Suffer said:
VDweller said:
Todd: I'd say the impact the original had in its day was about so much more then the angle you viewed it at, or how combat was executed.
Suffer may get burned for this, but suffer agrees with Todd.
Fallout isn't first and foremost about combat or perspective, it's about setting, storyline, dialogue and great cRPG execution of choice and consequence.
I'm still wondering where people keep up with this kind of mentality. It certainly wasn't from listening to the original developers, or for that matter, playing either game. You know, the combat that was pretty much faithful despite BIS' hatchet job on Fallout 2. Choice and consequence IS a vital part of P&P gameplay, so why should Fallout only be half-ass in style? Well, aside from marketing at Bethesda having bigger balls than the developers...
What worries suffer is that Bethesda can choose whether or not to include TB combat and isometric perspective, but they may not have this choice on what really matters, as they simply lack the developing talents to create such a game.
Then that is simply their mistake.
The price tag of the Fallout-usage license went in the millions, not thousands.
Reminder; they didn't buy the IP, though.
Funny that it would be valued in the millions if people keep using that hundreds of thousands sales figures, which I've pointed out to Fear-Gut every time I've had the ambition to correct the idiot about this. I don't know what they put in the coffee there at Interplay, but it made numerous people quite DEE! DEE! DEE! and forget about the history of the industry. I guess that way it makes it easier to forget about your miserable failures in development, of which Fear-Gut has had many.
So Fallout had 300,000 initial sales? And then a load of repeat-sales over the years, until it was Interplay's highest-published duo game set?
Blizzard was shitting themselves in excitement once they broke the half a million copies mark, but then it went much higher over time. As Fallout is a series, initial reception plus word of mouth over time, plus what people have as an image of Fallout, plays a key point in how this will be recieved.
Remember those old-school I kept mentioning? They're looking forward to Fallout returning the good gameplay to the market. They are an unspoken
majority, with only a few still fighting to speak for the disillusioned, because while there are CRPG players, there are FAR MORE P&P RPGers, and if there's a quality CRPG, they'll likely buy it over some shitware that is merely a flavoring of the same garbage the company released previous.
Perspective, folks. I'm just using this as yet another driving point, that the license is worth millions to use, not to buy. The sales are there only if people treat it well. Otherwise, word of mouth and what people have expected and have not receieved will kill the game off. Kind of like how the shitty Ultima 9 was pretty, but it had none of the life nor soul of the Ultima series, and therefore it died. Despite the UO crowd being offered mad discounts, and the gameplay being much like other 3d platformers at the time. Yes, TES with guns might appeal to numerous Bethesda fanboys. On the other hand, it might not be what they're looking for, for similar shallow reasons, or for valid reasons that the old-school doesn't like playing formulaic, console-designed crap.
See, the market has LOST the old-school. There's loads of LARPers, MU*ers, and numerous amounts of other people that love the genre that only niche developers like Spiderweb care to tap. Jeff does rather well with his products. Nobody else still around seems to care to give that kind of depth. If there is, direct them my way, I want to speak to them.
There IS a market for an old-school game, there was in 1997, and the fact that P&P is still quite alive and well, means that P&P gameplay doing well on a computer isn't too much of a stretch for the imagination. The only problem is the unbelievably dense and
spineless US corporate mindset, that is the butt of many jokes starting from the Japanese and is spreading into Europe.
The only issue here is Bethesda's competence. So if they are incompetent, I don't see the point in rewarding them with a cookie. Nor do I see it fitting that I smile and keep handing out dog biscuits to a company whose rep enjoys the gaming media patting his head as he shits out more steaming piles of lies.
We're talking market appeal here and when you're doing so as a salesman you have to assume first and foremost that people, being the cowards they are, will go with what they know.
However, the market already knows Fallout, at least in passing. It's rather hard to play a BioWare or Bethesda game without them being compared to it on a message board, hard to read reviews without the constant comparisons, read news sites without noticing the title and what it is praised for, etc.
The only issue is casual sales, and casual gamers are NOT Fallout's intended audience whatsoever. Every flop of a Fallout game has proven that. Curiosity sales will give way to word-of-mouth, as it IS truly the strongest force in the game industry.
To the market we have named as BethSoft's favourite market "Fallout" is just a spookword. It'll scare a number in them in fear that they might have to actually think when playing this (OMG TEH SUK), it'll interest a number because they've heard good things about it.
But will it get the reaction that "Bethesda Softwork presents" got? No. Not by a mile. Not by a league.
The thing is, Bethesda already HAS this market by the throat. All they have to do to make all these console kiddies swallow their crap and dryhump it for years to come is say "Relive the Oblivion experience, in a post-apocalyptic setting".
Show's over.
Word of mouth is already affecting this game's reception. One, it's being made by Bethesda, killing all hopes of it being a role-playing game. Two, it's being made for console.
Really, did everyone forget what happened with the half-baked design idea that introduced clannies into the Fallout fandom? That didn't last, either, when Interplay was still a prime force in the industry. Nope, didn't help at all.
Because the answer to this question immediatelly answers another question that Sander indicated indirectly; intent. Oblivion was never intended to be a cRPG, it was intended to be a hack-n-slash exploration dungeon-crawler. Hype around it being intended to be the best cRPG ever is just that, hype, the actual intent behind it was to make a fun, high sales-rate game.
So what's the intent for Fallout 3? Important question, no answer. Let's ask Pete, shall we?
"We're approaching Fallout 3 as if we developed the first and second games - we're developing it just like we developed Oblivion. Fallout 3 is our baby, we want to stay true to what it is and we want to deliver something that all the fans think is worthwhile. We're trying to move the series forward, keeping it fresh and cool while staying true to its roots."
Suffer thinks that a month or so after Fallout 3's release NMA's <title> text will change to "No Mutants Allowed - Modding out the suck"
Then I will concept a mod that will purposefully earn the game an NC-17ish rating across a few countries, and possibly be banned in New Zealand like Postal 2, which is still more of a CRPG than anything Bethesda has done to date. Remember the Oblivion debacle involving possible mod content?
At least Postal 2 can decently respond to your decisions depending on how you play, versus the skill treadmill. Yeah, I said it. RWS, crude as they are, has more CRPG writing talent, than Bethesda ever promises to try and laze from doing any real design work with their muchly-hyped Retard AI.
