Am I playing Obsidian worst games or...?

I've played NWN2 and found it boring. Dungeon Siege 3 (demo), really bad. Alpha Protocol, bad, boring, buggy... What's happening? Why so much hype with them, joining W2, etc.? Did I pick their worst games? Are they that bad?

 

They're that bad, yes.

 

MCA made Planescape Torment and wrote for Fallout 2
NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer is considered good or very good (story)
NWN SoZ is considered good but flawed or shit
Kotor 2 is considered good (but the last third of the game is a fucking mess imho)
New Vegas is very good

Obsidian is famous for its good writing aka even when they write shit it's better than everything AAA developers put out these days.

 

Replay Alpha Protocol and realise it's actually very good. This Good.

Play Fallout New Vegas and discover that its quest design is up there with Fallout 1 and its C&C is some of the best in any game ever.

MotB has great story and C&C. Story has PST vibes.

SoZ is a great dungeon crawler, the combat is surprisingly pretty good, though the story isn't great, which honestly isn't an issue for this particular campaign.

Kotor 2 is like Star Wars: Torment. Play it with Sith Lords restored content mod to fix up the ending and you'll enjoy it.

And to be honest, aside from Alpha Protocol, yes you have been playing the worst Obsidian games. NWN2 OC sucks balls, DS3 has good combat, everything else is mediocre to average, and the demo especially is pretty terrible.

 

Also, try playing DS3 with a gamepad. They keyboard / mouse controls are the worst ones I've ever seen, as is the camera.
I haven't played much of it, though, so I can't judge on the overall quality of the game. My coop buddy is constantly making excuses.

 

The controls are alright postpatch, but it's definitely built for gamepad.

 

Alpha Protocol is a Mass Effect clone, according to many a retards.

 

I've found Alpha Protocol is a lot better on the replay. The first time I played it I thought it was ok but with some flaws and a bit short. Replaying it I've noticed the flaws in combat a lot more but the rest of the game has been a lot more enjoyable. The storyline and reactivity is a lot better than I initially assumed, and the dossier system does a lot to make dialogue more than just hitting speech checks and winning everytime, it requires you to actually understand these characters and decide if you want to get on their good side or piss them off with interesting, but not necessarily better, consequences for each option.

It being short is probably in its favour since it allows for several replays to get all kinds of outcomes from it. There really is a lot going for it and it'd be a shame if those mechanics didn't find their way into other Obsidian games.

 

most of their games are mediocre brah

im sorry you bought into the codex hype

 

BROS ALLRIGHT I AM GONNA FIRE UP FAG PROTOCOL ON MY FAGBOX TOMORROW

I THOUGHT KOTOR2 DID SOME REAL GOOD SHIT DESPITE BEING A FLAWED GAME

I OWN THE REST EXCEOT FOR DS3 BUT I HAVE NO DESIRE FOR THAT

 

Alpha Protocol is the last game I played multiple times. (Got it for 3 bucks from Steam, amazing buy)

Fallout: New Vegas is awesome too. KotoR 2 is good once you know they got buttfucked. The NWN2 expansions are great too.

 

Mostly agree, except SoZ is just SoZzie. And AP Is just mehkay.

 

Obsidian pretty much makes story based games. Some of them are better than others, though. For instance, I didn't like NWN2 enough to get too far into it, but I enjoyed MoTB for the setting and story. I liked the Alpha Protocol dialogues and characters even if combat and stealth is pretty shit. The timed dialogue minigame was interesting and I'd like to see it in future games.

But yeah, most of the hype is not over Obsidian joining in on Wastland 2, but MCA, known for his work on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment. I guess if you liked New Reno in terms of quest design and whatnot, it portends well to have MCA collaborate on Wasteland 2.

 

The black-and-white shadow worlds were the real selling point of the game for me. Especially how solving some of the quests required you to shift between the two worlds, such as one involving a group of smugglers or criminals near a port.

What other game ever did that so well? Or did the same thing at all? Blue-tinged dreamscapes and black-and-white shadow worlds alternating with the material world of the game - that some mindbending stuff.

 

This.

 

Venetica. I thought it was pretty well-executed there too.

 

All Obsidian games are bad. We ignore that because the stories are passable. But all video game stories are bad. Now that is the dilemma. The ultimate C&C only Obsidian can deliver.

 

FO:NV has friendly cowboy robots, and the C&C is where one of them becomes town sheriff.

