and how many people heard of fallout before bethesda took the helm? answer in short is not very many. heck they even used bethesda's engine.

if it werent' for bethesda the fallout series you all keep pointing at would have just whilted and died

I don't think you understand this process at all. The developer does all the work on the game. The publisher just pays the developer and does quality control. So New Vegas was not Bethesda's world, vision, and creation. It was Obsidian's.

Dude, chill, seriously.

I can see a loosing battle here. Obsidian done it all with NV. Beth just put their name behind it. The game dialog and selection of NV is far superior to Skyrim. A game can have a good story, but fail due to lack of dialog selection. I mean "selection" and no just dialog "execution".

skyrim doesn't have multiple ways to finish quest lines. in a few quests they give you two options. i created a roleplaying scenario for the companions, but i can't do anything i thought up. same with the MQ and the rest of the guilds. in skyrim any role play is strictly confined to the structure of the quest. i will never be able to betray the companions or side with ancano (sp?) in the mage guild. i don't care what story or RP you think up, it will never happen. RP is implemented in quest structure. skyrim doesn't have it. you can choose good or bad quests. you can't choose to finish quests in a good or bad manner.

beth published FNV, obsidian did all the work. envisioned? no, obsidian created the story. i do agree no one else does what beth does, but that doesn't mean beth does it well or can't do it better.

This is the reason why Skyrim, or even previous TES titles, are not my go to games for a cinematic, interactive story-telling experience. Is it a bit depressing to see the dialogue in this state? Yes, but it hasn't exactly been stellar in the other games, either.

Envisioned and produced? No no, that's what Obsidian did. Bethesda literally said "hey would you guys like to make a Fallout game for us," Obsidian said yes and then Obsidian called the shots. They wrote the plot, they chose the location, they built the world. Bethesda provided the engine, many of the world items (carry-overs from FO3) and iirc, assisted with bug fixes and just with teaching Obsidian how to use the engine.


Anyways, maybe you prefer a game like Skyrim where you imagine up all your character's dialog and responses. That's fine, but not my cup of tea. Why? Because it's literally all fantasy. Your imagination is doing all the work. That to me, equals a crappy game. I'm not saying using your imagination is a bad thing, but when a game RELIES on the player having an imagination, yes, that's a bad thing. That just means the game itself is sloppy and lazy to me.

Sure, every blue moon there'll be a conversation in New Vegas where I have a question that isn't offered in dialog, or I have a response that isn't offered in dialog (and I literally mean once in a blue moon cause they did a really nice job of providing a nice variation of player responses), but how is New Vegas failing to provide a "proper" response (the response I want) any worse than Skyrim failing to do so? Skyrim doesn't even friggin' try, and therefore lacks so much content by comparison. Skyrim is SOOOO phobic of that blue moon moment that it ends up failing entirely.

Stop being phobic of asking the player to make decisions and provide us with the tools to make some, the game will be better for it.

Who the [censored] cares? Fallout and Fallout 2 were great games, and if you take into account that the video games market was smaller back in 1997-1999, then you can't even compare how many people had "heard" of the original Fallout games as compared to the new ones.

Supremacy..if you had even an inkling of a clue about the Fallout Series before FO3, not only would you know that it had a cult following, but everything about FO3 is essentially rehashed from older titles, they didn't re-envision a dern thing

It is truly astonishing how some people... Longknife ... can get so worked up about this. It's insanity I tell you.

And you needed to post this why?

Wasn't aware I was worked up, but ok.
Sorry guys, apparently my knickers are in a twist.

Seriously though, all I'm doing is posing questions to a forum that provides no answers to them. Only echoes and petty insults.

So I guess the real topic in this thread is

Skyrim's dialogue options are a slap in the face to FO:NV fans

Part of the problem with the lack of TES player dialog is that (if you haven't noticed) TES fans get really twitchy when it comes to putting words in their mouth. There's a reason the player never has much to say, and it's pretty much because if you started giving the player choices, it'd step on someone's "well MY character wouldn't say that" and you'd get a billion threads flooding the board over it.

