Students of Fallout
- Thread starter Morbus
- Start date
Sorrow
So Old I'm Losing Radiation Signs
I played Syndicate half a year ago and I found it as addictive as when I played it the first time. Also, as annoyed by character pathing and non-translucency of buildings as when I played it for the first time. Looking from present perspective, I was disappointed by lack of moddability and in awe of the excellent use of extremely limited colour palette (16 colour) in game graphics.squinty said:A bit before, I think I finished Syndicate on the Amiga about 20 timesawesome game. Played it a few months ago (PC version which was far inferior though) and yeah it was ok.....but only for nostalgias sake though I think..
I still love Syndicate and SW graphics.
Also, I'm a bit annoyed that for some weird reason I have only one page of my Syndicate manual.
The RED SCORPION moves differently than the normal one. It will try to get you by moving vertically first, then horizontally. Car fuel!
lord_hellraiser
First time out of the vault
That's strange. I've played Fallout 1 a long time ago before and never had that much problems getting into the game. Maybe I forgot...
I then played Fallout 2.
Then I also played Oblivion, and STALKER.
Oblivion confused me with its crap UI, the ass-load of stats (zomg!) and the strange way it drops items -- though only at first.
STALKER was the only time I read the manual. I got stumped by the stashes early on, but got past that too.
I then played Fallout 2.
Then I also played Oblivion, and STALKER.
Oblivion confused me with its crap UI, the ass-load of stats (zomg!) and the strange way it drops items -- though only at first.
STALKER was the only time I read the manual. I got stumped by the stashes early on, but got past that too.
Sorrow said:
That's propably the most intelligent thing you posted on these forums.
And I agree with Per, Wasteland is an excellent game.
Mikael Grizzly said:
Unbanned.
Morbus
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Wasteland is probably the best RPG ever... Maybe second to Torment?
Still, it sucks.
Anyway, I agree with sorrow and the same happens to me. When I play Diablo, I play for the fun. Same goes for StarCraft, Fallout, Torment, Darklands, M&M, and lots of other games I often replay. However, there are some games I want to replay purely out of the fond memories I get. They're not that many, but there some. But I don't actually play them if they aren't fun anymore.
Also, who here remembers the first time they played Fallout? And I mean the very first time, the demo even. Do you remember the feeling? Well, I bet you don't, and if you do, it's probably but a shadow of the true thing. An amazing thing happened to me yesterday. I was playing Supreme Commander, jerking around and stuff, and there must have been I don't know a rush of secretions or whatever inside me, maybe dopamine or whatever they're called, I got the SAME EXACT feeling I had when I first played Fallout. I don't think it was because of the game, I don't know, it just happened, but it was amazing. It felt so good, so warm and fuzzy. THAT's what I call nostalgia. I don't get those anymore, even though I play Fallout like every two months or something.
Also, Per can't ban me. I'm immune.
Still, it sucks.
Anyway, I agree with sorrow and the same happens to me. When I play Diablo, I play for the fun. Same goes for StarCraft, Fallout, Torment, Darklands, M&M, and lots of other games I often replay. However, there are some games I want to replay purely out of the fond memories I get. They're not that many, but there some. But I don't actually play them if they aren't fun anymore.
Also, who here remembers the first time they played Fallout? And I mean the very first time, the demo even. Do you remember the feeling? Well, I bet you don't, and if you do, it's probably but a shadow of the true thing. An amazing thing happened to me yesterday. I was playing Supreme Commander, jerking around and stuff, and there must have been I don't know a rush of secretions or whatever inside me, maybe dopamine or whatever they're called, I got the SAME EXACT feeling I had when I first played Fallout. I don't think it was because of the game, I don't know, it just happened, but it was amazing. It felt so good, so warm and fuzzy. THAT's what I call nostalgia. I don't get those anymore, even though I play Fallout like every two months or something.
Also, Per can't ban me. I'm immune.
Mechanics-wise, of course. But I'm guessing story/writing is unimportant for you?Eyenixon said:
I like to play "Supreme Commander" too. Maybe you should come over some time so we could play togetherMorbus said:
Morbus
Sonny, I Watched the Vault Bein' Built!
