User comment history
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| News Comments > Wrath of the Lich King Cinematic, Interviews |
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| 12. |
Re: Blizzard Cinematics? |
Aug 21, 2008, 21:44 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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I agree. They need to be making full length movies...
Yeah, but they need a copy editor to go over their script before recording dialog.
"You SHALL be King..."
Ack! Shall is used as a future modal verb only in the first person singular and plural. Since this line is in the second person singular, it should read:
"You WILL be King..."
Granted, this is a mistake that people make all the time that doesn't affect the basic meaning of the sentence. That said, although less common, this is a grammatical mistake on par with: "You IS the Lich King, Arthas!" In other words, the verb's conjugation does not match the number and person of the subject, a grammatical no-no.
Whatever. Schools don't even give a shit about proper grammar anymore, so why should we expect it from a corporation?
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| News Comments > Fallout 3 Q&A |
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| 20. |
Re: Hey asshole! |
Aug 5, 2008, 02:17 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Okay, let me argue this seriously for a moment. What made Fallout, Fallout?
In the previous post I mentioned Arcanum. Arcanum is basically Fallout: Steampunk Edition. There is a lot that is different between Fallout and Arcanum, but anyone that has played both can tell you that Arcanum "feels" like a Fallout game. So in order to answer your question, I think the best approach would be to find what was common to both Fallout and Arcanum.
Starting with the most obvious, both games were from an isometric perspective. Perspective isn't just cosmetic: it affects how the game world appears and how you interact with it on a fundamental level. Consider how different the gameplay feels between Hellgate: London and Diablo II. Likewise, consider the differences between Ultima VII and Ultima Underworld. A shift in perspective as dramatic from overhead isometric to first person changes things dramatically.
Both Fallout and Arcanum had open, freely explorable worlds that, unlike Oblivion, didn't sacrifice depth of content. Key to this was the use of an overland map, random encounters, and fully detailed adventure areas (either towns or "dungeons"). The expansive map, that your location icon traveled across so slowly, gave the world an impressive sense of scale. Likewise, the very well designed random encounter system made the world filled lived in, that you weren't just crossing empty space but there were other people, and occasionally creatures, sharing that same space. Finally, the adventure locations, although limited in number, each had their own character and lots of substantive stuff to do in them. This world design system that was in both Fallout and Arcanum was superb, as it gave a huge sense of scale without sacrificing depth of content. Compare your first trip from The Den to Vault City, in Fallout 2, with a trip from the Imperial City to anywhere in Oblivion. In Oblivion, you can still see the tower of the Imperial city from almost every spot of the gameworld, making the world feel miniaturized. Where as in Fallout 2, that trip to Vault City takes about a half hour of real time, about 2 weeks of game time, will have at least a half dozen random encounter, and you discover the town of Modoc along the way. That Fallout 2 trip is often very rough, with bandit encounters perhaps getting a companion killed, with lots of running away from overwhelming groups of enemies, such that when you see that green circle representing a visitable area, you can only hope that it's a town in which you can find safety before continuing on the second half of your journey east to Vault City. The world system of Fallout and Arcanum was uniquely designed and created free form gameplay that was truly memorable.
Both Fallout and Arcanum had a non-linear main quest, although Arcanum, unfortunately, to a lesser extent. In Fallout 1 you had to find the water chip, in Fallout 2 you had to find the GECK, and in Arcanum you had to find the owner of the gnome's ring. You were given some hints and places to start looking, and then you were let loose upon the gameworld. Those hints, while leading you on interesting side adventures, all led to dead ends, forcing you to just explore the world, gather clues where you can, and ultimately find your objective after having gone through the world as you saw fit, rather than following a linear quest chain. Now it's possible that Bethesda has designed their world and their main quest similarly, but I have serious doubts about that. After all, their target audience is the same bunch of mouth breathers that couldn't find Caius Cosades with step by step directions, and the damned quest compass is making a return. Somehow I doubt that you'll be expected to explore the world without guidance in order to find clues, i.e. to expect you to have an adventure.
I could keep going but this post is long enough as is. Other similarities I had in mind: non-class based character system, focus on multiple solutions to problems, fully written dialogue trees where what you say can have major consequences.
