I most likely wouldn't be interested at all if Obsidian. The world would be small and boring, and the quests being better is subjective.

There aren't enough words to tell you how much I disagree with you. KoToR II was a good game but horrific in comparison to the first. It lacked the overall epic feel of the first. I felt awesome and all sorts of bad in the first one. The second was just like a blah following in revans footsteps. Oh and they destroyed the Ebon Hawk so bump them. Fallout New Vegas was kinda disappointing. Less funny things happened even with Wild Wasteland perk, the entire world just seemed bland. I know it was a desert but bottom line here. The dlc for New Vegas was good but I loved how Broken Steel extended the story. New Vegas was good, but yet again, lacked that epic feel. They make good games but the sense of holy cow is gone. They're not original developers, they just take the existing system from the previous game and put different quests in it. The take the silly putty and reshape it, but its still the same silly putty. Bethesda takes the best from the old games and takes that into consideration when they make newer more fantastic silly putty. I would hire Obsidian to make dlc packs but never another game.

It might be good in every way besides game play. The only above-average games developed by Obsidian were New Vegas and KotR II, two sequels that are already graphically similar to KotR I and Fallout 3. New Vegas The company's most recent released game was Dungeon Siege III; a game that's mediocre at best and a game that lacked Obsidian's "amazing" writing skills. That's also excluding how terrible South Park: The Stick of truth looks...

I really struggle with that notion. It's already been said by someone else in detail so I won't go into it, but it just doesn't make any sense. It's just stuff there because it's a place with a quest or things to kill. Bethesda obviously spent zero time imagiining how it's supposed to function as a fictional world.
Bethesda cannot write. They're truly dreadful. Other people have mentioned the DB questline - I'm sorry but the way it starts makes no sense whatsoever. It's just ridiculous. And personally I'd much rather drag that obnoxious brat straight back to where he's supposed to be after being a small child who openly defies what the Jarl decreed yet apparently nobody is able to do anything about it. And the thieves guild - it's just totally unbelievable how shoddy that writing is. It's like a case study in crap writing. It's crap writing as an art form. I imagine you'd need to work really hard to cram in so many plot holes.
Bethesda seem to not think about if the stuff they churn out makes any sense or has any internal consistency/. They seem to simply not care.

It's not really a matter of whether Obsidian should make their games, it's that Obsidian totally put them to shame in certain areas. I'm totally drading Fallout 4 - I love Fallout, more than TES, and what we'll get is we'll plonk this here for no reason, stick that there for no reason, think up some incoherent nonsense, have some people in super hero cosrtumes, a town full of children that makes no sense, a couple of uber weapons and then we're done. Kids will buy it, iwe'll sell millions, all's good.

i personally cannot understand how any one can look at Fallout 3 or Skyrim and say they make any sense from a narrative perspective.

Neither can I, hence I ask, but I always get "just my opinion that it makes sense" as the answer and never provided with actual points or justification. So I guess I'll never understand.

It depends on how you look. The civil war quests themselves make no sense, but the quest line does. The main quest makes sense as well. Though it's kinda harder to see and requires some explanation. The general overal story being told is still good, it's just the individual chapters where Bethesda often fails.

Perhaps. Tell ya what.

Get obsidian, bethesda and Valve in a room.

Obsidian works on the story. Valve works on the execution (half life one and two had poor stories, but they were delivered in a good way. Bethesda's lore masters (those poor guys) work with the two (but without heirachy)
Obsidian works on Rpg elements. Valve finetunes them and provides and creates ideas for the second in-house version .
Valve works on the gameplay.

Would be great if they listened to forums or had something like twitter to write about their plans and see how the community reacts

I can see it from Longknife's perspective, so I do understand where he is coming from. Doesn't mean I have to agree. From where I see it, a lot of it does make sense. I can't help it that our opinions are opposing. Where he sees Megaton as a bunch of people that stupidly wasted their time setting up around an unexploded nuclear device, I see stubborn, resourceful people that refused to leave a place that helped them survive until they could get up and running. It's a perspctive issue rather than anything else.



