1Up interviews Emil Pagliarulo

Interview was OK, but the dialogue thing really concerned me. Dialogue can affect reactions and what quests you get, and then presumably those quests can be solved in multiple ways - but the game's end and 'big' themes, by the sounds of it, are determined by key storyline moments that are set in stone as you move through the game, and, if I'm getting this right, those are CHOICES rather than dialogue. ie. choice to blow up this city or leave it standing, choice to side with X rather than Y.

So I'm guesing we'll all have those key story moments, however we play the game. We'll all fight through X dungeon where Y is held, we'll all do this, etc. Which, I guess, is a consequence of having a railroaded story and a pre-determined character motivation (where's dad).

I don't see how dialogue can't be inolved with that, even if it's just 'Yes, I want to side with you and let's go blow up the town'.

But I'm guessing we won't get the little quirky cool stuff you could completely miss many times over, like fathering a son in New Reno that might pop up in an ending. I guess that's the advantage of having multiple endings for each settlement, rather than one collection of blanket multiple endings.

Still, I can't help feel that this dialogue quote is taken a little out of context, simply becuase, with the megaton example, for instance, you'd presumably have to use dialogue to accept or deny his big decision.

If, on the other hand, it's simply a karma check - so you could go through the game and do lots of little 'bad' things and get the same ending as doing one major bad thing and playing the rest good - that kind of, erm, isn't as good.
 
xu said:
Sander said:
In Fallout 3, the player will come across schematics for different custom-made weapons. These might be found in different places in the world, or obtained as quest rewards. Each set of schematics lets you build a certain, pre-determined weapon, as long as you've got all the components, and most of the components are junk objects you'll find in the world.
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Arcanum, anyone?
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And the whole 'make your own weapons from scrap' was one of the most annoying parts of the that game for me. I diddn't like to go through trash bins to find weapon parts then and i don't like it now.
 
Not unless our intrepid politicos are afraid of China or a sentient supercomputer nuking the world, or our nation's capital becoming overrun by hideous Super Mutants.
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Spoliers about new story?!?
 
Mr. Teatime said:
.....but the game's end and 'big' themes, by the sounds of it, are determined by key storyline moments that are set in stone as you move through the game, and, if I'm getting this right, those are CHOICES rather than dialogue. ie. choice to blow up this city or leave it standing, choice to side with X rather than Y.

So I'm guesing we'll all have those key story moments, however we play the game. We'll all fight through X dungeon where Y is held, we'll all do this, etc. Which, I guess, is a consequence of having a railroaded story and a pre-determined character motivation (where's dad).

I don't see how dialogue can't be inolved with that, even if it's just 'Yes, I want to side with you and let's go blow up the town'.

But I'm guessing we won't get the little quirky cool stuff you could completely miss many times over, like fathering a son in New Reno that might pop up in an ending. I guess that's the advantage of having multiple endings for each settlement, rather than one collection of blanket multiple endings.
......
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FO1/2 had stories based on Towns like Vault City and the Raiders Den or NCR and the Squaters in Vault 15. I doubt your argument that FO3's x area for y's bad guy "Depth" will APPROACH FO1/2.

That's one reason why I'm PISSED! Beth/Todd are ramming a game engine and story without any depth...Based on 2 previous Games WITH FUCKING TONS OF DEPTH!!!
 
JR Jansen said:
Arcanum, anyone?
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And the whole 'make your own weapons from scrap' was one of the most annoying parts of the that game for me. I diddn't like to go through trash bins to find weapon parts then and i don't like it now.
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schematics and crafting was one of my favorite parts of Arcanum
 
In Fallout 3, the player will come across schematics for different custom-made weapons. These might be found in different places in the world, or obtained as quest rewards. Each set of schematics lets you build a certain, pre-determined weapon, as long as you've got all the components, and most of the components are junk objects you'll find in the world.
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Yeah... build a minigun with motorcycle exhaust pipes as barrels...
Sounds much like Oblivion's alchemy system and I wouldn't be amazed if it worked a very similar way (very few engine changes).
Anyway, the idea of creating items doesn't sound bad at all as long if they get it right, but after playing Beth's last games over the years... well, I keep getting the impression the mentioned company has trouble learning from it's own mistakes.
Altering existing stuff for Fallout 3 is IMHO a must have - it's been there in both 1&2 and worked fine, the only feature I missed was the ability to 'do it yourself'.

