Fallout 3 : I didn't have my standards too high

Happy New Year, crazy Australians.

 

This thread part of the Codex "lets say the complete opposite of what I believe cos its witty" meme?

It is right?

 

If Cleve says that Fallout3 is a good game which reflects the Codex general opinion of it - the end is indeed nigh

 

But I think it is even more surprising that a former Sir-Tech programmer is praising this game.

I mean, Sir-Tech games are a whole world apart. They are games of only numbers and calculations, lots of tactical decisions, and just alot of analytical thinking. Everything in their games would be made from a functional point of view, and presentation would not even be a secondary concern for them.

For a Sir-Tech person to do all this talk about how much he appreciates a modern game which is publicized to focus more on "immersion" and "feel" - it does not compute. Desslock Syndrome?

I would have thought these people would rather be there at their Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association, making a systematic re-enactments of battles and playing them with lots of hard rules on them.

 

Game developers past their 35 tend to become absurdist fucktards.

 

Look at Desslock, man.

This is a game critic who had played all the old RPGs of the past. A long-time RPGer. More oldschool than alot of us.

Come Morrowind, and he changes completely.

Recently in an interview, he said that stats and numbers have no place in a RPG. He started talking about how Bioshock represented the ideal RPG, and raged against NWN2 for still have a ruleset based on numbers, because it "prevents you from roleplaying".

It's fucked up. It's totally OK, if you like modern games, to be completely honest, but to go one step further and also repudiate every single game of the past is tragic. Because so many of them contain good ideas, and when they lose the endorsement of people who are old enough to have played them back then, it weakens the case for using ideas from them.

 

I also had low expectations for F3; I wanted to like it.

But it was just too shitty. I'm not even talking about shitty as a Fallout game or even shitty on an RPG front at all. The combat and animations in general were just so terrible I couldn't play long enough to get into Megatown or whatever. If a game is presented as an FPS, then I am going to be judging it on its FPS elements. Now, I'm willing to forgive some stuff for the RPG stuff (see: Bloodlines), but the shittiness Fallout 3 manages to provide blows my mind. And even if there was a Fallout or PST quality RPG buried underneath it all, Im still not sure I could stomach it.

 

Midlife crisis. What can you do. Even absurd amounts of alcohol don't seem to cure it.

As to the morrowind case maentioned above, the problem about Moronwind and Bolivion is that these games promise a fucking lot. And fundamentally, the premise of a full sandbox game is the best thing since sliced bread.
Sorry to say, but fulfilling it is well beyond the ability of a rather mediocre (should I say uninspired?) dev team. Enter Oblivlol and Fallus 3. Yet the premise of total freedom in an rpg is still appealing, and dirty thoughts apear, like: These games could 'ave been so much more.

 

This entire thread is absurd.

"Star Wars Episodes I-III were examples of excellent cinema. Discuss!"

 

Difference is that Star Wars I-III are pretty much universally loathed. Fallout 3 is pretty much universally lauded (both by the critics and the public), with the exception of hardcore rpg fans, and even then there's a split between decent and pile of shit.

 

Actually, that's not quite true. Episodes I-III were received very well by a generation of children who didn't have the experience of growing up with IV-VI. Quite similar to the console kids who never played FO1 & 2. The parallel is not perfect but it has some merit.

 

BLASPHEMY !!!!!

These kind of people are the reason for Bethesda making crap, instead of well written storyline. I bet he is playing to see the whole 200 different!!! endings...


Cleaning the water to fight radiation!!!, yeah that is the spirit of a well written Novel .



My GOD! It's full of Stars...

 

I-III also had a kewl special effects with hordes of Jedi/soldiers running around blowing various shit up. Whereas IV-VI episodes were more to heavy-on-dialogues fantasy and not yet another action b-movie.
So in a way your comparison is correct.

 

No man, it was the use of the effects and art direction itself which made Star Wars (1977) a masterwork of filmmaking.

Despite the fact that the 1977 movie was low budget, they had all improvised brilliantly with props. George Lucas personally had every prop on the set dirtied so it looked "worn and used". Things like that really added to the atmosphere and the detail of the movie. His attention to detail was also responsible for the visual style of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, on which he worked extensively, and without much credit, because he just loved filmmaking that much (He had just as much to do with the other Star Wars movies; he did not take directorial credit, because he broadened his role to everything from the editing to the effects, and nearly died from exhaustion on his work on the movie).

Consider that when Luke and Obi-Wan enter Mos Eisley, you have rats scurrying away as they approach. In the city, there are traders walking on strange alien animals, and all sorts of people moving around about their business. Every such thing was intricately seen through, with details in the foreground and the background, and what makes it a great movie is how it suceeds in making a setting come alive.

We simply did not see it in the CGI prequels, because they were entirely on the green screen, and Lucas had less control over the look. When we see those special effects from the prequels, we are just not as convinced, because it feels so painfully obvious that it is real actors trying to adjust to a pretend environment that they can not see. Real people do not seem congruous with colourful computer generated images.

