I agree.

I have both f1 and f2 installed as well.
F3 still is better.

Yeah but this is f4 forum and you are hating on it rather than going to the other forums and keeping them alive and well. That shows what you actually enjoy f4 or complaining on Bethesda more than f1 and f2.

Planeacape is greatly overrated. Bloodlines was good but had huge issues. Arcanum was awesome but to many critical bugs (unofficial patch makes it better)

Btw i still play arcanum so its also installed.

It was a much better fallout like game than the garbage VB.

Well, Might and Magic for instance. Have you played it? I recommend the series to anyone. It's amazing. The character building in the series is phenomenal. A lot of cool skills to put points into, great turn-based combat, character building that actually matters. It's the same reason I love Arcanum. I like building characters and testing them, trying new builds, weak builds, strong builds, pushing the game and what it can do.

To me, it goes back to D&D, where the story matters of course, but to see your character grow with the world and the story, is more impressive.

I like story and dialog as much as the next guy, but the game itself is what matters. Planescape did great in one area, but the gameplay suffered, so much in fact that some builds were gimped.

edit: I think RPGs are a package deal though. I don't expect a character building simulation nor do I want a world simulator. An RPG should have great gameplay, where you can tinker, make cool builds aka characters, and see how they react and affect the world and storyline with their choices of skills and alignments.

Fallout 3 was all right in one department, but like most Bethesda titles, story and dialog is paper-thin. One of their biggest weakness. Skyrim was an improvement though, but it added restrictions that limited character freedom, which I didn't like. Morrowind was a nice balance for me. Now Daggerfall needs to be looked at again. It's a great idea, but the execution wasn't done properly. But imagine, a Daggerfall for our generation...ohhh the possibilities lol.

It's better not to think about modern Daggerfall. It'll be extremely dumbed down, with worse dialogue than Skyrim and wonky animations. But hey, at least the story will be good. Assuming they don't mess it up and retcon many things, of course.

I'm allergic to DOS so I'll never be able to experience Daggerfall

If you want to talk about "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle", Daggerfall's a perfect candidate. Hundreds of different procedurally generated quests, 90% of them being crawls through a list of thousands of labyrinthine, procedurally generated dungeons that all feel the same and make no sense. The Classmaker has a ton of options, but then a lot of those options are imbalanced, or straight up broken; Skyrim's perk trees have way more potential than even Daggerfall's class system, which had the most "stuff" to it compared to the TES games that came after it. And race really didn't matter in that game, since your class is the only thing affecting skills/attributes and you can add any of the racial resistances/advantages with the Classmaker's advantages/disadvantages system. The main story isn't so much a story as it is a string of mostly irrelevant sidequests you do for royalty in exchange for information. And I f'ing love Daggerfall. I actually think there are a lot of things it does better than Morrowind, although Morrowind is still more fun to play.

People just really exaggerate how much "deeper" the older games were. It's okay to like them better, but you don't need to justify your opinion by coming up with elaborate anologies or blowing small things out of proportion to explain how the games have gotten "dumber".

And, just putting this out here, New Vegas is wildly overrated. I still love New Vegas, but yeah, it wasn't perfect even aside from the bugs and rushed schedule.

Well RPGs have certainly been more streamlined, but it's the nature of the beast. RPGs were a lot more complex back in the day, but the audience wasn't nearly as big as it is today.

Streamlining isn't bad either, but too much is, just as too little is. I prefer a good balance. The late 90s had that. Nowadays, they're not nearly as unforgiving as they were. This includes other genres as well.

Why assume there is supposed to be any immersion? It's a menu. As for the look of it, all menus in Fallout 1 & 2, are designed to resemble plausibly in-world artifacts; the Pipboy, the barter screen, the inventory; the scanner. Players need only read the manual to understand how to play.

With the use of a period UI, why would that UI mimic our modern Windows UI? (Having it do so is what would break immersion IMO.)
This was pervasive. The UI, the game box, the manual inside; all were designed to be [like] objects one might imagine existed in the game world.

And yet it shouldn't what I am comfortable with; what should matter is what's native to Fallout. Of course I had to get used to it too. I did not start the game as a veteran player for simply playing it back then. Fallout was a departure in many ways from what anyone was used to.

This [to me] is justifying change for player comfort rather than players finding a game that they like.

This is also justifying converting aspects that existing players are familiar with, into something other ~prefered players are comfortable with.

