Be Right Back, Uninstalling

Is finally ready

For anyone interested, here it is.

Still only played the intro at a friend's house.  T'was a lengthy but entertaining review to read.

Warning, long post is long

Well let's just say that I stopped reading half way through at the "One man's junk..." part.  It was well written but it was just another purist arguement for "why can't all these tons of features from a simplistic game engine back in the day where it was very easy to implement en-masse be in a fully realized much more complex visually and presentation wise engine!"

I just facepalm everytime I see this.  It's like comparing a new 2008 corvette car to some older more outdated model, and saying the newer one isn't as good because it doesn't have a carborator and it automates the process of starting the car by one step.  That may be your opinion on the matter but I can't help but feel in my opinion that kind of rationality... is irrational at best and delusional.

You know when somethings clearly wrong when you actually try to say having objects around that add atmosphere and substance as a bad thing because it's "useless" (something older engines could not do very well without spending a lot of time painting junk in per-pixel, which is why it wasn't done most of the time in the levels of detail seen in modern engines).

I can't help but also find the simple irony in the fact that you seriously complain about a feature such as weapon and armor degradation being useless, yet also complain at the lack of groin shots and eye shots, and can't understand why they are absent... when really, that too is even more "useless" considering all it really does is have a new type of death/shot animation and adds a tiny for-that-moment stat modifier to the affect enemy.

I just don't understand this purist mentality that something has to be exactly like something that was older in order for it to be good at a baseline.  I thought Fallout 3 was excellent in it's own merits, although certainly more flawed in others.

Would more weapons+armor types be nice?  In an RPG like Fallout and even in Elderscrolls, of course.

Would more meaningful impact on some character roles be nice?  Sure.

Would more meaningful impact on how the quests and world interact with itself be nice?  Of course!

But the absence of the above do not detract from the experience, they only add to it when they are present... and that's why when you base your entire review completely around the false idea of "what it could of been" seems rather erroneous to me.

No offense here, but from the sounds of things... especially how you were actually complaining how frustrating the lockpicking minigame was when it was the easiest damn thing on earth to do and happen to factor a lot into your stats, and how you complained that good accuracy with a laser weapon (they are higher accuracy-lowerdamage weapons, especially if you have a high luck).... that this generation just isn't for you.

Now, I know you didn't say Fallout 3 sucked.  I also respect your opinion seeing as how well written it was put together.  But in my personal opinion,  I tend to disagree with yours on Fallout 3 being a great game.  I guess my expectations of game development for the current generation of games is more... realistic than yours seeing as I've been dabbling in it.

Again... that said I do think there could of been some easy to implement things added to F3, and some things that should of been handled MUCH MUCH better in the situations.

brb, getting nick chester to register an account so he can tell you how much your opinion doesn't matter.

/sarcasm

<3

(12-18-2008, 09:40 PM)KorJax link Wrote: [ -> ]Warning, long post is long

Well let's just say that I stopped reading half way through at the "One man's junk..." part.  It was well written but it was just another purist arguement for "why can't all these tons of features from a simplistic game engine back in the day where it was very easy to implement en-masse be in a fully realized much more complex visually and presentation wise engine!"

So, you stopped reading halfway through, and yet you have a full sense of everything I said?  I guess I only need to read half of your rebuttal before responding to it, then.

(12-18-2008, 09:55 PM)ZargonX link Wrote: [ -> ][quote author=KorJax link=topic=2011.msg56514#msg56514 date=1229654429]
Warning, long post is long

Well let's just say that I stopped reading half way through at the "One man's junk..." part.  It was well written but it was just another purist arguement for "why can't all these tons of features from a simplistic game engine back in the day where it was very easy to implement en-masse be in a fully realized much more complex visually and presentation wise engine!"

So, you stopped reading halfway through, and yet you have a full sense of everything I said?  I guess I only need to read half of your rebuttal before responding to it, then.
[/quote]

I should rephrase.  I stopped taking it seriously half-way through, and that's when my warning bells went off.

