Quote Originally Posted by TinCow
I just did. It's called the Living Economy mod. Merchants have fixed amounts of cash and the run out. The more of an item a merchant has, the less money he will buy it for and vice versa (supply and demand). I don't have a link for it because I'm at work, but it should be very easy to find at any Oblivion modding website. It's even built-in to OOO.
That's a new one to me, duly noted.

I don't know the name of them off the top of my head, but there are several built-in to OOO as well. Flora and Fauna something or other? There's a ton of alchemy stuff out there that will mimic any and all game effects.
Mimicing game effects is one thing, sure. I guess my point is that I'd like to see the alchemy system changed entirely back to the way it worked in Morrowind, save perhaps a few interface improvements. I am not aware of anything that does this, and as I said before, if YOU do, please let me know as I would very much like to take a look.


So what's the alternative, removing all voicing from the game?
Happy medium always. Having SOME speech is good and even to be expected. Major cutscenes, major plot events, etc, sure all those definitely I could see having voiceovers. Morrowind did a decent, but by not means perfect, job at this. The key is to make the major points interesting yet not make it so that fan-made content is not going to clash noticably with the original content, and so that new major content can be added in such a manner that it also blends in smoothly. This is where Oblivion falls flat on it's face because of that inherent limitation.

While I certainly wish there was a great deal more text and speech options, I personally think that the text sounds good when it is spoken. I really, really, really want them to add far more text than they did in Oblivion
We are of one mind here, absolutely no disagreement.

, but why does that mean they have to take out the voiced parts to make it mesh?
They don't have to remove it all, just make it far more balanced. See my response to your earlier point above.

This is out of line. My comment was not an attack on you by any means. it was make a differentiation between the content of the game and the game engine. Please re-read my words.

I swear that nothing I am writing is a personal attack on you. Please do not take it that way. If you feel attacked by anything I have written, then I fervently apologize for it. I like responding to your posts because you have a lot of interesting things to say about Fallout and I enjoy discussing them. Your posts have made this a far more interesting thread than simply links to new screenshots.

I doubt we will agree on many aspects of FO3, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy an exchange of ideas in a civil manner. If you don't like discussing this stuff, just say so and I will stop responding to your posts.
Freely given, freely accepted. My apologies for my harsh reaction, but I couldn't think of any other way to take it as such. Perhaps I need to stop spending time in the backroom, there are a lot of very angry people back there.

In my personal opinion (this whole paragraph is personal opinion), some of the original FO gameplay mechanics were good, but some were not so good. SPECIAL was excellent.
Singing the same song we are.

Action points were decent, though I thought the Infinity Engine did a better job with combat.
Meh, Bioware did a good job with making their engines work smoothly in their games. Real turn-based still has it's appeal and place. This is perhaps where we diverge in that I don't think anything other than REAL turn-based works or meshes well with the FO setting.

FO NPC control was horrible. Inventory control was very poor. The dithering effect when behind obscuring structures was inadequate.
Preaching to the choir my friend. In fact you are dead wrong, inventory control was/is mind-numbingly aggravating. And I swear I almost had an aneurism trying to keep Dogmeat alive in the Military base.

The wasteland travel and random encounter systems were primitive and unimaginative.
Partially disagree here. Primitive... meh, by today's standards sure. Unimaginative? Are you nuts?? The Monty Python skits in FO2 had me laughing so hard my wife came in to see what I was making a racket about. The random encounter system worked fine, and in such a manner that it seriously discouraged exploring certain areas unless you'd worked getting better gear and stats. I still got my tookiss handed to me at lvl 21 with HPA near the military base, when I was jumped every 1cm by a full band of super mutes, all carrying chainguns and rocket launchers.

All of these negative things can be improved on radically (in my opinion) and so I think that all of them could be abandoned for completely new gameplay mechanics and actively improve the game. Just because one system worked well doesn't mean another system won't work even better.
Well said, but the other side of the coin is that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." I think this is largely one of my major problems with Bethesda in general, in that they now seem to have a very arrogant mindset that everything they touch will be gold after their Oblivion success, and they can ignore canon and precedent completely because "that previous stuff is old and busted". The sad thing is, they have enough of a fanbase at this point that the game probably will sell just fine if not well, and they'll be sure to buy absolutely glowing reviews from the major sites to "validate" this. I guess the other bit to that is they keep seeming to think they can redefine certain aspects of established genres because their sales successes 'gave them the right to'. I admittedly have not played any of their previous games except Morrowind and Oblivion, but it seems to me and others that they've firmly decided to go down the route of making action games and "deep" FPS's, and abandoning their roots of making more traditional RPG's. This in of itself doesn't bother me at all, as I said it's the fact that they have the arrogance to say "Oh it's definitely an RPG because we say it is" re: whatever product they are making, when in reality it couldn't be further from that. /shrug Take all that as you will and with a requisite amount of salt.