Your knickers have always been a little twisted, for one reason or another. Nothing wrong with that...most of the time.

You are right. And I echo that....wait...What was your question, again?

This topic is quickly derailing into a new vegas vs skyrim thread....lol


But I think that my point about bethesda and the fallout series is being missed.

Yes, I know about the fallout series. I've played fallout 1 and 2, and then the reimagined 3 and new vegas. And just because the older games had a cult following, which i was aware of, does not make them stellar mind blowing games...but that's not the point of this thread or this post.

Really what i'm just trying to say is that the good things about new vegas all came as a direct result of bethesda's work on fallout 3.
- the series would have never gotten off the ground again without bethesda
- same engine and alot of the same assets

Those of you who are ignoring or denying bethesda's influence on the series in something of self denial. I'm not taking anything away from obsidians decent work on new vegas, but without bethesda it wouldn't have been possible.

I don't think anyone is actually losing their bananas over the early linearity of New Vegas like you keep saying. I'd agree with Echonite that the first few hours are linear. Linearity is not always a bad thing (ex: Lonesome Road), it just happens to make the first five to ten hours of every New Vegas playthrough somewhat similar. I really like Primm, but it's not so fun the fifteenth time around, and unlike bottlenecks later in the game I haven't developed my skills enough that I can tackle it differently on a different character.

Sorry for the off-topic. I agree with the other poster who chalked it up to the Nostalgia Effect. The Elder Scrolls series has never been very good with dialogue.

this

Gotta agree with Longknife. I just got the Ultimate Edition for New Vegas and the writing and dialogue makes a mockery of Skyrim.

Yep lulz.

Not just New Vegas though. As I've said before, I think Fallout 3 exceeds Skyrim as well. New Vegas simply gets mentioned simply because it preceded Skyrim directly, and therefore it "set the bar" for Skyrim, and from a New Vegas perspective, it doesn't even look like Skyrim attempted to jump.
But even if you were to compare Skyrim dialog to Fallout 3 dialog (the game that set the bar for Vegas), Skyrim seems to fail to meet Fallout 3 standards as well, as I explained a couple pages back.


That's what's so frustrating and confusing about it. Beth literally just watched another developer and didn't steal ANY of their good ideas (another example of a good idea Obsidian had that doesn't involve writing? New Vegas companions can judge height. If you jump off a cliff you can survive, they'll follow you if they can survive it too instead of running the long way around. Skyrim NPCs still can't jump), and a couple years ago Beth did a better job than they did now. It's like....wow wtf happened in the last 5 years? Like you can make sense of Obsidian simply having more focus on dialog than Bethesda, but Bethesda showing they could do more expansive dialog, then forgetting? That one confuses me.

ups wrong thread

No. The good things about New Vegas were the writing, the quests, the choices, the political satire, the NPCs, and the quests. Bethesda had nothing to do with any of that. Skyrim lacks in all of the things that New Vegas excelled in, which is why many consider Skyrim to be a huge step backwards from New Vegas.

Here's a good question. How many quests in Skyrim have an "Optional" objective, an alternative objective, or use the word "Or" in them?

well don't you think that with all the people hollering at me that bethesda had nothing to do with new vegas that on the same note it's unfair to judge skyrim to another developers work? same reason we don't compare skyrim to mass effect. If you're going to compare bethesda's work it would be only reasonable to go to fallout 3 if anything....but that's only if you give obsidian all the credit for NV.


on topic, i've said it before and i'll say it again. the elder scrolls as a series has never been known for it's dialouge and i'm ok with that. I'm dont mind it in my fallout games, but i'm satisifed with TES.

It always annoys me when people say this. Unless you picked up Morrowind recently, you're probably playing because you associate it with good memories from the past, when you first played it (aka nostalgia). If you started playing Morrowind 10 years ago, it doesn't matter if you continue to play it now. I played Interplay's LOTR series last week. Is it that good? No, but I loved it as a child, and it holds good memories, so I continue to love it now.