More from CanardPC

[FeelTheRads]

Well.. Wow! Someone has the guts to say the mutants and the ghouls don't look anything like the originals.

Too bad it comes from a satirical magazine. Bethesdarians will probably motivate it with "they're only trying to be funny! LOL!"

 

[kebn]

The combat sounds awful, it really is the worst of both worlds, set to disappoint everyone. Automatic chest shots? Honestly, no die hard shooter fan will touch this game if that's the case for the final product.
I had thought it was going to be a similar system to Deus Ex.

This was a great preview. Really glad to hear about the dialogue in some detail.

 

[SuAside]

While I was expecting an outright treason of the Fallout setting, more because of ineptitude than vice, I have the feeling the game is spot on. The ambiance, scenery and lighting of the Vault seem perfectly faithful to the series, with just the right dose of rust to enhance claustrophobia.

Remember that the NMA preview agrees with this bit; the Vault is spot no. Though SuA thought it a bit too dark/steampunky, I thought it was as accurate as you could rebuild a Vault in 3D. Just point-for-point copying, great stuff.

It's outside of the vault where I felt it was more up-and-down.

well, let me clarify.

while general architecture of the rooms, furniture and computers felt "right", the lighting and darkness was in my opinion off. this is perhaps because i always viewed the vaults as a beacon of light, hope and safety. when you step into a vault out of the wasteland, you have well lit corridors and walls without flaking paint and whatnot. everything is well maintained. Beth's vault looks run down (and this surely enhanced the claustrophobic feeling, but i didn't really get that in FO1/2, vaults were big and cosy compared to real world bunkers). not to mention they indeed transition to utter steampunk with for instance the way the vault doors open.

and what really annoyed me inside the vault was the people inside. the utility belts & pipboys, the riot-geared police/vault security, the Mr Handy, the gangers with leather jackets,...

just didn't feel right.

Do we know if it's possible to play a female character?

yes, you can.

 

[Phil the Nuka-Cola Dude]

So basically its a fallout-themed oblivion mod with dumbed down combat?


*yawn* Only the best from beth.

 

[Slaughter Manslaught]

Riot-Geared? Weird. I thought that the Vaults had some Combat Armors stored, dind't they? Why they would wear riot-gear when they have Combat Armors ready for use?

 

[kebn]

Riot-Geared? Weird. I thought that the Vaults had some Combat Armors stored, dind't they? Why they would wear riot-gear when they have Combat Armors ready for use?

If in doubt, its for immershun purposes .

 

[Vasuki]

Mr. O. Boulon is my hero, now if we could have more critics like him in gaming Journalism I would die a happy man. He gets right to the point and says the flaws that fans and people that are interested in the game want to know in his preview.

 

[Brother None]

I don't mean to undermine your comparison or anything, but the reason GTA games score so high is because they're actually good.

Does any game deserve a 10/10? Now that's a different argument, and before it even gets off the ground, I'll premptively spoil it for you: the majority position will be "probably not."

Uh, yeah, but Bethesda games are good too. Sure, Oblivion is loaded with flaws and not as good as Morrowind, but it's still a fun, addictive, pretty free-wandering game.

The question you have to ask is not: are the games good. It is: would they get 10/10 scores without hype? GTA IV is good. Oblivion is good. Is either 10/10 good? No. And that has nothing to do with "is any game 10/10 good?", the fact is that both games are good, but not necessarily great enough for an A+ (haven't played GTA IV, note).

 

[SuAside]

Riot-Geared? Weird. I thought that the Vaults had some Combat Armors stored, dind't they? Why they would wear riot-gear when they have Combat Armors ready for use?

If in doubt, its for immershun purposes .

useless to discuss that. we do not know the whole story there.

hell, maybe there are combat armors but the overseer isn't issueing them because he fears they might fall in enemy hands.

or there just aren't any? maybe the vault's weapons shipment got routed to another vault and they got a truckload of teddybears instead.

 

[Kukident]

Beth is like R*. Anything they do will get 9 or 10/10 scores.

I don't mean to undermine your comparison or anything, but the reason GTA games score so high is because they're actually good.

Does any game deserve a 10/10? Now that's a different argument, and before it even gets off the ground, I'll premptively spoil it for you: the majority position will be "probably not."

That's a good question and unfortunately one which you can only answer subjectively.

