DraQ said:
Neeshka said:
cool spells like, say in diablo 2
Wat.
No, seriously, wat?
Of all games with some sort of magic system you had to pick up D2 as an example of interesting one?
Besides, while the complaint is true for OB (which sucks balls, just like Skyrim will), Morrowind (and before that Daggerfall) had pretty diverse array of effects, including utility magic that helped your mage feel like a wizard rather than mobile artillery emplacement disguised as a dude in bathrobe. MW also included spellmaker, and while premade spells generally sucked, you could make some rather interesting stuff by yourself.
Both oblivion and fallout 3 have a very simplistic and repetitive combat system.
It's not that diablo 2 has the best spell system, but it's real time and there is a very decent number of abilities that you use based on the situation; whereas in fallout 3/oblivion it's 2-3 abilities with the "circle round the enemy and wait for x resource to recharge".
World of warcraft has a pretty diverse spell system too. I'm not sure what it is with certain people on the codex but just blanket dismissing *any* mention of WoW seems quite strange.
They do have a very well developed and evolved combat system and the core gameplay is really quite good.
My point is with so many places to learn "good" combat from; both for fps and rpg games; bethesda totally fucked it up for both oblivion and fallout 3.
In any video game it's really not a bad idea to hold the player's hand for at least the first area or few levels. Then you can ramp up the difficulty. Having an unnecessary set of annoyances or obscure and unintuitive set of features at the start will scare away most gamers and frustrate those who would even want to endure it. It's just bad game design.
For example in the very first few quests in fallout new vegas you are sent to get a xandrake root. The root is hidden somewhere around the schoolhouse and you have zero clue what it looks like. To find it you assume it's somewhere around the schoolhouse. So you run around looking for 3-4 pixels that look slightly different from the rest on a texture map that is already very brown and badly done. So you basically run around face down spamming the use key everywhere that seems slightly off.
Do you really think that is a good starter quest to pull people into your game ?
No, seriously. FYI, BG1 is just slightly behind oblivious in terms of being complete clusterfuck of utter, multi-aspect suck, and that's largely because near the end it somewhat dials its coma inducing banality down.
Claiming it's excellent, let alone the best is pretty much like putting briefs on your head and running around the street, jumping people carrying groceries and pooping in their bags.
Hang on, BG2 isn't one of the best RPG's ever made ?
I'd really like to see your list of good rpg's.
That's a property of Oblivious and possibly FO3 (couldn't be arsed to play it), not older beth's games. This also applies to most of your other criticisms.
I stated in my initial post that I was talking about recent bethesda games; so that would be oblivion and fallout 3, and new vegas (which isn't technically a beth game but w/e).
There's a lot of hype about skyrim, but it's clear that it will take a lot of influence from design decisions made in oblivion and Fo3/vegas.
About the stat system:
The thing is D&D is an established system so we know what everything in it means.
If a game wants to make a new stat system it should at least make an effort to make the system be coherent and make sense. There should at least be some recommendations and a way to know how each stat translates into something in the game.
In both oblivion and fallout 3 there's a "conversation" or "tell me about yourself" that asks completely irrelevant questions that translate into stats. So every time you do this you end up with a wonky build that you have to fix. This whole step is completely unnecessary and detracts from the flow of the game.
And then there's a ton of useless stats/perks.
about alchemy:
I didn't say it was a mini-game. Anyway the thing is at the very beginning of the game you are barraged with a ton of completely useless potions and a ton of useless ingredients. It's not intuitive at all. There's no way to figure out where you can get a certain ingredient or which ingredient will be useful initially.
So yet again the gameplay here reduces to madly spamming the use key every time you go near any vegetation model in the game. Half of these aren't clickable so you end up spamming the use key for no reason.
In Oblivion you get athletics skill so you end up spamming jump to level it while running around - is this really a good idea to implement in a game ?