Sex, age and pic please 
Anyone here ever played TRIBES? The entire community has been through this same crap twice. Going for three even! The main thing I learned from that whole ordeal was that TRIBES died with the original. The future had come, I grew up, game standards advanced and shifted; the environment simply could not support that original experience. In the end everyone just wanted a time machine so they could go back to that first week when things were exciting and new.
But in the end, even though T2 was a hackneyed, forced, Streamlined!™, steaming turd I still really enjoyed blowing people up with the satchel charge. Maybe, if I'm so lucky, F3 will have a similar moment.
RIP Fallout.
PS: I thought F2 was crap. Way to ruin something great by making it bloated and cliche. For me, the grandeur of the series died in 1998. Bethesda is just pissing on old piss on a grave filled with piss at this point, imho.
But in the end, even though T2 was a hackneyed, forced, Streamlined!™, steaming turd I still really enjoyed blowing people up with the satchel charge. Maybe, if I'm so lucky, F3 will have a similar moment.
RIP Fallout.
PS: I thought F2 was crap. Way to ruin something great by making it bloated and cliche. For me, the grandeur of the series died in 1998. Bethesda is just pissing on old piss on a grave filled with piss at this point, imho.
shihonage
Made in USSR
Roffler said:
Yeah, I remember the F2 magazine coverage. Then I run the game and I'm some retard in a backwards village doing menial tasks for other cretins. Never finished that game.
Heldelance
First time out of the vault
Fallout 2 was awesome, certainly not as much of a classic as Fallout 1 but still awesome. The problem with everyone that thinks Fo2 is a cliched game is that they fail to realize that if they changed the formula, Fo2 could've become what morrowind is to daggerfall.
Ok, I'm not going to quote anything from you Kiko, but I'm afraid I don't think you've ever really played an RPG, so you're having difficulty keeping up with the dialog on the boards and you can't seem to contribute. You're dealing with people with experience in gaming and with previous Fallout games, which I must have missed on your list, and who actually look at the subject matter in question and hold it up to the light to make observations and conclusions. To which you reply with 'hope' and the general statements that Beth wouldn't do things that you might not like. Not really based on anything besides your hope and trust of Beth aparently, and often in the face concret evidence to the contrary.
At the very least though, you should actually PLAY Fallout, at least the first one, before contining to post on these boards so you can actually understand what people here are talking about. It's really just common courtesy. Cause your basically arguing in defense of a game you've never played and just assume will be great in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary on a fan board for a franchise you have no experience in.
The biggest problem in your expereince is I don't think you have really experienced a game that game you any choice, which I think is a critical part in making an actual RPG, I would therefore say you have no real experiene in RPGs.
It's not your fault, really, adding choice into games requires more work as you actually have to create branches of a story depending upon your actions. It's more work than most game developers are willing to put into making a product now. At best most games give you a magician's choice of two options and a cursor and neither decision really affects anything whatsoever and some are so lazy as to keep askin gthe same question till you chose the option they want you to. JRPGs pretty much have never offered a real choice, and while I enjoy Final Fantasies as much as the next guy and have played them since the very first one was released, they aren't really much in the way of RPGs, and never really have been. I've always kinda been bothered by JRPGs tendency to start with a decent idea, then decide they need to have someone try to blow up the world for some reason, usually suceed, and it's basically a long story you have no real bearing on and just sit back in watch while mashing the fight option on the inevitable turn based random encounters they continually throw at you. You basically may as well just read a book though, cause they story is gonna go one way no matter what button you press. You just get pictures to go with your reading and usually some jailbait looking school girl with crayon colored hair.
RPGs should have choice, however, to justify the title. You have a 'role' to play, and options on how to play it. Instead of just killing things and following a set story you have no bearing on.
See I disagree with you there.
System Shock 2 frigging amazed me when I played it and it stands to me as one of the best games I ever played. It was amazing to me and still stands on a pedastal in my mind for what it did to me, and is the only game that I had an actual physical reaction to as I was drawn in to the game with a trepidation that filled me with a desire to glance over my shoulder intermitantly to make sure nothing was actually in my apartment comin gup behind me.
It was a shooter with some minor RPG elements, but it was mainly a FPS shooter.
It was just well made, compelling, engaging, and had a good story.. though the endling was a bit of a dissapointment the game still blew me away and I tend to dislike shooters.
