Ratty said:
Metalheart, Restricted Area, Afterfall, Outcome, Wasteland Wolf, New Dawn, a number of NWN and Morrowind mods... Then there are other, non-PA games that are *heavily* inspired by Fallout setting and mechanics, like Omega Syndrome. Have a look at the news section over at No Mutants Allowed to get a better idea of just how influential Fallout is.
So you are referring to a bunch of non-entities that failed miserably. Or mods, even better. Thats influence alright.
Gold Box games and TOEE were quite linear and heavy on dungeon crawling. While most P&P roleplaying sessions come down to just that, the roleplaying ideal is a non-linear plot in a fully dynamic world, and Fallout does a much better job delivering that.
As for the Fallout visuals and interface, they were completely designed around the game's P&P orientation. From the isometric perspective and hex grid emulating the view of that old table in your mother's basement with a map and cool plastic figurines on top of it, to the almost total exile of textual feedback into the informative console inconspicuously placed in the bottom left corner of the screen, Fallout practically screams pencil & paper and I really find it perplexing that you missed such an obvious design point.
Well. Theres a lot here thats a lovely matter of perspective. For one thing, the 'role-playing ideal' has changed a lot over the last decade, and Crpgs started with the same Gygax-oriented dungeon crawl that D&D started out with.
And interestingly, when I P&P a lot back in high school, or even college, hex maps and minis weren't the centerpoint of the game. We didn't use them, actually. On the rare occassion that we couldn't keep track, something was sketched out on scrap paper. And the maps we're generally handled on square graph paper, so no, the hex maps didn't do anything for me. I never actually used hex maps and minis in PnP games until D&D 3.0/3.5, despite having tabletop wargaming as another hobby.
And the poor feedback & tiny text console in Fallout annoyed me, more than struck me as annoying more than anything else.
In Fallout, quests can be performed in any order and in a number of different ways - or not at all, seeing as practically every quest is optional. Theoretically, you can beat the game in minutes if you know where to go and what to do. Fallout is practically the epitome of open-ended gameplay.
If the Elder Scrolls games led you to believe that open-endedness is undesirable in RPGs, then I suggest you get a memory wipe, because your perception of computer roleplaying has become horribly skewed and completely wrong.
And yet, which approach is popular, which is selling, and which is being produced more and more often? Thats right. My 'skewed' view of computer roleplaying is essentially all you can get from mainstream developers. One of the major reasons I've lost a lot of interest in the industry.
Diagnosis: amnesia. A typical RPG of that era still had topical and often very generic dialogues. Conversation trees of Fallout's level of complexity and with full dialogue lines to navigate them were fairly uncommon (as I recall, Ultima VII was the most advanced in that respect), and *dynamic* dialogue trees (with different nodes depending on the character's stats, allowing for some pretty amazing stuff like "dumb dialogue") were, as far as I know, non-existent.
You're possibly right on this one. But sadly, all its lead to is the
1) good choice
2) a 'request for more info' loop that leads right back into the choice
2) hesitant choice ANNNDD
3) evil but accepting it choice.
All of these flavors, of course, lead to the same outcome.
So it hasn't progressed much beyond Ultima in any meaningful way, has it?
It's really not my fault you don't see the status Fallout has in the media and gaming community.
It certainly doesn't show in the games that actually get made, and really, thats the only thing that matters in the end. A small group of people can chew some theoritical status like festering cud all they want, but if nothing comes of it, its pretty meaningless. And, now, we're at this lovely point with Oblivion- crappy products that I have no desire to buy. Because really, a Bethesda made Fallout 3- do you really think its going to be more like Fallout 1, or more like Oblivion?
Thats right, they're going to go with their own formula that sells significantly more copies and they can easily bribe the gaming rags into over hyping it. Even if it is complete shit.
@elander- 7th Circle is the guy back on the first page of this thread who was trying to explain simple concepts like analogies to you.
