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[Virtz]

ive never played crysis but isnt that a FPS that doesnt have 100's of different 3-D movable physics controlled objects

Can you wreck a shack piece by piece or tear a tree apart in Fallout 3? No. It may not have as many small junk items lying around (although there still are many), but it does in turn quite accurately simulate the foliage in the world. And does it with much better lighting for each leaf than you'd see on someone's face in FO3 (possible hyperbole).

NPCs that each have their own voices and things to say,

You've got me there. That's clearly why the engine chokes when there are 10 people on screen.

a freaking huge map,

That's actually been Crytek's trademark of sorts since Far Cry - "Hey, let's load up the whole island even though only a portion will be necessary!". And by the by, FO3 and OB don't actually load the whole thing either, they load areas up discretely. Try riding a horse in OB on a not so fast computer and see for yourself.

and enough quests to keep you playing for days?

So do MMOs, I can't see how that made them look and run like shit. Hey, it's actually quite meaningless!

dont compare such a big game's graphics to a small one's that uses the same requirmenrs

Why? They're both using up resources mostly on stuff I don't care about. Except one looks good and does what its genre is supposed to do well and the other looks like Morrowind and could really use the resources for things other than 5 layers of bloom.

why put in extra NPCs if they are not going to do anything important? 3 out of 4 NPCs had something to do with a quest.

What? 3 out of 4 were fillers. Well, maybe not 3/4, but a half. The sorts that gave you stuff when you're either really good or really evil. I think only Rivet City actually had a greater deal of actually useful NPCs. Most of the others didn't have all that much to say normally either, although they did come into play during some quests from other settlements, I'll give them that.

Still though, hostile filler NPCs - good, non-hostile filler NPCs - bad?

as for the ghouls emotion, i dont think id have any left after a life of having my flesh peel off and being hit by people.....

Unless you were a woman and had a better voice actor? And this never kept Harold from having a morbid sense of humour (even though they kind of fucked that up in FO3).

[Puck]

Yup, it's a problem with the gamebryo engine. I wouldn't call the engine crap, as I don't know enough about coding, but its definetly behaving like crap.

If you have enough computing power to provide at least 60fps constant, it STILL will play like crap, UNTIL you add ifpsclamp=60 to the .ini, whooopdeeefuckingdooo now it runs smoothly. (well, you need to cap your framerate at 60 with vsync too) Admittedly, if you cannot tell 35 from 50 fps, you probably will not notice how and why the gamebryo engine sucks.

Problem is, there are (SMALL!) interior areas without any special apparent lighting effects that totally screw you over. Sucks big time. Same problem with oblivion.

Everytime your framerate differs from the ifpsclamp value, the games will slow down or speed up accordingly. Hey, at least its smooth -.-

Now, if there were fucking RELIABLE ways of capping a framerate at say ... 40... in those games, you could play them without ANY trouble. but the only tool I found that promises to do that.... just doesnt work properly

[Micro102]

ive never played crysis but isnt that a FPS that doesnt have 100's of different 3-D movable physics controlled objects

Can you wreck a shack piece by piece or tear a tree apart in Fallout 3? No. It may not have as many small junk items lying around (although there still are many), but it does in turn quite accurately simulate the foliage in the world. And does it with much better lighting for each leaf than you'd see on someone's face in FO3 (possible hyperbole).

a freaking huge map,

That's actually been Crytek's trademark of sorts since Far Cry - "Hey, let's load up the whole island even though only a portion will be necessary!". And by the by, FO3 and OB don't actually load the whole thing either, they load areas up discretely. Try riding a horse in OB on a not so fast computer and see for yourself.

and enough quests to keep you playing for days?

So do MMOs, I can't see how that made them look and run like shit. Hey, it's actually quite meaningless!

dont compare such a big game's graphics to a small one's that uses the same requirmenrs

Why? They're both using up resources mostly on stuff I don't care about. Except one looks good and does what its genre is supposed to do well and the other looks like Morrowind and could really use the resources for things other than 5 layers of bloom.

as for the ghouls emotion, i dont think id have any left after a life of having my flesh peel off and being hit by people.....

Unless you were a woman and had a better voice actor? And this never kept Harold from having a morbid sense of humour (even though they kind of fucked that up in FO3).

the shacks and trees are hardcoded to fall apart... they arent made out of peices of things that you can just hit off. cant say much for foliage as fallout doesnt have any lol

fallouts map is bigger, and all games load peice by peice...same with DF, and we all know that the larger the world the more lag. even though it isnt showing the world

MMOs have the graphics of a N64 and servers strong enough to hold 10000 online players. and i still think oblivion had more quests

i can say for certian fallout doesnt look like morrowind but i prefer the lower quality. for some reason oblivions graphics made the game seem a little off. anyway dont compare graphics of a game that focuses on graphics to one that focuses on content.

go to ghoul city... there are women and men ghouls. they all sound emotionless. you telling me they didint do that on purpose?

