That's what I just said and I agree with you. As said taking mecanics, good mechanics and inventing and improving on them.

I'm saying Obsidian did New Vegas after Bethseda, and invented and imrpoved on it. I.E. Reputation, Companion A.I.,etc.

Bethseda didn't make Fallout nor did they make Fallout 2, no Interplay did. But Bethseda made Fallout 3 and surely they somewhere had inspiration from the other games that they took and improved on logical game mechanics.

Also in the Diplomatic Immunity quest, if you sneak in Hooded Thalmor Robes, Thalmor boots and Thalmor gloves you can disguise yourself as a Thalmor agent, don't know if that option is restricted to Altmer though. The outfit in the room at the beginning is supposed to function as a disguise but doesn't work because it isn't hooded robes.

Completely agree, also reputation.

But the reputation system in FNV wasn't perfect, I'd rather have a sliding scale than x amount of negative and y amount of positive.

I'd love to see these two things in skyrim.

Reputation does exist in Skyrim does it not ? People treat you a lot nicer if you've done things for them, guards comment on factions you belong to or quests you've completed. Isn't that a reputation system ?

If you go by this vague definition aren't those gimmicks you complained about improve an already existing platform?
Aren't those touchscreens the evolution of controllers then?

But you need originality not just improving the already existing, as there will be a point where you cannot improve it without drasticly changing it.
Otherwise you get Call of Duty, which is basically the same game for an entire decade with improvements.


It's acctually more of a disposition system, members of certain factions will like you more or less depending on your standing and deeds.

the only time in oblivion that any one ever said any thing about you wearing armor/clothing that wasn't that factions was if you were in the mages guild and walking into a guild hall wearing a necromancers robes. i was attacked once for doing that but thats the only time i've evre seen it happen in an elder srclls game.

but it would be nice if they did that tho i also hate it when i was a storm cloke and walked into the baraks in solitude and no one said or did any thing to me.

How do they know what faction I am in?

The Guard that goes "Psst I know who you are, hail Sithis"

By god you're telepathic.

Also they only comment very limited.

I'm the mother flippin [censored] Arch mage and they go "You must be the new recruit of the college"

No no no. You know that I have a Honeywords telepathically, magically. You know that I stole an item when you weren't even looking. You know that I have good lockpicking. But for some reason being a Guild master of a guild doesn't hit your ears.

And I personally like the Town Recognition. The whole Town's opinion on you.


Read Longknife's post. What he said is your clarification.

I think this is a big factor. It's not a good factor - it's stupid how you can go round dressed as the enemy and nobody cares. It ruins immersion.

Also the clashes between stormcloaks & imperials happen in random encounter spots that don't make any sense in terms of where they'd be skirmishing and stuff like those imperials marching their prisoner towards Windhelm. At least in NV you had a sense of the front line. If Beth had made it, they'd have had Caesar's legion spawning outside gun runners.

It's ironic that you get armour recognition for nightingale armour - the armour of a super secret sect even Brynjolf didn't know really existed - yet random thieves know exactly who you are and don't seem at all surprised.
On the other hand, you march around in your special dark brotherhood uniform - these assassins fight from the shadows by having special armour that luckily nobody seems able to recognise.

I find myself not surprised Beth failed to draw off really good ideas from the previous title they published so know intimately and own so they can't be accused of ripping off - the more I've played Skyrim, the more I've realised how little thought has gone into everything except the landscape and dungeon design.

I find it humorous to be running around Dark Brotherhood armor and the guards aren't trying to arrest me. Even if I'm not doing anything the very fact that I seem suspicious, IDK you could bother to check it out.

FONV = modern communication or more advanced, so word will spread qucker, yeah if you walk into a stormcloak camp wearing imperial armor, or into a city wearing DB armor they should do something, but its highly improbable that they would know your face around the nation and say isnt that that guy? If you are part of the thieves guild or DB, people should not know you are in those, because the whole point of those organizations is to be secretive.

You pick up random drags from a bandit, yet you are not thought as a bandit, while you pick up random drags from a Ranger (who wear scavenged police armor by the way), you are with them.


But really, the idea that just because somebody implemented it, so other should also do it instantly along with improvements, is pretty flawed. Sometimes it just doesn't work, faction armor was buggy as it is already and it honestly didn't added much.

