View Full Version : Fallout 3 discussion
Well judging from the screenshots it looks like they wont.
Just look at the one with the party hats.
It's so Fallout.
LeftEyeNine
04-09-2008, 03:14
What do "visuals" mean to a Fallout fan, a phenomenon dated 1997-98 ?
What do "visuals" mean to a Fallout fan, a phenomenon dated 1997-98 ?
To capture the post-apocalyptic world.
A world blown up and rebuilding from scratch and yet with a sense of humour(even tho that's more of a gameplay issue but places like New Reno and The Den was a bit humour if you look at it in a certain way).
tibilicus
04-09-2008, 14:04
Although I have enver played a fallout game myself learning of the setting and story it seems like a rather interesting universe.
I think if Bethesda could do a really good job of this, thyre RPG's are normally of a very good quality. What is it fallout fansa are actually unhappy about? Bethesda themselvews admit to being huge fallout fans but is it the fear that they might ruine the gameplay/story?
I think if Bethesda could do a really good job of this, thyre RPG's are normally of a very good quality. What is it fallout fansa are actually unhappy about? Bethesda themselvews admit to being huge fallout fans but is it the fear that they might ruine the gameplay/story?
Bethesda has been increasingly cutting back on storyline, plot, and freedom of choice while increasing action. A lot of people feel like their games are slowly losing the qualities that make them RPGs and they are simply becoming FPS games. Oblivion is a good example of this. You can go anywhere you want, whenever you want, but the quests are very linear and there are almost none that can be completed in multiple ways. The only choice you get is do the quest or don't do the quest. There aren't multiple choices to make and multiple outcomes that emerge from those choices. Traditional RPGers believe that choice is one of the most important aspects of the genre. Remove the choices, and it becomes more of a free-form FPS, not much different than Crysis.
Fallout fans are particularly rabid about this, because Fallout 1 & 2 had multiple possible solutions and outcomes to every single quest. The games were very much based on free choice of action in an open world. Fallout fans are afraid that, given Bethesda's track record, they will remove one of the things that they believe made the games so great.
Well Beth has already stated that there will be multiple choices when it comes to quests now.
LeftEyeNine
04-10-2008, 03:48
Well I'm not one of those "oh look they'll ruin it !11" kinda allergic fan.
But this is more and more turning into a despair for me, rather than sn excitement of years behind, after seeing that we can nuke some places with a gun in hand and all flaws already and overly expressed in the "masterpiece of its release date": Oblivion.
The "shiny paint" coat Oblivion had was worn out as time rained over it and people came to see that it was not a RPG after all.
What's more, when something is being done for consoles as well, I'm always skeptical for I have the every right to, since consoles are not computers. They are designed and regarded the fastest way to play a game -which can kill a RPG. The word "fast" is the silver blade for a RPG in the heart.
TB666, if I was only craving to see a worn out feel, there are dozens of FPSs out there. Release a Fallout 3 with its classic isometric perspective with a revised 2D engine, assuring that it has the right story and the ambience, it will sell more than Oblivion. I guess I'm better put now.
tibilicus
04-10-2008, 19:21
Well I'm not one of those "oh look they'll ruin it !11" kinda allergic fan.
But this is more and more turning into a despair for me, rather than sn excitement of years behind, after seeing that we can nuke some places with a gun in hand and all flaws already and overly expressed in the "masterpiece of its release date": Oblivion.
The "shiny paint" coat Oblivion had was worn out as time rained over it and people came to see that it was not a RPG after all.
To be honest I couldn't agree with you more though. It was good till the main quest was over but then really is there any point to me doing side quests? I couldn't become the infamous outlaw thief I wanted to mainly because the AI guards would follow and harass you till you ended up in prison.
(n)
A gamespot preview
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/fallout3/news.html?sid=6189021&tag=topslot;title;1
Sounds nice IMO.
tibilicus
04-11-2008, 00:18
"According to a Bethesda representative, the primary game is shaping up to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours of gameplay"
Quote from that article. Not sure if it's just me but I normally expect a lot more hours worth of gameplay out of a game than that. Fair enough BIoshock was great and I did that in 18 hours but I to got the feeling then that whilst great, the replayability factor was low.
"According to a Bethesda representative, the primary game is shaping up to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours of gameplay"
Quote from that article. Not sure if it's just me but I normally expect a lot more hours worth of gameplay out of a game than that. Fair enough BIoshock was great and I did that in 18 hours but I to got the feeling then that whilst great, the replayability factor was low.
Well pretty sure that there will be downloaded content, expansion packs and as stated in the article, multiple ways of doing things. All these things will add to actual gameplay.
In Bioshock there was only one way of doing things. Sure there was the to kill or not to kill children thing and gave you a different ending but overall that had little to no effect on actual gameplay since the game played out exactly the same.
Hopefully just like in Fallout(and from the sound of things) you will have a reason to go back do things differently.
To be fair, the full quote is:
"According to a Bethesda representative, the primary game is shaping up to have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours of gameplay, though it will offer dozens of hours of other stuff to do for players who enjoy exploring side quests and other types of content."
The way I'm reading this is that the main storyline is 20 hours, but that's without doing any side quests. I definitely wish the main storyline was longer than that, but the total game time looks more like 20 + "dozens" of hours. Sounds to me a lot like Oblivion in its length, with a pathetically quick main storyline but far more to do on the sides.
Short storyline suits me just fine if the replay value is high enough, and it looks like it will be.
Finally, the world is catching up with Fallout. Soon you will be able to buy Rad-X and RadAway (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/10/scirad110.xml).
I don't understand the hate being directed at this game. Better this than nothing! It sounds like a gamer's wet dream to wait for the 'perfect developer' to come along and develop the perfect sequel to one of the greatest rpg series of all time. Besides, I've been dying for a first person Fallout-esque game for years.
Oddly enough I am somewhat comforted by the idea that the same developer who made Morrowind and Oblivion is doing FO3. After all those were extremely moddable games that were massively improved by the fan community. Barring another appearance of underwhelming NPC AI (i.e. Oblivion's shoddy Radiant AI system) modders should be able to do wonders with FO3.
LeftEyeNine
04-15-2008, 23:19
I don't understand the hate being directed at this game. Better this than nothing! It sounds like a gamer's wet dream to wait for the 'perfect developer' to come along and develop the perfect sequel to one of the greatest rpg series of all time. Besides, I've been dying for a first person Fallout-esque game for years.
Oddly enough I am somewhat comforted by the idea that the same developer who made Morrowind and Oblivion is doing FO3. After all those were extremely moddable games that were massively improved by the fan community. Barring another appearance of underwhelming NPC AI (i.e. Oblivion's shoddy Radiant AI system) modders should be able to do wonders with FO3.
I guess that's the basic of your inability to understand.
I say: "Better nothing that this."
And I'm not certainly not looking into a "modding toolkit". I want a game.
Veho Nex
04-17-2008, 02:30
Is beth going to turn into the next EA games. Killing our favorites one game at a time? or will they become the gods of the gaming world, reviving our favorites one game at a time!
I have just returned from a 5 hour session of playing Fallout 3. The NDA I had to sign limits what I can say to an extreme extent, so my comments will be pretty vague. Please don't ask me any specific information about the game, because I cannot divulge it.
As Whacker well knows, I was somewhat skeptical coming into the game. I enjoyed Oblivion, but it could have been much better, and I thought it was a significant step down from Morrowind. Fallout 3 is definitely far more like Oblivion than it is like Fallout 1 and 2. On the surface, this comment will disappoint many people. However, a lot of the flaws in Oblivion have been rectified in Fallout 3. I'm pretty sure I can't say what those are, but Bethesda has definitely learned from a lot of their errors.
That's not to say the game is perfect. There are still many aspects that could use improvement. I can tell you for a fact right now that hardcore NMA-style fans of Fallout will hate this game. However, everyone who liked Oblivion will love it. I think a large number of people who didn't like Oblivion will love it as well, due to the improvements that have been made.
I don't think it's a game that is going to stand up well against some of the classic RPGs of yesteryear, like Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Planescape Tormet, etc. This is not an old-school RPG and you shouldn't expect it to be. However, it will certainly hold its own against the current generation of RPGs. I think it will turn out to be on par with Vampire: Bloodlines. Possibly better, possibly worse. All in all, I think it will be worth buying and I think you'll get your money's worth of entertainment.
Oh, and the modding community is going to go nuts over it.
So have they decided to allow the game to be moddable ??
Because in the last interview they haven't decided yet(would be stupid if they didn't make it moddable, Oblivion is pretty saved thanks to the mods).
I didn't see that interview, could you post a link?
Veho Nex
06-01-2008, 07:54
TC you must have some (Female dog)in connections. Like how the heck did you pull off being able to play the game for 5 hours? and where cause i would rub my knees raw for a chance to play that game for even an hour.
I didn't see that interview, could you post a link?
Well can't seem to find the actual interview but here is atleast one link that shows that I'm not totally insane :laugh4:
Similarly, the extent of mod support has yet to be determined. The company would like to ship a construction kit with the game, but specific plans have not been made.
http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=411&page=4
TC you must have some (Female dog)in connections. Like how the heck did you pull off being able to play the game for 5 hours? and where cause i would rub my knees raw for a chance to play that game for even an hour.
My wife and I are friends with 4 Bethsoft employees, so we were invited to do a 'Focus Test' of an early beta at the Bethsoft offices (in Bethesda, Maryland, outside DC). Essentially they just watch you play the game, take notes on what you do, and ask questions about what you liked, what you didn't like, etc. I think there were about 80 people who took part over 4 days, though there were only about 15 on the day we went. Hopefully we'll get invited back for a second round, if they have one, because it was a fun afternoon.
Veho Nex
06-01-2008, 20:02
Lucky man
Interesting post TC, thanks. So the one main question I have is did you play it on the PC or on the console, and if so can you say which console?
:balloon2:
I'm wary of spilling information I shouldn't, have they announced which platforms its going to be on yet?
[edit] NM, found myself that they had already announced it for PC, Xbox, and PS. All three platforms were being tested when I was there (I think), but there was only one PC setup available when my wife and I got there. Since I have to live with her, I let her have the PC and I ended up on an Xbox.
Veho Nex
06-11-2008, 19:50
If you guys have pre ordered you get a nice music cd and poster. I kinda like the first three songs but the last two kill the whole groove
Love it or hate it Fallout 3 is coming... and here are the new videos you've been waiting for... :2thumbsup:
Teaser
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36040.html
Second Teaser
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36191.html
Trailer
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36202.html
4+ minute in-game walkthrough preview
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36197.html
4+ minute in-game walkthrough preview
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36197.html
I'm not loving it nor hating it. But wow, that gameplay looked awkward, not fun and incredibly unimpressive. You should be able to use that mini nuke to nuke the gameplay of Fallout 3.
4+ minute in-game walkthrough preview
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/36197.html
Looks awesome :2thumbsup:
Especially love the look of the city.
And the gore is always nice :yes:
I'm not loving it nor hating it. But wow, that gameplay looked awkward, not fun and incredibly unimpressed. You should be able to use that mini nuke to nuke the gameplay of Fallout 3.
Dunno about the mini nuke, but that video is an accurate (if very fast) representation of how VATS works.
If there are two things that I love in this world, they are Fallout and Penny Arcade. So I don't quite know how to react when I see two of my favorite things melded together, like some sort of jackalope ... apparently this is going to be a series (http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/vault/pennyarcade-1.html) ...
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/fallout_1_sm.jpg
TevashSzat
07-28-2008, 02:26
Never understood the hype of Fallout 3 since I never played the first 2, but today I read I think the latest issue of PC Gamer which had a feature article on it. I must say, from what I have read so far, it is like S.T.A.L.K.E.R(which I've loved playing), but with alot more RPG style(which I like). I just hope I get a new comp by the time it is released since I'm almost 100% sure that my current comp can't even start it
I highly recommend Fallout 2.
Didn't like the time limit in the first game but that is gone in FO2.
Fallout 2 is like a game unleashed, no rules no nothing.
You can whore yourself, blow children into tiny little bit, do drugs etc.
It has quite alot of bugs and I suggest that you save often since it has a habit of crashing but it's so good.
Bob the Insane
07-29-2008, 20:42
Playing Fallout 2 this weekend again...
Fallout 2 + Fallout 2 Restoration Project + Timeslip Engine Tweaks + Resolution Patch
Playing it on my Vista machine at 1680x1050...
It does crash out occasionally but then it takes about 10 seconds to start up and load a game and you have to save a lot in Fallout anyway, it is pretty deadly for a CRPG...
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=1097
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=1067
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=1138
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=1097
This link for the Fallout 2 Restoration thingy appears to be broken. Try this one (http://www.killap.net/fallout2/expansion/1.2/F2_Restoration_Project_1.2.exe) instead.
This seems extremely Fallout-ish: sealed nuclear reactor-in-a-box (http://earth2tech.com/2008/08/01/hyperions-nuclear-in-a-box-ready-by-2013/) ready to be buried in your backyard!
https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Lemurmania/hyperionburied.jpg
Hyperion Power Generation, a startup building compact nuclear power reactor units that are “about the size of a typical backyard hot tub”, says commercial deployments could start as early as 2013. [...]
Hyperion’s “cartridge” reactor or “nuclear battery” is small, portable and self-contained, which could make it a good fit for remote, rural locations that are disconnected from the power grid. The company says the device can be delivered where it is needed and then sent back to the factory for refueling every five years.
RabidGibbon
08-06-2008, 21:28
Awesome, with these things being hauled around the countryside every five years we'll be living in the wastes before you can say "Would you like a gimp mask with that motorbike sir?".
Man sure hope I get dipped, I'd love to be a super mutant.
Some new gameplay footage (http://www.gametrailers.com/player/usermovies/251221.html). The indoor stuff seems very Stalker-esque to me ... not that that's a bad thing, mind ...
A new movie (http://www.prepareforthefuture.com/), moderately amusing.
Things like this (http://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/2654830) give me real hope:
There're some freaky random things that happen to keep you on your toes - I had a woman run up to me in the middle of nowhere begging for help because she was strapped with explosives. She ran off, not really giving me any opportunity to help her (bug?) and then exploded. Weird.
5 new videos at gametrailers.
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/4758.html (warning, not for youngster).
Looks awesome
Bob the Insane
08-29-2008, 19:17
Nice find...
Some interesting stuff there...
Don't forget to read your Vault Dweller's Survival Guide (http://www.madbrahmin.cz/download/fallout3/manual/Vault%20Dweller%27s%20Survival%20Guide.pdf) (PDF warning).
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/fallout3/news.html?sid=6198382&tag=topslot;thumb;1
The diary of a wasteland survivor, worth a read :yes:.
Apparently, we can regenrate limbs now.
CrossLOPER
10-01-2008, 18:57
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/rpg/fallout3/news.html?sid=6198382&tag=topslot;thumb;1
The diary of a wasteland survivor, worth a read :yes:.
Apparently, we can regenrate limbs now.
I laughed.
I laughed.
:beam:
I wonder if this is just a one time outside game thing, or will there actually be a diary in-game, where we'll find more such write-ups as we finish quests........Freelancer had one, though it was ofcourse a pretty limited kind of thing.
It'll be fun to read, from time to time, how one made progress in the game.
Vladimir
10-03-2008, 18:13
I laughed.
The city on the other side turned out to be the ruins of Bethesda, Maryland. :laugh4:
Kekvit Irae
10-03-2008, 20:16
The city on the other side turned out to be the ruins of Bethesda, Maryland. :laugh4:
I pass through Bethesda each time on my way to Maryland whenever I take a trip up there. :tongueg:
Vladimir
10-09-2008, 14:54
Apparently I'm an idiot and can't send pictures from my phone to my e-mail. They never make it through. Anyway...
Anyone been to the DC metro lately? They've bought more advertising space than Toughbook! My God, it felt like I was in the vault!! ~:eek:
Apparently I'm an idiot and can't send pictures from my phone to my e-mail. They never make it through. Anyway...
Anyone been to the DC metro lately? They've bought more advertising space than Toughbook! My God, it felt like I was in the vault!! ~:eek:
I've heard its all over Metro Center (as usual, the epicenter of WMATA advertising) but there's nothing on my normal route (Vienna -> McPherson). Are they the 'flip-book' style ads in the tunnels like they've been doing on the red line, or just posters in the stations?
Vladimir
10-09-2008, 20:07
I've heard its all over Metro Center (as usual, the epicenter of WMATA advertising) but there's nothing on my normal route (Vienna -> McPherson). Are they the 'flip-book' style ads in the tunnels like they've been doing on the red line, or just posters in the stations?
Dude, you don't understand: I was in the vault.
Yes, a little over dramatic but it was late and I was blown away. Nearly everywhere they could buy advertising space, they did. The only thing missing was a guy walking around in that battle suit thingy. They probably couldn't do that because it would scare people.
I haven't seen any of the neat "flip books", just stationary ads. They dominated at least two stops to include Metro Center. The artwork was of good quality. They're clearly not holding back with the ad money.
Gah! I don't need the temptation to buy a new computer. :wall:
LeftEyeNine
10-28-2008, 04:27
I got candies for the first one to share a review with us, no matter whether brief or detailed.
:smoking:
For some reason it's not being released in India, at all :wall:
8.5 or above out of 10, all over the internet........and I've been going crazy trying to find some store that'll ship to India, but no luck. :(
Anyone here know any shopping site that I can get the game from? I so want this one.......
The_Doctor
10-28-2008, 19:40
For some reason it's not being released in India, at all
Appartly it is because of cultural reasons.
http://www.destructoid.com/fallout-3-release-canceled-in-india-in-light-of-cultural-sensitivities--108734.phtml
http://www.gamingindians.com/2008/10/fallout-3-controversy-india-release-cancelled/
Poor India.:no:
8.5 or above out of 10, all over the internet........and I've been going crazy trying to find some store that'll ship to India, but no luck. :(
Anyone here know any shopping site that I can get the game from? I so want this one.......
Have you tried this place?
http://www.play-asia.com/
I'm an idjit. I bought Fallout 3 through Amazon using gift codes (I have an Amazon Visa that helps defray the high cost of loving books and video games). Anyway, Amazon busts out a new promotion where I could have had the game today, saying all I need to do is cancel my old pre-order and create a new one. Well, if I did that I would be out the forty bucks' worth of free money.
So I gots to wait for normal delivery sometime around Friday. At least I'm not in India.
frogbeastegg
10-28-2008, 21:26
Eurogamer review (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=270173) and retrospective (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=269648).
Other than that, I'm not reading anything. I've been ignoring the previews, the threads, the interviews and all the furrore; I'll play it and see how it stands - or falls - on its own merits.
LeftEyeNine
10-29-2008, 15:52
I've read reviews just like what I expected. I'm definitely nervous about that the reviewers are suffering oh-look-at-those-awesome-gfx-of-Oblivon syndrome. I hope they are not.
http://www.play-asia.com/
Yup tried that, they supply, but not where I live, so I'll have to get it shipped to some bigger city and then have someone send it to me from there.
Looks like that is my only choice though.
Sarmatian
10-29-2008, 20:46
I've read reviews just like what I expected. I'm definitely nervous about that the reviewers are suffering oh-look-at-those-awesome-gfx-of-Oblivon syndrome. I hope they are not.
Don't you know that big gaming site review hype instead of the game. God forbid that some reviewer may actually have an opinion of his own...
Click (http://neocrisis.com/content/view/2903/39/)
CrossLOPER
10-29-2008, 21:15
My roomate got this game yesterday. It's Oblivion with guns, but it's actually pretty fun. Also, Bethesda made a jumping animation, so your character does not just pop into the air like a puppet on strings. Still crashes on closing and V.A.T.S. sometimes goes screwy and just decides to abruptly end and teleport the the player to some random area in the room.
Other than that, I'm not reading anything.
Very wise. I walked into the game pretty much blank, tonight, and I'm really glad I did. There's some stuff in the tutorial level that would have been ruined if I knew about it ahead of time. So far, my verdict is two thumbs up, or three if you've been exposed to a lot of rads ...
Veho Nex
10-30-2008, 06:27
I got both hands up on this game, cause its backed me into a corner of awesome
I wanted to get it for the PS3 but the above link just made me decide not to do that, unless I read elsewhere that these bugs were a fault of the reviewer or have been fixed in a patch. :thumbsdown:
Kekvit Irae
10-30-2008, 19:58
I'm going to echo everyone and say that the more I play it, the less it feels like Fallout and the more it feels like Oblivion with washed out colors. You can even buy a house in Megaton and decorate it from a nearby merchant.
