I think Fallout 3 will stay my favorite over 4: Immersion and protagonists.

[Goliath100]

snip

I think it's need to make a distinction between 2033 and Last Light: 2033 has the best handling of morality in the business, LL is a lot more questionable. And you seem to do the classic mistake of thinking of it as good vs evil. For 2033, its maturity vs immaturity and for LL its redeeming vs unredeeming.

...payed a stripper for a Dance... "You are a bad person..."

I think the idea is that you are wasting time on personal pleasure.

[killing Lesnitsky is bad]

This is what I mean with LL being questionable. I think the idea is "forgiveness", but you do that later too with Pavel. Or it may be acting like judge, jury and executioner is bad because that was what was doing before. Or it may be don't kill people. See what I mean with LL being questionable.

"You're a tool who nukes the surface again, because you're so dumb and vile to realize Dark ones aren't super evil."

Actually, it's more like: "You an immature twat that never stops to think, to observe the world around you."
There is this great blog that explains the whole of 2033. It's a good read.

It does not judge you.
The game DOES judge you based on its OWN ideas.

Contradicting yourself much? The game do judge, but, isn't that Fallout 3's problem? That there is no real consequences for your actions.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Fallout 3 was extremely technically impressive when it came out, and even as someone with a massive nostalgia boner who had played the first two games through childhood I really appreciated the little changes to the familiar setting. It struck me as a better version of what Brotherhood of Steel was trying to accomplish, in that it was using this familiar setting but also kind of doing its own thing.

The problem is that it's the epitome of Bethesda games.. superficial freedom masking incredible, incredible shallowness. Fallout 3 is very much during the "Oblivion" phase of Bethesda games where the shallowness was at its greatest. There's never any sense that any of the locations in the game actually interconnect as part of a coherent world, because there's no overall story or drama to tie them all together or to which they're all reacting. In that sense, it's not a roleplaying game so much as a dicking around simulator.

It was also atrociously balanced, as roleplaying games go, with some perks being incomprehensibly useless and others being game-breakingly powerful.

But when I said the same things aobut Oblivion in the past, it made me realize that some people prefer it that way. Some people do want absolute freedom even at the cost of a crafted narrative or immersive world, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just how people like to play. Skyrim is I think a good compromise.

 

[SajuukKhar]

So you don't think you are being unreasonable here, making claims about which game you'll like better when one of them was announced what, a week ago? Maybe your enjoyment from the game you did play being weighed against the enjoyment you didn't get from a game you can't have played yet isn't exactly reasonable?

Spoiler: As for the story in 3

Whats funny is that literally everything in that pic is objectively wrong, and even Bethesda haters on 4chan frequently call out its idiocy.

I don't understand why people still post it.

 

[Vault101]

Fallout 4 is looking pretty good to me. Voiced protagonist can be a good thing. Too early to say but I'm hopeful, I just don't really trust Bethesda with their storytelling. Great world building, crap execution....

I agree, in that they give you this world but not much else..I feel like I'm playing with virtual action figures

that said I am SUPER surprised they're going the talking protagonist route..because that is very UN Bethesda like, Id expect that from say Obsidian but not the kings of "walking camera on legs"

this actually makes me sort of excited. not only because mixing Fallout with Mass Effect is like my gaming fever dream but also it makes me wonder if theyre putting more focus on story

The problem is that it's the epitome of Bethesda games.. superficial freedom masking incredible, incredible shallowness. Fallout 3 is very much during the "Oblivion" phase of Bethesda games where the shallowness was at its greatest. There's never any sense that any of the locations in the game actually interconnect as part of a coherent world, because there's no overall story or drama to tie them all together or to which they're all reacting. In that sense, it's not a roleplaying game so much as a dicking around simulator.
.

or this...this is a good way to put it

 

[Chaos Isaac]

EXACTLY!
The game DOES judge you based on its OWN ideas.

Also, no, giving money to a stripper is a NEUTRAL act. It gives neither "possitive" nor "negative' karma. I have no idea why you think it gives you anything.
Very few things do actually. And they are all fairly logical. The biggest one is "judge after you know something, not before" which is a theme. That is what gives you the most "points' by far.

If you havent noticed you were with a child when you had that guy in your hands... the game has had 3 levels in which it was beating you over that you are teaching it the basics of morality. It wanted you to show the child mercy. Not so much save that retard, but rather do it for the one who is watching you both...
The entire point of the last levels...

As for the ending... both endings of Metro 2033 were made to feel epic either way. It is not like the book ending (even if the bad one IS in a technical sense)... now that is what gamers needed...

There is no accuracy cheating in STALKER. I can assure you of that. That is mostly shit talked by bad players to excuse them being bad at it.
Also, on almost EVERY single game EVER NPCs are less accurate than the protagonist. It is ALWAYS like that. From Half Life to Wolfenstein to Quake to CoD to Metro even...

You just said it didn't judge you. Good job being all flip-floppity. So that angle is a dead argument.

Also, they're not logical. No, to be fair, morality rarely is, based on personal views, bias, circumstance and upbringing.