[Reasonableman]

the shacks and trees are hardcoded to fall apart... they arent made out of peices of things that you can just hit off.

Sorry, but you're very wrong on this count. You probably shouldn't be arguing with anyone if you haven't even played one of the games in question. I still don't understand exactly what the argument is about, but still.

[Puck]

I thought it's about if the gamebryo engine sucks.

I'd estimate 50% (did you know that 80% percent of all statistics are made up on the spot?) of gamers cannot or do not perceive one of the major problems of the engine. People tend to call it "microstuttering" but apparently that term actually describes a specific SLI synch problem, but there is no better word for the problem in the gamebryo engine yet.

Anyways. Pick an outside spot in FO3/Oblivion. A spot your PC is able to render properly at a decent framerate. Turn around 360°. If you dont notice how the vertical lines jump back and forth (IM NOT TALKING ABOUT TEARING HERE) youre one of the lucky people that doesnt notice it and can go play it happily ever after.

The rest of us, you know, the people that actually have put some points into perception, have to suffer from this horrible horrible thing.

If you use the ifpsclamp setting in the ini file, you can remedy that, but you have to provide a constant framerate to make it useful. The only way to RELIABLE cap the framerate in oblivion and fo3 is using vsync, tho, which means you have to spend a whole lot of mola so you can have a puter that constantly provides 60 frames.

now here comes the hook: go to rivet town, for instance. walk over the bridge, turn right, enter the market there. proceed in the direction of the burning barrel. Your fps WILL drop for no apparent reason.

I dont know whats going on there. Other than my cpu, maybe (2.4ghz core2duo) I have more than enough juice to run the game. I tried it on 800x600 with lowest settings, fps drops there.

Which fucks up the ifpsclamp setting.

Oblivion has even more of those mysterious molasses spots.

[Torak]

Which is why Morrowind with every graphics mod>Oblivion/Fallout 3.

[Puck]

Morrowind is better than those two even without any graphics mod 

[Aqizzar]

Wrong.  Without Better Heads and Bodies, Morrowind is unplayable, at least after having played with them included.

Logical quirk I thought of in Fallout 3: The Disarming the Bomb "Quest".

You roll into Megaton and automatically start a conversation with the Mayor.  You can offer to disarm the bomb, which he'll pay you 100 caps for.  You can try to squeeze another 400 caps from him, but even with 7 Charisma and 50 Speech, it's like 30% success possibility.

Anyway, you go down and 'disarm' the bomb, and are told the process would be a challenge for a master of explosives.  It's a process that requires all of three mouse clicks, and basically just checks if you took explosives as a tag skill, or just got it to 25-ish points.  (A note on realism - to disarm an atomic bomb, you can just bash up the trigger mechanism, or if you're paranoid, pull the solid-state explosive shell off, trivial tasks either way.)

The mayor rewards you 100 caps, and a free house, in a fit of altruism and poor real-estate management.  The somewhat cramped house comes with a fully-functional robot butler, who dispenses distilled water on command, which basically translates to free health and money, and a karma point for giving water to a guy who's dying literally right outside the town gate.  A free house and a magical robot, in a town with no water supply where the natives sleep ten to a room in a commonhouse, but you have to pry that other 400 caps out of the mayor's cold dead hands.

Now, this all makes a rote sort of sense in game-design terms.  You have to have skills to accomplish a task, and get better payment, but if you complete it either way you get a central place to rest, customize, and stash your stuff.  But there's about three or four points where realistic logic comes to screeching halt.

[Puck]

Wrong.  Without Better Heads and Bodies, Morrowind is unplayable, at least after having played with them included.

That's bollocks and you know it  We're playing games where kobolds look like this: "k" And we're happy doing so, aren't we?

But you're right about the bombquest ofc. BTW, I think if you start with the related attribute at max (which is stupid, because there are this bobbleheads for every stat) or if you just max out the according attribute with drugs, you should be able to tamper with the bomb anyway.

And what you described, about how to disarm an H-bomb (is that one?) ... well... that sounds about you need 25 explosives skill... because... it doesnt seem that hard, but where are those parts exactly?

[Deon]

Wrong.  Without Better Heads and Bodies, Morrowind is unplayable, at least after having played with them included.

That's bollocks and you know it  We're playing games where kobolds look like this: "k" And we're happy doing so, aren't we?

