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Obsidian is better than Blizzard, Bethesda, and Bioware all AT THE SAME TIME
- Thread starter Jharp
- Start date
I like this analogy.
Dick Justice
Banned
New Vegas on PS3 tended to freeze by the hour for me. Fucking ruined an otherwise fantastic game. Fallout 3 also had that 'game runs worse and worse as your save file builds up' shit, and the DLCs were a fucking embarassment in the technical department, with freezes and framerates close to single digits. Still, I loved Alpha Protocol. Janky but fun, and being an asshole never gets old.
I haven't looked into that, but if The Elder Scrolls Oblivion, New Vegas, and Skyrim all run poorly on PS3 I don't think the issues with New Vegas are coming from Obsidian.
In essence you need Obsidian for all story, plot and dialogue related tasks and some other dev to help them with the actual game engine.
Imagine Obsidian creating KoTOR3/another RPG with Crytek/Rockstar/ND/SSM/343 to help with the engine, gameplay world design.
EDIT: Note that I have played FO3 on PS3 (Platinum earner). It had its share of issues with the growing save file being a pain.
It's not. PS3 doesn't handle Bethesda's engine well because of its weird RAM issue. In those games you can pick up and move a lot of objects and when you do it saves the location each time. That's why the problems hit their games the hardest (although open world games in general struggle more on PS3, again a RAM issue since open world requires more usually).
Obsidian detailed a lot of this stuff and that's what people believe is the cause of the rift between bethesda/zenimax and them.
the DLC is.
When you try to do Mothership Zeta, as soon as it starts it freezes. broken steel has horrendous framerate that leads to freezing.
the main game can be completed, but i would guess it drops to about single digit FPS and screen tears like hell. it also freezes a lot and if you don't save often you're screwed
then there's also the typical bethesda glitches that are present but happen more often on PS3 from what I've experienced.
Don't be an ass. I you've got nothing worth posting, don't post at all.
BigTnaples
Todd Howard's Secret GAF Account
Is the rift confirmed though? I know there as that and the bonus thing, but have they officially acknowledged it?
I would like to see them get another crack at Fallout next gen.
There's no evidence of a rift between them.
Yes. And it never could have been. Obsidian competencies and strengths are not the ones needed for building a good action RPG.
It's weird, everyone says it except well. Zenimax & Obsidian.
That might be not as impossible as some would think:
kotaku said:
source
Pretty sure Obsidian mentioned being in talks with Bethesda recently regarding some unnamed project.
There have been a lot of multiplat ports that should have probably skipped the PS3 due to technical issues. Too bad publishers are greedy. I'm just glad my PC is decent enough to play open world titles.
On the PC side, I had a lot more issues with New Vegas than I did with Skyrim. CTDs were pretty common with New Vegas. I haven't played Fallout 3 for comparison though (played through that game on 360 before jumping on the PC bandwagon in 2009). From what I have read, Fallout 3 was pretty bad for CTDs on PC as well.
jim-jam bongs
Member
Actually F3 is really stable once you get the GFWL Remover and Maximised Window Mode mods.
AcceptableGhost
Member
New Vegas made Bethesda good money and Obsidian knows what they are doing when it comes to these types of games. Bethesda would have to hate money to not let them do another one.
jim-jam bongs
Member
Dark Souls and Fallout: New Vegas are tied for my favourite game of all time. Can't we all just get along?
Vulcano's assistant
Banned
A game that is 100% combat (although wonderful) cannot be the best WRPG by any stretch of imagination.
Cannot be a WRPG, period.
The Souls series are SoulsRPGs, a genre of awesomeness exclusive to themselves.
That way Fallout and Souls can both be the best RPGs in their respective categories and everything else can fuck off
- yes, ME2 too. (ME2 is a really bad game, deal with it)
- yes
- didn't play DS but Diablo III was ok.
but pretty much yes, Obsidian is ten times better than Bioware or Bethesda. Blizzard made sc2 and that's enough.
Stop with that nonsense.
Prefer Troika for my chasing-the-dragon-that-was-Interplay games, but Obsidian's overall output of late has been more fun for me than the other companies listed in the thread title. (Full disclosure, I enjoyed the break from the Southwest FO3 provided over nu-Vegas.)
Need to knuckle down in (vanilla) Neverwinter Nights 2 which I'm playing for the first time atm so I can get some lazy compressed screenshots of its bad dialog for Obsidian struggle sessions like these, though.
