Abandon hope all ye who enter here: Fallout 3

Cafe Society
21

[QUOTE=Johnny Angel]
Good lord, not me. Having to save before you travel because it may turn out to be impossible to find the entrance to the dungeon. The quests are almost all randomly generated and are basically all the same. The randomly generated dungeons are buggy and you need to save after every room because you’re liable to fall out into the void (a problem not entirely absent even from Oblivion). Morowind was a huge improvement in playability.
[/QUOTE]

Speaking of this, I’d actually like to see a game which mixed randomly-generated quests with pre-built ones. I think it would make a very cool game if they went back and used this old, but great idea. It all depends on execution, y’know?

22

I have such mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I’m so thrilled that it’s being done by a big-money company that won’t fold during development, but on the other, I’m rather annoyed that it’s this particular one. (BioWare, IMO, would have been a far superior candidate.)

From their previous attempts at roleplaying games, it seems to me that Bethesda seems to be good at making very pretty empty shells. They can make very large, beautiful, dynamic worlds, but they can’t seem to fill them with anything of substance. “Characters” are flat and boring, conversations (and voice actors!) are endlessly repeated, there’s no humor or irony to speak of, and stories are so limp as to be virtually lifeless or even nonexistent. Nonlinearity can be a good thing, but in Morrowind and Oblivion, there’s no drive to complete the core story at all, because it’s no more interesting than any of the other thousands of subquests.

Fallout can’t be Fallout without distinct characters. Fallout can’t be Fallout without conversation choices relative to character type and attributes, without the chance for relating to someone with subtlety, deceit, guile, charm, contempt, or rage, without wittiness and sarcasm in both setting/situation and dialogue, without a story that’s genuinely interesting, immersive, and pervasive, as opposed to just some little thing you can check out if you feel like it.

There are definitely other things that I feel any game in this series needs to have, but these are the ones I worry most about, based on the type of RPG Bethesda seems to be interested in and/or capable of.

I don’t doubt that a great Fallout 3 could be made in this engine. I just don’t trust at this point that Bethesda knows the difference between a great Fallout 3 and a post-apocalyptic Oblivion, or even cares.

23

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
Speaking of this, I’d actually like to see a game which mixed randomly-generated quests with pre-built ones. I think it would make a very cool game if they went back and used this old, but great idea. It all depends on execution, y’know?
[/QUOTE]

That would be The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first in the series, as I recall. There were some fixed dungeons (storyline ones) and some randomized ones. I think Daggerfall mixed prefab and random dungeons as well. Daggerfall was roundly criticized for the emphasis on “FedEd quests” that are the easy way to do semi-random missions.

24

I love Oblivion, and I admit I’ll probably buy Fallout 3 on its release date. I think my biggest excitement is that the Oblivion game engine is so moddable that the user community should be able to have a sizable stable of mods within a month of release.

25

[QUOTE=nevermore]
I have such mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I’m so thrilled that it’s being done by a big-money company that won’t fold during development, but on the other, I’m rather annoyed that it’s this particular one. (BioWare, IMO, would have been a far superior candidate.)

From their previous attempts at roleplaying games, it seems to me that Bethesda seems to be good at making very pretty empty shells. They can make very large, beautiful, dynamic worlds, but they can’t seem to fill them with anything of substance. “Characters” are flat and boring, conversations (and voice actors!) are endlessly repeated, there’s no humor or irony to speak of, and stories are so limp as to be virtually lifeless or even nonexistent. Nonlinearity can be a good thing, but in Morrowind and Oblivion, there’s no drive to complete the core story at all, because it’s no more interesting than any of the other thousands of subquests.

Fallout can’t be Fallout without distinct characters. Fallout can’t be Fallout without conversation choices relative to character type and attributes, without the chance for relating to someone with subtlety, deceit, guile, charm, contempt, or rage, without wittiness and sarcasm in both setting/situation and dialogue, without a story that’s genuinely interesting, immersive, and pervasive, as opposed to just some little thing you can check out if you feel like it.

There are definitely other things that I feel any game in this series needs to have, but these are the ones I worry most about, based on the type of RPG Bethesda seems to be interested in and/or capable of.

I don’t doubt that a great Fallout 3 could be made in this engine. I just don’t trust at this point that Bethesda knows the difference between a great Fallout 3 and a post-apocalyptic Oblivion, or even cares.
[/QUOTE]

It’s hardly worth me writing a reply now. You called it nevermore.

I’m not abandoning hope, it’s all I got to hold onto. But after Deus Ex 2, Master of Orion 3 and Homeworld 2, I’ve lost all faith in sequels.

26

[QUOTE=Johnny Angel]
Good lord, not me. Having to save before you travel because it may turn out to be impossible to find the entrance to the dungeon. The quests are almost all randomly generated and are basically all the same. The randomly generated dungeons are buggy and you need to save after every room because you’re liable to fall out into the void (a problem not entirely absent even from Oblivion). Morowind was a huge improvement in playability.
[/QUOTE]

See, either I managed to apply just the right magical concoction of patches and updates, or I somehow was immune to most of the game-destroying bugs that so many people apparently encountered. About the only major bug I dealt with was a clipping problem when using a flying spell in a dungeon, and even that I thought was kind of fun. I get what you’re saying about the quest designs being too similar; my hope would be that more variety and purpose could be incorporated into even the random dungeons. But I really liked the fact that I could be walking along (or riding my horse, which could also fly! whoo!) and just encounter a dungeon that wasn’t marked on any map and I could just start exploring and maybe even find some good loot. I liked the huge area to explore, and the sense that this was an entire continent.

27

[QUOTE=Brainiac4]
That would be The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first in the series, as I recall. There were some fixed dungeons (storyline ones) and some randomized ones. I think Daggerfall mixed prefab and random dungeons as well. Daggerfall was roundly criticized for the emphasis on “FedEd quests” that are the easy way to do semi-random missions.
[/QUOTE]

There’s been a number of games like that. I think the best example as Shadowrun (Sega Genesis, not Snes). Fantastic game and extremely well-implemented, band it had virtually every quest done randomly. But what you were after changed, too, and it could be done far beter with today’s technology. It’s all in the writing. You have to make sure you’ve got 80 different ways to describe the situation and can combine them adequately.