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[Virtz]

(...) This comment is clearly made in ignorance, because Oblivion's dialogue system is the Morrowind Big List of Topics. (...)

Look what I've highlighted in red and think about it for a second.

Dodging (or any kind of special enemy behavior that involves physical movement) is significantly more difficult to do well in a 3D environment than it is in a 2D one. However, I will conceed that the thing with melee weapons kind of sucks.

It was done perfectly well in NWN 1. Well, except for the lack of a "missing" animation.

Oh, come on. What is this, kindergarten? "It does too have choices and consequences," "Oh, yeah? Well they're dumb choices and consequences!" However, I am a little curious  - what exactly constitutes "smart" choices and consequences. Give a hypothetical example (not one from the original Fallout games, please, I want a control).

Well, if you're asking for something not from the original Fallout games, would a publisher cut feature count?

Originally, helping Killian in Junktown was supposed to run the town into the ground because of his steel fist while helping Gizmo would make it flourish, a twist ending. If you were helping what we consider "the good guys", it's bye bye Junktown. But in the end, the publisher didn't like "tricking" the player like that and had Tim Cain cut it.

And if that's too close to home, then look at how The Witcher does it. The consequences of your choices are unknown until much later in the game and there's no real good/evil choices, it's about picking the lesser evil. For example:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you spare the vigilante werewolf in Vizima and don't have him changed back into a human despite it being your job given by his spouse, he'll help you fight some criminal scum later in the game. While it might not be the best of consequences, the choice isn't right or wrong in a good/evil sort of way.

Nuclear-powered cars: Missed the whole "Fifties naive optimism about nuclear power and the future" thing, huh?

Missed the whole "limited number of Chrysalis Highwaymen were built and otherwise the traffic had stopped" thing? Unless someone spent their life gathering Highwaymen in Washington, this makes no sense. And why would there be a war for oil in the world if the cars were all nuclear powered? The reactor driven cars are supposed to be rare, not your typical FPS fuel barrel. And if they're so common place and knowledge of how to dismantle their engine is apparently lost, then how does this work?

And people being on the east coast isn't particularly stupid. It's been a matter of decades since Fallout 2, and almost a century since Fallout 1. The Enclave being there is hardly a huge lore breach - the survivors needed a new headquarters after the Oil Rig blew up, and where could be better than Washington DC?

How about away from the BoS and Super Mutants? What sort of moronic faction goes anywhere near other powerful factions after being beaten?

The old capital, easily accessible by vertibird

Except vertibirds are short-ranged, hence Navarro.

, and, best of all, far, far away from the crazy ass mutants in California who blew up the Oil Rig. And, well, why shouldn't the super mutants and Brotherhood of Steel have made their way east, eventually?

Ok, so a Brotherhood of Steel, Enclave and Super Mutants walk into a bar... and bullshit. The Super Mutants were retreating away from the BoS, why would they want to be anywhere near them? The real BoS doesn't care about Lyon and his fellow morons, so that's fine. But the Enclave, where in the world are they supposed to be getting recruits? From the "dirty mutants" they wanted to exterminate? It's like seeing homosexual black Jews in the Nazi Wehrmacht. They shouldn't be more than a remnant simply trying to survive, not propagating Malcolm McDowell as the president of the US and hunting vault dwellers for whatever reason and wearing Fallout Tactics armour.

The cars are apparently nuclear powered, so I'm assuming by shooting them the reactor itself is damaged and causes damage to everything nearby.

Right, so Bethesda is trying to convince everyone that after 200 years, no one would've long since looted the car's engine despite there being things powered by it like power armour and that a few bullets to a reactor (or actually anywhere on the freaking car) cause a nuclear explosion. How does that make sense? And again, who the fuck would drive something that explodes in a nuclear explosion when it crashes? Besides a complete Idiocracy brand moron who thinks nuclear explosions are so awesome it'd be worth it, that is.

[Cthulhu]

DOOD NUKULER EXPOSIONS ROOL.

Anyway,

Ok, first off, Oblivion. Have you seen the excuse for changing Cyrodil from a rainforest to a Middle-Earth rip-off? It's the most retarded piece of "lore" I've ever read.

