What RPG to play... choice of five. - by Digital Nightfall
Digital Nightfall on 16/1/2011 at 20:33
I already own all of these. It's almost arbitrary which one I install and play first. I tend to average about ten hours a week gaming, so whichever I choose is going to be the game I play for a considerable span.
Morrowind: I've heard over and over that this is probably the best of the series, so I am kind of curious about actually playing it.
Shivering Isles: Again, I keep hearing that this was by far the best Oblivion had to offer, but I never actually played it. I'd like to give it a shot some day.
Fallout 3: I actually tried to get into this once before but never could. I know it has alot to offer, I just need to sit down with it and focus.
New Vegas: Everyone at work is loving this game, and most have either not played FO3 or insist that it's the better game. A few have even told me that I should skip FO3 and head right for NV.
Alpha Protocol: Due to the huge helping of love this game got at TTLG, it's on my to-be-played list.
Assuming I play all five, which should I play first?
henke on 16/1/2011 at 20:46
FO3 is certainly better than NV, but if you already tried and failed to get into it maybe you should give NV a go after all.
I couldn't get into Morrowind or AP.
Phatose on 16/1/2011 at 20:47
New Vegas first, then Alpha Protocol. Skip FO3 altogether - NV added back in a good bit of depth that FO3 lacked, and it's by far the better game.
While doing that, start compiling the million and one mods you'll need to make Morrowind not suck. Then play it.
Jason Moyer on 16/1/2011 at 21:08
NV, then AP, then ES3.
Al_B on 16/1/2011 at 21:16
Quote Posted by Digital Nightfall
I just need to sit down with it and focus.
I think that's going to be key whichever one you choose. It took me a little while to get into Fallout 3 but once I managed to commit a couple of reasonable play sessions to it then it grabbed me.
I'm currently playing through New Vegas and really enjoying it. However, I'm not convinced yet that it has the same variety of locations as in Fallout 3. It wouldn't be a bad choice and being able to discuss things you've encountered with work colleagues may make it a better option.
june gloom on 16/1/2011 at 21:49
Alpha Protocol is Game of the goddamn Year. If you don't have a lot of time for gaming, go with AP, it can be gotten through comparatively quickly as opposed to the timesinks that Bethesda games can be.
Dresden on 16/1/2011 at 22:36
Morrowind isn't better than Oblivion. It isn't bad, but there's several things that make it annoying to play and people wear their rose tinted glasses a bit too much.
Shivering Isles is definitely the best part of Oblivion.
I would just go for NV. It is in fact far better than FO3 in just about every aspect and the most fun out of all of those, except AP which I haven't played.
Aerothorn on 16/1/2011 at 22:50
If you are going to play all five, do Morrowind first. I love it and think it's great for its time, but there are ways that it's antiquated (Oblivion has a better combat system, for instance). I think it might seem like you're going backwards if you play the later Bethesda stuff first. As for the "which mods" question, you can either:
A. Play it vanilla for historical authenticity, etc.
B. Check out (
http://morrowind2009.wordpress.com/) for a handy guide to making Morrowind all snazzy. Note that some of the mods require the expansions, if you don't have those. I'd skip the "new lands" for now - you're going to have more than enough Morrowind to explore on a first time without those.
On the other hand, Alpha Protocol is by far the shortest of those games - I played through it in a few days. So that's not a bad choice.
SubJeff on 16/1/2011 at 23:06
The good thing about playing Morrowind now is that your machine will (should!) be so powerful it eats up the scenery and doesn't get bogged down in that terribly designed "I know, we'll wait 'til you get to the edge of the area
instead of preloading what we can see is coming durrr huuuuurrr" idiocy of the loading zones.
You might actually be able to make a super jump spell that's useful for bounding across the landscape!
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Alpha Protocol is Game of the goddamn Year.
There seems to be a lot of love for this on here but Metacritic scores put me off. Oh, what's that? Who trusts Metacritic anyway? Well I certainly don't think they are a go to for how
good a game is since the big releases (BioShock?) tend to get kow towing official magazines over-inflating scores. But I do pay some attention to lower scores since there is no incentive for anyone to downgrade a game unless it deserves it.
Nameless Voice on 16/1/2011 at 23:16
I can give some random ramblings on each of the games, but can't decide on which one to recommend:
Morrowind
It's been a long time since I played this, and I really should go back and play it again as there were many factions that I never joined and therefore many quests that I never undertook.
As I recall, the game feels a bit more clunky than Oblivion, the combat isn't as good, the magic system is more clunky (because you need to "equip" spells before you can cast them with the main attack button), and so on. Graphically it doesn't look that great any more either, but there are probably mods that help with that.
Morrowind has a much more exotic, interesting and original setting than Oblivion's fairly typical high fantasy, and the fact that it's set on an island that's only meant to have been properly populated fairly recently really helps when compared to Oblivion's completely broken sense of scale (the entire Imperial Province, from cold snowy north to swampy south, is tiny and filled with barely any people). It also has a lot more factions, and the fact that most dialogue is text-based means that there's a lot more dialogue in the game.
It doesn't have that totally broken level scaling system from Oblivion, either!
Shivering Isles
Definitely the bast part of Oblivion. The Isles are slightly reminiscent of Vvardenfell (the island in in Morrowind), and the game area is much smaller and more compact than the original Oblivion landmass, being filled with more detail and less repetition. The main quests involve Sheogorath, and when has anything involving him in an Elder Scrolls game not been awesome? The Isles are also filled with a wide variety of strange and unusual crazy people!
Fallout 3
Fallout 3 is something of a mix between Oblivion and the old Fallout games. Its plot is a little weak and recycled, and its wasteland a little empty, with somewhat unrealistic settlements of people, but I still found it a very enjoyable game. It would have been a lot better without so many accursed copy-pasted metro tunnels, though. It has tons of quests to complete, and probably the best character generation sequence I've ever seen in any game ever.
New Vegas
I haven't finished this yet, but so far I'm finding it much better than Fallout 3. It basically takes the best aspects of Fallout 3 and combines them with the depth of setting and characters from the original Fallout games.
It starts off rather slow and uninspiring, with a rather uninteresting character generation compared to FO3, and a fairly trivial-seeming main quest at the start, but after playing it for a while I began to see the level of detail in the world, and loved it. I still haven't really got anywhere in the main quest yet, getting too busily distracted by the huge piles of side quests that I seem to keep acquiring everywhere I go.
I wouldn't necessarily say you should skip over Fallout 3 to play this, though, but you should definitely have played the first two games all the way through before playing it.
Alpha Protocol
I bought this in one of the recent Steam sales, but haven't played this yet.
