New Fallout 3 screenshot and Todd Howard speaks

Briosafreak said:
How this will clash or somehow mingle with the classic Fallouts design choices, in the practical sense of a final result, is something that I'm quite curious to watch.
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I suspect that it will simply result in very watered-down roleplaying. Whilst narrative consequence and choice are crucial to Fallout and roleplaying, they certainly aren't the only requirements for a deep experience.

If Bethesda strip away the involved and intelligent - mechanical - character development, along with meaningful tactic combat, then they're going to end up with a digital Adventure Gamebook; roleplaying-extra-light.

Briosafreak said:
One note though, in Oblivion people disappearing in doors, that bizarre speech minigame or some occasional glitches with the AI were awful to achieve any suspension of disbelief, so that philosophy still needs some work in order to achieve a better immersion in absolute terms.

In relative terms they got it from many people, which means their consumers don't have such high standards regarding visual immersion as one might expect.
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Exactly, because any computer game is artificial, and requires the willing investment of the player; suspension of disbelief is not something you can force upon an individual, it is something that the player buys into. I am as involved playing Fallout, as I am playing any first-person game, if not more so because of the mythology and personal investment in the narrative.

Do games developed think their world are any more real to players than the sticks we used to wield as guns when we were children?

Briosafreak said:
I so gonna hide the mechanics of Magic the gathering next time I play it. Immershun FTW!
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The future of strategy card gaming!

Still, you do get the feeling that mainstream computer roleplaying is dominated by people with no real love or understanding of roleplaying.

I'm very grateful to the indie developers who still understand that I can read a character sheet and still care about rescuing Mrs. Migginses' cat...
 
Dude, for the last time, start typing legible sentences and take all that flashy crap out of your sig.
 
Bernard Bumner said:
es, but so does any aspect of a game; good third-person graphics come at a cost. (I presume you don't mean processing cost?)
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Of course I didn't. Hell, even if I didn't own both Crysis and NWN2, I'm still not ignorant enough to think 3rd person/isometric games can't be ten times more resource hungry than the prettiest, most graphically advanced game on Earth :P
A first-person roleplaying game doesn't need to compete with first-person shooters, and it isn't as if Bethesda are creating Fallout from scratch.
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Not so. Unless an FPP cRPG can push the envelope of past the shooter level of up-close immersion and interactivity (and in case of action cRPGs, level design), there's no sense in bothering. The point of using FPP in a cRPG is to wow the player. If you can't do that, you have to use other means to wow the player and allow character-gameworld interaction, which basically means drowning out the FPP wow with text, icons and/or a thoroughly userhostile GUI.

Either you do FPP better than the best shooter ever did, or you have no reason to do FPP.
I'm not sure it would have seemed any odder than those same constraints within any other perspective. Games are full of arbitrary restraints <snip>
The only reason not to, is because of an obsession with immersion and creating a virtual reality.
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Yes, games always have arbitrary restraints. The point of my incoherent ranting was that these constraints mustn't be glaringly obvious, or it'll break immersion. In Fallout, it wasn't glaringly obvious I couldn't nick someone's cup of coffee. The reason for that (apart from the sucky resolution) was the perspective. In Doom 3, it wasn't immersion breaking that I couldn't investigate the minutiae of random room X, because I was busy killing stuff. In Oblivion or Morrowind, it would have been decidedly odd to have all manner of relatively peaceful environments, without the ability to interact with them. I'd have been as painfully aware of the constraints put on me, as I'd be of wearing a straitjacket.
How would Van Buren have dealt with those problems, or is it okay to have a richly detailed world without proper physics in third-person, but not in first-person? Does first person have to be substantially voiced, but third person can rely on greater segments of dialogue?
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That's a false dilemma. VB had to cope with a far greater level of it than the original Fallouts, but not anywhere near the level they'd have had to if it had been FPP based.

It's pretty simple, really. If a coffee cup can fill out the entire view area of your game, you better be able to do something with it, or you'll feel restricted. If it's just one coffee cup of 10 on your screen, and there's 5-10 other things to mess with, it doesn't matter the coffee cup is part of the background, because, well, it IS part of the background.

Game voicing is a different barrel of fishy kettles altogether. A cRPG with capital RP shouldn't be fully voiced at present. Media size and compression methods means that even if budget constraints don't kill character interaction, the sheer volume of data associated with voiced text, will. In this respect, Oblivion was fucking impressive. But it was also about as close to having fun role-playing as a week-old roadkill.

