XOXO Ash

A message from Ashley Cheng:

UPDATE:
Dear Blizzard,
Please forgive me.

XOXO,
Ash

Also this:

So about this post. You know the one. I have nothing more interesting really to say about it. I would, however, like to thank Tom Chick’s Fidgit — a blog that never disappoints – for nailing what was really going on (see his last sentence).

The upside to this is that I do have a new forum sig now -

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a guy with a Cars blog that he started last month who is pissed that I forgot it on my Pixar movie list and he’d like more web traffic…

Thanks Killzig for the heads up. I actually spent a part of my morning sending mails and messages for a number of blogs, so they could fix Ashley’s name, everyone was calling him “Chung”. Crazy.

Lead Designer Jumps Into The Forum

Emil Pagliarulo went to the Bethesda Games Fallout 3 forum and left a few enlightening posts, let’s start with armor in Fallout 3:

I know it’s been mentioned in some preview or other that all the apparel (armor and clothing) is a single suit. Headgear is separate. There are a LOT of apparel options, and yes, there are are some pieces of clothing that give stat boosts, so if you decide to wear clothing and not armor, you’ll still get a discernible gameplay benefit.

I’ve seen some apparel/headgear combinations I never wood have imagined (some which involve a big pre-war lady’s sunhat…)

And real time combat:

For us, balancing the combat is very much a “feel” thing. It’s something that takes a ton of playtesting (involving the entire dev team), and determining what feels right for everyone. It’s all about finding that nebulous perfect balance between player skill and character skill.

In run-and-gun, melee feels a lot like melee in Oblivion. If you connect with the weapon, you hit. There’s no die roll to determine that. But your character’s skill, as well as the condition of the weapon, determine the damage done.

In run-and-gun, ranged combat is… I dunno. I’d say it feels a lot like Deus Ex 1. Accuracy is affected by player skill and weapon condition — so if you’ve got, say, a really high Small Guns skill and a perfect condition assault rifle, your aim will be dead on. Low Small Guns and crappy assault rifle, and you’ll miss more. The skill and condition also affect the damage you’ll do.

With most ranged weapons in run-and-gun, you can also go into an aim mode, which zooms you in and increases your accuracy. With Melee and Unarmed weapons, the player will block instead of zooming in.

Based on all the feedback we’ve gotten, it feels really solid now.

Of course, V.A.T.S. is its own story completely…

I’d say for combat, I generally go 70% V.A.T.S., 30% run-and-gun (but that’s different for everyone, really).

Finally level scaling:

I’d say that:

a.) because of the issues some people had with Oblivion’s leveling
and
b.) the fact that we’ve really been focusing on the importance of overall game balance…

…this is something the dev team has come back to time and time again during our playtests, and is something we’re still tweaking. We’ve finally gotten it to a level that we feel really good about.

So basically, if you do the main quest path and adhere strictly to that, there are some areas that are set up to match your level, so you don’t get your ass handed to you unfairly while just naturally playing the game. But certain paths and locations are more difficult, by design.

It’s also the case that the farther you wander out into the Wasteland, the more you’re taking your life into your own hands if you’re not prepared. I mean, hey, a Deatchlaw’s a Deathclaw.

And, um, yeah — no Raiders in Power Armor.

More From Australia

A small preview of Fallout 3 at The Age Blogs:

Unlike most role playing games which feature your character as the star of the screen, Fallout 3 is played from a first-person perspective like a shooter.

Bethesda’s Pete Hines says the first-person viewpoint was chosen because “we felt this was the best way to really immerse the player in this world. You can get up close to all these iconic elements from the original game.”

You can play in third-person as well, but it will be very difficult. “We have this new over-the-should third-person camera,” enthuses Hines, “and it is kinda cool seeing yourself walking around in the vault jumpsuit.”[...]

Hines believes VATS really adds to the game’s dramatic tension.

“I’ve got enough ammo and health packs to keep myself alive, but in the game all that stuff is fairly hard to come by, so we really want to play up that idea like you’re down to your last clip of ammo, you’re low on health, you queue up some moves in VATS, and you’re like: ‘Please, God, let this guy die with this shot…’”

During focus testing sessions, most Fallout 3 players have used a combination of both real-time and VATS combat, keeping VATS for encounters with more difficult enemies.

Mutant Chronicles: Let The Fans Decide

This is off topic, but it has to do with our beloved Ron Perlman and a post-apoc flick, so here it goes, from Quiet Earth:

We’ve been waiting on news of this film for ages now, and it turns out that reports of the film being pretty bad might actually be true. Why? It’s getting a screening at the San Diego Comic Con and Ron Perlman told reporters that they’ll be asking fans “how to make it better”. “We’re trying to get [it] to the marketplace,” Perlman said in a group interview in Beverly Hills, Calif., on June 30 while promoting Hellboy II: The Golden Army. “In fact, we’re going to have a screening of it at Comic-Con [in San Diego on July 26] and allow the fans to sort of have their input as to what the movie does well and what it needs work on.”

Quite unusual, if you live near San Diego maybe you can help out and later gives us a rundown on what happened?