Carlos' Bitch1
Arcane
Vault Dweller said:Graphics, animations, and your character's face are very important in RPGs, especially those where you see your character's face only when you rotate your character. Got it.made said:"If we exclude the first person perspective, and bethesda engine, and real time..."
I just played the review copy for an hour.
Char generation is a mess. I spent the better half of that hour trying to find a non-repulsive face before I gave up. Increasing "age" turns your face fatter and yellow-er. Right on. Next I had to click through 8 screens to assign my stats. Then answer a bunch of questions that may or may not have had an effect on how my skills turned out, I'm not sure.
Relieved that it was finally over, I went outside. Found a shop, chatted with owner, had a look at his stuff - WTF is this? 100 items crammed into one long ass list in a tiny window that shows only 5 at a time - no icons, no tabs, just text. Like a fucking console rpg from the 80s. I didn't buy anything. Same crap in the pipboy: there's no paperdoll, no drag&drop interface, no icons. It's all menus and text. Tiny menus and huge text. You have to scroll to see all your skills. Three decades of UI evolution never happened.
I tried to explore the town a bit more but even running around feels retarded. The char zips around like on skates. 3rd person reveals he's actually walking on clouds - the animation is totally disjointed from the camera movement. No sense of weight or mass. Think Bloodlines but ten times more jarring. The game doesn't look bad on screenshots but when you actually see it in motion it feels terribly outdated. Whatever, thankfully pipboy can teleport you straight to your quest objective.
So I found the girl I was supposed to talk to for my tutorial. I killed her dog before her eyes (after pumping 2 magazines into its head at point blank and staring in disbelief at the idiocy that is VATS). She didn't care, but apparently I lost reputation with the town. I quit.
Note that I didn't play FO3, so all this came as a shock to me. I knew it was bad, but for this I wasn't prepared. At least now I know everyone who claimed that pos was fun and "good for what it is" for the retards they are. I don't blame OE for any of this. I can't see how anyone could have turned the engine and UI into something halfway acceptable without rewriting it from the ground up.
The sad part is, there might be actually a decent game hidden underneath that pile of crap. Writing seemed decent from the little I saw of it, voice acting was spot on, and supposedly quests and world design are awesome. But I couldn't sit through even Arcanum or PST in this engine. It's unplayable.
And another fine fellow who somehow loses the plot everytime an Obsidian game is put down on the Codex.
I won't bother with the usual suspects anymore; you know who you are/will respond with sarcastic gibes that stick to certain bits of a post and ridiculous analogies about ' Ripping a clip and killing someones dog in front of their face was the same as accidental friendly fire between US and British armed forces'.