New Elder Scrolls Game In 2010? 130
Paul Oughton, publishing executive for Bethesda, spoke to GamesIndustry about the company's plans for the future, and his comments include some information about the next Elder Scrolls game. Quoting:
"'At the moment we've got Fallout 3 for this year and potentially there's a new Elder Scrolls title in 2010,' said Oughton. 'At the moment we're not that interested in the Wii. We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We'll continue to pursue three or four titles a year and go for big titles,' he said of the company's publishing plans for the future."
Re:Jeez Late news, TES:EMPIRE trailer is available (Score:3, Informative)
Video is Warhammer, NOT Elder Scrolls (Score:3, Informative)
I wondered why there weren't any comments - it's because it's a fake video. I was a bit suspicious as soon as the map showed an area named "Empire", which isn't overly Elder Scrolls-like, but then the first character appeared and he's a Warhammer Warrior Priest! Here [youtube.com] is the original Warhammer video.
Someone needs to mod the parent down as "-1 fake"
(Yes, I know it might be obvious to others, but not everyone will have seen the Warhammer video)
Fallout 3 is better than 1 and 2 (Score:5, Informative)
Have you played it yet? It's quite good.
There are some changes. But if you examine it in an unbiased fashion, they have actually improved several game mechanics from the first two games.
1) You have to get power armor training to wear power armor. This prevents people from making a 1st level character with a high outdoorsman skill and walking to Navarro to get Adv. Power Armor, completely breaking the game. And knowing that it was there, and that you could, made any replay of the game feel totally contrived at that point.
2) Medicine. Changing the mechanic of medicine skills was a Good Thing. In Fallout 2, First Aid/Doctor were much faster in terms of game time. But in terms of player time spent clicking, just slapping "rest until party healed" was faster, so people didn't use those skills much. Now, since Medicine impacts stimpack effectiveness, people will both use the skill AND value it more, regardless of their build.
3)Healing mechanics. Not being able to rest in the wasteland without a bed means finding food, water, or stimpacks to regenerate HP. In Fallout 1/2, you could just use the pipboy to rest a lot, in almost any location, and therefore avoid the need to use stimpacks at all. Ample use of resting in the game often lead to me having huge stockpiles of 200-300 stimpacks simply because I didn't have to use them. They became less of a commodity.
3)Weapon skills. Weapon skill ratings affect both your accuracy in VATS, as well as your damage in real-time and outside of VATS. This means a couple of things; it means that a level 1 character can't use a laser rifle to much effect, in or out of VATS, without a high energy skill. This means that, as with the power armor, you can't break the game by finding a plasma rifle early on. It also means that you can use VATS to get out of playing an FPS, but you can't avoid using VATS to get out of playing an RPG. Somebody with low weapons skills still does poor damage, even if they're a crack shot with the mouse.
4) Weapon conditions. First, repairing weapons gives a lot more use to out of the repair skill. It also seems more realistic than having weapons and armor that never degrade, despite years of use (Fallout 1/2). Secondly, this makes weapons more of a commodity than they were in the first games -- since you have to constantly acquire weapons to repair your own, it creates more financial expenses for your character (which is good because it makes bottlecaps more of a commodity).
5) Stealing mechanics. In Fallout 3, you can't rob a vendor of their shop inventory without killing that vendor first (as in Oblivion). This may seem unrealistic, and it is, but it is important to maintaining game balance (and thereby fun/replayability). In Fallout 1/2, you could often eliminate scarcity for your character simply by buying something at a store (say San Francisco), then stealing all of your bottlecaps back from the shopkeep, and then repeating over and over until you had more armor, weapons, medical supplies, and ammo than you could possibly carry. Combined with the possibility of scoring free Adv. Power Armor in the early stages of Fallout 2, this made the game unenjoyable rather quickly once you knew about these locations and how you could exploit them.
Fallout 3 may be different, but I think it's better. I bought my copy to support Bethesda, and I sincerely hope they release expansions and/or Fallout 4.
Re:Jeez Late news, TES:EMPIRE trailer is available (Score:2, Informative)