But really, I honestly respect your opinion, but I just can't feel the way you do towards it.  There are always things that would be nice to have in a game in my eyes, but then there's whats to be expect realistically from a game... and then you should judge that game based on how well it handles that realistic expectation.  As the generation gap between games and sequals grows bigger, this especially is true I think.

As a species traditionally we become inspired and motivated by older ideas and thoughts, and make something new out of this new inspiration... it's what progress is all about and is what everything has a foundation on.  Not by simply taking the older design and copying it to the letter, with a small tweak here and there.

(12-18-2008, 09:40 PM)KorJax link Wrote: [ -> ]I just facepalm everytime I see this.  It's like comparing a new 2008 corvette car to some older more outdated model, and saying the newer one isn't as good because it doesn't have a carborator and it automates the process of starting the car by one step.  That may be your opinion on the matter but I can't help but feel in my opinion that kind of rationality... is irrational at best and delusional.

You know when somethings clearly wrong when you actually try to say having objects around that add atmosphere and substance as a bad thing because it's "useless" (something older engines could not do very well without spending a lot of time painting junk in per-pixel, which is why it wasn't done most of the time in the levels of detail seen in modern engines).
[/quote]

If you'd kept reading, instead of leaping to the conclusion that I'm just an old crotchety gamer, my point was not so much that the junk was there, but that it a)was there in more variety than actual useful equipment, and b)it could have been integrated in the repair system more interestingly.  One might say that would have been a very modern way of doing things.

Quote:I can't help but also find the simple irony in the fact that you seriously complain about a feature such as weapon and armor degradation being useless, yet also complain at the lack of groin shots and eye shots, and can't understand why they are absent... when really, that too is even more "useless" considering all it really does is have a new type of death/shot animation and adds a tiny for-that-moment stat modifier to the affect enemy.

Again, I made a single reference to the lack of groin shots, in a picture caption no less, and you've leaped to the grumpy gamer conclusion.  

Quote:I just don't understand this purist mentality that something has to be exactly like something that was older in order for it to be good at a baseline.  I thought Fallout 3 was excellent in it's own merits, although certainly more flawed in others.

I don't believe this at all, nor did I say anything like that in the review. I would not want things to be exactly the same from game to game; I expect advancement.  Where it becomes disappointing is when the advancement feels like it undoes elements that were successful in earlier versions.  Change for changes sake is not always good, but neither is stagnation.  The secret is making changes that enhance the experience in new ways.

Quote:Would more weapons+armor types be nice?  In an RPG like Fallout and even in Elderscrolls, of course.

Would more meaningful impact on some character roles be nice?  Sure.

Would more meaningful impact on how the quests and world interact with itself be nice?  Of course!

But the absence of the above do not detract from the experience, they only add to it when they are present... and that's why when you base your entire review completely around the false idea of "what it could of been" seems rather erroneous to me.

I think your point of view here is the one that is in error.  You seem to be saying we should expect less from games, even when we know they can do more.  With many years of experience playing games, I know what can be, so when something that's supposed to be new and improved doesn't live up to what I've encountered before, of course it detracts from the experience.  And, I don't think I based my review around what could have been, I based it around what was, and looked to areas of improvement.  I did not go into the game (as I know many Fallout fans did) prepared to hate it; I kept an open mind, and I do say it's not a bad game in its own right.

Quote:No offense here, but from the sounds of things... especially how you were actually complaining how frustrating the lockpicking minigame was when it was the easiest damn thing on earth to do and happen to factor a lot into your stats, and how you complained that good accuracy with a laser weapon (they are higher accuracy-lowerdamage weapons, especially if you have a high luck).... that this generation just isn't for you.

As for the lockpicking, I just found it to be a completely needless addition.  When I'm making my way through an interesting old factory, I don't want to be stopped every 5 minutes to do a damn rotate-n-click game.  And once again you leap to the grumpy old gamer conclusion.  You must be a very angry youth

Quote:Now, I know you didn't say Fallout 3 sucked.  I also respect your opinion seeing as how well written it was put together.  But in my personal opinion,  I tend to disagree with yours on Fallout 3 being a great game.  I guess my expectations of game development for the current generation of games is more... realistic than yours seeing as I've been dabbling in it.

