SkeleTony said:
But there are limits to how beneficial or appropriate the first person perspective is for games in general and RPGs in particular. For one thing there is the whole lack of peripheral vision thing. For another there is the whole lack of tactical capabilities.
Fallout 1 & 2 and FO:Tactics were, at their core, party based RPGs(even if the party aspect was poorly implemented in 1 & 2). Making FO 3 a FP game is stupid IMO...it just does not feel right.
I disagree with this. In my mind, Fallout 1/2 were single-character games, and really poorly utilized its viewpoint and system. It could easily have done fine as an FP game, considering that all you really had was ONE PERSON, and a "party" of braindead idjits which shot you more than the enemy. Given that your controllable resources amounted to ONE PERSON, first-person control would have given you better control of your one, and only, character, without costing you in control of anything else (What else? You only had ONE PERSON). Now, the end result wasn't BAD, but it was not an effective use of its system. Isometry in Fallout was purely a dodge to save on art and system resources. It did not add to the game.
Given all the other decisions already made, first-person is the right move for the game. This is not saying that every previous decision was necessarily good, but given what has already been decided by the game, and the market, first-person is the right way to go. Compare: KOTOR vs. Jedi Knight. When it comes to handling the entire perspective and control thing, Jedi Knight simply does it better.
For all the people protesting the concept of first-person or real-time combat, WHY do you protest it? Do you feel that the real-time or first-person combat will somehow cramp your ability to control your ONE SINGLE CHARACTER? Because while we can all agree that real-time certainly cramps one's options when it comes to dealing with an entire party, Fallout has never been a party-based game. Will real-time really hurt your ability to control one character? Yes, the player's reflexes will start to play a role in this, but are yours really THAT bad? The fact that player skill directly impacts character skill really only matters when the character's skill must exceed the player's skill. If the character does not need to be more skillful than the player, what are you really losing? It's a non-binding constraint as long as the player can match the expected performance of the character.
