If by modern you mean Fallout 3 and beyond, then absolutely New Vegas and its DLCs. You will not get anything of a deep story from any of the other offerings except maybe Fallout 4's Far Harbor, but that comes too little too late if you might not tolerate Fallout 4's flaws to get there.
New Vegas doesn't play very well in terms of combat, hello Gamebryo engine, but it has a complex story with many possible directions and endings, and many factions that are much more than black and white. Your character's own dialogue is also far better written compared to Bethesda's offerings and has a lot more agency in the world. I think you will find enough to enjoy there as long as you can get past the hump of some middling (even for its time) shooting.
A lot of that can be owed to the staff similarities between the original Fallouts and New Vegas, Obsidian's strong point, particularly Josh Sawyer as director.
I think that's a lot of what happened back when it released. The most recent Fallout game before then was Fallout New Vegas, and when it comes to a narratively deep RPG that's almost an unfair fight compared to anything Bethesda has put out, so of course Fallout 4 fell very short of that mark.
But it does have successes in other areas. For the first time in, shit, any Bethesda game ever I found the animations and feedback of moment to moment combat actually enjoyable, the junk gathering and upgrading is an extremely addictive loop, and the game does look genuinely pretty and immersive, though the character animations still let it down.
I liked it to the tune of multiple hundreds of hours, myself.
It just depends what you go into it looking for. If you want a deep RPG you won't get it, and I found the story enjoyable, but just all right, but not horrible or anything. I do also really enjoy the gameplay.
The shooting won't change the world, but it is enjoyable, and I really like the scavenging and modification of weapons and armor, and as a motivation for exploration it's great.
I accidentally read an extremely dry Wikipedia page about a British politician until I realized that you meant the TempleOS guy. I agree, very interesting guy. Too many Terry Davises!
Usually smoke weed and play a game, or play bass guitar. Weed does well to prevent me from dwelling on things because it shortens my attention span. Games allow me to escape, and not much keeps me in the moment as much as playing music does, to do it right you must live in the moment, so it helps.
That being said, this is all escapism, which makes me feel better, but never solves any of the things I might be anxious about.
It makes sense. I respect the hell out of the guy for being honest and true of his morals and standing by his community, but I'm sure he knew what he could get into by doing that, and he took the shot anyway. I hope he's just been shuffled around elsewhere and still has a job.
I'm not even the same person you were originally responding to. Just saying, if your goal is to get ideas across it's better to be nice. If you just want to dunk on people and sink to their level, then carry on.
I'm making a general statement, not really representing my opinion in this particular conversation. If you care about what you're standing up for, you should do your best to get it across to people, the perception is as much the fault of the listener as it is on the conveyor of the information and how they do it.
Felt like it was doing just fine to me for how advanced the systems were on a console that was six years old. I do wish you were able to play it, it's an awesome game, it indeed has ambitions that surpass the hardware, but I do think they managed to pull it off, if only by the skin of their teeth.
I loved the way that you had to really think about and understand the world to get around. If I grinded humanity in the Depths and then needed to go to Anor Londo or something, I would stand there and imagine the path I would need to take, and the layout of the world would sort of unfold in my mind's eye in the path that'd I'd have to run to get there, and that was always so satisfying and amazingly grounding and immersive for me. not only the lack of fast travel, but the lack of a map.
It just never happened like that again after that game.
Me too. I know it's a bit of work to set up an alternate mode and method to get to different planets and missions, and I'm sure teams are run really tightly on what gets worked on or not due to paying for whole teams to work, but I do wish they did what they could to future proof it.
A lot of always online games are awesome, have artistic merit, and can be looked back upon later as gaming history, and if they don't preserve these "art pieces" then a huge chunk of gaming history will likely disappear into the ether in 10 or 20 years. It seems a little silly to me that we can go back and play Mario 64, or even Helldivers 1 and see what that was like, but Helldivers 2 will become an inaccessible splash screen, it's a waste of all of the time and work, and even the money that went into making this happen in the first place.
Did the first one really have offline? I played the shit out of it, but I was always connected. Sure, they should implement something similar here, too, but it is genuine work they need to put in to get it there, I'm sure they had to invest that for the first game especially since it was on the Vita.
It isn't arbitrary, though, go on any of the communities that care about the meta war and you'll see people really do keep up with it and enjoy it, they work with each other to focus on the major orders and do a bit of roleplaying at the same time.
I know that you're very anti always online, and I understand and agree that it should be optional, but to say that nothing comes out of it would also be disingenuous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosing_a_Mistress?wprov=sfla1
Learn and be scarred