Agreed. But we already know the guards know. Cause I always get a couple, "Psst I know who you are hail Sithis" while none of the new recruits down in my Dawnstar sanctuary sound like a guard and I have never seen them in my area.

Makes no difference though. You can upset a trader and they'll still sell to you. Unless you commit crimes that trigger the bounty system, all you're ever going to get is a few nasty comments. They may as well not have bothered at all.
The only example I think of is

The difference is, Obsidian did not have to work on writing a game engine and thus leaving a lot more time to add very nice features to the game. Even though the current game engine, which Skyrim uses is an upgrade of the Oblivion/Fallout engine. A lot of work has gone into rewriting it, leaving less time for details. All though I have good in faith in Bethesda polishing things with patches and dlc.

Bandits are different - it's not a faction uniform, it's whatever they can scrounge to wear. You have a distinction between armours that are represented as more generic and those that are a specific uniform of a specific force. That means relatively few armours are faction specific, but having them makes the game seem more realistic. Why anyone would even want to go round dressed as, say, a ranger while fighting for the legion is quite beyond me anyway. Like would you really want to fight for the stormcloaks dressed as an imperial? Having faction uniforms means the player can opt into feeling really part of a faction. The way Skyrim does it it's like having a WWII game where you can fight for the Allies dressed as a member of the Waffen SS if you fancy it.

May or may not be a valid point when you realize New Vegas had 1 year production time and Skyrim had 5 years. Yeah they had to tweak the engine and make new world objects, but really? That supposedly takes up 4 and a half year's time?

lol.

Exactly. Bandit and fur armor is different from what represents a faction. Bandits are not factions.

The guards a psychic remember? They know if you steal a horse in the middle of nowhere! They must have horse license plates.

They had a very, very short amount of time to put together a large and pretty complex game and had to cut a lot to meet the deadline - like it's emerged a chunk of planned legion content. The development time was nothing like F3's. They did a hell of a lot in a very small amount of time.
Skyrim took I think 5 years to make - IIRC Obsidian had 18 months. But they still managed to add a range of features that worked very well.

LOL.

All they did was add aiming down the sights, HC mode, and some factions that all pretty much ad the EXACT same paths, go to mr house first, go to said faction or yes man, or stay with mr house, go to the boomers, go to the BOS compound, then do the hoover dam. With very few variations between. It was not a big feat. And the lack of locations was ridiculous compared to FO3.

They also overhauled and improved the weapons generally, having a bigger and well balanced range with new animations, they added a range of crafting and created the companion wheel that made a hell of a lot of sense but Bethesda decided to go backwards and still use the clunky dialogue system. Though Bethesda prefer companions that are made of cardboard so there's little point interacting with them anyway.

They let you join factions in ameaningful sense and created a genuine interplay between those factions and real choices you had to make - like both BoS and House? - well you have a tough decision to make. They did have lots of meh locations, but again they had a ridiculously short amount of time, it's known they cut a lot due to this (apparently including post MQ play so I've heard - they wanted to do it properly or not at all it's said). Their gameworld made a lot more logical sense than Bethesda ever manage and some of the bigger locations clearly had a lot of work put into them. Skyims MQ has NO variations beyond a certain decision involving the blades. NV's quests made sense - nothing in NV was one enormous plot hole like the thieves guild.
To cap it all, they released DLC that had a sub story arc running through it that in turn linked back to the main story - so far Bethesda have decided to rip off Underworld because vampire super powers are cool and stuff.

Man - imagine if Bethesda made a game the same size as NV in the same amount of time - I shudder to think what they'd come up with. They can't write stories that make any sense or give the player real choices or balance things properly when they have five years.

Considering Skyrim had to do EVERYTHING from scratch... YES!

New Vegas was provided with a working engine, art assets, textures, animations, working mechanics...
New Vegas is actually more of very big, very expensive Fallout 3 mod from people who could get their hands on the source code.

Uh, NO, the gun animations looked EXACTLY the same, down to the T, the factionswere by no means MEANINGFUL, all the they did was have adifferent leader, with the same damned quests, all of them except the NCR said destroy the brother hood, and seriously, a follwer wheel? That would take a whole 5 minutes to develop. The game had hardly ANY Improvements from FO3, which was eons better than NV. Even the aim down the sight function was broken most of the time having your gun move up and down and being unable to fire. There were already recipes to create weapons in FO3, all they did in NV was add some.

Exactly, NV was a mess considering they already had EVERYTHING laid out for them.