You simply can't be objective about that, because for example, you had to specifiy what game elements you rate, how you rate them and how important each element is, in relation to each other and in the end parts of that rating system (like the weighting of each rating-part) have to be determined subjectively again.

In the end it just cannot be told objectively. You can only make approximations to that.

In my opinion 10/10 should be given very very rarely. I may have played over 200 games (or a lot more or less, I didn't count them exactly) in my lifetime so far, and I would only give those 10/10 I still remember as having a lot of fun with it and which are still fun if i play them now.

Or if games achieved something exceptional, like having revolutionized the games that followed or similar.

Therefore I would for example give Dune 2 10/10, because it had so much innovation in it and was a milestone in RTS history. Of course it was not perfect (I remember having a limitation in numbers of units&buildings which surely wasn't intentional and only a result of low RAM at that time or so) but there were so many good things about it and so many things that got copied a lot of times (minimap, building a base, the buildings a base usually has, getting ressources, and so on and so on) it just deserved 10/10.

Then again if some kiddy comes around and says "OLOLOL 10/10 for Oblivion because it wuz so much funn!!1" I think that rating can't be taken seriously.


I'm currently working on a big and open site which has a pretty elaborated rating system (Can't go to much into detail or someone will steal my precious ideas. Yes, I'm that paranoid!) which prevents a lot of abuses and gives those who obviously know more about games / hasplayed more games /... (based on the info which can be found about that person in our database) a much better weighting resulting in an, hopefully, a lot more accurate and less spoilt average rating for a game.

It for example prevents that people who run around giving ratings of, let's say, only 0 and 10, have a loud voice. But that's just a part of what the algorithm does.

I guess that was a little off-topic and long, and I didn't even intend to write anything. Well, if anyone cares, when our project is finished and polished I will open a thread or something in NMA. The site is totally dependant on user-input (like wikipedia) so the more users we will get the better it will be.

must...stop...writing....

 

[Frog]

No matter what kind of aspects you gonna rate, what is their importance and relation to each other the 10 out of 10 score means that you think the game is perfect. Thus it means you feel it doesnt need any refining. And if so any thought that something might be done better to enchence the game would lead to conclusion that the game is not perfect and does not deserve 10/10 score.

Well, just my 2 cents on the scoring matter.

 

[iridium_ionizer]

I don't think a 10/10 necessarily means it is perfect. Sure the fraction does if you think of it in a mathematical sense. However, does a 4 star restaurant mean that it could not improve in any way, sense, or form. Of course not, in this case it means exceptionally great. Exceptionally in the sense that it is far above the competition.

Now, I haven't played GTA IV, and have only completely read a few reviews but many of them couch their score in qualifiers that it only gets so high a score because it raises the bar so much, maybe not in terms of driving or shooting gameplay, but in the sense of having a believably living and breathing city. NCPs using newspapers to run from the rain, guys gawking at pretty girls, etc. Maybe that's all hype too - I haven't played it - but from the sound of things it sounded more believable than Oblivion's radiant AI. I have briefly played GTA III and GTA: Vice City, and while the seamless city was impressive the random pedestrians were cardboard cutouts, so it probably is a big step up for sandbox shooter/drivers.

 

[Autoduel76]

No matter what kind of aspects you gonna rate, what is their importance and relation to each other the 10 out of 10 score means that you think the game is perfect. Thus it means you feel it doesnt need any refining. And if so any thought that something might be done better to enchence the game would lead to conclusion that the game is not perfect and does not deserve 10/10 score.

Well, there is no such thing as a game that something couldn't be done to enhance it, so by that reasoning there should never be a 10/10 score. Honestly, perfection in anything, is pretty much unattainable...at least by humans.


I think 10's are handed out too liberally by many places, but really its not something that was ever meant to equate to "perfection". If you read the descriptions of what a score is supposed to mean at the various sites, most of them don't say a 10 means the game is perfect or flawless.

Scores are pretty stupid anyway (IMO), but I just think of them more like resteraunt, movie, hotel ratings anyway. 5 star is the highest ratings for those, and they are given out all the time. There's hundreds of 5 star resteraunts in the Los Angeles area where I live. But, its not like there's absolutely nothing that could be done to enhance the experience of those places.

