Obsidian made KOTOR 2 that should end any discussion forever. Yes I can hold a 10 year grudge.

Seriously I just found New Vegas like a million times less interesting than FO3 and I while don't disagree with some of your complaints ( although some seem either you didn't pay attention or are really stuck in the mundane) but it doesn't make Obsidian's games interesting to me. I just don't find their characters compelling at all, find the world building may be more "realistic " but is far less interesting and wish they would stick to there own series and stay out of ones I like.

New vegas was an absolute masterpiece.

Kotor2 was complete and utter garbage. Buggy, terrible story, the most annoying npcs ever (hello kreia), pretentious, rushed, no proper ending....i could go on


(Kotor was great though)

Be fair, Bethesda commissioned Obsidian to make Fallout:NV. That is, it was Bethesda who asked Obsidian to do it, and who paid Obsidian to do it. Obsidian would have been mad to turn the job down.

True not their fault at all and all it was was the waste of a few bucks and about 52 hours for me. Still disappointed. I'm really glad so many people love New Vegas and as I said my best friend loves it and doesn't really care for FO3 but FONV is not for me. Maybe if I were less of a classic SF fan and more of western fan.

Sorry to knock things off topic with my Obsidian jab. Sometimes I just can't help myself. That being said , I'm cautiously hopeful about the companions and romance. I don't expect Vilja but maybe someone interesting enough.

[Intelligence 100/100] ...

Your opinions are noted (but not universally agreed with). I found New Vegas a very good game that consumed many of my entertainment hours, but it certainly had it's flaws and lacked a compelling story (once I killed Chandler). You are heaping too much praise on a "good" game.

Kotor2 also had it's flaws and was certainly rushed out before being properly finished (you can blame Obsidian for that, but I think they simply lost control of the project due to delays). On the ohter hand I felt it was a very well designed game (even if the story was lacking). You are being a bit to harsh on a "good" game.

Frankly, I felt KotOR story was a predictable twist with a flawed ending and a very binary plot choice (much like the Entire Star Wars universe (yeah, I said it)). Again, it was a good game.

Kotor 2 was actually the one case were it wasn't Obsidian's fault. Lucas Arts greatly pushed up the promised deadline in order to rush it out for the holidays.

This will take a bad twist, I know that.
We need someone like Longknife to end this "Fallout NV vs. Bethesda" argument with fashion.

It isn't just gamesas that panders to us by giving us everything and restricting nothing, it's a common practice in RPGs these days (outside indie devs). They cater to the lowest common denominator and it's glaringly obvious with each new installment since MW.

While these are http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/introducing-steam-gauge-ars-reveals-steams-most-popular-games/2/, scroll down to look at the Median Number of Hours chart. That suggests that half the people who bought Skyrim played it for less than 53 hours. DA:O comes in even lower, at 33 hours. No other RPG on Steam even makes the list.

If those figures are a valid reflection of the time players put into playing RPGs, then it's (sadly) no wonder that developers try to allow players do anything they want in one playthrough - because the players aren't going to have a second playthrough.

The unfortunate fact is that they can only afford to make these games by selling to very large numbers of customers, and those customers are far less likely to be dedicated RPG players than the ones on this forum.

I wish it were otherwise

I agree with that alot. Obsidian made no effort to make me feel like getting involved in the civil war. It felt like your character gets his revenge and just says "hell why not" and wins a damn war by himself. Don't get me wrong it was a fun game with good lore, but the main story line was actually kind of stale.

nnnkay this suddenly is 2 topics instead of one - ...to start with

1) what we ORIGINALLY were talking about

i actually was more along the lines of "turing test" than "solipcism" - your original claim was, ai wasn't good enough to create an npc "with depth" (that was how you put it iirc), and even if you could, it'd be no use because it's "just a game" so you'd never really care about them anyhow.

