[Multiplatform] Fallout 3 - Guns with Oblivion

The character creation sounds interesting, although it also sounds painfully non-skippable. I HATE long, non-skippable tutorials. I guess I can deal with that, though.

I hope there's not too much focus on gathering food and water like it sounds. Yes, it's in genre, but for a game like this it'll just serve as an annoying distraction, along with weapon deterioration. Really, wilderness survival was just an afterthought in the first two Fallout games. Sounds like they're just using it as an alternative to stimpacks, though. Free healing, at the price of sucking up radiation. Might make an interesting spin on things.

VATS system sounds silly. People are just going to play it as an FPS anyway. It'll encourage people to neglect their arms skills and fight in real time constantly, shooting people manually instead of bothering with hit chances in the first place. The alternative is to enforce arbitrary misses (crosshairs are on his chest, but the game makes you miss at point blank anyway), which would also be stupid.

It's one of those things that's not going to work at all, because it clearly wasn't a decision borne of devoted gameplay design. It's there solely to appease the No Mutants Allowed crowd whether it works or not, and nothing good ever comes of doing that. This is where I start to have serious misgivings.

Heh, I like Bethseda being evasive about whether or not child NPCs will be killable. They're probably still negotiating with the ESRB about whether letting the player do that will bump the game up to an AO rating.

I just don't know what to think about the nuclear catapult. On one hand, it sure sounds wicked fun. On the other hand: what is this, Unreal Tournament? I was pretty sure those big bulky plasma rifles defined the upper limits of how much you could strain credibility.

It looks okay, but I can't say I'm filled with confidence in Bethseda after reading this. I think they'd have been better off making a more generic post-apoc game, rather than actually calling it Fallout.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

This could've been titled Apoc Romp and chances are the NMA crowd would've been excited about it.

This is a pretty good point right here. This game they're presenting, if it were being sold as an unrelated post-apocalyptic game, people could accept it as being Fallout 3 in spirit and be done with it. Actually making it a sequel, with the name and everything, puts a bit more of a burden on them to be true to the originals. You don't just take someone else's established series and then go way into left field with it.*

It's a bit early to completely condemn the game, of course. The nuclear catapult, nuclear exploding cars, and the whole VATS thing aren't filling me with confidence, but there'll be more to the game than just what was shown in an alpha-build press teaser and trying to win over the NMA crowd is an exercise in futility anyway. I'll wait for more information before passing judgement - I just won't be holding my breath.

*No I'm not saying it's that bad, just using it as an obvious example.

How ya doing, buddy?

Pang, have you completely forgotten how to debate something? I mean, the Zelda 1/Zelda 2 comparison is right fucking there, and instead you're wandering off on a tangent about Super Mario Bros. SMB2 wasn't anywhere near as good as the first or third game, so it's not reinforcing your point much, and I really don't know what that last bit was about.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by The_Griffin

Isn't it ironic then that Zelda 2 is widely considered the worst in the entire series, outside of the CD-I games?

Extra ironic given that it's not actually a bad game. People just didn't like it because it was different. I mean, I'd still rank it as the weakest of the series, but even the worst* Zelda game is still good in its own right.

On the other hand, Zelda 2 also didn't take extreme liberties with its source material. Even if you didn't like it, you can't argue that it wasn't Zeldaish. There was nothing in that game that would have seemed out of place in a traditional Zelda game.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night? Another radical departure. You didn't even play a Belmont in that one, and it was more Metroid than it was Castlevania. It sure didn't suck, though - and it still looked, sounded, and handled like the good old gothic horror action romps from before. It stayed true to Castlevania's particular designs, right down to the maddeningly placed medusa heads, even while changing up the gameplay.

Now, it's a little too early to be screaming about Fallout 3 given that we've had all of a single 8 page teaser to look through, but that brief teaser really doesn't suggest an end product that stays true to its source. It's entirely possible to not be enthusiastic about the direction of this sequel without being one of the NMA jerkoffs, after all.



*The CD-i games emphatically do not count.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

Why not do some sort of randomized damage system for a FPS as well? Put in bullet randomization as well as little numbers that pop up each time you shoot an enemy that aren't necessarily the same every time. What's so hard about adding random critical hits to a FPS game?

Y'know this works in the modern Castlevania games pretty well. Mind you, side-scrolling platformers and FPS's are two different gameplay mediums, but it's not impossible to implement this well.

Yeah, you'd have the FPS purists howling angrily, because That's Not The Way Things Are Done, but different doesn't always mean bad. If you don't market the game towards the FPS crowd in the first place, as they're doing with Fallout 3's VATS system, it's more palatable that way.

It's all in the presentation, though. I'm sure we could spend all day going back and forth naming examples of good ideas that were implemented badly. I'm sure it's possible to make it work better than it did in Vampire.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

Perhaps they're eliminating sub-hitboxes for when you're not in this slowed down time so that you can't just go BOOM HEADSHOT on every guy just because you're good at FPS games.

Shooting enemies while in normal time is counted like a standard shot to the chest no matter what? I guess I could go for that - it'd be quite the equalizer. The best way to enforce this would be to have more and more enemies with heavy chest armor, though, which will promote some odd aiming tactics.

Not that I have any business complaining, since I was forever going around in Fallout using rifles as melee weapons and scoring mad critical hits by popping everyone in the eyes.

I'd still rather have a fully turn-based game than some hybrid, though. It doesn't have to be exactly like the first two games, but I've been upset about this trend towards real time everything for years.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by RacinReaver

Darn Square and their ATB!

Let's be fair, some of the blame lays on Bioware's shoulders too, even if I did like the Baldur's Gate games.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Matt

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Seriously though, I'm staying optimistic about Fallout 3 simply because it could be good. And that's good enough for me until I start reading terrible reviews and play a terrible demo.

I find life is a lot more tolerable if you're pessimistic by default. That way you never get your high hopes crushed, and when things actually turn out good, it's a pleasant surprise.

I mean, you're going to be very very sad if you're expecting Fallout 3 to be awesome and then it turns out to be a piece of suck, but if you expect it to suck and it does indeed suck, you're not nearly as upset. You even get the gratification of knowing you were right all along. Pessimism is win/win.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Depends on how much stock you put in IGN or Gamespy's opinions. The bigger the company or franchise name, the less eager they are to even breathe a negative word about the game.

Jam it back in, in the dark.