can probably be expected from the other side.
20/07/2008 at 04:19 Albides says:
Noc:
That’s an interesting point with the Mechwarrior similarities. If they do plan on releasing a modkit, can you say “Mechwarrior mod”?
I’d say accuracy is the built-in reason to target different body parts. It would be lame if there was no crippling. If I recall correctly (it’s been, what, 10 years?), towards the end of the fallouts your accuracy becomes good enough that you invariably try to shoot people in the eyes anyway.
20/07/2008 at 04:38 sinister agent says:
If I recall correctly (it’s been, what, 10 years?), towards the end of the fallouts your accuracy becomes good enough that you invariably try to shoot people in the eyes anyway.
I usually went for the legs. Often knocks them over, see, and then you can step on their face more easily, or the dog can get a few free hits in. Or the head if they’re up close – if you knocked them unconscious you could often leave combat and simply ignore them, or kill them at your leisure. I certainly hope they’ll maintain and even expand options like those.
Quick question – is unarmed/melee combat implemented or viable from what you’ve seen so far? Just curious, but it would be nice if it were a workable option. Hell, if they do go all-out on the combat and exploration, they might at least make a fun game by getting that part right.
20/07/2008 at 06:48 malkav11 says:
Bah, why shoot for the legs when you could shoot for the groin? That was nearly always a critical that knocked ‘em flat for the followup eye-shot. And really, wouldn’t you fall over if someone pounded searing-hot plasma through your genitals? I think you would!
Alas, FO3 won’t have specifically targetable groins.
20/07/2008 at 07:22 Leeks! says:
@SwiftRanger
I’m breaking my ‘don’t reply directly to others’ rule for that one, man. Do you honestly–honestly–think any developer could possibly be that thick? I mean, really.
20/07/2008 at 07:59 Roman says:
“That’s because eastern turn-based is shit and the Japanese are masochists. And while I’m on the subject, anyone who thinks frequent unavoidable random encounters in an RPG are a good idea should be shot.”
That’s just the point!! If shitty eastern turn based combat sells on a WESTERN market, then why hasn’t anybody tried making a GOOD turn based RPG since Temple of Elemental Evil. That was the best combat in an RPG I have ever played PERIOD. Godd bless Troika’s souls…
Does anybody claim Fallout’s combat was perfect? NO, they don’t. It could easily have been made more complex, they could have added more tactical oppertunities à la Silent Storm or Jagged Alliance 2. But no, what do we get? A FUCKING SHOOTER…
Bethesda has no balls what so ever, an “independent” game developer controlled by Zenimax’s corporate greed and the biggest hacks in the industry.
20/07/2008 at 08:21 Muzman says:
I wanna see a turn based combat system in a game that’s like Toribash, but with ace AI and guns too. Is VATS anything like that?
that is all
20/07/2008 at 08:23 Albides says:
Does it sell on a western market, or does it sell to a certain subset of the western market who themselves are masochists, and actually enjoy playing games with excessive preening characters making absurd fashion statements? It’s a different target audience entirely. The J-RPG combat is an entirely different manner of beast to the X-Com tradition of the west. I personally avoid the former like the plague. And too few probably play the latter to make it worth catering to that market.
And since when has turn-based gameplay become an essential RPG experience? The same beloved Troika that made TOEE also made Vampire: Bloodlines. The first-person RPG.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed turn-based combat as much as the next guy. ToEE was okay for a while, until I left it for a week, went back to it, and had one of those “caught in the mirror moments” and wondered “I’m doing what for who and why?” and gave up because I couldn’t relate to the plot (I do this a lot when I leave a game for too long). Incubation was awesome. But I think the demise of turn-based gameplay is an entirely different thing to whether or not Fallout is going to suck or not, or whether Bethesda’s balls are of a respectable size.
All of the rhetoric here is very, very strange. It’s like everyone is a games developer that got outbid for the license and couldn’t bring their plans to fruition, and so are castigating the winner for their design choices. If that sounds odd it’s because every Fallout 3 thread is odd, quickly filling with a bizarre series of often trivial complaints about a game no one has played yet.
20/07/2008 at 09:01 Requiem says:
I think one of the most often expressed comments on NMA regarding Baldur’s Gate, Planescape Torment, Arcanum, KotoR etc is the shit real time and pause combat. So nope I can’t see the majority of Fallout fans being happy with real time and pause.
