Fallout 3 upgrade system as much fun as Deus Ex

[Jonas]

Hahah man, CP... your post looks like some sort of NSA document.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS CLASSIFIED!

Screw You Jonas!

[James T]

I've gone through a fair few hours of Fallout 3 (most of that spent trudging unbelievably slowly through empty countryside -- pace-wise, this game is like playing the entirety of The Witcher while Geralt's drunk), and I'm baffled at how inferior this game is; I expected the critical reception to be fairly hype-gullible (as PT Barnum once said, there's a games reviewer born every minute), but this is off the scale; even Alec Meer's comparatively more reserved review was far too kind to this thing. I can understand why Bioshock got its excessive hype (crap game, but awesome decor!), but what the hell does this have? I truly cannot think of anything this game does that other games (both recent and otherwise) have not done better, and it's not like there's some je ne sais quoi here that turns the game into more than the sum of its parts if you just click your heels and believe. The Witcher demolishes FO3 in every respect (except that you can't be a safecracker, heh), so, it's pretty much over before it begins, but there's more -- I don't care if Bethesda were 'going for something different' with their attempt at making an RPG with guns, 'cos they failed. DX got it right (and STALKER suggested that pure FPS gunplay and RPG questing/socialising can complement one another perfectly well without Total Game Failure), and Fallout got... thirteen-headshots guy, to pick a particularly illustrative example. I don't care if he's the King of Siam, if I shoot him in the head, he should be fucked up -- abstracting hit-points to the degree that someone with lots of 'health' has a bulletproof face is unacceptable in anything even dabbling with shooter mechanics -- and FO3 is swimming in 'em. Meanwhile, if you want an open world in which you're not moving at the pace of a brick, saddled with a interface that isn't a fiddly, arcane fucking nuisance (it beggars belief that you can't remap the keys you use in the Pipboy, and the goddamn 'escape' key still going to the main menu while you're in there is a little gripe that goes a loooooooooong way), Far Cry 2 outdoes Fallout, and it's as aggressively unambitious an open-world game as you'll find. At least it gets the basics right.

I thought perhaps FO3's raves were mostly coming from those deprived console-oriented reviewers/gamers who hadn't had the pleasure of decent PC material (in which case their last major Western RPG would've been, what, Mass Effect? Whoopee), but not really -- people are gaga about this thing across the board (er, the gaming community, that is, not this board, hyuk hyuk).

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

[Jonas]

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

I, too, feel like you're taking crazy pills.

[Trestkon]

I can understand why Bioshock got its excessive hype (crap game, but awesome decor!)

I guess I'll love Fallout 3 \o/

[James T]

I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!

I, too, feel like you're taking crazy pills.

So you haaave... nothing?

(and yes, Bioshock has the best aesthetic bells & whistles in gaming, but take away the pretties and it's... Doom 3. A Doom 3 so brutally unbalanced in your favour that it's like having a god-mode you can't get rid of. And remember all that talk of 'in-game ecology' and 'moral choice'? Funny stuff. I've seen toilet-door graffiti deeper than the 'moral choice' they were trumpeting.)

[Jonas]

(and yes, Bioshock has the best aesthetic bells & whistles in gaming, but take away the pretties and it's... Doom 3.

Yes, it's Doom 3 with open levels, upgradable weapons, character advancement, and a good story with political and philosophical overtones. Take that away, and sure - it's just Doom 3. But take that away from DX, and you got Unreal. Your point, my good man, is moot: You can easily reduce Bioshock to Doom 3 by removing things from it, in the same way that I can easily reduce you to a corpse by taking away your brain - that doesn't mean you're just a corpse plus a brain.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

Agree with you James T.

It was also suspected that Peter Hines bribed the reviewers with Holidays and free Hotel Rooms. They further more made some kind of agreement where the game would not score under a 9.0 or 90% on major game reviewer sites. They have done this before btw.

Bethesda over hype their games because they are unethical bastards. They pull the peter molyenux syndrome where they promise the world and instead deliver mediocrity.

[Phasmatis]

Well personally, I'm really enjoying the game.

[Jonas]

Bethesda over hype their games because they are unethical bastards.

Or, you know, because they think they've created some really fantastic products and they want to do the best they can to make sure they sell well.

[Trestkon]

It was also suspected that Peter Hines bribed the reviewers with Holidays and free Hotel Rooms. They further more made some kind of agreement where the game would not score under a 9.0 or 90% on major game reviewer sites. They have done this before btw.