*Different strokes for different folks.* used to mean different games for different players.
( Now it's "Accept MY preferences ~in every game, because I am the new company favorite." )

Change is good....too much change at one time is bad. Bethesda always has a solid base to work from and then injects new concepts and ideas for the fans to digest over the course of the new game. Radical changes or not enough change does not provide the average customer with a pleasurable experience. DLC or patches can iron out problems but the main game has to satisfy the fans.

All games from gamesas that I have played have been decent games. The ES and FO series I consider outstanding. I look forward to the new games that come out for these series.

Other game series that I have played have not given me the same outlook. AC and Destiny as well as Battlefield have given me spotty games that I am unsure of whether or not to get the next installment.

Bethesda usually does things right.

The older games were designed to have greater player input. They related the abstract essential events, and the player used those as constants in the narrative. The newer games expect nothing but button clicking and they show enough of the events to remove any abstraction... but not enough to avoid odd ~immersion breaking situations because of it.

Also: In the older games, the player is expected to understand the context and logical effects of their actions. In the modern games, they actually tell players that shooting townspeople has made the town hostile.

I'm all for more challenging RPGs, but I always have to question whether games are unforgiving as part of their design, or because of arbitrary and misleading design choices.

Some (very important, I think) things to keep in mind guys.

First off - it's okay for members to have concerns with or even be critical of these games. All too often around here people lose sight of the fact that it's possible to enjoy a game but still find flaws with it - just because there's a couple things that might turn you off doesn't mean you don't like other aspects of the game. Those who come in here with a critical eye aren't required to also make sure to point out what they like about the game (if any) in every post they make than those who have no (or fewer) concerns should feel they need to balance their every post with criticism so as to not appear to be an "apologist" or other such nonsense.

What happens pretty much constantly on this forum is that someone will make a long post about their feelings, and then the next person who reads it will take one sound bite from that entire post, think of a way they could interpret it so at to be as offended as possible, and then post a response that assumes their counter is going to be of the most ridiculously exaggerated extreme.

From a moderation stand-point, none of us particularly care whether a member likes or dislikes this game or any other game out there. All we care about is that conversation is constructive, on-topic, and civil. Pretty simple stuff, I think. The members that feel the need to jump to Bethesda's defense at every suspected "insult" cause us as much trouble as those who need to turn every thread into a bucket of tears. And trust me, it's a pretty even split and has been for years. Every once in a while one "side" or another tries to claim they're the wounded party but it's just not true. No one "hit first," and really what it comes down to is you can either accept a difference of opinion or you can't.

Luckily for us, most of the members on this forum are not parodies, but 3-dimensional human beings with nuanced opinions who understand what a fact and an opinion are and don't fly into a rage every time someone disagrees with them.

Anyway, that out of the way there is one post I wanted to reply on-topic:

Not necessarily true, though...

For starters, Bethesda was not the only company engaged in negotiations for the Fallout IP. If they weren't around, who knows whose hands it would have ended up in or how it would have turned out. That only means that I don't know how a different hypothetical would have played out, and neither does anyone else. Bethesda got the rights, so we can assume they either wanted it more, had more resources to invest in it, or both. I personally think it's pretty cool and I like seeing artists have their own take on things - but others will feel differently. And that's okay.

As well, no one can say how Fallout 1 would have turned out had Interplay had access to modern-day technology. Keep in mind that a company is not one person - I'm sure if you asked 10 ex-Interplay employees what they'd have done with modern tech you'd get 10 different answers.

The "technical limitations" thing also tends to fall apart upon a bit of research. There were plenty of first-person or even 3D roleplaying games out there at the time Fallout 1 came out. I remember playing various Might and Magic games around that same time, and they did just fine with 3D environments and sprite characters. The last Ultima game didn't release until 1999 but they had it's software-rendered 3D running just fine by '96 or so. That's just two off the top of my head.

If Interplay had wanted to make Fallout a 3D game, I don't see any reason they couldn't have. There were 3D games well before Fallout came onto the scene, and by the time Fallout was released Interplay itself had either developed or published plenty of 3D, real-time, or action-oriented games.

Also [additionally] there is a frequent misconception that 3D means first person, which is by no means the truth of it. (And as we know, most of the first person games in the early to mid 90s were not 3D at all.)


*Pillars of Eternity is a 3D game.

** And as an aside: Fallout's base assets were 3D models; even though the engine was 2D.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/FModels.jpg

Anyone remember the old SSI gold box series? Those and some of the Wizardry games were what I cut my cRPG teeth on. Actualy, i recall playing some old ASCII, text based, Dungeon Crawl game when I got my first IBM PC back in the early 80s. Dual 5.25" floppies and 512k RAM....Whoop!

Doom (and all it's ID spinoffs until Quake) were actually 2.5D games. I recall the Hexen engine had some limited 3D capabilities with scripting.