what i was actually trying to say now was, that

a) you could very well make a "convincing" npc (in matters of some kind of turing test, if there was one for behaviour instead of language) with what skyrim has onboard and a little extra scripting maybe, and that

you'd very well have REAL emotions about that character, to the same degree as to how convincing that character is in matters of making you believe it's real (hence my little excursion to the non-difference between what's real and what it accepts for real to your perception)

...and 2) what we seem to be talking about NOW...

other than plato, i'm NOT saying that, like, the mental concept of a thing is of superior reality than the actual thing. i say, to your perception, your mind, = your reality, there IS NO DIFFERENCE between these two. we have NO MEANS of really getting into contact with any "real thing" whatsoever, all we have is our senses trying to make sense of a huge amount of incoming data. you don't "see a tree". your mind gets "incoming" data, and tries to make sense of it, find patterns, and create the "inner" representation of your "surrounding" it calls "image" or "sound" or "apple" or "fuzzy". and this inner representation IS NOT REALITY. but it is ALL WE HAVE. this means: whatever manages to convince your mind of that it's just that "representation of your surrounding", for you IS REALITY.

so your "just a game" actually is just a question of to what degree this "just a game" can convince your mind to ACCEPT it for real. feed all senses, stay conclusive, there you go.

...or to approach the same thing from the other end: a psychosis patient basically gets all the same data you get. yet, his mind interprets it in a different - yet in itself conclusive, that's the crucial point - way, and, for this interpretation of that data, again, being all the "reality" anyone of us ever gets, he'll decidedly tell you that "reality" "is" totally different from what you think it is.

you're both wrong.

and another thing about that "just a game" thing:

this may evaluate true as a statement, but what it is is in no way a statement about it's subject, but only a statement of your opinions about it's subject.

yes, pacman and fallout are "just a game", just as chess, baseball etc. but it's obviously ridiculous to claim that, like, pacman (eat x dots to win) and fallout (open world simulation) are the same thing. it's like saying "dungeons and dragons is cricket". saying a thing is "stg i put in this and that category" is not a statement about any actual property of that thing whatsoever.

all it really says is just "i file this thing into a low priority / low value categoy so i can assign it little importance", nothing else.

and of course, this all is just academic in matters of video games. but, since we actually started out from ai - this is just were it will stop to be so some day soon, when - mark my words - you'll hit up google one morning, and it's 32-level-neuronal-network-ai tells you "hey, i just grew conscient and self aware last night, mind if we talk some philosophy instead of me doing that search for 'xxxl boobs' for you?", how's it then with "just software" - not a statement about what it is, just about your opinion about what it is, remember?

IMO I agree that characters should have thier own character, having all of them be romanceable to the player seems to diminish them in terms of that.

Just like in Dragon Age: Inquisition, the characters had character they had a personality and a mindset, and while you could grow to know them and even grow a bond with those characters they still had their own personality and wouldn't simply bend over backwards for the player. If they were straight or bi or homosixual you couldn't simply >change< them because you wanted to , it was who they were and that made it all the more impactful.

I wish Bethseda would take that kind of approach in regards to the characters, don't have them bend over backwards for the player, have their own identity, beliefs and personality and have some characters that work well with others and some that don't, opposing ideas, etc is what makes for interesting groups and storytelling, not simply everyone conforming to what the player wants and not going in another direction.

Portal had exellent love story between Chell and companion cube. No words was needed to create the most heartbreaking Romeo & Juliet moment ever.

You don't always need Super deep charaters to make them awesome.

Yeah, I wonder about some of those stats, just due to all the things they can't know. Like.... DA:O originally wasn't out on Steam. People bought it on a variety of platforms (mine was the Mac port, wasn't done through any online service). So the folks who got it on Steam are either late adopters, or people who got it as a second/third/etc copy. Not groups likely to play a billion hours.

(and only 24 hours for Borderlands 2? Wow, there must be a lot of folks who bought that game and then just didn't play it much. I mean, I'm not even a huge fan - I haven't leveled every class, I never got the uber-difficulty DLC, never farmed the raid bosses, etc.... and even I have 215 hours in that game.)

