Bethesda Announces New Fallout Game For 2010 254
On Monday Bethesda announced a new title in the popular Fallout series called New Vegas, set for release sometime in 2010. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. They said it wasn't a sequel to the highly-acclaimed Fallout 3, but rather a brand new game set in the same universe, though they confirmed that it will be similar in style to Fallout 3. The new game will be developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a studio containing members of the original Fallout team, which Bethesda's Pete Hines discussed in an interview with Shacknews. The Fallout series also made headlines earlier this week when Bethesda trademarked the name for TV and film.
Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as they remove the level cap.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck winning over the PS3 owners after shafting them with the "exclusive" 360 and PC downloadable content. Yeah, I want to go out and pay the same amount for a Bethesda game as another player, and then get less for my money.
Screw em.
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PS3 owner are entitled to the option of buying any DLC for a game available on that platform. Yes, an option by itself do have value even if you do exercise it immediately.
I would say XBox360 owner are shafted because of exclusive agreements for PS3, so why not XBox owners go ahead and stop buying from game companies that shafted them while PS3 owners stop buying from Bethesda?
I would certainly hold back until I know if there DLC is going to be XBox exclusive. If so, I will just skip this one even though
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Technically you get the same for your money.
If you buy the game for Xbox 360 or PS3 at retail, you end up with the same game.
Okay, you don't get the option of the content, but that costs extra money that you're not paying in the first place.
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it just encourages this sort of short-term corporate money grubbing, and shows people Bethesda could really give a shit about their customers, they're in it for the money, and that's it.
Says the proud owner of a Sony product.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
[i]they're in it for the money, and that's it.[/i]
This just in: Company works for money, customers shocked.
Tune in for the details after our special investigative report "Water: It's wet."
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, if you want the DLC you'll have to subscribe to Xbox Live which is around $50 a year
You can purchase DLC with a free Xbox Live Silver account. Most people won't need WiFi for a system that's sitting in the same place all the time, and to my knowledge the PS3 lacks the 360's streaming movie service.
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And isn't it handy that for people who *do* happen to want WiFi on their 360, they can then purchase a WiFi adaptor.
What if I want to purchase a PS3 without paying for any built-in wifi bits?
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In addition to removing the level cap, I hope they re-do the whole leveling/skill system to be more Fallout-like. IMO it was the one thing that pushed F3 over the tipping point from "Fallout in a new skin" to "Oblivion with guns and some Fallout references". If they'd gotten that right, it would have been a content-starved but true Fallout game; as it is, I reluctantly have to side with the "Oblivion with guns" folks.
Hell, I wish they'd change it for the next Elder Scrolls game, too. The fact that you be
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Yeah I think the one that will raise the level cap and change the ending is Broken Steel which is the one after The Pitt. Supposed to come out the end of this month or sometime next month. Personally I'm starting to suspect that they made the ending like that just to make you buy the expansions. I'm holding out for the gold version whenever it comes out.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
This was my take on the ending....
The chamber is filled with radiation, oh noes!
I equip an advanced radiation suit and pop a Rad-X. Wewt I have 85% rad resist.
I go into the chamber, I'm taking in about 2-3 rads/sec. Cool, that gives me about 5.5 minutes without using any Radaway. I go in, it takes me about 30 seconds to enter the code and start project purity.
Oh no, I'm passing out from radiation. WTF? I have 4.5-5 minutes left before I DIE from radiation poisoning, and I haven't even suffered the first level of radiation poisoning. I'm incapable of taking the 10 seconds to turn around an walk back into the airlock so I can escape the chamber? WTF?
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
They failed only in that they did not respect one of the primary laws of RPGs; if it has stats, it can be defeated.
Rather than actually flooding that room with the 'radiated' property, which interacts with with, as many have noted, your rad resistance and what not, they should have created a new property; 'deadly radiation' or something. Upon entering the room, your radcounter should have been overridden to 'off the scale,' and here's the important part, regardless of radresistance or any other perk, skill, equipment, or anything. Your POV should have fallen instantly to the floor, and you should have had only the ability to crawl slowly to the keyboard. Your hands should have appeared in front of you, with a crawling animation, with the skin visibly cooking, peeling, sloughing off. This should also have acted as a timer for how long you have to actually get to the damn keyboard. It should have been possible to die on the way there (maybe it is at the moment, but I don't think so.)
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You mean like the microwave hallway ending to MGS4? I don't think you can die in there. I should play through the game again to see if you can.
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Woah woah, watch it! Haven't played MGS4 yet. Holding out for it on the 360.
