I pretty much never trust Gamespy. I like to read their previews to find out what’s cming and what it’s like, but qualititatively their reviews are really unreliable, and often appear to have been bought and paid-for with advertising.
No review I ever wrote for Gamespy was influenced by advertising. Or even by the niceness of the developers and PR reps I occasionally spoke with if I had tech issues.
Out of curiosity SB who DO you trust as game reviewers? I usually hit GameSpy and IGN as I like the way their sites are laid out…and I generally find their reviews go along well with my own (well, they love the Total War series anyway…what’s more to like?? :)).
-XT
Here’s a translated Q&A with French magazine CanardPC that seems like a fair accounting of their 30 minutes with the game.
http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=43893
Without knowing which revies, exactly, you wrote, this statement means little to me. I’m not saying I believe you’re corrupt, or that you’re dishonest personally. But I’ve noticed that most of the “big reviewers” online and off fall over themselves to offer up grotesquely inflated scores to mediocre big-name titles with big advertising budgets. (Such as Oblivion, MGS 2 and 4, etc.)
I’m definitely not one of the fanboys that is already declaring it a failure, and I’m looking forward to it, but I suspect I’d be more accepting of it if it was some other sort of post-apocalyptic RPG and not Fallout 3. It has high standards to live up to.
I’m concerned that it’ll be Oblivion with guns. I liked Oblivion, but it wasn’t a deep RPG. You had some freedom to roam, but it was free in a way sort of like the grand theft auto game. You could fiddle with whatever you wanted, or follow specific quest lines. But you didn’t really have any decisions that affected the world or gameplay experience dramatically outside of what type of character you were. To complete quests, you’d do A or go to B - not make moral choices or have multiple options for accomplishing your goals. It was lacking in the RPG elements.
I fear Fallout 3 will be the same way. You’ll have various objectives and you’ll be able to roam the world, but you won’t have that deep fallout experience.
I’m also concerned it’ll have dumbed down gameplay because it was developed originally for consoles, like Oblivion.
On the plus side, the art/design teams seem to really have a good feel for what the fallout universe should look like. The environments look great and the pip boy is really well done.
I’m actually thinking of getting the survival edition , which isn’t something I usually do because the pip boy alarm clock looks so damn cool.
Exactly. The Oblivion experience was broad but shallow in that you had a lot of options regarding what order to do things in (or whether to do them at all), but those options didn’t really have any consequences.
Yes you did, but you didn’t post-right the link and deny me rights to reposting it. It’s all about the § symbol.
As to the topic at hand, I think Mass Effect showed you could mix FPS elements with a deep character development system and come out with a really good game. Mass Effect was only short some polish from being a really great game, in my eyes.
After seeing some of the footage and reading a few articles of people who have had some hands-on time with Fallout (including that written slaying of the game posted in this thread), I’m concerned this game might not even live up to Oblivion.
I’m pretty cynical and pessimistic, so I’m preparing for the worst, but really, a game like Fallout takes time to really get into, and that reviewer didn’t seem to have it for that long.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Fallout in the first hour or so: “Whee I get to kill rats! Oh look a scorpion, now I’m dead!”
But when I started interacting with the world, it grew on me until it eventually became one of my favorite games of all time.
Let’s hope that they somehow managed to do i right…
It is useful to distinguish the passionate Fallout fans, herein “Fallout fans” from those infamous sorts of fans who at one time referred to Feargus Urquart as “Feargus Imatwat” – these fans shall be referred herein as “Twatters.”
The fans have known for a decade that the next Fallout was never going to be an isometric turn-based RPG. Many of them have chosen not to accept this. It breaks my heart as well that the genre had gone from moribund to officially dead. Nothing is bringing it back, and even fan efforts have been very slow in developing anything new with the old Fallout engine.
Of course the Twatters do not accept this change. But more than that, they don’t accept any change. They glom on to anything they can present as evidence that the new game is “not really Fallout” by such picky standards that even Fallout probably wouldn’t qualify if it didn’t have the pedigree of actually being Fallout. The original was not stamped out according to a divine plan – it was a serendipitous mash-up of a lot of disparate elements, though it did deliver an emergent sense of a consistent world. Now of course the Twatters are committed to that original haphazard pastiche, and are impatient with variations on it. The Twatters would never accept the kind of creativity put into a new Fallout that made Fallout happen to begin with. It’s kind of like the old joke – a conservative is one who admires a reformer long after he is dead.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the new game although it will never take the place of being able to play Fallout for the first time once more. A lot of things went on in my life around that time that break my heart for being unrepeatable.
