There was a very brief window where it was possible to make games like this - where the game market was large enough to spend time making an expansive game, but before the demand for highly polished games came in.
Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had a lot more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.
But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).
There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.
Despite its lack of graphical flair, I enjoyed Fallout 1 and 2 more than any other RPG to date, besides Planescape: Torment, and Baldurs Gate to a lesser extent. It seems that a lot of the drive to create really compelling and believable worlds and stories has been redirected to help sustain the huge amount of effort required to keep up in the graphical arms race. It's unfortunate, because I've found no correlation between graphical quality and fun in the RPG genre.
Oh, me too, I was just explaining based on market forces, not my personal preferences. Try Darklands if you haven't yet, it might be right up your alley:
The list of games you like is very similar to mine - Planescape, Fallout 2, and Baldur's Gate are some of my favorite games. The review on the Abandonia page is kind of junk, but the screenshots will give you a little idea. The combat is real time tactical with pausing - similar to Baldur's Gate, and the majority of moral and skill-based choices are text based on beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds.
It's a really, really hard game with a tough learning curve, you'll die a lot before you get the hang of how to start and play, but it's really rich and rewarding. Probably the most unique RPG I ever played - it's historical fantasy set in the Holy Roman Empire, and the systems of the game are all based on the superstitions of the day. You can pray to actual saints to help you perform miracles, there's no magic per se - just alchemy that you mix from different ingredients. There's so many ways to play it and so many different options, but it is really hard and you'll get killed a lot in the beginning.
These sites have helpful info if you get into the game:
Try it out, if you like sandbox-style fantasy games with tactical combat, detailed character customization, and don't care about graphics - this is quite the game for you. There is a plot and a main story (there's actually three of them), but you find it over time, you just start out the game trying to get rich and famous and you can totally ignore the plot if you want. Maybe worth a spin - you'll probably need Dosbox to get it working, also spend the time to customize the sound in Dosbox so it starts playing, the sound on the game is really, really good.
Oh yeah, I wasn't disagreeing, just throwing my two cents in the ring.
I'll have to check out Darklands. Not much time for gaming these days, but I love the old DOS games as well, although they were before my time the first time around.
If you've never tried it, you might like Mount & Blade, an indie game that's more action oriented, but you can build your own personal army as you go for fame and wealth. You can even get your own fiefdoms and castles and collect taxes from those, protect them from opposing factions, etc.
That window also came before the advent of today's high-resolution displays, leaving more budget for the unimportant parts like story and gameplay. (Though I'm definitely
wearing rose-tinted glasses, art drpartments for a big-budget game today are huge!)
What about the Ultima games, have they been entirely forgotten as well? They were certainly an important influence on Fallout.
In particular, Ultima IV pioneered the concept of a computer RPG protagonist making ethical choices. Instead of "go kill the bad guy", the game simply tasked you to excel at virtues.
Parts VI and VII were the first games to create a truly immersive RPG world. The non-player characters would have a life of their own: during the day they'd go to work, then enjoy a drink at the pub, and then go home to sleep. Static and inventory objects could be used together in inventive ways -- making bread was the classic example. The plot lines were well-developed and touched upon social issues.
(Ultima VIII and IX were developed in 1994-99, after EA had swallowed Origin. Those games are travesties that are best forgotten.)
And don't forget Ultima Underworld. Released in 1992, it sported 3D grahics and a decent amount of choice in the game. You could alienate a race by killing one of them and it would make the game much harder to finish. A nice link: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/etcpress/content/ultima-underworld-co...
> Of course, not every game was like this. Fallout was one of two games offering this much freedom. The other was Fallout 2.
There was at least a third one: Arcanum. If anything, Arcanum gave the player even more choices as one of the choices of infinite graduations was the player's navigation between technology and magic, which had consequences throughout the whole game.
Arcanum was also the second game series I've known (after Fallout) where playing "evil" throughout the game was actually possible and not a dead end.
The ramifications of alignment was a biggy, especially whether you went magic or technology. There's the whole wizards city (or whatever, I haven't played the game in far too long) that if you went technological you was pretty much outright banned from and it was a bitch to gain entry.
Again your reputation for good or evil also helped later in the game. If you was evil (and had the reputation of a killer) you could intimidate much better because you had the right charisma traits attached to you character.