Need to knuckle down in (vanilla) Neverwinter Nights 2 which I'm playing for the first time atm so I can get some lazy compressed screenshots of its bad dialog for Obsidian struggle sessions like these, though.
I never modded the shooting in Fallout 3. I did mod it in New Vegas. Were either as good as, say, Far Cry 3? Nope, but New Vegas was a lot worse.
And the point I made (or tried to make; I was falling asleep when I wrote that post) was that the world was compressed for the sake of gameplay. More below.
You are incorrect. It's not about empty spectacle or shallow mechanics--Bethesda could greatly deepen their mechanics and, if anything, a wider variety of people would like the games.
Fallout 3 is all about having this world to be in. That's been Bethesda's MO since Arena. Yeah, they're cartoonish and weird, but so were all previous Fallout games, so I fail to see the problem.
Branching overall plot systems is an element of the game, and New Vegas is better in this regard. But far, far more important is the fundamental idea of perspective: both games are in the first-person perspective. Branching plot lines? That's not nearly as important--it's a high-level (in coding terminology) aspect of the game. Perspective is a low-level aspect. You can have branching plot lines in everything from an FPS to an RTS, but you need to make sure that the FPS uses its perspective well, just as you need to make sure the RTS uses its perspective well.
At its core, both Fallout 3 and New Vegas utilize the first person perspective, and thus, design concessions must be made for that perspective--that is, in this case, the world must be treated as a real space. Fallout 3 does (with a slight abstraction seen in all Bethesda games--the world is indicated to be bigger than that which is represented in the game... the game's world is a smaller-scale version where everything is closer together). New Vegas does not.
Think about it this way: two teams make an FPS version of XCOM. One is real-time, the other is turn-based. The turn-based game has more similarity with previous XCOMs, more strategy, and so on and so forth.
Most people are going to hate the turn-based game because turn-based first person perspective is rarely any good. The human brain, which sees everything in first person, is going to expect the real-time game. It's going to get really impatient and frustrated with the turn-based version of the game. The turn-based game would have been significantly better had it been from an isometric perspective.
New Vegas is a lot like that. It doesn't really make any good use of the first-person perspective, which means it's incredibly off-putting at a core, fundamental level. All the things that make it better than Fallout 3--and there are many of those--are things that are wasted because of that core perspective issue.
New Vegas should have been isometric, like Fallout and Fallout 2. It would have been significantly better.
This seems pretty damn selective, considering you quoted something I wrote that ends with a comma. I remember trying to explain this last night: New Vegas has places like this that are identical. They're gamey. They don't feel natural. They have "this zone that is created for game balance," like the Cazador and Deathclaw areas. Fallout 3's areas are like... "well, bears and death claws live out in the mountains, and super mutants live in the cities, so avoid those as best you can." It comes across as more natural.
I hate it precisely because I want to love it.
And also because of the various amounts of shit writing and design. It's inventive as hell, and some of the stuff it does is absolutely incredible, but it has so many fundamental storytelling and design issues that it's hard to swallow. In my wall of text a few pages back, I described one of these godawful boss fights. The only challenge to it was realizing I could basically break the game.
Project Eternity's going to be good because level design isn't nearly important. It's isometric. If one can play as a stealth player
Sure, it'll have the same uneven writing Obsidian games always have--some great stuff, some really bad stuff--but I'm confident it'll be the best game they've made since patched KOTOR 2.
Except World Design, which is the entire reason a game should be in first person vs isometric. New Vegas should have been isometric. It's an awful first person game.
I don't think it's necessarily Pavlovian.
There's a mod for Fallout 3 that marks literally every object of interest within the world. Every boat wreck, every secret maintenance hole, everything. In terms of sheer density, Fallout 3 just annihilates New Vegas. There is always something to find... but Bethesda is content not to mark it, not to make a quest about it, or anything else. They're content just to let it exist within the world, and whether you find it or not is entirely up to you. You can turn off the map markers and that's stuff's still discoverable, still interesting, and still compelling.
New Vegas, on the other hand, is the more Pavlovian game. Why? Because it seems as though every object or place in the world has a quest attached to it. That means that, if you find something, you're going to get an XP or lore reward. It's a constant trail of breadcrumbs, moving the player from place to place.