Like I said, Fallout 3 was a good game, but not a great game.  I have every right to say it was not a good Fallout game, because the moment a developer takes up an existing license, it brings with it all the expectations and experiences of the games that came before it.  Is this entirely fair?  Maybe not, but as I've said many times, games don't exist in a bubble - every experience a gamer has had colors their opinions of whatever is put before them.  

As for saying that your expectations for current gen games is different, I'm not quite sure what you mean.  Are you saying they get a pass on certain things because of the difficulties involved?  Or that we just have to accept that certain things are "next gen" (like no turn based play)?

Quote:Again... that said I do think there could of been some easy to implement things added to F3, and some things that should of been handled MUCH MUCH better in the situations.

And I agree completely with you there.

(12-18-2008, 10:11 PM)KorJax link Wrote: [ -> ][quote author=ZargonX link=topic=2011.msg56523#msg56523 date=1229655322]
[quote author=KorJax link=topic=2011.msg56514#msg56514 date=1229654429]
Warning, long post is long

Well let's just say that I stopped reading half way through at the "One man's junk..." part.  It was well written but it was just another purist arguement for "why can't all these tons of features from a simplistic game engine back in the day where it was very easy to implement en-masse be in a fully realized much more complex visually and presentation wise engine!"

So, you stopped reading halfway through, and yet you have a full sense of everything I said?  I guess I only need to read half of your rebuttal before responding to it, then.
[/quote]

I should rephrase.  I stopped taking it seriously half-way through, and that's when my warning bells went off.

But really, I honestly respect your opinion, but I just can't feel the way you do towards it.  There are always things that would be nice to have in a game in my eyes, but then there's whats to be expect realistically from a game... and then you should judge that game based on how well it handles that realistic expectation.  As the generation gap between games and sequals grows bigger, this especially is true I think.

[/quote]

Understood.  I just hate it when people respond to something by starting with "I didn't read the whole thing"

And hey, I'm perfectly ok if you don't agree with me; if gamers agreed on everything, well, uh, I don't know what would happen.  But it probably wouldn't be good.  As long as we all accept that it's ok for people to have different opinions on things, we'll all be much better off.

KorJax - anti-oldschool  :

Zargon sums up pretty much how I feel as well, I warmed to it, it was a good game, but there was a lot left to be desired

Thanks for taking the time to post and reply, Zargon. And when you say you want Spectacle Rock to take the long view, you're talking about page length, right?

I'm about 20 some hours into the game. I've done none of the main quests that I could help (on exploring I met someone who knew james so I wound up skipping the first, and possibly more, waypoints to the Following in His Footsteps starter quest), but I agree with your basic summation.

In short, it's like Google Earth, exciting and interesting to explore for hours and hours, but not really much interaction to draw the player in.

Even shorter: All setting, no gameplay.

I could, and probably will, spend another 20-40 hours just wandering around looking at stuff, finding new places, drooling over the graphics. But the gameplay got stale 10 minutes outside of the vault.

(12-18-2008, 10:11 PM)ZargonX link Wrote: [ -> ]As for the lockpicking, I just found it to be a completely needless addition.  When I'm making my way through an interesting old factory, I don't want to be stopped every 5 minutes to do a damn rotate-n-click game.

I've said this before, but I think this is more of the same bad game design forcing bad player behavior. If there were no locks, I know I, and many other gamers, would still rifle through EVERY FUCKING BOX in that factory. Why? I don't need any more mines, I've got like 90 already. and I'm lousy with stimpacks. the lockers in my house are full with 5 pages of spare parts and equipment to the point that I can't find anything with the limited inventory interface. Yet, I will still look at every locker, mailbox, dropbox, stove, fridge, metal box, ammo box, dumpster, trash can, bathroom stall, suitcase, desk, filing cabinet (stand alone or bank of 4), etc and if it doesn't say EMPTY then I will open it. and if there are any High Value Items (carton of cigs, water, drugs, ammo, vodka sells good etc) I will load up and cart that shit home or to the nearest vendor for selling. The lock minigames are just the silly icing on this cake.

