Citizen P wrote on Nov 11, 2015, 06:27:
So, your almighty hallowed franchise declines in chapter 2.

You're allowed to mention Deus Ex to explore isometric vs FPS in regards to dynamic gameplay, but I can't mention another RPG from the same company because it has inconvenient tits? Are you a bigot, or blinded by fervor? Your inability to even address the main quest lines of all 4 titles objectively shows how indefensible your argument about depth of storytelling truly is. Roleplaying games are rife with kill and fed-ex quests, the context and reasons change, but that is the bread and butter, for good or ill.

So, your almighty hallowed franchise declines in chapter 2.

You're allowed to mention Deus Ex to explore isometric vs FPS in regards to dynamic gameplay, but I can't mention another RPG from the same company because it has inconvenient tits? Are you a bigot, or blinded by fervor? Your inability to even address the main quest lines of all 4 titles objectively shows how indefensible your argument about depth of storytelling truly is. Roleplaying games are rife with kill and fed-ex quests, the context and reasons change, but that is the bread and butter, for good or ill.

I have told you to stop your bleating and go play your unchanged game and enjoy it for what it, a great old game. Your not winning an argument here, because there is nothing to win. Or lose.

I hope your the last Unwashed Villager, because this obsessive pedantry is irrelevant and should be retired.
I have told you to stop your bleating and go play your unchanged game and enjoy it for what it, a great old game. Your not winning an argument here, because there is nothing to win. Or lose.

I hope your the last Unwashed Villager, because this obsessive pedantry is irrelevant and should be retired.

I've argued with people smarter than you about this subject in the past. So in fact, I expected you to do better, to try and provide a semblance of challenge. Some kind of logic. Anything, really.

Unfortunately, reducing each game to a phrase and claiming accuracy of comparison, makes it patently obvious that I'm arguing with none other than a child.

Repeating yourself like a broken record, grabbing onto cheap gotchas, doubling up on unclever insults... I don't need to paint a picture here that you haven't already painted yourself.

Google isn't gonna cover for you. Don't start arguments knowing nothing about the subject. This is some free advice for the future.

I'm done with you. Enjoy your hoarding simulator. Todd Howard loves you.

Citizen P wrote on Nov 11, 2015, 04:27:
You're an idiot, and that's okay. You don't want to grow up, and you want everything your way, the old wat, or no way - but you aren't a big enough to just let things go, you have whine and complain. Love to hate, grow up.

Protip: attributing reason to emotion is a poor defense. But then again, you've tasked yourself with defending the indefensible.

Let's review main quests:
F1: Get Water Chip to save Vault. A timed fetch quest.
F2: Get Geck to save village.
F3: Find Father who abandoned you.
FNV: Find the man that tried to kill you.

Reductio ad absurdum is not an argument.

Fallout 2 almost all of its art assets are from Fallout. Buggy as absolute hell on release, it was virtually unplayable.
Fallout 2 Had a whorehouse, moreover you could be a pornstar. A fetch quest involved finding dirty magazines, the game featured a number of whores, and getting a crimelord's daughter pregnant. Wow, that's edgy. Do you remember fetching golden gecko skins for rewards? I do. Do you remember the citizens of Planescape: Torment? Torpedo tits and bikinis everywhere.

Both Fallout's featured low-rent, at the time, celebrity voice acting.

Many quests in Fallout 1 and 2? Go here, kill this, get that, bring it back.

More reductio ad absurdum.

Back To The Future 2: a bad guy travels to the past, and good guy travels to the past to stop him in order to save the future

Terminator 2: a bad guy travels to the past, and good guy travels to the past to stop him in order to save the future

SAME MOVIE CLEARLY.

In other words, you make much noise, signifying nothing.

I think Fallout 1 is great, Fallout 2 is alright, and you're stuck in fantasyland.

It never gets old when people refer to Fallout as something that was so far in the past that it cannot be purchased, ran, re-experienced, or as if it is something that hasn't been thoroughly documented.

http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/The_Nearly_Ultimate_Fallout_Guide

A good guide like this, studied thoroughly, gives a good look at how rich Fallout's world was under the surface.

There are situations in Fallout that you'll never find in FO3/FO4 because they are simply too complex for Bethesda to script. They don't have the know-how.

But of course a troglodyte can blow through Fallout like they did with Diablo, and miss on the entirety of it all.

Fallout 2 is a parody of Fallout, instead of trying too hard to make great atmosphere they filled the game with as many popular culture references and bad jokes as they could.