Bethesda's games are basically designed with player curiosity in mind. It's about constantly putting something in the player's field of view that is worth checking out.
In every thread discussing the quality of various video games, some idiot will come in and start talking about Dark Souls and Demon's Souls. It's really, really fucking annoying, particularly when it doesn't make any sense at all.
I think it's like... low-level/high-level stuff.
The low level stuff is fundamental. If you're designing a web page, you've got to make sure fundamental stuff like navigation is proper before focusing on whether the colors are perfect. Both are part of the UX, but you've got to nail the fundamentals before determining which colors are the most complimentary.
Fair enough. I'd argue Fallout 3 does that--and that's the reason it resonates with people more than New Vegas. But detailing the missteps of the genre (like Liberty Island being really off-putting to people who have no idea what they're doing or System Shock 2's drawn-out intro and weird keybindings) is really for another post, so I won't jump into that.
Right. Human Revolution's biggest problem was that they tried to borrow stuff from Metal Gear Solid--a franchise that revels in its gaminess. The game just flat-out demands that you stealth in third-person, for instance, despite the fact that after Thief, third-person stealth is pretty much entirely irrelevant.
Yeah, you're right. The game's world reactivity isn't as strong as it should be. It's not a great immersive sim, but I do feel as though it's on par with, say, Far Cry 2, in some regards. That game never remembers what you do. It doesn't even have any idea of who you are, except that you must be killed by everyone ever. Still, the fact that I can choose how I want to tackle the world, even if it's not as flexible as I'd like (diplomacy with bandits, for instance), the fact that the game's got some fairly complex AI (making people afraid of me is just as fun as it was that time I scared a Burrick so it freaked out every time it saw me coming in Thief's Bonehoard) and overall lets me take a stealth/melee/shootbang/occasional dialog approach... that makes me class it as an immersive sim, but one that's limited in some respects.
Well, uh, some people do. Of course, that list also has Amnesia on it, which is absurd, but my contempt for Amnesia is best left to another thread.
Oh, absolutely.
It's just that the core experience isn't as good.
According to some of the mappers I've spoken with, this is pretty much flat-out objective. Bethesda just has the better world structure, period.
Dialog, quest, and lore aren't quite fundamental enough. Think about things like... flatness. Basic level design philosophy is that levels shouldn't be flat, and Fallout 3/Skyrim are great at this. In Skyrim, for instance, that really, really flat tundra area around whiterun? It's never really flat. There are hills and streams throughout. Then they populate that with interesting stuff, whether it's ruins, a giant's camp, or a cave with a dead guy and a bear outside. Skyrim just kind of puts them there and says "hey, this is a world you can be in for a while." In New Vegas, the ruins might have a quest, the giant's camp probably would, and you just know that somewhere, some wife is crying about her husband who went off to a cave and hasn't come back in days. It draws attention to the fact that it's a game. It pushes the player out of that immersed headspace headspace.
I would like to see Bethesda design a world with Obsidian writing it and me getting to smack the Obsidian guys with a newspaper every time they write stupid shit.
Why are you labeling it as an RPG then if you have no stats and say decision-making has no influence on the RPG-ness of a game?
You sound like you have an open-ended adventure game in your hands
Decision making has an influence on the game; not sure why you think otherwise.
It's basically "roleplaying at a party."
There's another, bigger project I'd like to make that takes place over the course of the summer. Everything you do costs time. No XP or anything, just time. If you get better at a thing, it costs less time. How you spend your time affects you and the way other people think about you. The other primary way of interaction is through dialog. Go to the arcade? Cool, two hours. Get a job fishing? Eight hours. Etc etc. Again, it's a role-playing game, but it doesn't utilize statistics. It's about role-playing in a different way.
decoyplatypus
Member
You have an . . . idiosyncratic view of the relative importance of perspective and gameplay systems. Why should branching plotlines be a secondary consideration in a game that is fundamentally about player choice?
If what you're saying is that developers need to take perspective into account when designing a game, then sure, I agree. But what considerations, exactly, a developer has to make for perspective will turn on the central gameplay concepts as much or more than some theory of what first-person games or isometric games "require."
Why? There are thousands of first-person games out there, and the good ones don't all utilize the perspective in the same way. They certainly don't all treat the world as a "real space" in some common sense.
My concern about the perspective in this example would not be about some predisposition toward playing first-person games in real-time (I've played plenty of first-person, turn-based dungeon crawlers). My concern would be that the perspective would limit my view of the field, which is important in XCOM because of the central gameplay systems.