FO3 has vampires.

FO1 has none of such obvious idiocy thrown into your face in the main game.

Obsidian is better than Bethesda because they're semi-competent instead of cretinous. Being the only choice in town during a time of slim pickings, doesn't make them "great".

 

What a hot load of bullshit. You can make any game sound terrible if you strawman it enough and take it out of context. Fallout 1 has a "virus" that makes you "evolve" into a more powerful creature. "The only reason Fallout is better than Skyrim is cause it's semi-competent instead of cretinous."

Besides I was talking about the quest design and C&C, not the story. The sheer number of options you have in each quest both in terms of how to solve them and the resulting impact it has on story and gameworld vastly outnumbers Fallout 1.

Look at this flowchart for options and C&C in a quest for a relatively minor faction- as much as I love Fallout 1 and think it's a better game it doesn't have any quests that have that kind of depth to it.

 

Fallout 1 had TB combat and Iso gameplay while FNV which I have dirty plessure to play is on shity Bethpizda 3D engine and is RTC. End of the Rhine.

Fallout is SCIENCE! fiction not SF. Deal with it.

 

Let me explain to you the difference between realism and plausibility. A game is a fictional world, and in a fictional world, _anything_ can be made to exist. The real challenge is to make the world cohesive enough to be believable, making its own rules coexist in harmony.

FEV was put into the Fallout world, and so it was there, assigned a function, working in harmony with the setting and plot. Nothing majorly wrong with it.

Yet the Falllout world already has a set of basic rules, inherited from generic post-apocalyptic, "Mad Max"-ian film and literature. These rules say that people are most concerned with survival. Resources are scarce. Living is grim. This is hardly a fantasy world, so resources like electricity and fuel are important.

Now, how, exactly, would people let a clunky robot become Town Sheriff? And before we ask that, how would robots, valuable pieces of servomotors and electronics, be allowed to roam openly around the wastelands?

None of this would happen. The world would immediately self-correct based on its own rules, taking them apart for scrap. And nobody in the rag-tag group of survivors leading a settlement would allow a toaster with synthesized speech rule over anything - it would be used for reparing valuable electronics, power sources and/or weapons.

Based on these basic rules, many other things about FO:NV should be completely different. When you encounter a clinic, the doctors should be grim, deathly tired, running out of resources, with a line of radscorpion-bitten survivors stretching around the block. The basic rules of decency would remain, like in Wild West, but violence is likely to erupt in this line, as people would fight those who cut in.

What I wouldn't expect is a clean place with friendly doctors and... no line.

I wouldn't expect souvenier shops.

I wouldn't ever expect electricity spent on giant neon lights. No matter how much you have, in a post-apocalyptic world, there would ALWAYS be better ways to spend it. Electricity is a form of currency in itself, and in FO:NV it is expended to... lure people into "New Vegas" to ... get currency. Would random wasteland survivors really contribute enough to justify all this spending on lights and security?

Why does the game start with a doctor who repairs your brain with a reskinned G.O.A.T. test? Shouldn't you be barely resuscitated and thrown out on your knees, outside, while he deals with an amputee with blood spraying from his elbow, along screams of a woman miscarrying in another room, frazzled midwife running by, looking 20 years older than she actually is?

In game that's forgone TEXTUAL description and the artistic abstraction given by isometric view, one would expect some VISUAL attention to be paid to the survivors of this world. Yet they're all well-built. They don't look starving. Women are supermodels.

I could go on, but I shouldn't have to. The world should crumble under its own weight, yet the heavy hand of the writer is felt throughout as they keep the inconsistent pieces hanging in the air by a string.

When you said

... I assumed that "quest design" also included writing and plausibility.

But, now you claim that you are more interested in dry, "mondblutian" side of the game. Here I have to ask you something.

You are very much into C&C and branching of quests. But how did you come to accept the combat system? Fallout's combat system, however workmanlike, is much deeper than anything in FO3 or New Vegas.

So then, in the end, the only part of New Vegas that's more advanced, on clinical level, is the C&C branch trees. I suppose that's nice, if that's all you're into.

Yet this requires a very specific, isolated, clinical type of appreciation that I'm unable or unwilling to possess. When it comes to RPGs, I look at a game as a whole. And FO:NV is nowhere near the original Fallout in that regard.

 

Do you prefer ToEE and KotC to PS:T and MotB? Then chances are you'll find most Obsidian games to be irredeemable shit.