Temple of Trials is universally hated, stupid tutorial level that the devs were forced to put in.
The trouble with Turn Based games not selling is hardly any one makes them any more and they are just not marketed properly. Silent Storm’s marketing in the States was apparently a right balls up.
20/07/2008 at 09:15 Roman says:
“And since when has turn-based gameplay become an essential RPG experience? The same beloved Troika that made TOEE also made Vampire: Bloodlines. The first-person RPG.”
Yeah but Bloodlines combat sucked balls, which was kind of my point. It was a fantastic RPG everywhere else though; great dialogues (voice overs!), atmosphere, characters. Awesome role playing oppertunities in Santa Monica and Hollywood but it turned into a simple hack&slash in the later parts of the game (not helped in any way by the earlier mentioned horrible combat).
Imagine Arcanum with Temple’s combat: can you say best cRPG ever?
20/07/2008 at 09:57 Dreamhacker says:
Clarification: Bloodlines combat was far better than any sort of combat created by Bethesda Softworks.
20/07/2008 at 10:01 SwiftRanger says:
@Leeks!
Well, from this and several other previews it does sound like being too easy. VATS time is limited by action points but opponents don’t seem to do anything to you while you’re in that mode. That doesn’t make it tactical at all. What do you get when you take out enemy turns in a turnbased combat system? Challenge? :) This looks more like a bullet time (stop time actually) with careful targeting attached to it. There’s barely any risk attached to it.
20/07/2008 at 10:29 kadayi says:
@Requiem
An unhealthy amount of credence is given over to the likes and dislikes of NMA when the reality is, the site represents a very, very small amount of players (barely a few hundred active posters in total). That’s not to discount their opinions entirely, and they certainly have the knowledge when it comes to Fallout Lore. But I don’t think their posters opinions on game play mechanics can be written as law, also I think it’s a mistake to try and paint them as a unanimous collective (they are far from it). Certainly some posters are fanatically opposed to everything FO3, but they are the extreme rather than the standard. I’d also say the sites coverage of the E3 press reports and comments on them has been shown has been fairly positive, even given the relative shortness of the demo. You get the odd ‘That’s it I’m done with FO3′ or ‘Beth can suck my balls’, but overall I’m sensing a different vibe emerging in the threads. The fear was that FO3, would not only not be a true successor to FO 1&2, but that it would be a lousy game to boot, and bury the franchise forever.Since E3 it seems a lot of people are beginning to think that even if it doesn’t quite live up to FO1 & 2 standards in terms of Story, it is otherwise shaping up to be a relatively good game. But still at the end of the day we are talking about a few hundred peoples opinions. Where as Beth will be hoping to sell Millions.
20/07/2008 at 13:00 Okami says:
Hmmmm… Am I the only one, who liked Bloodline’s combat?
Turn based combat really only makes sense if you’re controlling more than one character. Otherwise it get’s pretty boring, since a lot of the tactical and strategic considerations in a turn based game result from the interaction of different characters with different abilities.
As far as I’m concerned, Bloodlines pulled the rpg/shooter hybrid off pretty well. Sure, combat was twitch based, but your attribute and ability scores really factored into the equation. Ok, so close combat was a let-down. But good, action based close combat is hard to pull off and there are enough examples of pure, close combat based action games sucking in that department.
Bloodline’s biggest problem was the last boss. The last two levels, fighting against the Kuei Jin and clearing the Ventrue Skyscraper, were hard enough if your character wasn’t specced for combat, but they were at least managable.
But the last battle? If you hadn’t enough ammunition and healing potions errr… blood packs with you, you just couldn’t do it.
It would have been nice, if there was an option besides combat to beat that guy. Where’s the point in playing a sneaky, stealthy guy with high social attributes, if you absolutely need to be a combat specced killing machine in order to complete the game?
I hope Fallout doesn’t fall into the same trap. I’d really like to be able to complete the game with a minimum of fighting and killing, just by beeing a sneaky, manipulative jerk. Just like in real life…
20/07/2008 at 13:15 Albides says:
Okami: just so; at least in response to the Bloodlines fights, at least. I don’t remember the boss fight being all that difficult, but maybe I was properly prepared. It might be that I’m just not the sort to critique games as I play them, as many here are.
