Interview Oblivion - spiritual successor to Fallout!

[elander_]

I absolutely love how it's the interns and QA people who come up with the best, most thought-out, intelligent answers.

They haven't been fully assimilated into Bethesda cube yet. ha ha ha ha ha

 

[Paranoid Jack]

I absolutely love how it's the interns and QA people who come up with the best, most thought-out, intelligent answers.

It's amazing how honest (and well thought out) statements can get through our animosity yet the PR types can't figure that out... they just keep throwing monkey poop at us from their cages.

 

[Wursel]

I loved the true open-endedness of the world, and the fact that I was this lone guy in a completely unknown world...

Hmm, didn't Emil once say that he never played the old Fallouts?

 

[Claw]

I went there to look for those honest, thought-out answers and what offends my inflamed eyes?

Poll: What is your favorite city in Oblivion?
And "None" is not an option.

Of course, surely everyone is an Oblivion fan!

 

[Mech]

I went there to look for those honest, thought-out answers and what offends my inflamed eyes?

Poll: What is your favorite city in Oblivion?
And "None" is not an option.

Of course, surely everyone is an Oblivion fan!

Liking the design/layout/people/artistic value/etc of a city in a game means you have to be a fan of the game?

Ignorance knows no bounds indeed.

 

[Callaxes]

It's hard to like any city in the game if the game didn't impress you in some other way. Fallout's music was dull, but because I liked the game, I ended up uploading the soundtrack.

What do you call it? Nostalgia? Good times? Good mood? Whatever it is, it can make something relatively ugly into something decent.

And since every city in Oblivion is ugly you got to have some good memories to make them decent at best.

Yeah, ignorance knows no bounds indeed, eh?

 

[Mech]

Neither does arrogance

 

[Jasede]

Wait, you admit the music was dull, yet you enjoy it because you liked the game? I am with Mech here.

A different example: Thief 3. A terrible game. But everyone (nearly everyone) loves the Cradle misison it had, even if the game sucks.

 

[Callaxes]

Why? It reminds me of a good game I enjoyed. I still like the touch and smell of books made out of cheap paper from the comunist era, even though modern books have better covers and pages that don't break so easily, but it was this cheap fabrick upon which I read in my childhood books like "1984", "La guerra del fin del mundo" and "Don Quijote".

Fallout made that music a little (scracth that) a lot better for me.

 

[Futile Rhetoric]

Wait, you admit the music was dull, yet you enjoy it because you liked the game? I am with Mech here.

Why? Someone might consider something mediocre in and of itself, and yet love it for the associations it evokes. This is the most normal thing in the world, e.g. "I love this song because I heard it when I was in love", "this movie always makes me depressed because of the way my life was when I first saw it", "I love that city because I went there with friends when I was 16 and had a great time", etc. Take away any of these associations and the things in question (song, film, city) may be considered unremarkable, and in fact would be by some others who didn't have them.

A different example: Thief 3. A terrible game.

This is where you fail, again.

 

[Jora]

I don't think Thief 3 is a bad game. I had a lot of fun with it. There are many good missions (Seaside mansion, the Rutherford family castle, Cradle, the Keeper compound, the Hammerite chuch...) and I spent plenty of time on the streets mugging people, fleeing the guards (sometimes by jumping from balconies and through windows!) and robbing the apartments. The dynamic shadows are a fun mechanic.

The story is good too.

 

[MisterStone]

You know, after reading the Q + A as well as other interviews with FO3 designers, I am starting to think that it is the video game journalists who are the actual morons and not so much the Bethesda Dev team (well, obviously Emil is a dumbass, and Hines). They focused on all kinds of stupid shit (kewl wepuns! toilet drinking!) in their previews without giving us a better idea about some of the more important stuff.

I realize that this is dangerous thinking, and will report to a re-education station posthaste.

Still, even though a number of people on the dev team seems to be reasonably smart and capable of appreciating the first two Fallouts, I have to worry that the higher-ups will still manage to dumb it down and bowdlerize it a great deal before it is released.

 

[Callaxes]

The writting staff looks pretty intelligent, they are independent when it comes to creating a character just as long as its fills the role the developers want it to have (a love interest, a unarmed trainer, a information sandwicth, etc.) and it doesn't cross the ERSB line (etc. in fact none of the Fallout NPCs were disgusting and unmoral, the worst case I can think of is the prostitute in Fallout Tactics with the "My ass has seen more rubber then a dead rat on highway 56" line). So I think we can expect in the least some good characters and no Bioware cliche's.


Oh wait scracth that! I just rememberd the Baron Evil Von Burke.

 

[Surgey]

For such JRPG haters, you sure use ellipses a lot.

 

[Jasede]

Wow, you guys have terribly low standards. (Thief 3)

 

[pkt-zer0]

Wow, you guys have terribly low standards. (Thief 3)

...what's so bad about Thief 3? From what I know about it, it seems to have improved AI and less murdering with more stealth, compared to its predecessors.
Mind you, I haven't really played much of either of the games.

 

[VonVentrue]

Fallout 3 is officially fucked.

That's some news...

 

[DarkUnderlord]

I went there to look for those honest, thought-out answers and what offends my inflamed eyes?

Poll: What is your favorite city in Oblivion?
And "None" is not an option.

Of course, surely everyone is an Oblivion fan!

Liking the design/layout/people/artistic value/etc of a city in a game means you have to be a fan of the game?

Ignorance knows no bounds indeed.

Actually the question is "favourite city" not artistic / layout etc... so for all intents and purposes there's no liking anything, it's just a matter of whether you can rank them all and pick one out off the top. It's like having a buch of turds on your lawn and some piles of spew and being asked "Which is your favourite?". The question itself implies that you at least like them enough to make a judgement where-as in all honesty, if you thought they were all sub-par, you wouldn't necessarily have a favourite, hence Claw's comment.