Are you seriously saying that the entire game media profession was mass bribed in order to secure a good rating?

It seem as if you don't like *any* games. It must be rather depressing to keep playing things you don't like by developers you despise.

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

I do it for a living Trestkon Fallout 3 isn't a bad game, its just not the Tripple A perfect 10 game every reviewer on the planet keeps claiming it is.

[Trestkon]

I do it for a living Trestkon

Really? What do you do?

[Mr_Cyberpunk]

I'm a professional QA Tester for a developer in South Australia. We've worked with THQ and EA. happy (mostly third party stuff.. editing their work ect.)

[James T]

(and yes, Bioshock has the best aesthetic bells & whistles in gaming, but take away the pretties and it's... Doom 3.

Yes, it's Doom 3 with open levels,

'Open levels'? STALKER, Far Cry 2 (even bits of FC1, from memory), Thief 2, Deus Ex, these have 'open levels'. Bioshock was a series of tubes (like the internet!), occasionally with a hub or two so you could go down the 'objective C' tube rather than the 'objective B' tube. There are a maximum of two approach vectors to practically every situation in Bioshock -- go in guns blazing from one end of the tube, or go in guns blazing from the other end. It has absolutely anything but 'open levels'. In-universe it makes sense, Rapture being underwater and all, but if you're going to restrict player movement that far, the game's going to have to find its virtues elsewhere. You could 'open' the story instead with branching narrative paths/consequences, for example, or you could learn from Valve and dice the one path up with some puzzling (this would've required the least deviation from their apparently-chosen path, but they didn't do it -- yes, I remember Kyburz's office, that was a single room), or if you're not even going to spice up your shooter by that much then you've got Doom 3. just make it a really good shooter (see Valve again; balanced weapons, a variety of enemies that exercise the full spectrum of weapons, and a decent challenge) but...

upgradable weapons, character advancement

(for a tick there I thought 'What character advancement?!' but the gene tonics, I get it) ...as I was saying, Bioshock, even on the hardest level, is so hideously easy that gun tweaking and the offensive spells are meaningless (strictly speaking, you can specialise, but given that you can switch tonics and plasmids at regular intervals, and given how many slots are available to you, there's zero risk and therefore zero thought required). There are the brief difficulty spikes of the Big Daddies, but with Rapture's ankle-deep flood of ammo and Eve, my stocks are far too high for them to take me down unless I perversely offer my own neck.*

The Objectivist stuff was good fun, and it was nice to see a game studio actually have the ambition to build a premise around it, write some decent psycho dialogue to suit, and come up with some entertaining characters, but it means nothing without a game to back it up, it's just veneer. A wonderful veneer that deserves to be wrapped around a much better game. Minus Suchong and Kyburz, ideally. I hope that other studios will take up the challenge post-Bioshock to put that much care into their game milieus, but a game is about more than the wallpaper. The old mantra "gameplay before graphics" always seemed insultingly obvious to me in the early 90s, but apparently it still needed saying, as it died the day Bioshock came out; I'm hoping for a comeback.


* I remember Ken Levene making a seemingly neutral observation post-Bioshock that people tended to play games 'conservatively' -- if the electricity-and-wrench combo is effective, and people are confident in their Eve supply, they'll largely stick to that combo. That gave rise to forum posters and article commenters protesting that people who found the game too easy were 'playing it wrong'. I agree that anyone who stuck solely to one or two tactics would be taking a piss a bit, but the real lesson, one that Levene was hopefully indicating that he'd learned, was that you shouldn't make a game where succeeding with so crude a moveset is possible. If necessity isn't the motivator (and surely we play action games to leave our safety zone?), tedium's going to have to do the job, in which case you're just waiting for the player to get bored. I usually hear complaints of boredom targeted at the post-reveal portion of the game, but I sensed the problem rather earlier on.

As for the Fallout 3 thing, the issue of publisher/review fraternisation (perks for reviewers and advertising dollars influencing games writing) is hardly dead and buried -- ever read a major gaming blog or site that doesn't see its members jetted off to publisher 'events' on a regular basis? -- but on the other hand, the game reviewing community as a whole is laughably overexcitable and inclined to follow the leader -- you don't need to shout 'em a holiday, let alone provide anything so unseemly as cash, just put that money into your marketing team and carefully build up manufactured hype for a few months, and as long as your game isn't as catastrophically broken as 'Clear Sky', you're laughin' by review-time. Only way to know a game is to play it for yourself -- reviewers (as they stand, at least) are a joke.