NowGamer interviews Howard and Pagliarulo

[Cimmerian Nights]

VATS is a perfectly balanced system,

This is an incredibly ignorant statement, and I invite you to support it with just one example of how it's perfectly balanced. Seriously, if you want to salvage your credibility. You can't just throw statements like this around as if they actually mean something without some basis in reality.

Watch how I do it:
VATS is nothing if not perfectly imbalanced. By design! Instead of having some kind of overriding design principles at all, Bethesda slap-dash threw VATS together and then only through testing did they realize that being attacked by enemies during VATS was "annoying" (yes, accounting for enemies and strategizing is annoying for combat) so they nerfed enemy attacks! Having to use your brain is annoying and gets in the way of enjoying explosions! What a pain! It's a cheat plain and simple. What kind of Mickey Mouse RPG combat system does this? And then the ultimate imbalance, only you can use VATS, your enemies cannot. How can it be anymore imbalanced I ask you?
They have clearly dumbed-down combat to be nothing more than a showcase for bloody explosions. How is this conducive to role-playing and not just pandering to the HALO/GTA crowd?

What game was the inspiration for VATS, why nothing less than that venerable RPG Burnout!!!
So you've got a combat system predicated on slow-motion pornographic violence. Gee that's good RPG design, and sure to sustain interest.

And worst of all VATS is nothing more than a great big compromise. Like it's supposed to appeal to the TB crowd.

Bethesda took the infrastructure of a FPS and put some scant RPG window dressing on it, instead of using a very solid RPG system that is the entire basis for Fallout.
Fallout was designed to emulate pen and paper gameplay, as in GURPS. This design was set even before the setting was made, so for the original developers, it had the priority of the setting. Bethesda is selling the setting with some combat system they made up on the fly and had to put training wheels on halfway through because they didn't know what they were doing.
I'm sure some find it fun and their minds are occupied by the flashy shiny gore splattering around the screen.

But I ask you, now knowing what Fallout was based on, how VATS shows fidelity to these concepts. If Bethesda used these concepts and improved on them.
Or did they just cash in on Oblivion with guns?



I would never claim Fallout 1's combat didn't have room for improvement, I could spend all day explaining the differences between it and a complex TB game like JA2.

But Beelzebud is right, you've quaffed to heavily on the Kool-Aid there buddy. If you want to be taken seriously you'll not toss out ridiculously wrong statements like that without backing it up.

edit:

The comparison between Michael Bay and Bethesda is apt.

Whenever I read what they have to say, that's who they most remind me of.

Yeah, I just saw this last night:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRS90V8BQGo[/youtube]

 

[Morbid]

I think that if I would make a game that would sell in millions of copies, then I would be assured that me and my creation are perfect as well. Sad but typical behavior...

 

[Crni Vuk]

I do agree and I'll go on to say I think this simplified combat in games today is making people into sore losers when they finally (if ever) die. Weird how you can just hide behind a corner and regen health to full in most FPS games.

Oddly enough "Fallout" 3 didn't use that funct... er... Operation Anchorage. Nevermind.

Now that as you mention it what comes to my mind is the news I heard last time about the new Game based on GTA4 [cant remember the name, but some form of addon I guess?] and changed the way you respawn, now you respawn directly where you died which seems to be different to the usual GTA4.

Do people get that easily frustrated novadays? I mean what would the same people do by playing Baldurs Gate on hard? Or even already just ... Tetris ? I mean some games get a lot of good feelings out from a difficult setting, if I just remember Super Ghouls and Ghosts or Super R Type from the SNES.

*Edit
Do people really get some kind of fun and excitement out of registering somewhere, on a fan-page just to explain people how wrong they are in their thinking an thus just get banned ?

 

[Trithne]

...and changed the way you respawn, now you respawn directly where you died which seems to be different to the usual GTA4.

Do people get that easily frustrated novadays? I mean what would the same people do by playing Baldurs Gate on hard? Or even already just ... Tetris ? I mean some games get a lot of good feelings out from a difficult setting, if I just remember Super Ghouls and Ghosts or Super R Type from the SNES.

Ah, good old Nintendo Hard games. It's a shift in gaming priorities. Now everyone's obsessed with using a game to 'tell a story', and apparently dying and repeating sections would be detrimental to that in some way. I still play roguelikes, where if you die, you die, damnit. Game over, no reloads. I like games that restrict my save/load to opening and closing the game.

But the real problem is that games are apparently still too hard, despite all this lowering of the bar. Complaints about The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex that it didn't give you the login for a certain account, you instead had to deduce it from information the game provided at disparate points, claimed the game was too hard. It's utterly ridiculous.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

I still play roguelikes, where if you die, you die, damnit. Game over, no reloads. I like games that restrict my save/load to opening and closing the game.

I love Nintendo hard games but not every game should have the save and load restrictions. For some games, like Rogue, it's a good thing while for others, like Fallout or PS:T, I wouldn't be a huge fan of it. My problem is like yours, Nintendo Hard games and games which are good Iron Man games all but not being made anymore, which is a problem. I'm for maximum variety but all games should offer a challenge.

 

[DoktorVivi]

Resistance 2 has an Arcade Mode that restricts the number of lives you have.. it's pretty cool that they included it as an option.

 

[I_eat_supermutants]

When I first saw the initial shit about Fallout 3 I was hoping since they had gone first person they'd at least take a Deus Ex style approach to it. At least have alternate ways of doing this or that.

Some cases yes, you can. Alot of the cases you really can't finesse your way through Fallout 3. You can't really talk your way through Fallout 3. In the end you really just have to balls to the wall shoot everything that moves.

Hell I could at least get through Fallout 1 & 2 and Deus Ex without killing anyone or very little.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Yeah I_eat_supermutants, I would have preferred something similar.

An Action Boy/Charisma Boy/Stealth Boy approach with optionally a Science Boy solution to get past difficulties or strong opponents.

Almost every encounter has to be solved with shooting.

 

[cronicler]

But there is different ways to solve problems TDG!

You can be an .Acton Boy and real time bullet fill the mob!
You can be a Charisma Boy and Vats bullet fill the mob!
You can be a Stealth Boy and sneak attack x2 to x5 damage the mob and use dart gun to poison the mob!
You can even Science Boy all encounters! Just use a Plasma Rifle!