CVG Fallout 3 preview

[Zaptoman]

I'm all for them trying, anyway.

Agreed.

 

[Brother None]

ALSO: a bunch of negative Nancies, the lot of you! I can see factional disputes breaking out between NPCs on the fly, and me loving it. Imagine you could also intervene on the fly and influence the outcome, which also adjusts your in-game standing with both factions accordingly. A real-time, emergent Yojimbo metagame. It would add a little pizazz to the standard "do quests for faction X" mechanic to gain favor, not to mention more flexibility to roam the shades of grey.

I'm all for them trying, anyway.

I'm not negative, I just wish I had any reason, any reason at all, to even vaguely believe anything Bethesda promises about RAI.

Because their track record just isn't very good.

If they succeed, great. It sounds cool.

But say someone claims to be building the best wooden shack ever. He proceeds to build a shitty wooden shack. It falls down. Well then, I'm not about to hire him as a contractor for an excellent wooden shack. I have no reason to trust his abilities, nor his promises.

Since they've shown incompetence at building a wooden shack, the best approach would be to take a step back and try a mud shack next time. Gothic was way more convincing than Oblivion, so just try and take a step back and adopt the system of Gothic II or III (without the bugs).
I suppose their "sizing down" is a part of taking a step back. And that's certainly a positive experience. Dumping RAI wholesale would've been better.

 

[Section8]

This much is incontrovertible, the open-world structure of Oblivion was sometimes seamless to play through and the AI-driven daily routines of Cyrodiil's denizens a delight to play around with. The same will be true of Fallout 3, when you're out in the wastes.

The very mention of the word "incontrovertible" makes me wish for a wall to spring up around the Bethesda offices so a giant goatse.sque arse in a court wig can be filled with the urge to defecate. Of course, the "incontrovertible [...] sometimes" bit calms me with unintentional humour.

And like everyone else, I don't want to sound negative about what should be a very positive feature leading to all sorts of emergent gameplay possibilities, but haven't we heard this before? Like Brother None says, Bethesda not only lack the track record to inspire confidence in their success at this endeavour, nor do they have the track record to believe them even if they did.

Think back on how much this very feature added or detracted from Oblivion. They couldn't achieve stability through parametric adjustment and had to resort to some fairly drastic kludges to stop the world from killing itself, and even then the cute little emergent bits of gameplay were generally oddities and things that weren't meant to happen, such as guards killing each other or innocent civilians. Also, the game lacked adequate responses to situations like breaking into somebody's house and waking them up with sword in hand.

I'd certainly like to see a lot more effort invested into this, but like anything with Bethesda, seeing is believing.

We're also promised that there are at least 60 voice actors and that the more recognisable ones from Oblivion ('You have my ear, citizen!') haven't made the cut.

That seems a bit harsh. It's not really the voice actors fault that they were put to such poor (over) use. If I were in charge it would have been the designers/producers who made such a poor decision (among others) that wouldn't make the cut.

Oh, and the whole expanding the NPC->NPC dialogue thing is cute, but surely the effort they spent would be better invested into PC->NPC interactions.

 

[terebikun]

It's being pimped as much as Patrick Stewart was for Oblivion. Maybe Stewart will voice Dogmeat.

Ah, George Clooney in South Park. I'm not gonna lie, I am all for this.