Also: the skills of the game are not proficiency enabling a task ~they are bonuses to standard tasks that anyone can do.
This makes me recall the skill challenges in
Fable II, which were very simplistic in design but brilliant and appropriately difficult in execution. A dot zips back and forth across a semicircular-shaped bar, and a shrinking band within the bar is your target. All you (the player) do is hit a button, and you score points for timing it while the dot is within the band, and you get more points for the longer you wait and the smaller the band shrinks to, but that also makes timing the button press harder. So simple, yet challenging, and the more points you get, the quicker you level up that skill. How would you feel about tasks like that if they were included in the modern
Fallout games? Not just fetch quests. Not just directions to follow, but being granted the opportunity to exercise SOME form of skill, regardless of whether that skill actually bears any relevance to the activity being performed in the game.
I mean, I always think about things that could have been transplanted from other games into the modern FO titles which might've heavily improved them, but this is the first time I recalled that skill leveling system from
Fable II and I personally think it would've been nifty if a few of these were present in the game. =)
FPS doesn't mean cosole or non-RPG.
games like Ultima underworld, System shock, Deus ex are great RPG but not for console.
even between same FP view RPGs, there are many difference between TES Arena and Morrowind which are dungeon crawling and quest RPG.
FPS doesn't mean non-RPG, but FPS also DOESN'T mean RPG.
The common complaint about "consolitis" is that the controls for a console are a single handheld object containing less than 20 inputs, compared to a PC game where your inputs are a mouse (upwards of 4 inputs) and a keyboard (upwards of 100 inputs). Most PC games made use of the number keys for subsections of their control schemes (weapon inventory in shooters, your action skills in
Fallout, etc) and still had over 80 other keys to make use of, and this is already most of the inputs you can make use of from a console controllers. So console games, perfectly reasonably, would consolidate (please pardon the pun) its controls into fewer and fewer actions.
For example: Sneaking, Lockpicking, and Pickpocketing would be separated into 3 different actions on the keyboard, in addition to other actions such as observing and/or "interacting with", in any combination you see fit, in the original
Fallout games. In
Tactics even more controls are added that further interact with these in the form of Standing, Crouching, or Prone. yet in the modern games all of these are narrowed down to the binary state of standing or crouching and what object you're interacting with depending on your binary state determines what your interaction choices are. You can't speak to someone while you're sneaking, you can't try to nonchalantly pickpocket while standing incognito, you can't just "interact" with a character unless they have the option explicitly programmed into them.
Restricting all of the action options as a result of the number of inputs being so drastically limited on console controllers is the cause for the so-called "watered down" effect, which is largely justified, but in plenty of cases offers the game creators a situation to creatively exceed (as I've mentioned before, elsewhere, "provide a 'box' to think outside of"). Games made for consoles offer far fewer options for players to explore because of the fewer control inputs, and players transitioning from games with a greater abundance of options/actions/etc to games with far fewer will feel the impact of these restrictions in almost exclusively a negative manner, and understandably so. But just like the topic of this thread to begin with, extremists on any end of a matter, many take it too far and consider it a blight upon all things without exception. I feel that console controls offer plenty of things that the mouse and keyboard don't, and that approached appropriately and creatively the lack of inputs doesn't have to be restricting at all. In short, that it's not always a bad thing. But that impulsive notion that it IS always a bad thing is "consolitis". At least in the case of FO3 (and by extension, FONV) it's definitely a bad thing, and the limitations weren't handled well at all.
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