About the dialogs and their influence: I'm (and I think not only me) dead sure that what we'll see in F3 will be a slightly modified version of Oblivion/Morrowind style semi-talk. But the problem is more general here - think, how long has it been that you've played a CRPG or any other similar game that required more thinking and planning than 'how do I pull the trigger' ? Stuff that requires extensive thinking is not very popular nowdays - most of the todays game industry target audience doesn't really care about that as long as it has some glitter and nice specialFX. To put it simplier:

More ways to do something in a game = game becomes too complex for some people = less players = less money

More players = more money = screw the fans and get our cash;/

R.I.P Fallout - you're never going to happen like I would want to;/
 
Autoduel76 said:
schematics and crafting was one of my favorite parts of Arcanum
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Especially when you start a dwarf blacksmither for the first time and go all the way and realize that mechanical plate requires skill in mechanics. And by the time you get the needed skill in mechanics you already are seconds away of finishing the game. What a bummer.
 
Whoops. I'd forgotten about that conversation, Ausir. Silly me. Still, Fallout 2. The brain wasn't transmitting to the mouth pretty often during that game's development, so the mouth got its own ideas.

I still hold forth the comparison to Terminator, though. I'm very afraid Bethesda intends to simplify the cause of the war to "Evil machines did it". Not everyone understands economics and geopolitics.

Everybody understands EVIL ROBOTS!

Anyway as was already said, Fallout 3's intro seems to back up a simplified (read: dumbed down) explanation. I don't like the implications of that.

And honestly, I'm still very worried about Emil's comment a short while back about Fallout 3 being more of a successor to the "legacy" of Bethesda's two Terminator FPSes than sequel to Fallout.
That explains a lot about Fallout 3, and it hurts.

xu said:
Especially when you start a dwarf blacksmither for the first time and go all the way and realize that mechanical plate requires skill in mechanics. And by the time you get the needed skill in mechanics you already are seconds away of finishing the game. What a bummer.
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Time for a story that has only a tenuous connection with the sub-topic at hand!

First time I played through Arcanum, I was a human technologist. Electrical, Armor crafting and Steam Tech (can't remember the exact names) with Melee and Dodge. Hardest difficulty, Born Under a Sign as the background (very few critical misses or critical hits, made the character much more consistent).

It was EASY.

Between me (Charged Rings, Elite Mail, Balanced Sword, Chapeau of Inversion and Flow Disruptor), my Automaton and the Dog nothing was stopping us.

The point is that I've never really understood why people bitch about Technologists in Arcanum. If anything, they're TOO powerful. Went through with a Gun user, pretty similar results.

Hell, I enjoyed digging for parts too. I enjoy doing that in real life as well, though. :mrgreen: You can find some good shit in the garbage. Hell I've found complete, less than a year old computer systems in the trash. Instant cash.

Anyway, in my opinion it's Mages that suck ass. Yet everybody else says Magic users are overpowered in Arcanum.

All I know is that every time Kerghan tried to use Magic on me in my first game it was deflected. He couldn't take me down to save his undying life, including with Necromantic spells. Harm only did 10 or less damage when it hit at all. Which wasn't often.

So poor Kerghan the Terrible had to resort to Melee. He promptly went down like a sack of potatoes. I even reloaded and fought him one on one, he still couldn't take me. The Automaton was able to beat the hell out of him 1 vs 1 as well- no magic affected him, and every time poor Kerghan hit the Automaton he damaged himself.

Compare to my second game where I played as a mage:

Kerghan killed me in one shot with Quench Life. I also had to keep a ridiculous amount of fatigue potions on me at any time throughout the game just to stay conscious, let alone to use magic.

Lessons learned, I guess.

Err. So I guess my opinion is that crafting systems are generally good, and people who don't understand/bash them are generally a bit slow.

Ausir said:
Well, wasn't the Van Buren crafting system also similar to that?
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Yeah. It was pretty much exactly the same. You could strip carcasses for some components, loot them from people or containers, etc. Once you had everything you needed (including the skill required to construct the item), you just clicked "OK". Voila, instant item.

Really, would anyone WANT a complex crafting system outside of a sim? It would have to be represented as a minigame (or series of them) by sheer necessity. Come to your own conclusions on that one.
 
So, as long as we get schematics, we can make anything, even with crap repair? Free explosives for dumb melee characters eh.

Dialogue consequences only include NPC reaction and getting quests, but no actual role-playing, which is handily summarised by karma score? Huh?

And again the bullshite that fans hate change and are motivated by sentimental self-brainwashing. I want a quality Fallout game because I liked the originals, not because of the amount of time playing them. You can reinstall games, so he wants PC's to die eh?

He sympathizes with an imaginary audience he creates to justify his lack of interest. I would say some of us are pretty hard-core, but we don't fit his patronizing description.

