Strictly speaking, you should have been able to oust Maxson from the get go. New Vegas establishes that it’s a tenet of the Brotherhood of Steel Codex (their holy text) that the chain of command must flow linearly (i.e. “the Chain that Binds.”). So the Elder can give orders to Paladins, and the Paladins can give…

I lost a lot of faith in Fallout as an institution after Fallout 3 came out and broke my heart (as a long time fan of the series). I got a lot of that faith back after New Vegas came out and you could actually showed that you could meld the old-style roleplaying with the more action/exploration focus that Fallout 3…

Honestly “so cut content can eventually see the light of day” is why I like DLC as an idea to begin with. I mean, it’s better to offer the thing for sale and let people who think it’s worth the asking price than for it to simply never exist. DLC is also an opportunity for developers to apply lessons they learned…

Claiming that anybody was vehemently opposed to DoAEx3 is pretty much just a marketing move by Play Asia, in order to convince a certain “ethics in games journalism” crowd to buy their game. Nobody really cared about DoAEx3 to begin with, and that’s why it’s not releasing in the U.S.

To me, the best way to go about is to make everybody in the wasteland potentially killable (mostly to dissuade people from using rocket launchers and the like in populated areas) and create significant consequences for killing someone you shouldn’t have killed.

It really is kind of disappointing how over the years Fallout has gone from the video game RPG that was among if not the best at modelling the tabletop experience in terms of variety, negative space for roleplaying, and allowing the player to come up with alternative solutions to something that is an excellent action…

Sadly, you are still saddled with at most four responses at any given conversation juncture. I would gladly sacrifice “voiced protagonist” for the glorious 12+ responses a game like Planescape: Torment gave us. A lot of times polish is at the expense of enabling roleplaying, since roleplaying takes place in the…

For me, “when to buy a new console” has always been a function of price, not game selection. It’s not as though the Witcher 3 isn’t still going to be a good game if I don’t get to it this year, or next year.

I’m honestly surprised that this is news. Considering the quality of user reviews you find on various parts of the internet, having the people who made it review it is probably well-above average in terms of utility as the people who made it have at least played it extensively before writing their review (which is not…

This is absolutely not censorship in any shape, way, or form. That anybody could conceive of it as such betrays a fundamental misconception of the nature of “censorship” on the part of that person.

I have personally never enjoyed his podcasts or his videos, and I object to a great number of his opinions, but I feel terrible about this and I wish all the best to Mr. Bain and his loved ones here. Hope he beats the odds. F*** cancer.

I hate every part of this. Attributes being “what natural talents you have” and skills being “what you have learned to do” is a sensible and fairly realistic way to model these sorts of things. I mean, that someone is really “smart” by whatever standard doesn’t mean they are knowledgeable about science or that someone…

To this day I still have a beacon up for “Wants to play 1 vs. 100”. I plan on leaving it up forever, since, well, I do.

Steam really needs to have the ability to mute curators. Since anybody who cares deeply about “what arbitrary framerate threshold a video game reaches” is someone whose opinion on video games I have no interest in whatsoever.

You’re pretty much only going to be wearing the VR headset when you’re playing games, and “you kind of look silly when you’re playing games” is something that anybody who is really into games got over a long time ago (or just never bothered to consider in the first place.)

I feel like there are some historical topics that while they may not be automatically in poor taste when addressed in a video game, you should at least step very carefully around them if your intention is to actually teach history (and not just to be offensive.)

“Fallout 3 populates its world in a way that feels much more natural.”

I would guess the answer is “mutant.”

This article coming up always upsets me, since New Vegas is far and away my favorite game of the last 15 years.

I used to be the person who thought Ratatouille was the best Pixar film. Now I am the person who thinks Inside Out is the best Pixar film.