Of course

I still have most of them installed.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Curse-1.jpg

*There was also the Legend series. I played through those a couple months ago.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/EOB1_zps877169a7.jpg

Here is a kick: The Gold Box games cost $50 (except Hillsfar)
[That means $80 today.]
*So did the Legend series.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/EOB_Promo_zps83dfed12.jpg

Function over form; you can't justify a confusing and unintuitive GUI. With the Pipboy, Bethesda did a much better job creating an intuitive UI that feels like part of the game world, and that's regardless of them designing UIs for consoles. In Fallout 2, performing a lot of simple actions requires going through a lot of lists and sub-lists to choose the action; the game would not have suffered from making it easier to use my Lockpick skill on a locked door, or my First Aid skill on an injured NPC. Looting also became a pain in the ass because of how corpses would pile up, and the inventory and barter menus are just another uninformative mess.

I don't see what you mean. The new games have less depth because they're less abstract? As for the second part, I don't remember getting a notification that shooting townspeople made them hostile; I just see that happening. The game will tell me I've lost reputation or karma, or gained a bounty, but that's a different notification that reflects the logic of the game. I think a game ought to be at least somewhat clear about the consequences of my actions, since a lot of video games handle consequences in completely different ways (or not at all).

Maybe a bit of both. Some of the interfaces in older RPGs were clunky. Some things weren't intuitive. On the other hand, the games weren't as forgiving. Characters in your parties died. If you were a low level, you'd get your butt handed to you by a moose rat lol. That was the point though. As you progressed, you could see your character becoming stronger and more powerful. You could even see this in Morrowind. When I first played the game, a mudcrab killed me lol. In Oblivion, you can kill dozens of rats in the beginning of the game, no problem.

Also, I don't necessarily like a challenge for just the challenge alone. The game has to be reactive, flexible even, smart. I shouldn't be able to kill 10 rats at level 1 without losing a bar of health, and I shouldn't be spending an hour figuring out how to sleep or figuring out how to resurrect a cleric. There's a balance I think we can all appreciate it.

The UI in Fallout was pretty good actually, pretty simple at least. I had no problem finding my way around. How long did you spend playing the game?

Oh, I know how it works now. It's just a hassle to navigate, and the inventory/trade menus really aren't as informative or organized as I would like.

I certainly can.
(Though not everyone can, it's true.)

That's disturbing [IMO]. Bethesda's UI was terrible ~except for the Pipboy, which sadly was also co-opted as inventory.
The entire concept of barter was removed; (it is impossible to barter in FO3; you can only sell items for caps to pay with; that's not the same thing).

Oh, just because you can justify something doesn't mean it's worth justifying. My problems with Fallout 2's UI aren't in the artwork.

And for Barter, what are you talking about? The only difference between Bartering in F3 and F2 is that caps are automatically accounted for; I can still set up a list of items to exchange for theirs before hitting the Barter. I actually think 3/NV has a much better barter menu than Skyrim, although Morrowind's was cool for letting you haggle the prices.

I have to agree that the Fallout 1 & 2 UI was not what I would call "intuitive". I recall when I first started playing it that I felt someone designed it to look "cool" rather than actually functional. Of course you get used to it after a few hundred hours....

Of course they are art.

Of Barter, think about it. What is barter?
In the Fallout series ~until FO3, you didn't need caps to barter. Caps were not money; they were used as a trade equalizer, when necessary; and/or in exchange for trivial items.

In Fallout, the PC could come in out of the wastes looking to sell a minigun... Not everyone could afford to trade for a minigun; so the PC had to accept the best offer, or look elsewhere. Sometimes they needed medical or anti-radiation drugs more than they needed their items; so they traded anyway ~and lived.
In FO3 it is impossible to trade for items; all you trade for is caps [that's selling]. There is no bartering in FO3.

http://s271.photobucket.com/user/Gizmojunk/media/Shunned.jpg.html?sort=3&o=1755

You don't need caps in Fallout 3. Traders can lack the caps for a minigun, but they will still trade you a bottle of wine for one if that is what you want to do.

I feel like the barter thing is just arguing over semantics now. In 3, I can still barter that Minigun for Stimpaks, food, ammo or I could just trade them the Minigun at a loss if they didn't have any caps; hell, you could go through all of 3 without spending a single cap and still find a use for bartering and the barter skill modifiers.

I know. I directly mentioned reputation/karma losses in the sentence immediately after the one you quoted, and then explained why I'm cool with the notification in the sentence after that. You omitted that part of my post; that's what I mean by disingenuous.