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[Ioric Kittencuddler]

HDR lighting is great.  At least in Half-Life 2's episodes where it's done right.  It adds a really nice realistic feature that actually enhances game play.  Bloom is kind of like HDR lighting's obnoxious little brother who tries to imitate him but just completely misses the point, and ends up making everything look like you just woke up... all the time.

[umiman]

I never really like bloom either. It's bloody annoying and I always turn it off, especially in FPS. Same goes for motion blur. And all those sparkly effects that make you miss that perfect shot. I kinda set all my FPSes to Counterstrike settings.

The thing I don't like most about RA3 as it is is that I can't tell what's going on. Like FFXIII's trailers. Too much bright colour and movement. It's like the stellar opposite of the current day's fascination with brown. Not that I'm still not interested in controlling MCVs that can move into water to make bases as well.

How many double negatives can you string together?

[LeoLeonardoIII]

How many double negatives can you string together?

As many as you don't not want!

Returning to this thread's true topic of Fallout 3:

Fallout 1 rocked. Fallout 2 improved on it but there was a little something missing. But it was still rock-hard awesome. The next couple Fallout games sucked ass. So it's not like Fallout 3 is the first failure of the series. It's just the most public failure.

The decision to make it first person is a strange one, when we still enjoy tile-based turn-based strategy. And Fallout 1 and 2 used hexes, which are hardly ever used outside select wargames.

(I want the sidewalks of my city paved with hexagonal bricks)

But what comprises Fallout is the setting, the black humor, the quirkiness, the casual gore, the gameplay, the solid quests with lots of branching options, and in general all the interesting choices to make.

Will Fallout 3 be all of those things? Maybe. It might be able to do it even though it looks nothing like Fallout.

And gore is part of Fallout. I remember getting kill criticals with pistols and rifles and just blasting a huge chunk out of the torso of a person. Critical hits to the groin with a Minigun. BB gun criticals to the eye. This is the stuff of legends.

[Torak]

What makes something silly in a "kid" way or a "mature "way? Let me refresh your memories a bit: RA2 had dolphin soldiers that attacked with super sonic waves, giant mind controlled squids, psychic russians who could mind controll buildings, a giant Eiffel Tower Tesla Coil, soldiers who shot radiation, the incredible hulk, and tanks that looked like trees when they stood still. And that's not even 1/3rd of the strange shit that was in there.

I swear to god I've seen you post this before, with the same replies.


Or maybe I'm just freaking out, man.


Also Fallout 3 won't have (a) good dialog/story, since, c'mon, it's Bethesda, they can't write a coherent storyline to save their life and instead cover it in graphics and gameplay.

[Keiseth]

Also Fallout 3 won't have (a) good dialog/story, since, c'mon, it's Bethesda, they can't write a coherent storyline to save their life and instead cover it in graphics and gameplay.

I thought the Daggerfall --> Morrowind transitional story was pretty clever (The Warp of the West.) Morrowind also had several interesting mini-storylines that blew the crap out of most other games at the time:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 I particularly liked the girl who dropped her amulet in the water. When you dive in to get it for her, and come back out, she tries to murder you while you're down. "No good deed goes unpunished, outlander..." I don't think anybody at all expected that, as Morrowind had plenty of trivial tasks like that for you to undertake.

[Dwarmin]

Sigh..
I love the series too much....what a travesty

[Cthulhu]

The problem with the ring in the water mission:
1. You can't see the ring, it's literally invisible.  You have to run your crosshairs across the entire pond.
2. It comes out of nowhere.  I had no idea what was going on, and was still confused a few minutes later.  It was a long time ago though.

[Pnx]

Morrowind was pretty great, it actually wasn't any less linear then oblivion but it didn't give you the whole quest map thing showing you every little step, or the auto-travel that just made me feel like I was being guided by the hand. True Morrowind was no less linear but it actually felt like I was performing the quests and figuring it out, rather then doing an infinite series of what felt like fetch-quests... I still fondly remember that shrine in vivic.

Oh and the magic system in oblivion was overpowered, my mage had a staff that could kill even the nastiest of daedrath in less then three blasts, and failing that I developed a couple of spells that could do it in one, and they cut down on the kinds of enchantments you could do, it's true that having a regenerative breastplate was a bit overpowered but it sucked that they had to make enchantments so limited. I did however have some fun with what I had. I fondly remember my departing moment in the game was riding into town wearing the champions armour (which I had no proficiency in) on shadowmere whom I enchanted with water walking so it could ride over the stormy seas, then zapping everything in sight with my uberpowerful magic. Then I just walked into the center of the imperial city and use my uberspell inferno to lightly burn everyone in town to death over multiple castings... then I paid my fines and went on my merry way.