You'll notice that ultra violence, wacky humor, and a retro-future post-apocalyptic setting, aren't present in Arcanum, and yet Arcanum still felt and played like it was a Fallout game. My point here is that a Fallout mod for Oblivion would never play very much like Fallout. Now it's possible that Fallout 3 doesn't just play like a mod for Oblivion. It is possible that Bethesda really worked hard to ensure that the only similarity between Fallout 3 and Oblivion is the perspective and the game engine. Many things are possible. But I have seen nothing so far to suggest that Fallout 3 is anything more than an Oblivion mod. The fact that the gaming media is calling Fallout 3 "the true follow up to Oblivion" sure doesn't do much to convince me otherwise.
This comment was edited on Aug 5, 02:19. |
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| News Comments > Ken Levine: BioShock Rescued the Shooter |
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| 35. |
Re: BioShock |
Aug 4, 2008, 21:56 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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Really? "So many?" Care to list that humongous group of dead genres?
Traditional RPGs in the mold of Baldur's Gate and Fallout. Obsidian seems to be the only developer actively making these anymore, but even they seem to branching out into console action-rpgs.
Space Combat games like Freespace 2 -- I can't even remember the last time a GOOD space combat game was released that wasn't a mod. Was it that online one from Microsoft that came out around 2000? I think it was called Alliance or something?
Turn Based Squad games like XCOM or Jagged Alliance 2. Last one of these I remember playing was Silent Storm in 2003, and that had only come after a several year drought.
Even single player first person shooters designed specifically for the PC are a rare commodity these days. Last one I can remember, other than the Half-Life episodes, is F.E.A.R, which was three years ago. Everything else is just a console port which tends to have a pretty big impact on the gameplay. What ever happened to games like SHOGO, Unreal 1, Soldier of Fortune, Star Trek: Elite Force, Jedi Knight, No One Lives Forever, etc.?
That's what I could think of off the top of my head. Whatever, you never buy my arguments anyway.
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| News Comments > Fallout 3 Q&A |
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| 12. |
Re: Hey asshole! |
Aug 4, 2008, 21:38 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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I guarantee there's around 25 guys on this forum who are the absolute fucking Judge AND Jury on whether a title has enough fallout-ness!
Well it would've been nice if they had made a game that played like Fallout. Arcanum is very, very different from Fallout in a number of respects, but it still played and "felt" like Fallout, which is what I was hoping for from a Fallout 3: a game with similar GAMEPLAY. The basic impression I got from E3, however, is that Fallout 3 is Oblivion 2: Post-Apocalypse. Given that Oblivion and Fallout are on opposite ends of the CRPG-gameplay spectrum, I think it's safe to assume that Fallout 3's relation to its predecessors will be limited to the purely cosmetic.
Also, it's not looking to hopeful that modders will be able to rescue Fallout 3 the way they rescued the abysmal Vanilla Oblivion, as it has been confirmed that the game will NOT ship with an SDK. So far, Beth has been unwilling to provide a straight answer about whether or not one will be released post launch, which suggests to me that it probably isn't happening.
Whatever, I'll keep following the game and probably get it at launch, if for no other reason than to see for myself what has become of one of my favorite game series, but damn, this is not what I was hoping for when it was announced that Fallout 3 was back in production.
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| News Comments > Ken Levine: BioShock Rescued the Shooter |
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| 25. |
Re: BioShock |
Aug 4, 2008, 18:48 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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So did anyone actually read the article? Or did they just see the headline and jump on the forums to complain?
Although I agree that the success of Bioshock does seem to have gone to Ken's head a little bit, he's hardly claiming that the entire shooter genre would've collapsed if Bioshock had been a financial failure, as many of you seem to think. Instead, Levine is making a couple of perfectly reasonable points:
Irrational was just barely able to get a publisher and funding for Bioshock. The decision makers at gaming publishers all felt that there was no market for a System Shock/Deus Ex-style game. Since it was such a high profile game, if Bioshock had failed, then its failure would end up being Exhibit A for publishers when deciding not to fund SS/DX-style games. The result would've been that any future developer of this sort of game would have an even harder time getting funding than Irrational, and given that Irrational was only just barely able to get funding, you could pretty much write off there being another game like this for the foreseeable future.
Someone want to explain to me what is so unreasonable about that? So many other genres are basically dead because the suits don't feel they can make Halo-like profits off of them -- why wouldn't that have happened with System Shock-style games as well, if Bioshock had been a high profile financial failure?
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| News Comments > Morning Previews |
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| 4. |
Re: No subject |
Aug 4, 2008, 13:19 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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As far as I know they said that all NPCs will be killable, that means CHILD KILLING!!!!! WOHOO!!!
