Quote:
Originally Posted by red_avatar
The problem is that most people in FO1&2 had no voices. In FO3 EVERYONE had a voice and this means that you have limits. Voice actors are very expensive.
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Mass Effect had an absolute trove of dialog, large text dumps for nearly every named NPC. This goes for minor characters, to major characters.
The writing was well done, the voice acting was superb (and unique voice actors used for almost all roles), but most importantly, there was detailed exposition (in the form of dialog and Codex entries) and a large variety of character development for all minor and major characters.
This also illuminates some other unprofessional design quirks in Fallout 3, for example, killing the Ghouls attempting to get into Tenpenny Tower is considered an evil deed, merely
killing them no matter what your intent delivers evil karma. Since Fallout 3 does not utilize the Karma system of Fallout 1 or 2 (where Karma was a measure of your character's public reception rather than a good/bad meter) this means that no matter what your - or your character's - intentions, killing the psychopathic Roy Phillips who obviously despises the normals within Tenpenny Tower is somehow evil.
Compare this to Mass Effect which doles out Renegade or Paragon points
after the quest has been completed. Your dialog choices impact this heavily. Say you encounter the man who wishes for his wife's body to be returned to him for burial after she died defending Eden Prime. Speaking to the Alliance member that oversees this relations subject, you learn that her body possesses invaluable knowledge as to the effects of Geth weaponry, her wounds can be studied to save lives.
You can either choose to Intimidate the officer into returning the body, Charm him into returning it, telling the man who wishes for his wife's burial that it is needed for research cruelly, or attempt to convince him of the importance regarding the study of his wife's body.
Each choice and approach is changed by your intent, what you say in dialog completely changes what you
meant by doing a deed.
If Bethesda had the intelligence to approach their "choice and consequence" with this deliberation, their game wouldn't be as big an unprofessional piece of **** as it currently is. You could return to Tenpenny Tower and say that the "Ghoul scum deserved to die." and receive negative karma, or say that "They wouldn't listen to reason, and they were putting the lives of other in danger, I had to remove them." and receive positive karma, on the other hand the neutral approach response could be "They wouldn't move on, they got dangerous, I killed them." which is simply a reactionary result.
Instead Bethesda sees fit to merely provide different avenues of action. This isn't too bad, as Fallout 1 and 2 employed the same system, but of all this talk of evolution, and the fact that the new Karma system is nothing like the original, they could've at least try to actually
evolve what was worth evolving instead of slapping a new perspective and a shoddy buggy unoptimized engine on top of a mediocre shooter with watered down meaningless RPG elements and no replay value whatsoever
(ahem).
Mass Effect was produced earlier than Fallout 3, it had a similar budget and they didn't even have to pay for some expensive license in order to procure the rights for the game, yet Bioware made a far more polished product that was balanced, well written, and although not a real RPG, it was truly much more of one than Fallout 3 was.
Compared to the competition, Fallout 3 is one of the worst RPGs I've had the "pleasure" of playing in the last five years, it ranks up there with Gothic 3 as veritable ****.