peter_spy

But with the conversation going on, I think you don't want other distracting sounds to be put in the foreground, especially if there can be some AIs walking around or any emergent stuff happening, not to mention glitches. At least when it comes to important story cinematics, I'd rather have a full control over that via separate audio track played in 2d, sync'd with what is going on on-screen. It would take more work, sure, but it will also feel more seamless to the player. Btw. doesn't the cinematic camera use itself as point of hearing sound by default?

From my perspective this is kind of overcomplicating things. If you need to make the conversation hearable, why not play the sound in 2d (player's head) or in a sound marker with large enough radius and volume?

So, you have some kind of social pressure related to editing / real-life balance problems. I don't have such pressure, and tend to lose myself in such work completely, but I also recognize this isn't exactly healthy kind of passion. You can always have a design doc and a dev schedule / diary, if you have less time for editing. This should keep you more focused on your milestones and your goal, even with long breaks between editing.

I think we should not distract Greebo with problems with other idtech4 titles, he already has his hands full, spending his free time improving DR functionality and our TDM editing experience.

I remember having high hopes for first Assassin's Creed. What I basically wanted was a TPP equivalent of Thief/Dishonored during the Third Crusade. What I got was an open-world Prince of Persia 3d with simple mechanics, boring metagame story, and tons of busywork. And people loooved it. If anything, the series' commercial success proved that there isn't enough boredom in the world, and people like to work in games just like they work in real life (i.e. for most people it's familiar repetitive time-killing). That's why I don't use massive sales as an argument in discussion. A huge mass of people will have, if only out of statistical necessity, very average tastes

Well, there's a difference between critical and commercial success, that's one thing. The other thing is, that talking only in terms of "it's good because I like it / it's bad because i don't like it" is shallow and boring. This is why I try to provide examples, and specify what I don't like and provide some kind of reasoning behind that. But that won't make an interesting, substantive discussion against arguments like statistic numbers or sales figures. And no, people who talk like that don't have to make games, movies, and whatnot, (even though sometimes critics become creators and put their knowledge to practical use).

Well, it's not only me; a lot of people who played and enjoyed original games share this opinion. As a Fallout game, yeah, FO4 it's not a good game, as it slowly abandons what made these games great: role-playing, interesting takes on ethics and morality in post-apocalyptic world, which was a playground for player choice, without authoring it too much. Bethesda's work with FO3 was important, because they did translate pretty well what was 2D sprites into 3d objects and, as far as their crappy Embryo engine goes, the general gameplay mechanics. But that's the nuts-and-bolts side of things, not so much the craft of creative work. Actually, when Bethesda has the artistic freedom, they don't do very well. TES since Oblivion looks like a generic fantasy world, without much flare or character. Just compare it to something like Gothic series, which is (equally if not more buggy but) based more on actual medieval European architecture, and it has more distinctive style (The Witcher did it very well too). But getting back to FO3, it was important as a base for F:NV, as Obsidian basically took these resources and tried do make their Fallout out of it (supposedly there's quite a bit of Van Buren content in F:NV). And as original FO designers, they did much better job with it than Bethesda, trying to translate values associated with the FO name into an engine, assets, and the FPS style of play they were given. This is something Arkane did too, as Prey is basically System Shock 3; it refers to the old values from previous games and tries to make modern spin out of it, and the result is pretty great.

Best selling game doesn't mean great game. It only means a lot of people bought it (myself included). If you want more substantial discussion about that, this video is a nice place to start: For one, when I watched that video, I almost instantly recalled what the quest was about, even though I last played F:NV in like 2011. Then I tried to remember a quest in FO4 that would be half as good as this one. I couldn't. IMO Bethesda is just turning FO into a series of first person shooters with nice locations, and this is not what FO was about. There seem to be a lot of people who are okay with that, but again, that doesn't mean FO4 is great, especially in comparison to first installments, which those people probably never played.

DX:IW and Thief 3 engine uses like first, super-buggy version of Havok, which was then bought out by Nvidia, afair. Renderer is 100% custom mess, not sure about the rest. And yeah, editing was easier with UE 2.x frontend, but you couldn't do much about bugs. IdTech is more like "editing for programming geeks", but we have people here who can fix bugs and upgrade things. It's not a zero sum game, but the time you wasted in T3Ed looking for workarounds, here you'll spend it on learning scripting. You might not like it, but at least your efforts are more constructive and creative.

I think there's something inherently wrong with how Bethesda works as a game studio. For many years now, main quests in their games were subpar on every level, from writing to gameplay and technical execution. Last passable main quest was probably in Morrowind, but I'm not 100% sure about that. If there was something original and genuinely interesting, it was buried somewhere among side quests or faction quests, like assassins guild in Oblivion, Shivering Isles DLC, or thieves guild in Skyrim. Same goes for Fallout 3 & 4 (and the latter even has the same main quest, just reversed). The only reason I can find for that is that people working on main quests are either interns, or it's kind of penalty or purgatory for employees, for noone likes designing main quests, or the team responsible for that consists of studio vetrans / higher-ups who can't be fired.

To me FO4 was a big step backwards in the series, in almost every way, except for graphics and some distractions like base building stuff. Bethesda actually managed to achieve a new low with the mediocrity of the main quest and limited binary choices. It felt like quests were designed by interns. I spent a great deal of time with F:NV though, something like 200 hours. While the main game was buggy at launch, they managed to fix alt least the major ones. And the story DLCs were excellent; Honest Hearts maybe a bit less, but Dead Money, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road are fantastic.

Maybe it's me having poor time-management skills, but last time I had this much time for games was during my Uni years. I binge-played through most of Prey during one rainy weekend, and on Sunday afternoon it felt like a huge gaming hangover. I'm too old for this shit.

