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It's sort of sad that "immersion" became such a buzzword in games and people talk about it like it's an objective thing. When we say that we're "immersed" in a game what we're really saying is that you get really wrapped up in it, just like you can get really wrapped up in a book, or a movie...

I really liked cooking food in New Vegas, because hardcore mode gave you a reason to eat (and it's a fun bit of roleplaying to try to keep all the recipes in your head as you wander the wastes, and think "Do I need agave for that or banana yucca?") The problem with cooking in Skyrim and Fallout...

The specific experiment this guy did was interesting, since it shows how firmly resistant the game is to the idea that a player might not want to shoot somebody when given the opportunity to do so. The game, as it turns out is really strongly resistant to that idea again and again. It's not...

I really wanted to go there and ask what the hell that person thinks roleplaying entails (note that, at this point "RPG" and "roleplaying game" are more or less distinct entities), but then I saw the anime avatar so I knew not to bother.

The weirder karma abberation in New Vegas was when you storm into Cottonwood Cove, kill everybody except the slaves for no karma change, then when you go to loot the tents and the buildings of the items that the recently deceased no longer require you start losing karma. So the game doesn't...

Karma mostly made sense as "general reputation". It made less sense when the presentation was more realistic and more sense when it was more abstracted (after all, if no one sees you steal something, why should you lose reputation) plus Fallout 3 sort of thoroughly deconstructed it since you...

I guess the real question is then "what is Todd Howard willing to go to bat for", since he's (most likely) a real person who thinks some things are better than other things for reasons unrelated to sales. There were some abrupt about-faces in development priorities between Fallout 3 and Fallout...

From time to time though, the creative types are going to have these arguments with the suits and win at least partial victories. The more concrete stuff that the creative types have to point to here the better. So things like "Kotaku said that this was the worst (non-spinoff) Fallout game"...

I think you could do a lot with either full dialogue or just more descriptive terms, and you could double the number of dialogue options with the existing framework just by adding a "hold down a shoulder button" option to bring up 4 new ones. I mean, pretty much everybody rags on Fallout 4's...

I really am curious how Bethesda is going to react going forward to some of the consistent criticisms of Fallout 4. While Bethesda will earn their share of plaudits and awards, it's not as though the praise of their latest effort has been uniform or unblemished and as much as we deride...

I think it sort of depends on how small the neighborhoods in which a thing is consistent are. Like take Batman for example. Bill Finger's Batman, Grant Morrison's Batman, Frank Miller's Batman, and Denny O'Neal's Batman are all pretty different (particularly for stories about the same guy) but...

I just read the title as with a / or with air quotes around "casual". That is to say, that the most elite of games elitists would scoff at as "for casuals." Like we can all recommend fairly old school CRPGs, deep strategy games, Berlin definititon roguelikes, and the like but I read the...

I kinda want to become the Radwolf now.

There's really two things at work here. The first is that there are a lot of people who construct their identities around what they choose to consume; that they are defined by their favorite TV series, their favorite video game company, or just the fact that they like to play video games. So...

Bethesda games are basically the logical extreme of the "power fantasy" aspect of the aesthetic appeal of roleplaying games. Everybody, on some level, enjoys being told that they're great, special, powerful, etc. and RPGs with their combination of advancement and kinda upside down difficulty...

What's sad to me is how many people are going to view this as "a weird stunt" and not the video game analogue of something a lot of tabletop roleplaying game players gravitate to naturally. That is to say, if the party is beset by bandits, guards, etc. a lot of the time the party will try to...

There's a lot of stuff from Van Buren that didn't make it into New Vegas though. Like the whole "inadvertently spreading a plague" and "the other group of adventurers working at cross purposes to your party" alone from Van Buren could support a whole new game that felt very different from New...

Isn't the question posed by the title just a category error? Like which is greater? 3 or {1, 1.5, 2}? Which is better, dogs or cake?

I think dropping the number and going with the subtitle is a good idea, both because numbering your games suggest that they are both connected and sequential. Like "Fallout 5" suggests both that it continues a story from the previous "four" Fallout games and that you should play them all in...

I think a big part of what makes Bethesda games is that they are, for many, immersive because you can go from one thing to do to another thing to do. In this regard, I feel like Skyrim is a a good example as you can flit from killing monsters in a dungeon, to mining, to making jewelry, to...