I'm going to echo everyone and say that the more I play it, the less it feels like Fallout and the more it feels like Oblivion with washed out colors. You can even buy a house in Megaton and decorate it from a nearby merchant.
Yep, and that's not the only house either. Like in Oblivion, there are multiple in different places that are of varying quality and size and which can be upgraded in various manners. The one I got while beta-testing even came with its own barber robot that would change my haircut at will. :laugh4:
Crandaeolon
10-30-2008, 20:43
Hmm. Endless gray and brown containers strewn in a landscape of gray rocks, brown vegetation and grayish brown corridors is not kosher. Bad Bethesda! Bad!
Yes, finding secret stuff is fun. Good job. Well done. But, y'know, it doesn't HAVE to be because the containers containing said secret stuff are hidden by camouflage. Also, after reaching level 6, I have this nagging suspicion that everything from loot to enemies is still scaled by player level... never heard of status quo balancing, eh, Bethsoft? Hmm?
Oh well, those are relatively minor niggles. We'll see! ~;p
The_Doctor
10-30-2008, 21:27
What do you do with a house?
Sarmatian
10-30-2008, 22:57
Basically, people just shouldn't think of it as a Fallout 3, but Oblivion in post-apocalyptic setting. That way it can still be an enjoyable game... Yes, it will be hard for die hard Fallout fans to do that, but hey...
johnhughthom
10-31-2008, 00:37
Basically, people just shouldn't think of it as a Fallout 3, but Oblivion in post-apocalyptic setting. That way it can still be an enjoyable game... Yes, it will be hard for die hard Fallout fans to do that, but hey...
That's how I've been intending to look at it, have to wait until tomorrow to play though. Wish I still lived in the States at times like this...
LeftEyeNine
10-31-2008, 02:10
Basically, people just shouldn't think of it as a Fallout 3, but Oblivion in post-apocalyptic setting. That way it can still be an enjoyable game... Yes, it will be hard for die hard Fallout fans to do that, but hey...
That means the end of the Fallout.
****.
Kekvit Irae
10-31-2008, 02:16
What do you do with a house?
The exact same thing you can do in Oblivion: store stuff, take screenshots, upgrade the decor, and eventually forget about once you get bored.
LeftEyeNine
10-31-2008, 02:56
Oh, and a decoratable house, yes. Fantastic.
Veho Nex
10-31-2008, 03:06
I love the fat man and the mini nukes, byfar the most kick a thing ive ever done in the game?
Warning Dont open if you havent faced any major bosses yet
Who has fought the mutant behometh yet
Veho Nex
10-31-2008, 09:03
I beat it, took me from 3pm to 1 am with a one hour break. I only did two side quest though. Time to go back and do it on an evil karma now.
Ja'chyra
10-31-2008, 12:17
I beat it, took me from 3pm to 1 am with a one hour break. I only did two side quest though. Time to go back and do it on an evil karma now.
Well done, but i have to ask what's the point of rushing through the main quest and missing out on most of the game?
Bob the Insane
10-31-2008, 20:51
Wow...
I was off Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday playing the game from about 3pm Tuesday to 2am Wednesday, 9am Wednesday to 1am Thursday and finally 9am Thursday to 11pm Thursday...
I have not finished the main quest and in fact I am not sure how far along I am...
I have been to the Jefferson Monument and listen to my fathers tapes telling me where he headed next.
I have not been systematicaly exploring or anything, but rather just getting destracted on my way to a core quest location. The nature of the central story, searching for your father, really plays along with this well. You get to decide how urgent it is for you personally. No one is artifically pushing you along the path with "hurry must save the world now!" as was the case in Oblivion and Mass Effect...
My personal opinion is that it really is a perfect story (so far) for this style of open ended gameplay. You rush out searching for your father but keep getting distracted and and having you priorities tested by what you see. It is a personal journey so the decisions you make and the diversions you take all fit in neatly to the unfolding story...
To me it all really does feel very "Fallout(tm)" in style, content and structure, the Wastland does feel pretty big (I know technically it is not but there is no car and no horse to get around on so it seems like it is). The fast travel works nicely once you have found a location but can't be abused. No fast travel in combat or if you are overloaded with stuff.
One thing that is a bit of a distraction is the music, sometimes it is fine and sometime is sounds just like Oblivion with some extra echo and metalic twangs.
They do have kids in the game but you can't kill them. They react to being attacked and everyone else will come after you but they are essentially immune to injury. Personally I am fine with this, better than not having them in the game at all.
Basically I have the game on my PC, all graphics maxed out and a good resolution and it looks great. Utterly fantastic? No, but very good... The animation is not as bad as has been made out and the AI is decent enough. The intelligent enemies seek cover, change to an approriate melee for the range, pick up better weapons if available or if you have shot their weapon out of their hands. They even run away sometime... This on top of reasonable non-combat activities too...
For my best comparison for how combat works and the general gameplay think back to System Shock 2. Only much prettier, with people you don't have to fight and on the ground. Where as Bioshock took the Survival Horror aspects and built and intelligent shooter, Fallout 3 kept the somewhat awkward RPG/FPS hybrid combat and filled in all the other RPG baggage of NPC's and locations and such.
If you keep in your head that this is an RPG you will enjoy the game more. I recall one event that really got in into the open nature of the story. I was in Big Town and I was talking to the inhabitants. I had rescued some of them and an attack was coming. I was speaking to them as I waited. One of them, Buttercup, started flirting with me and I finished the conversation meaning to talk to her again later. The attack commenced, not a particularly hard one but it was early in the game and both you and the citizens are poorly armed. The the defense went well and the enemy put to flight. NPCs were cheering and very happy. I was speaking to them and soaking up their praise and noticed Buttercup was not there. I went back and found her dead, killed by a random grenade toss I think. I found myself upset for a moment and my finger hovered over F9 (quickload for you 360 and PS3 players). But then I thought better of it and decided to let the story play out, I would save them all on another playthrough (or kill them and steal there stuff maybe). But that momentary pang really brought home to me how much I was buying into the story and my character's role in it...
It is just a computer game, a FPS/RPG hybrid (with more RPG than FPS) and yet, I still feel sad about buttercup. Dogmeat is gone too. I am a hero to the helpless and a deadly storm of violence to the evil and oppressive. But even given those choices, difficult decisions come up. In one case I have now, you know the situation will end badly if you walk away, but the "good guys" are proposing the violent solution and the "bad guys" simply want to be left alone/defended. What is the choice for the boyscout hero type??
I have been rambling about my experiences with the game rather than reviewing it really. My main point, if you like RPG and are not violently opposed to FPS you will like this. And it looks pretty nice...
Veho Nex
10-31-2008, 21:52
I cried in the end, because I did good karma ending with self sacrifice.
And bob you're about 1/4 done, you've got a long way to go.
And the reason i rushed, is cuz with oblivion I wouldnt rush then I would get too sidetracked and so I've never actually beaten oblivion.
Kekvit Irae
11-01-2008, 10:25
As much as I love LittleBigPlanet, I find myself playing Fallout 3 more. :questiong:
I'm enjoying wandering around the area of DC and seeing what sights I remember from living there.
Currently I'm trying to figure out a way to reach Rivet City, without much success no thanks to blocked roads and super mutants with rocket launchers.
Kekvit Irae
11-01-2008, 14:40
Is it wrong to giggle like a madwoman when I shoot a frag grenade out of a charging super mutant's hand, resulting in its one-hit demise?
:loveg:
Is it wrong to giggle like a madwoman when I shoot a frag grenade out of a charging super mutant's hand, resulting in its one-hit demise?
No, Kek; in fact that is the essence of everything right in the world.
I went with my usual Fallout diplosnipe, with an emphasis on energy weapons. I'm not having a hard time finding ammo -- anybody else gone with either energy weapons or big guns? How's your mileage?
Oh ya! Oh ya! Just got off the phone with my cousine in Cardiff, he's got a copy and he's sending it to me by mail :jumping: :dancing: :birthday2:
Kekvit Irae
11-01-2008, 16:12
I haven't played with Energy Weapons yet, but I keep collecting a load of energy cells from fallen robots and other places, and a laser pistol is available early on. Plus, if you complete a certain android quest, one of the possible rewards is a REALLY nice plasma rifle.
Crandaeolon
11-01-2008, 16:43
Went with big guns, had slight problems at the beginning but found a flamer quite early, and then there's Rock-It Launcher (which has practically infinite ammo) available from Megaton. Rivet City has a steady supply of most kinds of ammo, getting there is not that hard if you aren't afraid of a few rads - just swim in the river to avoid the super muties.
Veho Nex
11-01-2008, 23:11
Well there are two things you should know. No matter which you chose, to blow up to un arm, the bomb in megaton all the people there will be wandering around or in the underground.
Veho Nex
11-02-2008, 06:51
I like the music. A bongo bongo bongo! No no I dont wanna leave the congo
Kekvit Irae
11-02-2008, 08:49
The first really major glitch I found (other than the game freezing up on me):
In Big Town...
When I finished the Big Trouble in Big Town, I got the option to help people defend against the super mutants. Two of which were [SCIENCE] Fixing the robots in the junkyard and [SMALL GUNS] Help train the townsfolk in firearms. Unfortunately, every time I try to fix the robots, they go missing. There are no robots to fix! Not really a gamebreaking bug for me, since I could reload and choose the Small Guns option, but if you don't have an autosave or save before you made your choice, you are hosed as the townsfolk will stand around in the junkyard complaining about what I need to do.
It annoys me so badly to see a good quest gone buggy.
LeftEyeNine
11-02-2008, 15:09
It was a nice decision to edit the title. Thanks.
frogbeastegg
11-02-2008, 15:52
I completed Dead Space this morning. Fallout 3 will be go in a bit.
I'm aiming for a high intelligence, luck and agility character with small guns, barter and repair tagged. The tonne of skill points I'll get from high intelligence will be used to bump those skills plus some conversational skills, with science and lockpicking a bit further behind. Brains over brawn ... but with a pistol in case people get rough.
Kekvit Irae
11-03-2008, 06:58
I take back what I said about Oblivion-styled scaling. The random encounters you face in the Wasteland ARE scaled to your level. I'm currently level 14 and I'm seeing lots of super mutants and giant radscorpions now when I used to only see molerats and crap when I was a much lower level. THANKFULLY the individual enemies themselves do not scale. Running into DC at level 3 will get you murdered faster than you can say "War never changes," while plowing through slavers in Paradise City at level 14 is a cakewalk.
I'm aiming for a high intelligence, luck and agility character with small guns, barter and repair tagged. The tonne of skill points I'll get from high intelligence will be used to bump those skills plus some conversational skills, with science and lockpicking a bit further behind. Brains over brawn ... but with a pistol in case people get rough.
Meh, Barter early on isn't all that useful. You may want to tag Speech instead. The experience you get from a successful speech check is extremely useful for low levels. I'd hold off on Barter until you get to around level 5 or so when your inventory is bursting with items to sell.
If Speech isn't your thing (after all, you can always pick up Lady Killer/Black Widow at level 2), you can replace it with Science or Medicine. Sneak is useful if you plan on playing a stealthy character since the first hit you do with any weapon (read: classic sniper archtype) while [HIDDEN] will be an automatic critical with bonus damage. Often enough to kill someone. You can also automatically shut down robots with a certain perk later on.
Sarmatian
11-03-2008, 12:46
Even though I don't like where Bethesda has taken Fallout universe, I must admit FO3 is a very decent game. Of course, it's hard not to compare it to its predecessors and in that regard it is the worst in the series by far. As a standalone game, as a post-apocalyptic FPS/RPG it's okay I think. There are occasional moments where the game will live up to its predecessors and bring a smile to a face of an old FO1/2 fan, but those moment are rare...
I've tried playing with a high INT/CHA character with speech, science and repair skills tagged and it was pretty much impossible. The opportunities to use those skills were rare and pretty much any encounter in the wastes forced me to reload. It's very hard to escape, especially if you've encountered multiple opponents with guns. If you do manage, you'll probably lose most of your HP in the process. Tagged skills aren't that important since they improve at the same rate as all other skills, basically you just get a one time bonus of 15 points when you tag a skill.
CHA/STR/END/LCK are rarely useful. There are not many opportunities to use CHA. With each point in strength you gain +5 to how much you can carry (with 5 STR ist's 200, with 6 it's 205 - not that much of a difference) and a bonus to melee weapons damage (which you will rarely, if ever use, except on critters not worthy of wasting ammo). END may be more useful, giving you more HP but it's not crucial. LCK governs only your chances of a critical hit, but there's a perk later on which gives better results.
Go for perception, agility and intelligence, that's my advice.
And, the stupidest thing from Oblivion is back - you have to constantly repair your weapons. I mean, there may have been some logic behind it in Oblivion, where there were no firearms or energy weapons, but it still was silly to have my sword deteriorate after 5-10 hits. Of course, it's even sillier to have your gun deteriorate after 50 shots have been fired. It has deteriorated and it now fires worse bullets? :wall:
Better then Oblivion, but in most ways, the only connection with old Fallout games is the name.
Basically, people just shouldn't think of it as a Fallout 3, but Oblivion in post-apocalyptic setting. That way it can still be an enjoyable game... Yes, it will be hard for die hard Fallout fans to do that, but hey...
Guess I can add it to my, "maybe when it's in a bargain bin for 10-20 bucks" pile then.
I'm sure you all have been waiting with bated breath for my post here. /dripping with sarcasm
So crusty cranky ol' Uncle Whacker decided to give it a go, one of my unfortunate friends decided to buy the game, Collector's Ed. Went over to his joint on Sunday and played it for about 2-3 hours. It is exactly what I thought it would be.
What it isn't: Fallout. An RPG (by any stretch of the imagination).
What it is: A "semi-deep" post-apocalyptic FPS with some hopeful potential, once the modders fix it. In other words, Oblivion with Guns.
Let's start with the bad. Bethesda has essentially done exactly what they were expected to do with the Fallout IP. They utterly gutted SPECIAL and the skills system. The vast majority of the "perks" I see on the list are basically related to pumping skills. Characters can become "god" and do any task provided they pump the right skill, just like what Beth did with the Elder Scrolls games. There is NOTHING turn-based about the combat whatsoever, VATS is basically a cheat bullet time mechanism with an annoying "death cam" mode that can't be turned off. Furthermore, the way they did the actual gun mechanics were just horrible. Apparently the "cone of fire" range that bullets can travel off of the crosshair reduces as you put points into the relevant skill, but it does not affect damage. They should have done the exact opposite and reversed those two. If I'm going to play an FPS, I expect my shots to go on target minus recoil and modifiers, like movement (Crysis did this great). Repair... ugh, I can't stand how they implemented the whole repair skill, won't get too deep into it. The interfaces are utterly rotten, but hopefully something like btmod will be released that will fix much of this. Radiant AI makes a great return as well, still waiting for the "I saw a radscorpion the other day!" conversation. Level scaling is also in, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as it was in Oblivion. Another thing that I felt is far too contrived was the setting and landscape. Things seemed far too washed out and drab, FO1 and 2 were actually rather vibrant games and had varied landscapes and scenery. Some areas were rather washed out and drab, like the "dead" cities and the raw desert. Other areas were rather colorful, like the settled places, brotherhood compound(s), LA, Reno, etc etc etc. I also think they did a poor job with strewing random debris and junk all over the place, just to force the landscape to be broken up. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not advocating absolute "realism" when it comes to landscape from an atomic attack aftermath, but the whole thing doesn't sit well with me how they did it. Normally this kind of stuff doesn't bother me unless it's significantly off kilter in my eyes.
Now let's finish off with the good stuff. Humor. Oh man did they get some of the good parts right. The signs out in front of Vault 101 after you exit were great, "Let us in mother:daisy:ers!!" The Deputy Weld bot got a few chuckles out of me, as did some of the other similar model robots in the subways. "This. Is. Now. A. Live. Fire. Zone. Please. Take. Cover. Thank. You. For. Riding. With. Metro. Railways." Gotta also admit to taking some pleasure in the chunky gibs that sometimes result when you kill people or critters. Lastly, I think this game is salvagable, just like Oblivion. Vanilla Oblivion is total garbage, the wow factor lasts for about 5 hours, give or take, and then one realizes how shallow the game really is. Mods completely and totally saved that game and gave it SOME depth and variety that was much lacking. I think the exact same can be said for FO3, mods can save it.
Final verdict. It's not Fallout, and it's not an RPG at all. What it IS, is an FPS that might actually be rather fun if one can get past the "what it's not" parts and the community fixes it. I'll revisit it probably after Xmas when I'm going to guess that the modding tools will have been out for awhile and folks have had some time to work on it, and we'll see what happens from there.
Got it last Friday and my wife and I were playing a good deal over the weekend. It was interesting for us to play as we had both done an Alpha test of the game and there were obvious differences between the release version and the Alpha. For the purposes of this review, note that I am playing on Hard difficulty (will probably play on Very Hard for all other replays).
First off, like others have said, it is not Fallout. Do not go into this game expecting to play another Fallout game. You won't get it and you'll be very annoyed. It is far, far more like Oblivion than it is like Fallout. It is definitely Oblivion with Guns. However, it is also decent fun and I predict that it will be a multi-replay classic after the modders have some time to dig into it.
The Good:
Atmosphere. No, it's not Fallout, but it's still pretty cool. The post-apocalyptic atmosphere is excellent. I actually don't mind the random clutter strewn about the wasteland, as it adds greatly to the feeling of the place. It's all so... depressing... that it really is a monumental event when you finally find some small town, even if it's only got 3 people in it. Finding a trader or a caravan is often a welcome sight, and the bleak loneliness of the place is wonderfully accentuated by the Galaxy radio station, which is a simply superb background. I get actively unhappy when I move outside of its broadcast range.
The World: When I was told in Alpha that the game world was actually a good deal smaller than Oblivion's, I was VERY disappointed. I thought Oblivion was too small as it was, so I expected to be extremely unhappy with the size of the FO3 world. Not so. I don't know quite what it is about the game that achieves this, but the world seems very large. Getting from one side to the other is difficult without fast travel (which I hate and use exceedingly rarely) because you'll encounter all kinds of hazards on your way. For reasons I won't explain due to spoiler, the town of Megaton is no longer accessible to me. This has turned out to be a major inconvenience, as it was a very central location and losing it as a safe-harbor where I could rest, repair, and refill my supplies is a blow to my ability to travel the wastes freely.
The Quests: All in all, not bad. So far, most are far more creative than the usual FedEx style quests of so many games. What you have to do and where you have to go is not always clear, there are usually multiple ways to solve them, and the rewards can be interesting and unique. If there's one complaint, its simply that there aren't enough of them. For example, Tenpenny Tower is a major building with easily a dozen unique named NPCs and probably more than that. However, with the exception of one quest that is related to the Tower but is really a Megaton quest, there is really exactly one quest at Tenpenny. What gives? I expected to be working out of there for a long time, but I finish my single job and that appears to be it for the rest of the game. Such a waste.
The Difficulty: Pretty decent. Surviving can be really hard, especially at low levels. Ammunition is very hard to obtain at low levels, and I have found myself in serious problems due to being stranded in the middle of nowhere with next to nothing left to throw at the enemy. DC itself is absolutely terrifying and my first attempt to penetrate it had to be aborted due to my inability to cut my way through all of the baddies along the way. I am now about level 10 and have just finally started getting enough ammo to serve my needs by buying and stealing every last bullet I see in the game and by carrying multiple weapons at all times so that I can use all the ammo types. The 0 weight on all ammo types may be absurdly unrealistic, but it's necessary for gameplay, so I'm grateful they implemented it. For the record, I LOVE hard games and for that reason will be bumping the difficulty up to the top level on my second play through. Interestingly, the difficulty seems greatly reduced from what it was in the version I tested, at least in the intro areas.
Load Times: Unbelievable. Seriously. Oblivion took forever to load up. FO3 not only loads the game in blazing fast speed, it also loads saved games unbelievably fast. I don't know what they did to optimize the engine, but it's amazing. Whichever programmers achieved this deserve a promotion and should be coveted by any Dev in the industry.