It doesn't really matter what kind of game you make, quality shows through.
Unfortuantely the lack of quality these days shows through more than anything else.
Unfortunately I think the term RPG has grown extremely loose these days. I mean I remember playing the original Zelda on the first Nintendo that came out and while I enjoyed it I sure as hell wouldn't call it an RPG. Unfortunately if it was released today it probably would be defined as one because the term has grown so lax.
I totally disagree with you here, to the point I wonder if we played the same game. I notice though you may have gotten the game in a differnt language, and perhaps the translation sucked.
Rare, rare, is the game I can play more than once, even RPGs. Even GREAT RPGs. Even games like Fallout, Torment, and Arcanum I tended to use character editors on so I could max stats and see all the special conversation points for high intelligence or the like as well as do all the skill quests, just so I could see everything on one playthough.
Mass Effect I've played though going on four times now, each time with a distinctly different character and playstyle. I've blown through it as a paragon soldier do-gooder and enjoyed sniping when I could as well as short "I'm up he sees me I'm down" running jumps between cover and ginning down enemies doing the same with assault rifle burst. I was quite surprised to find the game played very differently as a renegade adept with a very creative and well explained, in addition to just being plain fun ability to toss stuff around by altering it's mass. I was further surprised that the tech tree I'd largely ignored in two playthroughs was actually extremely useful even though I tried the neutral engineer on the insanity level, and I kinda figured it'd be dull. Wasn't.
Moreso at least in the English version the dialog was superb and the technology was some of the most realistic and best explained I'd encountered since reading Pournelle, if you bother to investigate it and read the codex entries. There was a lot of depth there that helped create a setting.
The 'good and bad' aspect was far superior to that of KOTRO, which I always found stilted in that evil decisions where just the typical I steal candy from babies crap that bored me, was far more interesting. You had a goal regardless of how you approached it, and you could be ruthless and self interested in doing so, without just being bad to be bad. You had a purpose.
I liked the military structure of it, which usually totally fails in pretty much every other game I've seen even try to attempt it, and I liked how they explained it and basically put you on detached service after your stint as an XO. Hell, you could even stay in uniform and keep your human crew in like uniform if you felt like it.
Plus given that it's the first part of a trilogy the fact that they record your decisions for the rest of the trilogy and because several seem to indicate some fairly big branches in the future since some of the decisions you can make are fairly big it has the best possibility I've seen as a truly branching story in decades.
I mean most games like Oblivion and even Morrowind may claim to be non-linear, and I suppose they are to an extent that you can go randomly from place to place, there is very little actual branching play in your decisions. Writers like to keep it simple and even if you kill one guy over another they still bring you right back to the same place in the plot somehow so very little is changed regardless of what order you do it in.
It may be non-linear in the sense you don't go from point A to point B through C as you do in most JRPGs and the like, but the points are pretty much the same no matter what order you play connect the dots in.
ME isn't terribly long, and while non-linear to some extent in that you choose which planets you want ot go to and often when - and that actually does affect a few things in the game - there are actually some very large plot points you can completely disrupt and are likely to force some pretty big branches to develope in future games. It'll probably add considerable time to the creation of sequels, but I'd like that to continue as a trend if it actually allows me to 'affect' outcomes. It'll undoubtably add to complications for writers and the developers, but I give them props for daring to risk that.
Nope.
Even if it's not your cup of tea, it's still an interesting take of a game and very well made. It steps outside of Bioware's previous experience in way that highlights Beth's inability to do so. It'll probably stand in sharp contrast to FO3, and maybe even show that if someone more responsible had control of the Fallout Franchise and decided to change the view aspect and control, they probably would have managed it with better skill.
Pretty frigging tactical actually.
Yeah, there were times a score or so of Spanish Conquistadors bullied a few hundred or a few thousand naked natives around while wearing far better armor and weilding far superior armor, but there were a few other times when those same armored juggernauts got their helmets handed back to them with their asses in it by tattooed guys hitting them with sticks. The main reason Escrima still exists as a fighting form.
Hell I once worked with a guy who wore Class IV body armor that was largely impregnable. Was practically stormtrooper armor and he was killed by a shirtless militia kid with a crap old shotgun not even loaded with slugs. Had shot in it that normally wouldn't even have scuffed his mesh, and he could have taken pointblank even in most joints.