They never said that. What they did say was that they were trying to keep unkillable characters to a minimum, which they also said about Oblivion. Child killing is almost certainly not in the game.
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| News Comments > Censored Fallout 3 Down Under? |
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| 22. |
Re: No subject |
Aug 4, 2008, 00:00 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 2007 — President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.
A bill that Obama voted for btw...
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| News Comments > Fallout 3 Movie |
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| 52. |
Re: No subject |
Jul 15, 2008, 12:13 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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I'm going to make a point that many of you seem to be missing:
Games evolve.
Games devolve is more like it. Games change my ass: they're becoming more and more alike. The games industry has run out of ideas. This notion that changing a turn-based isometric traditional RPG into a console first person somehow constitutes innovation is boneheaded in the extreme. How the hell is taking a unique experience and making it generic moving game design forward?
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| News Comments > Fallout 3 Movie |
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| 18. |
Re: No subject |
Jul 15, 2008, 00:18 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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this way I get to look forward to an awesome looking shooter/rpg with no emotional baggage.
You'd be pissed too if the long awaited sequel to one of your favorite games turned out to be a cheap cash in. For example, imagine that a new Thief game was announced, but that, in order to appeal to the rapidly growing casual game market, Thief 4 will be a series of motion-sensitive minigames for the Wii. All the characters and atmosphere you remember will return, but none of the gameplay that made the original so memorable. How would you feel about that, even if it was the best Wii minigame collection ever made?
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| News Comments > Dragon Age: Origins Announcement |
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| 31. |
Re: Good/evil |
Jul 14, 2008, 23:03 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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I guess some people won't be satisfied until every game is just as much a monotonous chore and incessant sequence of aggravations as every day life?
Look Creston, we got on the topic of whether or not Bioware's games feature good writing. A writer's function is to describe reality. Note, however, that describing reality does not have to mean a mundane retread of the banalities of everyday life. A good sci-fi story, filled with wonderous technologies, alien races, and otherworldly powers, can describe reality very well, a number of the better Star Trek episodes spring to mind. You see, the power of literature is that it doesn't have to deal with an issue directly. A good author can tell a story, and the issues he is interested in, his themes, come about through the interplay of his characters and the situations they find themselves in. The reality the author is seeking to describe may never be directly dealt with in the story, only manifesting itself when the reader thinks about the issues the story raised for him or her. The fact that a story deals with reality in some fashion is what gives that story meaningfulness. If the story didn't deal with reality, but described something that no one can ever relate to with their own experience, then there would be little profit in contemplating the story after the fact.
Have you ever noticed how you tend to think about a story, whether in text, on film, or on the stage, when everything doesn't all work out in the end? Could that possibly be because you sense that not everything will work out in the end in your own life? Sure there will be victories, but there will also be defeats, defeats such as a marriage falling apart, or a best friend dying in a car accident. The fact of the matter is that we don't all get to live Hollywood lives where the good guy always wins, always gets the girl, and always lives happily ever after. And while that is nice fantasy for a summer blockbuster, it doesn't really get us seriously reflecting on the reality of our lives the way good literature does, whether in text or on the screen.
I am partly describing my own literary tastes here, but regardless the power of literature lies in its ability to get you to think seriously about your own reality through someone else's fiction. Maybe you don't buy my own tragic take on reality, but nevertheless I'm willing to bet that the stories that have deeply affected you did so because they touched on something important in your life.
At any rate, if Bioware wants to be known for good writing, then they need to start dealing with reality in some fashion, something beyond simplistic battles between contrived characters of absolute good and evil. Only then will their stories really start affecting people, getting them to pause and think about something meaningful.
This comment was edited on Jul 14, 23:05. |
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| News Comments > Dragon Age: Origins Announcement |
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| 23. |
Re: Good/evil |
Jul 14, 2008, 16:13 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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If KotoR had been created with more room for neutral characters, it wouldn't have stayed true to its source material.
You're thinking in terms of the DND alignment system, which does a remarkably poor job of describing moral reality. Think about it: how often are you faced with a clear right and wrong, and some vague third option which is a combination of the two? I'll answer for you: never. When people actually have to stop and think about what it is they ought to do, it's because the situation is unclear and your choices offer competing risks and benefits, both moral and material. Another possibility is that the morally wrong decision will materially benefit everyone involved, for example a "white" lie. The point I'm getting at here is that life is rarely so simple as to boil down to a choice between a clear good, a clear evil, and an indifferent.