The Average:
Dialog: No where near as good as Fallout, but far better than Oblivion. The conversations are still relatively short, but at least they make sense and the response options have enough variety to allow you to roleplay in a basic manner. From what I read, I expected little humor in the game, but I actually find a great deal. The game is consistently amusing to me, and in an actual comic manner, not in the cheap FO2 pop culture style. The Mechanist/AntAgonizer amused me about as much as I've ever been amused by a game.
Stats/Skills: BethSoft shoe-horned the FO system into Oblivion. It works fine on its own, but it's nothing like FO except in appearance. Still, the system is pretty decently balanced so far and I cannot be a jack of all trades. I always find myself wishing I had higher stats/skills in various areas and deciding where to put my skill points every level is agonizing. I have ended up pumping my Intelligence up just to get more skill points. I may end up re-evaluating this towards the end of the game though since I can't tell how high a level I'll be by then. It's possible I will end up a master at everything, though while that's bad from a game perspective, it's actually on-par with the FO series, since you could become a master of everything in that eventually anyway. Most of the Perks are useless, though that's also very much in the FO style.
Combat: It works. It's not remotely like the AP system in FO and I still don't understand why they tried to market it like that. It's not great, and it's not horrible. VATS works, but it's a gimmick. All advertising that attempts to make it sound like turn-based combat in any manner is a bald-faced lie. It's nothing of the sort and shame on whoever decided to try and portray it as such.
The Bad:
The Interface: I complained about this to my BethSoft friends before and they were convinced it would be fine this time around. Apparently I need to rant at them some more. The interface is abominable. First, you can't bind all keys. The exit Pipboy key cannot be changed (even though the enter Pipboy key can, someone please explain this to me) and the VATS keys cannot be changed. Not only is this horribly inconvenient, it's also apparently an intentional design for reasons I cannot fathom. There is also no button to switch weapons, such as the scroll wheel. Even Oblivion had that! You also have to do EVERYTHING through the Pipboy, which is horrible because the font is too large, the screen size (of the Pipboy) is too small, and the whole interface is just difficult to navigate. Major, major issues on this whole area. A FO3 version of BTMod cannot come soon enough.
Repairing: Simply a pain in the butt. I don't mind repairing in concept, but it's horribly tedious to do in the game and items deteriorate way, way too quickly. Whoever thought the current repair system was a good idea needs to be shot. This will be one of the first mods I download.
No Custom Radio Stations: I specifically asked for this when I tested the game and while I never expected BethSoft to pay any attention to my request, I'm annoyed they haven't allowed this. The music is one of the best parts of the game, but it gets repetitive quickly. I want to be able to drop new songs into the existing radio station rotations and I want to be able to drop MP3s into a folder for my own custom radio station playlist. This should be absurdly easy, since it's already possible for the background music. I bet they'll release this as a Downloadable Content and make me pay for it.
Summary:
A flawed game with huge potential. Take a look at the list of things under The Good and you'll see why. They've essentially built a game that got all of the critical aspects right. They've built a world that is fun to play in and it's packed full of places to go and people to kill. Modders will have a field day with this game and I expect it will probably end up ranking well above Oblivion on most peoples favorites list. The problems with the game are annoying, but not crippling, though I am now convinced that the day BethSoft understands how to build a game interface will be the same day Molerats land on the moon.
Oleander Ardens
11-03-2008, 16:26
I just wanted to thank my fellow Orgahs for their various enlightening reviews. Seems that I will postpone the aquisition and hope that patches and modders transform and improve this game as or more than they did with Oblivion. :bow:
Bob the Insane
11-03-2008, 20:01
I have to disagree a little, it is not simply an FPS. It is not simply an RPG either but rather an FPS/RPG hybrid in the style of System Shock's mechanics.
I also have to disagree with the description of VATS as well. Bullet time traditionally has you still in control of the shooting while time slows done. In VATS you completely had over the shooting to the RPG elements of the game. You nominate targets and the dice are rolled in the background and you see the results. I got my character to lvl 20 well before finishing the game and thanks to this, some bobble heads and books I maxed out small arms and energy weapons. Now I am a decent enough FPS player myself, but my guy totally rocks in VATS. Long range headshots, two shotting Deathclaws (which are still scary and dangerous to a lvl 20 character in power armor if allowed to get close) and such. Things that very difficult to do in normal FPS mode.
I am a long time Fallout fan (always have them somewhere on my PC) I do see as above the potential there. The artwork in the game is very true to the style seen in the orginial games. Cars, chairs, tables, computers, buildings, power generators and so on are all very much in the correct style.
The story telling is a little off though, good enough but not the same level of quality as in the originals. They have fallen into the oldschool traps for the GM in a PnP RPG. You have the big open world but have to artifically limit your players interactions to stop them breaking the story. It even drops into direct railroading of events at at least one point. The end of the story feels far to rushed as compared to the begining. It is a shame because by the time the story has unlocked some cool stuff it is starting to shove to in the back to complete the central quest. I really can see how this game can be completed very quickly if you chose too.
It is true that the bear bones of something that could be amazing exist in the game.
frogbeastegg
11-03-2008, 21:57
LCK governs only your chances of a critical hit, but there's a perk later on which gives better results. .
That's not quite right. For every odd point in luck you gain +1 to all of your skills. The perk adds on to what you already have, so if you have 9 luck and the perk you get a 14% chance to crit - awesome!
My character has 9 luck. I'm critical hitting people's heads with my crappy pistol so much that I feel overpowered. I don't have the perk yet; I'm only level 4.
After the unanticipated high of Dead Space, Fallout 3 is proving to be something of a low. That’s a disappointment; I have purposely kept away from all the hype and panning of this game, and overall done my best to ensure I come to it with nothing except the willingness to see it as a game in its own right. That should have made it easier for it to astonish me.
I've played for around 3 hours, reached level 4, done a few quests and a risky raid, and got my own house.
Character building. SPECIAL is still a good system. I like it. The perks are unbalanced, and some are clearly far better than others. A perk which gives me a total of +10 skill points to pre-set skills, or one which gives an extra point of intelligence which will add up to an extra 18 skill points if I take it ASAP? Tough choice, I do not think. I'm getting 19 skill points per level plus 3 more from the perk I picked on reaching level 4; I doubt I will have problems boosting up the skills I want, especially now I have cut science from the list (see below). I feel a wee bit uber, and mostly like that.
Difficulty. I'm playing on normal. I didn't min-max my character, didn't create a combat heavy build, didn't even do much reading about to see what builds are particularly good. I'm pwning the world. Scarily so. Doubly scary since I have seen quite a few people grumbling about how hard the game is at that level. I have 4 END and crappy starter level equipment and I still manage to survive an encounter with 6 gun-totting nutters without using a healing item or any sort of booster drugs. Not only that, I can then survive fighting them again when the game regenerates them in while I'm scavenging.
Combat. I like VATS, not a lot but like all the same. It works; it's different; it lends some feeling of individuality to the game (see later point). Remove VATS and it's all terribly fast and terribly twitchy. Add in the way stats control whether you hit or not, and I'm missing headshots over and over when I feel I should hit. On the flip side, if you remove that connection the combats stats wouldn't be that important. Hmm.
Economy. Without much effort I have more caps than I feel I need. I have oodles of loot to sell. I have lots of health and rad restoring items. I have something like 60 rounds for my pistol plus other misc ammo and grenades, and multiple items to use for repairing my gear. I have a house. What I don't have is something I want to buy; I haven't spent a single cap. I thought it was supposed to be a hand to mouth scrape for survival? I am most definitely *not* happy to see the Oblivion/Morrowind style shops back again. Trawling around multiple shops and waiting for days for shop keeper's cash to regenerate so I can sell off the next fraction of my loot is not fun. It takes me longer than the expedition.
Radio. Please. Have. More. Tracks! I have access to two stations and they endlessly loop over and over until I could swear they only have 2 songs and 1 ad each. I killed the radio on my pip boy, and now it's too quiet. Oh, BTW, Bioshock called. It wants its soundtrack back. Yes, I appreciate other games have used this style of music, and yes I know it's not something Bioshock invented. It is something Bioshock made its own to my mind. Each time I hear that one about not wanting to set the world on fire I expect a Big Daddy to turn up, complete with Little Sister and dancing splicers.
Voice acting. It's average at best.
Controls. The default xbox controls are not what I'd consider to be the intuitive setup. I keep doing things I don't want to when attempting to do something else. Having the pip boy on B in particular does not feel logical. There looks like there might be an option for rebinding the buttons; I shall investigate.
Mini games. Lock picking is ok. It's easy, straightforward, and I can live with it. Hacking. I love it so much that I have cut the plan to add points to science, and will now ignore every last terminal in the game. It's times like this which remind me that, while my literacy based skills are mostly unscathed by my dyslexia, I'm by no means unaffected. Picking words out of a screen full of gibberish? Only if I laboriously shift the cursor about until it highlights the words buried in the mass. Trying to remember all of those words while trying to work out which one is the right one based on remembering letters and their positions? Sorry, but it's so difficult for me it took half an hour it took to hack that terminal in the vault, and in the end I only passed it through luck.
Colour. Thanks for offering me a choice of several colours, that's excellent. However, when I set the interface to blue I wanted it all to be blue. No green. It's another dyslexic thing; certain colours make our lives harder, and green is right up there next to bright yellow for me. Blue. I want blue. So why is half the world still in green? It robs me of my usual ultra high-speed reading fluency and demands I concentrate, and that makes me feel like a semi-illiterate idiot. ~:mecry: Oh and that hacking mini game I have so much difficulty with? It's green. :furious3:
Regenerating enemies. Ok, I understand why. Yes, I don't have a problem with it in theory. Overall I consider it to be a sound idea and necessary part of the game. When the gang of thugs I recently slaughtered regenerates with no warning in the same area I'm wandering about in then the agreement wavers. It could be argued that this is another gang sneaking into the building while I'm scooting around looting. Another gang, made up of exactly the same character models and numbers, taking up exactly the same patrol routes, as if I had never gone through and killed them all. Hmm.
Feel. No, I wouldn't call it Oblivion with guns. I'd call it a Bethesda game. It feels like Morrowind and like Oblivion, from the static talking head conversations to the peasant types with rakes. Heh, it is nice to see them making a game without the fabulously broken character creation system from the Elder Scrolls games.
Robots. I like them.
The vault. Once you hit 19 there's a single word for it: boring. I also felt I was railroaded down a particular path, one I didn't want my generally heroic character to take. The childhood sections were cute, if a little lengthy for the content.
Technical. It crashed my xbox within the first hour of play. I now live in fear of walking around corners in case it happens again.
I had planned three playthroughs for this game, one as the smart average type I am now, one as a stealthy type, and one as a combat crazed gun nut. Now I revise that to reaching level 20, completing most of the quests, and finishing the main quest. It may grow on me enough that I play again. It may not. I do intend to give it chance. Once the moral ambiguity and less straightforward quests turn up I will probably like it a lot more. Right now I am finding nothing but clear cut quests which could be in any game. Do this thing which is good, or do the other thing which is evil.
Kekvit Irae
11-04-2008, 03:49
Some of my collected thoughts:
It is apparent that the makers of the game were Fallout fans and read the Fallout Bible. Playing through the game normally just makes it seem like Oblivion With Guns, but the real treat are the very minor things that pop up like the computer logs, holotapes, and conversations about the backstory of the Wasteland. eg: Greta in the Underworld talks about being over 200 years old, living before the bombs fell. Her backstory confirms what happened to the Necropolis in Fallout 1, where Vault 12 was never meant to be sealed and thus the radiation changed the inhabitants into ghouls.
However, there are some contradictions... Why are there Chinese soldiers in the Capital Wasteland? You find corpses of them (in surprisingly good condition) just outside the Super-Duper Mart, along with a Chinese Radio signal. The corpses are in surprisingly good condition, which leads me to believe that they invaded DC after the bombs fell 200 years ago. But weren't the Chinese repelled by American/Canadian forces in Alaska? How did they get all this way into the heartland?
Another contradiction is when you talk to the old adventurer in Tenpenny Tower (the only one who doesn't hate ghouls). He's a human (couldn't be a day over 80, I assume), and he mentions that he was adventuring with his ghoul manservant before the war. Wait, there was another war? Considering the current year is 2277, the only war I remember was the Chinese war 200 years ago which wiped out most of the world. There are big pieces of the story missing, and this makes me sad, seeing as I'm a BIG Fallout fan.
Radio. Please. Have. More. Tracks! I have access to two stations and they endlessly loop over and over until I could swear they only have 2 songs and 1 ad each. I killed the radio on my pip boy, and now it's too quiet. Oh, BTW, Bioshock called. It wants its soundtrack back. Yes, I appreciate other games have used this style of music, and yes I know it's not something Bioshock invented. It is something Bioshock made its own to my mind. Each time I hear that one about not wanting to set the world on fire I expect a Big Daddy to turn up, complete with Little Sister and dancing splicers.
I specifically asked my friends at Bethsoft about this. They indicate that once the modding tools are released, it should be pretty easy to both add new songs to the existing radio stations and to add in completely new radio stations.
Sarmatian
11-04-2008, 14:24
That's not quite right. For every odd point in luck you gain +1 to all of your skills. The perk adds on to what you already have, so if you have 9 luck and the perk you get a 14% chance to crit - awesome!
My character has 9 luck. I'm critical hitting people's heads with my crappy pistol so much that I feel overpowered. I don't have the perk yet; I'm only level 4.
Yeah, I admit I spoke before quite understanding the game mechanics, actually not reading about attributes. I just thought SPECIAL attributes work in the same way as in FO1/2. Perception doesn't cover all ranged weapons in FO3. END - big guns, PER - energy, AGI - small guns. So if you want a character to go around with rocket launchers and so on, END is for you, although I found considerably less ammo for big guns and that might be a problem if you go that way. On the other hand, it may be that the game balances what you find depending on your specialty (like NWN) but I doubt it...
That
Economy. Without much effort I have more caps than I feel I need. I have oodles of loot to sell. I have lots of health and rad restoring items. I have something like 60 rounds for my pistol plus other misc ammo and grenades, and multiple items to use for repairing my gear. I have a house. What I don't have is something I want to buy; I haven't spent a single cap. I thought it was supposed to be a hand to mouth scrape for survival? I am most definitely *not* happy to see the Oblivion/Morrowind style shops back again. Trawling around multiple shops and waiting for days for shop keeper's cash to regenerate so I can sell off the next fraction of my loot is not fun. It takes me longer than the expedition.
Could be that I just didn't bother with looking under every stone, but I didn't find too much caps. Ammo neither. It may seem much now, but believe 60 rounds for 10mm pistol is not much. It's practically nothing. When you had out to the wastes, you'll find that your ammo disappears rapidly. In fact, I've had several situation where I used up all ammo and ended up in a bind. Now I carry sniper rifle, chinese assault rifle, shotgun, pistol, laser pistol, hunting rifle (and lot's of ammo for each) and I still don't waste ammo needlessly
CrossLOPER
11-04-2008, 14:44
***Minor spoilers, but don't open if you are less than half-way through.***
My friend finished the game last night. Yeah, prepare for an 85% probability of being mad.
Mikeus Caesar
11-04-2008, 15:32
I'm still undecided on whether or not i'm getting, but 4chan /v/ had a rather disturbing topic in which they figured out how to kill children. Unfortunately, their characters already looked rather creepy (skinny, face stubble). This was made even worse when they're walking around wearing childrens clothes such as pyjamas and scout uniforms. This is even more disturbing when the clothes don't actually fit.
And oddly enough, it just made me want the game more...
:clown:
Kekvit Irae
11-04-2008, 15:43
***Minor spoilers, but don't open if you are less than half-way through.***
My friend finished the game last night. Yeah, prepare for an 85% probability of being mad.
I just won the game, and instead of getting mad, I got a warm fuzzy feeling by doing The Right Thing®.
Bob the Insane
11-04-2008, 20:36
**** Please read only if you have finished ****
Not much of a choice really... After a lot of moral ambiguity in some of the quests (especially the side ones), the end is clear hero or selfish git choice... Oh and I had a side kick along at the end who wouldn't be bothered by a bit of heavy radiation if you get my point...
You have to wonder, if the mod tools come out, if they will be flexible enough for someone to redo Fallout and Fallout 2 in the Fallout 3 engine. That would be sweet...
Veho Nex
11-05-2008, 00:17
I just got to level 21 and when i hit enter to select my perk game crashed any one else getting this issue?
You never have to worry about finding nice people in any of the other vaults as far as I can tell
Kekvit Irae
11-05-2008, 05:30
I just got to level 21 and when i hit enter to select my perk game crashed any one else getting this issue?
That's because the game is designed to stop giving you exp once you hit level 20. How you got to 21, I'll never know.
Veho Nex
11-05-2008, 06:54
Cheats :D
At level 20 i get bored so i wanna cheat it up a notch, didnt work:/
Zenicetus
11-05-2008, 08:44
Okay, you Orgah folk did it... convinced me to order Fallout 3. Fedex delivers tomorrow.
I want to compliment everyone on this thread for great reviews, pro and con! Especially the gripes about the game.
Somehow I never managed to play the original Fallout games (probably too busy with combat fllight sims), and I didn't play Oblivion either. So I'm not carrying any baggage or expectations into this. I don't like pure shooters, but if there's some RPG elements and good atmosphere, that's enough for me. I've been in deep Witcher EE immersion lately, and I'm ready to bail out of swords and sorcery and into some sci-fi and guns. It was this or Dead Space (which I'll play eventually), and I think the semi stop-time combat here will be more friendly to my current PC hardware, and my geezer lack of twitch reflexes for realtime shooting.
Anyway, thanks again for the great comments, and also a big thumbs-up for hiding spoilers, while still letting us all know what the overall flavor of the game is like.
Kekvit Irae
11-05-2008, 16:02
I have decided to do a second playthrough with Energy Weapons. On my first playthrough, I managed to get the Wazer Wifle in Little Lamplight, and never bothered with it until the final epic battle when I was low on .32 ammo (Ol' Painless is the superior weapon for Small Guns for the sole reason that it costs far less AP to shoot than the sniper rifle). When I first used it, I was drooling at how useful it was, even with only a crappy 35 points in Energy Weapons (that's WITH the bobblehead). Five shots with full AP? YES PLEASE.
Veho Nex
11-05-2008, 16:41
Has anyone ever been walking along and seen a streak appear in the sky then suddenly explode? When you goto to the "area" of the exlosion you'll find alien battery cells. But what is the alien gun?
Crandaeolon
11-05-2008, 17:49
A quick tip for those who don't like the default repair system: there's a console command to access a NPC-style repair screen, but using the player's repair skill. You won't need to use other items for repairing, but it does cost caps like usual. For this reason it's quite not cheating. ~;p
Bring up console with tilde (~), type player.srm
frogbeastegg
11-05-2008, 21:36
Could be that I just didn't bother with looking under every stone, but I didn't find too much caps. Ammo neither. It may seem much now, but believe 60 rounds for 10mm pistol is not much. It's practically nothing. When you had out to the wastes, you'll find that your ammo disappears rapidly.
:gasp: Yay! :grabs gun, runs out into wastes:
Another factlet I've found about criticals. According to the official guide, being in VATS mode gives you a 15% chance to critical. Add that to my character's 9% from luck and it's no wonder heads are exploding all the time. Once I collect that +5 perk I will have a 29% chance at a critical hit. That is crazy!
Kekvit Irae
11-05-2008, 21:57
Another factlet I've found about criticals. According to the official guide, being in VATS mode gives you a 15% chance to critical. Add that to my character's 9% from luck and it's no wonder heads are exploding all the time. Once I collect that +5 perk I will have a 29% chance at a critical hit. That is crazy!
Don't forget the perk that adds an additional 50% damage on a critical hit!
Sneak + Sniper + Commando + Finesse + Better Criticals = Oh my god.
Bob the Insane
11-05-2008, 22:26
Yeah, with Sniper + Commando + Better Criticals and 100 in energy weapons I was killing ghouls (feral obviously with me being the boyscout hero of the wastes) in single headshots with my laser pistol (in VATS).
Later on it is the only way to keep your ammo usage remotely reasonable. I mean when I made the switch to energy weapons I had over 1500 rounds for the Laser Pistol. I though I would never run out, but some of the later enemies take a lot of killing.
The fact that picked up weapons only have 8 rounds of ammo really helps the balance and prevents things getting silly. And that you use them to repair your equipment is good too. I mean, repairs by merchants can get expensive and there are big advantages at keeping you weapon 100%. Also with the limited carry capacity you get into the habit (especially later on) of simply leaving anything you don't need to repair your stuff.