Go back and reread my posts. Where you might see some sarcasm (which was intended) you should also see some explaination. It's there, I assure you. I know because I wrote it.

Bethesda is unwilling to put the R&D into a new engine, Skyrim's engine is painfully limited and it shows with the junk repeating animations. Between super Mario brothers jumping and the arcade y hit box collisions straight out of morrowind I don't know whether to puke or cry. Obsidian would be the same but the difference is Obsidian would not pretend to make a action game, they would give us a hardcoe RPG and the crap engine would be forgiven by the fans and not acknowledged by the new casual fans Bethesda courts. After watching E3 demo videos I cannot even think of playing through the smudgy playstation 1 textures and wooden, looping animation mess that is Skyrim

Skyrim's textures are definitely unremarkable. I once commented that on consoles, the rock formations (or "mountains") looked like they came from an N64 game. The high res texture pack for PC is actually decent, though, though some textures remain muddy. Animations, too, are dreadful; nothing new from Bethesda.

This is kind of a worthless statement without stating what in particular you find more believable. Precisely how am I supposed to evaluate the merits of your opinion if you've made only the foggiest of claims?

In a broader sense, no one has argued that every single aspect of Fallout 3's world is unbelievable. Obviously there are people, and they are trying to survive, and within the context of a post-apocalyptic world this makes some degree of sense. The problems arise when you look at exactly how they survive (both in terms of where they are and what got them there). I can overlook things like the total impracticality of Megaton's construction. Maybe they really dig planes, maybe they're inventively stupid, it doesn't matter---Megaton is possible, however unlikely. It's just lame world design, with little effort spent thinking about how a world like this would work, made clear by the fact that you have to make improbable justifications for why thing happened the way they did.

(I'd say it's still easy to objectively measure the probability of a settlement forming one way or another. If nothing else, we can simply use occam's razor to identify what is a more believable outcome.)

There's a difference between that, however, and the total lack of infrastructure in most settlements. Take Dukov's place---what even is this? How can he possibly feed himself, much less his two guests? It's a two floor house filled with drugs and booze. He's wearing pajamas, for chrissake. I assume he's not getting out much. This is a scene from a movie or a book: a survivor stumbles across a potentially dangerous hedonist who's resigned himself to a fatalistic party-til-you-die attitude. In that context it makes sense. A movie/book is linear and told from a single perspective. You don't need to know whether he's keeping livestock and a garden out back because that's not why he's in the story.

A game, especially an open world game, does need to make these considerations. The player isn't locked into a single perspective. They can explore every inch of his house, they can check every cranny around the perimeter, they can press him regarding his situation. When there's no verbal explanation for how he continues to survive with a diet consisting entirely of six and drugs, and there exists no physical evidence that would suggest he has other means of procuring food, that is a failure in design.

Saying whats better Bethesda or Obsidian,Is like saying whats better Coke or Pepsi,they are similar in many but you can't say whether which one is better than the other otherwise it would just come down to a mere opinion,thus leading to a major forum about fighting about who's better than who.True there are some mathematical facts about which one puts in better graphic engines in there games,but no matter what it just comes down to whether you like their games or not,i agree that Fallout 3 was better than Fallout:New Vegas story-line wise,but Obsidian did make the games Fallout 1 and 2,and yes you do see Bethesdas work more often than Obsidians,but if Skyrim was developed by Obsidian well then it wouldn't really be part of The Elder Scrolls saga then,it wouldn't be able to without a partnership between them to make it,and a lot of the Lore,and main aspects of the game would be cut out because Bethesda owns all those things with the other Elder Scrolls games.

Fallout 3's engine is limited in that it can't have too many npc's and creatures on screen draining resources. Fallout New Vegas used an updated version of that engine that handled crowds much, much better. Therefore you must adjust what is represented on screen to the capabilities of which engine version is used.

