TheFeniX wrote:I hated hunting down books and was honestly annoyed Beth went with a level up only increase in skills, as opposed to ES games.
I'm not sure either system is entirely great, but I do prefer the ability to just buy the skills I want to use instead of having to make an infinite number of iron daggers so I can craft one good weapon at the end of it, for instance. The "increase skill with use" system sounds intuitively like it models the effects of practicing a thing to be better at it, but in reality it makes for some godawful grinding.
Aw cmon, INT has it's uses, there has to be at least 3 INT checks in the game. I mean, there's almost always another stat check you can do instead and INT checks were always "state the mind-blowingly obvious," but.... you know.. stuff.
Yeah, but they're in the Wasteland Survival Guide and the outcome for mostly INT responses is just more skills which you won't need if you have high Int anyway and is nowhere near as good as the one for the no-stats sarcastic response (which is +3% crit chance, which you can't otherwise boost in F3)
Ironically, I think given all the powergaming cheese I've done on Fallout 3, I think the level cap should probably be about 16 or so. That's about the last point that the game feels balanced. Higher level enemies just shit all over the weapon balance, with basically any automatic weapon that isn't a gatling laser becoming irrelevant due to their low per-shot damage and nonexistent crit rates.
Anyway, Beth lost their shit when console development became their primary goal. Obviously Morrowind had major issues, but there are very few 3D games that pulled off that level of depth in an RPG. Fallout 3 is a tourist game. I really enjoyed it, but it's run by rule of cool ("Hey, let's build a city around an exploded nuke and let this random guy fuck with it.") much more so than Obsidian building a living world with New Vegas. My decision to purchase F4 on either launch day or a Steam sale will be completely dependent on if Beth tries to make it themselves.
The design mentality of Morrowind is different. Morrowind simulates a world and then just leaves the player to it, whereas modern Bethesda games are essentially designed to validate player decision. Whichever direction you choose to walk in Skyrim there will
always be quest content waiting for you that feels about appropriate for your level, so your decision to go there was always "right".
Morrowind just drops you in the world in your pants and doesn't even care if you go straight to the place where you can steal the best sword in the game at level 1.