LP Albums or LPMUDs?

Except maybe the Fallout franchise, which was dead for a long time. At least it saved the franchise for MOST of us, but you can't please everyone.

Albums. (I've edited the post with a side note)

Reminds me of "pet cemetery" and/ or those genetic replacement pets.

For me its the difference between "Honey" and "imitation honey".

http://www.amazon.com/Honey-Tree-Imitation-12-Ounce-Plastic/review/product/B000YSXDDY/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

They love it... (which is not a bad thing at all), but its not honey, and I ate some by mistake and felt like I'd swallowed honey flavored miniral oil yuck: Thank God they don't just call it Honey and shelve it with the rest!

Oh I'm sorry, was there something deliciously ironic about my post that made you bite

If I express a serious opinion, I'm a basher, if I express a sense of humor, I'm petty and childish.

What's a man to do but zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.


That assumes something was saved in the first place. Nothing has been brought forward except bastardised canon.

I'm still pondering why Beth needed the Fallout license to make a game of this scope.

I bought a phonograph not too long ago. Digital recordings just sound too "cold" to me.

Yeah, right. Saved the Fallout franchise, this load of crap again. How did it save the franchise anyway ? What, were the originals in immediate peril of being destroyed in some great cataclysm that'd remove them from creation ? No, so it didn't "save" Fallout from anything. But I guess most of you are hitting your knees in gratitude for something with the Fallout name on it, heh.

I've yet to see you make a single worthwhile contribution to any of these discussions. All of your responses have been insulting toward one poster or another.

Originals? What are you talking about now? If the franchise was't sold to SOMEONE, another FO game would have never been made. Anyone who purchased the franchise would not ahve made a FO2 clone...that seems certain.

As far as your snide remarks, they don't add positively to your arguments.

Again, what was it "saved" from ? My comment about the originals would be the only situation in which Fallout 3 has saved anything at all. If no Fallout game was to be made after BIS' demise, then that'd be fine, the series doesn't need saving. This is akin to reading an article a while back about how classic series like Wing Commander "need" to be remade. Saying a garbage statement like Fallout 3 saved Fallout is basically telling people to just shut up and be glad we got a Fallout game period - which is fine for consumerist sheep I suppose.

Digital recording [@CD quality] truncates the audio frequencies. Get a 24bit sound card (a good one.) and record your first plays as 24bit wav files.

Systems that use DSPs tend to cut down drastically on the "noise" so wonder if that's also a factor in a phonograph beating out MP3s (for example), I remember an old prof telling us why he likes audio systems that are anolog because the noise made it sound better to him. Never actually tested that, though.

The transition form LP to cd was a striking one. CDs ahve always sounded somewhat hollow. This is especially true in comple music, like jazz or Classical, and especially when the range between soft and loud is large.

But this is a good example of our argument. We may all agree that LPs are superior to CD, but the market (now) does not reflect that. There are companies who serve the niche LP market and may be sufficiently successful to prosper, but there will never be as successful as a company which produced CD.

Like it or not, things change for better or worse. Companies change with the market...or die.

We agree completely on the quality issue. Its worse tho'... I've heard tales about dual CD/DVD audio releases where the CD is on one side and the DVD audio on the other ~and of the CD audio being purposely degraded to make the difference in sound quality apparent to more than just audiophiles.

If everyone made games based solely on what would sell - all we'd ever see is countless clones of GTA, Halo, and Call of Duty (oh, wait... ) If it's just about money, then why bother trying to make a quality game? If the majority of the market isn't interested in RPG mechanics, then why not just make a game about making a bunch of boobs bounce across the screen with realistic physics, in a post-apocalyptic world?

At some point you have to find a middle ground between "let's focus solely on making a good game," and "let's make a game that will sell lots of copies," or you just end up with stagnation. That's what Fallout 3 is supposedly trying to do anyway(if you look at all the GTA clones that came out after GTA 3 that tried to cash in on the "contreversy" market - you need to actually have a quality game on top of killing hokers and swearing.) All I would ask is that they slide the bar a little bit over to the side of gameplay. F3 is actually frustratingly close to doing so to begin with.

Presumably, it wouldn't even take up that much resources to do so (or make it any harder to play or make a viable character, either.) It's much longer, time consuming, and costly to go through the development process of adding a new weapon than the coding involved in making that weapon "work." All I'd be asking for is some more programming to add some more implementation and consequences to the Attributes, even out the levelling, and raise skill levels to 200 or 300. (Or to just throw out the current system and come up with something that works better - if you're just going to make something that plays like System Shock with dialogue trees anyways - why even bother with Attributes and anything more than a skilled tier system? Wouldn't make a worse game, necessarily, and it would be more appropriate for that gameplay.)

That's just programming, though - balancing would take longer than actually coding it in. And most of that's already been done - the beauty of already having two games before this one to see what works and what needs tweaking. It's not like you're designing a whole new system from scratch, after all.

