Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I was reading an article about Fallout 3 on 1up.com when I came across the following question and answer, and it had me up in arms.

“1UP: You’ve mentioned that the game will have multiple endings, perhaps as many as a dozen. Without giving away any spoilers, can you explain the sorts of things that will affect which ending the player reaches? For example, will conversations affect the outcome of the game, or is it primarily larger-scale, world-shaking actions?

EP: We went back and forth with the impact of dialogue on the character, and ultimately decided we didn’t want to penalize or reward the player for carrying on a conversation. What you say and how you say it will certainly affect how NPCs react to you, and whether or not they’ll give you quests, but not the ending of the game. [That] really depends on some of the big decisions you make during the course of the game, as well as your karma. And your karma changes based on your actions. So [if] you destroy Megaton [a city built around a supposedly inert atomic bomb], your karma plummets, so that will certainly affect the ending. But there are other moments too, key moments during the game, that greatly determine which ending you get. “

So basically, this means that all the times that you had a chance to talk your way out of a situation in the first two Fallout games is gone. This is a big SPOILER alert, so if you have not played the first Fallout, go to the next paragraph. In the first Fallout, you could actually beat the main bad guy without firing a shot. If you had built up your speech skill, you could actually talk the super computer into turning itself off. End of SPOILER.

Now, Bethesda has decided that we do not need huge branching discussion trees like this, becaue they do not want the player to miss out on something. I hate to tell them, but the ravenous fans that have been waiting for this game for so long, they remember when Interplay was a good company. Those fans would have researched and played through every possible dialogue tree possible through multiple plays.

And this goes past just the dialogue stuff. This is just the way it was in general. In Fallout 2, there was a way to get power armor and a plasma rifle within 10 minutes of leaving the first village. It took a little patience, but it could be done and you were rewarded for that creativity by having the power to mow down most of the early competition. Innovation allowed for this. Bethesda does not seem to be getting this. I am holding out hope, because they are allowing a third party view, and they have implemented a pseudo turn based battle system.

But some of the smaller nuiances are getting skipped or glossed over, and I think I know why. I think a lot of it goes to the fact that this game is coming to the consoles. And no offense to my console breathern, but I don’t think that a lot of them read through countless pages of dialogue to find a pacifist outcome. They want to see pictures like the one from the top of this article. I was hoping that Bethesda would go the Irrational Games route and set up two development teams, one for each platform, but that is not going to happen. I will wait, and hold out for a final verdict on Fallout 3. They still have six to seven months to change things, so I think that the feedback they see in the forums and on sites like this will help to get some of these things changed.