Also note that ammo has no weight, unrealistic sure, but at least it avoids the inventory shuffle from Fallout 2...
Kekvit Irae
11-06-2008, 15:19
I blew up Megaton and...
that annoying girl, Moira, is STILL alive and she's a ghoul. Great. Now she's going to haunt people with her annoying voice and insane babble for centuries.
Although I did love how Deputy Weld (or, what's left of him) still talks about how the bomb is perfectly safe.
Sarmatian
11-07-2008, 00:17
Finished the game. I must say I'm a little disappointed. Considering the scale of the game, how many locations and NPCs there is, there should have been far more quests, and they should have been more interesting. Actually, not that they aren't interesting, but they usually involve huge dungeon crawl in complex labyrinths. While doing quests, most of my time was spent on figuring out which freakin' corridor to take to get to the next level.
I've also found energy weapons overrated. With 100 invested in them and 90 in small guns (level 17), I've used guns far more often, even against opponents in power armour. Chinese Assault Rifle, Combat Shotgun and Hunting Rifle are much more versatile. Not to mention that it's far easier to repair them and get ammo for them.
I guess I'll try a female melee/big guns build next. There's nothing sexier than a scantily clad chick with a flamethrower :laugh4:
Zenicetus
11-07-2008, 00:26
Some first impressions after starting the game last night (this is the PC version, BTW). There are some annoying things here and there, but overall it's a fun game and I'm looking forward to diving back into the post-apocalypse tonight. I never played the earlier Fallout games, or Oblivion. Lately I've been playing the Witcher EE, so that's an inevitable reference point for some things, since they're somewhat similar games.... sort of a RPG/FPS hybrid.
Good Stuff:
The post-nuclear world feels right, and it's fun to move around in. I love the trashed and rusting "1950's idea of a 2000 future" cars and trucks. The radio music and the graphic design on the faded ads and billboards feel a bit like a Bioshock ripoff, but it still helps establish the setting.
I'm using an older PC (Athlon 64 3800+, 2 gigs RAM) with a newer, but not state-of-the-art video card (GeForce 8800 GTS). The framerate is very smooth with full effects on, at 1024x768. I haven't tried running it at my monitor's native 1600x1200 yet, but it might be okay there too.
I like the way your hit points don't replenish automatically between combat events, like they do in the Witcher and some other games of this type (including "rest anywhere" variants of the D&D games). Auto-healing has a tendency to reduce the feel of danger and risk. You take more chances, and enemies are less scary. In Fallout 3, I'm being much more cautious about initiating combat, I'm being careful about my supply of food, water and meds, and that's good.
The interface is pretty good. The main screen isn't too busy, and the wrist gadget thingie works well to handle all the inventory, quest info, maps, etc.
Not So Good Stuff:
I don't like how fast weapons and armor deteriorate and need repair, but I can live with it until someone mods a reduced rate. A little deterioration over time would feel realistic, but this seems over the top... just a game mechanic to force the player to spend money or invest in repair skills.
The over-the-shoulder 3rd person view of your character isn't very well animated. The combat moves are okay, but I hate how your avatar rotates like he's on a turntable when you turn around. It just breaks immersion. Would it have killed them, to animate the character taking steps while turning in place? The transition from standing still to running is a bit wonky too. I've gone to the full frame/shooter view so I don't have to watch my guy move around.
The text display for conversation is MUCH LARGER than it needs to be, for a PC game. Probably due to it being a cross-platform game, but I still think it looks a bit cartoonish. Maybe there will be a mod for this.
I started at Normal, like I usually do with a new game, and might have to re-start at a higher level. I'm leaving the Vault with more stuff (gun, ammo, armor) than I thought I would. I had this image of having to get by in a very hostile environment with just a crowbar and a T-shirt and jeans. I feel awfully buff for my first encounters with the outside world, and combat so far is going a little too smoothly.
The combat design works pretty well, although it's disappointing that there's no cover system, as in Mass Effect for example. It's fun to watch the "bullet time" animations after you've selected actions in the V.A.T.S.
However, I think the realism suffers from the number of bullet hits it takes to bring down even a lower-level "soft" enemy, like a human Raider with minimal armor. If a V.A.T.S. sequence shows 3 direct hits to the head (no helmet), you don't normally expect a standard human to keep running at you. The number of allowed hits may be related to the way the player's character can also soak up a lot of damage. Or maybe it's to make the starting weapons weaker, so there's room for the damage inflicted with better weapons. But either way, I'd prefer a more "realistic" game like Bioshock, where one single shot to the head from a revolver will take down a splicer. And you're equally vulnerable, more or less. That matches real-world expectations better than what I'm seeing, so far, in Fallout 3. Maybe this will change as I get deeper into the game.
Speaking of head shots...
What's with all the decapitations? Before I even left the Vault, I'd shot a guy's head off his shoulders with the 10mm pistol. I've done that a few more times now, in my initial wanderings outside Megaton. It's the kind of thing I like seeing in The Witcher... it's at least potentially possible for a sword to do that, in combat. But small caliber pistols just don't rip people's heads off. Maybe I'm just being too literal... I'm sure some people like the effect.
I'm still very early in the game so take this with a grain of salt, but what I've seen so far of the enemy AI during combat, isn't very impressive. It's mostly just bum-rushing the player with no apparent tactics or use of cover, and the occasional scripted surprise (locked door behind you suddenly opens and they jump you). I've see too many human enemies rush straight into my gunfire, bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight. You expect that from critters, not humans. About the only impressive thing I've seen in the AI so far, is one Raider bailing out of a fight and running away, after taking some damage. It's not a game-breaker, but in a game that relies fairly heavily on combat, I was hoping for more.
Bad Stuff:
I ran into one area that triggered constant crashes to desktop. I avoided that area, then came back later and it was fine. I'm hoping that's rare, or will be cleaned up in a patch soon. My current gaming rig is very stable and never crashes with a well-programmed game.
That's enough for now. Gripes aside, I'm glad I bought the game.
OverKnight
11-09-2008, 06:01
I've noticed that the longer each individual session of playing becomes, the more likely I am to suffer a CTD. To combat this, I save often and if I'm in a marathon session, I restart the computer periodically. I remember similar issues with Oblivion and memory leakage.
I love the Winchester-esque "Repeater" I found. To bad I haven't found a Cowboy hat to go with my Regulator duster, so I could properly wander the Wasteland dispensing Kinetic Justice.
LeftEyeNine
11-09-2008, 14:13
We've received patches (http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/downloads/patches.html) for your major CTD problems.
frogbeastegg
11-09-2008, 15:52
:sigh: 9 hours play and character level 8; it still doesn't catch me. I've done quite a bit of exploring in the wastes and got some major and minor side quests completed, and the game isn't working.
I still have way too many caps and little to buy. 4,000+ caps and growing. If I didn't have a couple of bits of gear which require me to pay others to repair them then I'd have much more. The one thing I would like to buy I can't find anywhere selling: bobby pins. After the initial handout at the start of the game I have had to collect all others from the corpses of feral ghouls.
I still have far too much ammo and easy sources to get more. 160+ 10mm, 70+ for my rifle, 120+ for my shotgun, and a whole locker stuffed full for guns I don't use.
I still have more loot than I can sell without tedium. I've taken to leaving everything except the better items lying in the dirt.
Combat has changed a bit; now it is either numbingly easy or I die in two hits. Numbingly easy is the most prevalent. I stormed a camp of super mutants at level 4 with a pistol, empty shotgun and a broken rifle and won, admittedly just barely and with the use of a couple of stimpacks. Even so. Multiple super mutants. Pistol. Empty shotgun. Broken rifle. Wimpy level 4 character with 4 endurance. No use of stat boosting drugs or explosives. I won. I'm on 'normal' and it feels like I accidentally selected 'very easy'.
I'm still waiting for the much talked about moral dilemmas, unexpected results and grey areas to appear. So far it has been depressingly black and white.
The atmosphere will dash through the door and apologise for being late any minute now. Maybe it’s stuck in traffic? Maybe it was involved in a fatal car crash on its way over? Someone try calling its mobile and see what happened.
It's crashed my xbox again.
Dungeons. Didn't I spend 60 hours running about badly lit, confusing and repetitive tunnel/cave based dungeons in Oblivion? Yes, I did. Didn't I hate that? Yes, I did. And didn't I spend a lot of time doing that in Morrowind too, and hate it? Yes, I did. Didn't I clear out this set of subway tunnels an hour ago? Yes, I di - oh, wait, that was the other one a bit further to the east. Or south. Or in the city. Or ...
The experience itself leaves me cold. I don't care about - or like - the people, the quests, the setting, the world, or any of it. I don't care about quest rewards or finding loot. The one thing I do care about is gaining XP; levels are the only reward which feel valuable in this game. Skill books are ok; I get 2 points from each and that's enough to create a minor blip of almost excitement each time I discover one. Bobble heads do manage a minor blip of excitement; 10 skill points or a skill point make a noticeable difference to my character. I've found 4 so far.
There doesn't seem to be much to look forward to as you advance in the game. Better armour? I'll take power armour, all the rest is minor stat variations on the same old boring. Guns? The ones I have are plenty good. Having another +3 to damage on my shotgun won't make much difference. Other misc items? I barely use them as it is. Levels. It's all about levels and the stats gained thereby.
Why do I fail every speech challenge where I have a success of over 60% but succeed frequently on those where I have between 40% and 59%? The law of percentages must be warped by my character's unnaturally good luck :inquisitive: Should be the other way around: failing most of the lower percentage ones and passing most of the higher, with some losses on both because even 99% doesn't mean guaranteed win.
The voice acting continues under whelming. Hurrah for the option to advance to the next line at the press of a button; I can read far faster than these people can drone. The robots are the only good voices thus far.
Is it a good thing when you’re wandering around the wastes and classifying all the inhabitants as lazy good for nothings who would rather wallow in filth then try to nail a tile on a roof and not get doused in radioactive rain? Yeah, the food and water is irradiated and civilisation as we know it is dead, but does that mean you can’t sweep that pile of rotting radioactive junk out of your shack? Because that might, you know, help stop you dying from disease and radiation poisoning.
I do love my combat shotgun and rifle combo. :loveg:
The one thing the game is doing an excellent job of is making me want to play as an evil character. That's highly impressive - I always have a halo early on in any RPG. I can't stomach being evil, and struggle to play that way. Here, oh give me a shotgun and let me loose! So many NPCs would benefit from a head exploding critical! We'll see how long the froggy ethics last; I have a shiny halo and like people running up to me in the streets to give me gifts to support my heroic efforts.
I am shocked with my feelings on this game, a little horrified too. Oblivion was a game filled with problems and built up around the most broken character system I have seen, yet I managed to enjoy most of the time I spent with it. Fallout fixes some of those problems and brings an awesome character system, and then completely fails to engage me.
Maybe I should restart on hard, dial down my intelligence and luck, and play to be pure evil. :considers: That would mean repeating 9 hours of stuff I didn’t enjoy the first time around, with a character build aimed at skills I don't want.
Over 24 hours now since I installed this, and I've played it for 17 hours, and I'm feeling very sleepy, still I could not resist sharing this, the funniest thing happened when I was playing an hour back....
So, I'm trying to get to the GNR building via the subway, and I'm about to reach the last station where there's this one Super Mutant, I however am oblivions of this fact, suddenly, I see two of those cockroach thingys, moving in the distance, and they start running. Next thing I see, is the hazy outline of the Super Mutant running after them round and round, banging away with his club. Suddenly, I see him running back, now with two ghouls after him......it was pretty funny, I wish I'd remembered what button records the movies.....was as good as a scene from a cartoon :laugh4:
Zenicetus
11-09-2008, 22:55
I just reached level 7, and aside from one difference of opinion with Froggie (I do like the feel of the world, and enjoy roaming around in it), I'd agree with everything else.
The combat is still feeling a little too easy on Normal... maybe due to the Sneak-Sniper-Commando etc. spec I'm using. But I'm not feeling like re-starting the game at a higher level, now that I'm in this deep. Maybe if there had been fewer dungeon crawls. There really are too many of those, and I have a feeling there are plenty more to come.
So far, the conversations and choices are... meh, about average for this type of game. Meaning, it's not cringingly adolescent in the writing of the plot and the dialogue, but so far it's no literary masterpiece either. It's a little too predictable (so far), in terms of where I know I'll have to go and what I'll have to do. There are a few surprise twists, but overall it's missing that element in a good RPG of not know what's going to come next.
I'll probably finish the game on Normal, set it aside for a while, and then see if I ever want to re-play it with a different spec and moral alignment in a few months (or years). I am still enjoying the post-nuclear war atmosphere... all the ruined buildings and junk lying around. Maybe it's because I've overdosed on medieval and sword & sorcery games in the last year, so I'm primed for this.
The combat dynamics have a few good things, like the slow-mo animations in the V.A.T.S., and some tactical considerations in targeting. But other aspects seem flaky. The manual says V.A.T.S. shows a percentage to hit. However, a higher-end opponent like a Super Mutant will show reduced percentage to hit than a weaker one (like a radroach), using the same ranged weapon, at the same distance. I don't understand this. It's like the V.A.T.S. is factoring in inherent toughness or something, and that's causing more chance for me to miss the shot? Whatever it is, it doesn't feel right. I don't care if I cause less damage to a tough target, but it shouldn't be harder to place a bullet on a big, lumbering target like a Super Mutant than a smaller, weaker, faster one.
Another thing getting to me is the need to engage with guns at very close range, to have a decent chance to hit. I'm at level 7 with a good setup of S.P.E.C.I.A.L., skills, and percs for small arms and energy weapons. To get a decent chance to hit, I still have to either run up close to the target in spitting range, and start firing away, or wait for the target to run close to me. And then there's a silly dance where I fire while backing up, just to keep a charging target close enough for decent percentages in the V.A.T.S.... when I should never have had to get that close in the first place! That can involve some interesting and challenging uses of cover at close range, but it just doesn't feel like guns should work this way.
Maybe the devs are trying to leave room for improvement in your targeting skills in the upper levels. Or maybe it's a concession to smaller console game screens, where they want you to see the enemy up close, instead of a dot hiding behind a bush. Whatever the reason, it just just feels dumb to have to get so close to enemies in a gun-based game.
Related to that, there doesn't seem to be a big difference in accuracy (chance to hit) between guns that should have a pretty wide spread, like pistols vs. assault rifles vs. long guns like the rifle.
These are relatively minor gripes, I suppose, because I'm still having fun just being in this game world. And the range thing isn't as glaring a flaw when fighting indoors. Close-quarters combat can be intense, and feels about right (other than numbers of hits a human enemy can take to the head... sigh).
Bob the Insane
11-10-2008, 16:10
The ranges are definately truncated. But I have to say, with my Sniper rifle and my high lvl character and 100 in small arms plus the right perks and I have hit guys on the catwalks of the large satellite dishes from a pretty fair distance away...
Mind you it is in keeping with the original Fallout, percentage to hit could drop at a ridiculous rate given the ranges possible in FO and FO2...
Zenicetus
11-10-2008, 23:44
The ranges are definately truncated. But I have to say, with my Sniper rifle and my high lvl character and 100 in small arms plus the right perks and I have hit guys on the catwalks of the large satellite dishes from a pretty fair distance away...
Well, maybe it's for scaling reasons then, to allow for improvement in the upper levels. Between the short practical engagement range for guns (at least in the first half of the game), and the way you can soak up a fair amount of damage... I'll be tempted to try a melee specialist spec if I ever make another run through the game. Toss a grenade, then run up and beat the tar out of the enemy. Not sure how that would work with multiple opponents though, or the tougher mutants and robots.
Sarmatian
11-15-2008, 03:10
Well, maybe it's for scaling reasons then, to allow for improvement in the upper levels. Between the short practical engagement range for guns (at least in the first half of the game), and the way you can soak up a fair amount of damage... I'll be tempted to try a melee specialist spec if I ever make another run through the game. Toss a grenade, then run up and beat the tar out of the enemy. Not sure how that would work with multiple opponents though, or the tougher mutants and robots.
It didn't work too well for me. You're handicapped since enemies can start shooting before you close up to them. One on one encounters are doable, but they're doable with almost every weapon. When you try to deal with a group, they will spread out, even if they were tightly packed. Basically, you get shot at while you're moving towards them, when you get to them, you can pummel one while the others move in opposite direction and shoot at you. When you kill the first one, you have to move to get within striking distance of the second one and again you get shot at. Also, when you're running, you can't use cover and so on. Melee just isn't worth it. Although I have a 10 strength character with 75 in melee, I use my small guns with 30 skill rating and 6 agility.
Anyway, I know we've had our fair share of first impressions and reviews, but for those still interested, this (http://computergames.ro/en/games/viewitem/id/1002/name/fallout-3/section/review.html) is by far the best, most objective and most hype-free professional review I've found.
frogbeastegg
11-15-2008, 16:57
Hmm. I'm not thrilled with the game but I don't find myself in agreement with that review. It's very ... ah, well if I say it's very no mutants allowed does that make sense to other people? Far too hung up on the fact that this is a new game, and therefore it can't possibly be much good because everyone knows new games are shallow, dumbed down, derivative and aimed at people with an IQ of 3.
Even my limited (not quite 10 hours now) playtime proves some of his points inaccurate. Teleporting about the map without penalty? Sure - until you drop into an area which has repopulated with enemies. Dead on arrival isn't that much of an understatement for the time I dropped into the midst of a raider group via fast travel. Fast travel out into the wastes is a gamble; you'll be fine most of the time and you don’t know disaster awaits until it is too late. The spoiler point about the sheriff? If you're good enough then you can intervene and stop that - I managed it. Karma does have an effect: I noticed NPCs being nicer to me after I started to reach higher karma levels, and my halo-sporting character gets random gifts from people for "being a hero". I've been attacked on sight by evil folk, and had assassins sent after me.
Other points are nonsensical. As unimpressed as I am with the voice acting, the comment about "characters in a post-apocalyptic world spoke with the same tone (and occasionally, the same pronunciation) as the fair gentle folk of the Victorian age." is pure hyperbole. The ability to choose whatever path you like at the ending regardless of the moral alignment you have taken throughout the game? It's been in nearly every western RPG I have played, including those classics which people like this reviewer don't class as dumbed down for the idiot masses. It's present in games for a reason: player choice. Even the evilest of characters might have a change of heart when they find that pushing the big red button fills the world with fluffy bunnies. You're unable to create your character for the long run because it's impossible for you to regret perk choices? Amazing; I regret 2 perk choices already. Planning is vital for the better perks: they have pre-requisites. I tried to plan ahead from the start, and I have still made quite a few decisions I regard as mistakes.
If I were going to do a melee character I think I would go for high END and average STR. Close combat will mean you take more damage, so your health needs to be sky high. STR only has a small effect on damage (.5 per point). Perks and skills would drive most of the killing ability. AG could be ignored or robbed for points because VATS isn't much use in close combat. I'd keep a good luck score too; every build benefits from more criticals. With good intelligence you could pump up unarmed and/or melee very quickly, then flesh out your support skills. A high medicine score would be important; anything to make your stimpack stores go further. Sneak would be a handy skill as it would enable you to pick and choose your fights and start the combat from a more advantagous direction. Maxed iron fist for unarmed ASAP, a level or three (depending on what other perks you want) of toughness, fast metabolism, possibly adamantium skeleton or life giver if you find you're more fragile than you like, chemist if you use them a lot, probably cyborg (damage resist!), better criticals, maybe chem resistant if you took chemist, paralysing palm, ninja. The first few levels would be the hardest; survive them and it might start to shine.
As far as combat goes, I think a variation on my current tactics would work. In my current game I try to get quite close before calling up VATS and opening fire so my accuracy is maximised; zigzagging about and running from cover to cover gets me to the range I want without taking too much pain most of the time (my 4 END character is made of tinfoil). Sometimes I need to plan my approach a bit, sneakily loop around to better ground before letting the enemy spot me. I'd hotkey stimpacks for quick, seamless healing. Landmines and grenades would be very powerful when faced with tougher foes or groups. Going for an ultra-pure close combat build would be much harder IMO.
In a way unarmed might even be easier than a ranged character. You wouldn't need to lug an inventory of guns about, would have more caps from selling off guns and ammo, and you would never need to worry about your favourite gun running out of ammo or breaking. All you would need is stimpacks, good armour, possibly some explosives, and a sprinkling of chems for tough situations.