But you're right about the bombquest ofc. BTW, I think if you start with the related attribute at max (which is stupid, because there are this bobbleheads for every stat) or if you just max out the according attribute with drugs, you should be able to tamper with the bomb anyway.

And what you described, about how to disarm an H-bomb (is that one?) ... well... that sounds about you need 25 explosives skill... because... it doesnt seem that hard, but where are those parts exactly?

Right... The man is just too fed with stuff he can't find the difference .

[Aqizzar]

Wrong.  Without Better Heads and Bodies, Morrowind is unplayable, at least after having played with them included.

That's bollocks and you know it  We're playing games where kobolds look like this: "k" And we're happy doing so, aren't we?

ASCII forces us to use our imagination, or take an imagination cue from a tiny mess of pixels.  Vanilla Morrowind takes an unignorable nosedive into the Uncanny Valley.

And what you described, about how to disarm an H-bomb (is that one?) ... well... that sounds about you need 25 explosives skill... because... it doesnt seem that hard, but where are those parts exactly?

It's modeled on the Fat Man bomb, which achieved fission by compressing a sphere of uranium with a shell of plastique explosive.  Stripping that off would expose you to the uranium inside, but is otherwise completely safe.  Thinking about it, any bomb worth it's salt would have at least three triggers - atmospheric, pressure-plate, and a failsafe timer.  Since it hasn't blown up, that means all three triggers failed, so unless someone specifically went in and crossed the wires with a new battery, it couldn't possibly even set off the explosive shell and fizzile out, let alone detonate.

Apparently, I have an Explosives skill greater than 25.

[Granite26]

Still though, hostile filler NPCs - good, non-hostile filler NPCs - bad?

Yup

[Puck]

Filler-anything is mostly bad, isnt it?
I never heard somebody scream "YAY, filler"

maybe apart from "you won free gasoline" - "YAY, fill'er up!"

[Virtz]

the shacks and trees are hardcoded to fall apart... they arent made out of peices of things that you can just hit off. cant say much for foliage as fallout doesnt have any lol

They are, actually. You can pretty much punch individual walls off. And FO3 did have foliage around Harold's area. Point is though, that Crysis does simulate a lot of physics and that FO3 simulating each can as a physical object doesn't redeem it in terms of performance (especially considering it runs pretty much the same regardless of whether or not there are such objects in the area).

fallouts map is bigger

No. Crysis - 8x8km = 64 square kilometers, Fallout 3 - below 16 square miles (around 31.36 square kilometers).

MMOs have the graphics of a N64 and servers strong enough to hold 10000 online players.

You must've had quite a spruced up N64.

and i still think oblivion had more quests

Maybe than an MMO in alpha. That or a free Korean one where all you do is grind.

i can say for certian fallout doesnt look like morrowind but i prefer the lower quality. for some reason oblivions graphics made the game seem a little off.

Problem is that it runs worse than Oblivion (save for the loading times). And it really does look like Morrowind's ashlands - bunch of repetetive hills, boulders and dead trees.

anyway dont compare graphics of a game that focuses on graphics to one that focuses on content.

I haven't mentioned any game that focuses on content yet. We're talking about a game that sacrifices cities and towns for pretty graphics on an engine best used for strategy games and a game that pretty much focuses on graphics with a side order of physics (when they really should've focused more on the latter).

go to ghoul city... there are women and men ghouls. they all sound emotionless. you telling me they didint do that on purpose?

Actually, having recently seen a gameplay video of Ghoul City, they seem a bit more emotional than I remember. What really struck me as emotionless was when I heard the ghoul in front of Tenpenny Towers trying to get in. Somehow that embedded itself into my skull as a representation of all ghoul voice actor performances (since it's the same guy). So you're sort of right here, the ghouls weren't all bad. Still though, I can recall some pretty stiff or stupid sounding performances (although more so from Oblivion than from FO3).

Still though, hostile filler NPCs - good, non-hostile filler NPCs - bad?

Yup

Why? Assuming they don't act retarded (well, good luck with that when using Radiant AI), they can really help create the atmosphere.

Take the druggies, street whores and pimps in Fallout 2's New Reno (yes, I know the city's unbelievable in a post apocalyptic world, but still), you can't actually talk to them, yet it wouldn't feel the same without them.

Or take cities in Daggerfall - generic as hell, full of filler NPCs only there to give you (possibly misleading) directions and tell rumours, yet they feel more like cities than anything in OB. You're not that likely to find interesting people among random pedestrians in reality. Most of them should be pretty boring for coherency's sake.

[Puck]

Just for the record, I thought oblivion ran worse than fallout 3. Well, I still do.

But it doesnt matter that much, they both run like mol-ass-es.