I'm still not sure what you mean. You can see landmarks and human figures at a distance in New Vegas. You can aim your shots in realtime. You can look at environmental details or try to pick out safer routes around areas. Each of these things is handled differently from how an isometric game would handle it.
Again, I'm not sure why more natural = better use of first-person, but even if that were the case, I don't see what is so unnatural about deathclaws moving into the quarry in New Vegas.
I think many would argue that XP, quest tie-ins, or lore significance is precisely what makes areas "worth checking out." If there are only intermittent and arbitrary rewards for exploring, and you're putting hundreds of landmarks in the game that have no function except to keep the player running, then we're not talking about Pavlov any more, we're talking about a pigeon in a Skinner box.
I agree to an extent.
I do think the Mass Effect 2 and 3 shooting mechanic is way better than Alpha Protocol, but I felt that Protocol was more of an RPG than Mass Effect 2 and 3 were pretending to be.
Fallout New Vegas is loads better than Fallout 3, for sure. Again, because it felt more like I was role playing in that than in 3.
I only played a little bit of Dungeon Seige 3 ages ago, when I rented it. It was ok, but I was playing on consoles. Maybe that makes a difference?
I don't think Obsidian gets the credit they deserve for remaining true to the feel of Western RPGs. While other develoers are trying to mold the RPG genre into other genres in order to grab them sales, Obsidian has pretty much stuck to their guns, and crafted RPGs that feel like RPGs. And not action games/shooters/etc, with "RPG" elements.
I was hoping that Obsidian would be making the next Fallout, but I don't think they, unfortunately. I really did enjoy New Vegas.
Full disclosure; I used to work for Obsidian as a QA tester back in 2006 or so, so I admit I may have a bit of a bias, but they were some of the coolest guys and gals I've had the privilege to work with. Genuinely nice people, with a real love of the genre they develop in. Feargus and Chris were great guys, and I loved chatting with them. I admit, I nerded out a bit being on first name basis with those two. Unfortunately, I had to leave the company, which bummed me out. Still, one of the best experiences I had working in the gaming industry, so it guts me whenever I hear they're going through financial hardships.
Anyway, as far as western RPG developers go, I think I respect them the most. They really do seem to love the genre, and want to keep "traditional" western RPGs going, while the other guys do other stuff. I don't particularly feel that one approach is better than the other, I'm just glad that we still have that classic approach, along with the newer approaches (I love Mass Effect. 2 and 3 were ok. Fallout 3 was fun, but I like New Vegas more).
I do think the Mass Effect 2 and 3 shooting mechanic is way better than Alpha Protocol, but I felt that Protocol was more of an RPG than Mass Effect 2 and 3 were pretending to be.
Fallout New Vegas is loads better than Fallout 3, for sure. Again, because it felt more like I was role playing in that than in 3.
I only played a little bit of Dungeon Seige 3 ages ago, when I rented it. It was ok, but I was playing on consoles. Maybe that makes a difference?
I don't think Obsidian gets the credit they deserve for remaining true to the feel of Western RPGs. While other develoers are trying to mold the RPG genre into other genres in order to grab them sales, Obsidian has pretty much stuck to their guns, and crafted RPGs that feel like RPGs. And not action games/shooters/etc, with "RPG" elements.
I was hoping that Obsidian would be making the next Fallout, but I don't think they, unfortunately. I really did enjoy New Vegas.
Full disclosure; I used to work for Obsidian as a QA tester back in 2006 or so, so I admit I may have a bit of a bias, but they were some of the coolest guys and gals I've had the privilege to work with. Genuinely nice people, with a real love of the genre they develop in. Feargus and Chris were great guys, and I loved chatting with them. I admit, I nerded out a bit being on first name basis with those two. Unfortunately, I had to leave the company, which bummed me out. Still, one of the best experiences I had working in the gaming industry, so it guts me whenever I hear they're going through financial hardships.
Anyway, as far as western RPG developers go, I think I respect them the most. They really do seem to love the genre, and want to keep "traditional" western RPGs going, while the other guys do other stuff. I don't particularly feel that one approach is better than the other, I'm just glad that we still have that classic approach, along with the newer approaches (I love Mass Effect. 2 and 3 were ok. Fallout 3 was fun, but I like New Vegas more).
jim-jam bongs
Member
RUN BROTHER! RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN!