The reason why I think it gave me bad karma, asides a I think a karma effect, though I can't remember if it has one or not, I seem to remember recognizing it and being like, 'No way'. Not to mention the whole Karma guide on the wiki says it does, and from when I played the games, it was pretty accurate. (I didn't follow it on my first playthrough.)

Honestly, I don't remember three levels where it was beating me over the head with it's poor, stupid, paint-by-numbers shit moral system. Like, at all. Maybe the time I was hanging out with the dude who got caught by nazi's with me, who ended up being a back-stabber, so that taught me... "Most people are assholes. Always look over your shoulder and be wary, 'cause post-apocalypse!"

Besides, I did show the kid mercy. I spared almost everyone I could, except you know, genocidal assholes, because you know. They're evil. And should die. And man, it's entirely hypocritic when the game is like, "For the good ending, the Dark Ones murder EVERYONE because you were such a nice guy. Moral of the story kids; Don't hurt bad people, have other people hurt bad people so you can be the hero?

Neither ending is really epic. They're kinda hollow. At least to me they were, mainly because I saw no impact. Dropping a nuke fucks things further and maintains status quo. The other is non-canon and dependant on a not-great morality system.


Right; you're not listening. I. Saw. A. Few. Bad. Examples. Of. Hyper. Accuracy. In. Gameplay. Kinda like in far cry when you're in shrubs three miles away, around a corner and a dude will still see you and shoot you in the leg.

Fun Fact; I was shot through a view point of roughly 2 inches, through three plain windows and a small hole in a tailwing of a plane while I was on top of one in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Bro, those guys aren't less accurate then you unless you're a pansy playing on normal or lower. Which, funnily enough, is kind of the point of difficulty settings. (Worse off, my story was on normal.)

In Metro, I was shot sprinting by a dude three stories up, through a railing, in the dark so well and so accurately I couldn't even bother to change path before I got killed. And no, he didn't have goggles.

Or maybe I should talk about the guy in Killzone, able to headshot me with a pistol from the bottom of a tower, behind a mech, and through three railings.

They are totally bad shots. I mean, all A.I. totally can't keep up with player accuracy.


*Edit: No, i'm wrong. The moral system isn't paint by numbers. You get moral points for just talking to some people and little things like. As well as you get bad ones for small details that don't really mean anything.

The big moments are paint by numbers, which are honest. But the rest of the system is really, really, arbitrary.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

.

Ooh, I like you.

First point: Fair enough. 2033 doesn't really suffer from that morality, except for maybe needed too many good ones, and/or arbitrary points that don't make sense. But that's opinion. As for maturity? I don't see that. Maybe it is, but I would say the game conveys it poorly if it is.

Second point: I didn't pay her for personal pleasure; I payed her to help her make ends meet. 'Cause i'm a nice guy. I didn't even watch, I got up asap. But that doesn't matter. It's just kinda narrow minded in it's morality, which is unfortunate, but probably a necessary evil. And I guess that's my thing, Metro wants me to take it seriously, but I can't because of things like that, where there's no in-between. It's not a world of grays, no matter how it acts. It has empirical right or wrongs.

Third point: I did forgive Pavel, actually. He was a character not twirling his mustache all the time. But seriously, that dude was all down for genocide. Maybe I shouldn't be judge jury and executioner, fine, but after seeing the effects of the dude gassing a populace. He shouldn't live. Seriously. But, again, that is a bad enough thing to do apparently to justify me suicide bombing instead of being saved.

Fourth point: See, that's not even fair. I did stop and look around all of the time, and knew better, but because I didn't jump through the few specific hoops it had, I get a bad ending arbitrarily. The ending game segment didn't really do it any favors in my opinion either.

Maybe i'll read up on that blog. Though, I could just get the books, see if the whole Anna thing is better done there.

 

[SmallHatLogan]

I thought Fallout 3's opening sequence failed miserably. There wasn't enough back story to make the player character or the vault dwellers interesting, and there was too much that it made me feel certain character aspects were forced on me. Either go the whole hog and fully flesh the character out or make them a blank slate. I would've preferred it if they had just given an opening narrative explaining what the vaults were and then started the game with you being unceremoniously booted out with a photo of your dad and the instruction: "find this guy" (which is pretty much as much context as you have in New Vegas).

IS this one of those threads where we pretend immersion is some sort of objective quality that can be defined based on a standard list of criteria such as graphcs and characters, rather than a personal assessment that relies on whether an individual is enthralled?

Because it looks like one of those.

Fallout 3 never immersed me. Tetris immersed me. I'm also pretty sure L-Block was a better developoed character.

Okay, I'm joking on the second part, but the bit about Tetris immersing me? Totally true.

Now, I don't begrudge anyone speculating on how awesome Fallout 4 will or will not be, but I have trouble making that call personally with the data we have.

Yeah I've never really gotten the check list people seem go through when judging a game's immersion. It always seems to be such minor things that "take people out" of the game.