Thing was he was flanked, didn't clear the room well enough and just because of positioning and having his right arm canked looking up a stairwell a seam opened up under his armpit. Just couldn't really be helped with the positioning of the arm and the way the chest armor had to wrap around and yet still have a hole that he could put his arm through. If his arm was down he would have been fine, but he wasn't and the otherwise harmless shot went right in that hole because his pauldron rotated up with his upper arm, and that was the end of a bad day for him.
I can.
I remember when I first got into gaming on a neighbor's Atari, I don't think you ever really expected to 'win' a game. Game's were hard.
I can't think of any game that's hard now.
The few times someone tells me a game is hard and I look at it, it's not hard, it's just random. That seems to be the definition of 'hard' most people use for games now. It's not that anything requires much 'skill' to do, that might alienate some gamers and impact sales, and in contrast they add some random element that supposedly affects difficulty. That's not difficulty though, that's pure random chance as oppossed to facing actual AI or requiring finesse to accomplish something.
It's like games are treated as books or movies now and everyone is expected to simply follow along and see the end if they simply sit long enough and look at it.
Games have little blurbs featuring how many hours of gameplay you'll get out of them. What the hell is that? This game has 40 hours of gameplay and then I'll be done with it? There's time well spent. Is there a chance in 40 hours there will be anything in the game I haven't done? Could I somehow not get to the ending? Probably not.
Same time they took skill out of the equation.
Games are now big business, and big business looks at the numbers. They want sales. They want to appeal to the broadest possible audience. No one should be excluded for thier inability to read a manual or a lack of hand eye coordination.
Has here even been a manual worth reading in the last 5 years? It's like no one expect anyone to read the manual anymore, so they stoped trying. Manuals are basically 4 pages spaced out into 8 with big type they don't expect anyone to pour over at all, because if they made a game that actually required you to read anything before starting it they'd probably lose a certain percentage of gamers. Safer not to have any complexity or depth at all.
It's along the same lines as why I'm continually amazed younger gamers keep defending game companies like they make games for the 'art' anymore, rather than cranking out what they can for the money. No one defends Hollywood much anymore, who went through much the same thing decades ago, so I'm not sure where the idealism comes from for gaming companies, but it's there. I just wish it was justified more often. I do so miss the 'art' of many games, much like Fallout.
I often say that myself.
Companies now only want to concentrate on graphics it seems and no time at all seems to be spent actually crafting a compelling story that stands up to even the mildest form of scrutiny.
Ok, so don't.
Fine with me.
At least borrow the story from a previous game that DID pay attention to a plot though. Just update one of these old much loved games. Hell, Hollywood has run so low on ideas they do it all the time, not like it's much different.
Not even original for games, Sierra long ago updated it's own early Quest games when new technology became available. King's Quest 1, Space Quest 1, and Quest for Glory 1 were all updated and re-released with better graphics and few revisions at all to the plot, and I picked them all up - or more accurately Mommy dearest did>.>
I'd even play the original next to the update and enjoy doing so.
Seems a far safer bet to me to obtain the rights to an old half forgotten but well recieved game from a few decades ago and give it a new engine that to make some new graphics engine and then tack on a plot you had someone jot down on the back of a napkin.
I totally agree with that.
The people most dissatisfied with games nowadays are the people who know better and have had better.
Most of the younger gamers love some crap titles simply because they don't know any better. The bar is set pretty low for anything they play to hurdle.
Raising that bar doesn't really do them a favor, but it might do the dissatisfied a favor if more people call the game developers to account and expect a return to previoius ideals.
The Brainy Gamer article is fascinating to me as it first I thought it a study on something I've been looking at for awhile now, basically crap handholding tv and games treating kids like idiots so they grow up to be taller entitled idiots who still expect everything to be handed to them of broken down in the simplest terms so they don't have to read.
Reading the source though it strikes me that it was actually a bunch of adults the guy who gathered together, or at least kids in their 20s given the internet grammer of some of them.
Regardless it's a fascinating read.
