You miss the point of what I was saying and it is cherry picking, because as I said you intentionally ignore the things that BG does good and what makes it a true classic, while at the same time focusing only on things that the game doesn't do or could do better in some fantasy world where artists can build any game they desire without financial limitations.
You're assuming it's financial limitations, not limitations of designers themselves. For example from what I understand ToEE is one of the best implementations of D&D on PC, yet still, despite lots of writing and choices they managed to make a game that is pretty uninspiring. Were money the problem?
Yes, definitely. How do you think the game was financed? By a fairy living in Tim Cain's ass, or by a publisher who gave the developer certain amount of money and time to do the game, and then since they are the ones financing the game imposing stupid shit on the game that Tim Cain would never agree to if he was independent. I mean, if you don't believe me, take it from the Tim Cain himself. He did an interview with Matt Chat, talking about how the publisher butchered certain ideas and parts of the game. That is without going into the whole "you have 18 months to finish the game, or else..." So, if you think that money does not play a huge roll, I don't know what to tell you.
https://youtu.be/m4XVW6qcuzM?t=6m13s
In Arcanum they could make a giant world but combat mechanics had horrible flaws. Were money the problem? And why build such a giant world in first place, where half of this world is available only in late part of the game?
Do you understand simple concepts such as budget, time within which the game needs to be released, man-hours, etc? I mean, if you have a limited amount of people, money and time, each feature that you put into the game takes away from that limited pool of resources. As Tim Cain himself said it: "They (our games) were buggy, and I think there were two big reason why that was so. First, we tried putting a lot of features into these games. We really needed to learn how to edit, because we would spend a lot of man-hours putting a feature into a game that hardly any of the players would ultimately care about. For example, Arcanum had newspapers that reported on major incidents that were caused by the player, but I don't remember a single review mentioning that.
We spent a lot of time getting that working, and those hours could have spent balancing real-time combat, or fixing the multiplayer code.
Second, we kept our team sizes small, both
for budget and for management purposes. This meant we had less total man-hours to work with, and
all of the late nights and weekends couldn't make up for the fact that we only had about a dozen people working on the Arcanum and Temple projects. Looking back, I am amazed our games were as feature-rich as they were, but I am not surprised they were as buggy as they were. We should have made some serious feature cuts early in their development."
So he is talking about struggling with the budget and a small team to make these games. Obviously, if he had limitless amount of money to work with, he could have invested more time and hired more people to make the game less buggy and with a more polished combat.
Money is always an issue, because its a limited resource. If you don't think so, you are wrong. Period. I mean, even the reason why Troika was closed was because they could not get any more money from the publishers for their new projects. And the reason why they couldn't get money is because the publishers were more interested in supporting big selling titles -> which translates into.... are you ready?....yeah FUCKING
MONEY! $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ ka-ching!
In Fallout they did what they did. Was money at fault or maybe loss of GURPS revealed that devs simply aren't good at designing combat systems?
People are talking about GURPS like it would have made a huge difference for the Fallout games combat wise. It wouldn't. At least not about the complaints that I made. This is because of the way GURPS was designed into the game. It was just a module attached to the game with rules that could be edited. This explains why Tim Cain was able to save the game from being scrapped after losing the GURPS licence. All he needed to do was edit the ruleset and thus SPECIAL was born. Which means that the fundemental aspects of combat were hard coded and having GURPS would not change the fact that there is no crouch, no climbing on roofs, no cover mechanic, that unarmored opponents can survive a shotgun blast to the head from a few inches of distance. That animations look horrible, the enemy turns take way too long and the combat often freezes leaving you with having to repeat the whole process, save corruptions, etc.
Oh and if Tim Cain had a fairy in his ass that could cough up a few million dollars, legal wrangling involved would have probably be much smoother and you would end up with GURPS in Fallout.
Or maybe they could hire you with your "brilliant" understanding of how the industry works and then all of their man-hours, small team, budget balancing and feature cutting wouldn't be a problem.
