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[piecewise]

There are games that use the "learning-by-practicing" approach(Bloodstone, and I think Magic Candle series; some roguelikes), just as well as those that modify the difficulty of mini games based on skill(Wizardry 8 - lockpicking).
That there is but a few of those, seems to suggest that the approach so despised by you sells better in the end.

Thats hard to say one way or another. It would probably depend on marketing to the right crowd more then anything. But, almost inevitably, the streamlined (and main stream) you make a game, the more it will sell. And The newer fallouts are certainly designed to be easier and less complex then their predecessors.

Complete and total bullshit, nostalgia goggles of the highest order.  You have actually played the original Fallouts, right?  They have exactly the "learning brain surgery by headshots" business you're railing about.  You earn experience by doing whatever, and then spend it doing whatever you want.  Slaughter a few dozen radscorpions, and you improve your lockpicking ability at your next level up.  Nothing about being "streamlined" or "main stream" cheapens a game, as proven by the fact that you're remembering the old Fallouts as being more complex than they actually were, to fit your argument.

Geez Aqizzer, calm down, and stop putting words in my mouth. Where did I say the system was at all different? Where did I even MENTION the system in that? Easier and less complex does not mean a completely different system.

I was talking about the game as a whole, not the leveling system. And yes, fallout 3 is easier and less complex then the original fallouts. In the original fallouts you're told basically nothing and can just walk out into the wastes and immediately get savaged by giant mantises. In fallout 3 you're rather slowly and gently lead into the wastes, ie easier. It doesn't make it better or worse, just easier. In this case, I'd say fallout 3 is better, though.

As per Complexity, the earlier fallouts are more complex in terms of multi-layered stories, interworld connections, world interaction and gameplay. Some of that complexity came from needless obtuseness though and was fixed in Fallout 3. I'd say that the gameplay in general is more streamlined in Fallout 3 then Fallout 1&2, with all the good and bad that entails.

In the end all I was doing was drawing a connection between the fact that Fallout 3 reached a larger audience then Fallout 1 & 2 and the fact that Fallout 3 was more streamlined and easier to get into then Fallout 1 & 2. And, just for future knowledge, I played Fallout 1 & 2 after I played fallout 3.


 

[JoshuaFH]

I'm going to have to agree with Piecewise, but for the wrong reasons.

The aim of videogames, I think, is to entertain the user. Literally nothing else matters, but it's a tricky business as since there's actual interaction between the player and the medium, the experience is much more personal. What I feel that Piecewise is getting at are the abstractions that make the game less personal, where the game loses touch with the actions of the player versus the skills of his player character, breaking the experience and reducing the 'entertainment' factor if you will.

Now, downright saying that 'point allocation' or 'training based' systems are inferior or superior to eachother also seems fallacious to me. The personal skill of the game developers is what matters most, being able to shape the gameworld to perfectly enclose the player in, and entertain them, is all a matter of the quality of it's design.

So, with this information in mind, it's important to keep in mind that all people have different priorities when it comes to the brand of entertainment that they find themselves most entertained by. This is hugely subjective, and so that saying that any one way of enjoying oneself is superior to another is folly.

This is just a longwinded opening, meant to secure in mind that it isn't method of design that determines entertainment quality, but the skill in design. Now, to my actual point.

I too also think that the way that Fallout 3 and New Vegas treats the player, having played them both, is rather ham-handed. If the game has to slap your hands away from an action you want to do, something has gone terribly wrong. It was always in my opinion that menial tasks, like the 'hopping' example in Oblivion, were so short-sighted that they should not have been included in the first place, and so in order to make a 'training based' skill system, optimally, in my opinion, you'd be forced to limit the things that the character can train in, and also to make the world more apt to reply to the player's decisions.

What I mean by this:

What I mean by limiting what the player can do is simple,  things like baking, lockpicking, jumping, or whathaveyou, are skills so mundane that is it not adding 'entertainment value' to allow a player to become a master baker, or lockpicker, or High-jumper. If I may reference the game Deus Ex: Invisible War, where lockpicking is a matter of having enough multitools, regardless of the player's station or experience. Baking is a matter of having the correct ingredients in the correct proportions. Jumping is a matter of not being overly burdened, plus any form of enhancement that would allow an ordinary man to jump higher than normal, like special shoes or magic, or being on a trampoline. Things that the player is apt to do frequently and vigorously, like combat, are those things that most deserve a training based system. A game where a player can use maces, spears, fists, or sword, and gets better by practice, is a straightforward reward to allowing a player to use the weapon they like, and having them get better at it. It also doesn't seem unreasonable to be training "like" skills while training a single one; for example, if a player's character spends most of his time in sword melee, then he is not only training his sword skill, but his strength and experience in melee combat in general. So if there ever comes a day that should he find himself taken with the urge to wield an axe, or mace, he will find that since it pertains to melee as well, he can pick it up with proficiency without having to practice with it for a long period of time like he did the sword. It is in the game designer's hands to make the combat system visceral and immersive, and thus entertaining.

