lockgar said:
Man, this is a while later a good while later, but anyway, as you said, differences in opinion. I thought the music was great, especially when you turn on the GNR, giving you that delicious sense of irony.
The oblivion comparison, although somewhat valid, gets silly, how would everyone had liked the dialog and character interactions? There not many ways except how games like Oblivion, mass effect, and Kotor allow you to interact with the npcs. Which essentially come down to the same way. Not to mention the game was made in the same engine, there are bound to be similarities.....
This "twitch pollution" is again, a matter of preference, but that's why there is V.A.T.S.
I don't have a lot of spare time and generally only post one comment in Zero Punctuation.
Anyway, one radio station doesn't save you from the general Fairy Land feeling you get from the default soundtrack. To me, music's a major factor and the sound tracks of Fallout 1/2 are far more successfully in conveying a post-apocalyptic feeling than anything else. I would have expected that the devs, as the "Fallout Fans" they claim they are, would have gotten at least that one right. I mean, the musical atmosphere is a bullet point noone could possibly miss. Apparently not, as the Bethesda devs prove.
So you think the dialogue system renders my comparison "silly", because there wasn't any other way to solve it? How about using no dialogue? I'd rather let my imagination think up the voices from a good description than to hear lame, uninspired voice acting across all channels. Fallout uses almost no dialogue, but rather small snippets of well written text and dialogue to create a setting and let your mind enrich it - it is far more stimulating than the graphical exposé this game offers, or the awesome still Uncanny Valley faces you get to observe as the game freezes time and zooms into them. And then the uninspired, bland emitting of lines begins.
Which brings me to another solution: write good dialogue and hire professional, quality voice actors. There were not a lot of voiced animated heads in Fallout 1 or 2, but they sure were done a lot better than anything in Fallout 3. And that includes Liam Neeson - if you want to compare Hollywood muscle, Richard Dean Anderson (Fallout 1) and Michael Dorn (Fallout 2) did a much better job.
Or perhaps voice everything in such a cheesy way that it's funny (think Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid or Silent Hill) - however, I'm not sure it'd fit in this type of game. Still, it'd be better than whatever it is we have now.
And V.A.T.S. being there for the non-twitchers? That is NOTHING compared to the turn-based game system behind Fallout 1 and 2. For one, you don't "run out of V.A.T.S." in them. In Fallout 1 and 2, you and your enemies are on an equal footing: you move and act, they move and act. You can shoot or hit them in the groin, they can shoot or hit you in the groin. Etc. In Fallout 3, you're a super hero, above the others, the Chosen One capable of freezing time, entering Matrix Mode(tm) and inflict great damage while the enemies can barely scratch you. And this super power recharges continuously.
In other words, your character is a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu if you will). Personally, I prefer playing a realistic character and have everything on an equal setting - either way, V.A.T.S. is NOT, not even in the slightest, a fix for the Fallout 1/2 fan.