Not for any value of "play" worth playing. Last time I checked, playing evil in DA meant only being able to do the main quest (unless you start gifting people all around, artificially giving quests back) and giving up pretty much everything that would give any depth to the game. Not having any sidequest does not a fun game make.
I think "freedom" in games is overrated. When game designers focus on freedom, they necessarily sacrifice plot and character development. Games that offer the level of freedom of Fallout 1 and 2 aren't in high demand for the same reason that Choose Your Own Adventure books aren't regarded as serious literature, or even pulp fiction.
There's a certain novelty to being able to do "anything" in a game world, to be sure, but I much prefer games that offer small pockets of freedom within a strong linear narrative. Mass Effect is perhaps the best example, with its cinematic storyline and rich conversation trees.
The end result is often an either/or, but the holy grail is that you'd get at least some of both: a strong narrative that is still a strong narrative even after accommodating a wide range of freedom of the player, whose actions meaningfully influence the narrative. You probably need some better AI to do some runtime story management, though, since as you point out, choose-your-own-adventure style isn't too satisfying. Sort of the computer version of what happens in RL roleplaying games with a good DM--- they keep the story on track, but incorporate a wide range of player actions into the story, so there's both strong narrative and player freedom.
As an alternative, you can also view the lack of story in some games as a good thing, because it compels you to make up your own narrative.
"The answer is simple: Nethack does what computers do best - what computers were invented for. It hands you a symbolic representation of something, and lets you interact with it. The symbols are utterly mundane ... but the interaction is extraordinarily complicated. Interacting with the game of Nethack can be glorious, frustrating, hilarious, and satisfying. Like any great game, it's even fun to watch and talk about when played by others. There are probably more web pages of people telling their Nethack war stories than there are pages discussing the game itself." (http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/nethack/index.html)
One of the main reasons for me to play a game is their story. Over time I noticed that the open world games that provide huge amounts of freedom can't put too much polish into the story and it's presentation.
Of course that's not surprising: you can't spend too much work and polish for a part of the game that with some luck nobody would ever see.
This is why I personally prefer more streamlined games of late.
The problem (at least from the perspective of someone who enjoys games with lots of meaningful choice) is that the public in general seems to be happier with fewer choices, more simplistic gameplay and absurdly expensive graphics. So while it would be possible to smarten up today's games and offer more choice the publisher who did so wouldn't be rewarded in the marketplace.
You know, I can see where you're coming from. But I feel the gaming industry's a bit like hollywood. You have the big blockbusters with fancy graphics and big-name producers, which usually aren't as great as they're marketed to be. But if you pay attention, there's a strong indie industry that is making a lot of games that are smart, fun, and simple (without being simplistic). In fact, the iPhone is turning out to be a good platform for this. Granted, there's nothing like Fallout, but there is a surprising array of intelligent well-written games there.
That's a bit simplistic. The indie sector releases a lot of crap, whereas the mainstream industry allows the existence of awesome games like Crysis, wich is a terrific aesthetic experience -- thanks to the graphics, and thanks to the money that big companies can put on the table.
Disclaimer: I like Fallout, Planescape Torment and the like.
That's also on the simplistic side. The main thing that big budgets support is a particular style of design that scales to vast amounts of content - the gameplay is simple and repeatable, typically revolving around a few simple/interchangeable actions, but the environments and characters are greatly varied, and in-depth scripted events and cutscenes are considered the leading additive elements - the prime distinguishing factors. With current game technology, the budget can effectively get as large as desired, and the game's content will become correspondingly more and more polished and epic to accommodate. Technology is very much in a background, supporting role, once you're talking about AAA games.
At the indie end of the scale, budgets and schedules are too fractional to support a content-scalable design well. That doesn't stop indies from trying those, of course(the obvious way to make a new game is to clone an old game and swap out or add more content), but the success is usually better found by taking a specific approach to the gameplay - small, focused designs, rather than sprawling, interchangeable ones.
The first two Fallout games sit at an intermediate stage on this axis, but I actually still found them too big for my own tastes. To me, any game that presents a seemingly endless bounty of content tends to start feeling overwhelming. The last CRPG I really felt comfortable with, and explored every last bit of, was Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. That was a 1993 game, and many other games from around that period(Betrayal at Krondor, Ultima 7) already go past my comfort/scale threshold.
Yes, this is absolutely true. People do get confused and overwhelmed by choice. Either that or they're completely unaware that any choice exists.