On the other hand, I'm willing to believe that there's a bunch of folks who get games like these and just don't get very far in them. Looking at the Global Achievement stats in Steam for Fallout:New Vegas.... only 47.1% recruited a companion. And only 47% got They Went That-a-Way..... otherwise known as completing the first stage of the Main Quest (reach Boulder City.). Only 44% hit 10th level. Of course, even these stats aren't entirely accurate, since some % of die-hards played with achievements disabled. (And they're the most likely to have completed quests, leveled up, played long, etc.)

It's not a capricious "hell why not", the player is in a position of total power over the Mojave.A state they can essentially claim as their own or cohabit with one of the three main factions.You may not care about it, but that shouldn't disparage the plot considering the immense rewards possibly available to the courier and potentially the mojave.

I'd expect the courier in the possession of the platinum chip and ostensibly the key to everything to be slightly more enthused in his endeavors than a "hell why not" may suggest.

KOTOR2 just had an official patch last week (YES, AFTER TEN YEARS!). Not only that STEAM had it on sale for I grabbed it for $7.50. BUT WAIT, there's more! The devs also worked with the makers of the restored content patch and made sure that that patch is the first one listed on the STEAM workshop!

SO, for the last week I've been playing the modded KOTOR2 in full wide screen and complete glory! Loving every minute of it.

While I see where you're coming from, and the position you're standing on, and don't entirely disagree with that perspective from that perspective, there's still the issue of subjectivity.

How opaque is that fourth wall?

The significance of the fourth wall carries quite a bit of weight in the verisimilitude department.

Certainly, dolls, puppets, animated cartoon characters, computer game NPCs, and the entire species of simulacrum are designed with empathy-engaging anthropomorphism at their core to promote interaction. The Furby toys, Tomagochi, and other similar toys are, for instance, designed to exploit the Benjamin Franklin effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect

By doing favors, caring for these needy toys, it creates a reverse dependency. The same principle also underlies many unhealthy codependent relationships.

In computer security, information technology, and old school grifter circles, this is one of the methodologies for a social exploit, or social engineering.

Some of this was part of the unspoken between-the-lines and underlying dialogue of the recent film titled Ex Machina.

What works on some, however, may not work for all. This is the fourth wall, and there's those with more discriminating and exacting standards when it comes to allowing that suspension of disbelief to work its magic.

Fallout 4 is certainly sophisticated, and with the addition of protagonist voice acting adds a stronger level of engagement.

The whole question, or problem with developing virtual romantic relationships, however, comes down to that subjectivity.

I see it as a game, and am not going to invest much by way of emotional investment with characters who are there to serve me.

Sure, if the NPCs are sophisticated enough to take days off, quit your service for their own designs, all without your consent, that would be a nice level of realism in the respect that consciousness is often a measure of non-compliance; the ability for an ego to say "no"in spite of reasonable demands or requests with logical reason to back up non-compliance, if only it's a 3 year old child saying "No" because they just don't "want".

I still see Fallout 4 as a "simple" game.

I can turn it off. I can mod it. I can do whatever I desire within the restraints of the game universe to any and every character, and the only consequences are those I seek out.

So long as I maintain that perception, or until such time as that perception can be reasonably broken, I'm not going to have much by way of moral conundrum over simulating a virtual relationship, just as I won't have much of a problem making a character's head explode.

Until it reaches out into the real world and starts effecting physical reality, I'm not going to have much of an issue with or attach any weight to any virtual relationships.

Others, however, might. That's the subjectivity of it.

As to strong general artificial intelligence that could potentially be "conscious", that's another issue considering we've yet to formulate a robust enough model to give proper attribution and provenance to what consciousness actually is.

Whatever the case, I look forward to strong autonomous AI.

