so hey why are you guys complaining about fallout 3 again?

yeah i agree and i have played fallout 2 and i do not think i have played a more boring game ever.

SWING
MISS
SWING
DODGE
SWING
PARRY
SWING
HIT FOR 7


sweet man this is fun GIMME MY BORING UNINSPIRED D&D-BASED ISOMETRIC RPG BACK!!!

I'm not going to comment on Fallout 3. I'm a die hard fan and I have been for about 11 years now but I'm going to wait to play the game before I make judgement call. I enjoyed oblivion and even though I consider Fallout/2 to be my favourite game I'm kind of happy the series has been reinvented in a way that is not PS2 PORT BOS which was taking the franchise and really giving it a kick in the groin, so thanks bethesda let's hope you don't take THAT route. Anything else and I'll at least play it.

All I can say other than that is LEFT 4 DEAD!!!!!!!!!

Fallout was all about bringing the PnP RPG to PC, allowing the players to role play different characters that have an effect on the game world and have some real choice and consequences.  The ES games lack all of that, with each game since Daggerfall having less content then the last.

What?  No they don't.  I'll admit that there are very few opportunities in the Elder Scrolls series to make a decision that HAS AN IMPACT and that is pretty lame, so you're not off the mark there, but saying you're not able to play the role of different types of characters is pretty ridiculous.  In fact, I prefer having my character shaped by what I do and not STAT ALLOCATION, so I think you're overreacting, because aside from the lack of impact your character has on the world, you can't ignore the conceptual similarities between Bethesda games and pen and paper RPGs.

Lets not forget Beth crapping all over the Fallout lore and their horrible idea of dark humor and what makes a fallout game("Hey its Fallout, lets get some nuclear explosions on the screen!" Todd Howard).

CRAPPING ALL OVER THE LORE yeah man who gives a shit.  I guess maybe if you are DARKNECRID that is an issue but that is a dumb basis for a complaint and I would rather they changed shit to something they were comfortable with than forcing themselves to write the game 100% according to what an entirely different company wrote 10+ years ago.  I think once the sequel is made by a completely different company years later, you should kind of expect changes to be made.  It's more like a reimagining of the series than an actual direct sequel, which imo is fine.  If you don't think it's funny then yeah that's another thing entirely, and I could see you being annoyed by EXCESSIVE VIOLENCE//MININUKES//other generic FPS shit, but I didn't really think Fallout 2 was all that clever so much as it was clever for a video game, and I sort of felt people always overrated the humor part of it in the same way they do shit like PORTAL.  I imagine this game will be tongue-in-cheek too about a lot of shit and there's like barely any info out on the game aside from what combat is like so I'm not even sure what you're basing this on other than being angry that it's not the same game over again.

Anyway, I think ES games are lacking in dialogue partially because of the setting.  I think when people try to write for high fantasy they tend to go into with certain preconceptions for how characters need to be and sound and that has a pretty pronounced negative impact on the writing.  I'm not saying I'm really expecting it to be good, but I have a SUSPICION that it will be better than their previous games.

As for combat, even most Fallout fans will admit that they were lacking in this compartment and surprise, surprise, few, if any, fans think it needs to say exactly the same as the older games, but generally the games are about character skill instead of player skill and an FPS game is pretty much the exact opposite of that(the mini-games aren't any better).

So what?  How is one in any way better than the other?  There's clearly a stat allocation component to Fallout 3, so it's not even like your character's skill is completely irrelevant.  They just made it less of a factor (I'm not even sure about this!) and added player skill into account, oh no!!!  I guess you want another PC RPG but a lot of people, myself included, find PC RPGs really fucking dull and slow-paced and uninteresting and not really as immersive as first-person combat, so while I'm not even like a big fan of FPS, I think it's a step in the right direction in terms of the format combat should adopt.  It sounds like your complaint is that instead of combat relating solely to how you've planned out your dude's stats, now it relates to that and your ability to comprehend basic FPS controls.  Seriously, dude?  fkdjfkdjkfjd why can't they do everything exactly the same???? is basically what you're saying!