When I read that, I thought it was a wiki page, and a disgruntled fan had put it in there as an attempt to be funny.  Only until I read what you said did I realize that was something they threw in when they realized people noticed the whole Jungle-to-Forest thing. 

Question: Was the Oblivion team the same as the Morrowind team?  Please say it wasn't...

[chaoticag]

Here is my two pence:

when fallout 3 was announced, I did what I usually do. I pretty much ignored it.
A few weeks ago though, I noticed it a bit more and wanted to know what it was, so I read the previews.

To me, this does not seem like an oblivion with guns, mainly because the one annoying thing about oblivion was cut out, leveling does not make the game more annoying.

Then this thread comes along, and I read most of it, skipping the last two pages as everyone seems to be sticking to obscure details that I could care less about.

Here are my opinions, feel free to chalenge them, but remember, being too open-minded can be as bad as being too closed minded:

-Fallout is not made for the pc:True, you can't argue with that.

In the end, in this modern day where comanies spend millions of dollars it is no longer about the die-hard fan, but about the bigger market. There is more profit in making a console port to the pc, than porting a pc game to a console.

-Exploding nuklear cars:

Realism is bad here, as every cold fusion powered car (that is their explanation) should have either been set off by the nuklear attack, scraped, or used to power buildings by now.

Gameplay element: Refreshing, as the use of the enviroment is often neglected.

-Relations to fallout 1 and 2:

Could care less here, having never played them, plus there is a certain amount of stress that a story can be put under. Is it for the better? I'm not sure, although I'm more familiar with washington DC than California.

-Lack of sex:

Everone seems to be afraid of the ESRB, these days, but I can gaurantee sex references if this is going to be anything like oblivion. (Fun fact: oblivion had a book in the fighters guild tower thingy, a fun read, although starts off boring.)

-This discussion:

I think that the people who disagree should at least put what they would have done diffrently, it would be more benificial than just saying "look at what they did here, blasphamy!". And don't say that I'm trying to insult you, because that is how it seems like to me so far.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Great.  People are going to forget I was even part of this discussion by the time I have time to finish my post.

[Torak]

-Exploding nuklear cars:

Realism is bad here, as every cold fusion powered car (that is their explanation) should have either been set off by the nuklear attack, scraped, or used to power buildings by now.

Gameplay element: Refreshing, as the use of the enviroment is often neglected.

What? Exploding objects in an FPS are a refreshment? What about exploding barrels which work their way into EVERY GODDAMN FPS EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE GAME. Give the Cars a barrel model and there will be no difference.

[Tilla]

This is the worst thread on this entire site.

[Okenido]

^ never has seen the troll threads.

[chaoticag]

-Exploding nuklear cars:

Realism is bad here, as every cold fusion powered car (that is their explanation) should have either been set off by the nuklear attack, scraped, or used to power buildings by now.

Gameplay element: Refreshing, as the use of the enviroment is often neglected.

What? Exploding objects in an FPS are a refreshment? What about exploding barrels which work their way into EVERY GODDAMN FPS EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE GAME. Give the Cars a barrel model and there will be no difference.

I think of the game as an rpg. Same as mass effect.

[Virtz]

Question: Was the Oblivion team the same as the Morrowind team?  Please say it wasn't...

Partially anyway. Oblivion credits. Morrowind credits.

To me, this does not seem like an oblivion with guns, mainly because the one annoying thing about oblivion was cut out, leveling does not make the game more annoying.

The leveling's still there, just that it's toned down to certain areas. It may sound less annoying, but leveling itself wasn't that annoying in the TES series until Oblivion, so I've faith in them that they'll make it a broken piece of garbage anyway.

-Lack of sex:

Everone seems to be afraid of the ESRB, these days, but I can gaurantee sex references if this is going to be anything like oblivion. (Fun fact: oblivion had a book in the fighters guild tower thingy, a fun read, although starts off boring.)

Oblivion had less references to sex than Morrowind (had a brothel) or Daggerfall (had frontal nudity).

Not only that, we've already seen in a preview that it'll be toned down compared to Fallout 1 or 2. In a preview, the player asked a prostitute and she said he's too young. Why would a prostitute in a nuclear wasteland have anything against sleeping with a 19 year old? Are they trying to tell me that there's a legal age in this nuclear wasteland and that it's 21?