If this is simply a matter of dealing with people's expectations, then fuck them; make a great game, and if joe-public is too stupid to get it, then they don't deserve it. More to the point, given the recent trend towards mediocrity and banality, I suspect that joe would be very, very interested.
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Now that I agree with entirely. It's hardly a crime to aim a game at fans of a genre. Which is why I'll never understand BethSoft pretends to make cRPGs. I'm unaware of whether they ever did, but it is plainly obvious that their recent offerings have been aimed at appealing to as many people as possible, rather than providing a role playing opportunity to role players. Given the popularity of sandbox shooters, it is perhaps not so strange that that is what both Morrowind and Oblivion plays like (or sandbox clobbers, if you prefer).

I suggested earlier that a nice solution to the MUST HAVE FPP issue would be zipping the camera out for tactical TBS combat & similar things where FPP forces metagaming. An alternative is the truly oldschool approach of FPP TBS, but that approach has two problems of its own; first, vision is impaired as hell in FPP. If the game involves close scrutiny of the gameworld, like cRPGs usually do, being stuck in FPP can feel like wearing blinders, which obviously kills immersion & needlessly limits the players ability to utilize his character. Second, if the game involves more than one player controlled avatar, bunching them together in an inseparable blob severely limits player tactics, and really, feels like the player's had his limbs removed for the occasion. No, I do like Wizardry, but for other reasons.
 
Disconnected said:
Yes, games always have arbitrary restraints. The point of my incoherent ranting was that these constraints mustn't be glaringly obvious, or it'll break immersion.
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I certainly agree with those last paragraphs, but this piece I've quoted is where I don't agree.

Roleplaying has always had highly visible mechanics, and absolutely requires that a player should surrender themselves to the inherent duality of it; they have to be able to inhabit the role whilst also intelligently developing their character.

From my point of view, I cannot see the difference between a coffee cup which fills my screen or one which is only a few millimeters of poorly resolved pixels. In my world, both can be dealt with via a facetious message about coffee cups or caffeinated beverages. Possibly, I have very different expectations than other gamers, I suppose.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it would have to be a problem if the game was simply bold enough to defy expectations of immersion or of what FPP gaming should be. Some people might be annoyed by it for a while, but in my world, they would soon forget that it was ever a problem to them, because the richly written text would provide depth and amusement.

I'm inclined to think of the early days of adventure gaming, back when my 48k Spectrum was cutting-edge gaming. So many programmers were happy enough to litter games with poorly resolved contradictions between descriptions and actions, along the lines of,

You enter a poorly lit room. In the darkness, you can barely make out a table containing a few items. The bodies of the other unfortunate souls to enter this place lie scattered around in the gloom.

> Examine bodies

There is no "bodies"

> E corpse

You see no "corpse" to examine

> Bollocks

I do not understand "Bollocks"

After a while, people started to write around such things in a more intelligent manner, so that "bodies" could be dealt with via witty little asides about interfering with the dead, and expletives were greeted with warnings about your language (or in the case of Valhalla, you were punched by a dwarf).

Good writing can deal with the interface between the game world and reality, deftly and without it being too jarring; such things become accepted as part of the internal logic of piece.
 
I recall pixel hunting in Fallout 2 when the message came up "You stare suspiciously at the rock to make sure it doesn't attack you."

What bastards.

I forget where it was. There were super mutants and you had to blow up an entrance.

Disconnected said:
In this respect, Oblivion was fucking impressive. But it was also about as close to having fun role-playing as a week-old roadkill.
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Amen.
Disconnected said:
It's hardly a crime to aim a game at fans of a genre. Which is why I'll never understand BethSoft pretends to make cRPGs.
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It appears to me that... they're not being proffesional, in that they're not aiming at any audience at all. They are just doing what they like to do. They alienate every base they create. It also seems to me that they can make a load of money off anything they create, anything as long as they hype it enough.

Jeezy Chreezy. Somebody needs to come up with a formula for immershun.
 
Bernard Bumner said:
Good writing can deal with the interface between the game world and reality, deftly and without it being too jarring; such things become accepted as part of the internal logic of piece.
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I'm not sure I understand you, unfortunately.

But as far as graphics are concerned, it's a two-fold problem. The more detailed the world is presented to you, the more sophisticated interaction is necessary to suspend disbelief.

If I read you The Hobbit, for example, you probably wouldn't even expect me to attempt doing an angry female hobbit voice, though if I did, it wouldn't kill immersion. It wouldn't, because our interaction won't lead you to anticipate that you'll hear an angry female hobbit voice. If I, on the other hand, could present you with an actual, talking, angry, female hobbit, it'd kill the immersion rather brutally, if it sounded like me.

cRPGs establish some sort of consistent method and level of interaction between it and the player. In your E Corpses example, it's immersion killing that you can't fiddle with the corpses, because the game has established that you can fiddle with stuff, and it has given you corpses. Hence the Bollox

If the deal is that the player can pretty much always mess with something on screen, especially the more obvious bits (which by default are the ones taking up most of your focus), the existence of stuff like that, that lacks aspects for you to mess with, kills immersion. To give an example, I don't know a single Oblivion player that wasn't surprised to be unable to manipulate torch holders. Not that it was important within the framework of the game, but it was important to the suspense of disbelief, because the game made players anticipate being able to do something, only to refuse them the ability.