 

[Keldorn]

More Codex whining. Wonderful. And, great. I fell for the trap as I just whined myself about the whining. HAHAHA!

Yep, you should try to avoid complaining about justified complaints.


Those FO3 developers are obviously afflicted with hyperactive FPS clickfestian consolitis ..."I want to click, shoot, and kill, every target I see, can't stop now, lol this is great, it's just like Doom !"

 

[Cassidy]

More Codex whining. Wonderful. And, great. I fell for the trap as I just whined myself about the whining. HAHAHA!

Yep, you should try to avoid complaining about justified complaints.


Those FO3 developers are obviously afflicted with hyperactive FPS clickfestian consolitis ..."I want to click, shoot, and kill, every target I see, can't stop now, lol this is great, it's just like Doom !"

A FPS isn't bad if it's challenging, with more outdoors than generic corridors and unique gameplay features. Bioshock is the finest example of consolitis FPS pal, Babysitting vita-chambers so you can never die and big-daddies that are easier to kill than an average monster in the older, but harder games of the same genre are the next-gen concepts for FPSes! Truth be told, Bioshock is a sign of the times: FPSes and RPGs will both become more and more dumbed down because ridiculously easy twitch gaming is the way to go for FPSes as is Bethesda dialogue trees and dumbfuck NPCs for RPGs: one for a target audience of clumsy retards and the other for the same T.A. of clumsy retards as well. Three words define the future of mainstream gaming: Lowest Common Denominator

I want to have to think fast, to aim and shoot at damn fast enemies that can dodge my bullets, retreat and call in reinforcements(enemies with decently done AI), to have stealth as a important tool(And with a Thief 1 like AI to spot you) and to have the option to disable the crosshair in a FPS or any other action game. And preferably, to have enemies that are easier to kill with one type of gun and harder with others, and bosses that require alternate methods for being defeated(Luring into a trap, sneaking, etc.). Plus, it would be good to have a well written and interesting story, even if linear, that follows the game.

I want C&C, well written characters and NPCs and a nonlinear gameplay for CRPGs without babysitting quest compasses for dumbfucks. And also not another LOTR clone shallow game world.

Is there no RPG besides Age of Decadence that fits that and no FPS besides older ones like Unreal and Half-Life 1 that fit that other requirements? Or are all future FPSes going to be like Bioshock?

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

Is there no RPG besides Age of Decadence that fits that and no FPS besides older ones like Unreal and Half-Life 1 that fit that other requirements? Or are all future FPSes going to be like Bioshock?

I know you're going to vomit at the first sight of this, but Halo 3 actually has some "balls" on the higher difficulties. It's not very "PC" but at least you can die...a lot and it rewards some quick thinking as well as quick shooting. But then again, it's cool to hate it uncontrollably.

As for RPGs, not really, besides Scars of War. Eschalon won't have the choices and consequences, The Broken Hourglass seems a bit too cliche, Fan Made Fallout is never going to be finished, Afterfall will likely end up a twitch shooter or vaporware (despite it's great promise), The Witcher is a ridiculously high powered NWN engine game that few people who want it will be able to play an few choices and consequences to boot, Mass Effect....needs no explanation. So we are positively screwed besides AoD and SoW. And those games are both being made by Codex members...go figure.

 

[hakuroshi]

But he's right, you know. You can clearly see Fallout's influences in Daggerfall.

And especially in Arena
But the games had something in common, true.

As for devs quotes. Probably everyone tried once to kill everything in Fallout2. It can be fun in a retarded way (and actually brings some new dialogue options). But wipe out Shady Sands... When Fallout was released, my friend wanted to play it as a completely evil badass he usually played, but arriving at Shady Sands he was striken by pity and ended the game with as positive karma as any savior can get.

 

[Naked Ninja]

I think you were being a bit unfair there VD. Take the QA guy who said this :

The first time I played Fallout 1 and got Power Armor and a Plasma Rifle (I didn’t know about the Turbo Plasma Rifle yet), I created a save, and killed every single person in every single town I’d ever been to.

Yet it you read his entire post, he also said he loved these things about Fallout :

The ability to beat Fallout 1 without killing anyone.

...

I loved being able to work for Gizmo in Junktown, then ratting him out to Killian Darkwater. He would question how you know so much about Gizmo’s operation without being one of his stooges. If your intelligence and charisma were high enough, you can persuade him that you were independently investigating him and found out all the information Killian needs to put him away.

...

The feeling of desolation was amazing. There were small settlements, and then long stretches of nothingness (or alien spaceships if your luck was high enough). Almost very town was full of people who feared outsiders. The player never really had a place to go back to to feel safe. This lead to people staying on edge for almost the entirety of their playtime.

...

The ending of Fallout 1 (SPOILER): Doing this grand quest over multiple months of in-game time to save your entire Vault, and then having them exile you when you finally return and save them is pure Black-Isle Studios GOLD.

You've portrayed the man rather unfairly as some sort of action-killing junkie, not cool.

And so what if some people on that team liked the c&c, some liked the atmosphere, some liked the story, some liked the action/violence and some liked all those aspects? So Fallout appealed to many different types of gamers on many different types of levels? That's a pretty cool achievement in my mind.

The bethesda team seems to span the entire range there so I don't have any problem with that. Remains to be seen if they can produce a game with the same multi-faceted appeal, sure, but painting them as a team of retards just because some people vividly remember a moment in Fallout when they survived a deadly encounter through using a single grenade is just not fair at all. Bad form.

 

[Mech]

Come on now, taking quotes out of context is what RPG Codex is all about.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

Come on now, taking quotes out of context is what RPG Codex is all about.

Nope...that's SA's job.