Homage is different to consistency. If you make too many changes, you don't have a sequel anymore. Making the call is difficult, but indications are that they are getting it wrong.

Adult fantasy means sex is in then?

Why the heck do they keep letting Emil out in public? Every time he opens his mouth he pisses me off. It is tragic that the lead designer is in sore need of a PR monkey to vet his comments.

For Arcanum, yes mages >> technologists.
 
If I may be so bold, I'm going to put forward a theory as to why the Fallout property is getting retcon'd to death: Bethsoft didn't initially plan on using the Fallout setting. Perhaps they were planning to do a post-apoc setting game after Oblivion, and had already figured out the core of what they wanted to do. Then the FO intellectial property came up for sale and caught their attention. They liked the look and style of it, so they snapped it up, skinned it, and grafted the hide onto their existing framework.

Bottom line: Bethesta never intended to keep the cannon setting, they just wanted the style and "skin" of Fallout. How about that for a theory?
 
I've been reading this forum for some time, but have never posted. After some time of this building up, I just have to say:

Has anyone here actually played the game? Hands in the air please. Oh, no one?

Well, then, this quote may very well summarize everything:

Tom Smykowski: It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
 
The people at NMA (most of them, at least) aren't JUMPING to conclusions...

It's more like they're making reasonable judgments about elements and trying to predict the outcome.

Jumping to conclusions, would be to, let's say, call me a sadist. It would be like that because you have little or no information to infer a truth from.

On the other hand, the fallout fans have had nearly ten years (or 3 years in the case of Bethesda) to analyze potential Fallout 3s.

There has been much discussion on the pros and cons of Bethesda producing this game... and yet, you think they're simply JUMPING to conclusions?

Oh, and by the way, one time posters and lurkers like us have little leverage when it comes to discussions. Sad, but true.
 
nindustrial said:
I've been reading this forum for some time, but have never posted. After some time of this building up, I just have to say:

Has anyone here actually played the game? Hands in the air please. Oh, no one?

Well, then, this quote may very well summarize everything:

Tom Smykowski: It was a "Jump to Conclusions" mat. You see, it would be this mat that you would put on the floor... and would have different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.
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*sigh* I wish people could take the time to educate themselves by actually looking through the forums. You claim to have read these forums for "quite some time," but even in the limited amount of time I've been here, this same, tired argument has been presented and rebutted again and again and yet you still find it necessary to rehash it.

It's ridiculous to say we're not allowed to form opinions based on what we know from game journalism sources, screenshots, demo movies, interviews, etc. and so on. There's plenty of info to discuss, and that's what we're doing. Might the game turn out to be an amazing title completely contrary to what many believe based on what we know so far? Unlikely, but sure. Does it matter? No. We can only talk about what we know, and sometimes venture into the realm of speculation. Speculation is a valid topic of discourse sometimes, as long as it's clear that speculation is all it is.

Most of us will be very glad (surprised, but still glad) if Bethesda manages to crap a diamond out of their churning rectums rather than the steaming pile many are expecting. We just believe that, and jot this down, based on what we know and have seen so far, the steaming pile is much more probable.

Oh, and by the way, your reference to Office Space is an insult to a white-collar classic. Or is it blue-collar? I can never remember the difference.
 
Sorrow said:
Crafting Power Armor?
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Well it's plausible since there'll be gads of highly explosive nuclear reactors in centuries-old automobiles and piles of scrap metal from which any tech-savvy person could easily fashion himself a suit of hi-tech armor, right? :roll:

And a rubber band, paper clip, and length of surgical tubing should fit the bill nicely for a nuclear catapult no?

I can understand if you can fashion make-shift weapons from wasteland junk, but not actual rifles, machine guns, swords/hammers/Daedric maces, or advanced forms of armor. But then that'd also limit the crafting systems usefulness, as proper weapons and armor would always (in logical terms) be much more effective.
 
They might have been looking at the possibility of a non-fantasy setting, but many claim to have always been big Fallout fans. The reason they seem to be messing things up is because 'that is what they do best'. They don't understand the subtleties of the original and presumably want their product to have a broader appeal.

Lurkers have plenty of leverage if they make coherent arguments. Vague variations on 'but you haven't played the game!' as a first post are just annoying examples of trolling.
 
Sorrow said:
Crafting Power Armor?
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Exactly. The crafting concept is not necessarily a bad thing, but can't be exploited into infinity. One can make a spear from a knife and a pole, but not a power armor.

EDIT: Ha, I see some of you share my thoughts :)
 
But how about making a hardened power armor using a regular power armor and some other stuff?
 
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