Did I at any point mention graphics? The engine is incapable of creating believable NPC interplay, or even standalone emotions, effectively making the emotional side of the story dead. Graphics have nothing to do with it.
Maaaaybe
^this
Emotion comes from the animators and voice actors, both of whom are different in this game. Yeah, the engine had some uncanny valley problems due to the way the faces are put together, but that’s been completey overhauled for New Vegas and was never the main problem to begin with. Bethesda has shitty writers and they hire terrible VO artists for the bulk of the characters. That’s mainly what made the characters seem wooden. So yes, you were talking about the graphics. Even without the graphical changes, better dialogue and acting would have solved the problem.
Your point that the engine can’t render emotion, but that it has nothing to do with graphics doesn’t even make sense.
If you can’t admit they stare blankly at you like a robot making you feel uncomfortable even behind the screen then you must be talking about a different game. I also don’t understand the whole zoom in when you talk to someone, they should be avoiding looking at the face, but other than that Fallout is great.
Wrong. Emotion comes from believable characters. Believable characters come from many things: The rendering of emotions (which sucked), animations, and voice actors, yes, but more importantly body language, NPC interactions, and environmental interactions. These lasts ones are critical to a good character, and the engine just can’t handle them.
Also, saying “lol u complain about grafic you idiot” when it comes to something that is horribly handicapping a game, even if it is graphics, is just idiocy. Graphics are not just pretty things to look at. They are instrumental in the immersiveness of a game and, yes, the characters. Take Half Life and Half Life 2. Which one has more compelling characters?
So it is about graphics.
You also seem to be equating facial rendering with perceived emotional expression, but it’s only part of the story. Again, the writing and voice acting are much, much more important.
The whole “body language” gripe is ridiculous too. Those types of things can help sell a character, but they aren’t even close to being the most important aspect. The best characters I’ve ever encountered in games were in Torment, The Longest Journey and Baldur’s Gate 2, and they were all just blobs of pixels.
So basically your point is “It isn’t about the graphics, but it’s totally about the graphics.”
As for your straw man about Half Life vs Half Life 2, which game had the better writing and acting? Half Life 2. THAT is the reason the characters were more engaging in HL2, the facial rendering and animations were just the icing on the cake.
Could Fallout 3 (and Oblivion for that matter) have had better character animations? Absolutely. But it’s near the bottom of my list in terms of importance.
Also, I know I come off as a pissed off dick most of the time, but I’m actually enjoying this discussion and I do respect your opinion. I just happen to disagree. Sorry if I’m overly blunt, that’s just how I talk. :freeman:
You and all the internet. It is to be expected here.
In any case, I think you are underplaying the importance of realism of characters. I have never found a great character from any game made pre-around 2004. Its not to say they weren’t interesting with great writing and voiceacting, but they never were in any way real. They delivered their dialogue and were done with it, and that is my issue with Fallout and Oblivion. A great character to me is one that acts like a real character, and part of acting like a real character is the body language, believable interactions, etc. Its important to me.
Also, as to graphics, it is about graphics, but not the “grafics” concept of graphics, i.e. that you are bringing them up solely for the purpose of a game superficially looking better without any depth. In this case the graphics give the game depth in the characters.
Think of it this way. If you were to watch a movie, if an actor just gives his lines brilliantly, makes some pseudo-good facial expressions, and nothing else, would you praise him? Would it effect your view of the character? I apply the same to video game characters.
Think of it this way. If you were to read a book, and the main character gave no facial expressions at all, would that make him any less effective?
I don’t think comparing something that is supposed to represent a real character to a real person giving a performance is a legitimate criticism. That’s kind of like saying that we aren’t really on an island in the Tempest, so it must be a shitty play. There is some suspension of disbelief inherent to characters in any video game, and anything that helps alleviate that is just a bonus. Good facial rendering and body language are not essential gameplay features.
Thats weird, my copy never locked up on me for my PS3, and no your wrong there are a lot of ppl here who have a PS3.
Still, I hope this is the last Bethesda game to use that engine. I already disliked it back when Oblivion was new.
still waiting for the first Fallout 3 to drop to below $20 because I’m a miserable cheap fuck. 
Apologies for only partial quoting, but I only wish to add to this one, and not get into the whole argument/discussion.
The gamebryo engine is well capable of performing those tasks, even with the somewhat limited open editor, the geck. It just requires some decent scripting and knowledge of the built-in tools of the engine.
