2008 GOTY awards

[Solver]

Would you say that playing with people you know is a requirement for enjoying it? Or do random people work just fine?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Solver
Would you say that playing with people you know is a requirement for enjoying it? Or do random people work just fine?

People you know certainly helps a lot. I've never played fully random (always at least one other friend), but it's still good. You just run into the occasional ******* and have to boot 'em is all.

In Left 4 Dead you truly have to work together to survive, so most people work pretty well. Strangers regularly revive me, heal me when my health is low, etc.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Oh, meant to say I'm also glad about Spore, where the outcomes across the board show how right I was and how wrong certain other forum posters were.

I've got to give you credit for that one. I was expected Spore to be very good, but I'm so glad that I never bought it.

[DrSpike]

I wasn't including you as you saw the light in time.

[Solver]

I am somewhat surprised with Spore. I was not really expecting it to be a good game (or, more precisely, a game that I'd like) but I was expecting it to receive excellent reviews throughout and to be a strong contender for GOTY. As it is, looks like Fallout and Left4Dead will pick up most GOTY awards, and games like Mass Effect and GTA are also ahead of Spore.

[Felch]

Originally posted by Asher

The bugs were:
- it wasn't autosaving correct
- after I was killed by Megaton residents, it would respawn me in the middle of town where they would instantly kill me again. and again. and again. in an infinite loop.

If this is by design, then the game instantly disqualifies itself from GOTY.

I'm not sure about the autosaving problem you had. However, if you enter or leave a building, the game autosaves (this is the default setting, adjustable in options). My guess is, you were in a building, did something to piss off the town like stealing and then defending yourself, and when you left the building it autosaved. So everytime you died in town it would jump you back to the last save, which was as you were leaving the building with everybody mad at you.

It's certainly a debatable design decision to make the whole town attack you if you defend yourself from an angry victim of your own theft. However, not making the entire town mad at you would allow players to steal, kill the person they angered, and then move on without consequences. It's kind of a tricky situation to balance. In the Elder Scrolls they used town guards, who were often astonishingly omniscient. In the end, no game is perfect, but I think Fallout was a mighty fine effort.

Perhaps if the aggro in the town was linked to people witnessing the crime, or finding a dead body, or something. Also it would be nice if there were a way to placate people you've pissed off. In my experience, if you steal accidentally they just recover it. Once they're fighting you, it's pretty much to the death, unless you run away. In any event, it's an understandable criticism, but you should give it another shot when the patches and new content come out.

[Asher]

I'm not upset with the aggro.

I am upset that once they do aggro, the game was over. I had to revert to a manual save I made 30 minutes earlier.

Again, the issue isn't the aggro, it's the fact that they aggroed OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER ad naseum such that it BROKE THE GAME.

[DrSpike]

What Felch described is probably what happened, and as he said you can adjust how the autosave works in the options.

So if you want your 'natural' play style where you piss everyone off then perhaps you should exercise that option.

[Asher]

Stupid default options combined with stupid game mechanics does not GOTY make.

I'm not buying into your asskissing excuses. This is supposed to be a playable, open-world game. Being an evil jackass is supposed to be one of the possibilities. Stop pretending like it's not.

[snoopy369]

It's perfectly playable by nearly everyone else. Stop blaming user error on the devs

Heck, if you only lost 30 minutes, why are you even whining? I lose more than that all the time... when I forget to quicksave regularly, which I do, when I'm not a moron. When I forget to, then I deserve what I get

[Asher]

Originally posted by snoopy369
It's perfectly playable by nearly everyone else. Stop blaming user error on the devs

You're exaggerating. Most gaming forums are full of people upset with how buggy the game is. It is not user error to steal something in the game (which is permitted!), then have a combination of poor design decisions and bugs work together such that the ENTIRE GAME IS TOAST unless you were fortunate enough to make a manual save (which I had, a while before). That's not user error, that's dev error.

As for "reading the manual" and how it described this would happen, I bought the game off of Steam and I've no physical manual or even any idea if a PDF version was in the steam copy...

It is not a reasonable expectation that the entire ****ing town would instantly swarm you and kill you over and over and over and over again until the end of time because I opened someone's ****ing cupboard in their house. Ridiculous.

Heck, if you only lost 30 minutes, why are you even whining? I lose more than that all the time... when I forget to quicksave regularly, which I do, when I'm not a moron. When I forget to, then I deserve what I get

Because it's completely unacceptable, and apparently I have higher standards than you. I certainly have more games to play than you.

I was playing Fallout 3 til I ran into all the bugs (the crash to desktops + this annoying bug I keep talking about), and it immediately went to the bottom of my massive pile of "games to play".

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Asher
Stupid default options combined with stupid game mechanics does not GOTY make.

Funny how none of the many people that have played Fallout 3 either here or at other forums I read have had this problem.

I agree with Snoopy - stupid is as stupid does.

[Asher]

Originally posted by DrSpike


Funny how none of the many people that have played Fallout 3 either here or at other forums I read have had this problem.

I agree with Snoopy - stupid is as stupid does.

Your troll is tired, let it go. I'm not biting.

If you want to argue it is reasonable to expect for an entire town to immediately be summoned and kill you 1000 times over for opening someone's cupboard and thus ending the game unless you had a prior manual save, then you can feel free to, but that doesn't make me the stupid one.

PS: A cursory google will show you I am far from the only person to have had this happen. In every instance, you've got some eunuch trolls such as yourself who simply say "well now you know why you need multiple saves!"

Any game design that relies on users making constant and frequent saves is broken.

You have been owned, move along now. I tire of you.

[Solver]

I now wonder if the Valve guys are going to do one of those free weeks or something for Left 4 Dead. I looked at some of the articles about it - I'm still not a fan of zombie apocalypse type stuff but apparently the game itself is very good.

[Asher]

Out of interest, here's Counterglow's thread on the game. Title: Fallout 3 is the buggiest game I've ever bought

Issues so far-

1- Crashes like a bastard.

2- Prone to graphics breakthrough and flicker even after updating drivers.

3- Some side quests appear to be impossible to complete due to "Speak to...." tasks failing to trigger the necessary dialogue paths.

4- Disappearing/suicidal NPCs bugger up the plot.

Not impressed. Needs patching, badly.

awful game. i gave it away. i can talk to people in real life, why on earth would i want to have painfully slow and boring conversations with computer generated dick heads? that's not a game, that's torture!

the game for me went like this:

amazing intro
talking
talking
talking
leave underground place (thank god for that, no more pointless talking!)
pick up ammo
enter new place
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking
talking

give game to friend.

There's obvious quality problems to this game. Accept it, apologize, and kiss my ass profusely.

http://www.counterglow.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=41933