I'll admit I have my own checklist but it's very broad and doesn't focus on anything tangible that is or isn't in the game. It mainly boils down to:
1. Do I give a shit about what's going on?
2. Does it feel like my actions have consequences?
Everything else is just so much window dressing.

 

[RikuoAmero]

Remind me again OP...is Fallout 4 still in development? If so...how is it you are able to say that it is lesser in terms of immersion and protagonists than 3?

 

[Something Amyss]

Yeah I've never really gotten the check list people seem go through when judging a game's immersion. It always seems to be such minor things that "take people out" of the game.

Kids these days are spoiled. Back when I was young, we played games at 3 FPS because that's all we had!

Seriously, though, a lot of them are graphical in nature and I can't help but wonder if it's because we're talking about people who never had to pretend six blocks was their hero.

 

[TemplarofSteel]

Yeah I've never really gotten the check list people seem go through when judging a game's immersion. It always seems to be such minor things that "take people out" of the game.

Kids these days are spoiled. Back when I was young, we played games at 3 FPS because that's all we had!

Seriously, though, a lot of them are graphical in nature and I can't help but wonder if it's because we're talking about people who never had to pretend six blocks was their hero.

I'd say blame it more on studios that were clamoring that graphics were the end all be all for games, mostly because graphical improvements look nice and were also much easier to do from a practical standpoint than doing better stories, etc. In terms of FO3, NV, and the like, I have not played Last Light or STALKER so I can't say definitively how the games compare to the latter two but I will say that I have kind of a weird view on NV and FO3. I will actually agree that for the arc story NV is probably better, the story feels a bit tighter and the world you travel through in New Vegas does feel more organic and real.

However it was missing some of the stuff in 3 that I really missed, I loved stuff like the battles between the Mechanist and the ANTagonizer and getting involved in that. I enjoyed all the little tangents and side stuff, a lot of it feeling more fun and interesting. Now I might just be a weird case in that I love gonzo scifi and some of this stuff brought back those memories, but in some ways while NV was probably a better world it almost felt dryer than FO3. That being said I LOVED old world blues and as said I thought the story itself was probably a lot better. I get that some of this is going to come down to opinion in terms of realism etc. but to met part of what makes a game immersive is also the fun in it.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'd say blame it more on studios that were clamoring that graphics were the end all be all for games, mostly because graphical improvements look nice and were also much easier to do from a practical standpoint than doing better stories, etc.

So why do see see it in story-based games? Mass Effect or Fallout?

 

[Goliath100]

snip

I'll let the blog speak for me on 2033. I have little to add. But, one thing: So, if Pavel is guilty for not trying to stop genocide, and shouldn't live for that: Than what the hell those that make Artyom? He did attempted genocide after all.

 

[TemplarofSteel]

I'd say blame it more on studios that were clamoring that graphics were the end all be all for games, mostly because graphical improvements look nice and were also much easier to do from a practical standpoint than doing better stories, etc.

So why do see see it in story-based games? Mass Effect or Fallout?

We see it for those games too because in general industry pushed the idea that graphics were the most important thing and they convinced each other of it. I don't care as much about graphics as long as I can clearly see what's going on and what I'm playing doesn't glitch its way to Geigerian horrors (unless it's supposed to do that for some reason)

 

[Radoh]

So you don't think you are being unreasonable here, making claims about which game you'll like better when one of them was announced what, a week ago? Maybe your enjoyment from the game you did play being weighed against the enjoyment you didn't get from a game you can't have played yet isn't exactly reasonable?

Spoiler: As for the story in 3

Whats funny is that literally everything in that pic is objectively wrong, and even Bethesda haters on 4chan frequently call out its idiocy.

I don't understand why people still post it.

What's actually funny is that despite you claiming that literally everything is objectively wrong you don't seem to care to point out any of that claim, and then say that there's a phantom audience that backs up your claims here who also call out this "idiocy" yet also that you don't back that up at all.

Wait no that's not really that funny. Nor is the reverse that funny, so I'm not entirely sure why you make the claim that it is.

In fact how can you even make the claim that "Then later we got through a village of children who fdso gah frrzlmpr blaaa huygggnl asdf;lj" is somehow objectively false? That isn't even a language you can't make that claim.

 

[Chaos Isaac]

snip

I'll let the blog speak for me on 2033. I have little to add. But, one thing: So, if Pavel is guilty for not trying to stop genocide, and shouldn't live for that: Than what the hell those that make Artyom? He did attempted genocide after all.

Pretty much a jerk.

 

[farscythe]

welp.. the only reasons i loved 3 more then nv.. are three dog n the soundtrack... that happy bouncy soundtrack with 3 dogs yabbering... kept me going forever... mr vegas n his 4 or 5 songs... put me off real quick (tho am replaying nv now.. n mojave music radio helps)

but regardless.. 4 looks promising. dialogue wheel is a lil worrieing,,but long as they give me plenty vaults n story to find.. im happy

also.. veritbird.. woo

 

[Goliath100]

Pretty much a jerk.

So, being a jerk isn't a bas enough thing to be to justify you suicide bombing instead of being saved?