I browsed and edited most of the original script code in fo3, and I have to say, the editors suck even at basic high-level programming. I admit it’s not the most convenient engine, and sometimes requires messy workarounds to script a properly staged event, but the gamebryo script language is still a pretty decent one, if used well.
It looks ok, I’m pre-loading it at the moment.
I’m genuinely into this discussion here. Storytelling in games is an important aspect of the overall experience of a game, and I’ve done a bunch of blathering on the subject here. As for the writing quality, Xenogears is a particularly good example of a game story. Despite it’s occasional translation hiccup, it’s genuinely engaging despite all of the dialog being delivered in text boxes with no voice over.
However, with a FPS/RPG combo like Fallout: New Vegas, some people will be aching for a proper facial animation engine. Their point is justifiable, but due to the limitations of an open world engine setup, one can’t put tons of polys into a character face if they’re used only once for a quest. It would be inefficient, suck up valuable polycounts that could be spent on something else, and ultimately inessential to the overall gameplay arc. HL2 and it’s derivatives are much more focused games- linear levels, point to point. Ergo, it’s important that we bring out the detail in characters to make the few people we meet in the world as believable as we can. The citizens have interesting facial states that vary depending on how programmers set their mood, and it shows. To my knowledge there isn’t such a system in F3/NV.
At any rate, I’ve played HL2 many times over, and haven’t finished F3 due to it’s sheer scope. I simply don’t have time to wander over tracts of destroyed DC. I wish I did, it was fun to explore when I had the opportunity to sink lots of time into it, but sadly I got a big case of “content overload.” (My generic term for when an open world game gets so massive that the sheer amount of content available overwhelms a player and discourages them from continued play. This can also happen if the narrative hasn’t immersed the player sufficiently to keep them in the game.)
ADDENDUM: On the flip side, Grand Theft Auto IV is pretty much the gold standard for how to do an open world game- you can go nuts or you can go with the story, and both aspects are long and varied. Plus, the characters had good facial animation, the graphics were simply amazing, etc. Better yet, the game had incredible writing- a funny, yet cynical and sad look at the dark mirror that is us.
A book is a fundamentally different medium to games and movies and as such uses entirely different methods. It requires to make an image of the character in your mind, backed up by its description, in which you give him the lacking life-like features. Videogames and movies show you the character, which removes this ability.
While I accept that there is a suspension of disbelief, that doesn’t mean that one can just ignore the flaws. The less suspension of disbelief used in a character the better, at least for me, and as such the greatest characters in video games are ones with the aforementioned features on top of the usual voice acting and the like.
It really should be noted that the vast majority of the place is just a bunch of samey rocks and buildings with the occasional vaguely interesting building or character to make it feel like you didn’t just waster your time walking for hours across the tedious wasteland.
Preordered on Steam 2 months ago, it’s pre-loaded and ready, can’t wait to play it.
Most stuff I’ve seen on it looks great.
Ill do like it do with most of my other games. Ill pirate it, and if i like it, ill buy it.
I’m still playing Fallout 3, it’s just great!
I love cutting a Supermutant’s head and killing
a caravan who repaired my armor to, just to get back my money 
But I think “New Vegas” will just feel like a simple AddOn…
I agree that character empathy is important. But you pretty much HAVE to make what you show to the player be high quality. There are solutions:
- Don’t show anything. Example: Penumbra: Overture. The whole game, you’re assisted over the radio by a mysterious person called Red, whom you never see. In the face of an army of horrors, he’s pretty much the only person trying to help you. When you finally reach his home deep in the underground, he asks you to kill him to atone for his terrible misdeeds. He is already sitting inside a closed furnace and merely asks you to turn it on. Safe to say a lot of players probably felt guilty about killing him; and they never gave him a 3D model.
- Reduce how much is shown. Plenty of games involve a more text-based approach for a large part of conversation, but voice acting or facial close-ups for more important characters.
- Cycle through reused character models. Sure, it’s a little less optimal than unique models for every character in the game, but I don’t think people would mind quite as much, especially if the ones they have are good. This is how HL2 worked; it meant they could get each individual face to look pretty good.
LOLOLOL U ALL FAIL!!!11!!!1! FALLOUT 3 SUKZORZ AND SO DOZ NEW VEGAS CUZ I PLAYED TEH FIRST 2 AND FALLOUT 3 AND NEW VEGAS ARE’NT MADE BY TEH SAYM PEOPLE!!! Not really, I actually think that Fallout 3 was an improvement over the first two, and I saw this as someone who has played all the Fallout games. This is just what I’ve been seeing all over the internet by people who played the first two and were pissed that their favorite game series was changed so drastically.