humorguy

I had crashing too trying to leave Rivet City, and I have FOOK2 too. I tried the coc metrocenter08 and then fast travelled back to Rivet City, but the game crashes on entering rivet City and even crashes when I try to save before entering Rivet City!

So either you have to remember to save fully or hit F5 every 5 seconds, meaning your not getting immersed at all! I would rather have an autosave after each battle so if I lost one I could go back to before that battle. With this autosave, assuming I won 3 or 4 battles in a row I would be playing the game all that time, being immersed all that time, not having to think about anything other than the story, the characters and the game. Then, if you lost a battle you would have to re-load anyway, taking you out of the immersion! As I say, there is a mod for Oblivion and a mod for Fallout 3 that offers autosave after battle, so it's not only me that wantys this feature! So please someone, do an autosave mod that at least saves more often, but bestof all, after battles!

The only time autosave works is before a boss battle and when you change areas. Now between areas you can have up to 10 hours gameplay - so, lets say you forget to save because you are so immersed.... That's 10 hours you would have to go back, unless you faced a boss battle somewhere in that 10 hours! We are talking PC here, so on console I don't know. All I know is enjoyed Oblivion and Fallout 3 immensely more because of autosaves after battles, which in all RPG games is at least every 20 mins or so!

Can anyone make a mod so the game autosaves after every battle, or just more often? Dragon Age, after all, is promoted as, and is, an immersive game. Obviously when your immersed in playing a game you forget to save as often as you might, and in any event why would you want to be less immersed by having to repeat to yourself 'remember to save, remember to save!' so you remember to save! There's an autosave mod for Oblivion and one for Fallout 3, so could we have one for Dragon Age please, so we can can be even more immersed in this great game/story?!

Mustardman, we can demand more - we can demand that a game is set up with difficulty and options so that we get the Oblivion that is like Morrowind and console/mainstream gamers get the Oblivion Oblivion. It should not have to be one or the other! I also think that there should have been a boycott of the pay for official mods and there should have been an outcry over bugs and an outcry over the dumbing down like there was for Deus Ex 2. But there wasn't. PC gamers, based on PC game sales and few PC game releases, seem to be giving up and walking away to retro and independent gaming, as full price PC games sales are down and retro/independent game sales are way up! Thank goodness for mods like MMM and Frans that do do something about the creature/NPC AI and do get rid of the static levelling to a large degree! If we consider these mods as 'patches' that bring to Oblivion what should have been in it in the first place, we can see how underwhelming and buggy and lacking in content Oblivion really is. I wonder if they consciously left these things out to save money hoping/knowing the modding community would do it for free?! Given the charge for the horse armour mod for example, you can see how money is what it's all about now!

This is just part of a bigger trend. I blame Bethesda for much bigger things in my opinion, that was the way they did not tell the truth about minimum requirements, telling unwary gamers that they could play the game with their system when it would not be possible. That was diabolical and put PC gaming even more into the second-hand car selling type sleaze! The second was selling official mods in a crass way of making money! to pay for horse armour was patently a rip-off at even $2, because it ratcheted up the bigger mods! This is also part of a trend of giving us less for the same game price. As much as I love HL2, for example, I am not so blind as to see that 5 hour expansions selling for $20 retail is going to lead to more 12-15 hour $60 games rather than the 35 or so we have had for 15 years up to about 3 years ago. Last year saw the smallest number of PC game releases. This year doesn't look like it will be much better. The over emphasis on graphics and the lessening of content is killing PC gaming in front of our very eyes. Oblivion and Bethesda are part and parcel of this problem. Why there was not an outcry over the dumbed down Oblivion like there was for Deus Ex 2 is about the fact there are fewer PC gamers who care. They have given up and are moving into console gaming (reluctantly), and independent games and retro games that they know have the gameplay they don't see in modern PC games. You only have to look at the growth in 'abandonware' sites and the opening last year of the ebay retro section to see where the interest is going. And what major PC gaming site and magazine doesn't talk about the growth in inde gaming? In fact the huge success of the Wii is as much about a resurgance in retro style gaming as it is about the control sticks! If Fallout 3 is dumber still, and other PC games continue to go down this route of less gameplaying hours for the dollar, I can see PC gaming coming to a quiet close sometime in 2009. As a 20+ year PC gamer, that saddens me. There are plenty of warning voices out there. You should start opening your eyes as a PC gamer! This blog is a good start: http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/04/21/the-next-next-gen/