Yes, Fallout 2 is thematically poor. However, mechanically, in terms of world reactivity and freedom of player agency, in the details that matter, its programming and design is ages ahead of Bethesda.

Fallout 2 was the beginning of thematic decline, however it was still far more thematically cohesive than Fallout 3, and incomparably better when it came to meaningful utilization of stats and world reactivity.

As for Planescape Torment, it was a vastly different design with its own strengths and weaknesses, which is outside the framework of this discussion. But yes, it was a classic game, unlikely to be reproduced in all its depth.

These days we have companies who have tools for growing 3D grass and making 3D houses, but zero knowledge on developing true world reactivity. That's how you end up with an NPC in Witcher 3 telling you his life story while you're robbing his house right in front of him.

edit: n/m

Citizen P wrote on Nov 10, 2015, 20:49:
An RPG elitist! I appreciate your neckbeard is long, unwashed, and dusted orange with sacred cheetos, may your parents basement be everdark and foreboding to the profane sunlight and social graces of in-person human contact. The original Fallouts were great isometric games in their time, and that time has passed: go back and enjoy them, otherwise don't play these new iterations if they have sullied your perfect memories. Times change and things change with it, except you, in your basement and your sour fantasies.

The ultimate irony is of course is that you cling to the oldest crappiest game designs like they're new, just because a game comes out in 2015 with better graphics, which still uses them.

You actually live in the past!

When pointed at something better, you deride it because it is "old" chronologically, while in reality it was on the forefront of innovation, before decline started. And it still is!

Decline in gameplay happened, parallel with incline in graphics. To people like you, who believe a game written for adults means it has tits, that's all that ever mattered.

"Isometric" is a red herring. Not only is isometric perspective widely used today, but the original Deus Ex was an FPS, and it was chock-full of world and character reactivity like you will never see today, not even in Deus Ex:HR.

So was Fallout.

Fallout 1 had tremendous atmosphere, it made you care about something of your own volition, instead of stuffing heavy-handed sentiment down your throat. It didn't saddle you with idiotic filler quests. It had far more complexity and imagination to everything that happened, or could've happened, to you.

It rewarded you for being clever, for being your own person. It built an actual world that responded to the character you created.

But hey, enjoy your skinner box. Enjoy fetching apples for people in a nonsensical world, and leveling up stats that mean nothing. Enjoy your invulnerable NPCs and one-word dialogue choices. Enjoy pointless, boring timesink activities that belong in an MMO, rather than a CRPG. Enjoy the hoarding. Enjoy the grind.

But hey, cheer up. After all, you get to make your character look like Furiosa from Mad Max while she "crafts items".

It's troglodytes like YOU who are still living in a mental equivalent of a cave, and YOU are helping companies like Bethesda produce same old, primitive, throwback-to-programmers-writing-dialogue-on-a-napkin shit with a newer skin.

I'm still waiting for people like you to develop taste. But stupid... stupid never changes.

Kxmode wrote on Nov 10, 2015, 16:59:

shihonage wrote on Nov 10, 2015, 15:37:
Fallout 1 had compact and effective writing. Effectively designed abstraction . . . [middle gutted] . . . where too many people offloaded crucial parts of their brains onto Google.

TL;DR you clearly have "issues" with Bethesda's Fallout series. Instead of bitching about the "good old days" (it's NEVER coming back) find another game you can enjoy. I hear the crowdfunded Wasteland 2 is quite good; or perhaps Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void is more your thing.

Hey, you figured out I have issues with Bethesda's take on Fallout. Congratulations.

Wasteland 2 is just a mediocre squad shooter. No real world-building or story to hold it together, the whole thing is a giant gimmick.

Starcraft 2: Legacy Of the Void may as well be my thing, because it has co-op play, but that has nothing to do with subject, or even genre, at hand.

Perhaps your inability to discern between genres is not merely a symptom of your own mental deficiency, but just a sign of the times where all genres are grinded together for profitability and robbed of their individual edge.

Case in point: Fallout 4, an alleged "ar-pee-gee", which is really an FPS.

(INT check failure) Oh no, he started with the hurty Bethesda words again, better stop reading this post now. Bad words hurt head. Bad man, go away.

Fallout 1 had compact and effective writing. Effectively designed abstraction of a world that sucked you in. And an innovative and complex design which made the world elastic and gave you a sense of actually being there and having freedoms defined by your character's abilities.