Why do I do all that? Cause there is no gameplay. Hoarding is my substitution The game taught me that when you start out, you have nothing. And every little thing you get is important. I might need to sell it for the extra caps, or I might need this item as an ingredient in some uber schematic later in the game. Took me forever to bring myself to sell the BBgun, and I only finally did after seeing that a vendor had one for sale. The game starts you out with the premise that you need to scavenge to survive, but scarcity is just an illusion. And why do I need stimpacks when I can sleep for 1 hour on a cardboard box and get fully healed?

To get on my Valve soapbox, one thing they do very well is iterative player testing to see how the players are behaving. They like to see how players are interacting with the environment, and learn from that how to reduce unwanted or frustrating behaviors. Could you imagine what they would think about me squeezing every last cap worth of value out of those iguana bits? Could you imagine if in Left 4 Dead they hid the pills and pipebombs in random cupboards, trash cans, dumpsters, desks, cabinets and you had to open each to find them?

Add to this and the ever-present problem of quicksaving and quickloading, and there are no consequences. Post-apocalypse games are supposed to be all about hardship and consequences. Walk into a radiation zone? Quickload and avoid! Too much drugs and now addicted? Quickload and take 1 less. There are lots of interesting potential hazards tradeoffs to face that you will never have to face thanks to quickload.

Fallout 3 is beautiful, the ruination of DC is fascinating. But the engine is terrible for FPS. VATS tries to hide the fact that the engine is terrible for FPS, and fails to distract. The sniping is poor, the CQB is poor, the enemy AI and pathing is poor. The engine is terrible for melee combat, unless you like swinging the bat in the same arc over and over.

For anyone who wants to defend Fallout 3, what is fun about it for you? What makes it a "game" and not just a beautiful and vivid world to explore and loot?

And no, I never played Fallout 1 or 2.

Lol, Rummy pretty much summed up my thoughts on the game.  My lockers are so very very full of crap.  Also I would spend stupid amounts of time using the buggy object movement key to place interesting objects around my house to feng shui it up appropriately.  I barely got anywhere in the main plot and it didn't bother me at all, and after I got to level 20 just dicking around with sidequests and exploration, I more or less just stopped playing =X.

i has a garbage can outside that shopping mall, it holds all my worldly treasures

(12-18-2008, 10:11 PM)ZargonX link Wrote: [ -> ]If you'd kept reading, instead of leaping to the conclusion that I'm just an old crotchety gamer, my point was not so much that the junk was there, but that it a)was there in more variety than actual useful equipment, and b)it could have been integrated in the repair system more interestingly.  One might say that would have been a very modern way of doing things.

My apologies, I must have missed that.  I do admit to jumping the gun, as this is a good point.  However, I felt that currently the system was fine as is and didn't require anything additional to be good.  It would have been nice but you can't expect everything in the world to make it into a game.  See Deus Ex, one of my all time favorite games... some of the mechanics were flawed (i.e. the gunplay was much like Fallout 3's except a little worse), but it never detracted from the experience for me.

Quote:Again, I made a single reference to the lack of groin shots, in a picture caption no less, and you've leaped to the grumpy gamer conclusion.

Perhaps I did jump the gun but the point of my comment was that for the most part groin shots are "redundant" just as much as having a repair system is "redundant", so when you label the repair system as being not needed, but allude to groin shots and such being out and have it give the impression in an elegy-style manner, I can't help but wonder your reasoning other than the fact that it's different.  Again, I simply may have misinterpreted your intentions with that caption, as generally that's something I tend to hear from the NMA types so I may have wrongfully generalized this based on that assumption.