Now, the whole FO3 ending bit is moot what with Broken Steel coming out in a month, which a) jumps the level cap to 30, and b) rewrites the ending so that you don't die. Or can send a companion. :-)
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When will you 360 owners realize that MGS4 is not coming out for the 360?
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Super Mutants are just resistant to radiation. Ghouls are resistant and healed by it.
So let's look at all your companion, Fawkes is a Super Muttie and highly resistant to radiation, Sergeant RL-3 is a robot and unaffected by it. Charon is a ghoul and healed by it. Butch, Star Paladin Cross, and Jericho are all humans and reasonably so would not be willing to die. Clover is also a human and would die, but she has a slave collar so she should listen to your orders. Also, I like dogs too much to try to get Dog
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Yeah, that one annoyed me, too. A lot.
The first time through, I was there with Fawkes. Here's a character who's one most important trait, on which part of the story is dependent, is being able to survive very strong radiation.
He leaves you, and comes back right before the end game, when you end up facing very strong radiation.
It's like someone pulling Checkov's gun off the mantle then throwing it away and ending with a fistfight.
Star Paladin Cross, on the other hand, will go into the radiation for you and
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No, Star Paladin Cross does not go in. You're thinking of Sentinel Lyons, who is not one of your companions.
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She didn't look like it, but Fawkes was a lady super mutant.
Elder Scrolls? (Score:2)
No more love for Elder Scrolls? I guess FPS will always win over RPG in raw popularity with Western audiences.
Re:Elder Scrolls? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oblivion was more FPS then Fallout 3 because you did not have the turn-based rpg combat in Oblivion, you just swung your sword randomly and sometimes blocked. I dont know about you, but I never got tired of blowing a super-mutant's head off in slow-mo. I did get tired of Oblivion's swing 2 times and block once combat by about level 10.
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No idea why that would be.
I like FPS', in fact, I love FPS' but I thought Fallout 3 was a little crap.
I did however love Oblivion. Fallout 3 just felt like a really poor attempt to mangle an FPS into Oblivion and the end result wasn't IMO all that good.
FPS' still seem better if they focus on being FPS' - see Bioshock and Deadspace for excellent examples. All that said though I did enjoy Mass Effect which was I suppose also a mangling of the FPS and RPG genre.
I think Fallout 3's biggest fault really was just
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Fallout 3 wasn't for people who play FPS. It was mainly a way to see the series in 3D for old school fans of series.
In order to take the approach they did turn based was the most logical and even then you didn't have to pause and take turns.
Fallout != Oblivion stop making the comparison. So what if they borrowed the codebase (if they did) doing so does not mean much of it was left. Fallout 3 was made in the heart as the original games. And many of the fans (including) myself enjoyed it greatly. Sure ther
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"Fallout != Oblivion stop making the comparison. So what if they borrowed the codebase (if they did) doing so does not mean much of it was left."
Quest system, physics system, inventory system, general gameplay feel, terrain/graphics engine. They're all fairly major parts of a game that have been kept from Oblivion. As you start state yourself, Fallout 3 is a somewhat different genre to Oblivion due to the action element. This is where my issue was with it, they'd used an engine perfectly purpose built for o
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Don't forget the leveling system, which let you become godlike at everything by the end of a normal game without really trying to. That's 100% Oblivion, 0% Fallout.
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I think Fallout 3's biggest fault really was just that they'd borrowed too much of the codebase from Oblivion such that it was effectively just Oblivion with different art and story and guns instead of magic/bows.
See, I look at it the other way. Oblivion was Fallout 3, only lacking guns. I enjoyed Fallout 3 much more than Oblivion, mostly because of the atmosphere. Oblivion was Yet Another Fantasy Realm, of which I have seen plenty. Fallout 3 is more grounded in reality, and because I live near DC, I fo
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Heh, that's a fair point ;) I suppose I should've just used the term shooter! FWIW, Fallout 3 can also be played 3rd person.
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The Elder Scrolls are FPS. Of course, 'S' may stand for "Slasher" in some cases, but still the games have more in common with Heretic and Hexen than they do Ultima.
Re:Elder Scrolls? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bioware made Neverwinter Nights, Obsidian made Neverwinter Nights 2. Worth noting that Obsidian is essentially made up of people from Black Isle Studios, the makers of Fallout 1 and 2. It'll be nice to see Fallout back in the hands of (some of) its original creators.