[Earthquake Damage]

Personally, I loved Morrowind.  I would've loved Oblivion until I learned of an engine limitation that its predecessor did not have (in fact, I did love it 'til then).

In Morrowind, if you fortify an attribute or skill above 100, it works at that level.  In Oblivion, the effect is capped at 100 (with few exceptions).  I played for dozens of hours at maximum difficulty, slowly building my character up (with a homebrew mod similar to Galsiah's Character Development for MW) to the point that I would be able to contend with the high end beasties.  At some 200-250 strength, I realized I wasn't making much progress.  So I started testing, and discovered that bullshit hardcoded limitation.  Pissed at this point at having wasted so much time, I stopped enjoying the rest of the game, rushed the main quest just to see the story, and uninstalled.

In short:  Self-inflicted frustration left a bad taste in my mouth regarding Oblivion.

More objectively, Oblivion's character interaction is miserable compared to Morrowind's, and that wasn't exactly MW's strong suit, given the horrible dialogue interface (nice idea, dull implementation -- though the dialogue itself was fine).  That and the "everything levels with you so exploration is meaningless" feature, which is easy enough to fix, are the only two major problems I see.

I'd like to add that Daggerfall, though far less polished/complete IMO than its successors, trounces the others in terms of mood.  The main quest is not standard good vs. evil nonsense and has a healthy dose of intrigue.  They did a fine job making the nobles seem like scheming bastards.  I like that.

EDIT:  Expanding on Oblivion's "everything levels with you" crap, it's important to note that, since the vast majority your skills/attributes provide no effect beyond 100 (which includes weapon damage), that once you've maxed the relevant skills it is actually detrimental to gain more levels.  More leveling only increases the duration of battles since HP continues to grow for both you and your opponents.

[Sergius]

The problem with the ring in the water mission:
1. You can't see the ring, it's literally invisible.  You have to run your crosshairs across the entire pond.
2. It comes out of nowhere.  I had no idea what was going on, and was still confused a few minutes later.  It was a long time ago though.

Actually the ring textures were bugged. All rings were pitch black. There's a ring texture fix somewhere.

Also the boyfriend isn't invisible, just like 70% transparent or something. You can see a kinda ghost. Then you kill him and take his mega chameleon ring and rob every single store in the land blind standing right in front of the shopkeeper.

[Cthulhu]

The coolest thing I ever did in Oblivion was wait until level 17 to do Kvatch.  Monsters level up much faster than people, and the guards get massacred.  The guy with the key?  He walked out the door and was immediately punched in the face by a Frost Atronach, sending him flying.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

The problem with the ring in the water mission:
1. You can't see the ring, it's literally invisible.  You have to run your crosshairs across the entire pond.
2. It comes out of nowhere.  I had no idea what was going on, and was still confused a few minutes later.  It was a long time ago though.

Actually the ring textures were bugged. All rings were pitch black. There's a ring texture fix somewhere.

Also the boyfriend isn't invisible, just like 70% transparent or something. You can see a kinda ghost. Then you kill him and take his mega chameleon ring and rob every single store in the land blind standing right in front of the shopkeeper.

That's was a woman.

The Bethesda that made Daggerfall was very different from the one that made Oblivion.  While Morrowind dumbed down most of the things in Daggerfall, it still managed to be compelling because of the lore and atmosphere.  Oblivion dumbed everything down even more, and ignored the lore and atmosphere in favor of making the game as generic as possible. 

The whole "A member of the Septim line must wear the amulet of kings or hell will invade" thing was just a story.  The empire had been ruled by non-septims for centuries in history.  Like for instance, it's founders, but in Oblivion they just ignore that to make a generic save the world plot.  Cyrodiil was covered in rainforest and mangrove swamp, but in Oblivion it's generic European fantasy land.

http://www.imperial-library.info/pge/cyrodiil.shtml

Finally, Oblivion was designed with the limitations of the Xbox hardware and the supposed lack of intelligence of XBox gamers in mind.

The PC port was terrible.

http://damicat.googlepages.com/whyoblivionsucks

There's more, but this is just to give people an idea of why I have no faith in Bethesda for Fallout 3, and they've done a great job removing any reasonable doubt that it won't suck with their previews.

[Asheron]

Click me

[qwertyuiopas]

I only have played morrowind and oblivion and I have to say this:
The only thing they did right in oblivion was the script spell effect and (possibly) ragdoll corpses.

Anyways, I have played RA2 and what I have heard makes me want to avoid 3 unless they change MANY things.
I can still remember playing as yuri on the bermuda triangle map against computers and it getting to the point where about all I had was the canter islang, and then "selling" the parachute drops...

[Sergius]

That's was a woman.

I remember that a woman asked for the ring, but some chameleon dude then jumped at you. Maybe it was the woman after wearing all her armor crap and ring, I don't remember, it was a long time ago.