Quote:I don't believe this at all, nor did I say anything like that in the review. I would not want things to be exactly the same from game to game; I expect advancement.  Where it becomes disappointing is when the advancement feels like it undoes elements that were successful in earlier versions.  Change for changes sake is not always good, but neither is stagnation.  The secret is making changes that enhance the experience in new ways.

Agreed.  My bad for misinterpreting and jumping the gun on your review once again.  It's just I got the impression from the review that you would prefer things to not of been added (especially for stuff that adds to the immersion, like lockpicking), and things be instead be kept the way it was.  Which may have been wrong of me to assume, once again.

Quote:I think your point of view here is the one that is in error.  You seem to be saying we should expect less from games, even when we know they can do more.  With many years of experience playing games, I know what can be, so when something that's supposed to be new and improved doesn't live up to what I've encountered before, of course it detracts from the experience.  And, I don't think I based my review around what could have been, I based it around what was, and looked to areas of improvement.  I did not go into the game (as I know many Fallout fans did) prepared to hate it; I kept an open mind, and I do say it's not a bad game in its own right.

Maybe I should rephrase that.  I do not think we can expect less from games, but I do know that we can't expect every game to be flawless, especailly when you have to consider that in-general it's much harder to make games nowadays exactly how they were done before, with current standards.  Perhaps it's an issue with the industry as a whole, but when you have to sell something to a new audience that is large, but yet also be able to reasonably create an experience in a time-frame that won't take a decade to develop with the modern technology of today, you just can't expect the same level of complexity in game design that was done before. 

In this day and age for example, you can't have several thousand KM of land to explore that's randomly generated (which in daggerfall's case wasn't even that good and didn't offer anything meaningful except what you could imagine), and have extensively long strings of dialog and dialog interaction, as that is expected by modern standards to all have voice acting, which isn't really too possible without spending a lot of money on something that would only boost purchases in a small manner.  It's a dirty truth, but a truth at that... today, games are in an age of presentation and immersion.  The only time you'll find that different or deviated is when someone makes something more independent or makes a style of game that typically isn't affected by the above standards.

When we measure Fallout 3 with the standards of today, it's clearly a standout game in it's own ways, much like how Fallout 1 in the days of 2D isometric views was a standout game in it's own rights.  I may have misinterpreted the theme of the review but I got the feeling that you were alluding to the fact that Fallout 3 wasn't as good as it could have been if it was a miracle baby of a game, which seems to me like having unreasonably high expectations in some reguards, although I could be wrong.

Quote:As for the lockpicking, I just found it to be a completely needless addition.  When I'm making my way through an interesting old factory, I don't want to be stopped every 5 minutes to do a damn rotate-n-click game.  And once again you leap to the grumpy old gamer conclusion.  You must be a very angry youth

I apologize for giving the impression and jumping the gun on the "grumpy old gamer", that was something that I shouldn't have done.  But frankly what do you think would be a good way to implement lockpicking?  Frankly the old "Morrowind" system where you would simply click on a door and have it tell you "so and so is locked, your lock pick attempt has failed" everytime you lockpick something, isn't the way to go.  It's an old RPG aspect that I'm glad is dieing off, where everything you do is completely detached from the player and you might as well read a book.  I like to get more involved in the game's I play, and maybe that makes me an explorer immersionistic nerd, but whatever.  Oblivion system also failed in my eye's, because it removed any real RPG aspects (which is why the whole game was a dissapointment because it wasn't much of an RPG and the world itself was very generic compaired to Morrowind).

Fallout 3's system is much better.  Not only is it greatly simplified from Oblivion's, but your skills actually have a real effect, and you can't even lockpick some things unless your skill level is high enough.  And really, you don't have to stop "every 5 minutes"... most things in the world are not locked in my experiece unless it's owned by an NPC in a town or such, as the most "locked" items I ever see in an area isn't really more than 3-4 on average.  No one's forcing your to pick all these locks either.  I do think the force lock mechanic shouldn't "break" the lock though... only break the bobby pins if you fail the attempt.