Omega Syndrome had a nice game "locked" behind a boring dungeon full of worms, had forced iron man when game wasn't balanced towards iron man, author used this:
http://i.imgur.com/Qa5Xs.png as a death screen.
Was it caused by lack of money?
No. Author failure is the main reason why we can't have good things.
I don't know anything about that game, so I won't comment.
I mean, there is probably around 30 things that BG does better than PST or any game out there, so if I focused only on those things while completely ignoring what PST does good and better than BG, I could make an argument that BG is 30 times better than PST and that PST sucks. But unlike you, I realize that these cherry picking type of arguments are very similar to arguments you hear from a whiny wife:
No, stop lying.
I started playing BG soon after playing Fallout, Fallout 2 and Ultima VII. Fallout 1 offered stat-driven dialogues and multiple quest solutions, non-linearity and freedom of movement. Fallout 2 offered it in a giant world. And combat was somewhat interesting due to critical hit tables and death animations, despite being shit. Also, it sophisticated character development system.
But that is not how it works, remember? You need to ignore all the good stuff and focus only on the bad. I mean, that is what you were doing with BG. Be consistent to your own criteria, man! You don't get to start talking about all the cool features Fallout has. I mean, if you are going to take against BG its inability to do aimed shots, I want to take from Fallout the inability to control party members. Lets just focus on the negatives. Lets talk about about the bugs, lets talk about save corruptions, no terrain elevation. Lets talk about the inability of your character to perform some basic things, like I don't know... like swimming or climbing, or not having a cover mechanic. That's how you examine BG, so why can't I use the same logic on Fallout?
Then BG1 comes and suddenly pretends that Fallout 1 and 2 didn't exist.
No, its not that it pretended Fallout 1 and 2 didn't exist. Its that they wanted to improve certain things like party based combat, size, scope, number of playable characters, creating a game D&D ruleset for which they needed to make a completely new engine, and since we live in a real world and not some fairy land with limitless resources they needed to cut certain ideas out to make the other stuff work as they wanted. And I agree with you btw that Fallout 1 and 2 is better than BG1 alone. However, to say that the whole BG trilogy therefore sucks is retarded beyond belief. Especially due to your whiny approach in justifying why it sucks. "It doesn't have this and it doesn't have that... " - Yeah, well Fallout doesn't have this and it doesn't have that. It doesn't mean it sucks.
Comparison to PST is wrong because PST has something special to offer to compensate shit combat (writing, characters, descriptions, character development, stat-checks, etc.).
Again, that is not how your critiquing works. Focus on the stuff that PST doesn't have. Such as romance options, character banter that is on the same level as it is in BG, humor, it doesn't have as developed combat, nor as developed character creation, or how Nameless one can't equip any armor, nor do the characters change their appearance when equipping new armor. It doesn't have the size and scope of BG trilogy and it doesn't have all the classes, oh and it doesn't have aimed shots, etc.
Lets focus on the bad stuff. Ignore the good.
PS. BG had good writing, good characters with even great character development in BG2. PST had better writing, but you can have good->better without having good->everything else is total shit. Another concept that seems completely unfamiliar to those of you who can't do basic logic.
BG1 doesn't have anything special to offer beyond music, graphics and sound.
Why are you stuck on BG1 when it is just the first part of the whole saga and to get a complete experience you must play the whole trilogy? Its not like BG1 is a completely different game from BG2 and Throne of Bhaal and it fits in almost seamlessly within the whole trilogy. Could it be that you are attempting to cherry pick again, pointing out the worst examples, just so you would have a leg to stand on?
You're a moron and you have no taste.
Well, if being consistent and applying critical thinking to examining games these days qualifies one for being a moron with a bad taste, then I am proud of it. Btw, I love Fallout 1 and 2, PST, Arcanum, Vampire the Masquarade: Bloodlines, MotB, Ultima VII, and yes I love BG trilogy among other games. Yeah.. horrible taste in games, because I like something that you yourself do not like (for completely bad reasons btw). And again... if you personally don't like BG, I am fine with that. Tastes differ. But to say BG objectively sucks because of what it isn't and ignore all the stuff that it is, well.. that is just retarded imo.