By being sycophants to Bethseda.

It's how everyone in the prequels made the prequels svck.

So they're "pretentious" for making games with more depth. Ulysses was an awesome character, built-up and teased through-out all of the DLCs and Kotor II characters more than made up for it's less interesting plot.

Carth was good but yeah, dead family, betrayed mentor, he could have stopped it; some real originality there. Where-as, from Atton, you get hear about him in the wars, how he was a Sith Assassin because he had some inert force-abilities.

KotOR felt pretty generic, especially after I played the sequel. The characters lacked the depth Obsidian put into theirs. Same goes for FO3 and NV... FO3 was the first BGS game I played and after buying Oblivion on the cheap I think it might be my last.

EDIT: FO3 was definitely a lot better than Oblivion, but I don't see BGS ever hitting Obsidian level character quality.

I played KotOR II before the first one, and I played II to death before I even touched the first; makes me feel a little biased when I say that finding the Star Forge was a more interesting plot than gathering the old masters; for perhaps the same reasons I hate Peragus and try to rush Telos but like Taris more. But Obsidian certainly do characters better than a-lot of others, hell the entirity of KotOR II was about the character of the exile and confronting the past; over-all it I can see why some consider it a better story.


Bit of a no-brainer .

BGS aren't aiming for Obsidian level character quality. Making a game is about choosing your battles: Bethesda go for worldbuilding, and Obsidian go for character development. Bethesda could no more hope to beat Obsidian on dialogue than Obsidian could take on Bethesda's environment design. It's probably why I didn't "click" with New Vegas: the world just felt like a film set on which the story was being acted out. Conversely, I think it was Ken Rolston who said that, in Bethesda's games, the story is just a device with which to drag the player through the world.

Of course, Bethesda have improved greatly on their stories, and made some truly memorable characters - and I don't think anyone could say that the worldbuilding in New Vegas was bad, it just wasn't quite as good.

'FO3 was better than Oblivion'.

What was exactly 'better'?

Both story lines svcked, you can't argue anything else. FO3 is [censored] compared to the originals like Oblivion is. (You can barely hold against Brotherhood of Steel, by god that's embarrassing)

Characters didn't really exist, only card-board cut outs of scientists, cannibals, Fallout Tactic ideas and overal the things i remember were the most bizarre things that made no sense. (Republic of Dave)

Level design, world design, story design and execution, character design, dialogue, voice acting ... I can't think of a single way in which Fallout 3 did not improve on Oblivion. I'd even say that it was a better game than Morrowind, though Morrowind will always be my most-loved game.

I certainly can argue that Fallout 3 had a good story (and I don't think Oblivion's was bad - just a little generic), and I think the BAFTA award it won specifically for its writing vindicates that. The only thing I didn't like was the abruptness of the ending, but I thought Broken Steel resolved that very well. It would be pretty hard to argue that Moira wasn't a memorable character, just to pick one, and I didn't think the Republic of Dave was particularly outlandish - just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_to_Pimlico.

We've had maybe two and a half million threads debating the pros and cons of Fallout 3 versus 1 & 2 and I think we can save our aching fingers by just accepting that they're all games that approach things in different ways, set slightly different priorities, approach game design from different angles and made three classic but very different games in the process.

My impression of Obsidian games is that they're actually really good, but a bit dragged down due to issues like bugs (New Vegas) or a forced hasty release (KOTOR 2). Very much flawed gems. This can be partially blamed on publisher decisions.

Alpha Protocol was also a really cool concept with some poor design choices. Time limits on dialogue options are okay, it works well in The Walking Dead. In this case the time limit is very short though, and each dialogue choice was simplified to 1 or 2 words so you can read it fast enough. The result of that was that quite often you did not know what you were about to say. Also the level design was quite linear and forced you into combat quite often so trying to make a stealth focused character didn't work very well, and there was a really overpowered pistol skill.

New Vegas with a thorough bugfixing mod (Mission Mojave) is awesome. I find that the writing and quest design is significantly better than Fallout 3's. Way more choices in quests, meaningful skill/SPECIAL checks in dialogue and during other moments, and companions with their own quests and a lot of dialogue. I think that some people were also disappointed by New Vegas not because of the bugs, but because it wasn't the Bethesda style sandboxy dungeon crawler which they expected after Fallout 3. I think that if New Vegas had come out before Fallout 3 it would've been received much better.

KOTOR 2 is already awesome, with the exception of the last act because it was rushed due to time constraints. Obsidian had to release the game about 6 months earlier than planned because Lucasarts wanted to have the game out for Christmas. The Sith Lord Restored Content mod which got its final release a few weeks ago restores much of this content and fixes most of the bugs.

I like KOTOR and I like Fallout 3. But I prefer KOTOR 2 over KOTOR and New Vegas over Fallout 3, I feel Obsidian did a much better job with the writing in both games.

That's fair. I love New Vegas, but I did feel a lot like I was being talked down on with the Lonesome Road DLC, which is the main reason I wasn't a huge fan of it. It's like, having showed us the themes they wanted to impart throughout the base game, they then decided that we were not smart enough to get them and spelled everything out for us. Ulysses just generally came across (to me) as an existential buffoon, a first-year philosophy student who says 'sheeple' unironically and is convinced that his insights are, like, totally unique and deep, man. This wouldn't be a huge problem, except that Ulysses is clearly intended to be an author avatar, which are never not annoying, even when the author is talented (see: Heinlein in Starship Troopers, Richard Morgan in the final Takeshi Kovacs book).

Yeah, I love South Park but I don't see how the appeal could transfer to a game, when biting satire and comic timing are what's good about the show.

I think this hits the nail on the head. Aside from (kind of) sharing a universe, an engine and gameplay, they are just completely different games, if that makes sense. If you approach both the same way you're going to be disappointed in at least one.

I never quite understood why anyone would say that. It's true that the original ending was pretty bad, but the resolution was equally weak if not more so.
Although unlike most I can tolerate the end voice-over not being changed. Ron Pearlman is not cheap people!

i thought Obsidian did a great job with New Vegas and the Dlc's, it was the game i played most in 2011 until Skyrim, i hope they get the chance to do a similar type of game again.

Haha - the worst thing was that I jokingly predicted both the original ending, and how Broken Steel would start. I just really enjoyed BS's pacing and level design.

This is slightly off-topic, though. As far as Obsidian is concerned, I really did enjoy NV's characterisation - Veronica was one of the best game characters I've seen.

I dislike a lot of the sycophants that surround Obsidian. Not sure what draws such strong reaction from them, but in my honest opinion I find many of Obsidian's games to have the pretention of good writing while actually just spilling out as much purple prose as possible. I preferred Kotor 1 to Kotor 2, and Fallout 3 to New Vegas.