Megaton - In Megaton you see one brahmin. But who knows, that might represent 40 brahmin which is enough to have an occasional slaughter for a bounty of meat and hide, and there would be plenty of milk to consume and have left over for trade every day. So there really is no need for a crop field that would only serve to lure raider thieves and animals, and drain Megaton's lake.

Why does Dad refuse to turn over Project Purity to Col. Autumn - Because he cannot share the glory with him. Here is a man who framed a passage of the Bible because he thinks it declares him the Alpha and the Omega who will bring the waters of life. Therefore, Col. Autumn is the dragon.

There, now Bethesda's FO3 makes perfect sense.

With enough apologism you can make perfect sense out of anything, check ME3 ending and that lulzy indoctrination theory,


Read Twilight, its a great book

Beyond stuff like whether people would construct a town around a live nuclear device, have an oddly incongruous tower full of rich people plonked in the middle of nowhere or a town full of children (who are presumbly breeding with one another), I think it doesn't make any sense in design. There's no impression of how people organise food or are surviving long term, supermutants are plonked in random places with no reason for being there and enemies spawn throughout the landscape with no reason for being there. Like where is this army of hostile robots coming from? Worse, the level scaling means by level 15 the entire landscape is a total deathtrap only the lone wanderer can possibly cope with - molerats disappear and suddenly deathclaws are everywhere - those caravans are doomed if you're in the same cell.
Computers games are always going to be abstractions you can pick holes in, but New Vegas portrayed a far more coherent world - settlements linked by the roads which are pretty safe and hostile wildlife off the road living in certain zones which is their territory. The criticism being it could get a bit empty, but it was a good idea that made a lot of sense - not walk out of town and twpo albino radscorpions and a deathclaw are running amok just to give you something to shoot at, though by the time they appear you can handle them anyway. I never had any problem with F3 deathclaws - New Vegas ones were much nastier and needed a bit of thought.
And little things - like why do Bethesda never portray wildlife as having young? It's a simple thing that helps immersion and it could also help level scaling look more natural - lower level more young, higher level more advlts, even then 'alpha male' types. New Vegas deathclaws lived in packs with dominant male, dominant female and babies. F3 deathclaws just randomly spawned all over the place on their own for no reason, Old Olney being the one exception.

I think Skyrim is better and makes more sense - I like the way e.g. wolves don't just vanish (though I've never gone past level 40 something so maybe they do later) and of course there's a lot more portrayal of how people are supposed to sustaining themselves. But it's still not very well thought out and this is amplified by the utterly dreadful writing.
Bethesda seem to have a mindet that they're just making a computer game in the sense of giving you something to do and something to kill. They're seemingly not concerned about the storytelling side which I think is a big problem as they supposedly make RPGs, and RPGs need quality storytelling. I personally really like the gameplay mechanics in terms of the combat and the choice of first/third person style. I do actually really like its action side. But I think they're now moving directly into making action games with a levelling system where the story simply serves as a tagged on excuse for you to be doing whatever quest you're doing and an excuse for you to be gettting awesome powers. The only reason they're doing this vampire stuff is because they've figured the players will go crazy for awesome vampire powers ripped off from Hollywood. The reason it happens will be an afterthought.

Fallout 3's writing was pretty dire, but Skyrim takes the biscuit. I love the game from a 'it's fun to play' standpoint, but it's like they wrote the quests in five minutes. And they must know this. They must have some insight into how terrible their writing is - outside sycophantic industry reviews they're famous for it.

I'm still hoping there's going to be more to the guild quest lines... They all seem to end just as they begin...? What the...? You know.

I understand where you're coming from; idealy yes I should expain my view. However, to do so would push this thread further down the road of FO3/NV comparison. A thread like that should be in the Fallout general discussion forum, rather than Skyrim general discussion.

The point of this thread isn't comparison, but rather discussion on whether or not Skyrim would've benefitted from Obsidian's input, or even direct collaboration.

I think we could all benefit with an improved and enhanced morrowind. Im sorry but when I think of if obsidian got ahold pf a tes game, mofrowind with improved combat keeps coming to mind.