Sol Invictus said:
Games with parties are fine and all, but it's not like you had much of a party in Fallout, given that all of the NPCs who accompanied behaved on their own rudimentary scripts (I must personally thank Ian for shooting me in the back a million times). It's not like Fallout's combat system was tactical in any way. It was pretty basic. The only difference between the combat in Fallout and Diablo was that Fallout's combat was in turn-based, while Diablo's was in real time. It was nowhere as advanced as Jagged Alliance 2, which was much more of a turn-based tactical game than it was an RPG.
This brings up another point: Why is it okay to have turn-based tactics in an RPG but not real time action? In truth, these combat modes are mutually exclusive to the RPG.
So really, what's wrong with a single player, non-party RPG?
The combat was fun in fallout from the perspective of the death animations being great, etc.
It was not a big tactical challenge for the most part, but there was a real strategic aspect to it, unlike diablo for instance. In diablo you pretty much just grab the next better item as far as I can tell.
In fallout, you have a lot of different choices and strategies for making your character alone, which lead to a variety of different perks to be possible to choose from.
I can remember some characters with snipe using one gun and getting 4 critical eye shots every round, and others who used big guns instead and others who used melee and survived by having all the toughness feats possible.
The combat itself lasted just seconds most of the time, which I think was realistic and also nice in the sense that in a game that is not heavily combat oriented and tactical I don't want to spend hours clicking the 'kill next guy' button. Which is basically what you do in diablo from the sound of it - there is no thought or planning in your character build that I know of.
I like jagged alliance a lot and it is much more of an rpg than most of the rpgs out there, but I dont expect that level of tactical goodness in the combat. But, I do expect SOMETHING. Or else for combat to be something that is not a major part of the game. unfortunately, with gothic, the combat is not only cheesy and annoying and unbalanced, but you also spend more time in combat than any other activity...not to mention you have the always ridiculous situation where you are always in site of more monsters as if the whole planet is just a big monster farm or something...which is yet another complaint about first person games. that might make sense in a war or something, but it makes no sense in 99% of cases.
In fallout, you have some abstraction, and you are travelling for days of game time between encounters. In the wilderness, you can walk for miles and miles without seeing anything so large as a deer. As for seeing predators, of course they are sneaky, but shit, there have to be like a hundred deer to support one wolf so there just aren't that many around and it's not possible for it to be otherwise.
In an FPS action type game, all abstraction is gone, and you just have a (very poor) simulation of reality to work with.
All these 'rpgs' coming out barely deserve the name. Hence, ou know, all the dislike of them from, well, everyone who has played real RPGs and wonders how the fuck giving a sword ro a big titted elf can make something into an rpg.