Again, the more up-close and personal the player gets with the gameworld minutiae, the more important the minutiae gets. I think, perhaps, this is a concept that is lost on most present cRPG devs. In theory it doesn't matter whether I can pick a flower, kick a ball or go swimming in a game. But if the game dumps me on a football field, gives me a really attractive ocean, or places highly distinctive flowers on every corner, my inability to do those things, suddenly becomes glaringly obvious to me. They do, because the dev has, intentionally or not, made me anticipate doing them.
Cheech the cat said:
It appears to me that... they're not being proffesional, in that they're not aiming at any audience at all. They are just doing what they like to do. They alienate every base they create. It also seems to me that they can make a load of money off anything they create, anything as long as they hype it enough.
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They're only alienating people who're stuck in a particular genre, and there just aren't that many of you.

Whether they're professional, I guess, depends on what profession you wish they were in. BethSoft is a corporation. That means they're in the business of making money for shareholders. They do this by making games, sure, but if those games weren't aimed for as broad an audience as possible, they wouldn't be professional. Because their profession isn't making good cRPGs.

Really, what most of us here would like to see, is that BethSoft wasn't so fucking professional, because as far as most of us here are concerned, professional means wrecking a franchise we love.

You can't even make the argument that they'd be more professional to research a way to preserve our beloved franchise and still give it mass appeal, because it's cheaper not to do it. And I'll bet you a paycheck that's exactly why they haven't done it. I don't believe they'd be one of the most successful game devs, if they weren't bright enough to estimate whether it'd make economic sense to research ways to give the gameplay of the franchise mass appeal. After all, I'm bright enough to think of it, and I'm neither particularly bright, nor employed by a game-making corporation.
 
Okay, being proffesional video game creators is not trying to make as much money as possible.

For sake of argument let's say it is.

Dumbing down essential gameplay features and constantly giving the game new ideas (if you can call it that) will not necessarily maximize profits.

They will hype the game into the ground with their hype machine 5000.
Game reviewers will belaud the game either way.

The reason Fallout 3 will be like Oblivion is not because it will make them more money. It's because they suck at making games.
 
Right, and governments are in the business of educating children.

The world doesn't work like that mate. BethSoft employs professional game creators. The company itself is a corporation. Corporate entities have 1 and only 1 job: earning money for the shareholders. Whether that involves selling more brown paper bags or video games than anyone else, is incidental.

Precisely like governments aren't in the business of educating children. They're in the business of self-perpetuation. Educating the idiot offspring of the citizenry, just happens to be a means to that end, because it appeases the citizenry, and pist off citizens overthrows governments. If the citizens demanted their kids be minced and made sausage of, then that's what government would do.

Likewise, if buying a legendary franchise and Oblivionizing it, is the way to create the next BioShock/Crysis killer, then that's what BethSoft will do. And by the looks of things, that is indeed exactly what they're doing.

It's not like it doesn't make sense either. They have the know-how to make that kind of game. Arguably, they're the best qualified to do it the planet's ever seen. So when hardcore cRPGs don't sell shit, and making one would require the corporation to invest its resources in doing something they've never done before, and which lots of other companies are pretty good at, what possible reason could the management come up with, to justify it to the shareholders?

Even if BethSoft's stock is controlled by the management, an insane - from a business perspective - move like that might get them sued into Oblivion by the minority stockholders, which in turn might destroy the company entirely. Things like that actually do happen because, like I said, corporate entities exist to earn money for the stockholders. Taking an obviously less than optimal approach to that obligation is illegal.

This is one of those cases where corporate competition isn't cool. Because people who want what we want, isn't much of a demographic at all. Trying to please us just isn't worth it for a major player like BethSoft.
 
I see your point. At least we got to common ground, that they're not living up to their responsibilities (ie not being proffesional.)

Your goverment analogy was interesting. The goverment has a responsibility to edumacate the childrens but instead they shape them in a ignorant way.

I dont think that the goverment needs to make the children docile to get what they want. I dont think bethsedea needs to dumb down and change Fallout to make the most money.

Then again, they have their own definition of immersion and their own way on how to maximize profits.

By the way, my formula for immersion:

x * fun factor = immersion

x = a game
 
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