Easy sales and [ideally] less tech support expense?

~~~~~~~~~

:rofl: ~When I first played Baldur's Gate 2, I had transfered my Party from BG1. During play there was what I thought was a bug, and I called Interplay tech support. It seemed that after I had accepted this dwarf into my party the game started appending my PC's last name to the dwarf in the journal entries. It perplexed the tech and he looked it up, and found that ~by chance, the dwarfs name was the same as my BG1 PC's. ~Heh... I guess ya' had to be there.
Wonder what it cost Interplay though.
:angel:

There are some out there, I'm sure, who hae such a view on the bottom line that quality means very little to them...in fact, quality is purposefully degraded to save overall costs. You see this in cheap electronics, where, say a 5% failure rate out of the box is acceptable and planned for in the finances (it costs a lot of money to reduce failures from say, 5% to 1%,a nd that cost savings is passed on to the customers, who don't mind taking the product back until they find a good one).

But most companies try to make the best product they can, given the time and resource constraints i which they operate. These resources are generally finite, and when deciding how to use these resources, one must keep an eye on the cost/benefit ratios of every feature. That is, if we allocate 10% of our resources to dialogue, and we are discussng increasing that to 15%, we must ask ourselves where do we need to cut that extra 5% from, and how is this change likely to affect sales.

Further, there is almost an epic struggle between the developers (engineering), the marketing people, and the financial controllers. The engineers always want tot make the best product possible, the financial people always want to spend the least amount of money possilbe, and the marketing people generally have very clear requirements in mind. Every product ends up being the negotiated result of all these forces.

Who said anyone wanted a clone? Van Buren wasn't a "clone" either. Neither would be a Troika Fallout 3.



So how exactly changing "the type of games I enjoy" into "the type of games I enjoy much less" saved "the type of games I enjoy"? If anything, the hybridization killed the genre as it was, any "saving" was superficial at best.

I certainly didn't want a clone. ~but I didn't want a sand-box either.

In Fallout 3 you can beat the hell out of Amata with a bat, and she'll still help you escape.
In Fallout 1 you lay a finger to Tandi in Shady Sands and the town will try to kill you ~even though she is a "quest NPC".
and she can be killed despite being a "headed" character, and that it might prevent you from access to lines of dialog and animation (that would go unseen).

It didn't. That's where "You can't please everyone" comes into play. But it did save the franchise for a lot of us, or did you miss that in my post as well?


Oh nos! I'm being tagteamed by the NMA hitmen!

if u luv it so mch y dont u marry it?

jk lol i also love falout 3

Fallout 3 is a fun game. If it only has a nodding aquaintance with the original games, who cares. I hate turn based combat, so FO 1 & 2 and KOTOR were never more than average games to me. Games like Blade Runner had similar depth of plot and so they still get played by me.

As for Fallout 3, its a fact of life that Morrowind was never finished by 85% of the people that bought it. Beth decided that it was not giving the customers what they wanted so they dumbed down the main quest in Oblivion to allow more people complete it. FO 3 works on the same principle, an easy main quest that an idiot can finish, with extensive side quests to maintain replay value. Its a Beth game made the way that Beth now make games, wishing it was something else is pointless.

Alas... I've no creds at NMA [that I am aware of] ~tho' it would be nice. :hubbahubba:

I'm not affiliated with NMA. I don't post there any more often than I post here. I used to be a DAC admin, but I don't even bother looking there. I'm The Vault hitman, if anything.

And please, spare us the cross-site trolling.

Not sure how large the "us" in your statement is, really, because I'm having a tough time how anyone, let alone fans of Fallout and Fallout 2 can think the franchise was "saved". Frankly, no one's told me yet what fate it was from, heh. Not an issue of whether or not it's true to the original games, just how you can save a series, heh.

That's what I'm saying, though. Is that the vast majority of the development resources is about actually coming up with the in-game models and textures - that's what we're really seeing as the biggest contributor to length of development in these games over time. Even if I was making over $30,000 a year to do it, it could easily take me a month or two to bring just the appearance of a new weapon or character model from original concept to final in-game implementation.

Programming, while more complex, is still not as time-consuming as all of that. It hasn't even changed all that much over the past few decades - it still just comes down to algorithms. The resources you'd have to shift to get a programmer to implement this stuff back into the game wouldn't be all that big of a hit to the bottom line. I'd be willing to bet there's some skilled modders out here that could make all of those changes in a couple days if that's all they were doing and were paid what these guys make, (and had access to the full set of tools, and the game was designed from the ground up to accomodate it.) We're not talking about shifting 10% of the total resources just to changing SPECIAL around - it's likely something closer to 1%.

I don't have any proof of this, of course, beyond my own experiences. But neither do we have any proof that the reverse is true - that any of these changes would mean it affected the bottom line all that much.