Obsidian seems to be pitching a New Fallout Game as well.

[Ihoe]

 

oh As much as I love their games, I'd really love to see them ruin another great Idea with their fossil feuled Design mojo and less than imperfect injections of the said designs. Alpha Protocol, KotOR 2, NwN2, Dungeon Siege III. These guys dream good, but way too much.

Actually, I would be tempted to say that much of their weakness is their way of revealing the story to the player, and what sorts of characters they've been using. For example, you can't really build the story around the Path of the Hero, but not have a player who manages to go through most of the steps. If the character the player is controlling is special, and the story is built around that character finding out how special they really are, you can't have the character just instantly come to terms with it and set off on a series of adventures using their special talent. If you do, the story ends up fairly weak, like NwN2 with the player mostly just dealing with all the societal issues of being this special person. For another example, you cannot make the player have instant freedom to go wherever they want right off the bat, but take it away over time, especially with an open world environment since this discourages the player from continuing through the game and story because they end up being locked out of most areas until everything is said and done, or suddenly having to deal with all sorts of new problems any time they return to that area. FO:NV kinda suffers from both problems.

 

this, Kind of reminds me of TES or Fallout 3, but I think the developers behind those projects implemented that "Being Special" attribute into their games a tiny tad better and more maturely than Obsidian. just look at how people view their Games... it's Amazing how people "roleplay" in Skyrim with barely the ingredients of a traditional roleplaying Game. yet The ingredients are there in FNV eg. but no matter what players do, they're still a courier who impregnated a woman back when he/she/it (Mods!!!) was a he.

 

New Vegas doesn't lock people out of anything, the player does that through the choices he/she makes, the game offers choices and there are consequences for those choices.

 

yeah... choices. All Setup, No Payoff. I could say skyrim was worse, but I felt that a slideshow of poorly rendered In-Game graphics wasn't as much of a Mass-Effect-Styled variable future situations I had hoped for (I know... ME3 only let you choose the color of your Explosion in the end... but the Rest of the choices were pretty solid!). Going a tad off-topic, but FNV's DLCs were an utter mess of linear Writing ('cept Ole World blues, I loved That one!)

[JimboUK]

The pay off is you get a different experience based on your actions, it also makes sense, you can't actively work against or murder members of a faction and expect to go and work for them.

 

I do wonder if the DLC for New Vegas was done by a different team, it was nowhere near the quality of the game itself. Skyrim I wouldn't even class as an RPG, it's an action game and not a very good one at that.

[hector530]

old world blues was one the best DLCs ever. honest hearts is good. lonesome road is ok and dead money sucks.

[JimboUK]

I thought the characters in OWB were great, sadly the rest of it was fetch quests interspersed with key hunts, I agree on Dead Money though, that was awful.

[Vagrant0]

With some of my points, I was talking as a general standpoint of most of their games I've seen. Both NWN2 and KOTR2 were very linear games, with a main character that is decidedly special as a point to the story, with areas that either get closed off for a significant portion of time or are made completely inaccessible after certain points.

 

For Fallout NV, I'll agree that the player isn't too special by themselves, but being the one courier that had the item Benny wanted, and surviving a shot to the head, as well as getting rescued by a country doctor who also happened to still have some stuff from the vault... Kinda makes it a special circumstance. The part of areas being closed off really has more to do with how they decided to make the game follow a linear path at the start... Giving the player the freedom to explore an open world, but strategically placing opponents in a way to prevent almost all travel through those places until much later (made particularly worse by the way that enemies seem able to detect you and start attacking from cells away).

 

Regardless, linear storylines don't usually work well with open world designs.