Baphomet said:
And frankly you don't make millions by doing RPGs right. You make millions by appealing to the lowest common denominator.
And you miss the obvious point that it is possible in a load of cases to do things right while appealing to the "lowest common denominator" too.
For instance with TES, Bethesda clearly aren't going to take the focus off graphics, since that would harm their LCD appeal.
Here are some quick TES improvements which will not harm LCD appeal (yet Bethesda can't be bothered / aren't competent enough to get right):
Fix the nonsense of the levelling system (
I won't repeat myself).
Fix the economy (to an extent - not expecting perfection, but e.g. per-item sale price limits based on level are needlessly stupid).
Fix the level scaling in Oblivion (while losing it completely might harm mass appeal, many games have done just fine with a little more subtlety).
Design areas which make some sense and fit in with the surrounding environment.
Give NPCs and creatures (to an extent) some reasonable motivations / lifestyles.
Either do scripting well, or design a competent AI system. Perhaps RAI could be judged as a "at least they tried" (but failed) situation. However, they clearly failed to give it the resources required to do it properly - though these might have been hard to predict.
Design quests which have meaningful implications and rewards, rather than (eventually) meaningless gold/items/stat boosts etc.
Note that Fallout for the most part did not have huge non-linearity, particularly with respect to the central plot (which would be hard to do). What it had was localized (mostly) consequence that was perceived to be important over the long term by the player - because it made a real difference to the world around him.
Sure, if you point out these issues to a rabid TES fanboy, you'll get a staunch defence of the status quo. However, you could fix them, then talk to the same fanboy and get a staunch defence of the fixes.
There are many improvements that can be made without sacrificing mass appeal. The whole "They can't improve the game since it's targetted at the mass market" argument is just crap.
Most of them aren't exactly resource intensive either. Patching up the worst holes in game mechanics wouldn't take long at all.
Nothing kills a joke quite as quick as explaining it.
Joke? I thought you were simply talking nonsense.
For what it's worth, my mind isn't made up on the Fallout 3 issue. With Oblivion, Bethesda seem not to have bothered to think about design much at all. It's simply shiny Morrowind with a bit of streamlining.
At least with Fallout 3 they'll be forced to re-think things. That's no guarantee they're not going to screw things up of course.
Actually, perhaps there is no hope.
...Fallout had many unique elements for an RPG, including its extensive (and iconic) perk system and darkly comic tone. Will those be present in the sequel?
TH: Oh, yes. Most definitely. "Bloody Mess" is the best perk ever, where your enemies die in ultraviolent ways.
It's just depressing that someone can pick up on a perk that:
Does nothing in gameplay terms.
Takes away the rarity of the more violent sequences, and thus any feeling that they're special.
There again, perhaps it was good PR. Talking about a perk which has some implications for gameplay might have exposed Todd's supreme logical nous.