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[Ninteen45]

Well the made it so it was, and then one of the execs wanted the whole oasis thing in, so...

[nenjin]

What will sell or not sell me on NV is if they use Betheseda's general content philosophy. I really can't sit through another Wasteland experience of flipping open tool boxes or kicking over generic piles of shit to get more generic shit I don't really need or use that much. FO3 was pretty bad about this. And then I played Borderlands and it took it to the next level. I want some thoughtfully designed content, and if they went overboard again on the open world design, and again filled it with lots of generic shit to make it worth the effort, then I ain't buying. No matter how interesting or thoughtful the dialog mechanics may or may not be.

[Sowelu]

What will sell or not sell me on NV is if they use Betheseda's general content philosophy. I really can't sit through another Wasteland experience of flipping open tool boxes or kicking over generic piles of shit to get more generic shit I don't really need or use that much. FO3 was pretty bad about this. And then I played Borderlands and it took it to the next level. I want some thoughtfully designed content, and if they went overboard again on the open world design, and again filled it with lots of generic shit to make it worth the effort, then I ain't buying. No matter how interesting or thoughtful the dialog mechanics may or may not be.

I agree, "lots of pointless items filling pointless boxes" is a pretty crummy way of doing things.  On the other hand, so is "This military base is completely empty of things you can pick up, except for the glowing sparkling obvious footlockers across three special armory rooms".  "Oh boy, I can loot crap pistols off twenty thugs and lug them around for later sales" is irritating, but so is "Everyone had fifty bucks and no loot, except for the dogs who had twenty bucks; it's just an abstraction so I can buy what I want".  What's your ideal middle ground?

[Shadowlord]

For me, I'd rather have fallout 3's system of loot than have mass effect's. Oh gods, the horror.
If you want a higher price for the junk weapons you pick up, *combine them* with repair. The returns on the first repair are worth the lost weapon, as low or no-repair weapons are practically worthless. If you're using a mod that lets you use assorted miscellaneous items to repair the weapon (such as tin cans, scrap metal, various other items appropriate-ish to the weapon), I'd even repair them as much as you can before selling them (plus you have a use for all that stuff besides giving them away for karma/money repeatable quests). Armor I generally don't even bother to pick up, since it's so heavy and difficult to repair.

If anything is truly useless, you can just leave it there. Of course, in Fallout 3, I ended up with a locker full of craftable/repair-usable items, and another of items to sell, and another with nuka-colas and nuka-cola quantums (for turning into quantums and then grenades later), and a desk with additional armor and things that I wasn't carrying around in it, and a filing cabinet with extra weapons that I wasn't carrying around, such as the fat man... In Mass Effect I ended up spending almost as much time in inventory management, turning items into gel, as I did playing the damn game. It got incredibly irritating after a while and actually led me to start and finish playing Halo 1 (which I had never played before, except the demo on the PC) instead as a break from all the inventory management, a game which I had avoided playing until now (this year, this month) mainly due to the lack of controllable saving and only having two weapon slots. I discovered that you really only NEED two, for a pistol (... for killing hunters and covenant in general), and either a plasma pistol or rifle (killing anything), a rocket launcher (flying things, tanks, the exhaust manifolds at the end), or shotgun (flood) as the situation dictates. So four would have been nice, but wasn't strictly necessary. After playing Mass Effect nearly to the end, You Can Only Carry Two Weapons, No Variations, No Upgrades didn't seem so bad anymore.

[nenjin]

What's your ideal middle ground?

Handcrafted content. And by hand crafted, I mean someone spent more than one day with it once the content tools are up to snuff.

As in, really putting in the effort to write a loot container system that actually was worth the effort. (From Morrowind to Fallout 3, every game has some very generic container scripts. It works well enough so they can make sure quest items and fun stuff end up in there. But that's about it. So many boxes full of dishes and silverware. ><)

Bethesda always interprets open world too literally I think, and the loot design follows. They feel open world means they need to hundreds of openable containers everywhere, which dictates having a loot code that can put items in hundreds of containers without completely unbalancing the game. So. Cups, forks, plates, potato chips and food items with 5 different names, and sprinkled in there, an item you actually want. Multiple x10,000....and there's your loot system.

