Bethesda's Fan Interview #2
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whirlingdervish
Brahmin Cavalry Commander
at least the bozar had a magazine in the right spot! 
What I really don't get is the drum-mag in the front end of the forearm.. It. Makes. No. Sense.
I almost hurt myself trying to figure it out..
btw, shihonage has a point, there is a similarity there:
although Id managed to get the drum in the right spot.
They're cool like that.
What I really don't get is the drum-mag in the front end of the forearm.. It. Makes. No. Sense.
I almost hurt myself trying to figure it out..
btw, shihonage has a point, there is a similarity there:
although Id managed to get the drum in the right spot.
They're cool like that.
Xenophile said:
Like I said, it makes sense if it gives you a charisma, or at least, a reaction boost, since you look better. But It shouldnt make you, say, repair better.
I like your camouflage idea, and that makes sense since you dont need skills to "blend" with the enviroment.
Welder and jeweler masks make sense, but they are not Suits, they are tools, in the case of mechanic's suit, its not the suit itself that gives the boost, it would be the tools. Of course we havent seen the overalls to tell if it comes with a belt, but as I understood the response, its just the overalls without the belt.(course I may be wrong)
And please, quit with the insults, there's absolutely no need for that.
Bodybag
Look, Ma! Two Heads!
Seymour the spore plant said:
Yeah, Fallout totally didn't have healing potions, magic herbs, or enchanted items like, say, a helm of psionic defense (+2). Being a gamer, I guess I just sort of file these things away under general categories. It's still worth noting that essentially every RPG, be it on a PC or on a tabletop, follows these basic conventions.
I guess it always strikes me me as kind of a cheap shot when people try and project the fantasy stuff on F3. It's rpg stuff, guys, sarcastically changing the words around only highlights the joyful ignorance of that simple fact.
THAT SAID I think it's totally reasonable to criticize the decision to have clothes specifically work in this way, generally, as a gameplay mechanic since Fallout didn't go to that degree, though we'll have to wait and see how frequently you find items that have these properties and to what degree they influence your stats. Like say the coveralls raise your skill by more than 10%, to throw a generous figure out there. Even I™ would roll my eyes at that.
DoktorVivi
First time out of the vault
If that's supposed to be a PPSH I'm going to cry. They moved the drum forward like 8 inches and added a shotgun style pump. WTF? But then again, I'd cry if that was supposed to be a shotgun too.
Seymour the spore plant
Still Mildly Glowing
Bodybag said:
You're missing the point. Yes, some of these things that you mentioned are indeed basic gaming mechanics that are included in some way or another in most, if not all, games. Healing items, for an instance, are a staple in pretty much every game that has a health system, for obvious reasons.
What's really important here is that these mechanics should present themselves in a way that is consistent with the game's setting, and in this case that is not happening. Fallout did most certainly NOT have potions, but an item which performed the same function while keeping coherency within a sci-fi setting. Clothes that increase personal expertise in something, flaming swords or emitting radioactive shockwaves as a form of ranged attack are very jarring to the world of Fallout, and the fact that they have direct parallels in fantasy elements doesn't help.
Mungrul said:
That's actually a really stupid rule, but don't let me interrupt your RPG snobbery.
hailtotheking said:
Uh, that's more the exception than the rule for every industry.
Myryad said:
They actually said this forever ago, but it was conveniently forgotten amidst all the piss parties.
Jiggly McNerdington said:
See, I wasn't sure how I felt about this. At first I didn't like it because of the tiny loss of strategy in inventory management, but then I remembered that for me managing my ammo was always the most irritating aspect of my inventory. So I guess now I'm ambivalent.
Zaptoman said:
Good catch, although looks more like a hat to me. They did say they would have some interesting hair styles, so I could be wrong.
beverageleverage said:
Shh, with that logic where would people go who want to complain about Bethesda being too lazy to do it, or too concerned with childkilling mods? (even though childkilling mods would have no effect on their ESRB rating or their controversy: just look at Hot Coffee, where R* intially defended themselves by saying it was user-created content, which was a valid argument until people found the stuff in the console game)
BOS Man said:
I've mentioned this before, but if you do the math leveling will probably occur a lot more slowly than in the previous games, making it so that perks would have to come faster to be balanced.