I would not praise Star Wars for dialogue, because Lucas deliberately went for cheesy Sunday morning cartoon dialogue, as it was supposed to be like. That's all that there is to it. Nobody sane is supposed to think there is any depth to the idea of the Force. There is not. When Obi-wan says things like, "Everything is true, from a point of view", he is only saying the obvious, and it's no more deep than Morpheus' teachings in the Matrix. It's all part of the Sunday morning cartoon feel, in which we have a caricature-ish representation of a mentor, not a genuine thinker.

 

Way off topic now, but I thiink you're giving Lucas too much credit for the Abomination that was episodes 1 and 2 (I refused to watch 3). He had control over it. Lucas may have been an A grade filmmaker once, but now he's a complete fucktard.

 

Fallout 3 wasn't horrible. It might even have been almost okay. Maybe you could even like it, in a kind of sado-masochistic way. But GOOD? Let's not get carried away here.

 

True. Plus, video game reviewers, are, by and large, to be ignored. Most reviews are by the mainstream, for the mainstream. This is not the case with movie reviews. Where with movies, it is quite common for blockbusters, popular with the mainstream to receive largely negative reviews, it is far less so for video games.

The "hardcore" fans speak pretty much as one in their dismissal of Fallout 3 as a Fallout game. Some do see it as a decent to good standalone game. Such differences of opinion are only natural. Overall, the point that Fallout 3 is largely derided by fans of the originals, much in the way the more recent Star Wars movies are by longtime Star Wars fans, seems to be fairly valid. Certainly by those fans with an organised presence on the internet.

 

I wonder what you mean by "popular". The truth is, at least where I live, people always go to watch a big Hollywood movie and then always afterwards complain how bad it was, "total rubbish", and so on. The point is, a movie can make dozens of billions and it may be that everybody has paid to see it, but nobody actually liked it.

Why do humans behave like that? They are in fact zombies, not humans. Even zombies aren't able to enjoy the Hollywood garbage in general.

Back to games. . Mask of the Betrayer was really good. So was Hordes of the Underdark, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't know how to play a game. (I started playing HotU without the map, and used the camera in such a way that I saw only what my character saw, or close to that. The atmosphere in the maze of the mad wizard was intense and magical. One of the NPCs had said that the maze was ever changing, with walls appearing and disappearing in a chaotic fashion. I occasionally got pretty lost there in the maze, but not in an annoying way. Then came the Underdark which was blander with the usual "find these three or four items in whatever order you wish" scarcely disguised. Well, it had its moments and places as well. But after the Underdark episode, the adventure really became otherworldly. Beautiful.)

 

Was he ever an A grade filmmaker? Lucas has admitted himself that a lot of the inspiration for Star Wars came from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. Kurosawa now there's an A grade film maker. I love his samurai flicks but still think Ikiru is perhaps his finest movie. Discuss.

 

It's not gay when Mario does it. If Mario ate some quiche, he would leave a grenade behind when he was done, obliterating any evidence he was engaging in fey behaviour. Mario proves a man with a handlebar moustache and suspenders who flips through the air spinning and twirling is still comfortable with his own masculinity.

 

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 6673788606

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/ ... 18741.aspx


Robert Bussard and his 2006 lecture to Google on Polywell Fusion; plus a recent update on progress.

(Also, Cleve should release Grimoire in whatever state it's currently in, as open-source, and let it have some kind of future... before he seals his vault for good.)

 

Funny that people are always claiming you are my alt - because I was also enchanted by HOTU as well. It had mystery and surreal setting that was very engaging at the time I played it. It's been a while but I have actually been thinking about playing it again lately.

 

I am another who feels Desslock has lost his mind.

The reason that FO3 has so many RPG elements in it is precisely because so many people have been clamoring for them. FO3 is a terrific example of how to turn an FPS into an RPG in a very smooth blend.

 

More like a terrible example
Both RPG and FPS elements of F3 are incredibly shitty.
Combat is terrible and forces you to use the retarded RtwP mode which makes you a god.
The AI is dumb and just stands there or runs at you (or gets stuck in some corridor) while you feed it with bullets.
The design of weapons is something 12yrs old would do.
Quests are boring and predictable with lots of fake, gimmick choices and multiple ways to complete them like "use speech skill to get right down to a reward or complete the quest from the beginning to end"
Dialogues are the most retarded ones I ever saw in a game and a reason enough to call you a moron if you say that F3 does RPG on an acceptable level
The character system is yet another gimmick that absolutely has no point other than being there because you are uber anyway.
Finally graphics are even worse than in oblivion - at least oblivion had more than grayscale.
The game is just the very same Oblivion except with more useless gimmicks that trick you into believing that the game is better than it really is.


The good example is VtmB. FPS still sucks in it, yet it does RPG fine at least.

 

I can't seem to bring myself to replay games like that. I would like to experience it again, but that's different. Even with MotB, which I played through quickly (making choices I imagined the character would have made) and so left some places unexplored, I haven't managed to replay the game (even though I actually began to some months ago).