yogge sothothe
First time out of the vault
In fact, don't use ANYTHING from Oblivion at all! The last thing we need is another weak first person shooter with the trappings of an RPG.
According to the July 25 2006 update on Duck and Cover, "Here's what we know so far: Development began in earnest after Oblivion shipped two months ago, and Fallout will likely use the same engine." If this is true, then all hope I've ever had for a decent Fallout 3 is already completely down the drain.
This post may end up being a rant again Oblivion, but the purpose is more importantly to point out the glaring short-comings of TES4 and hope that they aren't repeated in Fallout 3.
Despite assurances that Fallout 3 will utilize the SPECIAL system, I'm going to point out the obvious: the leveling system in Oblivion was utterly pathetic in terms of gameplay. The fact that all monsters were adjusted to your level basically means Bethesda was too lazy to actually sit down and work out the gameplay such that certain monsters met certain difficulty levels by the time the PC had progressed to that location. Instead, they just relied on a universal, bland formula of across the board adjusting to supposedly guarantee the same level of difficulty whereever the PC went, which in operation denied the player any sense of achievement or change in gameplay. Rats being as difficult by the time you were level 30 as they were at level 1 completely broke any sense of immersion that might have occurred, and generally eliminated any reason to level at all past level 5; its quite possible to finish the main plot at level 3. So regardless of SPECIAL, if they implement another lame adjusted level system (ie too-lazy-to-carefully-think-out-and-balance-the-gameplay system) then that alone should devastate the quality of Fallout 3.
Secondly, the utterly weak AI of the NPC's made for extremely frustrating gameplay for a large portion of the game; any missions which required cooperation with NPC's became more about trying to keep the poorly programmed NPC's alive than anything else. Moreover, the combat system itself presented a serious problem; without any means of discriminating or locked targeting, unintentionally attacking your allies was a matter of course in any engagement. To make matters worse, the poor programming of the NPC's guaranteed that they would run directly into the line of fire practically every time, again breaking immersion by making the player concentrate more on *not attacking* the NPC's than on attacking the monsters. This coupled with the above mentioned adjusted leveling of monsters, which did not apply to the NPC's, translated to the following reality: the higher your level, the tougher the game, the more impossible to keep NPC's alive. Not to mention, Oblivion provided no means of specifying which weaponry or means of attack the NPC's in your party should utilize, cheapening the amount of strategy that would otherwise have come into play. Now imagine this situation while playing in a Fallout universe of burst shots and grenades. Is there even a glimmer of hope of keeping *ANY* NPC's alive?
Unless Bethesda is planning on completely revamping the AI and combat system, as well as the poor, poor leveling system, Bethesda should just dump the whole mess and start from scratch.
Lastly, although not concerned with the engine itself, TES4's voice acting was simply pathetically miserable. True enough three of the characters (namely those acted by Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, and Terence Stamp) actually had *acting* (admittedly, rather excellent acting), but come on, all of TWELVE voice actors for the ENTIRE game, with only NINE of them recycled for ALL but 3 characters. Bethesda would have been better off actually hiring a decent cast instead of wasting their entire budget on 3 high profile actors and filling the rest of the game with disdainable trash. Besides the poor acting from the rest of the cast, when you hear one female NPC talking to another female NPC with exactly the same voice more than once in 30 minutes of gameplay, then you know that the developers completely skimped on the hiring. If this happens again in Fallout, what hope do we have of an immersive experience?
Despite these points, Oblivion *could* have been an excellent game. The world was non-trivially expansive, and some of the missions were genuinely interesting. And the environment alone was frequently quite absorbing. But compared to the experience of Fallout, from an objective, non-mythologized viewpoint, Oblivion fell utterly short, both in terms of gameplay and in the literary depth/value of the missions offered (particularly in the side quests). The kind of quests that Fallout fans are looking for are not the kind which the player grinds just to get a title in some guild or more equipment and experience, but the kind which the player is genuinely driven to complete to discover the next kernel of plot development. Of course, as many have pointed out already, Oblivion has NOTHING to do with Fallout. Let's hope Bethesda keeps it that way.