Quote:Like I said, Fallout 3 was a good game, but not a great game.  I have every right to say it was not a good Fallout game, because the moment a developer takes up an existing license, it brings with it all the expectations and experiences of the games that came before it.  Is this entirely fair?  Maybe not, but as I've said many times, games don't exist in a bubble - every experience a gamer has had colors their opinions of whatever is put before them.  

This is a fair opinion and I respect that, especially since I felt the same way about Oblivion in regards to Morrowind (even though that game never did things flawlessly itself, hell I can't even play it this day and age without modding the hell out of it).  I just think in it's own merits Fallout 3 is still a great game, and one of the better games released this year and the last (I tend to rate games like Braid, Audiosurf, and world of goo higher however... I don't own L4D so I can't comment on that). 

Quote:As for saying that your expectations for current gen games is different, I'm not quite sure what you mean.  Are you saying they get a pass on certain things because of the difficulties involved?  Or that we just have to accept that certain things are "next gen" (like no turn based play)?

Explained pretty much a couple quotes up.  Again though, I would hate to see things die out completely and I love it when indie gamers do things right and make "new old", and have it play great.  But when we take things to the mainstream level, it's a different matter of perception I think.

fucking wall of text vs wall of text

(12-19-2008, 08:51 PM)Vandamguy link Wrote: [ -> ]fucking wall of text vs wall of text

show me yours I'll show you mine?

(12-19-2008, 10:32 PM)CopulatingDuck link Wrote: [ -> ][quote author=Vandamguy link=topic=2011.msg56827#msg56827 date=1229737861]
fucking wall of text vs wall of text

show me yours I'll show you mine?
[/quote]

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely --having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with her surf.

Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall northward. What do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, --north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting? --Water --there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all. Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick --grow quarrelsome --don't sleep of nights --do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing; --no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook, -- though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board --yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls; --though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.  Unless you are a negro.  Nobody likes negros.  And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who aint a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way -- either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, --what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition! Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way --he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this: Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael. Bloody Battle in Affghanistan. Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces --though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment. chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me --since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

(12-19-2008, 08:51 PM)Vandamguy link Wrote: [ -> ]fucking wall of text vs wall of text

It's called a discussion.  They happen sometimes, albeit rarely, on the internet.

(12-20-2008, 12:09 AM)ZargonX link Wrote: [ -> ][quote author=Vandamguy link=topic=2011.msg56827#msg56827 date=1229737861]
fucking wall of text vs wall of text

It's called a discussion.  They happen sometimes, albeit rarely, on the internet.
[/quote]


Yeah, that was very cathartic for me. It wasn't till i started writing a reply that I realized that I knew the name of every container and the relative value of most items in Fallout3. As I was typing it up, I thought, this is like Pokemon, but with boxes. Gotta check 'em all.

Late bump here but here's something I can agree with that I saw on some other forums.

"Fallout three had the length and width of fallout 1+2, but not the depth."

Being that I'm a guy who can find a good chunk of entertainment simply out of exploring in any game, I love Fallout 3.   However I gotta agree with the above, especiaally when it comes to quests and NPC-relation interaction with the world, and it's defiantly something that could have been done to the game.  Right now it works pretty much like Oblivion in that NPC's and locations act as pretty much singluar quest depot's... and that's it.  Nothing deeper involved, and etc...

For me, quest+world structure doesn't have to be deeper than that to be a good game because I find most of my enjoyment in RPG's and such discovering locations, and basking in the small touches a game has to offer (i.e. cow tipping, the hidden radio tower signals that all have a little "story" assocated with them if you discover the source of the radio signals, etc).  However it definatly doesn't offer much beyond that, and seeing as it's been done before (as the OP mentioned), it is a little disappointing to me that the quests and NPC/world interaction is like this.  And, there were never really any "questlines" other than the Wasteland Survival Guide and the Mainquest from what I hear, which is also a shame.

I think for Bethesda's next game they should get a new quest/story/NPC game design team, and give their level/world designers a nice raise.  It's not bad, it's just a better questing/NPC/world-interaction design could have been done a lot better to tie the world together than what it was in forethought.