Roman: but did Bloodlines itself suck balls, I wonder? Do people, when others mention RPG and Bloodlines in the same sentence, excitedly jump up and say “I think you mean ACTION RPG, the real RPG is dead and Bloodlines was another nail on the coffin”? Er. Even if combat was the weakest part, it’s still a damnably memorable game and a fine RPG in spite of its combat/perspective, just as Fallout 3 could still be,.
Requiem: I don’t and never will care what NMA say. I’m sure they’re great at whatever they do (er?), but I actually kind of like real time with pause, even if it often doesn’t work in practice as well as it should in theory, which I cheerfully blame on the chaos of battle. Nothing works in practice as it does in theory. But considering the many people who like the Baldurs Gates and Neverwinter Nights, and the way Dragon Age was met with enthusiasm on this blog, it’s obviously not a game-breaker. I don’t think any mechanic designed to simulate combat is going to necessarily be perfect. You might argue it’s out of keeping with the original Fallouts, and you’d probably be right, but it’s a fairly narrow line of argument.
20/07/2008 at 13:53 tmp says:
You missed i was addressing comment that’d said this new Fallout had “virtually nothing” common with the earlier games; not virtually everything.
And even then some of things you bring up are arguable — “proper” understanding of the franchise? That’s subjective and down to individual opinions. Emphasis on RP? Very hard to say based on short previews given, the longer previews appear to have enough RP factor in there. Getting the story right — again, subjective and we have no details to tell if they actually did.
20/07/2008 at 14:17 Requiem says:
I treat what any forum group, not just NMA, has to say as an opinion poll.
Bloodlines was a great game, in my opinion the real problem with the combat was virtually every major quest ended in a boss fight with no option other than combat. But the main disadvantage hybrids have compared to turnbased is people with different reactions and fps skills will have a different time with the game.
If you suck at fps games you might have to spend more points to increase your character’s gun skills just to make the game playable, while the experienced fps player can get away with increasing other character skills and relying on their own skills for combat. Perhaps providing a fuller experience as they can do more in the game. Turnbased provides a level playing field, if you want to play a high combat skilled character both players will have to spend points to raise the skills. Character progression becomes a pure role play choice not a game play necessarity.
Real time with pause is a terrible design. In turnbased nothing happens unless you tell the character to do something. In real time i.e. fps or tps games nothing happens until you do something. But in real time with pause games you just sit back and let the game get on with the minimum input from yourself. Okay Baldur’s Gate and KotOR weren’t as bad as Dungeon Siege, but the number of times that combat resolved itself with me even in the room, or my characters running off and getting themselves killed while I was managing another character. Or NWN2 where they’d fight amongst themselves because my druid use an entangle spell and they walked into it.
20/07/2008 at 14:24 Vasara says:
Albides: Bloodlines is a different franchise though, so there’s nothing wrong with it being an action-RPG. The action-RPG thing works for certain games, but I don’t see how Fallout could benefit from this shift in genre. Fallout 3 could very well be a good RPG regardless of being more action-oriented, but an action-oriented game is not what fans want from a sequel to Fallout.
I’m still cautiously optimistic as far as Fallout 3 goes, mainly because I haven’t seen the things that I consider most important. The combat looks a bit uninspired and dull from what I’ve seen.
20/07/2008 at 15:21 tmp says:
If the real time with pause game resolves all itself with no need for input from you, then it means turn based version of the same encounter would be resolved with you just repeatedly telling your character to shoot an enemy (since that’s what the automated real time boils down to, given the usual lack of AI) I really don’t see approach that involves just mechanical, repetitive task that requires no thought and only takes more time… as improvement, in such case.
20/07/2008 at 15:48 Jochen Scheisse says:
How does nothing happen in RT games if you do nothing? The AI controlled pieces can act all the time, even if you do nothing.
The advantage of TRwP is in my opinion that things happen simultaneously. In full RT games is that one army, or one piece, moves fully, acts, and then the other army/piece acts. Even if there have been intelligent approaches to solve that problem, for example the Gollop approach with ready actions or the PnP RPG approach where you withhold your initiative, the beautiful thing about a computer is that it can make things happen simultaneously and still give you the time to interrupt and reassess the situation. I think RTwP hasn’t been done enough and there are still countless possibilities to be explored. Hybrid systems between RT and TB are a field that needs much more love.
