squeehunter
First time out of the vault
Johnny Angel said:
There needs to be a place to store your crap. Kind of like the car in FO2.
PCZone and PCGamer Fallout 3 previews
- Thread starter Brother None
- Start date
First time out of the vault
There needs to be a place to store your crap. Kind of like the car in FO2.
Things Bethesda Does Well:
* Large explorable environments
* Pretty Visuals
* Open Ended
* Lots of things to do
* Some good decisions of tools to use - they use many, and some like SpeedTree are pretty much industry standards. I have some serious issues with their core engine of Gamebryo, however (mostly brought up by a friend that works in the industry and happened to be evaluating it and other engines - odd caching and lack of good paging - at the time multiprocessing was not an issue, but for multi-threaded paging it could be useful).
Things Bethesda Does Poorly:
* Dialogs (hopefully FO3 is better)
* Emotional attachment to characters [good or bad] (name ONE memorable Oblivion character outside the king that dies at the beginning... now start naming FO2 characters - Sulik, Myron, Vic, Dogmeat, Gorus, etc - heck, even Metzger). Other RPG companies like Bioware, for instance, have this down to an art form, but to be honest, their romances are getting stale (always 1-2 romantic interests, always a bunch of dialogs over time to get there - exactly the same model as Black Isle's Planescape:Torment did with Annah and Falls From Grace - a similar model was adopted for Baldur's Gate 2 and they've used it ever since). I'm NOT advocating romances - I just want to care about the characters and most of all remember them for some reason, and there are many ways this can be done.
* Treatment of character based on character - I loved how Fallout used various bits of your character to determine how people react to you, sometimes with vast repercussions, whether that be sex, karma, attrbutes, or whatever. Imagine taking shelter in a barn during an acid rain storm and the farmer noticing you go in - he comes out with a shotgun and depending on your sex, age, strength, and maybe appearance makes a number of choices (dirty old man? protective father that sees a poor teen that needs help? Sees you as a nerdy geek and offers you indoor hospitality in his house? Sees you as a bruiser and lets you stay - but in the barn?).
* Humor - if Bethesda makes this just gore, they missed the ball. One of my favorite lines in fallout 2 was not even a spoof - one of Myron's guards makes an offhand comment about him - something like "Stays in his room all day with a never ending line of prostitutes going in and out - typical project manager." I find it utterly histerical now that I'm in the business world.
* Large explorable environments
* Pretty Visuals
* Open Ended
* Lots of things to do
* Some good decisions of tools to use - they use many, and some like SpeedTree are pretty much industry standards. I have some serious issues with their core engine of Gamebryo, however (mostly brought up by a friend that works in the industry and happened to be evaluating it and other engines - odd caching and lack of good paging - at the time multiprocessing was not an issue, but for multi-threaded paging it could be useful).
Things Bethesda Does Poorly:
* Dialogs (hopefully FO3 is better)
* Emotional attachment to characters [good or bad] (name ONE memorable Oblivion character outside the king that dies at the beginning... now start naming FO2 characters - Sulik, Myron, Vic, Dogmeat, Gorus, etc - heck, even Metzger). Other RPG companies like Bioware, for instance, have this down to an art form, but to be honest, their romances are getting stale (always 1-2 romantic interests, always a bunch of dialogs over time to get there - exactly the same model as Black Isle's Planescape:Torment did with Annah and Falls From Grace - a similar model was adopted for Baldur's Gate 2 and they've used it ever since). I'm NOT advocating romances - I just want to care about the characters and most of all remember them for some reason, and there are many ways this can be done.
* Treatment of character based on character - I loved how Fallout used various bits of your character to determine how people react to you, sometimes with vast repercussions, whether that be sex, karma, attrbutes, or whatever. Imagine taking shelter in a barn during an acid rain storm and the farmer noticing you go in - he comes out with a shotgun and depending on your sex, age, strength, and maybe appearance makes a number of choices (dirty old man? protective father that sees a poor teen that needs help? Sees you as a nerdy geek and offers you indoor hospitality in his house? Sees you as a bruiser and lets you stay - but in the barn?).
* Humor - if Bethesda makes this just gore, they missed the ball. One of my favorite lines in fallout 2 was not even a spoof - one of Myron's guards makes an offhand comment about him - something like "Stays in his room all day with a never ending line of prostitutes going in and out - typical project manager." I find it utterly histerical now that I'm in the business world.