Granted, video games, and narratives in general, tend to deal with something a little more grand than the mundaneness of everyday life. But, from my own experience, it seems that the grander the scenario the more confused the morality is. For example, a friend of mine, while serving in Iraq a few years ago, encountered a group of Iraqi police who had captured, for lack of a better term, a bad guy. The prisoner in question deserved what ever he had coming for him, and were he to die a violent death the world would probably be a better place for it. The Iraqi police had beaten this prisoner, and it was pretty clear to my friend that they planned to extrajudicially torture the prisoner to death once the Americans left. My friend had orders not to interfere with Iraqi POW operations, as such interference would insult the Iraqis and hinder the ability of the Americans to work effectively with. My friend ended up intervening to save the prisoner's life, and was later reprimanded for it, effectively ending his military career. Did he do the right thing? Probably, but it cost him his career, pissed the Iraqis off at the Americans a great deal, and all to save the life of a guy that didn't deserve to live to begin with, and would nevertheless likely be legally executed later on.
To go back to video games, how does the above situation fit into DND morality or the moral choices offered by video games? It doesn't, because video games offer very immature moral choices and the moral framework in which most video games operate does not even remotely describe moral reality.
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| News Comments > Fallout 3 Teaser Site |
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| 4. |
Re: No subject |
Jul 14, 2008, 13:39 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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I'm guessing verbal directions are also out and there will be another kick ass compass or arrow of some sort so I never get lost.
Yep, quest compass has been confirmed. Fallout 3 is Oblivion 2: After the Bomb, nothing more.
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| News Comments > Dragon Age: Origins Announcement |
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| 16. |
Re: Screen Shots? |
Jul 14, 2008, 13:15 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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When hasn't that been true?
Mass Effect would be the most recent example. An ancient evil returns to wipe out all life in the universe! Where have I heard that one before? Every sci-fi story ever written and, I almost forgot, the OC for NWN!
It also doesn't help that Bioware seems to recycle their characters from one game to the next too. For example, Wrex is Canderous Ordo, Ashley is Bastilla, Kaiden is Carth who is Anomen from BG2. I never played Jade Empire but apparently the characters fit the same mold there as well.
Writing isn't Bioware's strong point. All of their games boil down to simple confrontations between one-dimensional absolute evil and one-dimensional absolute good, saying nothing about the much more nuanced and ambiguous challenges people face in the real world. The plots themselves are recycled from one game to the next, and often rely on some "BIG TWIST", i.e. YOU are Darth Revan, to keep the players attention. Their characters don't come off as real people but as an amateur fan-fiction writer's attempts at "deep characters".
Granted, I'm applying literary standards to a video game, which is probably unfair given the abysmal efforts your typical video game makes at storytelling. Nonetheless, Bioware games still have very bad writing, even if they are marginally better than what exists in, for example, Gears of War.
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 8. |
Re: Top 10 OMGTWF.... |
Jul 13, 2008, 21:08 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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looking pretty good
Not bad, graphics certainly look nice, although I have to wonder how a TV would survive 200 years of post-apocalypse and play without any apparent power source. They're paying homage to the Fallout 1 intro, of course, but at least there it made sense: the bombs fell roughly 30 seconds ago, the TV survived through dumb luck, and the transmission cuts out a few seconds later when the power grid or broadcast tower collapses.
Whatever, I'm probably overanalyzing the trailer, but damn if the latest print coverage of the game isn't making this look like the Fallout fan's worst nightmare. The press are openly calling the game Oblivion 2 now, and what they describe of the gameplay sounds like that's a completely accurate description, the only changes being cosmetic with sewers replacing caves, office buildings replacing elvish ruins, and baseball bats replacing maces. And apparently the god awful level scaling is still in! Just "reduced", whatever the hell that means. Grr, of all the classic PC franchises that had to be turned into console trash, why'd it have to be Fallout?
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| News Comments > Out of the Blue |
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| 12. |
Re: No subject |
Jun 23, 2008, 12:54 |
Scottish Martial Arts |
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The classics nerd in me had to say this:
In Memoriam does not mean "in memory", as blue used it in his post. Rather it means "into memory" (memoriam being in the accusative case and implying motion towards). The idea is that when the person was alive he existed, but now he exists only in our memory, and that some day we all will only exist in the memories of others. I've always found the phrase to be quite poignant and beautiful, much more so than a simple "In memory of". At any rate, thought some of you might be interested.
This comment was edited on Jun 23, 12:59. |
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2494 Comments. 125 pages. Viewing page 17.
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