It's both a question of "will they" and "can they" though. FO3 had some "grey" elements, but they were still pretty easy decisions. The thing about New Vegas was that it encompassed real life philosophical ideals and theories, and the factions at war are at war because they FUNDAMENTALLY disagree with each other. (Caesar believes democracy weakens a nation and makes it compromise itself down, NCR demands personal freedoms, House demands progress. House-NCR is the closest you get to two factions not neccesarily disagreeing fundamentally, but they still do, albeit subtlely)

Compare that to content where it's like "this guy enforces slavery.....oh but he means well and you have to KIDNAP A BABY to stop him, DUN DUN DUUUUNN!!" or "these guys are fighting for religious freedom within their own land.....oh but they're racist" and it just sorta feels tossed together by comparison.

Skyrim is a wastebin full of ideas (there are few fine ideas there too) left halfdeveloped because http://www.titaniumteddybear.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/moar-because.jpg.

Don't remind me lol. At least F3 had the special system in place. Even though it was unnecessary since you could create the "perfect" character with the absurd amount of skill books.

SPECIAL is something they really need to work on. I want to be penalized for not meeting mission requirements on some things. Fallout 3 did none of that.

Could get the perfect SPECIAL too, thanks to that perk. Though admittedly, Agility and Charisma were sooooooo ridiculously worthless, you could set them to 1 and just beef up the other 5 and do great.


They won't. That I guarentee, 90% sure.
It's different gaming philosophies. Look at FO3 vs. Skyrim. FO3 they had the idea of making average locks require 50 lockpicking AND the minigame, which is a great idea because in Oblivion, people got so good at lockpicking they could open anything with bare minimum skill. Despite this, that limitation was removed in Skyrim. Why? Because Bethesda believes in player choice, which tbh, goes against what RPG's are about.
It's true they made an effort to make FO3 more like an RPG, so kudos to them for that. However, their philosophy is just so fundamentally different from an RPG philosophy that you could still end up doing anything you wanted, really. Hopefully they try harder in Fallout 4, hence why I'm only 90% sure they won't and not 100. They AT LEAST recognize there's a difference, so that leaves room for improvement.

The future? I don't see how it was any different in the past. All of the TES games, and Fallout 3, have been more or less single player MMORPGs with paper thin, inconsequential storylines. The strength of TES always lied in having a massive world with tons of stuff to do, not in telling a high fantasy epic that matters, that was Might and Magic and Ultima's thing back when TES was starting out.

It was never this bad before Skyrim.

Maybe not in Morrowind and Oblivion, but Arena and (if I remember correctly) Daggerfall had unremarkable storylines, and relied heavily on generic randomly generated content (generic fetch quests for example) like Skyrim does.

I'm a TES and FO player. I can't divide myself ..

But TES peaked with Morrowind Tribunal/Bloodmoon IMO. That was the best of the 3D TES games by a large margin.

Oblivion had the worst leveling system, Skyrim has purty snow.

You need to change the colour of the text in the quote hahahaha

I see them streamlining game design so that they have to do as little work as possible. Designing a themepark doesn't require much by the way of checking to see if things contridict lore or even what is going on in other areas of the game. Stats that don't matter means they don't have to worry about balance and diversity in character development. It is all just a lazy mess with pretty, pretty pictures.

I have no faith in BGS making an artistic statement with FO4. At best, I think we can expect more FO3.

I hope that whoever made the Pitt dlc has been making Fallout 4 this entire time. It's our only hope.

TESO looks and sounds amazing. It's exactly the direction Elder Scrolls needs to go in right now.

You are literally on the fence, sometimes for, ocassionaly against every issue. What is your deal man? "Lawl trollinz" isn't a legitimate excuse on these boards, btw.



Anyway, I hope BGS learns from their mistakes from Skyrim... I'd lump OB/FO3 in there, but really, they're ten times the game Skyrim ever came close to being. With TESO, they've gone against a lot of their word, but I suppose at the end of the day they are a business.

I just wish they weren't entitled to the FO series at this point

I have to wear a drool guard because of my intense anticipation for Wasteland 2.

chris avellone is on board since they met the money goal. i too am eager to see how it turns out.

this isn't simply a 'bash skyrim' thread though it does seem like it. suggestion: try posting a well thought out complaint /criticism/critique on the skyrim board. have fun.

i liked skyrim (just liked, it is nothing special). i liked FO3. after playing FNV i can't play FO3. even at release i hated the stories in FO3; the MQ is so bad and i can't express in words how much i hated the father. after FNV, the awfulness that is beth's writing is only exacerbated.

playing FNV before skyrim didn't help either. FNV showed what is possible in a video game, it offered role play possiblities i haven't seen in a long time.

skyrim is not an rpg. what i found enlightening was when i recently read a thread in skyrim board asking the question of 'how do you role play?' most answered in terms of eating, sleeping, and not using fast travel. that was the majority's views of what role playing is. how do you rp quest x? do or don't do. that is the mindset of the average TES player. only a handful actually create a character with motivations, boundaries, and guidelines (you know, real rp). longknife is absolutely right when saying it is a different design philosophy and a different interpretation of what rpg means.

unfortunately, FNV supporters are the minority. 'FNV railroads you because you can't go north' the detractors say, while glossing over all the way skyrim truly railroads you. 'FNV is too buggy' while saying in the next sentence 'beth games are always buggy' to defend skyrim. and it goes on and on.

