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was never good
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Apr 19th, 2008, 09:12 PM
Okay, let me back up a bit. When making Max Payne, Remedy decided on a 3rd person perspective because so much of the story involved the character himself that they felt he should always be represented on screen.
In an RPG, you're building a character that is generally intended to be a character separate from yourself and different in many distinct ways. For that reason (and others), the overwhelming majority of RPGs are not in 1st-person perspective - what's the point in making a character different from yourself if you rarely see that character?
In Metroid Prime, the 1st-person perspective was used as an immersive angle when your character's face was reflected off her mask when firing. Prime, however, is not an RPG. Simply playing as someone other than yourself doesn't make a game an RPG. Even if you are destined for great and magical things.
In Oblivion, Bethesda gets halfway around the issue by showing your character in full detail every time you enter your inventory. Also, most of the weapons are based in melee. Ranged weapons and spells significantly alter gameplay from its skills-based roots (as is common for any RPG) and this is a cited problem with the series.
The problem here is that the 1st-person perspective for RPGs is largely a covenant designed for and used exclusively by the elder scrolls series - not as a means of further enriching the genre, but as a deviation, and in deviating it builds interest (you could also call this a gimmick).
Extending this type of gameplay to Fallout doesn't make sense, design-wise. Most of the weapons are ranged and the character itself is a large part of the immersive factor and - as I was saying before - integral to the ROLE-PLAYING aspect of the game. Moving the series from an isometric perspective puts the emphasis on twitch gaming, which is largely separate from basic RPG skills-based mechanics, and wholly different from the system Fallout had in place before.
Their plan to let you pause and select body parts is interesting, but doesn't address all of the problems inherent to their decision to use a 1st-person perspective.
What is more irritating to me than the decision is the reason it was likely made - my money is on someone in corporate saying "Our best-selling games are first-person. Therefore, our next game will be first-person."
Does that address your concern, you pithy fuckbucket.
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