According to the July 25 2006 update on Duck and Cover, "Here's what we know so far: Development began in earnest after Oblivion shipped two months ago, and Fallout will likely use the same engine." If this is true, then all hope I've ever had for a decent Fallout 3 is already completely down the drain.
This post may end up being a rant again Oblivion, but the purpose is more importantly to point out the glaring short-comings of TES4 and hope that they aren't repeated in Fallout 3.
Despite assurances that Fallout 3 will utilize the SPECIAL system, I'm going to point out the obvious: the leveling system in Oblivion was utterly pathetic in terms of gameplay. The fact that all monsters were adjusted to your level basically means Bethesda was too lazy to actually sit down and work out the gameplay such that certain monsters met certain difficulty levels by the time the PC had progressed to that location. Instead, they just relied on a universal, bland formula of across the board adjusting to supposedly guarantee the same level of difficulty whereever the PC went, which in operation denied the player any sense of achievement or change in gameplay. Rats being as difficult by the time you were level 30 as they were at level 1 completely broke any sense of immersion that might have occurred, and generally eliminated any reason to level at all past level 5; its quite possible to finish the main plot at level 3. So regardless of SPECIAL, if they implement another lame adjusted level system (ie too-lazy-to-carefully-think-out-and-balance-the-gameplay system) then that alone should devastate the quality of Fallout 3.
Secondly, the utterly weak AI of the NPC's made for extremely frustrating gameplay for a large portion of the game; any missions which required cooperation with NPC's became more about trying to keep the poorly programmed NPC's alive than anything else. Moreover, the combat system itself presented a serious problem; without any means of discriminating or locked targeting, unintentionally attacking your allies was a matter of course in any engagement. To make matters worse, the poor programming of the NPC's guaranteed that they would run directly into the line of fire practically every time, again breaking immersion by making the player concentrate more on *not attacking* the NPC's than on attacking the monsters. This coupled with the above mentioned adjusted leveling of monsters, which did not apply to the NPC's, translated to the following reality: the higher your level, the tougher the game, the more impossible to keep NPC's alive. Not to mention, Oblivion provided no means of specifying which weaponry or means of attack the NPC's in your party should utilize, cheapening the amount of strategy that would otherwise have come into play. Now imagine this situation while playing in a Fallout universe of burst shots and grenades. Is there even a glimmer of hope of keeping *ANY* NPC's alive?
Unless Bethesda is planning on completely revamping the AI and combat system, as well as the poor, poor leveling system, Bethesda should just dump the whole mess and start from scratch.
Lastly, although not concerned with the engine itself, TES4's voice acting was simply pathetically miserable. True enough three of the characters (namely those acted by Patrick Stewart, Sean Bean, and Terence Stamp) actually had *acting* (admittedly, rather excellent acting), but come on, all of TWELVE voice actors for the ENTIRE game, with only NINE of them recycled for ALL but 3 characters. Bethesda would have been better off actually hiring a decent cast instead of wasting their entire budget on 3 high profile actors and filling the rest of the game with disdainable trash. Besides the poor acting from the rest of the cast, when you hear one female NPC talking to another female NPC with exactly the same voice more than once in 30 minutes of gameplay, then you know that the developers completely skimped on the hiring. If this happens again in Fallout, what hope do we have of an immersive experience?
Despite these points, Oblivion *could* have been an excellent game. The world was non-trivially expansive, and some of the missions were genuinely interesting. And the environment alone was frequently quite absorbing. But compared to the experience of Fallout, from an objective, non-mythologized viewpoint, Oblivion fell utterly short, both in terms of gameplay and in the literary depth/value of the missions offered (particularly in the side quests). The kind of quests that Fallout fans are looking for are not the kind which the player grinds just to get a title in some guild or more equipment and experience, but the kind which the player is genuinely driven to complete to discover the next kernel of plot development. Of course, as many have pointed out already, Oblivion has NOTHING to do with Fallout. Let's hope Bethesda keeps it that way.