Now, about making the gameworld more apt to respond to the player's decisions. Say that you don't have enough multitools to unlock the magical Hatamaran, it seems more than reasonable to allow you to bust down the door provided the correct tools, even if it is more difficult or expend other resources at your disposal. Or let's say that it's a chest locked by magical means and can't be opened with force, then it might seem more than reasonable to carry the damn thing and chuck it at enemies, until you find a way to open it and extract the hopefully delicious contents. What I'm saying is, that a game shouldn't box you into a clearcut way of thinking, that there should be some leeway when designing the game so that even people that aren't 100% completionists don't feel that they are being left out on content.

I hope that my point has been clear.

And I wouldn't mind there being a bunch of readable books in Fallout 3. Even the ones that weren't ruined couldn't be read, and I always felt I was missing out. Even if it was useless information, I'd have liked to know if that scorched book had atleast a few lines of legible text remaining.

[sonerohi]

I would love to murder people with treasure chests until the chest broke.

[Vector]

I always felt like skill-setting was about whatever your character was off doing in the evenings, sitting around the campfire with friends, after a long day's work.

EXP as a measure of time and effort in off-time, rather than as a direct off-shoot of actions one takes while one is in control.

I always liked games, like Tales of Symphonia and Final Fantasy IX, that made that other part of the characters' "lives" apparent.

[Trapezohedron]

Giant radscorpions wouldn't have been possible if they did take an artistic approach to science.

[kaijyuu]

I've never played final fantasy 2, but one of the complaints I ALWAYS hear about from people who have is that punching your own allies to raise your HP sucked. Every stat in that game grew through use, and nothing else. HP for example grew by taking damage.



Anywho, more on topic, roleplaying is a game like any other. Some aspects of realism don't fit if we want to keep it entertaining. Yes you could go through musty old tomes to learn skills in magic or science, but would that be fun?

If you stick to 100% roleplaying, ideally you wouldn't spend much "real" time leveling up your science or magic skill because that would be boring. No one wants to sit in a pretend library pretend reading books for 8 hours to be better at something. In a tabletop RPG, the DM would probably say "ok you read books for 8 hours and are smarter". In a video game, it'd probably be a montage or cutscene of some sort.

You can't translate that to gameplay because gameplay is DOING THINGS. There's no gameplay to be weened from doing something inherently tedious. There are a couple ways to get around it (picking up "consumable" books that increase your skill comes to mind), but nothing revolving around actually doing the thing to gain skill in it, unless you spend an inordinate amount of time turning it into a minigame. In a game like fallout that's about running around shooting scorpions, a book reading minigame just wouldn't fit.


I'm sort of rambling, so if you don't get my point here it is: You can't make the player do something different for each different skill. If you tried, you'd have a separate game for every skill: shooting scorpions for leveling gun skill, doing surgery to level medical skills, a lockpicking minigame to level lockpicking, etc etc etc. There's no possible way to make ALL these things have interesting gameplay. So, you
A) skip the gameplay and just give the player skill boosts as the game/story progresses (through picking up consumables etc),
B) make it really damn tedious to level up (repeatedly clicking on books), or
C) tie leveling these skills to something you already know is fun (shooting scorpions to level lockpicking).

Fallout obviously picked C.

[Phmcw]

I'd rather have A and C together : shoot a bunch of scorpion to get the medical book and supplies. Fallout 3 do it sometimes, I wish they would have chosen this path entirely.

[smokingwreckage]

If you want to see a pen-and-paper approach to this, you could buy and read "The Burning Wheel". It has two experience systems that kind of interlock: one levels-up your skills when you take on suitably challenging tasks, the other pays off when you achieve stated goals that you set for yourself, giving you points that let you survive more and more dire challenging tasks. Your wealth and prestige use the same system; as you pull of more difficult deals, your wealth "skill" increases. So you don't have to track purchases, you just ask the DM how hard it is to acquire what you want , and then set to wheeling and dealing.

[Leonon]

I like the hybridized versions of "practice to gain skill" and "spend xp to gain skill" like Asheron's Call and Gurps have. In Asheron's Call using a skill puts some xp into the skill directly and gives you some loose xp to spend wherever you want. It's balanced heavily towards loose xp in this instance but the system could work well in a better ratio. In Gurps it's suggested that skill points be given for completing objectives, roleplaying well, and not being a dick to other players or the GM. To spend the points it's suggested that characters have to invest so many hours per point into study/training (which can be shortened by studying/training harder). Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines has a similar system but more geared towards video gaming so it drops the study requirement and gives you free points directly into a skill if you study the right book at the right skill level. I'd think the pen and paper Vampire games work similarly but I havn't played them.

