My Boss at work has been to a convention where they got to look at this - you can kill someone, blow their limbs off afterward, and have sex with the corpse, if you so wish.

lol...so an alien sideboob is enough to set the US on fire, but corpse sex is a go? Awesome.

sideboobs ftw!

Interesting article with a reviewer playing as a goodie-two-shoes in the first part of the game

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/913/913218p1.html

first reviews are rolling in:

PC Gamer France, 93% - Good variety of quests, lots of replayability
PC Gamer Sweden, 81% - VATS is nice, but there is too much content in a game world that is too small, NPCs feel lifeless
GMC Italy, 9/10 - Good atmosphere and turn-based combat, lackluster AI and mini-games


Mmm...i was afraid the "open world" of Fallout would be hard to translate into a lively 3D world. I mean, in the original fallout games you'd have miles upon miles of computer-generated, random empty wasteland. Cities were beacons in the vast emptiness.

of course, that's is hard to do in a believable way in 3D. you have to fill the wasteland with "stuff", because unlike with the isometric view your imagination won't fill it for you.

So can imagine Bethesda putting too much stuff in too little space. Let's hope they found a good balance tho.

Did you ever play Delta Force? Specifically, Delta Force Land Warrior? (it's the only one I played). Crappy AI, but they generated enormous outdoor environments through some voxel technology or something. Why can't we do that any more? I miss massive, open, empty expanses. If you go into west texas, you will have a field for 30 miles. That's not strange. A field with plants and a fence and nothing else. Surely we can simulate that in a game.

I agree that things are too cramped. Oblivion was too cramped. GTA-San Andreas was too cramped. We need large expanses of nothingness.

So we can do ... nothing?

so we can walk for 20 minutes without seeing anything.

It would give more meaning to fast travel. There'd actually be a reason for vehicles!

Both very valid points. In (say) Oblivion, fast travel was more like a cheap teleport spell than an actual life-saving feature. With a huge open plain you could feature a sort of semi-animated fast travel feature like the original Fallout had. I.e. you see a huge map of the area, and a cursor representing you moving through the wasteland. Occasionally you could encounter enemies in the wild, or traders, or just some easter egg random encounter. If your outdoorsman skill was high you could often choose to avoid them or not. Etc.

Much more...fulfilling. You 'see' the travels and you can adjust them to your taste in real-time by clicking if you decided you want to another direction or just feel like checking out a certain area. Oh and when you get a car you just go a LOT faster.

Point being: there's no "I'm here and WHAM now I'm there!" button. Which, in Oblivion was kinda pointless given the relative proximity of cities and the mages' guild transport system.

of course, creating a huge area of 'nothing' is easier to do in Fallout than in a game like Oblivion. But there are enough advanced procedural tools to realistically populate (in the design sense) areas with vegetation and so forth.

It's just that...I like to have a feeling of expansion in a game. Nothing breaks immersion like walking for 4 minutes and getting the "you cannot go further. Please go back." message. Which, incidentally, will make an appearance in F3. Kinda lame.

FC2 looks promising in its freedom to tackle things in many different ways, though. I think the future of games is in dynamic storytelling, where the game reacts to the players' actions in subtle and unpredictable ways. Good RPG's with linear stories will still exist, but they will be more like...novels.

the whole "fast travel in a world that's supposed to be big" argument is touched upon in Zero Punctuation's review of Oblivion

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... 5-Oblivion

also notice the jab at JRPG's and the "no speakee retard" line. Zero punctuaton rocks.

indeed it does

I like criticism on the games i like, ie Mass Effect, because it helps me understand how far i stand from the middleground and its also sort of a instrument for measuring mental health. If you dont understand this then you have watch the movie about Larry Flint (Hustler) starring woody harrelson. There is a specific part there in a courtroom which can be used more widely.

Pretty nice Oblivion review. Quite accurate, unfortunately. Maybe the elder scroll peeps will pay attention. From a technical standpoint (graphics) it was almost flawless, at least for the time. It was everything else that was the problem. :p

Well let's not be too critical here, it was still a very good game by any standard. But it could have been a lot better if they polished out some of the things mentione, yeah. Like the fast-travel we were originally talking about.

As Peltz said, zero punctuation does a good job putting the dedicated gamer with his feet on the ground. There's only one game I recall him not having a single point of criticism about, and that game was Portal.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... Orange-Box

well, Portal was a genius game. It was also very simple, which probably helps. The whole game revolves around a single thing. And they did that single thing really well and even included a good story. So yea, I'm not surprised.