[QUOTE=nevermore]
What I liked best about Fallout were things that could possibly translate just fine to an Oblivion-like setting: the dialogue, the nonlinearity, the fact that you could talk your way into or out of almost ANY situation. There were an extremely impressive number of scenarios in which you had a choice to either fight or lie/negotiate. Another awesome thing about Fallout was the way that your skills affected your dialogue choices in a very real way… your choices were limited or expanded according to how you developed your character, which was so refreshing. I don’t like feeling like I’m the same person with the same knowledge and opportunities every time I play a different character. These are both things that could be incorporated into an FPS setting, but I don’t know how successfully, since those games tend to focus so much on the visual environment and AI that everything else tends to get marginalized.
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I agree completely with all of this, which is why I don’t much care that the game is being transplanted into a FPS enviroment. None of that requires turn based, isometric gameplay to be implemented. And a lot of it has been implemented in FPSes before, to good effect. I liked the combat system of Fallout, but it was the setting and the writing that set it apart from other RPGs, not the combat system. Can Bethesda deliver on that? I don’t honestly know. They never have before, but they’ve gotten closer with each new RPG they’ve released. This could be the one that puts them over the top, which would be awesome. It could be merely as good as Oblivion, which would satisfy me. Or they could completely cock it up and make a giant pile of shit. If that happens, well, so what? We’ll have two great, classic Fallout games, and one POS no one wants to ever play again. Is that fundamentally different from just having two great, classic Fallout games and nothing else?
It’s also worth noting that the franchise has never had particularly impressive AI. Remember how often you’d get drilled in the back by your own team members, because they couldn’t figure out that it’s a bad idea to go full auto on a bad guy when your character is in hand-to-hand range with him? The AI they used in Oblivion would be a huge improvement over the one they had in the original Fallout games.