demagogue on 15/4/2019 at 12:50

---

I'd say Stalker is the Ukrainian version of Fallout. Metro is the poor man's Stalker.
Or maybe it's the other way around; it's more polished but less character.
And then, as I just learned this last week, 35mm is the poor man's Metro.
Whatever genre they're all going after though, I like it (sometimes). Bleak & moody.

Jason Moyer on 16/4/2019 at 18:10

---

They should make a STALKER game in the ArmA engine.

Oh no, 1 is down.
This is 2 taking command. I say again, this is 2 taking command. Out.
Injured
4, Heal at Building At 2 O'Clock
Negative
4, I say again. Come in, don't just stand there.
4, I say again. Come in, don't just stand there.
4, I say again. Come in, don't just stand there.

Jason Moyer on 17/4/2019 at 12:57

---

I'd probably be ok with just having a co-op mode in Call Of Pripyat.

Sulphur on 23/4/2019 at 07:14

---

I've recently made two mistakes.

Mistake #1: buying Fallout 4's GotY edition for cheap, despite having no real interest in the game. I justified this at the time by saying to myself, 'you need a decent new western RPG in your life that isn't The Witcher 3'. Ignoring the fact that I have of course multiple western RPGs in my life that I haven't finished yet. But could I really blame myself?* The hunger for something new and shiny is neither logical nor permanently satisfied. Dissecting this a little, the truth is that Pavlovian hardwiring is difficult to counter despite an overweening awareness of it. In fact, it allowed for a measure of confidence that was unearned, in retrospect.

Awareness at a higher level somehow ended up hindering instead of helping: perhaps the solution to a thing this intractable is death by slow irony.

Mistake #2: playing Fallout 4's GotY edition. Let me clear something up here first - I enjoy it. Quite a bit. There's something to scarpering around its faded autumnal landscape, scanning a blue horizon pricked by naked branches and punctuated by the undulating sweeps of an overpass that's been bombed to bits and scattered across the skyline. Even the ruins of the cities bleed brown and crimson as sunlight spears their husks, and for the first time there's enough scale and presence in the detail to make it feel like these were real places before the concrete cracked and came apart in the wake of a nuclear fireball.

But - there's still something massively wrong with it. I feel that the one thing FO4's got right outside of the environments is the FPS-ness of its combat, which has lost much of the clunk and treacly aim of FO3 for something that's got better feedback and feels more immediate. And it's also the one thing that contributes to everything FO4 got wrong.

This is inherently not a bad thing if you're making an FPS. It's a problem if you're making an RPG, though. And especially a problem if you're Bethsoft. One of the problems with Beth is that they keep confusing quantity for quality - feel like your world's not fleshed out enough, or a choice doesn't have enough context? Loredump it to kingdom come.

Early on, I was going through a settlement and came across a raider log. There were multiple entries, something not facilitated by the arduous terminal interface and the tendency for nested menus. The entries were the leader's notes on supplies, the other raiders, problems that were happening. One raider had kidnapped another gang leader's sister and then killed her by accident, but kept ransoming her for as long as he could keep the deception going. What a villain! Of course, I'd already killed him by that point. Score one for me, big hero.

Now here's the problem with this - none of this context enriched the game. It simply post hoc validated your choice as someone who went in and killed a bunch of people (conveniently tagged by the game as 'Raider Scum'). As a first impression, this means questioning yourself or the game's motives aren't high on the developers' list of priorities, which immediately hollows out the entire experience (what if, instead, you'd killed someone who was actually trying to do right by his family?). It's also extremely boring to read through, because all of these logs are a) not exciting to read and b) take an age to cycle through because of the interface.

And it keeps happening: there's logs for people I killed or will kill, and bar a minimum of flavour, they're all overlong and dry as paste. NPC conversations are often no better. The loredump issue feeds into the bigger problem where literally all of the game is about the shooting. Oh, there's dialogue and choices to make, and things to collect, but it's superficially executed because the core loop of the game is threaded around finding shit and shooting at it in the most boring-yet-competent fashion possible until the problem goes away, for a hundred hours or more. Quantity over quality. I didn't mind in the beginning because there's a beautiful world to explore, but the problem with a Skinner box is, absent meaningful variation or player agency, things start to feel resoundingly hollow. 'Okay, it's beautiful, 15 hours later I can take that for granted; now what else is there?'

And the answer seems to be, 'everything Fallout 3 did, but worse'.

So as it turns out, I've actually made three mistakes when it comes to Bethsoft.

Mistake #3: hope.



P.S. FO3 is about a child searching for their father. FO4 is about a father searching for his child. This inversion could be either inspired or stupid, but I'm assuming the third option where there's going to be nothing clever riffing off of FO3's main quest instead.


*The answer is 'yes, you enormous fool', but this is why we invented the rhetorical question

Thirith on 23/4/2019 at 11:54

---

It's generally a problem with RPGs, though. So many of them write dialogue that's clearly directed at the player, not at the people who are actually involved in it, so it's all exposition ad nauseam. Something like Pillars of Eternity has better writing, but it's almost as bad at evoking a characters. Most RPGs want to be source books rather than stories, I sometimes feel.