Todays culture of providing for the lowest common denominator does tend to lead I think to gamers who don't want to read, they want instant gratification, and they don't really want actual challenge. They just want to breeze through things immediately as easily as possible. It's like games are a sight seeing event best finished quickly so they can move on. You stroll though a spot you havent seen, take a few pictures, and wander on to something else without bothering to learn the language or the culture or seek any explanation for why the place you pass through exists, all that is a distraction from going to the next view you want to take in as quickly as possible to move on to another.
It largely seems that the Brainy Gamers entire class was so used to the spoonfeeding it never occured to them to actually read anything in the game let alone crack open the manuals. Being so used to quick starts and James Bond beginnings they were unwilling to really try anything different and if it wasn't immediately obvious to them through some pictogram on screen as to what to do they weren't really interested in any investigation. It sounds like if they didn't have the 'assignment' to keep playing they wouldn't have. They did, and they found there was a reason to keep playing, possibly even had their standards raised for future games.
In theory I still kinda surprised how hard they found the game. I'm wondering if they had full copies or the demo version you can download for free on several websites which doesn't include any of the talking heads or intros.
Considering the game starts right away with a nice talking head of the Overseer telling you exactly what you need to do and even I think flashing your pipboy map up and showing you the destination of Vault 15 I'm not sure why they felt they lacked any direction, I mean that's a pretty clear 'go there, we need this' all in about 2 minutes of talking head dialog. Maybe that wasn't in their version though or prone to ignoring everything they just didn't listen immediately. I'm actually kinda curious if they just didn't have the version that included the intro.
I remember when my friend gave me the first Fallout game after I left the Marines and told me it was a great game I needed to try, as good as Wasteland - another game I didn't play. All he gave me was the CD with no manuals, and I think it was the first game I played after leaving a game free tour in the Infantry. I still had no difficulty figuring out the controls and what to do. Maybe because I enjoyed reading all the blurbs on the skills and attributes and found many of them funny, and maybe it was easy for me to grasp because I played AD&D and such games before they made the jump to video. I dunno, even if I hadn't I'm not sure I would have wondered if my action points were just dissapearing.
I'm gratified to hear of the turn around once they actually sunk their teeth into the game though, gives me hope for a resurgence of expected quality in game design.
At the very least though, you should actually PLAY Fallout, at least the first one, before contining to post on these boards so you can actually understand what people here are talking about. It's really just common courtesy. Cause your basically arguing in defense of a game you've never played and just assume will be great in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary on a fan board for a franchise you have no experience in.
The biggest problem in your expereince is I don't think you have really experienced a game that game you any choice, which I think is a critical part in making an actual RPG, I would therefore say you have no real experiene in RPGs.
It's not your fault, really, adding choice into games requires more work as you actually have to create branches of a story depending upon your actions. It's more work than most game developers are willing to put into making a product now. At best most games give you a magician's choice of two options and a cursor and neither decision really affects anything whatsoever and some are so lazy as to keep askin gthe same question till you chose the option they want you to. JRPGs pretty much have never offered a real choice, and while I enjoy Final Fantasies as much as the next guy and have played them since the very first one was released, they aren't really much in the way of RPGs, and never really have been. I've always kinda been bothered by JRPGs tendency to start with a decent idea, then decide they need to have someone try to blow up the world for some reason, usually suceed, and it's basically a long story you have no real bearing on and just sit back in watch while mashing the fight option on the inevitable turn based random encounters they continually throw at you. You basically may as well just read a book though, cause they story is gonna go one way no matter what button you press. You just get pictures to go with your reading and usually some jailbait looking school girl with crayon colored hair.
RPGs should have choice, however, to justify the title. You have a 'role' to play, and options on how to play it. Instead of just killing things and following a set story you have no bearing on.
Morbus said:
See I disagree with you there.
System Shock 2 frigging amazed me when I played it and it stands to me as one of the best games I ever played. It was amazing to me and still stands on a pedastal in my mind for what it did to me, and is the only game that I had an actual physical reaction to as I was drawn in to the game with a trepidation that filled me with a desire to glance over my shoulder intermitantly to make sure nothing was actually in my apartment comin gup behind me.
It was a shooter with some minor RPG elements, but it was mainly a FPS shooter.
It was just well made, compelling, engaging, and had a good story.. though the endling was a bit of a dissapointment the game still blew me away and I tend to dislike shooters.
It doesn't really matter what kind of game you make, quality shows through.
