Count me as definitely much, much closer to Sissyl's end of the spectrum. I'll slog through a game with poor mechanics, lousy interface, or subpar graphics if the story is good enough. No amount of fancy cutting-edge prettyness or awesome controls will keep me interested in a game with thin or no story for long.On the other hand, how unplayable of a mess are you willing to try to cope with for a story that is only "video game good"?
* thinks of Rule of Rose *
Not familiar with that one
Papo and Yo is out? I had meant to pick that one up, it looked neat.yeah, it's been out for like 9 months or so.
Not on Steam, it was released in August for PSN only. Steam version just came out 2 days ago.
Like Fallout New Vegas--we all know somebody shot the Courier in the head and that the Courier hunted his or her attempted murderer down, we all know that the Courier will go certain places and do certain things in his or her search for justice, and we all know the Courier gets caught up in the war for New Vegas and whatever side the Courier chooses will win, but who wins, who loses, who dies, who survives, who lives successfully, who lives but in general misery... that all depends on you.
I've played through all 4 endings in NV and the linearity would become more apparent after each play through, due to the nature of events in game are triggered by player only.
Without the player triggering the event, the powder ganger would never begin its attack on goodspring, for example. I've done all three quests (you only need one) for the seer in the brotherhood of steel at first playthrough and it became clear that many "fetch quests" are simply linear dungeon crawls.
After I bought the DLC, I had trouble going back to the game due to I need to do identically the same things to reach the required level (which was also a problem in Skyrim, although NV offered more "real choices that have consequences" than ES5, there were less npc with minor quests available. Quality over quantity I guess). Even the spawn points of roaming monsters are the same, so further playing became more about its system than for the story after a few runs, and NV wasn't really good at the gameplay department. Modding may also make it buggy, the game was nearly unplayable at its early stage...
Like Fallout New Vegas--we all know somebody shot the Courier in the head and that the Courier hunted his or her attempted murderer down, we all know that the Courier will go certain places and do certain things in his or her search for justice, and we all know the Courier gets caught up in the war for New Vegas and whatever side the Courier chooses will win, but who wins, who loses, who dies, who survives, who lives successfully, who lives but in general misery... that all depends on you.I've played through all 4 endings in NV and the linearity would become more apparent after each play through, due to the nature of events in game are triggered by player only.
Without the player triggering the event, the powder ganger would never begin its attack on goodspring, for example. I've done all three quests (you only need one) for the seer in the brotherhood of steel at first playthrough and it became clear that many "fetch quests" are simply linear dungeon crawls.
After I bought the DLC, I had trouble going back to the game due to I need to do identically the same things to reach the required level (which was also a problem in Skyrim, although NV offered more "real choices that have consequences" than ES5, there were less npc with minor quests available. Quality over quantity I guess). Even the spawn points of roaming monsters are the same, so further playing became more about its system than for the story after a few runs, and NV wasn't really good at the gameplay department. Modding may also make it buggy, the game was nearly unplayable at its early stage...
In the context of the rest of my post, my point was that a video game can have a generally linear layout--it pretty much has to--but still provide some options for choices so that your playthroughs are not identical. Regardless of the things that stay the same, there is no one story, no "canon" in a game like that with regards to many aspects of the story. That's as much as you can hope for with a combination of technological capacity and reasonable development time.
Of course certain things won't trigger unless you do certain things, but the same is pretty much true in many (and I find the need to note, given message board communication problems, that many is not the same thing as all or none) RPG campaigns as well, especially in pre-written modules and adventure paths -- generally speaking the dragon doesn't attack, the wizard disappears, the dead rise, until the adventurers show up to stop it.
With your example, I think the Goodsprings vs. the Powder Gangers situation is actually an example of advanced video game design in that you CAN trigger that event... but you can also easily choose to avoid it by refusing the quest, not talking to Ringo, killing Ringo, or killing the Powder Gangers beforehand. For a video game (please note that emphasis), that's actually a lot of choices. Some other games, like maybe a Final Fantasy style game (which are fun, but very heavily on rails) would just make the attack happen no matter what. If you go back and reread my post, I'll even note FNV can get very raily in some places--it's just a good example that you can offer some decent choices even if you're ultimately in an interactive movie/novel storywise.
I'm sorry you've been disappointed by the game. Personally I am still getting delighted by the things I discover and the opportunities I find and handle in different ways. Even if, yes, there are bits that, like war, never change.
Tangentially... as for mods, I've got the various New Vegas uncut mods installed, which are nice--it's just a fan's attempt at restoring developer content that had been cut out to make the game easier to run on consoles, so that does add some new things. There's a slight risk of further crashes, especially if you install the Freeside Open mod (because it forces the game to render and keep track of a lot more NPCs and such), but it's worked fine (but then I got NV 6 mo after release, as I knew a game like that would be buggy on release anyway) for me save for some crashes during fast travel in Old World Blues, and maybe the very occasional glitch (no more than in any other RPG I've played) elsewhere.
There are quite a few P&C adventures that have come out in the last few years, there are games like 'The Cave', Amnesia...
I finished Amnesia recently and moved onto Justine and some of the custom stories developed. Needless to say, the well ran dry so I went to its source.
Amnesia's sequel, A Machine for Pigs, has been in development for some time and I got a bit curious. Frictional Games' developer blog hasn't yielded much, but I came across an interesting post regarding unnecessary combat in games.
*For those wondering "what the hell's Amnesia?", I recommend checking out the demo on Steam (link). I won't feed any hype, but I strongly urge survival horror fans to check it out.
I'm disappointed that many Japanese horror titles never make it to PC...despite being built on PCs.