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Well, if these two people are Feargus Urquhart and Chris Avellone, then that's good enough for me to put "Fallout - New Vegas" on my wishlist.
designers (Score:3, Insightful)
Chris Avellone is head of Alpha Protocol, so it's doubtful he'd be able to join the team until later (AP is due in October). For those that don't know, Chris joined around the time the Troika team left (there were four people that left to form it as I recall, but the core were Tim Cain [Carbine], Leonard Boyarsky [Blizzard], and Jason D. Anderson [Interplay]) and is mostly known for creating the timeline and history published as the Fallout Bible. Feargus runs Obsidian, so I'm not sure how much time he ha
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I'll wait until Fallout: Vice City.
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Elder Scrolls ? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, what happened to the next Elder Scrolls ? Wasn't it supposed to be released in 2010 ?
Will they manage to release two large titles in the same year, or will they just postpone TES 5 ?
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Will they manage to release two large titles in the same year, or will they just postpone TES 5 ?
They should create a common engine for a double release of Fallout 4 and TES 5.
Or even a triple release with WhateverTheyComeUpWith 1. I'll buy any instance of morrowind as long as they keep the total freedom part.
My vote goes to Space-Morrowind 1.
Re:Elder Scrolls ? (Score:5, Funny)
If the don't change the gameplay... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think I'll pass. Not that I didn't enjoed Fallout 3, simply Im getting bored of those RPG games in which the main plot is about 10-20 hours long, and the subplots about 200. Im tired of little missions as "give this letter to X" or "bring me a piece of Y and I get you a powerfull gun" without any connection with the real mission. I think the last game I played that got the point on that missions was Gothic 2, where you know the real story after a long gameplay and most little missions was backgrounded by the election of your classes.
Yes, I know creating plots its the hardest part of a game and you, as a developer, don't want to throw away the efforts you put on creating missions just to see the gamer picking up a path and ignoring 4/5 of the story. But that's the way if you want people replaying and enjoying again your game.
BTW, why in most games you're limited by what the writers consider is the "real story"? You alwasy have to make the election between being 'good' or 'bad' with other NPCs, but most of time if you chose the 'bad' way you lose many subplots and hence the posibility of level up.
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That's exactly what I'm enjoying about the game, too. I finished the main quest back in January and put the game down for a while. A few weeks ago, I fired it back up, loaded my last save, and headed back out into t
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In the first two Fallout games (especially the second one) the vast majority of your time was spent on sidequests. You could rush through the game, but each new town drew you in to its problems and made you want to fix them (or make them worse, or find their enemies and agree to help them destroy the town, etc.) and helped you to prepare for the next area.
IMO, the biggest single problem with F3 w
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Last I checked, video games weren't real life. And last I checked, in the fantasy and sci-fi realm, the bad guys always seemed to have an opportunity to get a lot of work.
Re:If the don't change the gameplay... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is sort of the inherent problem.
A clever evil person takes nearly everything someone has, but leaves them enough to survive so they can make more stuff for them to take later.
In video games, evil basically translates to "killing everything I see for the pure psychopathic joy of it. There's almost never any real quality evil going on anymore, you either raze the village to the ground, or you save it from danger. There's no depth.
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I liked what Obsidian did with NWN2:SoZ, the second expansion.
It's significantly better at being more nuanced in abilities, good/evil, etc..
For example, you can be just a little evil in certain situations, behave in a less than nice way, get what you want, and not kill every poor guy. It's not just an intimidation roll, there's more to it than that.
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IMO, SoZ is the best Aurora engine based game so far (among official campaigns).
It is still darn buggy like NWN2 games, but it is obvious the developers try and to some degree they are successful in creating a good single player game based on the AE.
If you don't get impressed by intros, simply skip through them!
Oh dear god... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fallout series also made headlines earlier this week when Bethesda trademarked the name for TV and film.
Please let that be so Uwe Boll can't get hold of it.
A few other facts.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"J.E. Sawyer, who we last saw as the lead of BIS' last attempt at Fallout 3 (Van Buren), has confirmed he is lead on Fallout: New Vegas."
From NMA
Also Peter Hines has stated that they basically asked for an idea and that Obsidian pitched one to them.
"Pete Hines: I think we tried very hard not to put much in the way of parameters on them. To let them kind of come up with the idea. So we didn't go to them and say, we want a game that is set here, and--we didn't do that. We said, "What would you do with it? If we were going to do this, what would you guys like to do?""
From Shacknews interview
I think this is an amazing announcement and cant wait to see what they guys from Obsidian come up with!
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Please, Obsidian, don't waste time "tweaking" the engine, just make the game. Spend your time doing what you do best... writing.