Unfortuantely the lack of quality these days shows through more than anything else.
Unfortunately I think the term RPG has grown extremely loose these days. I mean I remember playing the original Zelda on the first Nintendo that came out and while I enjoyed it I sure as hell wouldn't call it an RPG. Unfortunately if it was released today it probably would be defined as one because the term has grown so lax.
Morbus said:
I totally disagree with you here, to the point I wonder if we played the same game. I notice though you may have gotten the game in a differnt language, and perhaps the translation sucked.
Rare, rare, is the game I can play more than once, even RPGs. Even GREAT RPGs. Even games like Fallout, Torment, and Arcanum I tended to use character editors on so I could max stats and see all the special conversation points for high intelligence or the like as well as do all the skill quests, just so I could see everything on one playthough.
Mass Effect I've played though going on four times now, each time with a distinctly different character and playstyle. I've blown through it as a paragon soldier do-gooder and enjoyed sniping when I could as well as short "I'm up he sees me I'm down" running jumps between cover and ginning down enemies doing the same with assault rifle burst. I was quite surprised to find the game played very differently as a renegade adept with a very creative and well explained, in addition to just being plain fun ability to toss stuff around by altering it's mass. I was further surprised that the tech tree I'd largely ignored in two playthroughs was actually extremely useful even though I tried the neutral engineer on the insanity level, and I kinda figured it'd be dull. Wasn't.
Moreso at least in the English version the dialog was superb and the technology was some of the most realistic and best explained I'd encountered since reading Pournelle, if you bother to investigate it and read the codex entries. There was a lot of depth there that helped create a setting.
The 'good and bad' aspect was far superior to that of KOTRO, which I always found stilted in that evil decisions where just the typical I steal candy from babies crap that bored me, was far more interesting. You had a goal regardless of how you approached it, and you could be ruthless and self interested in doing so, without just being bad to be bad. You had a purpose.
I liked the military structure of it, which usually totally fails in pretty much every other game I've seen even try to attempt it, and I liked how they explained it and basically put you on detached service after your stint as an XO. Hell, you could even stay in uniform and keep your human crew in like uniform if you felt like it.
Plus given that it's the first part of a trilogy the fact that they record your decisions for the rest of the trilogy and because several seem to indicate some fairly big branches in the future since some of the decisions you can make are fairly big it has the best possibility I've seen as a truly branching story in decades.
I mean most games like Oblivion and even Morrowind may claim to be non-linear, and I suppose they are to an extent that you can go randomly from place to place, there is very little actual branching play in your decisions. Writers like to keep it simple and even if you kill one guy over another they still bring you right back to the same place in the plot somehow so very little is changed regardless of what order you do it in.
It may be non-linear in the sense you don't go from point A to point B through C as you do in most JRPGs and the like, but the points are pretty much the same no matter what order you play connect the dots in.
ME isn't terribly long, and while non-linear to some extent in that you choose which planets you want ot go to and often when - and that actually does affect a few things in the game - there are actually some very large plot points you can completely disrupt and are likely to force some pretty big branches to develope in future games. It'll probably add considerable time to the creation of sequels, but I'd like that to continue as a trend if it actually allows me to 'affect' outcomes. It'll undoubtably add to complications for writers and the developers, but I give them props for daring to risk that.
Pope Viper said:
Nope.
Even if it's not your cup of tea, it's still an interesting take of a game and very well made. It steps outside of Bioware's previous experience in way that highlights Beth's inability to do so. It'll probably stand in sharp contrast to FO3, and maybe even show that if someone more responsible had control of the Fallout Franchise and decided to change the view aspect and control, they probably would have managed it with better skill.
PaladinHeart said:
Pretty frigging tactical actually.
Yeah, there were times a score or so of Spanish Conquistadors bullied a few hundred or a few thousand naked natives around while wearing far better armor and weilding far superior armor, but there were a few other times when those same armored juggernauts got their helmets handed back to them with their asses in it by tattooed guys hitting them with sticks. The main reason Escrima still exists as a fighting form.
Hell I once worked with a guy who wore Class IV body armor that was largely impregnable. Was practically stormtrooper armor and he was killed by a shirtless militia kid with a crap old shotgun not even loaded with slugs. Had shot in it that normally wouldn't even have scuffed his mesh, and he could have taken pointblank even in most joints.