Charisma won't be as important, not Speech, unless you mean ratio-in-overall-game-content-wise.
13pm said:
Yeah, who's he to talk about the dialogue he's seen and you have not! Like, he'd have to be a developer or something to know about that.
robertmuldoon said:
Do try to pay attention to at least a couple of the answers, if you can't be bothered to think about it logically for a minute yourself. The atmosphere surrounding videogame violence is a lot more volatile now than it was when the Fallout games were released, in addition to the previous children not having the exceptionally gory and high-def deaths they would have now.
Polynikes said:
It'd also be pretty fucking weird for you to go around killing children, but everyone's bemoaning not being able to do that either. Maybe you should give 'em a li'l credit.
frosty_theaussie
Still Mildly Glowing
Mungrul said:
Well for starters, we would have missed out on such absolutely golden gems as Alone in the Dark, Bioforge, Full Throttle, etc.
that's not the right question in this context.Westbend said:
the question is, why use only lightly modified real existing guns in an attempt to create generic ones? after all, i doubt they're stupid enough to tell us this is a modified PPSh-41 in the game. they'll tell us it's some generic weapon.
same goes for the "chinese AK".
whomever is designing guns probably never played FO1... or never understood what the guns of FO1 were supposed to represent.
Paladin Solo
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
terebikun said:
At least we get to nuke cities full of children! MOAR NUKES AND BOOBIES (and kids too)!
I like how, as with most your posts, you present no real reasoning but merely throw insults. And no, your "when in Rome..." bullshit is not a valid justification, as pointless and baseless hostility is in fact discouraged on these forums, as you'd know if you actually paid any attention.terebikun said:
No they didn't. The impression was in fact given in early interviews/previews that super mutants and ghouls were entirely mindlessly hostile monsters.
Ammo-management could certainly have used some improvements, but simply making ammo weigh nothing so you have to give it no consideration is a cheap cop-out on having to put any real thought into the issue. Of course, given how poorly Bethesda has handled inventory management in both Morrowind and Oblivion, I suppose it's a bit too much to expect anything else.
What exactly is the point of this passage? I don't believe anyone ever argued about what effect a mod that put in the ability to kill children would have on an ESRB rating.
Please show me this math, as I fail to see how you come to this conclusion. Just because Bethesda says the game is 100-hours long (if you do every single little possible side-quest and explore every single pointless, random dungeon) doesn't mean you won't reach level 20 until hour 99. It also has zero to do with "balance." You generally didn't get much (if any) levels above 20 in Fallout.
Nice job entirely missing the point of what 13pm said. Hint: just because Fallout 3 has 30948309834 lines of dialogue doesn't make the dialogue have depth. It could (and probably does) mean there's a lot of meaningless fluff. Half those lines are probably of about the same level as the famous mudcrab conversations.
Blah blah, politics, yadda yadda, high-def. Please. Yes, there's a lot more media attention on the subject, and that's about it. Games full of gore and violence still manage to get published just fine. And for those places that exert censorship, they can remove children and/or tone down the blood/gore just like Interplay did for Fallouts 1 and 2. Also, saying that the gore and deaths in FO3 is somehow "more" than what was in FO1 and 2 is just foolish. The gore and deaths are certainly not as well-done as they were in the originals, sure.
It's a little more weird that, as a character who has no qualms about violence and taking lives, you're magically unable to do any harm those under 18. Because violence and death is okay, as long as it's only done to those over an arbitrarily set age limit. I myself would find it less weird for a homicidal maniac to be killing children than I would find it if he stopped, tried to change a flat-tire, had trouble with it, disrobed and changed into mechanic's coveralls, and then finally got it done.
Kyuu said:
Haha, well put.
EDIT:
As for it being weird to kill children, I would have to disagree. It may be heartless, but definitely not weird. Children get murdered everyday around the world.
