Obsidian Fridays, Saturday Edition
Shut up. I meant to do that.
Knights of the Old Republic 2
Tim Cain is staying at Obsidian.
Cain is, of course, famous for his work as a designer on the original Fallout, and he also worked on the cumersomely-titled Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. Indeed, he is on the record as basically measuring himself by these two games.
He was hired by Obsidian Entertainment as a senior programmer in late 2011, evidently on contract, but it was confirmed by Chris Avellone earlier this week that Cain would in fact be staying on at the company in a permanent capacity.
J.E. Sawyer has posted a blog entry discussing his dislike of how weapons and skills are set up in the Fallout series. This at his personal blog, rather than at the Obsidian blog, mind you:
1) In a game where a player makes an investment in a variety of skills, I believe those skills should be applicable from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. In F1, that wasn’t the case with Small Guns/Big Guns/Energy Weapons. In F:NV, it was true for Guns and EWs, but it resulted in a lot of weapon role redundancy between the two skills.
2) I believe taking different skills should change the gameplay of the character. This really has never been true between Small Guns/Guns/EWs. You pretty much use all of them the same way, especially because of role redundancy or application overlap (cf. Laser and Sniper Rifles in F1, Anti-Materiel Rifle and Gauss Rifle in F:NV). It’s also not true of Unarmed/Melee Weapons.
His suggestion for how to deal with these and other issues begins with a recommendation to reduce the number of skill categories (e.g. having a generic “Guns” category rather than numerous type-of-gun-specific categories). That’s likely to enrage some of the harder-core Fallout fans, and perhaps RPG fans in general.
Chris Avellone has waded into the rumours surrounding Wasteland and Kickstarter by posting a lengthy blog entry reminiscing about the game:
– I was placed in an unpleasant moral situation early on in the title when I hit Highpool. I had to put down someone’s pet, and just as expected, the owner wasn’t happy about the situation I was placed in. And I felt horrible. This was in the first 15 minutes, and the game had caused a new reaction in me I’d never had when playing an RPG.
– Skill progression started defining my character’s personality. There was enough skill choices for me to start imagining what these Rangers had been trained in, what their talents were, and the ability to choose nationality of the characters fleshed them out even more, especially my RPG-toting near-silent Russian demolitions strongman, Romanov, who I began to build an increasingly-complex backstory for. (And yes, my Mom probably worried about me.)
– Despite the graphics at the time, the locations were areas I couldn’t have imagined, certainly not in a computer game. Here was a game where I could use my Intelligence to fight adversaries, transport my consciousness into an android’s brain and battle my character’s childhood fears, contract some serious post-apocalyptic STDs, use a mortar to blow up sections of towns, help a nomadic tribe of railroad tribals predict the future with snake-squeezed moonshine, and navigate a mine-covered golf course only to come face to face with a giant robotic scorpion in the middle of Vegas. Not to mention the range of enemies, personalities, and allies that can join you – all of these things didn’t require some high-tech solution, only a different approach to the game context.
It should come as a surprise to nobody, after reading that last paragraph, that Avellone begins his blog post by extolling the virtues of not using advancements in engine and graphics technology as the primary means of driving development and innovation in games.
Josh Sawyer is a cool, laid back guy who is very open to criticism. Here’s his Formspring, where anybody can ask him a question:
http://www.formspring.me/JESawyer
Fallout should really have more skills, but make them overlap.
e.g. a “marksman” skill to cover aiming with small arms, but a “pistol” skill to cover maintenance of your weapon (how quickly it degrades, how quickly you can reload and so on). The “repair” skill would also help with weapon maintenance (in a more general way), “electronics” would help in a similar way with energy weapons. Perks could support this by having an “auto-fire” perk to reduce spread/recoil when using automatic weapons, and so on.
I’m sure there are plenty of other examples with other skills, but guns is an easy one to describe.
Really looking forward to the Wasteland/kickstarter project. Never played Wasteland myself, my knowledge of it is all second hand (and mainly from the excellent CRPG addict blog!). Interesting to see how many little things were transferred to New Vegas though, some of it in the DLC (like the Robo-Scorpions!).
As for graphics advancement vs. gameplay additions, the greatest example for me is the Mount & Blade games, which are truly incredible (not least because of the massive modding community, something which games should also strive for these days, nothing keeps a game alive and profitable like modding).
M&B: Warband allows you to either join an existing faction or start your own, conquer the map and accrue wealth and power. It’s a little like Defender of the Crown, but as an RPG rather than being a strategy game. Mods like Prophesy of Pendor create entirely new game worlds with even more detail and interactions than the base game.