That said, I wonder if there's a chance to get Thief 3 source code, so someone like Le Corbeau (or Snobel for that matter) could start making upgrades and improvements.

I love Darren Korb's work. Usually his music stands very well on its own, and more often than not, seems more interesting than the games it was written for. Bastion is kind of meh, but the OST is great: But my favorite OST of his would be Transistor OST. Not only it's full of great instrumentals, it's also full of fantastic songs: As for mixing chiptunes and midi era with contemporary approach, I think Danny Baranowsky did a fantastic job with Crypt of the Necrodancer:

Hey, thanks for the kind words, Bob But I'm okay here; I like the way I play games now, and I like them shorter, like 4-8 hour experience instead of 30-50. With one main job and second hobby/job, I prefer to spend more of my spare time with friends and family, and during colder months, I'd rather do some modelling and mapping for The Dark Mod. So it's more the question of priorities, where creating something is actually more fun for you than playing.

Initially, yes. But learning how to use controller is neither super convoluted, nor unintuitive or hard. It's like learning to ride a bike, you do it, and you remember it permanently. I think my first X360 FPS game was The Darkness. I had some difficulty at first, but I don't think I played another FPS game without X360 controller since then. And yes, one important thing is that you can play it on a couch, or in your favorite comfortable chair, not at the desk you've been sitting at all day. Edit: also, using keyboard to text while playing is more like dancing while reading. I'm glad that we have voice chat or contextual action menus for that.

Using controller in FPS is just a skill. Unless you're a competitive/pro player, you'll do fine, e.g. in all single player games, regardless of difficulty level. Hell, I used X360 controller in Unreal Tournament 3 matches and still managed to end up in top five. I bet a console veteran who plays e.g. Battlefield every day would still kick my, your, or anybody else's ass here, with a controller, even if we were using a mouse and keyboard.

VR doesn't fix anything. It makes people sick, and PR-wise we're getting back to the gamer-nerds-with-weird-gadgets era. Until they manage to get something like hololens fully working with games, we're going nowhere. Right now it's just successful marketing for a niche audience. Installing a game could easily be a nightmare in 90s and early 2000s too, where you had to install a game from disc, then it would crash, you had to find a reason why, maybe search for a patch, then maybe for 3d accelerator/GPU drivers or some additional libraries, and then maybe, after additional hour or two spent managing your game, you could finally launch it. Thanks to Steam and its model borrowed from Xbox Live/PSN, I haven't had that problem for over 10 years. I download a game which is already being installed on my HDD, it installs all additional libraries on the first launch, and I'm playing it. And all my saves ale in the cloud, so I don't have to dig in the folders or back them up e.g. when I want to reinstall my system. When I have like 2 hours in the evening I can spend playing, the time I save on that matters a lot. And it wasn't consoles that limited the look of the game, as much as CD/DVD capacity. You had a bit better look on PC because of the higher resolution, but assets were limited to publisher's decision on how many discs the game would be shipped on. That was dropped later on, when "play from DVD" feature stopped being one of the priorities for the devs.

Yeah, I'm not 15 anymore, and I spend most of my working time in front of a screen. So yeah, spending even more time in front of a monitor is tiresome, and rapid mouse movement adds to that. All those improvements I mentioned are UX/UI things, so something impacting players in much more visible manner. And it began roughly with X360/PS3 era. Unified CPU architecture came with XOne/PS4, and players won't care about such things much, as long as games look good and have stable framerates.

GfWL was awful, but Steam got to the point where it made PC gaming as easily accessible as in Xbox/Playstation dashboard. And that's a good thing. I can't remember the last time when I thought about downloading all the necessary patches or drivers for a game, or to restore my backed-up save files. Steam does it all for me, so I don't waste time for that. Also, console games make PC hardware usable for longer. If you have a strong CPU/mobo/RAM combo, you can buy new GPU every 3 years, and you're good for a long time. I also love that there is controller support for 99% of games that come out now. Unless you're making a flight sim (or an e-sport game), you don't need all keyboard keys for controls. Controllers are more comfortable to use for longer time, and the camera movement isn't so jerky with analog controls, so I can easily play for 2-3 hours straight without eye fartigue. All of this is a result of unification of standards that came from the console world.

It's kind of appriopriate to post news about the two in one post, as both titles are potentially a development hell vaporware I'd still vote on HL2ep3 over SC.

Not really. Compare it to the 90s and early 2000s, where people were able to make multiple maps on their own. That still applies to e.g. Thief community, where people can still release something like a 12-mission campaign. In modern titles, even with fully-fledged editor or SDK, you rarely see a custom level, map or a new quest. All you get for Fallouts and Elder Scrolls is gameplay tweaks, better textures, character models and such. That's because communities are much more fragmented, and because games got too complex for one person to handle.

Also, games got much more complex, and golden days of big PC-oriented modding communities are gone. It's not like there'd be 10 animation programmers who would magically step in and volunteer to fix facial animations.

The thing is, Valve doesn't need to revive Half Life as a franchise. They're not desperate. They have tons of money from Steam and shitty Steam Greenlight / Direct games. HL is a cult franchise from late 90s / early 2000s. Its target demographics would now be considered either too "hardcore" or too sparse, so why even bother? Too much time has passed, and the game's no longer relevant. And they'll never meet the huge expectations. They'd have to come up with something new and groundbraking, or at least some kind of reimagining, like new Wolf or Doom. And even that would be treated as "abandoning core values" by older audience.

It's good that they didn't make it. With all the expectations, it would be Duke Nukem Forever all over again.