Thing was he was flanked, didn't clear the room well enough and just because of positioning and having his right arm canked looking up a stairwell a seam opened up under his armpit. Just couldn't really be helped with the positioning of the arm and the way the chest armor had to wrap around and yet still have a hole that he could put his arm through. If his arm was down he would have been fine, but he wasn't and the otherwise harmless shot went right in that hole because his pauldron rotated up with his upper arm, and that was the end of a bad day for him.
Brother None said:
I can.
I remember when I first got into gaming on a neighbor's Atari, I don't think you ever really expected to 'win' a game. Game's were hard.
I can't think of any game that's hard now.
The few times someone tells me a game is hard and I look at it, it's not hard, it's just random. That seems to be the definition of 'hard' most people use for games now. It's not that anything requires much 'skill' to do, that might alienate some gamers and impact sales, and in contrast they add some random element that supposedly affects difficulty. That's not difficulty though, that's pure random chance as oppossed to facing actual AI or requiring finesse to accomplish something.
It's like games are treated as books or movies now and everyone is expected to simply follow along and see the end if they simply sit long enough and look at it.
Games have little blurbs featuring how many hours of gameplay you'll get out of them. What the hell is that? This game has 40 hours of gameplay and then I'll be done with it? There's time well spent. Is there a chance in 40 hours there will be anything in the game I haven't done? Could I somehow not get to the ending? Probably not.
Pope Viper said:
Same time they took skill out of the equation.
Games are now big business, and big business looks at the numbers. They want sales. They want to appeal to the broadest possible audience. No one should be excluded for thier inability to read a manual or a lack of hand eye coordination.
Has here even been a manual worth reading in the last 5 years? It's like no one expect anyone to read the manual anymore, so they stoped trying. Manuals are basically 4 pages spaced out into 8 with big type they don't expect anyone to pour over at all, because if they made a game that actually required you to read anything before starting it they'd probably lose a certain percentage of gamers. Safer not to have any complexity or depth at all.
It's along the same lines as why I'm continually amazed younger gamers keep defending game companies like they make games for the 'art' anymore, rather than cranking out what they can for the money. No one defends Hollywood much anymore, who went through much the same thing decades ago, so I'm not sure where the idealism comes from for gaming companies, but it's there. I just wish it was justified more often. I do so miss the 'art' of many games, much like Fallout.
TTTimo said:
I often say that myself.
Companies now only want to concentrate on graphics it seems and no time at all seems to be spent actually crafting a compelling story that stands up to even the mildest form of scrutiny.
Ok, so don't.
Fine with me.
At least borrow the story from a previous game that DID pay attention to a plot though. Just update one of these old much loved games. Hell, Hollywood has run so low on ideas they do it all the time, not like it's much different.
Not even original for games, Sierra long ago updated it's own early Quest games when new technology became available. King's Quest 1, Space Quest 1, and Quest for Glory 1 were all updated and re-released with better graphics and few revisions at all to the plot, and I picked them all up - or more accurately Mommy dearest did>.>
I'd even play the original next to the update and enjoy doing so.
Seems a far safer bet to me to obtain the rights to an old half forgotten but well recieved game from a few decades ago and give it a new engine that to make some new graphics engine and then tack on a plot you had someone jot down on the back of a napkin.
SuAside said:
I totally agree with that.
The people most dissatisfied with games nowadays are the people who know better and have had better.
Most of the younger gamers love some crap titles simply because they don't know any better. The bar is set pretty low for anything they play to hurdle.
Raising that bar doesn't really do them a favor, but it might do the dissatisfied a favor if more people call the game developers to account and expect a return to previoius ideals.
The Brainy Gamer article is fascinating to me as it first I thought it a study on something I've been looking at for awhile now, basically crap handholding tv and games treating kids like idiots so they grow up to be taller entitled idiots who still expect everything to be handed to them of broken down in the simplest terms so they don't have to read.
Reading the source though it strikes me that it was actually a bunch of adults the guy who gathered together, or at least kids in their 20s given the internet grammer of some of them.
Regardless it's a fascinating read.