So I'd prefer a middle ground. Loot distribution that makes sense. Why is there cash in boxes, in an abandoned school, when bandits are using it as a hide out and concievably have ransacked the place years ago? Why is that cash not in their bunks, or something? Diablo set up the cursed paradigm that amazing stuff can be ANYWHERE....so your gut reaction as a player is to follow the system. Which, to me, kind of leads to boredom. The surprise of finding something cool in an unexpected is nice. It's less nice when I know it's a product of an algorithm, rather than as a piece of content some developer went "man, someone is going stumble on this little alcove I hid back here with this cool item and feel really special."

It's stuff like that, that only hand crafted content can address. Under most circumstances, it's not a HUGE deal to me. But when your world is HUGE and in exploring it as a player you start to see repetition, not unlike seeing a repeating texture stretching on to the horizon....

Yeah. It just kind of kills the whole illusion for me eventually. To Bethesda's credit, it only starts happening 10 or 20 hours into the game...but that's ostenisbly when I should just really be getting into the meat of things.

[kilakan]

See you must not have played morrowind much, because there are a number of hidden spots in that game with items that always spawn there, for instance, there's a huge mausoleum, with bodies all over the place, solidified with ash, all holding ash weapons, but one turns out to be a two-handed crystal sword with hugely powerful abilities, simply couvered in ash.  But yes I agree, random containers are no fun because the become too random, maybe have a program that limits the containers content depending on where they are, so 100 years in the future you could still find the hidden vault within the cola factory containing 100 bottles of cola, but everywhere else in the wasteland shouldn't have it, not unless someone is still making food.

[nenjin]

Oh no, I played my share of Morrowind. Daedra Shrines were awesome. That's the kind of content that made Morrowind worth it. There was progressively less of that in Oblivion IMO, and still less in FO3. The coolest thing I remember finding in FO3? The Dunwich Building. But what actually made up the content of the Dunwich building? As I recall, a few journal entries. One model. One named bad guy. And then globs of either ghouls or Deathclaws.

[kilakan]

ya I lost may faith in bethesda over oblivion and fallout

[de5me7]

some people have very strong opinions over the fallout franchise.

i dont, havnt played 1, 2 i didnt really like, 3 was good, but poor replayability imo.

i concur with you too over the loot issue. After a while you get to the stage when you look at what should be mysterious building, and have a 90% certainty that there will be nothing interesting inside.

In morrowind this didnt happen, there was often wierd and interesting stuff hidden around the world. In  fo3 and oblivion theres what - that mint armoured suit you need all those keys for... and theres a good flaming sword somewhere in oblivion.

i felt the quality of bethesdas script /story writting was very up and down in both games. Oblivions main, and guild missions were pretty lame imo, but some of the one off side quests were genius also shivering isles was very well written. In fo3 i felt the main story line was pretty decent, but many of the side quests were just retarded, e.g. the one with the two super heros, or the man/mutant/tree.

[Dr. Johbson]

Agree with you completely, de5.

[x2yzh9]

Weird, how'd this guy get his hands on this?

[Tilla]

Weird, how'd this guy get his hands on this?

pretty much every 360 game ever leaks early. looking at a torrent site, even Rock Band 3 is up for 360 - over a month before release. I'm guessing someone in QA or reproduction side is leaking games like mad

[Deon]

Wowza. Legionaires have the same phrase which they repeat over and over:
"Some of the slaves have been spreading stories about the Burned man again."

I am SO going to kill them after hearing it for 1000th time.

[mainiac]

God I hated the repair system so much.  They only put it in because they wanted non combat skills to have a role.  But it wasn't fun at all, it was annoying.  And there are many kinds of guns that will take a long time to break down if given the proper maintenance.  There are even some that will take a long time to break down without the proper maintenance.  Like for instance a certain famous russian assault rifle who's chinese version was slightly more common then air molecules in the game.

[Ninteen45]

http://www.justin.tv/jonms/