And regarding Fallout TB combat: as much as I like TB combat, the Fallout model as not particularly well done, so I’m not too sad to see it go. It’s just that as I said before, ISO TB is a very relaxed mode of combat, as opposed to with Fallout 3 where I will have to concentrate on that stuff.
20/07/2008 at 16:35 kadayi says:
Recently been replaying FO1 and I have to say the combat can be utterly annoying, principally because your teammates ability to shoot you, each other or any hostage in the room is almost unerring, and often involves criticals. I think one of the reasons everyone loves Dogmeat is because the 4 footed fecker’s the only NPC who won’t tag you in the middle of a fight.
20/07/2008 at 16:42 MetalCircus says:
Well that’s down to NPC ai over anything. The combat itself is fairly deep in the sense you can think first before tearing radioactive monsters to smithereens.
But I do agree. Taking on the Raider camp while Ian sprays everyone including you with 10mm bullets is fucking annoying.
20/07/2008 at 17:31 Plant42 says:
@Real Horrorshow -
Regarding your quote:
“And Fallout fanboys, just get over it already. If you expected a game developer to release a turn based isometric RPG in 2008 you’re out of your minds. I don’t care how great the old games are, no one’s going to play that shit.”
You need to read through this blog post, it perfectly sums up people’s thoughts:
http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Solivagant/diablo-3-vs-fallout-3-how-to-make-a-proper-sequel-92764.phtml
20/07/2008 at 17:48 Johnny Law says:
Plant42, don’t you think that anyone who calls Bethesda “the worst collection of developers in this gaming age” is a little hard to take seriously?
20/07/2008 at 17:58 MetalCircus says:
Why would someone take the word of a blog over thier own logic? Why can’t you let people make up thier own mind?
20/07/2008 at 18:11 Jochen Scheisse says:
That goes for everything you can quote or link. Sometimes linking is just convenient, if you feel your thoughts have been summed up pretty well and you don’t want to write a novel.
20/07/2008 at 20:54 malkav11 says:
The fact that people act in sequence is precisely *why* I prefer turn-based combat to real-time with pause. Still, I got over my antipathy to the latter long ago, with Planescape: Torment.
20/07/2008 at 21:04 Leeks! says:
Swifty–
What I was trying to get at is that all of our speculation thusfar has been based entirely on trailers designed to show off the combat system (which is what makes all of the forumrage [on both sides] surrounding this game so hilariously inane). It would be hard to make it look like fun if the character you’ll be playing as is being torn to shreds by the enemies. Have you ever seen any mass-market game advertising try to sell with “look how hard you’ll be getting your ass kicked?”
Betheseda is an extremely accomplished (not to mention loaded) developer. While we maybe haven’t seen a fully developed VATS battle yet, there’s just no way they’re going to allow one of their main selling features to be broken and unbalanced like you’re suggesting.
20/07/2008 at 21:20 Requiem says:
@tmp, I never said anything about the game resolving advantageously to you or your character.
@Jochen Scheisse I was talking about your character’s actions, but there are plenty of full real time games that nothing will happen until you cross an invisible line. There are two problems with most RT&P games. The first problem is the character ai, not the npc or enemy ai but your character, your avatar in the game world getting up and doing their own thing. Now it’s one thing for a npc follower in Fallout to go off and get themselves into trouble because they are npcs and it gives them an illusion of life. But when you own character keeps doing it it’s bloody annoying.
The second problem is it can really interupt the flow of the game when you keep pausing it. Now don’t laugh, rtwp (assuming you actually use the pause) can start and stop far more often than turn based does especially games with auto pause.
Ah Ian would life be the same if you didn’t shoot me in the back? I swear that must be deliberate. But who’s the greater fool, the one who sprays and prays or the one who stands in front of the one who sprays and prays (well at least after the first time)?
“there’s just no way they’re going to allow one of their main selling features to be broken and unbalanced like you’re suggesting.” Hmm unlike radiant ai by all accounts?
