Yeah, STALKER has a sneak system, albeit an extremely broken one at that. On the bottom left of your screen you have your stance indicator (walking, half-crouch, full-crouch), and flanking that indicator are two bars - one for the noise you're making and the other for how bright you are (as in light source, not intellect). Those two are supposed to determine your sneaking success like Ghost Recon or Metal Gear Solid. THing is, enemies in STALKER are all psychics - they immediately turn around and fire the moment you get within a couple feet's distance. Guess the radiation mutated their normal brains and senses huh?

As for the gauss rifle, I can't live without one. Seriously. I tried the laser sniper rifle and hated every bit of it (mainly the part where the body disintegrates). I have put FO2 to the rest permanently when I found out that all I do in a new game is to hike south to get power armor and gauss rifle, then proceed to terrorize New Reno and Vault City. The way I played the game gave myself the chills. I feel that I am turning into a terrorist soon. I'm afraid. I want to kill people. Don't... let... me... kill...

Help...

Hee.....lppppppppppppppp....

Or at least that's what Video Game Violence pundits want me to think.

Screw that. Vault City, here I come! (Not in a good way)

Sorry, I must have been confused. Was never a big fan of energy weapons.

I tried hand-to-hand before. As a kung fu expert. Freaking hard to play man... but you get a lot of nice moves.

But at the price of not having the Haymaker. Kung Fu master still sounds cooler than a guy with a powered fist. Super slegehammer is just... primitive. Yuck.

Still, gauss rifle is much more fun. Bang, splat, half a torso gone. YUM.

Combat really gets satisfying when you reach the Sniper perk.

You read the previews yet? It's no longer the fallout you knew.

In Interplay's defense, they ran out of money. Nothing to do with van buren. Remember the original Fallout basically fell off everybody's radars (a lot of hard core fans remember getting it from the bargain bins)? Didn't do much for FO2 too. And too many people pirating it. That's how it led to the demise of one of the greatest game ever.

As for Beth, oh you bet, they've got the looks of the wasteland in. The only thing that they didn't is the inclusion of the stick-actors from Oblivion. And the questionable credibility of their capability in writing believable and engaging dialogues. And oh, did I mention how FO3 previews nowadays are centered around exploding nuclear cars, super bio-hazard-like mutants and get-shot-in-the-head-and-get-your-limbs-ripped-off kind of quirky physics? Yeah, it is no longer the Fallout you remembered.

You sure? I thought powerfist is melee?

You're right. Powered Fist IS melee. Damn, I didn't know!!! Kept fighting bare hands only.

But haymaker sounds so much nicer than powered fist

Actually, I kind of dreaded the fights in big cities (e.g. New Reno) because it'd take eons before I get to move again. But I loved every single part of it. FPS changed everything. Just put it this way - turn Final Fantasy Tactics or Ogre Tactics into a real-time 3D squad-based game and call it FF Tactics 2 or something. See if the fans are ecstatic about it.

Ugh. Don't even mention the hookers and addicts. They dont kill each other - they run away, and HELL they have crazy AP for that!!!! Freaking Jet addicts sure run like a roadrunner on beep beep juice when facing the barrel of a gun!

I'm sure Fallout 3 will beat both games... if their target audiences are farmers who have a fetish for scarecrow-like stiff animations.

You'd think Beth could write something even remotely coherent? Oblivion's one piece of boring literature.

Megaton. Megaton. Beth PR lines. I love F3. Game of the year. Nope, never played F1 and F2 before. It's really nice. Action and consequences. VATS really fun. Megaton. Megaton.

My arse if he did played 10 hours. More like regurgitating preview facts than actual play time.

Check this out. Fix a crippled head with a stimpak. Nice. You don't need doctor skill anymore. Dip yourself in radiation and then flush it out of your system with Rad-X. Voila! Gained capability to regenerate crippled limbs. No more crippled limbs anymore. Finds a sniper rifle early in the game. Wow, how balanced. Bought a fatman launcher in the marketplace. IN THE MARKETPLACE???

Man, my enthusiasm is fading fast...

Yeah. In Rivet City. Kinda like New Reno. This is just ridiculous. Imagine how easy boss fights would be.

Let's call fallout 3 as FINO3 (Fallout In Name Only).

actually, the whole idea of teaser videos and gameplay videos is to let you gauge the game so that you'll be making an informed decision when playing the game. So far, the action part of the game is horrible. Horrible voice acting, amateurish animation and horrible immersion. That's what ANYBODY can get from the videos without playing the game at all.

You don't have to jump off a skyscraper to know how falling feels like, my friend.

Spike, you ever played the previous fallouts? Check this out:

1) in fallout 3, a BOS paladin says this to you "Steel be with you"
2) when fighting, a BOS paladin goes "To Arms, brothers, to Arms!"
3) Super mutants firing rifles (wow, suddenly in the East coast they evolved smaller fingers?)

These are just small things my friend. Let's forget about the analogies for now. I guess I failed to portray my point correctly with it.

But for the 3 points, maybe it's nothing for you, but for me, it's no longer absurd. It's way beyond that.

Actually I have nothing good to say about Fallout's AI either, so the new AI isn't going to be something stopping me from getting the game (there are other more serious ones...). In the old Fallout, enemies rush straight towards you, guns blazing. Combat in the old fallout series are more exploit than tactical, I must admit . The RPG elements are supposed to make the game interesting - combat is only a side effect.

Yeah. I would have loved it if the player, if he decides not to blow megaton up, gets a room in megaton, but then after proceeding along with the storyline he would be captured by the antagonists in his house. Turns out that the sheriff sold him out to save megaton.

And then, if the player had blew it up, tenpenny tower would actually inform the player well ahead that somebody's after him and he would be able to take measures and skip the whole segment of the game that involves him losing all equipment and have to escape from the antagonists' capture.

That's a nice surprise of gray over there - save somebody only to get betrayed; or be a bad guy and have somebody watch over your ass instead. And that would totally rock.

And for Arefu, that's just a rip off from FO2's slags quest.

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Added on October 15, 2008, 11:35 pmThen maybe deep RPGs are not your cup of tea. Nothing wrong with that, I have friends who swear upon JRPGs (*couch cough bueekkkkkk), and there are a few who would never go near Diablo with a ten feet pole.

This post has been edited by soggie: Oct 15 2008, 11:35 PM

I have only this as reply:

How about this. They facked up Morrowind by dumbing down Daggerfall. Then they facked up Oblivion by dumbing down Morrowind. Wanna bet what they'll be doing to Fallout 3?