IMHO, with Neverwinter 2, they spent a huge amount of time working on the engine, and then had to rush together a game so they had something to ship. The writing and game design suffered for it.
With Knights of the Old Republic 2, they spent more time writing (until Lucasarts forced it out way too early) and it showed... the start of that game is completely awesome.
Editors, ASSEMBLE! (Score:2)
blah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:blah (Score:5, Funny)
I hope this game isn't brought down by bullshit polarized moral choices too. Kill woman in house, don't lose karma. Steal her toaster though, lose karma. Post about it on slashdot, regain karma.
This is after the apocalypse. Nobody's making toasters anymore. Human life is cheap but toasters are priceless.
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The Older You Get (Score:5, Insightful)
The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self
and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.
At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them. Thus it becomes an exercise in look at the decorations of a plot that makes the story enjoyable. The only thing remotely well written was the Dunwich building, the Wasteland Guide, and the android quests. The rest was damn near disposable but I'll give kudos to the Nuka-Cola Challenge walkthrough. The fake history was well written. The main quest was terrible....
Re:The Older You Get (Score:5, Insightful)
I was going to type a reply, but the older you get the more all words start to look the same.
Abstract anything far enough up and you can dismiss it. Takes all the fun out of it though.
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That Dunwich building still gives me the creeps. I stay far away from that building, and quadrant if possible.
I think the main quest mainly suffered from feeling the need to deliver some sort of final good in the game, among so much gone bad. It really lacked the evil choices that made the good all that much better. But in sense of disposable...I dunno.
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The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self
and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.
At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them.
This is not a question of getting older, it's been noticed as early as 2,000 years ago by Aristotle [wikipedia.org]
Even though a study of story theory and realizing there are only 7 or so possible stories that exist, it would be a mistake to say that it diminishes the potential enjoyment of a story. In some ways, knowledge of it just makes a well executed story (Casablanca, Star Wars) that much more astonishing and enjoyable.
Personally, Fallout 3's appeal was not in the story, it was in the setting and world at large and g
Queasiness when playing (Score:2)
I've played the original Fallout 1/2 and enjoyed them immensely. I got the F3, and after a disappointing few weeks before the patch, started really getting into it.. It's my first FPS that I've played extensively. I noticed that it makes me queasy though, almost nauseous. Though I'd love to continue playing the game, it's not possible. Any experienced FPS that have suggestions (yeah, besides taking Rad-X or Radaway)..
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Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with experience... You're just prone to motion-sickness.
You might ask a doctor what you can do to combat it.
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Try to train yourself to blink when your character turns, like you'd do when physically turning your head in real life. People prone to motion sickness in games often don't "put themselves in the game" enough to activate that reflex. I'm not positive if it's something you can train yourself to do, but it's worth a shot.
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You might install Fraps and check your framerate. Rates below about 30 wouldn't be helping anything. If you're not familiar with all of this, I recommend that you fiddle with lowering your resolution and graphical detail settings so that your framerate gets to at -least- the mid 40's.
Have the bugs been fixed on the old one yet? (Score:2)
I'm intrigued by the premise of Fallout but I've heard bad things about broken elements in the game, bugged quests, stuff where you're left trying to read walkthroughs online to figure out how to fix what went wrong. Any patches for this stuff yet?
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Weak (Score:2)
They should have called it Lost Vegas [imdb.com]. They should have teamed up with Harmonix instead and made the awesomest video game evar.
Hey, it worked for GTA, right? (Score:2)
I'm glad to see the FO franchise moving again (lets not forget how much crying happened for FO3 after the successful but unfollowed FO2). But isn't it kind of stifling to creativity to just push out a sequel 2 years later that already is promising to be more of the same?
Yea, I realise plot wise the game jumps the shark too early to really continue the story of that main character, and kudos for not trying (many a bad movie/game have been the result of thinking success = must need a sequel). But I really d
Re:Original fallout team (Score:5, Interesting)
I totally agree, although I sort of liked Fallout 3 , I still felt like I was playing Oblivion or FPS games. The quests were ok for the most part, but lacked the obscure humor that made Fallout and F2 so much fun.
Also the original two seemed more like being in a bleak unforgiving world, Fallout 3 didnt give me that at all. You sometimes could run around for 5+ minutes and not encounter an enemy. At least the travel menu in the originals you would encounter enemies. The companions did not impress me.... I hope with some of the original team, they can make a modernized game which pays homage to the originals much better this time around.
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Fallout 2 much?