So yeah man, I don't think they have shown TIME AND TIME AGAIN they don't know what they're doing; the game looks alright.  I think they've shown time and time again they're taking a different path with the game, although the CORE PREMISE seems to be more or less pretty similar, and that you and probably most other Fallout fans just want them to remake the same ten year old game and just say they're doing it wrong as another way of saying they're not doing it the way the original did it (c...change....no....).

the ES games don't lack in dialog because of the setting. there has never been a single ES game with decent dialog. in morrowind there essentially was no unique characters. i could walk up to virtually any guy and the game and ask him HEY WHERE IS THE VOLCANO and get the exact same word for word response from the guy next to him (or anyone else in the world). oblivion was only a slight upgrade. the problem is that every character is treated the same as the next, you have some KEY WORDS you can ask about and that's it. there is hardly ever character specific questions you can ask, which is probably the biggest thing they lack. that, and the dialog just isn't good. in terms of story and dialog i don't know how you could have much faith in the game given the track record of bethesda.

did you ignore what i said or what?  i'm not sure there's ever been a single elder scrolls game that didn't have more or less the same setting.  they're all high fantasy shit, and you didn't even say that you disagreed with the idea that people write for different genres in different ways, you just said NOPE NOT TRUE.  what is that.  also you are kind of just wrong about the lack of unique characters.  you could walk up to any random npc and get a generic reply because there are like 8000 generic npcs and it's totally ridiculous to expect anything else, but there were a fair amount of specific characters with actual personalities and non-standardized replies.  i'm not saying that they were EXCELLENT CHARACTERS or that they weren't one-dimensional, because they were, but they WERE unique characters.

the thing it seems like you're not taking into account is that oblivion and other elder scrolls games were the way they were not only because what i think was an obligation people felt towards the setting, but also because of the number of people in them.  from what i can see there are a great deal LESS people you come into contact with in fallout 3, and so logically, i think that this will probably mean a lesser ratio of generic npcs to individual characters.  idk i did not get very far into fallout before i couldn't force myself to play it anymore but i didn't encounter any characters that were just overflowing with individualistic personalities.  do those come later???  anyway i didn't actually say i had faith so much as a suspicion that it would be better than their previous games due to factors i've already explained.

anyway, i think it was kind of lame to show a ton of EXPLODER BODDIES footage and not really anything else, but i think that is just the WAY IT GOES with game presentations, and not necessarily indicative of the fact that it's just going to be GUN'S GUN'S GUN'S.  my impression of the game is that it is going to be somewhat like metroid prime with exploration playing the central role and shooting and shit just being part of it too.  another thing i think you should factor in when considering the battle system is that it's different on a fundamental level from anything else bethesda has worked on before.  the reason the combat in morrowind and oblivion sucked is because it was just melee combat and you kind of need shit like COMBOS and whatever else to make that interesting; it's just poorly adapted to the fps format and i think there's really only so much you can do with FIRST PERSON MELEE.  but!!!  this is an actual fps with some thought it seems put into shit like targeting and weapons, plus you can still apparently do shit like HACK DROIDS or whatever and have them do stuff for you, so i think it will probably be a lot better.

and yeah i'm expecting it to be filled with fetch quests buuuuut the actual content of the game isn't as important to me in a game like oblivion because i always just do like the main quest and a few of the other plot-driven quest chains and just EXPLORE AROUND and check shit out for the most part.  i skip the random fetch quests so it's not like it's 100 hours long but i really only want to play a game for ~30 or so hours so it works out for me.

yeah man i don't mean you can't write high fantasy well, but i think there's an issue with the general perception of how you write it.  oblivion was a game that was clearly written based around those perceptions, to me, and the way people look at high fantasy is sort of based off of a bunch of really banal archetypes and plot devices and the like.  it's not as if you can't buck the trends, but basically i'm saying fantasy is a tricky genre to write because there is basically very little good source material so their inspiration is all just more really dumb shit.

fallout 3 is sci-fi, but it's a specific genre of sci-fi that i think lends itself to being written with less attention paid to what the writing SHOULD be like, and what people expect the writing to be like, because the perception of a post-apocalyptic setting/plot is a lot less rigid than one of high fantasy, i feel.  i mean it's still kind of rigid in that you expect the world to be BARREN WASTELAND//NUCLEAR WINTER but in terms of the setting and the events and characters i think it's a bit easier to do what you want and not what you feel you should be doing.  i'm not really saying that this is an excuse for oblivion's writing to be bad, because it's not an excuse, but i do think it played a part in why the writing was bad!

this is kind of a difficult thing to explain but i'm saying that i think oblivion and other past games of theirs were bogged down by the writers' perception of what they were supposed to write like, and they ended up writing generic fantasy shit in part because that is all they had to look to for precedent and i feel like they probably just felt like that was how fantasy was SUPPOSED TO GO.  a game like fallout has less in the way of rigid perceptions of how it needs to be written, and what it DOES have is, instead of being rote epic fantasy shit with dwarves, is an expectation from the public for it to be kind of darkly humorous and tongue-in-cheek.  i'm not saying that they are GOING TO WRITE IT WELL because i don't know whether or not they're good writers, but i'm saying i think they're going to be set up to write it better than their previous projects seeing as how they're not going into it feeling like they have to write an epic fantasy adventure and like they have to meet certain [bad] expectations.