The first system works in theory because you can do whatever you find fun and still have some points to spend in skills that are more tedious to raise (shoot radscorpians, gain lots of shooting skill and have a little free xp to spend on science or whatever). Asheron's Call balanced it poorly so leveling in it requires grinding mobs to gain xp but the system itself seems sound.

The second system only rewards you for playing the game but still requires a logical progression of events so get better at a skill. Bloodlines manages to have a combination of realistic study and abstract gaming that's fairly easy to balance difficulty wise (you always know the minimum and maximum skills of a character at any point in the story) but has a blatant "best character" design due to limiting the skill points available even further if you don't have a certain skill level at a certain time. It could be balanced to only give points from story events that can't be skipped (making all characters equal but not allowing for rewarding side missions) or making rewards available no matter how your character is designed by either making several paths per mission (making for a much shorter game for the same developement work) or making missions unfailable.

Basically, game skill system design and balance is hard.

[Cecilff2]

I thought you just ate the guys you shot to gain the knowledge from their delicious brains.

[Leonon]

I don't normally eat the brains, they tend to be hard to find most of the time.

Leonon, spreading knowledge all over the wastes.

[chaoticag]

I think the problem we're running into here is a problem of looking at the game too closely. Instead of imagining where the skill comes from we're just looking at the direct causes. Mechanically speaking, you level up due to killing dudes in Fallout, and you skill up in oblivion by doing stuff. On the pessimistic end of things, you can say "I got smarter by killing people" in fallout, and you can say "I got acrobatic by hopping all over the place, and jumping off of cliffs" in Oblivion. Both are pretty cardboard answers from a role-playing perspective.

On the optimistic end of things, you can see "killing dudes and questing" as an abstraction of the amount of exposure you had to the world out there, and the level up is the epiphany.With Oblivion you can say you had a "strict training regiment" in order to become acrobatic. That much is at least solvable by a different perspective.

The other thing I need to touch on is the difference between pen and paper, which already does leveling up skills by using them, and computer role-playing games. Ultimately, the difference is that in a Pen and paper, a good game master is one that tailors his campaign to his players, while a good computer player is the person that best tailor's his character to the gameworld. Simply  put, videogames are too static, and too railroaded for a more realistic leveling method to be anything other than frustrating. It's simply a limitation of the system as is, and all we can really do is paint a pretty picture on that wall until we hope we believe it.

[DJ]

If you think that learning by doing is how it should be you're gonna love Dungeon Crawl's victory dancing. Most of us don't really think it makes for fun gameplay, though.

Realism is all fine and dandy, but if I wanted perfect realism I wouldn't be playing a game, I can get that in my everyday life.

[jaked122]

Realism is all fine and dandy, but if I wanted perfect realism I wouldn't be playing a game, I can get that in my everyday life.

Realism in game has a different purpose, it allows the person to experience something that is impossible(for them or for now) for them to experience normally, in a realistic game you can apply the same technique in the game as in real life and become successful. Now something that is actually like that is probably going to have control issues when translating from actions in game to real life(as real life controls are implausibly difficult).

[G-Flex]

A lot of people here are making the grave and disastrous error of assuming that games have to work the same across-the-board, or have to serve the same purpose. "Games only exist to entertain" and "If I wanted realism, I wouldn't be playing a game" are hideously hypersimplistic and naive notions of the medium.

Do people complain about the coexistence of realistic drama films and ridiculous action blockbusters? No, not really, and there's a good reason for that: Even within the same medium, different works serve slightly (or sometimes wildly) different purposes. If I play Fallout 2, I'm sure as hell not doing it for the exact same reason I'd be playing Dwarf Fortress, Super Mario Bros. 3, or Sim City.


There's really nothing wrong with the abstract gaining of experience points through quests/dude-killing/whatever and the subsequent expenditure of those points on anything you want, but it definitely can be a tad silly, and it would be nice if more games broke the mold when it came to that. I think that, aside from some numbers needing potential altering and some bugs being fixed, learn-through-use worked well in Morrowind, and I wouldn't have wanted a point-buy skill system.

What I mean by limiting what the player can do is simple,  things like baking, lockpicking, jumping, or whathaveyou, are skills so mundane that is it not adding 'entertainment value' to allow a player to become a master baker, or lockpicker, or High-jumper.

Speak for yourself. You don't necessarily enjoy the same things as other people, which you admitted yourself. I'm glad Morrowind had skill in jumping and running and picking locks, even if the implementation of some of that was a bit off.

If you think that learning by doing is how it should be you're gonna love Dungeon Crawl's victory dancing. Most of us don't really think it makes for fun gameplay, though.

The reason Crawl has "victory dancing" is because of the experience point pool. It's hardly realistic.