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That "obscure humor" is for the most part the sci-fi nerd's trivia fest. You don't need that crutch when you something as distinctive and rich as the Fallout universe to build on.
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However that created distinctive feel of Fallout. 1950s Science Fiction. Remove that and it is yet another generic postap.
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Lets just hope that we don't need to use AP to walk more than 5 feet.
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Errr... WHY? I mean, what you're basically saying is "I want the exact same games I played years ago, but prettier."
Fallout 3 is fine in a 3D environment. It builds a more believable world. Being first person doesn't somehow diminish anything. Just look at the Metroid series when it jumped to a first person view. Neither are anything like the standard FPS du jour. They're both more open ended and exploration and detail oriented.
Stop viewing older games through the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses and realize s
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Of course it does. F3 is tiny compared to F2, both in terms of total world area (duh) and, more importantly, the sheer number and size of (interesting) quests. The cause of that is a combination of the move to first-person 3D and using voice actors for practically every line in the game. It's a trade off, and not one I'm terribly happy with. I thought I wouldn't mind it and was really excited about the game, but after playing it and thinking about it
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Being 3D shrinks the world due to the increased hardware requirements, and it removes the amount of details that can be included. How many prefab broken down buildings were there in Fallout 3 that you couldn't go into? The reduced scale made it silly to know there was a town not too far from my own vault, and that the "wasteland" was something I could run across in real-time from one side of the other.
There was rarely a sense of an isolated wasteland like there was in the first game, where travel across
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There is also the story and the features of the game that make it art. Ebert says that games can't be artistic works of fiction since the user controls the outcome. While the user does control the outcome, there is something to be said for a game forcing you to choose between two unfavorable options or choose how your character presents him or herself (i.e. roleplaying.) See Mass Effect for some of this, or better yet Planescape: Torment. The gameplay mechanics should really be a relatively minor thing
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Touche, anonymous, touche. I forgot the ever so important drunk frat boy demographic. And that "slight change" doesn't necessarily warrant a $50+ purchase.
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Then, if I may ask you, what IS an RPG? Because Fallout 3 seems to be one in my book:
You play a character of a race, sex, appearance of your choosing, check.
You make decisions that make allies, enemies, etc. and ultimately define your character, check (You can argue that there wasn't enough choices, [I don't] but that is not a limit of the 3D environment, it was a limit of developer time/money)
You level up via experience and place statistics to mold your combat abilities, check.
You acquire, manage, and equi
"Er" indeed (Score:2)
Fallout 3 was just "Oblivion with guns".
Being a big fan of the old Fallout games, I still don't get how a game being "just Oblivion with guns" can be considered a bad thing. I mean Oblivion was just what, the most successful CRPG of the last half decade?
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Oblivion isn't a CRPG. It's a first-person shooter with some RPG-lite elements tacked on.
It's pretty much one of the most overhyped, boring games released of the current decade. You can be a warrior and progress to the head of the Mage's Guild without casting a single spell, or become the master of the arena at level 1...the game is just a ridiculous graphics demo.
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Not in Morrowind. Go exploring in some of the tougher caves/ruins or run around inside the Ghost Fence for a while at level 1 and let me know how it works out for you :)
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I liked NWN2. The original NWN felt like a toolkit with a (rather shoddy) sample campaign bolted on. NWN2 actually felt like a proper game, with a plot and everything. Some of the dialogue, particularly that between party members, was very well written. If it didn't quite ascend to the quotable highs of the Baldur's Gate games, it didn't fall far short. I'll grant you that, on launch, NWN2 had some serious bugs that rendered it near-unplayable in places, but these have been fixed and if you haven't looked a
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Yes. It was much, much better than NWN1.
Re:not Bethesda, Obsidian (Score:4, Insightful)
To me NWN2 LOOKED fantastic.
I might never know though, since on release it was unplayable due to stability and gameplay bugs.
Consider me less than enthused about Obsidian's involvement.
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What... a Fallout game set in and around the ruins of Los Angeles? What a novel idea!
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It was more of an unfinished clone of Planescape: Torment IN SPAAAAAAAAACE. Which isn't such a bad thing. Soon enough we might even get to play through the HK-50 factory and see proper endings, too... although occasionally I wonder whether TSLRP or Duke Nukem Forever will actually release first.
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If you're the enterprising type, you can actually embed the PC application in the Cider "shell" and get it to run on a Mac. There are Mac ports of Portal, HalfLife 2, GTA IV, etc floating around that run in OS X.
Just check TPB!