Sounds like fun; I'm almost tempted to try it. If only the game were as enjoyable to play as it is to theorise about. ~:(
That build reveals the biggest flaw with Fallout 3's character generation IMO: INT and luck are so good I can't see any build where I wouldn't pump them.
Kekvit Irae
11-15-2008, 18:48
In contrary to Froggy's comments, I have never once had any trouble what so ever with fast travel. Once a static enemy dies, they stay dead for the entire game. Unless you're playing a total pacifist, you won't have any trouble going back to areas that were previously explored. The exception to this is apparently Deathclaws, which repop every time I traveled to that area (Old Olney, I think).
Playing a close combat character is world's different than playing a run-and-gun character. In contrary, again, early levels are surprisingly easy for a CC. It's the later levels that will kick your butt, as everyone and their grandmother will have rifles and variations of combat or power armor. The worst are the missile launcher-equipped enemies or enemies with frag grenades. The choice of playing either Unarmed or Melee is up to the player, but it all boils down to how early you can get a Ripper/Super Sledge or a Deathclaw Gauntlet. Another choice is if you want to spend perks on Iron Fist increasing your Unarmed damage (by a HUGE amount), or go Melee and spend those perks elsewhere. Either build you choose, building up both skills for Ninja is a requirement. Paralyzing Palm may seem cool, but having to throw away your Unarmed weapon (Deathclaw Gauntlet, Power Fist, etc) just doesn't make it all that worthwhile.
Another thing to note about close combat characters is that followers = life. They kill things often more quickly than a ranged character, and have a ton of hit points. Keep them alive, and they will keep you alive. If you have good karma, picking up Fawkes at the end game is a VERY good idea. He can mow down anything in his path. Both ends of the karma spectrum can pick up the ghoul follower in the Underworld.
And I've never once bothered with Luck, except for purposes of getting the 6 Luck requirement needed for a few perks. An extra 1% critical chance is not worth sacrificing an additional 10 to your carry limit. Besides, with a good sneak, you will get an automatic critical with bonus damage if you land a sneak attack, often enough to kill the enemy outright. I usually start with 4 Luck, spend a perk to increase it once, and find a bobblehead.
awesome game. they just need to fix the memory leaks that drops my framerates from 25 to 10 within fifteen minutes of play.
Kekvit Irae
11-15-2008, 20:41
It has been a long time since a game made me laugh, but I did when I found the Board of Education weapon. :gring:
Crandaeolon
11-15-2008, 20:44
I'm pretty sure that Power Fist works with Paralyzing Palm. My Big Guns / Unarmed character with Fisto! has gained several "targets paralyzed" stats, and I'm quite sure that I've only been using Fisto! (for "unarmed") since I picked the ParaPalm perk.
On a side note, it's quite fun to sneak attack Super Mutants and gib them into pieces with a single power fist strike. :laugh4:
Sarmatian
11-15-2008, 21:53
Hmm. I'm not thrilled with the game but I don't find myself in agreement with that review. It's very ... ah, well if I say it's very no mutants allowed does that make sense to other people? Far too hung up on the fact that this is a new game, and therefore it can't possibly be much good because everyone knows new games are shallow, dumbed down, derivative and aimed at people with an IQ of 3.
I get your "NMA" point but I'd say the review doesn't suffer from that syndrome. It acknowledged good points of the game. It awarded it 72/100, which is a fairly good game. The game you play through once or twice and then forget about it. Contrary to other RPG legends like BG or original Fallouts, which hardcore gamers played again and again.
Even my limited (not quite 10 hours now) playtime proves some of his points inaccurate. Teleporting about the map without penalty? Sure - until you drop into an area which has repopulated with enemies. Dead on arrival isn't that much of an understatement for the time I dropped into the midst of a raider group via fast travel. Fast travel out into the wastes is a gamble; you'll be fine most of the time and you don’t know disaster awaits until it is too late. The spoiler point about the sheriff? If you're good enough then you can intervene and stop that - I managed it. Karma does have an effect: I noticed NPCs being nicer to me after I started to reach higher karma levels, and my halo-sporting character gets random gifts from people for "being a hero". I've been attacked on sight by evil folk, and had assassins sent after me.
Teleporting without danger refers to the fact that nothing can happen to you while you travel. There is no danger of a random band of raiders and things like that. Sure, every once in a blue moon you'll teleport somewhere where bad guys are, but that can hardly be called consequence.
People giving you several caps, bits of food and 10 bullets isn't what I consider "karma having an effect". When you're good, bad guys randomly spawn to kill you, when you're bad, good guys randomly spawn to kill you. Not because you've wronged someone or something. They just want to kill you. Again bad game design.
Other points are nonsensical. As unimpressed as I am with the voice acting, the comment about "characters in a post-apocalyptic world spoke with the same tone (and occasionally, the same pronunciation) as the fair gentle folk of the Victorian age." is pure hyperbole. The ability to choose whatever path you like at the ending regardless of the moral alignment you have taken throughout the game? It's been in nearly every western RPG I have played, including those classics which people like this reviewer don't class as dumbed down for the idiot masses. It's present in games for a reason: player choice. Even the evilest of characters might have a change of heart when they find that pushing the big red button fills the world with fluffy bunnies. You're unable to create your character for the long run because it's impossible for you to regret perk choices? Amazing; I regret 2 perk choices already. Planning is vital for the better perks: they have pre-requisites. I tried to plan ahead from the start, and I have still made quite a few decisions I regard as mistakes.
Voice acting is generally bad. Alistair Tenpenny has the perfect British aristocrat accent. Where did he acquire it when was either born in the Vault on the east coast or in the wasteland, remains a mystery.
Change of heart is possible, but unfortunately in FO3 most of the times it's used as an excuse for bad game mechanic.
Although there are few good points, it still boils down to: uninteresting quests that in 99% are simple dungeon crawls, half imbecile dialogues, boring NPCs and uninspiring main quest. Pretty much everything that makes RPG an RPG. Not everything is that bad, it's an enjoyable game. But compare that to Fallout 2 which is a legend, classic, even a cult game for some, and you'd see that just an enjoyable game is a big step back. Yes, FO3 is a new game, it's not FO2, but you can't make a sequel and expect people not to compare it to original. That would be silly. It will always be done. We can't say "hey, let's not compare prequel Star Wars trilogy to the Original, those are new films". No, we can and we should.
Kekvit Irae
11-15-2008, 22:21
My thoughts on the Oasis quest:
(no spoilers within, just an image)
http://www.robotparty.us/happysadchair.jpg
Being a hardcore Fallout fan, it both saddens me to see a legacy end, but it also makes me happy that the developers have obviously spent time reading the Fallout Bible.
But compare that to Fallout 2 which is a legend, classic, even a cult game for some, and you'd see that just an enjoyable game is a big step back.
Funny thing is that when Fallout 2 was released the fanbase hated that game, calling it not a sequel to Fallout 1 etc.
Now they love it.
Kinda reminds me of TW community.
People hate the new game until the next game comes along and then all of the sudden the previous game is being loved.
I suppose when Fallout 4 comes out, people will call Fallout 3 a classic.
Overall I think Fallout 3 lives up it's name and I enjoyed the game just as much as I did with Fallout 2 even if it lacks the adult nature of Fallout 2.
But it's still good to be back in the fallout world and in FPS mode as well.
frogbeastegg
11-17-2008, 00:44
In contrary to Froggy's comments, I have never once had any trouble what so ever with fast travel. Once a static enemy dies, they stay dead for the entire game. Unless you're playing a total pacifist, you won't have any trouble going back to areas that were previously explored. The exception to this is apparently Deathclaws, which repop every time I traveled to that area (Old Olney, I think).
I played a bit more this afternoon and got killed twice when fast travelling back to areas which I had entirely cleared. The first time I spawned in the middle of a super mutant mob, including my first mutant master. The second I was surrounded by raiders. Hehe, the super mutant spawn was so bad that the space between the area loading and watching my head spin across the landscape was so short I didn't have time to draw my weapon. Lots of areas in the wasteland respawn; I see it when I'm wandering on foot too. It seems to take around a week of game time, and the new enemies will be scaled to your current level. For example, when I originally cleared the area which had the super mutants, I faced bloatflies and mole rats. There weren't any super mutants for miles. Indoor locations don't respawn in my experience, with the exception of a single respawn in the super duper mart.
If it moves and is coded in red, I kill it. XP - it's all I care about. I collect all that I can see. Every. Last. Point. I'll chase a fleeing enemy halfway across the map rather than let its points escape.
Heck, last weekend I spawned in the middle of a raider mob when I went back to Tenpenny Towers and that's a) not territory which had enemies immediately by it, and b) surrounded by well equipped human guards.
And I've never once bothered with Luck, except for purposes of getting the 6 Luck requirement needed for a few perks. An extra 1% critical chance is not worth sacrificing an additional 10 to your carry limit.
Increased carry limit is something I haven't felt the need for. I've got STR 5, increased from 4 with a bobble head. If I were using heavy weapons then yes, I probably would want more. In that case I'd go with the bare minimum to get the boosting perk, as the perk provides a better return than spending special points. Then again I might not: I'm carrying 5 weapons plus heavy armour plus a spare to repair my two favoured weapons plus grenades and other supplies, and still don't feel the need for more capacity. I leave low worth loot behind because I've got over 6,000 caps I can't seem to find a use for. The plentiful criticals, on the other hand, bear much of the responsibility for making combat a breeze. Stealth gives you one critical; luck gives you a whole chain of them on groups and on tough monsters.
The Oasis quest
I did that one this afternoon. Same pictures apply, though possibly not for the same reasons. (vague spoilers ahoy)
I remembered the character from the first 2 games. The quest promised to be different from the usual go ->kill -> fetch -> return. It might even be the first appearance of all those promised grey morals and unexpected outcomes :gasp!: Then I found myself in a mini dungeon killing things in order to get to the heart. A mini badly lit cave dungeon complete with fungi. Filled with mudcrabs - er, mutant crabs. Woop de do.
Teleporting without danger refers to the fact that nothing can happen to you while you travel. There is no danger of a random band of raiders and things like that. Sure, every once in a blue moon you'll teleport somewhere where bad guys are, but that can hardly be called consequence.
Funny thing: If I'd walked I would have survived both of the encounters which killed me this afternoon, and I'd have done it with ease. Fast travelling killed me. I died, had to reload, and then needed to change my plans. That's a consequence. You lose the chance to gain additional XP and loot by fighting as you travel. That's a consequence. Time passes too; the well rested bonus effectively lasts for less time when you fast travel because a part of its duration is taken up by a period where you don't do anything.That's another consequence. You lose out on the chance to see a blip on your radar or some ruins in the distance and wandering off to discover a new location. That's a consequence.
Loading due to dropping in on a super mutant party might not sound like a bad thing. It can be. I've noticed that the area's population sometimes changes when you load. I can be killed by 4 raiders at a specific location, load, go right back to the exact same point, and now it's populated by rad scorpions and dogs. Or super mutants. Or - in one rapidly fatal and very messy case - those incredibly lethal mutant bear things. You can end up losing potential XP and gear, or end up stuck with a situation you aren't able to deal with. This applies to mobs found both fast travel and ordinary travel, and it's made me curse on multiple occasions. :weeps for that raider group with combat shotguns which got replaced by a single mole rat:
Hmm. On reflection, most of my 'getting from A to B' deaths have come from fast travelling :sweatdrop: If I walk then I have a far higher survival rate, since I can sneak, snipe, pick my approach, and am aware that I'm heading into a combat situation. When I fast travel into danger I rarely have time to start VATS up, let alone counter attack. Taking the traditional route allows me to run away too! Hard to do that when you're in the middle of a mob, disoriented, viewing the world through a screen splashed with blood, and unsure what is attacking you, how many, and where from.
You know I sort of wonder why I use fast travel at all.
Hmm, another thought. The only difference between fast travel in older RPGs (the first Fallouts IIRC, also the Infinity Engine games) and what I'm experiencing in Fallout 3 is that the combat comes on arrival, not in the middle of transit. If anything the older games handled it in a less harsh manner because you had chance to react. Fallout 3 has the bad habit of dropping me in completely surrounded by enemies with powerful close range attacks.
People giving you several caps, bits of food and 10 bullets isn't what I consider "karma having an effect". When you're good, bad guys randomly spawn to kill you, when you're bad, good guys randomly spawn to kill you. Not because you've wronged someone or something. They just want to kill you. Again bad game design.
As opposed to most other RPGs where nothing at all happens based on your good/evil stat? Except perhaps determining whether you do flavour A or flavour B on a single sidequest? I didn't say it was a good effect, merely that for once there is one.
Alistair Tenpenny has the perfect British aristocrat accent.
It's Hollywood wannabe British. No, it doesn't make sense. Yes, it is rubbish. I still say it is hyperbole. Hyperbole in that it is a single character, not an entire world. Hyperbole in that Queen Victoria's accent was entirely different to the 'classic' British accent people think of (that would be BBC news reader circa 1940), which in turn is quite different to the one predominant today. Fallout's world is full of people who say :shivers: "y'all", a word that was surely created for the purpose of making the English cringe. Fallout's version of DC is full of Americans, who use American slang, have a tendacy towards aggressive phrasing, and who swear and curse frequently. I don't see how else they would sound.
Change of heart is possible, but unfortunately in FO3 most of the times it's used as an excuse for bad game mechanic.
It's always a bad mechanic. Always. The point was, it's a staple bad mechanic, and one which has appeared in the classic games this reviewer has such a fond opinion of. The way it is included in the review feels like a case of selective memory. I've seen plenty of spoilers for Fallout 3's ending; if half of them are true then it has a tonne of problems and a change of heart mechanic is by far the least of them.
it still boils down to: uninteresting quests that in 99% are simple dungeon crawls, half imbecile dialogues, boring NPCs and uninspiring main quest.
My earlier posts on the game in a nutshell. At this point I don't know whether to go with a ~:) for "I am not trying to be a smart idiot" or a ~:( for "I wish it wasn't so"
While I am an avid player of RPGs and a vet of many of the classics, I'm not a Fallout fan, in that I played them both and found them to be good but not awesome. I avoided the pre-release hype and the wailing, avoided previews, read only one review, and did my all to go in with an open mind and very little in the way of expectations. I wanted the game to show me what it was. I'm still stunned that I have ended up disappointed. That shouldn't have been possible - I've completed and had considerable fun with games like Two Worlds, a buggy, lower budget "I want to be Oblivion too!" game which needed huge patches before it was remotely playable.
Looking at it with an analytical eye I can see it should be good, if flawed. I know it has fixed many of Oblivion's worst problems and is a better game for it. I can see it should be a good game. I know that a lot of care and love went into it. I can tell that some of it is meant to be funny, touching, whatever. In practice? Total disconnect.
I have been struck 4 times by a particularly nasty bug which has the potential to be a game breaker. If you fast travel into a horde of enemies, press the right trigger to draw your weapon and/or right bumper to enter VATS, then die, all in a very short space of time, the game sometimes glitches when it reloads your autosave. You get stuck with your character attacking all the time, and nothing stops it. If you put your weapon away it gets pulled out again. If you swap to another weapon then that fires continuously instead. If you run out of ammo your character continues to attempt to attack. If you manage to change locations and force the game to load the glitch nearly always continues in the next location. If you load a save game then the glitch often carries over, even if the save dates from hours ago. If you pull the batteries out of the controller, replace them and turn the controller back on then it does not make a jot of difference. You can't talk to people. You can't go near people without hurting them. You can't pick up objects. It's very difficult to activate doors because you have to time it between the attacks. You burn through your resources pointlessly.
The first 3 times I got struck by this bug I managed to wriggle out of the endless attack cycle by forcing the game to load many times in short succession; entering and leaving areas, loading and reloading saves. This afternoon, after another death by fast travel, I got stuck in the cycle yet again, and no amount of loading would fix it. Fortunately shutting the console down did. I hope that means the problem is something which lives in RAM, because if it isn't that means that there's the possibility your game can be stuck with your character permanently attacking, rendering it unplayable.
I did find the majority of today's playtime to be more fun than any of the previous. Why? I didn't play it like an RPG, and I ignored most of the main content. I went on a scavenger hunt for bobble heads and skill books. I checked a list for the name of a bobble head's location and got a very rough idea of where in the wastes it was, then set out to find the location and search for the bobblehead with no further spoilerage. It's post apocalyptic Challenge Anneka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_Anneka). :laugh4:
Sarmatian
11-17-2008, 22:32
I'm beaten to submission by the sheer weight of text :surrender2: :laugh4:.
I've enjoyed our "little" discussion but it's getting too painful to argue. There are many complicated point that I would like to get across, but my English isn't that good. Actually, maybe it is, but I don't want to spend half an hour or more to write a response. Respect.
So I'm just going to post a link to a short video on youtube, called Greed Never Changes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nExxUvEcwQ0).
johnhughthom
11-18-2008, 00:03
I too have been wondering about accents, I haven't come across Tenpenny(just his goons trying to kill me) but Moriarity's accent baffled me. How did he get an Irish accent? Is it even an Irish accent? What on earth is it? Are Bethesda just mocking me, perhaps everybody who buys the game has a character who makes a woeful effort at their accent?
Yeah, Moriarty jumped out at me as well. His weird faux-Gaelic thing had me shaking my head. Really threw me out of the game.
It's strange that Bethesda lavishes so much detail on, say, a floor texture, then drops the ball so badly with the voice acting. And there are still too many repeat voices. Here's a thought: Don't hire expensive Brit actors to do bad impersonations of American accents (did nobody tell Malcolm McDowell about how we pronounce "schedule," among other words?), and instead hire a slew of low-cost voiceover actors so's you don't have repeats.
Take, for example, their wheezy old man voice. He shows up over and over again. And there's a Redguard voice who sluts around from character to character. It's quite irritating.
It's strange that Bethesda lavishes so much detail on, say, a floor texture, then drops the ball so badly with the voice acting. And there are still too many repeat voices. Here's a thought: Don't hire expensive Brit actors to do bad impersonations of American accents (did nobody tell Malcolm McDowell about how we pronounce "schedule," among other words?), and instead hire a slew of low-cost voiceover actors so's you don't have repeats.
Take, for example, their wheezy old man voice. He shows up over and over again. And there's a Redguard voice who sluts around from character to character. It's quite irritating.
When I played the alpha version, a lot of the voiceovers were done in deadpan by the Bethsoft employees. While not exactly quality voice acting, they were bizarrely humorous. I encouraged them to keep a few of the Bethsoft voiceovers, but apparently they did not.
frogbeastegg
11-18-2008, 21:44
I'm beaten to submission by the sheer weight of text :surrender2: :laugh4:.
:gring: :laugh4: Large posts are an old froggy trademark. They aren't seen as often nowadays as they were when I first registered.
Monkey Island. I loved those games. Adored them. Played them repeatedly. The 4th game does not exist :puts fingers in her ears and refuses to listen to anyone trying to tell her it was good: The Infinity Engine games too. I hate AD&D, and because I'm dyslexic I had a huge struggle understanding the character system, spells, combat, and so on. It was incredibly tough to play them. I completed all of them and loved them dearly. Planescape: Torment is still my favourite RPG of all time. Mass Effect nips closely at its heels.
Moriarity's accent
I had flashbacks to Atlas from Bioshock. Except Atlas' acting was good.
Speaking of voice acting, was I the only one who was completely under whelmed by Liam Neeson as the father? The birth scene and the scene where you toddle around and look at the SPECIAL book were atrocious.
Malcolm McDowell
He's in there? I don't think I have encountered him yet. Unless ... is he the one on the Enclave radio station? He's done a lot of work in games I've played, and he is frequently at the better end of the scale. Pity if he isn’t here.
Don't hire expensive Brit actors to do bad impersonations of American accents, and instead hire a slew of low-cost voiceover actors so's you don't have repeats.
It's more bizarre when you think that they use a fake English accent and a fake Irish accent, despite having actors on the crew who have real versions of both.