20/07/2008 at 21:57 SwiftRanger says:
Leeks!, of course we’ll have to wait till a final version to really find out as there were only a handful of combat situations shown but I am just reading previews and looking at the movies they’ve wanted everyone to see. Any optimistic forecasts for now will be based on those but that also means you can’t rule out certain worries as some footage and descriptions are pretty clear.
And while I guess Bethesda is showing much effort and enough good intentions to make things challenging, you can’t already say this for sure if you look at the mistakes (some main features included :( ) of their last title. They still got plenty time to do their thing though.
21/07/2008 at 04:04 Bhlaab says:
Did you play on the pc? Was the UI as unmanageable for pc users as oblivion’s?
21/07/2008 at 08:25 tmp says:
Then why would you “just sit back and let the game get on with the minimum input from yourself” if leaving it this way would resolve in the opposite manner? And the argument still applies — in turn based game i can just click “next turn” repeatedly and, due to providing such minimal input, it’ll resolve exactly as bad for character i play… where is that difference that makes the turn based approach not “terrible design” by the same logic?
21/07/2008 at 10:59 Ginger Yellow says:
“Did your character have the Bloody Mess perk as well? I found it a bit disturbing that all E3 videos show a character with that perk. Are gamers really so easily satisfied by a bit of gore? Pow, shot in the leg, head explodes, E3 crowd cheers stupidly. I’m baffled.”
Yeah, I had a similar reaction. Particularly since Microsoft are pushing the family console angle. Seemed strange to have *such* gratuitous gore at their press conference.
21/07/2008 at 18:26 Requiem says:
@tmp if you just click next all the time in turnbased the enemy will attack and your character will always just do nothing. But in RT&P quite often you can leave them to get on with it and they’ll come out on top. Or they’ll lose badly to a bunch of enemies that you’d have no trouble squashing when in control. Do you really think that’s good design?
In turnbased your characters have no ai, so you supply all the tactical decisions. Say you have enough action points to make three snap shots, do you take them all and leave your character standing in the open, what if they all miss? Do you spend a few extra action points to make one aimed shot that has a better chance of not only hitting, but hitting a vital area and then use the rest of your action points to get behind cover? If your first shot doesn’t penetrate your opponents armour do you switch weapons, switch ammo, run like hell? If the level of your tactical acumen is just to shoot shoot shoot then yeah you might as well be playing a real time and pause game.
AI in real time games is never going to be as good as in a turnbased game since no matter how powerful your computer it’s got to handle the ai for several characters at once compared to one at a time. It gets even worse when you add in the party ai for which ever characters you aren’t controlling at the time. If you think getting shot in the back was bad in 10 year old Fallout it’s nothing compared to the ai in the 2 year old NWN2.
Sure you can turn the party ai off in NWN2 but that’s rare. Having to control all your party in a RT&P game is tedious, with you usually having to start stop all the time quite often after every action. Leave a character alone for too long and the ai would kick in and they’d go off doing something stupid, or they would just spam their default attack, when much more powerful attacks were available.
Virtually every RT&P game I’ve played except for the Freedom Force games which have no party ai IIRC, when I’ve had to leave the game during or just before combat. I’ve come back to find the combat resolved, not always successfully but usually my characters are still standing. Though not as unscathed as they might of been if I had been directing things, who’s meant to be playing the game me or the computer?
21/07/2008 at 18:46 Obdicut says:
NOC:
So you mean, unlike in Fallout, where you always wanted to aim for the eyes?
21/07/2008 at 22:39 tmp says:
Well let’s see. In situation where the character has no problem to win using just the basic autoattack, the RT&P allows the player to skip all the menial clicking on ‘attack’ and ‘next round’ buttons. In situation where this simple approach won’t work due to number of enemies or whatnot, the player can (and is expected) to take full control over the character and carry them through.
What exactly is so terrible in this design? Saving you the menial parts when your input wouldn’t make any difference? Or requiring you to actually provide input when it does make the difference?
The same applies to RT&P games really — you supply the character with the tactics and they carry them out. The only real difference is, you don’t have to re-supply the same tactics over and over and over and over on every turn, if there’s no actual need to change the last issued action.
If the game encounters are simplified to the point where i can get away with this approach, then the problem is entirely different from just the choice between turn-based and something that has potential to flow faster. And replacing RT&P with turn based gameplay wouldn’t magically make it any more interesting.
