I got myself a Wii as soon as I could, hoping that it would be different enough that I wouldn’t be fifteen years behind everyone else in learning how to play the games. Boy was I disappointed when I figured out that it’s the same as every other console, except the controller is split in half and you hold each piece in each hand.

There’s a vocabulary of game logic that I just can’t pick up with my no-skill level. The only exposure I’ve had to a game getting interesting is watching others play.

*I am married to a big player of games, so I’m exposed to a lot of games, but I remain convinced it’s the games that are too hard for me/shooters that are the more interesting ones. I absolutely love The Sims, and can handle and even enjoy fighting games like Soul Caliber, or even racing games, which require a tiny bit of game-related coordination, but less than shooters.

I sat down with Fable II and have been thankful for its hand-holding, but it’s just not really my kind of thing. Lame, warmed-over fantasy crap just isn’t doing it for me, even if I am capable of walking a character through it.

I do think that we all can agree on the fact that a sequel should stay true to the original games, regardless of if they feel an urge to reinvent them or not. If they don’t there is no point in making a sequel other than using the name for fast cash.

And how do you stay true to the originals? Well, what you need to do, is basically staying true to canon, game mechanics, and the setting of the original games. One needs to design the new game without loosing what the previous ones were aiming for. One of the core design descisions of the original Fallout games was to try to recreate table top RPG games, which is why turn based combat was choosen, as well as a isometric perspective. And let’s be honest, FO3 hardly seems to be a RPG at all, it is more of a shooter with RPG aspects.

Apart from this, one of the things which really made the Fallout games stand out was the dialogue. You never really knew what you were gonna get, was the ‘right’ choice really the right choice. An example from NMA:
“Kill Gizmo the meanie – Killian rules with an iron fist. Kill Killian the lawman – Gizmo makes the place prosper.”

A good example in FO2, when the First Citizen of VC gets rather annoyed with you if you helt Gecko, or if you are non predjudice against mutants and ghouls.

The is, needless to say, much more than this, and if you can be arsed all views can be found at nma or dac.

It seems like bethesda are making a decent game. But, and this is a big but, it is NOT a fallout game, which makes it suck, much as a decent adventure game sucks as a FPS, a decent post apoc FPS sucks as a RPG. It isn’t that hard to get, rilly,

The best time to do a timed-media heavy event that includes fans for video games is in August/September. Although, I don’t think that the media really LOSES anything if a game is shown in October with two months until Christmas. I mean, all you guys put out these fat magazines about Christmas toys in November (well, mags like PC Gamer and Game Informer do for sure), and if we actually had a DEMO that the public could see, it would dispel the crap that’s going around about certain games (Fallout 3, for example).

While PAX and E3 have less in common, the big gaming companies this year packed up their E3 sets and sent them to Seattle to be unpacked for PAX. It was weird, knowning my brother-in-law at Ubisoft said that they are just as hyped about PAX as they were about E3, even more so. The point is that the exposure is high and the mood right for gamers at PAX, so they actually READ or PAY ATTENTION more to things that happen at PAX then they did at E3 this year.

A lot of people skipped caring about E3 this year that normally go on for weeks about it. That’s a sign of E3’s influence slipping for gamers, and it’s more of a “cosmetic event” for the media and investors.

As the preceding comments outline, I was following a train of thought that lead me to that conclusion. I wanted to see Emil’s reaction.

Care to expand on why apparently you don’t agree?

Absolutely. This is why I love Morrowind and Mass Effect and various other games that incorporate this journal system. It gives the player a breadth of knowledge, but those interested in just experiencing the game proper don’t have to deal with it.

Asking them hard questions, I see.

Not to mention Mass Effect does have a very comprehensive journal system in its Codex. It’s invaluable for those players who want to gain a greater understanding of the world.

The best games are subtle in both presentation and “telling”. If you play it and get a deluge of information, the story isn’t being told professionally. I realize that (some) older RPGs have better stories, but there’s a lot of things in them that were either redundant. They’d describe something I could see just fine. The dialogue (especially in Baldur’s Gate) was stilted and melodramatic.

The best balance is between the complete information overload of old RPGs and the lack of description of (certain) modern RPGs. I think that the closest to this balance is Morrowind, actually, thanks to the journal and wide array of information you can glean from inhabitants that was stored in the journal. I guess it could be described as the Civlopedia from Civilization: the information is there, but it doesn’t force itself upon you.

And games like Mass Effect seem to be doing fine without long text descriptions.