Voice acting is something Bethesda has always struggled with IMO. There are so many games in recent years with good to great voice acting that there's a large stable of quality actors to draw upon. You'd think Bethesda would look at games like Mass Effect, sneak a peek at the credits to see who provided all those excellent voices, and get on the phone to try and hire some of them. Celebrities don't tend to make very good voice actors. However good they might be as an actor, they are not used to conveying everything with their voice alone. Properly trained voice actors are.
johnhughthom
11-18-2008, 23:31
I have to say my interest in Fallout 3 started to wane when Lucien Lachanche popped in for a visit in a dirty suit after plastic surgery calling himself Mr Burke. I had been looking forward to meeting Mr Burke, thinking a mission to detonate an atomic bomb and blow up a town had to be fun. Then that annoying, pretentious fool from Oblivion arrived. It took me four goes at Oblivion before I did the Dark Brotherhood quest because that voice acting made me kill him and I certainly don't want to hear anymore of it. So basically Lucien Lachanche and a bizarre Irish accent in the same room were too much for me.
He's in there? I don't think I have encountered him yet. Unless ... is he the one on the Enclave radio station?
Yuppers, that's Alex sans droogs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)) on the radio. His American accents is ... unconvincing. I hope Bethesda didn't spend too much on him.
Maybe they should just fire whoever's been in charge of the voiceovers and start fresh. Your average small-town community theater director could do better, after all.
-edit-
Zero Punctuation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/420-Fallout-3) has weighed in. Usual disclaimers about his reviews, since they all seem to contain bad words.
Zenicetus
11-19-2008, 20:49
Yeah, Moriarty jumped out at me as well. His weird faux-Gaelic thing had me shaking my head. Really threw me out of the game.
Me too, but for a different reason. Unless there is frequent travel and immigration across the Atlantic in Fallout's post-apocalypse world (and I don't know canon, maybe there is?), Moriarty shouldn't have that strong an accent. Non-local accents would flatten out quickly in the second and third generation in the kind of small survivor communities Fallout depicts, after 200 years or so. Maybe he did wash up on the beach from an exploring Irish shipwreck or something. But it just didn't feel like he belonged there, and they just stuck him in like a stereotype Boston pub owner from a 1940's Hollywood movie.
On another note.... I've decided that if I ever do replay the game, I'll avoid putting too many points into Perception. That may be one reason why the game is feeling a little too easy, and I don't think it's just a case of playing at Normal instead of a higher level (unless Perception scales with that). I'm only level 13 but I can spot enemies stainding in the street a block away, with a large multi-story concrete office building standing between us. That's a little ridiculous, unless post-apocalypse tech includes something like neutrino shadow radar. It's just an overpowering advantage for the player. As long as I remember to occasionally turn and scan behind me, and outside of a few surprise/scripted scenarios, I just never get jumped by surprise. I can always initiate the attacks on my terms, from good cover (which bad guys seldom use). I think if I played it again with low Perception, the game would be more fun. The world would feel more dangerous.
Sarmatian
11-20-2008, 01:23
I've tried playing with a melee/big guns build character (STR and END, plus unavoidable INT) and I'm getting owned. It wasn't the problem at first, but later (10th level or so) it became quite hard. Enemies start getting better and better weapons like missile launchers, assault rifles, shotguns, energy weapons. I'm usually dead before I close in. Also, going in melee with deathclaws or yao guai-something is suicide. They're too fast and manage to disrupt my attack too often, not to mention they're often found in groups. Now, it could be that I'm just bad at it, I suck at FPSs generally, but I pretty much abandoned that build because it was too hard/annoying. Also, even if successful, my character usually loses much of her HP which forces me to travel often to rest which is annoying. I've gotten into a habit of exploring the wastes and using stimpacks until I find a new location and then fast travel back to Megaton to rest and fast travel back again to that location to continue exploring...
Big Guns are a disappointment, too. Using minigun means wasting ammo. Sure, they're useful at times, at close range and with big targets, but combat shotgun is much more efficient and powerful. Missile launchers are rare and ammo for them is rare, which means crappy condition of the weapon (NPCs can max repair it to 54%) and buying a lot of missiles (which is expensive). Flamer is useful and fuel isn't so scarce but again limited to close range and generally much worse than combat shotgun. although it's useful against slow and moderately armoured critters like radscorpions and those overgrown crabs.
For me, it wasn't fun at all. Small Guns/Energy Weapons combo rulez :2thumbsup:
Zenicetus
11-20-2008, 08:59
Yeah, as I get closer to the endgame, playing a sneak/small arms/energy weapons type, I realize why a melee specialist build wouldn't work. Getting mobbed by three mercenaries and a robot at close range is insta-death, because there is no specialized combat style for group melee, like there is in The Witcher (for example).
As good as the sneak skills are, they're not anything like the uber-ninja'd Rogues in D&D style games, where you can literally walk up behind an enemy without them noticing. Aggro ranges are still fairly long, whatever your sneak skills. At least at the level I'm at right now. This game wants you to use guns. The melee weapons are just a crutch for the lower levels, before you start accumulating more ammo than you can use.
Sir Moody
11-20-2008, 14:26
not entirely true my lvl 20 chatracter uses unarmed (deathclaw gauntlets) and I can usually 2 shot a death claw and with 100 sneak and silent running i can quite litterally get to melee range with most things
late game melee takes off again (mostly thanks too paralazing palm) but up until then your going to want a shotgun and a hunting rifle as backup as mid game is dominated by the small arms
Kekvit Irae
11-20-2008, 18:27
not entirely true my lvl 20 chatracter uses unarmed (deathclaw gauntlets) and I can usually 2 shot a death claw and with 100 sneak and silent running i can quite litterally get to melee range with most things
late game melee takes off again (mostly thanks too paralazing palm) but up until then your going to want a shotgun and a hunting rifle as backup as mid game is dominated by the small arms
And plenty of grenades. I'm now playing an Unarmed build, and I cant stress enough how useful grenades are in comparison to a ranged build.
It's strange that Bethesda lavishes so much detail on, say, a floor texture, then drops the ball so badly with the voice acting. And there are still too many repeat voices. Here's a thought: Don't hire expensive Brit actors to do bad impersonations of American accents (did nobody tell Malcolm McDowell about how we pronounce "schedule," among other words?), and instead hire a slew of low-cost voiceover actors so's you don't have repeats.
Hehe. Yeah, but it's something I've come to expect from Bethesda...
Tried it at a friends house during the week. It's pretty, and although some of the clutter seemed a little out of place it has remained somewhat true to the series. The combat system, alright, having looked here before playing it, (which I'm glad I did), I knew to expect an Oblivion style game. Fairly fun, and the quests are decent (where I got up to atleast).
It seems like there's a lot to do, fairly big world with many quests. Yet, despite having so much stuff to do, I had so little motivation to do it. I just couldn't will myself into playing longer. And despite liking the game, I don't think I'll be buying it any time soon.
Veho Nex
11-24-2008, 00:12
have done 100% everything I could from evil to neutral to good.. Took me well under my expected 100 hours mark, I think barely over 40 hours for all side quest dungeons and the like. Its way more fun to be evil, but more rewarding(Money and weapons) to be good... For example the law bringer perk, you can rake in the cash by just visiting all the raider spots you know of and taking their ears.
Kekvit Irae
11-24-2008, 01:58
have done 100% everything I could from evil to neutral to good.. Took me well under my expected 100 hours mark, I think barely over 40 hours for all side quest dungeons and the like. Its way more fun to be evil, but more rewarding(Money and weapons) to be good... For example the law bringer perk, you can rake in the cash by just visiting all the raider spots you know of and taking their fingers.
Ears for Contract Killer, fingers for Lawbringer. :tongueg:
Another good side effect of being Good or Very Good is the ability to recruit Fawkes and Cross late in the game. I love how Fawkes mows down people with his gatling laser, and Cross can wear any armor you give her.
Plus being good gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
Interestingly, the Washington Post has an article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/23/AR2008112302242.html?hpid=artslot) on FO3 voice acting today.
frogbeastegg
11-24-2008, 20:44
Interestingly, the Washington Post has an article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/23/AR2008112302242.html?hpid=artslot) on FO3 voice acting today.
That was a good read; thanks for the link.
Editor is coming next month along with 3 confirmed DLCs.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/933/933617p1.html
Fallout 3 DLC Revealed
Operation: Anchorage heads the pack in January for 360 and PC.
by Martin Robinson, IGN UK
UK, November 25, 2008 - Details of the first downloadable content for Bethesda's Fallout 3 have emerged from the vault, with Operation: Anchorage heading the batch for Xbox 360 and PC in January.
The PC will also be getting an official editor for the game in December, appropriately titled G.E.C.K (Garden of Eden Creation Kit). Fallout 3's game director Todd Howard said of the editor, "We've always seen the original world of Fallout 3 as a foundation for even more content. Some created by us, and a lot more created by users. It's fun to create your own character, but it can be equally fun to create your own adventures. We can't wait to see what the community does with the G.E.C.K."
Operation: Anchorage, a simulation of the liberation of the Alaskan city from Chinese communists, is the first of the downloadable episodes. Exclusive to Xbox 360 and PC, it will be followed by two further instalments; The Pitt, taking place in a raider town in Pittsburgh and due in February, followed in March by Broken Steel, which extends the main quest and takes up the story of the Brotherhood of Steel.
Price points have yet to be announced for any of the content.
Kekvit Irae
11-25-2008, 21:51
Editor is coming next month along with 3 confirmed DLCs.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/933/933617p1.html
Sounds pretty awesome. Looks like they are going to have some actual use for those two Chinese radio stations I found around the wasteland.
Zenicetus
11-25-2008, 22:11
Operation: Anchorage, a simulation of the liberation of the Alaskan city from Chinese communists, is the first of the downloadable episodes.
That sounds interesting. A change of scenery with some snow would be nice. IIRC, this would happen just before the big nuclear war, so the Anchorage area should be more or less intact. Maybe war-ravaged, but not as bad as D.C. I hope they don't just take the D.C. area rubble and color it white. It would be fun to see some of those "1950's idea of the future" cars and buses running around.
Exclusive to Xbox 360 and PC, it will be followed by two further instalments; The Pitt, taking place in a raider town in Pittsburgh and due in February, followed in March by Broken Steel, which extends the main quest and takes up the story of the Brotherhood of Steel.
I assume the first one (Anchorage) would have the player start up a new character at level 1, since there's no continuity with the post-nuclear scenario. Or maybe they'll start you at level 10-15, since it probably won't be as long as the main quest. If you're a soldier running around in power armor, I guess you won't be starting at level 1.
I wonder how they'll handle the other two DLC's though, especially the last one (Brotherhood of Steel) that continues the the main quest. Doesn't that imply that they'll extend the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. levels with more stats and perks, if the player can continue the quest with the same character? Or will there be some kind of reset, where the player starts again at zero or a lower level, to fit inside the current system?
Kekvit Irae
11-25-2008, 22:45
Operation: Anchorage, a simulation of the liberation of the Alaskan city from Chinese communists, is the first of the downloadable episodes.
I assume the first one (Anchorage) would have the player start up a new character at level 1, since there's no continuity with the post-nuclear scenario. Or maybe they'll start you at level 10-15, since it probably won't be as long as the main quest. If you're a soldier running around in power armor, I guess you won't be starting at level 1.
Note the word "simulation."
More than likely, it will be just like the Tranquility Lane simulation in Vault 112 during the main quest.
Zenicetus
11-25-2008, 22:52
Ah ha, I missed simulation. Yep, that would keep it in the timeline of the main game, if that's what they're shooting for.
Veho Nex
11-26-2008, 17:16
really i thought it was fingers for evil... hmmmmm
Rented on XBOX, and my full thoughts.
Pros:
Making weapons is a cute aspect of the game.
Very pretty.
Humourous at times.
The ambiance fits the series.
Some good wow factor moments.
VATS wasn't as bad as I initially thought it was. But... (see below).
Cons:
The quests/storyline filled with filthy plot-holes, bugs and other nuisances.
Plus it's not very original at all, many quests had me thinking "I've done this before".
I literally had to force my self to play, the only thing keeping me playing was the fact I knew I had to give it back yesterday.
The dust and terrain isn't brown enough. Gah!
The voice-overs... LOL!
In total I found the game to be pretty easy/lacking. :shrug:
VATS is a bit dodgy, since even if you have low perception just boot it up to see if enemies are around...
All in all, not as bad as it's made out to be by hard-core "old-skool" fans. Yet, in all honesty I much prefer FO1 and 2. Rent don't buy.
Sir Moody
12-04-2008, 19:14
Making weapons is a cute aspect of the game.
cute but theres not really enough - there is a fully functioning but still Beta mod that lets you craft any weapon in the game and is going to include some more later on so the community will fix this
The quests/storyline filled with filthy plot-holes, bugs and other nuisances.
Plus it's not very original at all, many quests had me thinking "I've done this before".
a flaw with most modern RPG's i find these days - gone are the days weh nquests were somewhat unique - theres only so many times you can do things
VATS is a bit dodgy, since even if you have low perception just boot it up to see if enemies are around...
must be an xbox flaw as in the PC VATS only works if your cross hair is in the general area of a creature within range
Kekvit Irae
12-04-2008, 20:23
must be an xbox flaw as in the PC VATS only works if your cross hair is in the general area of a creature within range
Same on the 360. I can only pull up VATS if the enemy is within my sights. For long distance shooting, I almost have to line the crosshair up perfectly.
a flaw with most modern RPG's i find these days - gone are the days weh nquests were somewhat unique - theres only so many times you can do things
Very minor spoilers.
The whole darn game is a mish-mash of the previous two games' story lines, with a few sprinkles of Bioshock/System Shock and a "matrixesque" ending. A poor, poor effort by the people that created the TES Universe. :no:
frogbeastegg
12-07-2008, 13:15
Finished at last. 1 month of play, in the form of 54 hours. I did all of the named quests except for 2 (1 broke midway through, the other is evil), found all of the bobbleheads and super mutant behemoths, toured the wastes, reached level 20 and turned into an angel of uber death.
Now I'm looking at the game retrospectively it's easier to see why I didn't like it more. The reason is blindly simple and I feel stupid for not working it out earlier: it's outdated. The graphics, budget and presentation are very modern. The game itself isn't. So many aspects of this game have been done better by other games, and Bethesda themselves have made little effort to update some of the creakiest aspects of their template.
The plot based half of the game never won my kinder feelings. That includes the side quests. This is the game at its most archaic. The static conversations with barely animated talking heads spouting lines of limp dialogue, before you head out to pick up the greeblie from tunnel dungeon 24, only to slog back and hand it over in another talking head scene. Congratulations, here are some items you probably don't need and a dribble of XP. Please activate the next talking head scene and learn which tunnel dungeon you need to trawl through in order to find the mystic spreebong. If the game had a good plot and writing I could have suffered this with better cheer; it doesn't. I forgive the dungeon chase with crap plot and dialogue when I replay Icewind Dale because it's very old and was never billed as more than an AD&D dungeon crawl. I won't forgive it in Fallout 3; it should be so much more.
The other half of the game, the part where plot and chat played no part, was much more enjoyable. Wandering the wastes looking for bobbleheads, behemoths, locations and XP was much more pleasant. It was this aspect which allowed Bethesda's attention to detail to shine, and this part which supplied the bulk of the good plot. Stumbling across charred skeletons and being able to work out what that person was doing when the bomb fell, finding records which detail the struggle to survive, the cold chill that ran down the back of my neck as I realised that a certain brothel must have been for paedophiles ...
Oh, and stomping around as an unstoppable killing machine of shiny righteousness never hurts :gring: Uber armour, uber plasma rifle, maxed useful skills, level 20, and the grim reaper perk, mmmm.
The game's power curve was quite badly out of skew. I was pretty unstoppable until I reached level 8. I then struggled until around level 11, felt combat was balanced until around level 15, then steadily got more and more uber. I don't mind the latter portion of that curve; the front part isn't right. I did reach level 20 very early on; there was a lot left for me to do. Level 25 would have been a better choice for the cap IMO.
Pontius Pilate
12-07-2008, 22:07
Finished at last. 1 month of play, in the form of 54 hours. I did all of the named quests except for 2 (1 broke midway through, the other is evil), found all of the bobbleheads and super mutant behemoths, toured the wastes, reached level 20 and turned into an angel of uber death.
Now I'm looking at the game retrospectively it's easier to see why I didn't like it more. The reason is blindly simple and I feel stupid for not working it out earlier: it's outdated. The graphics, budget and presentation are very modern. The game itself isn't. So many aspects of this game have been done better by other games, and Bethesda themselves have made little effort to update some of the creakiest aspects of their template.
The plot based half of the game never won my kinder feelings. That includes the side quests. This is the game at its most archaic. The static conversations with barely animated talking heads spouting lines of limp dialogue, before you head out to pick up the greeblie from tunnel dungeon 24, only to slog back and hand it over in another talking head scene. Congratulations, here are some items you probably don't need and a dribble of XP. Please activate the next talking head scene and learn which tunnel dungeon you need to trawl through in order to find the mystic spreebong. If the game had a good plot and writing I could have suffered this with better cheer; it doesn't. I forgive the dungeon chase with crap plot and dialogue when I replay Icewind Dale because it's very old and was never billed as more than an AD&D dungeon crawl. I won't forgive it in Fallout 3; it should be so much more.
The other half of the game, the part where plot and chat played no part, was much more enjoyable. Wandering the wastes looking for bobbleheads, behemoths, locations and XP was much more pleasant. It was this aspect which allowed Bethesda's attention to detail to shine, and this part which supplied the bulk of the good plot. Stumbling across charred skeletons and being able to work out what that person was doing when the bomb fell, finding records which detail the struggle to survive, the cold chill that ran down the back of my neck as I realised that a certain brothel must have been for paedophiles ...
Oh, and stomping around as an unstoppable killing machine of shiny righteousness never hurts :gring: Uber armour, uber plasma rifle, maxed useful skills, level 20, and the grim reaper perk, mmmm.
The game's power curve was quite badly out of skew. I was pretty unstoppable until I reached level 8. I then struggled until around level 11, felt combat was balanced until around level 15, then steadily got more and more uber. I don't mind the latter portion of that curve; the front part isn't right. I did reach level 20 very early on; there was a lot left for me to do. Level 25 would have been a better choice for the cap IMO.
so in sense, the game is pretty much Oblivion with guns? What do you think?
Sir Moody
12-08-2008, 04:20
so in sense, the game is pretty much Oblivion with guns? What do you think?
with a pinch of fallout humour in places but otherwise yup that sums it up
frogbeastegg
12-09-2008, 20:28
so in sense, the game is pretty much Oblivion with guns? What do you think?
No. You can tell they are made by the same developers, but they don't feel like the same game. Fallout 3 is a quest based game; Oblivion is a sandbox with quests.
Fallout 3 feels to me like a game which arrived too late. The graphics, budget and detail are 2008 at its best. Other aspects, mainly those relating to the quest portions of the game, feel like they come from the start of the decade. Once upon a time I'd have found the static talking heads amazing because they have lip movement, not cared too much about trawling umpteen tunnel dungeons, and accepted that the vast majority of games have rubbish plots. Nowadays I expect much more.
I could see a game like Fallout 3 working on Bioware's ancient Infinity Engine. You just strip away the 3D and the gloss and there you go. I can't imagine Mass Effect or some of the other recent high profile RPGs being made on that engine. You'd manage to get parts of the game working on the Infinity Engine, yet you'd never manage to get the whole.
Sir Moody
12-10-2008, 16:48
No. You can tell they are made by the same developers, but they don't feel like the same game. Fallout 3 is a quest based game; Oblivion is a sandbox with quests.
Fallout 3 feels to me like a game which arrived too late. The graphics, budget and detail are 2008 at its best. Other aspects, mainly those relating to the quest portions of the game, feel like they come from the start of the decade. Once upon a time I'd have found the static talking heads amazing because they have lip movement, not cared too much about trawling umpteen tunnel dungeons, and accepted that the vast majority of games have rubbish plots. Nowadays I expect much more.
I could see a game like Fallout 3 working on Bioware's ancient Infinity Engine. You just strip away the 3D and the gloss and there you go. I can't imagine Mass Effect or some of the other recent high profile RPGs being made on that engine. You'd manage to get parts of the game working on the Infinity Engine, yet you'd never manage to get the whole.
Im not so sure you know - Oblivion really wasnt a sand box either
Oblivions gameplay was exactly the same as fallout 3's - wander around until you find a quest or a landmark and complete/explore it then continue with the wandering
you can argue there were more quests/locations but the gameplay is totally the same - the only really sandbox item in Oblivion was the skill system...
Im not so sure you know - Oblivion really wasnt a sand box either
Oblivions gameplay was exactly the same as fallout 3's - wander around until you find a quest or a landmark and complete/explore it then continue with the wandering
you can argue there were more quests/locations but the gameplay is totally the same - the only really sandbox item in Oblivion was the skill system...