If you look into good Fallout gameplay guides, you will be AMAZED at how much has been lost in terms of complexity of scripting, reactivity, etc etc. Fallout was designed with the true spirit of an RPG in mind, back when the term stood for something other than "Really Profitable Game" to game companies.

Bethesda wouldn't know how to program something like this. The gameplay programming, the dialogue systems, environmental reactivity, alternate solutions and paths, it's all black magic to them.

Essentially they J.J. Abrams'd Fallout 3, and then "progressed" that even more in Fallout 4. Their game's freedom is about changing your geographical location in the environment, not about your character's choices.

It's a mediocre shooter with inventory and meaningless stats. If there was a miniscule functional difference between Fallout and Far Cry series, it's getting harder to see with each passing day.

Fallout has been dead since 1998. People don't even remember what made it Fallout. They're just gobbling up Skyrim with guns and LARPing their characters on which they spent 1 hour adjusting eyebrow makeup, because that's the true reactivity right there.

Nobody reads anymore. If they did, these games would not sell. We live in a time of utter cultural decline and stupidity, where too many people offloaded crucial parts of their brains onto Google.

Starcraft 2 came out in 2010. The campaign was fun, but sadly not cooperative. Then I forgot about it.

I really wish they didn't call these games "Fallout". They're far too simple in all the wrong ways, and have far too shitty writing.

All that engine improvement, the writing will still be complete shit.

Video drivers are now full of switches which optimize them for specific engines. I guess it was inevitable. NVidia sees "oh these guys have this many draw calls of this type in this place", and they're like, "oh we can queue them all up here or group it here, or speed it up like this"...

Ideally these optimizations should all be on engine end, but that's just never happening, apparently. If it did, I guess, videocard drivers would remain frozen at one version for very long periods of time...

After NVidia's "game-ready" Advanced Warfare drivers broke Advanced Warfare and I had to downgrade to fix all the stuttering and horrible FPS and missing audio and such, I lost faith in "game-ready" drivers completely.

Finally, we'll get a decent sequel to Diablo2. It will be called "Diablo2".

ldonyo wrote on Nov 4, 2015, 17:00:
I can say from personal experience that Diablo II works on Windows 10 in single-player mode. The graphics could use a re-rendering at higher resolution, however.

"Runs" and "works" are two different things. Diablo2 has no widescreen support, and all actor movement and animation speeds are messed up, compared to how it used to run on systems it was designed for.

If you want a quality WoW experience, it can be found on Nostalrius, a vanilla emulated server. Party like it's 2006, before all the dumbing down and inconsistent art style "upgrades". Max out anisotropy and AA, and the game still looks good.

Nostalrius PVP (primary server) has population of anywhere between 3500 and 7000 people at a given time, usually.

Nostalrius PVE (just opened) also has thousands, but likely will be less prolific.

Meanwhile, still waiting for new Tribes patch to go public.

I knew how this barely-game was going to play before it came out... wanted to be wrong. Looks great, gameplay is really non-existent. Fuck crafting, fuck combat/stealth sequences with humans, fuck fail-retry-fail, fuck indestructible alien.

There was a time when games had actually different code, algorithms, approaches behind them. But this is just the same tired shit in different skin.

I still don't see why a screensaver is being sold as a commercial product. The time of flying toasters is long behind us.

None of Telltale games are "interactive". I laffed when in "Walking Dead" you chose to save one character over another.

Oh yes they did get saved, and it was an actual "choice", except the character you "saved" was instantly pushed into the background of the story and departed to another location. Later on as the story briefly showed them again, it was only to shortly kill them off.

Designing interactive stories is an art and a science, and when all you have is state machine approach to this, nothing good comes out of it.

I've seen this entire show.

Not only was the episode itself clearly supportive of inciest, but-

"“Wedding Videography” ends with Briggs Hatton appearing on the screen stating that he is the writer of the episode and was an advocate for cousins marrying, and incest in general. (Editor’s Note: Briggs Hatton did write the episode, but that was the actor Matt Gourley playing him).

Briggs had talked with the rest of the writers in the Community writing room, and they had agreed to allow Briggs to make this episode under the stipulation that he reveals his identity and views at the end of the episode."

jacobvandy wrote on Oct 21, 2015, 16:07:

shihonage wrote on Oct 21, 2015, 15:22:
This last season they had an episode where they tried to legitimize incest. Without a joke. For real.

I don't recall the exact episode, but the show in general has a lot of dry satire... You probably just missed the joke.

This last season they had an episode where they tried to legitimize incest. Without a joke. For real.

(Doesn't read article) I feel my life improving already!