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.
Yeah, I think I get what you mean, though I'm not sure I agree. I mean, again that's presupposing that dialogue and choice is something you put on top rather than a core part of the gameplay design.
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
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.
another post, so I won't jump into that.
Yeah, I agree, it does it to a degree, but I'd say not enough so that it becomes Immersive Sim first and Action RPG second.
Far Cry 2 feels a lot more like a simulation of an environment, even if there's literally zero reaction or variance to how you approach things (except for fire spreading and people shooting you on sight).
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.
Back to my first point, in which I don't understand why you don't call RPG mechanics core. I think the RPG mechanics design and implementation is awesome, the problem is pretty much everything else, something that in the eyes of some (like your mappers or just FO3 fans in general) is not shared on FO3 (but to me it is).
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 don't really see how those two things relate. Would the games be better with less quests? New Vegas is a different kind of location, one with more people doing more stuff. Questing helps make it feel alive in the sense that it shows you that people have needs and issues. It also shows you how they live, etc. If everything's empty (like I'll argue FO3 is, with a small town of literally 2 people), you can't explain how they built the houses, how they subsist, etc.
I can understand that maybe the mapping isn't up to par, even if we ignore the unfairness of comparing a developer working on the same engine for the third time (Oblivion, FO3 and Skyrim) over the span of more than half a decade and Obs working on a borrowed engine for a year and a half, but the world's made interesting in a very different way in F:NV.
That's what subjective and what's for different tastes. I like narrative via quests, you don't so much.
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.
Personally, not really. Not a big fan of anything that Bethesda does, other than single-handedly keeping alive the silent protagonist WRPG genre.
Also you might have problems finding much stupid shit to complain about. Not everything they write is gold, that's for sure, and there's been a lot of questionable stuff (DSIII), but they have a quality way above most devs.
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.
I'm not saying it doesn't have an influence on the game, I'm saying decision making is one half of roleplaying, the other being stat feedback and gameplay.