Todays culture of providing for the lowest common denominator does tend to lead I think to gamers who don't want to read, they want instant gratification, and they don't really want actual challenge. They just want to breeze through things immediately as easily as possible. It's like games are a sight seeing event best finished quickly so they can move on. You stroll though a spot you havent seen, take a few pictures, and wander on to something else without bothering to learn the language or the culture or seek any explanation for why the place you pass through exists, all that is a distraction from going to the next view you want to take in as quickly as possible to move on to another.
It largely seems that the Brainy Gamers entire class was so used to the spoonfeeding it never occured to them to actually read anything in the game let alone crack open the manuals. Being so used to quick starts and James Bond beginnings they were unwilling to really try anything different and if it wasn't immediately obvious to them through some pictogram on screen as to what to do they weren't really interested in any investigation. It sounds like if they didn't have the 'assignment' to keep playing they wouldn't have. They did, and they found there was a reason to keep playing, possibly even had their standards raised for future games.
In theory I still kinda surprised how hard they found the game. I'm wondering if they had full copies or the demo version you can download for free on several websites which doesn't include any of the talking heads or intros.
Considering the game starts right away with a nice talking head of the Overseer telling you exactly what you need to do and even I think flashing your pipboy map up and showing you the destination of Vault 15 I'm not sure why they felt they lacked any direction, I mean that's a pretty clear 'go there, we need this' all in about 2 minutes of talking head dialog. Maybe that wasn't in their version though or prone to ignoring everything they just didn't listen immediately. I'm actually kinda curious if they just didn't have the version that included the intro.
I remember when my friend gave me the first Fallout game after I left the Marines and told me it was a great game I needed to try, as good as Wasteland - another game I didn't play. All he gave me was the CD with no manuals, and I think it was the first game I played after leaving a game free tour in the Infantry. I still had no difficulty figuring out the controls and what to do. Maybe because I enjoyed reading all the blurbs on the skills and attributes and found many of them funny, and maybe it was easy for me to grasp because I played AD&D and such games before they made the jump to video. I dunno, even if I hadn't I'm not sure I would have wondered if my action points were just dissapearing.
I'm gratified to hear of the turn around once they actually sunk their teeth into the game though, gives me hope for a resurgence of expected quality in game design.
Interesting Article
Not sure if this has been posted before. If it has, my apologies.
http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/10/fallout-3.html
Not sure if this has been posted before. If it has, my apologies.
http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/10/fallout-3.html
Jidai Geki
It Wandered In From the Wastes
That is an interesting read- to get the perspective of a casual gamer experiencing Fallout for the first time. It's a bit like Dangerous Minds but they play computer games instead.
I think that the majority of seasoned gamers forget how daunting they can be to a non-gamer. Playing even a simple FPS with someone who never plays games becomes an exercise in frustration as they run repeatedly into a wall because they can't operate two analogue sticks or a mouse/keyboard combo at the same time. Watching someone who never plays games try to play something as relatively inaccessible and open-ended as Fallout? An interesting experiment.
I think that the majority of seasoned gamers forget how daunting they can be to a non-gamer. Playing even a simple FPS with someone who never plays games becomes an exercise in frustration as they run repeatedly into a wall because they can't operate two analogue sticks or a mouse/keyboard combo at the same time. Watching someone who never plays games try to play something as relatively inaccessible and open-ended as Fallout? An interesting experiment.
It was already in the news. Not easy to find at the moment because of all those review round-ups, that nobody is really reading anymore.
But I see, there is a new entry on his blog.
But I see, there is a new entry on his blog.
Erny
It Wandered In From the Wastes
At work we gave one guy FO2 (cause he never played fallouts) and explained him how turnbase works briefly. He got into the game in no time and was hooked, enjoying the tactical combat and the story.
So I think it just needs a good tutorial to make a player understand the very basics - then its no problem and even "new generation" gamers can grasp it
So I think it just needs a good tutorial to make a player understand the very basics - then its no problem and even "new generation" gamers can grasp it
I had no problems getting into the game whatsoever. Maybe because I played the Fallout demo first.
Lexx said:
What he writes about is basically the reaction I had to the first 10-15 hours of gameplay. The game is novel at first but then slowly the realization creeps in that you are doing the same things over and over. Even worse is how rushed the main quest feels.
Oh well.
PetrolMan