Draikin is muted (is this how bannings work here?), no need to worry about that usedpilot :)
JMR
4942
Even better - go the Gone Gold route and post a ‘Fallout Impressions’ thread a day or two before the game hits the shelves.
liminal
4943
Hey Desslock, can you say anything about how the game “feels” on PC? Is the Pip-boy interface better for mousing and keyboarding than the one in Oblivion? Have you plugged in a 360 controller yet to see how that does on PC?
And how are the bugs? Oblivion has a particularly nasty one for those of us who use onboard sound instead of a soundcard: sound tends to cut out, occasionally at random, usually during action-heavy sequences. Footsteps are the first to go, but sometimes other combat sounds will drop, too. I fucking hate that bug, and I think I can only fix it by purchasing a sound card, which I don’t want to have to do for just one game. Has this afflicted you in Fallout 3? I fear that the shared engine means I’ll once again be hit by this bug if I go with the PC version.
Squee
4944
Hell no. This thread is an institution!
Hmn… I have an onboard sound card and I had no idea that bug existed? Maybe it depends on the brand of card? I assume you updated the driver?
Also, you can buy really nice sound cards for like $30. I picked one up a year ago that supports 5.1 surround sound and it’s a really nice sounding card, very cheap.
Here are some cheap 5.1 solutions:
I have an onboard sound card and that never happened to me. But it has been a pain in my balls for other games, though.
Scrax
4947
Kind of like cockroaches?
Killzig
4949
That was a great read. Thanks for the link.
It’s interesting, I never expected people to have so much trouble with the concept of turn-based combat and action points. It kind of reminds me of my own experience in trying to play Arcanum. I never could understand why the green dots turned into yellow dots and red dots and sometimes inexplicably increased, and other times went down. I kept expecting them to be like Action Points from Fallout, but they were obviously nothing like action points, and instead of trying to understand them, I gave up on the game.
[QUOTE]So far, I appreciated being left to my own devices, but because the game is so old, with the graphics it has and whatnot, it sometimes is hard to recognize what needs to be done. Like it’s only after you play a game like this that you realize how much easier having glowing objects of interest is.
Our first Fallout conversation was a disaster. Few students had posted on the forum as I had asked them to, and it was obvious that almost no one had devoted much time to playing. They basically tried the game, got frustrated, threw up their hands, and walked away.[/QUOTE]
Heartbreaking …
Yeah, not bad, but the following comments sort of go right back to it.
‘Fallout is almost impenetrable’? Yow.
I don’t think it would be as disappointing were it the perspectives from a random sampling of average gamers, but from young people who are looking to be developers it surprises me that they had so little interest in breaking down the formula …
Wow, that’s a pretty quick conversion from the kind of people Fallout fans hate to the annoying Fallout fans who hate them.
Killzig
4955
It’ll be interesting to see what their thoughts are after they get a chance to play Fallout 3. Going by what Desslock has been saying, it sounds like their reservations are mostly unfounded.
Well, the quotes were selected to fit the narrative best. That is, in the beginning the worst examples of one extreme were taken to drive the point, and then in the end for the other extreme.
It says they refused to read the manual, so fuck 'em.
No, it just says they didn’t read it.
And think about it; which recent games have REQUIRED you to read the manual?
There’s a great AAR (I wish I could find it) with someone from Ensemble that was describing their first few playtests of Age of Empires II with complete video game newbies. Grandma types used to playing Solitaire and whatnot.
They testers loved controlling the little men, but couldn’t figure out why the landmass kept getting bigger and the ocean was receding around them as they moved around. It took awhile, but the team finally figured out that the testers didn’t understand that the fog of war did not represent the sea.
I think the Pipboy looks great and adds a lot by keeping you in the gaming world at all times - but the F3 interface on the PC is needlessly cumbersome. It’s basically the same as Oblivion’s, where you have to go through the tab key and then click on the information tab you want - several steps slower than just hitting “I” for inventory, and “M” for map, etc., as in almost every other PC RPG. I’m really surprised Bethesda didn’t change that after Oblivion - it offers no advantages, and is just busywork.
I have encountered a crash bug which I believe is tied to the onboard sound driver (the game crashed once in a while, but infrequently) - that’s with the Realtek audio on a EVGA 680i motherboard. I’ve also encountered an SLI bug with my Nvidia 8800 GTS cards (F3 won’t enable SLI, although apparently it works fine with various other SLI setups, including with 8800 GTXes). A couple of other systems also encountered the occasional, but infrequent, crash - so there may be some driver kinks that still need to be worked out.