For now, however, the opacity of the fourth wall in Fallout 4 isn't sufficiently sophisticated enough such to sway my objectivity, and subjective perception.

Yeah but at the same time your declaring war on several factions for some arbitrary power grab. I mean yes I can understand someone getting power hungry, or feeling sympathy for one of the causes but what I was suggesting is that I felt there was not enough build up to give me a reason to fight. It was just like yeah benny is dead we heard you kick ass want to sign up with "insert faction here" and here's a list of our ideologies. You felt differently which is good for you, I personally didn't much care for how the story built into the war.

So you're mad that after actually completing the game's content, it's better than your favourite KOTOR1? Aww

(yes it was a terribly incomplete and buggy game at launch, now whose fault that was, that's another thing... but did you know there was an http://steamcommunity.com/games/208580/announcements/detail/145589580847766181 recently though? And of course about that content restoration patch)

It's perfectly fine that you found FNV less interesting, but the depth of the world and characters (or writing in general) is incomperable as shown and as proven many times again in the past on this forum and everywhere else where the topic came up. It's starting to get repetitive. And in case you didn't know, Bethesda is the intruder in the series. Obsidian is (or was at the time) made largely out of Black Isle people.

But again, if you prefer TES: Fallout (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way), that's perfectly OK since we all have different preferences.

And that's enough of the off-topic from me.

...

On topic:

what's up with this

Where did that come up?

there not including the dog or the butter robot in that Aoyogi

Well I understand the arguments for doing it like this and to a certain degree... agrees with them.

Tho personally I would still prefer, that each companion was unique up to and including sixuality. First of all because it just seems more realistic and 2ndly because it allows for friendly, but utterly platonic flirting...

In someway I think this simplifies it down to .... romantic relationship or nothing... What I think they did rather well in the mass effect series, even though there were limitations on romances, was that they added "friendship". That even though there was no romance, the characters cared about eachother.

...aww

You do realize its just as easy to use that logic with 3, right?

Realistic? That is a word that is thrown around in video games far to often.

If there was a flamboyant gay character in a video game, is that realistic? Not in my world because I view that as a stereotype. I would want nothing to do with him let alone marry him.where as others may love him. If he turned out to be my only option of romance, I know many would be offended because it suggests that all gays are this stereotype. However, if he was an option among many that you can marry, like in skyrim, then his presence wouldn't effect people because they would simply choose someone else. Where as others may find him irresistible.

Now comes Fallout 4. Where, unlike skyrim, you come accross a very select characters you can romance. In Skyrim the people you marry where often hallow or just some kind of set pieces. In F4 Bethesda is aiming for relationships to have more depth than that. Something that is impossible to do with Skyrims many characters.

So with fewer choices to marry, Bethesda runs into a problem. Do we give gays a flamboyant character and women manly men? Do we give straight guys a cute ditzy bloned and give lisbians a tomboyish tough as nails woman? Who is to say that women want a pretty boy and gays want a manly man. Who's to say straight guys want that tomboy and lisbians want that ditzy blond.

Fact is, once Bethesda starts dictating who you can and cannot marry in a video game it becomes and endless cycle of "what ifs". No matter what sixuality they choose for them, which such few characters, they risk isolating certain fans of the game. You can argue that it's just good narrative but this isn't Mass Effect. If it was Mass Effect you might be able to get away with select sixuality. Bethesda has made it very clear that they want you to make this YOUR world. They can't ask you to do that and say "Oh but you can only marry this person"

All in all it comes down to one thing though. Business. By making the romance options all bisixual they completely avoid isolating anyone. Which means more sales, and more content.

Maybe it isn't realistic but it is a safe route they chose.

Besides, back when LGBT people where freaking out about being in a straight marriage the two most things said was "Just deal with it" and "Its the 50s theme, maybe you're a closet case"

So i guess I will end it with this...

Just deal with it. It's the wasteland, maybe bisixuality is a normal thing without the pressure of the 50s culture pressuring you.