Fallout 2 and Half-Life were released virtually at the same time. And yet, the AI of enemies in real-time Half-life was leaps and bounds beyond that of Fallout.
The whole ‘great potential’ thing is meaningless if it’s not realized, and the turn based games don’t exactly show stellar track record in this area. Not to mention it’s hardly needed when as long as the basics are done well most people playing the game could never tell the difference.
22/07/2008 at 02:09 sinister agent says:
So you mean, unlike in Fallout, where you always wanted to aim for the eyes?
See, that’s one thing that seems to be ignored by most people in these discussions – those many areas where Fallout could be significantly improved. For one thing, you could vastly improve the ‘aim at specific body part’ options by adding location-specific armour, so that head/eye shots aren’t always the best option – a bloke with a helmet but bare arms, say, or something as simple as shooting someone through a gap in a wooden fence, which you wouldn’t even be able to see without the new perspective. Very simple, but that alone could make for a better tactical system, while everyone is obsessed with where Bethesda might go wrong. And that’s just off the top of my head – they’ve had scores of people considering things like this for months.
Unusually, the more I think about this, the more I’m thinking it might end up being a net gain for the series, even if they’ve lost some points in a couple of areas.
22/07/2008 at 09:07 Requiem says:
@tmp Sure it saves menial tasks, but at the cost of making the non menial tasks more of a chore, what’s so terrible is you spend more time fighting the game’s ai for your characters than fighting the enemy.
Turnbased allows you full control, where as RT&P you are always having to adjust the orders, sometimes having the game override your orders, or take the random chance that the orders the game picks are the best for the situation. Me I’d rather take the menial task rather than leave it up to chance. The trouble with default attacks is your characters might win through, but at what cost. If default attacks use up more ammo/power to get the job done relying on them even in simple situations you can find your characters in a worse position than if you exerted full control for all the characters all of the time. Which is hard really hard to do in RT&P.
RT&P just doesn’t flow faster than turnbased, not unless you set the game to easy and let it play itself. Not when you are constanly stop starting the game to issue orders or to cancel stupid decisions made by your character’s ai. In turnbased you might have to give the orders all the time but at least you’ve got the chance of giving the right orders that’ll end the situation faster. Besides turnbased has other tricks to make the game flow faster, in Fallout you can adjust the combat speed so that the game plays faster, try that in RT&P and you wouldn’t have a chance. Jagged Alliance 2 had an option for auto resolving combat, much like leaving it to the computer in RT&P you had no control and the computer wouldn’t always make the best decisions so it was pure chance if you’d come out unscathed or not. But it made low level random encounters less of a chore (if you thought they were a chore that is).
Half Life and Fallout 2 are two very different games with different approaches, comparing them is a little farcial don’t you think? Half Life isn’t even a real time and pause game so it hasn’t to do with this discussion at all.
Turnbased games not showing a stellar track record? Well there’s not exactly many of them being made recently for the mechanics to be refined and improved, but so far they’ve shown a lot better track record than any RT&P game.
@sinister agent, aimed shots were always the best option anyway due to their much lower chance to hit but I don’t think you’ll find many who wouldn’t agree that Fallout couldn’t be significantly improved in many areas. But the key word here is improved, not replaced with a radically different system which has it’s own foibles. You don’t need to replace Turnbased combat to add an location based armour system, you don’t need to replace the viewpoint to add gaps in the fence, as long as the character can see through the gap you don’t need to. That’s where line of sight rules come in, something already available in turnbased games.
22/07/2008 at 13:50 Shanucore says:
Christ, the real time versus turn-based argument is back *again*?
Next people will be back to moaning that big developers don’t make isometric sprite-based games any more. Oh, wait…
22/07/2008 at 18:29 tmp says:
Hmm okay, so the terrible part is having badly implemented AI for your character get in your way? I can see this point, but i’m not sure if that’s a drawback of RT&P system per se — after all, one could take older Fallouts and their awful companion AI as example that turn based system is terrible design… on the same basis that you spend more time fighting the AI of your companions instead of the enemy.
Also, would that mean if RT&P game implemented the system in most simple manner — that is, having the character just carry out the order(s) you gave them until you change it, without any attempt from the AI to override them or to come up with its own… then it’d no longer be “terrible design” in your eyes?