I don't agree at all. The term 'sandbox game' generally refers to non-linear gameplay that allows a person to take or turn down quests as they wish and move in any direction they wish to go, regardless of the main storyline. Oblivion seems about as perfect a fit for the designation sandbox game as anything else. I also don't understand how the nature of the skill system even applies to it being classified as sandbox or not sandbox. Surely it is the open nature of the world that makes something a sandbox game, not a person's ability to choose various skills as they please, as the latter is present in plenty of extremely linear games.
frogbeastegg
12-10-2008, 19:37
I don't agree at all. The term 'sandbox game' generally refers to non-linear gameplay that allows a person to take or turn down quests as they wish and move in any direction they wish to go, regardless of the main storyline. Oblivion seems about as perfect a fit for the designation sandbox game as anything else. I also don't understand how the nature of the skill system even applies to it being classified as sandbox or not sandbox. Surely it is the open nature of the world that makes something a sandbox game, not a person's ability to choose various skills as they please, as the latter is present in plenty of extremely linear games.
This.
Sandbox was the whole idea behind Morrowind and Oblivion. Make whatever kind of character you like and go forth into the world to do whatever catches your fancy.
johnhughthom
12-11-2008, 01:17
I think Morrowind was the perfect sandbox game, you could go out into the world with no idea what the main plot was. I played for six months without realizing there was a main plot. Playing Oblivion and Fallout 3 without following the main plot doesn't feel right.
Demons are taking over the world!! OK I'm gonna spend a few days looking for nirnroot.
I've just ostracised myself from my lifelong home to follow my father. I know, I won't bother actually looking for him, instead I'll help some nutter write a book.
That is why I could never really get into Oblivion or Fallout 3, it just felt wrong.
Sir Moody
12-11-2008, 01:42
Sandbox was the whole idea behind Morrowind and Oblivion. Make whatever kind of character you like and go forth into the world to do whatever catches your fancy.
Which is also true with fallout - however theres a finite number of character types and a finite amount of things to do as with Oblivion and as with Morrowind
a sand box game in my opinion is a game which provides the system and the rule set and then lets you do as you please - D&D in its table top form is a sand box - theres no limmit to what the DM can let the players do - Star wars Galaxies (pre-NGE) and the classic Ultima Online were Sand box's (more or less)
my definition of a sand box game would be "heres the game world - heres the combat system - go and do as you please - your imagination is the limmit" - Mount and Blade is the perfect example of this (or it was last time i played which was a while back)
by your definition Fallout 3 is a Sand box, just a smaller one then Oblivion which was a smaller one again than Morrowind
Sand box simulators is a better description :laugh4:
TevashSzat
12-11-2008, 03:48
I think Morrowind was the perfect sandbox game, you could go out into the world with no idea what the main plot was. I played for six months without realizing there was a main plot. Playing Oblivion and Fallout 3 without following the main plot doesn't feel right.
Demons are taking over the world!! OK I'm gonna spend a few days looking for nirnroot.
I've just ostracised myself from my lifelong home to follow my father. I know, I won't bother actually looking for him, instead I'll help some nutter write a book.
That is why I could never really get into Oblivion or Fallout 3, it just felt wrong.
Also, Morrowing just seemed so vast compared to Oblivion. You had way more than just 3 guilds, you had the 3 houses, over half a dozen guilds, three vampire clans. I easily played the game for 100 hours+ on just one character and didn't finish everything or even get that close to. Only thing I hated about it is that I couldn't find anything, especially crucial quest palces, and everyone gave horrible directions.....
johnhughthom
12-11-2008, 03:52
Only thing I hated about it is that I couldn't find anything, especially crucial quest palces, and everyone gave horrible directions.....
You know there is one quest place I can't find to this day, one of the Morag Tong contracts. It's somewhere on that island to the north.
I'm a bit surprised I didn't love this game more.
Somehow they've managed to remove the magic from Fallout 1 and 2. Those two games are favorites of mine even though they crashed all the time. This one got put on the shelf after a couple of weeks.
Sad really. Let's hope some of the downloadable content gets it running again. We really need a bigger world and less of a railroad plot.
Silly that you have to be very far in the storyline before you can use powerarmor too. There should be an alternative way to get acces to that (maybe from the outcasts).
More info on the FO3 DLCs:
http://au.xboxlive.ign.com/articles/937/937202p1.html
Of particular note is that they will include new perks, and the third one will increase the level cap.
Sarmatian
12-11-2008, 18:35
I'm a bit surprised I didn't love this game more.
Somehow they've managed to remove the magic from Fallout 1 and 2. Those two games are favorites of mine even though they crashed all the time. This one got put on the shelf after a couple of weeks.
Sad really. Let's hope some of the downloadable content gets it running again. We really need a bigger world and less of a railroad plot.
Silly that you have to be very far in the storyline before you can use powerarmor too. There should be an alternative way to get acces to that (maybe from the outcasts).
Power Armour here isn't really that powerful, so you're not missing out much. I've found Reilly's Rangers armour good enough for the entire game. Light, good protection, raises your skills, can be repaired with ordinary combat armour... No need for bulky PA...
The GECK (Fallout 3 modding kit) has been released.
http://geck.bethsoft.com/
Geezer57
12-12-2008, 15:12
Somehow they've managed to remove the magic from Fallout 1 and 2. Those two games are favorites of mine even though they crashed all the time.
Not to hijack the thread (just a F.Y.I.), but the updated downloadable versions of Fallout 1, 2, and Tactics from Good Old Games (http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/) are stable under XP and Vista. They're also very affordable at $5.99 US each.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not affiliated in any way with GOG.com, nor do I obtain any benefit from recommending them - just a satisfied customer. Their catalog started out pretty small, but is now getting larger. :yes:
frogbeastegg
12-12-2008, 20:30
by your definition Fallout 3 is a Sand box, just a smaller one then Oblivion which was a smaller one again than Morrowind
~:shrug: It's the common definition and I'm not the only one who finds that Fallout 3 doesn't fit it.
A small sandbox isn't much of a sandbox because you don't have space to play. Fallout 3's level cap is much too low, it's far too easy to max out your character, it doesn't take long comparatively speaking to make a character who is good at everything, and there aren't many non-plot quests. Above all you have limited scope for playing with the world, or doing incredibly random and silly things. Putting a grenade in someone's pocket is one. I can't think of many other examples. Where's the equivalent of breaking into Vivec's temple and killing him without doing the main quest? Where's the equivalent to murdering the master assassin with one of the poison apples he gives you?
In my opinion, while Fallout 3 has fewer quests and is more limited than Oblivion is (which in turn is supposed to be more limited then Morrowind), it has more variety in it's quests.....and the world is certainly more interesting. I tried Morrowind, after I had finished with Oblivion and the plugins, truth be told, I got bored quickly, there is much more err....quantity....but lesser quality.
I mean it's kind of what GTA 4 and GTA SA are different in. San Andreas was huge, but GTA 4 has more to do, I think.
Anyhow, we do have a nice group of people working on Tamrial Rebuilt, making modules for TES3 engine..........if enough people try, we might soon have a Wasteland Rebuilt too. :beam:
Power Armour here isn't really that powerful, so you're not missing out much. I've found Reilly's Rangers armour good enough for the entire game. Light, good protection, raises your skills, can be repaired with ordinary combat armour... No need for bulky PA...
Yeah I ended up going that way too. But In the other games power armor was so much better that the other types that I wanted to use on in this game too. As it turned out I only wore it for a few missions before swapping back to Reillys superior gear.
Kekvit Irae
12-15-2008, 14:54
The only problems I see with power armor is that is comes too late in the game to wear (unless you powergame through the main quest up to that point), and that it gives minuses to AGI (not really a bad thing if you are a melee character). For a Energy Weapons character, power armor is VITAL, at least the Tesla Armor is. Otherwise, you can get a 50 DR, +1 CHA power armor with no minuses to AGI by doing the Shoot Them In The Head quest and using the keys yourself instead of turning them in. Because said armor cannot be repaired with other armors, it's best to give it to a companion (companion weapons and armor don't degrade).
so in sense, the game is pretty much Oblivion with guns? What do you think?
nah, i got bored of oblivion, but i'm still thoroughly hooked on F3.
Zenicetus
12-15-2008, 20:08
The only problems I see with power armor is that is comes too late in the game to wear (unless you powergame through the main quest up to that point), and that it gives minuses to AGI (not really a bad thing if you are a melee character). For a Energy Weapons character, power armor is VITAL, at least the Tesla Armor is. Otherwise, you can get a 50 DR, +1 CHA power armor with no minuses to AGI by doing the Shoot Them In The Head quest and using the keys yourself instead of turning them in. Because said armor cannot be repaired with other armors, it's best to give it to a companion (companion weapons and armor don't degrade).
It was probably a mistake to include power armor training in the main quest line. They could have done it as a side quest tied to character level (i.e. you have to be strong enough to survive a mid-level enemy encounter to get the training), or just make it a perk you can select somewhere around level 10 or 12. I ended up using the Ranger armor until the last part of the game, when I switched to Tesla (when I had access) and finally the Shoot-em-in-the-head armor at the endgame. I wore that myself because by that time I was taking very little damage, and didn't need repairs.
It was a little disappointing that all the weapon and armor "styles" weren't that strongly differentiated. By the endgame, you have enough character advancement points (with the right perk selection) to max out two weapon types, and you can wear any armor. You're not forced to specialize as a "tank" (power armor with heavy weapons), "rogue" (sneak attack with lighter armor and small arms), or "wizard" (energy weapon specialist?). I know that games shouldn't all have to conform to holy trinity types like that, but I was expecting at least some ability to specialize, with hard choices between styles, and significant rewards for choosing a specific combat style. Instead, you can basically choose the best of everything for your character, which feels too much like powergaming. If you pay attention to the better perks and skills, you unavoidably become an invincible, uber death machine in the entire second half of the game.
All that aside, and agreeing with Froggie's points about the weak writing and quest design....
Speaking of which, what a disappointment that the core quest involved a water treatment plant! That's the best they could come up with? I know they need to leave room for sequels and other stories in this setting, but that just seemed like they couldn't come up with any good ideas. Heck, the minor "disarm the bomb" sidequest in Megaton would have been a better main quest line.
... I still enjoyed playing the game. I think it was mainly the environment. Too many dungeon crawls, yeah, but Bethesda did a good job with downtown D.C. and the Wasteland. I was continually amazed at how many unique static models were in the game. I was always stumbling across things I hadn't seen before. It was fun just running around in that world.
tibilicus
12-26-2008, 16:30
recently got this game for the 360 and can some one tell me who also has the 360 version if they found it incredibly unstable at time?
Normally 360's aren't renowned for build quality and I occasionally get the odd disk read error or system freeze but this has been amplified by Fallout. My 360 just doesn't sound healthy when running it sometimes, especially for a much longer duration.
I don't own a 360 myself, but my cousin does, and while someone else suggests something, I can tell you this, that according to him, his 360 always makes a noise like an old motorbike trying to go up a steep hill........but it's working fine. Just noisy.
coalition
12-27-2008, 04:35
Possibly one of the best games I have played...
frogbeastegg
12-27-2008, 13:05
recently got this game for the 360 and can some one tell me who also has the 360 version if they found it incredibly unstable at time?
Normally 360's aren't renowned for build quality and I occasionally get the odd disk read error or system freeze but this has been amplified by Fallout. My 360 just doesn't sound healthy when running it sometimes, especially for a much longer duration.
It crashed a couple of times on me, hung up, and had some nasty glitches. I didn't have a single disc error, and the console sounded the same as it always does while playing.
If you have a hard drive and the NXE update I suggest you install it. That will remove the strain on your disc drive and make the machine quieter, if nothing else. It could make it more stable if the disc or disc drive are involved in your problems.
tibilicus
12-27-2008, 19:10
It crashed a couple of times on me, hung up, and had some nasty glitches. I didn't have a single disc error, and the console sounded the same as it always does while playing.
If you have a hard drive and the NXE update I suggest you install it. That will remove the strain on your disc drive and make the machine quieter, if nothing else. It could make it more stable if the disc or disc drive are involved in your problems.
Think I'll probably try that. I guess if that doesn't work I will have to face the impending truth that my 360 could be nearing that tunnel of light ~:(
Edit: That seems to of maybe done the trick.
FO3 is not a bad game, but it could have been much-much better. For one thing, too few quests. In Oblivion you'd be tripping all over quests at every location. Not so in FO3 and it shows. Then there's a lack of the evil path thru the main quest. Good or bad, one still has to work for the good guys to finish the game. That's a minus as well. Also, I wish the map was a bit bigger with a few more cities and some equivalent of Oblivion's guilds.
Of course, there are good things: there's nothing quite like running around in a full suit of power armor frying mutants with the flamer while listening to "Butcher Pete" on GNR.
Major Robert Dump
02-05-2009, 00:51
Regarding moriarty and his accent: yes there was immigration from overseas by wealthy europeans who viewed the american wasteland as a new frontier, although not sure if he came with Tenpenny or not.
I love the game and I hate it. I feel its a little too easy and linear in the main quest, but then again I'm a bit obsessive in exploring and collecting:
- I'm level 15, with 5 maxed skills and all the others over 70 thanks to the comprehension perk, 42 books and lots of bobbles.
-I have a tendency to hang on to temporary party members to use as mules and backup fighters (by never actually completing the quest)...theres sydney, who offers to help you find the Declaration of Independence, you can heal her but not gear her......theres Red and the other guy from Bigtown who you rescue from supermutants, you cant heal them but you can equip them....theres the hooker from Dukovs, you cant heal or equip her but she is fun to look at (she eventually called me a **** for not taking her to rivet and left, i covertly followed her and watched her wander into a supermutant camp)....theres the guy you find outside of Little Lamplight who is getting kicked out for becoming an adult, you can equip him but not heal him...and of course theres dogmeat and the regular party members....I've had Mr Gutsy, RIP via Deathclaws at old olmey, by far the hardest fight I've had yet....and now I have Jericho who is by far the best vocal and conversationalist yet. I'm a bad, bad person and I know of the the ghoul in the underworld who I can hire and also the hot little slave girl in Paradise Falls, but I'm saving them for when Jericho dies, which doesnt appear to be anytime soon since he autoheals after combat, had unlimited ammo and is currently wearing Power Armor..
But even without all these people (I usually have them hanging in my house at TenPenny, its like a little party) I think its too easy with Vats and a little run and gun. Blasted my way out of the enclave with nary a scratch and I wasnt wearing armor (just my trade suit and the wig from the silly bot in the archives) because I started that quest after a break from the game and forgot to re-equip.
there have been a lot of entertaining, if not surreal, moments in the game:
-wandering out of some sewers I found a group of 8 raiders circled around a 9th raider wearing just his underwear, punching him and asking him if he wanted his mommy. they all attacked me, including mr underwear.
-came around the corner of a house in the cannibal town with my sniper scope up, only to find myself zoomed in on a little girl sitting very unlady like with her panties showing, to which her father told me "she's only 13 you know"
-offered to have a threesome with the guy who has the hots for the nuka-cola addict chic, at which point he yelled "hell yeah, I know where to get some nuka-cola" and ran into a mob of radscorpions and died
That being said, I dont like the fast travel system and how it relates to the spawn bubble. You see, AI characters that would normally travel their path unabated (because if you arent there, they arent figthing) will in fact run into trouble if you, say, try to escort them. So if you invest in the merchants and decide to protect your investment so you get to see a little return, your escorting them will actually get them into more fights because they are in your spawn bubble. On my good character, 4 of the merchants have been killed by Talon mercenaries who were, I assume, coming for me. I do have to admit though it's quite funny to be walking along and hear gunshots in the distance, turn around and watch a merchant, his guard and the pack mule blown sky high by some exploding cars. FYI the pack horses are kinda buggy so if a merchant does die, you can try to run down his pack and kill it and loot it but they do have a tendency to run into walls and disappear, so you gotta be quick about it.
So far my favorite weapon is the kneecapper sawed off shotgun. I think I have the special versions of all the weapons except the 10mm SMG, which sydney carries and i will get when i kill her and eat her, and the scoped 44 and the assault rifles.
Oh yeah, the exploding cars are a bit over the top as well.
This game is way, way better than oblivion and honestly better than most games I've played, I just don't like the mechanics of questing and how the game ends when you beat it. long post, I'll stop now.
Forward Observer
02-05-2009, 23:57
--------------------------------------------
Oh yeah, the exploding cars are a bit over the top as well.
This game is way, way better than oblivion and honestly better than most games I've played, I just don't like the mechanics of questing and how the game ends when you beat it. long post, I'll stop now.
The exploding vehicles are no fun if you happen to forget and try to use them as cover while being fired at. Conversely they come in pretty handy if you can entice your adversaries to be in close proximity to them when they explode. This tactic has saved my bacon more than once when I was trying to take on Enclave roadblocks while being pretty much outmatched in armor and weapons.
A lot of people have complained about the ending, and in a recent interview, one of the lead designers of the game has admitted that they misjudged how people would react to the game mechanic associated with the end of the main quest, and that they plan on correcting that aspect in future installments.
-----It's not that it was particularly bad story telling, although it did have some problems in logic. It really didn't sense that you had acquired a companion in Falkes who could perform the final task since he is imune to radiation, but then he cops out with some sort of destiny cliché.
The biggest complaint that most people have is that regardless of what one does in the last part of the main quest, it simply ends the game. I felt, like a lot of others, that it was a simply a big immersion killer to have to go back to a point prior to the end of the main quest, and simply ignore it if I wanted to continue to explore the wasteland and play out all the side quests.
They should have enabled the player to survive, so that after the epilogue, one could simply continue to play.
Cheers
P.S.
If you want a real exercise in escorting, try protecting Hannibal and his runaway slave group as they head to the Lincoln Memorial in the Head of State side quest. I think the developers did not intend the player to actually escort them, but instead simply meet them there. I didn't know this and spent the better part of 8 or 9 real time hours trying to complete the quest by physically escorting them.
If you do escort them, Hannibal and his group wander all over the map instead of heading directly for the Lincoln Memorial and it probably take 3 or 4 game days to do this because they walk at a snail's pace. They get to the first station north of the mall area, but then turn west-- wading across the Potomac towards Megaton. At Megaton they turn south and walk all the way to the Brotherhood of Steel camp. Then they cross a bridge at the Jefferson Memorial to head back north. Unfortunately I tried to escort them at a point in the game, just after the Enclave had taken over the Jefferson memorial in the main quest. After this event in the main quest the Enclave erects a force field around the memorial and sets up roadblocks all around the wasteland.
Consequently besides numerous animal attacks, and plenty of raider shoot-outs, I had to fight my way through no less than 4 Enclave road blocks. Fortunately, you can tell Hannibal to stop while you scout ahead. He will give you 6 hours to do this and you use can use the time to take out all the nasties in their path. They could not survive otherwise. It was an absolute epic journey, and quite a challenge---requiring many saves and re-loads, but it was kind of fun too.
The problem was that we came to a dead end when Hannibal's group could not get through the Enclave force field around the Jefferson memorial. By that time I had read on the Bethesda forums that the correct way to complete the quest was not to escort them at all, but simply fast travel to the memorial and wait for them to show up at one of the metro stations in the vicinity of the memorial.
Major Robert Dump
02-06-2009, 01:53
I need to try escorting him with my good character. Escorting is actually one of the more fun aspects of the game if you know what to expect. I noticed that freed slaves, like the one at the raider stronghold with the bohemoth mutant, will pick up weapons and ammo that you don't get first. This makes for entertaining gameplay when you travel back there and get ambushed by raiders and end up being helped by halfwit freed slaves in their underwear with assault rifles.
frogbeastegg
02-10-2009, 19:48
Adding in link to the topic (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=112356) with thoughts on the operation anchorage DLC. I'm leaving it seperate as it will make it easier for people to find information specifically on it; this topic is big and covers plenty already. A link here should hopefully keep the two tied loosely together.
There's a pretty decent preview of DLC 2 - The Pitt up on The Escapist:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/5778-Fallout-3-The-Pitt-Hands-On-at-DICE
Zenicetus
02-20-2009, 21:31
I just read that Escapist preview. WARNING: it has a few spoilers about the plot line. Don't read it if you want a completely fresh start on the expansion. Although frankly, the plot developments are fairly predictable once you know the basic "post-apocalypse city run by slavers" premise. We've all seen this movie before.