If I recall correctly, Van Buren, which was the official fallout 3 project just a few years ago, played and looked very similarly to fallout 2.
I’m definitely not a twatter - and I’m hoping I like the new game - but I’m skeptical that you can keep the same feel in a more action oriented game.
I think for me the most important question revolves around VATS and normal FPS mode. Does playing without VATS give you any advantage whatsoever? If you have the skillz to get a headshot everytime does it put you on an even playing field as someone who actually developed that skill?
But I really feel that this VATS could be cool. The old Fallout was a bit clunky in the way you entered and exited combat. Plus if you had 8 people shooting at you they all had to take a turn. Why not have all non-players go at the same time, and with VATS you essentially take your turns as you normally would?
I can tell at least this: the VATS system will definitely make it more my style of FPS. I like the level of graphics you get in an FPS and the down-in-it perspective, but I don’t like firing and bunny hopping in a circle and all that twitch crap. When I do play an FPS, I tend to strain my fingers staying in crouch mode most of the time. That’s why I like “first person sneaker” games like Deus Ex. Have you ever played Deus Ex multiplayer? It’s spy vs. spy. Whoever gets spotted first simply dies.
I’m very hopeful about the new Fallout, and frankly you could play a lot of worse things than “Oblivion with guns.” I’d far rather play “Morrowind with guns” and in fact that would be much more Fallout-like in important ways.
I’ve already pre-ordered the super-deluxe package. They got me with the kitsch. Not the “making of” video which I’m hardly ever going to get bored enough to watch, but the lunchbox and the alarm clock. I also have a special Fallout Tactics tote bag I got for pre-ordering that game, as well as one of only two Fallout Tactics t-shirts given as prizes for their caption contest years ago. Somewhere I have a Fallout 2 sticker that they were mailing away to anyone who e-mailed to ask for them. If I didn’t end up buying the super deluxe version, I’d have just ended up trying to find a deal on it from eBay for years afterward.
1Up’s podcast, The 1Up Show, has footage from a demo session and meeting with one of the guys at Bethesda. That link should go right to the correct video, E3 Episode 3: Resident Evil 5 and Fallout 3. The Fallout section starts at about 12 minutes in.
The game play looks like a decent compromise between FPS and turn-based, and there are definitely a LOT of ties to the original games. The look and feel of the interface elements, the sense of humor, and quite a few of the character building options are almost identical. It looks gorgeous too. They do seem to have thought quite a bit about balance and skill design. Building your character is actually done through some of the choices you make about how you approach the first 30 minutes or so of the game. They didn’t talk all that much about character progression and plot, but if they put anywhere near as much effort into that as they did these other elements, it should be pretty decent.
I’d buy it even if it were just an FPS with delusions of grandeur, based on what I’ve seen so far. Looks like a lot of fun.
I care more about the quality of the story than what perspective it’s in. I’ll happily take an FPS if the story’s as well-written and quirky as it was in the previous games.
Well, I have to say, I’m sold. The 1UP video was excellent, and the game does look great. CanardPC were obviously smoking drugs. Bad drugs.
I like FPS’s too, but they’re always in heavily supply in some fashion or another. I want gameplay more than I want story, and that’s what Fallout supplied and that’s what I’m worried about. Bethesda’s track record on that is extreme unreliability.
I’ll watch the video, but I saw enough bald-faced lies in videos in the run-up to Oblivion to take anything associated with Bethesda with a grain of salt.
Can you elaborate on that? How did Oblivion’s trailers lie? I don’t really understand how they even could, tbh.
The only thing I recall was a lot of talk about how the “radiant” AI was going to revolutionize NPC interactions with both the player and the world itself. NPC’s would have needs that had to be met, and they would go about meeting them in intelligent, realistic ways, and usually through some interaction with other NPC’s.
They did a demo of one NPC lady in her house which the devs followed around. She sat down for dinner and ate, played with her dog, trained her skills (by shooting magical spells at targets). They also showed other NPc’s going about town shopping, conversing, visiting the local Inns.
The final game AI however was nothing like what they had touted. And what little there was, was more annoying than anything else. One moment you were in a completely empty Tavern, the next, 20 NPC’s walk in (at the same time) and start eating and things go flying around (The physics engine fo rthe game was a little nutty). You go upstairs, come right back down and 50 NPC’s are all headed for the door at the same time.