However, it would be neither weird or heartless if the kids are actually only a bunch of 1s and 0s. As several have already said, if I shoot a fatman at a kid's dad, and the kid simply runs off while the dad is vaporized, that is just stupid.
Sure, some people might get an unsettling kick out of murdering children in a video game, but then who's really the one to blame: The gaming company for letting you make the decision or the person who's got a love for shooting digitalized children?
Are you one of those, "Guns kill people, not people," kind of guys?
Makagulfazel said:
The problem is, that sentence is partially right. Making guns easily avaible increases death rates just because there is now an additional possibility to do stupid stuff with (besides knives, axes and cars). If you throw crayons everywhere chances for street art increases. Simple as that.
I cannot help it, I find the whole "think of the poor children" discussion retarded at best. Digital adults are being murdered practically in every other video game - day after day after day, without any pause and literally in millions. Those virtual adults are being shoot at, stabbed, ripped apart, vaporized, and run over. Their heads and other body parts casually get blown up, burned out, bitten off, sawed off, et cetera, et cetera. Have you played Dynasty Warriors? With this ridiculous approach, it might as well have been called Genocide Warriors and its creators should have put to death for subverting the players to commit crimes against humanity. The whole gameplay structure consists of wiping out thousands of enemy combatants with a huge arsenal of deadly weaponry... and nothing more. Shocking? This one of the mildest examples available. The game is rated T for Teen, by the way.
The point is, if videogame violence is entirely and undeniably acceptable when it comes to killings of (often innocent) digital adults, there can be no acceptable reason whatsoever to preach another system of moral principles when it comes down to similar killings of digital "children". I consider myself to be a moral person. My sense of ethics does not see any substantial difference between nuking an entire city into hell and killing a single 10-year-old child with a shotgun. I would find both actions entirely unacceptable and abominable in the real life, but I have nothing, absolutely nothing against committing these acts in a make-believe virtual world that looks anything but the reality I live in. If you believe in the protection of rights of a virtual child - a low-poly child with low-res textures and twitchy animations, might I add, - I strongly suggest you to clear up your schedule for the next couple of months and check yourself into the first psychiatric facility you can find. I believe the appropriate term is "psychosis".
LATER [UNRELATED] EDIT: News from the Gamespot RSS feed. J.Thompson is very closely tied to the game violence discussion, so I thought I'd let you know.
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=26477932
Thompson facing permanent disbarment, $44K fine.
In his often heated communiqués to the press, ardent anti-game activist John B. "Jack" Thompson often uses fiery religious rhetoric to portray the perceived righteousness of his cause. Today, however, the Miami area attorney is likely looking for some divine intervention on his own behalf, after a Florida judge recommended he be permanently banned from practicing law in the state...
The point is, if videogame violence is entirely and undeniably acceptable when it comes to killings of (often innocent) digital adults, there can be no acceptable reason whatsoever to preach another system of moral principles when it comes down to similar killings of digital "children". I consider myself to be a moral person. My sense of ethics does not see any substantial difference between nuking an entire city into hell and killing a single 10-year-old child with a shotgun. I would find both actions entirely unacceptable and abominable in the real life, but I have nothing, absolutely nothing against committing these acts in a make-believe virtual world that looks anything but the reality I live in. If you believe in the protection of rights of a virtual child - a low-poly child with low-res textures and twitchy animations, might I add, - I strongly suggest you to clear up your schedule for the next couple of months and check yourself into the first psychiatric facility you can find. I believe the appropriate term is "psychosis".
LATER [UNRELATED] EDIT: News from the Gamespot RSS feed. J.Thompson is very closely tied to the game violence discussion, so I thought I'd let you know.
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/news/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=26477932
Thompson facing permanent disbarment, $44K fine.
In his often heated communiqués to the press, ardent anti-game activist John B. "Jack" Thompson often uses fiery religious rhetoric to portray the perceived righteousness of his cause. Today, however, the Miami area attorney is likely looking for some divine intervention on his own behalf, after a Florida judge recommended he be permanently banned from practicing law in the state...