By "People" I mean I'm talking in averages here. The target market for Fallout is tiny and much more focussed compared to that of, say, Dragon Age.
Also, most people only play through the game once (if that), so there's an almost philosophical question about whether choice of outcomes actually matter if the effects are only going to be seen once.
If you like choice & consequeces kind of RPGs, take a look at Vampire:Bloodlines (available on Steam, install the fan patches), the Witcher, and Obsidian's recently released Alpha Protocol.
What all these games (old and new) have in common is that they are often described as unpolished. And they are technically unpolished, because creating the enormous amount of content takes time and resources, and makes playtesting and balancing extremely difficult. On the other hand, the stories and characters of these games are often very polished compared to the the paper-thin stuff in most games. These days, the demand for better graphics gamers have these days makes the equation almost impossible - it is just too expensive to create the contents, lots of it which many gamers won't even see.
Witness the number of reviews that call the graphics of Alpha Protocol poor. Personally I think the graphics are amazing.
My memory is hazy but I thought that the game was only published by Interplay. It was actually designed and developed by Black Isle (most of its former members are now at Obsidian).
There is also a big price for Fallout's complexity and freedom, that isn't mentioned: bugs. Both Fallout 1 & 2 were very buggy. This just isn't acceptable on console games (not to mention that hard drives aren't standard on all consoles), which helps explain the lack of freedom in modern video games.
This article reminded me of something I've thought about - does any game developer use high level languages for AI or core game engine? It seems they all use C/C++ for most everything.
A few games have embedded Lua or Python for user scripting (i.e. Vampire:Bloodlines used Python for dialoges and quest creation), and a couple of games have started to require having .Net runtime installed... but does anyone know of a core game engine in high level languages, and C/C++ is only used for graphics?
The engine of civilization IV uses Python for most of its game engine - you can manipulate virtually every aspect of the game through changing/adding python scripts. More info: http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Main_Page
I would say that the vast majority of games out there use some sort of embedded scripting language.
For a AAA game, the core game engine (graphics, audio, AI, physics, low-level gameplay logic etc.) will be written in C/C++, but scripting engines are used a lot for high-level game logic and AI, at least at the prototyping phase.
LUA is very popular (but not LuaJIT as it doesn't run on the consoles). Every Unreal game uses UnrealScript and/or Kismet. Eve Online uses Stackless Python. GTA IV uses a 1st-party scripting language.
Most of the Pixeljunk series on the PS3 have a good chunk of the entire game written in the GameMonkey scripting language they use, as well as the per-level scripting.
Totally offtopic but does anyone else find the left side very distracting? I find it harder to read than usual. My eyes are drawn to the left (to the navigation etc).
I didn't find the sidebar distracting. Actually, I didn’t notice it until after I had read the article.
What did distract me was the picture of the assassin when I first landed on the page. I kept wondering why there was an article about Fallout on a website that I assumingly thought was about Guild Wars. That’s a big piece of Guild Wars branding to put on a site that’s about gaming in general.
The later game studio founded by the makers of Fallout 1, Troika Games, had a lot of great forgotten RPGs. Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil, and Vampire Bloodlines were all by them. They were pretty expansive but shippied with bugs (that have all had patches or community fixes by now)
In fallout being the bad/good guy is all about short-term vs long-term benefits.
Evil - Kill everyone, get their guns, their bullets, their armor.
Good - Politically resolve situations. Often less/equal money. Requires more diplomatic skills. Potentially less ammo, less guns, less armor. However you can rob everyone blind and still play the good role :)
Its all about creating allies or trade routes or killing the hell out of everyone.
Agreed, but as Aaronontheweb said, take a look at Fallout New Vegas. Several of the people involved with the original Fallouts now work AT Obsidian, and it seems they want to bring a lot of the old feel back. Just to take a single example, Stimpacks will be very rare now, and will slowly give back hitpoints - they won't give you +100hp in the middle of a gunfight. Radiation will be a lot more lethal too.
Fallout 3 had no sense of moral ambiguity and limited dialogue options. More importantly, it didn't have an ending that you create for yourself. I felt robbed when it showed what I had done instead of what happened to the world after I left it. Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 had full narratives about what happened after the story, providing a sense of accomplishment beyond simply beating the game.
Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had a lot more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.
But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).
There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.