FNV has raised the bar of my expectations. i will still enjoy games categorized as rpgs, though i know they are not truly rpgs. ignorance is bliss, and if i never played FNV, i probably would have loved skyrim and still be playing FO3.

FNV rewards lateral thinking and skill at using the environment to your advantage in going north around the deathclaws and Cazadors; if you do it right you can get to the Great Khans very early and if you can teach Jack enough chem recipes to get to Accepted you're all set gear-wise with what you can buy from their armory. If you came out of Goodsprings with the right equipment you can also put away those raiders at Bonnie Springs and pick up a combat armor, a trail carbine, the best brass knuckles in the game, and a whole bunch of caps all at once. Nowhere do I see these kinds of rewards for creativity in Skyrim.

I can't tell if pulling my leg or blinded by really devoted fan glasses.

I would say, it is better than nothing.
If you disagree, simply ignore new FO titles.... write them off as counterfeit. And go back to playing the originals.
Without BGS taking up the title (FO), it would be dead and buried.

No, it wouldn't.
Bioware and Troika were both next in line if Bethesda hadn't bid higher than them.
So don't act like BGS is some kind of a savior for Fallout.
Bioware and Troika would have "revived" the series if they hadn't.

Ah ye olde.. nostalgia argument..
Why can someone not be critical of newer titles, justifiably worry about the direction said company is going and thus complain about it?
Your comment as such is condescending to people who have a passion about the franchise but don't like the newer titles as much..

Yknow something else I noticed recently....

Before New Vegas I put the most time in Oblivion. Oblivion I would limit myself, much like the people of the Skyrim forums suggest. I did find with the do or not do system, but in Skyrim I couldn't. Why? Was it because I'd found better and couldn't go back? Or something else?

Thing is with Oblivion, for one it's more systematic. There's classes and races which at least act like guidelines and "suggested limits." You can easily expand upon those. With Skyrim, there's nothing to expand upon. Practically everything is the same.

Secondly, they say "ask yourself what your character would or wouldn't do." You know, that was great in Oblivion, where I had a quest where I could return a long lost artifact to a castle or give it to the thief that hired me to find it in the first place. There my thief would just sell it to his fellow thief and get decent coin, whereas my honorable warrior would return it and be rewarded with a specially enchanted shield that made him world's more powerful.
Skyrim doesn't do this. I literally CANNOT ask my character what he would and would not do because the game is void of morality. What do I mean? I mean if a woman accuses a dude of being an assassin and he accuses her of being a traitor, no matter WHO I side with, the game says "good job you got it right." There's no evidence, no conclusion, no actual plot. The game just waits anxiously for ME to make a decision before it decides which decision is right to please me.

Lemme put it this way....In Oblivion, my warrior was honorable, my mage was practical and my thief was selfish. Now take the above quest. Would the thief side with the potential traitor woman or the assassins? Well both reward the same coin, so when I ask myself about selfishness, it really doesn't matter. My thief just ends up becoming practical and choosing whichever is easier. My mage? He also chooses which is easier, but there's barely any difference. My warrior? He guesses. Like literally he just takes a guess cause he has nothing to work with, so he goes with a gut feeling and nothing but. And again, it literally doesn't matter. The reward is the same. My warrior won't end up gaining more power than my thief; no they all get the same reward simply for trying.
Now they say "ask yourself what your character would and wouldn't do," but wtf, how can I make decisions like that when the quests -literally- adapt to me? My warrior will literally take any quest save for a seldom few simply because there's no way of involving honor in most of them. My thief will take anything as long as it doesn't involve risking his neck. The result is that the ONLY difference between the two is that my warrior won't take quests involving theft or murder (or perhaps he will; sometimes the most honorable quests require me to murder someone first in Skyrim) and my thief won't work TOO hard. There's really not a huge difference though in Skyrim, and even when there is, it just doesn't freaking matter. The rewards are crap and can't compare to what I can find or produce myself.

Long story short, I get the sense Bethesda is just becoming lazy. Josh Sawyer has his presentation he did where he shows that they used model characters when coming up with potential RPG responses to quests (you can find it here if curious: http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/2012/03/do-say-right-thing-choice-architecture.html), and I just get the feeling something similar was done for Oblivion but NOT for Skyrim. Skyrim is all the hell over the place on the moral scale, with theft quests sometimes requiring you to be a good samaritan first and crusader-ish quests requiring you to do not-so-holy things first.

But bethesda arn't making teso it's zenimax that are making it NOT BETHESDA so they are going against nothing.

Hahah bioware are a disgrace did you see how they butchered dragon age 2 and mass effect 3 (wich aint evena rpg)?
And Troika is a huge stab in the dark all they really have going for them is tim cain.And without beth there would be fo3 (obv) but no new vegas as well.

1. I actually played Dragon Age 2 and it's not a disgrace, I wouldn't call it a sequel, more of a spin-off, but it's most certainly still an RPG. And Mass Effect 3? What I've heard about it is this "Oh it's great 90% through but the ending svcks." So disgraces? Butchered? Hardly. Changed, sure, but not butchered.

2. I'm not good with Troika history, but I remember there being some problem with Vampir Masqurade and the publiser.