No, i think it’s good counter-example to your argument how turn-based games will *always* have better AI than real time games. Because it shows that theory and practice often vary greatly, and that it’s actually possible in practice for real time game to surpass turn-based game in terms of AI performance. At least when it comes to ‘simple’ tasks like combat tactics.
24/07/2008 at 16:00 Requiem says:
Except the companions in Fallout were always meant to be seperate entities that had a will of their own, not mindless packmules/buddies at your beck and call.
It would have been a better design for real time and pause games to allow control of only your character and to have no ai for that character.
Well in it’s way Fallout’s combat ai had more to deal with than Half Life’s. And how much of Half Life was scripted? Besides I don’t know if Fallout’s ai was even considered state of the art for turnbased games at the time, did the Fallout devs even attempt to revolutionise ai? Comparing a turnbased rpg, where combat is only part of the make up of the game to a first person shooter where combat is the be all and end all of the game is faintly ludricous don’t you think? It’s much more interesting to compare Fallout’s ai to NWN2.
27/07/2008 at 17:46 moonracer says:
Almost anything that Bethesda does wrong, the modding community can fix. Unfortunately Bethesda’s on the fence remark about mod support leads me to believe that they have no intention to do so; which would be a strange and stupid path for them to go considering how much the mods extended the life of previous games.
04/08/2008 at 11:46 Diogo Ribeiro says:
:edit:
04/08/2008 at 11:48 Diogo Ribeiro says:
Too late for the knife party, so I figure I’d just drop a couple of cents into the broken pachinko.
The purpose of any combat model has zero to do with the player, but with how the developer wants to portray his vision of combat. Turn-based, phase-based, realtime with pause or vanilla realtime is of no consequence, really. The people behind Fallout wanted to reinterpret combat from a Pen and Paper basis, hence, they felt a turn-based combat model where each unit took their time and where all actions were described in great detail. This, amazing as it may seem to some, worked very well and was enjoyable, despite the many deficiencies of combat itself. Bethesda wants to depict a fast and furious system, complete with a “cinematic” (I know, it’s a bloated term that means vague and juvenile interpretations of both videogames and cinema, but it helps to convey what they are going for) attention to detail. This one is also a crowd pleaser, and it works.
In fact, anything can work. Again, it comes down to what the developer wants, and the tools they gives players so they can experience combat. Because of this, while different combat models have their pros and cons, there is no ‘best’ method to handle this. People praise the general workings of turn-based because it lends itself to complex interfaces and careful planning, but forget that realtime with pause allow access to the same; while others declare realtime combat to be a more fluid and realistic approach when compared to a “turn” but forget that pausing the game is just as abstract, unrealistic, and flow breaking – specially in more hectic situations, where you may pause repeatedly to negotiate between combat and order queues.
I think the more important argument is how much of a part the player will play as opposed to the character. You can attribute this to an old way of looking at cRPGs, or how much it’s based on that Pen and Paper feel if you wish, but there’s a very clear line between what you can do and what the character can do. Is Dirk the Daring a great marksman, shooting down Super Mutant pubic hair from several miles away because of his skill, or because the player has lighting-fast reflexes and can circle strafe with the best?
To me, this kind of debate takes precedence over other things since it embodies the very notion of what we should expect in a role-playing game. The genre was made for the gamer who dreams of being a character other than himself – the might barbarian who can wield swords is appealing because we cannot, and the same applied to the cunning wizard who can use magic to alter reality, the cleric who can heal and save lives, the bard with a wanderlust and the verve to sing about it. That is what the genre does, carefully allowing you to construct a persona – as well as witnessing its achievements and failures – through its own set of limitations and possibilities.
And with Fallout 3, there’s certainly that old Deus Ex and Bloodlines dread on the horizon – how will certain skills or abilities, given the implementation of a more direct control in place, work? If I intend to role-play a very specific character that is not versatile in some areas, will the game be constructed in a way so that my character has optional methods of character and story advancement, or can I bypass the game’s limitations through my own tampering with the virtual environment and its entities, such as running up to a Mutant and shooting it point blank in the snot to counter the fact my character’s Perception is low?
Or am I to follow the mantra of Oblivion defenders and just “imagine” it?