Its like being graded on a curve, rather than an absolute scale. Those resteraunts, movies, hotels, games, or whatever that get the highest scores are among the best avaliable at that time. Not perfect. Not the best of all time. Its quite possible that if one was released in a different time or place it might not get its 5 star rating (or 10 for games), because the competetion there would be stiffer.

GTA might not be deserving of a 10, even by those standards. I don't know and I haven't played it yet. But, I don't imagine there have been many other games released this month that were any better than it.

 

[Bodybag]

Uh, yeah, but Bethesda games are good too. Sure, Oblivion is loaded with flaws and not as good as Morrowind, but it's still a fun, addictive, pretty free-wandering game.

Not even my point by proxy, but I'll take it...? I've only played 30% of Oblivion, and no other Bethesda game. GTAIV is way better, incidentally.

The question you have to ask is not: are the games good. It is: would they get 10/10 scores without hype? GTA IV is good. Oblivion is good. Is either 10/10 good? No. And that has nothing to do with "is any game 10/10 good?", the fact is that both games are good, but not necessarily great enough for an A+ (haven't played GTA IV, note).

Well then, get back to me when you have before telling me how good it (necessarily) isn't.

(Note: I've been playing GTAIV since the hour of release and it's wonderful)

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

I wonder, if Rockstar had bought the Fallout franchise, would we be singing praise now?

 

[Brother None]

Well then, get back to me when you have before telling me how good it (necessarily) isn't.

Can't. No console.

However, there are too many inconsistencies between end-user response/flaws discussed and the 10/10 score for it to really make sense. I suppose you could say that of any game, but even with having played it, I would be surprised to find out this is not the same kind of pushing up of the score as good-to-mediocre games like BioShock and Oblivion got.

And no, first impressions don't really count. That's something reviewers are exceedingly bad at as well. There are games that knocked me off my sock at first impression or playthrough as well, that doesn't really make them great games.

In fact, we've been pushing up our boundaries on hype as represented in scoring for years now, though the Ocarina of Time peak still stands as an early one.

Is that because games have consistently been getting better?

Uhm...?

And even if it was, if 10/10 is the ceiling, and GTA IV aggregates at 10/10, ratings become meaningless as comparative statistics, if we're just going to 10/10 any hyped-up game from now one.

(ratings are stupid, anywayz)

 

[Bodybag]

However, there are too many inconsistencies between end-user response/flaws discussed and the 10/10 score for it to really make sense.

Oh, am I expected to defend the 10/10 scores or something? Since I can't really do that, I'll instead attempt to explain some of the user-reviews being somewhat lower: there's a natural backlash to be expected when a game is universally lauded. Someone reads a review claiming the game is perfect and when they finally get a hands-on lo and behold it's not perfect, and they feel slighted. That's a simplified explaination for a complex issue, but that's what people do and I don't like to rock the boat.

And even if it was, if 10/10 is the ceiling, and GTA IV aggregates at 10/10, ratings become meaningless as comparative statistics, if we're just going to 10/10 any hyped-up game from now one.

(ratings are stupid, anywayz)

Oh, well then NEVERMIND, I guess.

I can verify that GTAIV is really good, in case you're genuinely curious.

 

[Brother None]

there's a natural backlash to be expected when a game is universally lauded. Someone reads a review claiming the game is perfect and when they finally get a hands-on lo and behold it's not perfect, and they feel slighted.

The backlash isn't the issue there, though. Reviewers claiming the game is perfect is.

Besides, "why would a user aggregate rating be lower than 10" is kind of a moot point.

I can verify that GTAIV is really good, in case you're genuinely curious.

I assumed it's really good, Rockstar hasn't let me down so far and I assumed they wouldn't start now. But from what I hear, it's just another GTA game, nothing good or bad to add to the series, which sounds like a solid 8+ game to me.

 

[Morbus]

I don't think a 10/10 necessarily means it is perfect. Sure the fraction does if you think of it in a mathematical sense. However, does a 4 star restaurant mean that it could not improve in any way, sense, or form.

Unlike the first scale, the second scale you referred isn't closed. There are 5, 6 and even 7 star establishments. But there can't be 11/10 so 10/10 means perfect.

What I don't get here is why those jerks are so eager to blow their own scales... I mean, they have a 1 to 10 scale but it could easily be considered 5 to 10...

 

[Roshambo]

*snip*