EmCeeGramr
Member
DocSeuss has tried to explain how New Vegas "uses first person perspective less" than FO3 about a half-dozen times now, and each time still reads more like a drug-addled dream than anything that makes sense. No examples, no logic, just a weird ideological diatribe.
It's also odd that he dismisses Cazador placement as not being "natural" when their natural habitat is mountainous regions just like the Yao Guai.
It's also odd that he dismisses Cazador placement as not being "natural" when their natural habitat is mountainous regions just like the Yao Guai.
VitalNerve
Member
Either Obsidian or CD Projekt are best when it comes to WRPGs. Although from software embarrassed most companies in the west with Dark Souls.
BigTnaples
Todd Howard's Secret GAF Account
EmCeeGramr
Member
No surprise there!
BigTnaples
Todd Howard's Secret GAF Account
FairXchange
Member
I'm pretty sure I discussed it with DocSeuss in a previous thread before.
I will give that Bethesda is better with a geographical creation of a world and making interesting little five second encounters that you can build your own story around. I completely disagree that Bethesda makes anything that's actually "natural" though with their scaling enemies/item design and their main story/npcs that are completely illogical and unconnected from each other.
Bethesda makes pretty worlds but Obsidian makes breathing worlds.
Its the first time I've seen bias in this thread.
Actually, that sums it up perfectly.
Well, Troika is dead, and so is Black Isle. Honestly, I'm just happy with every year Obisidian continues to survive. It seems like the companies who build the games I enjoy playing most are also the most likely to die.
New Vegas features scaled items and enemies too (though yes, to a much lesser degree).
It seems like InXile is picking up Troika's post apocalyptic torch with wasteland 2 (that being, full 3D pseudo-isometric viewpoint rpg).
Edit: Shame Troika never got to realize this game. Looked promising even for a tech demo pitch.
That scares the shit out of me. Them closing down. Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, Mask of the Betrayer, Storm of Zehir and Star Wars: KOTOR 2 are some of my all time favorite rpgs, and I'd hate to see the studio behind these games clsoing down.
Sure, their games have some jank, but so does other games that I think are great. Risen, the first Mass Effect and and Dragon Age: Origins (console version). I love these games and I'd love for them to be flawless from a technical point of view, but I still love these games no matter what.
The same goes for older games like Planescape, Arcanum, Bloodlines, Gothic or whatever game I love that has some issues.
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villian."
Bioware, Bethesda, and Blizzard have lived too long...
Same. Deep games are an increasingly tough sell in an industry that's racing to get dumber every year. There's probably some reason rooted in society in general but fuck if I know what it is or what changed over the past 8 years. We'll need a sociologist for that.
Appeal to the masses! They don't need gray, something that need thought process, they need black and white! They need big PEW PEW boom with Reality like graph, they don't need a character with emotions, they need a ''badass'' (seriously.. what does that word mean now?) that is less emotional than a brick!
That's what happened those last year. Obsidian is one that keep coming with games that we keep returning too because they WANT to write something good and that we can relate to!
That's what happened those last year. Obsidian is one that keep coming with games that we keep returning too because they WANT to write something good and that we can relate to!
decoyplatypus
Member
There are youtube videos of people experiencing crashes or abusing glitches (youtube link), but I don't know of anyone breaking down the causes. I played on PS3 and had probably seven or eight freezes, another couple of times where the visuals turned into a trippy, unplayable color show, and then the infamous PS3 performance crash that Sawyer explained when it started showing up in Skyrim.
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
Reading this thread I just...
...
Just because a person doesn't enjoy Obsidian games doesn't mean that they hate RPG :\
Just because a person enjoy games like Skyrim doesn't mean that they need not bother or will be incapable of understanding Obsidian's products like Alpha Protocol and the others....
I don't get it, it's like the only absolute truth here is an extreme divisiveness in here. Either YOU'RE IN or YOU'RE OUT! Geezzzz.
...
Just because a person doesn't enjoy Obsidian games doesn't mean that they hate RPG :\
Just because a person enjoy games like Skyrim doesn't mean that they need not bother or will be incapable of understanding Obsidian's products like Alpha Protocol and the others....
I don't get it, it's like the only absolute truth here is an extreme divisiveness in here. Either YOU'RE IN or YOU'RE OUT! Geezzzz.