I think of the game as an rpg. Same as mass effect.

Bringing in Diablo elements isn't exactly refreshing the aRPG genre, either.

[McDoomhammer]

I'll bite, because I seem to have missed something here.  Why was levelling in Oblivion bad?

[Kagus]

Even I can answer that one.

The levelling system in Oblivion was based around your major skills.  When you created a character, you would pick a few major skills that you felt suited your character (you'd get a bonus to them when the character was finished).

The more you use a skill the better you get at it, just like it should be.

However, after levelling up your major skills by a certain amount, you would gain another character level.  A character level was basic RPG fare, but you'd have to rest somewhere in order to "confirm" the level-up.  Things are alright so far.

When you level up, you are given a choice of which attributes (intelligence, strength, agility, that sort of thing) you would like to increase.  Every skill was tied to a particular attribute, and there was a bit of synergy between skill and attribute.

At the level-up attribute increase screen, each attribute had a potential gain that is directly linked to how much you trained that skill since your last level-up.  This means that if you used a strength-based skill a lot, you would be able to get more points added to strength if you picked it as an attribute you wanted to increase. If you used an agility skill a lot, same thing for agility.

Here's where it gets bad.   If you did a lot of training in your major skills, the attribute level-up bonuses would not be all that great by the time the level-up occurred.  However, if you stayed away from the level-up inducing major skills and instead practiced a lot in your minor skills, the attribute bonuses associated with those minor skills would be much higher when you finally got around to levelling up.


That's ridiculously confusing.  Lemme try again.

A warrior with the major skills of blocking, sword use, and heavy armor use is setting out to buff himself up.  He goes out into the woods and fights with his sword and shield for long enough that his major skills go up enough for him to level up.

He sleeps, and picks strength (swordfighting) and endurance (blocking, heavy armor) as his attributes to increase.  He gets +2 points in strength and +3 points in endurance.


Now roll back the clock.  Instead of fighting, the warrior decides to train up his athletics skill (endurance), which is not one of his majors.  He runs for a very long time, and gets a few levels in the skill.

He then decides to find a mace and start smacking people around with it (strength).  He gets several levels in that skill.  Again, it's not one of his major skills.


Now he goes into the forest and fights critters with his heavy armor use, blocking, and swordfighting.

When he levels up, he picks strength and endurance, just like in the first scenario.  Only this time, instead of getting +2 to strength and +3 to endurance, he gets +4 to strength and +5 to endurance.  By staying away from training his major skills, he got a better deal out of the level-up.

[Cthulhu]

Also, NPC survivability plummets with high levels.  Remember the guards in Kvatch when you're like level 3, heroically fighting the daedra?  Try it at level 17.  They don't stand a chance, and just fly around limply.

[Brendan]

Didn't stats work like that in Morrowind, too? Although, you need 10 major skill level-ups to level up your character, so if you played around with crossbows for 5 skill-ups (+5 to agility) and spears (+5 endurance) when you levelled up, assuming they were both major skills, you could get +5 to agility and +5 to endurance. You also got an additional stat point in Morrowind which I usually gave to Luck because nothing changed its modifiers.

[chaoticag]

Didn't stats work like that in Morrowind, too? Although, you need 10 major skill level-ups to level up your character, so if you played around with crossbows for 5 skill-ups (+5 to agility) and spears (+5 endurance) when you levelled up, assuming they were both major skills, you could get +5 to agility and +5 to endurance. You also got an additional stat point in Morrowind which I usually gave to Luck because nothing changed its modifiers.

As far as I know they did, except leveling up made a diffrence as weak enemies stayed weak. Unless you trained your minor skills in oblivion then you get screwed over pretty fast by the twenties, plus healing spells and potions don't do much healing later on.

[ravensgrace]

...to choose from, and a ludicrously long list of beards.

That settles it for this dwarf!

Nah, I'm only kidding.  I'm mostly an ASCII/isometric kind of person.  I haven't been drawn to anything first person since WL, DW, or BT.¹  Well, 'cept maybe for p***y², which is definitely first person. 

¹ Wasteland, Dragon Wars, or Bard's Tale
² Christine