On the one hand, it's good that it's a more story-driven episode, and not another linear shoot-'em-up like the Anchorage DLC. That was very disappointing. What I'm wondering about though, is how much fun it will be to play with a capped level 20 character? That almost didn't matter in Anchorage, except for making easy combat even easier. There wasn't enough time or tactical potential in that short episode to make much use of the fancier skills and abilities. With the new DLC though, I don't know if that will work. One of the main things that keeps players motivated in RPG's is the continual increase in skills and abilities. When that's capped off, the game has to offer a very compelling story, or very challenging new enemies (which this might do, based on the preview), or gear and weapons you haven't seen before. One or two new weapons are mentioned in the preview, but I'm not a melee specialist that would be interested. If they have something for a sniper, maybe.
This time I'm going to wait for some user feedback before jumping on it.
tibilicus
02-21-2009, 02:12
There's a pretty decent preview of DLC 2 - The Pitt up on The Escapist:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/5778-Fallout-3-The-Pitt-Hands-On-at-DICE
You sir have just made my day. ~:)
Veho Nex
03-25-2009, 07:10
I heard a rumor the pit was just released, but my internet isn't working... still, about the only website i can seem to get on is this and my brothers website. can someone confirm?
frogbeastegg
03-25-2009, 11:53
The PC version was released and is available AFAIK.
The xbox version was released, discovered to be a huge, buggy mess and was pulled down. It's got giant red placeholder markers instead of new art assets, floating trees and rocks, crashes, and all sorts of other issues. Glad I didn't buy it.
tibilicus
03-26-2009, 00:46
I heard a rumor the pit was just released, but my internet isn't working... still, about the only website i can seem to get on is this and my brothers website. can someone confirm?
Yes it is, but I personally wouldn't get to excited about it..
So far I'm actually finding it less enjoyable than Operation Anchorage. Also if your a high level character you probably wont get much out of it unless you crank your difficulty right up.
Veho Nex
03-27-2009, 23:25
Bought it but as I was installing it computer froze up and died. That was on wensdat right after I read FBE's post. Anyways, I think I killed the HD where FO3 was on, when it was only a IDE cable death. So I have to start anew. I'll give a review when I am done.
tibilicus
03-28-2009, 00:08
I can actually say towards the end the Pitt was really quite good if not a bit short.
With out spoiling to much I'll just say the moral choice you have to make is really quite challenging and a taxing one, much harder than any decisions made within the main campaign..
frogbeastegg
05-10-2009, 19:37
I waited a month before buying The Pit. Now it's fully fixed and the game's level cap has been raised I downloaded it, along with Broken Steel.
The Pit is hard to recommend. It's better than Operation Anchorage, in that it's not pure run and gun. It's underwhelming in that the new area is cramped and dull, the main quest is short and dull, the new NPCs are dull and dull, and it features the mother of all Fallout collection quests ... which is annoying and dull. Collecting 100 steel ingots took me over an hour with a printed guide, and would have been intolerable without one.
The only good is that while the two sides may look obviously good and evil, they're not. Don't get too excited though; the truth is simultaneously obvious a mile away and poorly telegraphed. It revolves around a child born with a unique resistance to mutation.
The slaves should be the good side because they are slaves, right? Wrong. Problem: the only way you will know they're not the good guys is if you kidnap the baby as requested and take it to their lab. At that point you can see it's a rat hole filled with clueless idiots who can't wait to butcher the brat to get themselves a cure.
Fortunately I baulked at kidnapping the baby. I left it with the evil slaver faction, figuring that at least it has a safe, clean environment and loving parents, and that the experiments were being done with the child's welfare as the primary concern. The quest then required me to hunt down the slave leader; that's how I found the grotty lab filled with evil scumbags, and got the slave's speech about gaining the cure no matter what and with no concern for the baby. Quest completed I then was able to talk with the parents and discover that the evil slaver overlord has plans to free his slaves, spread the cure to everyone, and rebuilt the Pit as a proper city full of goodness and hope. He's ex-brotherhood of steel and a hero, blah blah.
IMO it was poorly done, set up more as a trap for the player than as a real choice. It completely relied on you making an environment based decision as I did, without knowing what the second environment would be like at all. Why couldn't they have allowed the player talk to both sides a bit before the need for the choice?
Broken Steel is ... meh. Quests which take you through yet more tunnel dungeons, followed by an assault on a huge base where your options get stripped away. Got 100 points in stealth? Tough, these enemies can still spot you most of the time. Want to hack and use something other than brute force? Tough, all you do is release more enemies or turn off a couple of turrets. The base is filled with tedious enemies who take and give a lot of damage, and behave exactly the same as the last 640 humanoids you killed. Yawn.
Broken Steel has killed the game's stability. I'm playing the xbox version and it's locked the console up multiple times. It has severe frame rate issues in that huge base. I'm seeing quite a few glitches I never encountered before, such as shots from weapons getting stuck and hanging in mid air forever.
(At this point I feel obliged to add that the first version of Broken Steel had problems registering achievements on the xbox, and was broken on the PC. The xbox version now has that fixed, and I haven't heard the same about the PC version. I would also add that the xbox fix was not as good as promised, and has broken some people's gamertags and achievements for Fallout 3 entirely. This after the debacle of The Pit, where it took 4 or 5 attempts before the xbox recieved a fully functional version of the DLC. A lot of people lost their game saves in that mess, primarily those with high level characters and many hours invested in the game. Completely and utterly pitiful.)
One of the new enemy types, the ghoul reaver, is either a glitchy mess or completely ill-conceived. It spasms around like the animation is fighting with the ragdoll effects, and soaks up so much damage it's nearly impossible to kill. I'm talking hundreds of bullets from a fully repaired top end weapon here. In a fight with 2 of them my combat shotgun went from fully repaired to completely broken before I killed them, and I used a unique laser and a unique Chinese assault rifle for lots of shots too. It's an understatement to say that a single one of these ghouls has more health than an entire dungeon worth of high level enemies. Meanwhile they do around 100HP of damage to my level 24 character with ultra amazing armour; she has just over 500HP. Spamming stimpacks is a tedious must. They're faster than you so running away is no good, and you can't sneak around them even with 100 points. The other new enemies are not nearly as tough; they feel as though they are operating on the same scale as the original enemies, so they represent the same kind of step up as a super mutant master did to a brute etc.
The new content does do a good job of sorting out the abysmal original ending. This is how it should have been. Being able to get to level 30 is very nice. The new perks are mostly complete rubbish.
All in all I can't recommend any of the DLC to the general player. Broken Steel is worth a purchase if the raised level cap is really important to you.
I hope that's truly it for DLC. No more please! I don't know why I keep doing this; I wasn't that fond of the original game in the first place. I guess it is because I keep hoping to find the wow-awesome game so many others did; got to be better than the tunnel dungeon trudge with awful writing and dire plot I played ...
Zenicetus
05-11-2009, 06:03
Note: this is about the PC/Windows Live version of The Pitt and Broken Steel.
I did the Pitt shortly after it came out, and concur with Froggie's review; she really nailed it. I won't say it was a complete waste of time, because I still enjoy running around in the post-apocalypse world as a change of pace from the other games I've been playing recently. The hot and steamy color palette of the Pitt was a nice contrast to the cool blues of Anchorage. Art-wise and environment design-wise I thought it was pretty good, although it did feel very cramped. I thought I'd be wandering around a city similar to the scale of D.C. like the main campaign, but it was more like being confined in a small neighborhood section. I understand the constraints, for a low-cost, minor DLC release like this, but it was still disappointing once I realized how small an area I was going to be moving around in. It conflicts with the big, open-ended feel of the main campaign (more on that below).
One nice thing I enjoyed was more use of the vertical in the environment. You can get up on rooftops in one area, and there are lots of catwalks. At least it was a little different than the corridor crawls.
I didn't have the patience to do the full steel ingot run, I only did the part that advanced the plot. I agree about the "big moral choice" too. That was very badly handled, with not enough information for the player.
Depending on what difficulty and character type you're playing you'll probably want to do the Pitt at somewhere around level 15-17. I did it with my character post-Anchorage at level 20. Other than a few surprises from scripted attacks, it was pretty easy.
Due to the aggravating way Microsoft forces you to buy points in blocks instead of just enough for the current game you want, I had some leftover points after The Pitt. Fallout 3 is the only reason I have that execrable Windows Live thing installed (I don't own an XBox), and since with the leftover points it only cost me $6.25 USD to buy Broken Steel, I did that. At that price I figured it couldn't be too terrible.
I'm about halfway through Broken Steel, trying to stretch it out a little, and my reaction so far is... meh. It's okay, I guess, although like the previous two DLC's I'm still feeling railroaded through the plot. These "mini" DLC's are not a good match for a game like Fallout 3, where the main campaign takes place in a very large environment where you can do a lot of exploration, and pursue dozens of side quests. I love wandering around the wasteland and discovering stuff.
For me, the three DLC's haven't been total failures, because they don't cost that much. On the other hand, they don't deliver that much either. They're just little stabs at expanding the original game world. Frankly, I would rather have paid another $30-$40 for a single "real" Fallout 3 expansion pack that extended the main campaign, with new character levels, and made the explorable world larger, with dozens more quests and not just one major, railroaded plot line that I'm forced to follow. On the other hand, major expansions like that are larger risks for the game developer. I guess it makes economic sense to do it this way, but I'll definitely be more wary of this approach. Ladling out fresh content in little dribs and drabs isn't a substitute for traditional, major expansion packs.
frogbeastegg
05-11-2009, 14:37
I did some digging on various forums. Turns out that the ghoul reavers are broken; if their animation is spasming about they are effectively invulnerable. When they are not spasming they are only a little harder than a Glowing One. The lock ups and other issues I have encountered are being experienced by quite a few others too. I should have waited a bit longer before buying - all of the fuss last week was focused on the broken achievements, with little attention paid to the gameplay issues.
I forgot to mention that I had trouble with The Pit too. A certain speech cut off halfway through, leaving me stuck. I had to reload. Later on another event failed to trigger, once again leaving me trapped with nothing to do except reload. I'm playing the fixed version, and have never downloaded any of the faulty ones so it can't be blamed on residual bad files at my end.
Colour me highly unimpressed. Putting out DLC for a closed environment like a console should be relatively easy to get right on a technical level. Most companies manage it; I can't think of any besides Bethesda which have managed to make such a mess.
I love wandering around the wasteland and discovering stuff.
That's the part of Fallout 3 I do like. It's still nice to wander the wastes and find the last few locations I have missed.
The DLC is like a capsule containing everything I dislike about the game, Broken Steel's main plot line being the worst offender of all. Inane dialogue -> tunnel dungeon -> pick up object -> return for more inane dialogue -> tunnel dungeon -> repeat until it's finally over. They even throw in some plot objects which don't make sense. Minor spoilers for the final plot mission:
If the Brotherhood of Steel have no air capacity whatsoever - as we've been told repeatedly throughout the game - then how can they air drop a crate of supplies into an Enclave base? And why does said crate contain an unencrypted voice message any idiot could pick up and listen to, detailing the Brotherhood's attack plans? It's dropped into a corner of a busy base; it would have been spotted as it parachuted in if logic was anywhere at work in the set up. And why couldn't they give me the orders and gun before sending me out to slog through a bunch of tunnel dungeons on my way to the base?
Any PC user tried to play a heavy modded Fallout3? I recently installed FOOK, a mod that adds most of the classical F1 and F2 weapons (.223 pistol hehehe) and many other stuff to it. Then there is also Marts Mutant Mod that's supposed to make ghouls more like zombies. They attack in larger groups, are tougher and so on. Also adds Floaters and Geckos to the game.
It all seems to be expand the fun with a better feeling of the old Fallouts, allthough I have only played them for a short time.
frogbeastegg
05-19-2009, 16:21
I hope that's truly it for DLC. No more please!
:sigh: I finally dragged my way through the rest of Broken Steel this afternoon and breathed a big sigh of relief as I deleted the whole lot off my console's hard drive. Guess what? Bethesda instantly announce two more lots of DLC (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/bethesda-doing-more-fallout-3-dlc)! Gah! Please. Just. Make. It. Stop!
:wall:
I've finished this game 3 times now! 3! And every single time they release more content so my game ends up returning to unfinished status! 3 times I have deleted the content off my xbox, 3 times I have breathed a sigh of relief that I don't have any reason to ever, ever go back! 130 hours! I have played nearly 130 hours between two characters! I worked hard to get 100% on the commercial game and they keep on taking that away. I don't like the game much even though I am an RPG fanatic, and they keep on giving me a reason to try it yet again just in case it's not as boring as I thought.
Please let me sling the game on my completed pile and never need to touch it again. Please. It's not too much to ask for, is it? Let me keep my completed status and leave me alone. Please?
johnhughthom
05-20-2009, 18:26
That announcement mentions DLC coming for PS3, I was under the impression Microft paid a fortune to make it 360 only a la GTA 4. I guess they only put up for a limited period of exclusivity.
Centurion1
05-21-2009, 22:15
I enjoyed Fallout 3. The DLC's eh i guess i just hate glitchy console games, you know i understand laggy games on my computer, cause computers are all built to different standards. But come on all Xbox 360s are the same how the hell can you make a game that doesnt work on a standardized operating system. If its too much then just tone it down a little.
The original game i loved, even though i sorta missed my character after killing him off cause my D bag of a super mutant companion wouldn't just walk into the damn room. Also about fawkes, uh hes a littleeeeee overpowered. In other words he broke my game. I just sat back and let him do my killin. So i got rid of him and took back my trusty companions, Jericho and my pet doggy. Plus i get to fit out Jericho in BA armor and make him a total BAMF but fawkes cant wear nothing (hint give the super armor you find in that quest to jericho and give him the best weapon you cant reapir. Because he doesnt use up the stuff and at least someone gets some use out of it). Also jericho said way better stuff.
While im ranting about companions i just want to say that they are totally an awesome feature. There isn't anything like having a little backup for a teamwork freak like myself (like seriously i preserve my marines in Halo 3, and if they die i give them a 21 gun salute. Do you have any idea how hard it is to preserve a 4 man squad on legendary in Halo, yeah a little hint here,... its hard)
So overall i give bethesda a thumbs up.
(sorry for my excessive use of parentheses and also my ranting)
Zenicetus
05-22-2009, 07:41
I enjoyed Fallout 3. The DLC's eh i guess i just hate glitchy console games, you know i understand laggy games on my computer, cause computers are all built to different standards. But come on all Xbox 360s are the same how the hell can you make a game that doesnt work on a standardized operating system. If its too much then just tone it down a little.
The technical problems are frustrating, at this late date in the game's development cycle.
On the PC at least, it seems to be mostly related to the "Windows Live" thing, which has nothing to do with the original game and just complicates things (like having to stay online while you play the DLC content). Frame rates and overall performance are still fine, but ever since the Pitt DLC it makes the game do a hard lockup of the computer on exit, requiring a reboot. It's been a year or two since I've played a game that actually locked up the entire Windows (XP) OS like this and required a cold restart, instead of just a crash to desktop.
On the positive side, I've revised my opinion of Broken Steel a little. The raised level cap does encourage exploration outside the main plot line. I usually don't look at online game forums or Wiki's unless I get stuck on something, but with the raised level cap there was an incentive to keep exploring the game world, and find a few of the unique weapons I had missed. BS beefs up the random encounters with the new higher-level baddies like supermutant Overlords, so it was fun finding these things. When I was capped at level 20, I just didn't have the motivation to finish this game content, and there weren't enough dangerous enemies to make it challenging. So, kudos to the game devs for providing incentive to continue exploring the world they created.
I haven't tried re-playing the game from scratch (and won't), but I suspect that the higher-level enemies added by the BS DLC throughout the Wasteland might reduce that uber-powered feeling you get around level 15 in the original campaign.
I'm still not sure I'll buy either of the two announced DLC's. The alien one is interesting thematically, so I might go for that one. The "horror swamp" one doesn't sound that enticing... just more killing stuff, over and over? I dunno.
The original game i loved, even though i sorta missed my character after killing him off cause my D bag of a super mutant companion wouldn't just walk into the damn room. Also about fawkes, uh hes a littleeeeee overpowered. In other words he broke my game. I just sat back and let him do my killin. So i got rid of him and took back my trusty companions, Jericho and my pet doggy. Plus i get to fit out Jericho in BA armor and make him a total BAMF but fawkes cant wear nothing (hint give the super armor you find in that quest to jericho and give him the best weapon you cant reapir. Because he doesnt use up the stuff and at least someone gets some use out of it). Also jericho said way better stuff.
I play a small arms and energy weapons specialist, going for sneak and sniper skills. I like to scout the terrain before advancing, take out perimeter guards with a sniper rifle, etc. For that style, when I use a companion at all, Charon (contract ghoul) is a good one. He'll go into sneak mode when I do, which keeps him out of trouble most of the time, and he doesn't feel overpowered.
The main problem with companions is the way they'll take off on their own if they spot nearby enemies before you can engage them yourself. It's usually related to pathfinding; especially in complex vertical 3D environments where they're spotting enemies above or below you. So I'll often tell Charon to just wait somewhere while I scout ahead, or when I go into buildings with complex vertical levels. I like the way he grumbles under his breath, and complains about areas not being safe.
frogbeastegg
05-22-2009, 12:11
I haven't tried re-playing the game from scratch (and won't), but I suspect that the higher-level enemies added by the BS DLC throughout the Wasteland might reduce that uber-powered feeling you get around level 15 in the original campaign.
Unfortunately not. I'd planned my second character around the 3 DLC episodes, so I had plenty left to do after completing the plot and DLC missions. I found that with the metal blaster and 100 points in energy weapons the overloard and albino radscorpion were going down in 5-8 shots. One's a strictly melee enemy and seldom got to hit me, the other was just another gun user who did more than average damage. Unbugged ghoul reavers I could kill in a single stealth critical or in 2 normal shots.
The enclave troops were the toughest IMO. That new flamethrower is nasty and the ones with hellfire armour take a tonne of shots to drop. I didn't encounter any outside of the Broken Steel plot line.
Zenicetus
05-22-2009, 20:08
The enclave troops were the toughest IMO. That new flamethrower is nasty and the ones with hellfire armour take a tonne of shots to drop. I didn't encounter any outside of the Broken Steel plot line.
I've run into a few of the new Enclave guys outside the main plot in the wasteland, at those small encampments with the portable satellite dish. They're easy to spot at a distance from the blue glow. Usually it's something like one guy in the new Hellfire armor, with two in Tesla armor and maybe one scientist.
I also ran into one lone guy in Hellfire armor right outside the door to the Citadel, with no Brotherhood guards around. I had just teleported in to that location, so it was probably one of those random threats the game generates for teleport arrivals.
Centurion1
05-23-2009, 18:47
Yeah i havent really run into many of the new enclave. So how much better is the hellfire armor at full strength
Zenicetus
05-24-2009, 21:17
Hellfire armor has the same 50 damage reduction as T51b armor (highest in the game), slightly less rad resistance at +15, and it adds +30 fire resistance and +1 strength. Like the T51b there's no agility penalty. Unlike the T51b which costs money to repair (and can't be repaired completely past 88% I think?), you can repair Hellfire armor with other Hellfire armor taken from Enclave soldiers. Together with the strength bonus, that makes it the best armor in the game, I think, if you're into wearing power armor. I gave my T51b armor to my companion as soon as I figured out how easy Hellfire armor was to repair.
It's mainly the toughness of the guys wearing the armor, and their heavy weapon, that make them hard to kill. It's not so much the armor itself. These are the stats from the Fallout 3 Wiki page on the Hellfire Trooper:
Statistics
* Level: 24
* Health: 250
* SPECIAL: 6ST, 6PE, 6EN, 3CH, 4IN, 4AG, 4LK
Skills
* Big Guns: 100
* Energy Weapons: 100
Centurion1
05-24-2009, 22:02
Yeah i ran into some yesterday so now i have a fully powered up set of armor. Yeah it looks nice and the guys are a pain in the @$$ to kill. I also give the t51b armor to my companion i mean otherwise its useless in like five minutes
Quirinus
05-28-2009, 00:56
I just bought the game, having played it briefly in a cybercafe a while back.
Are there any suggestions for the new player? Like, what skills/perks/items to avoid, etc? In Oblivion I was most comfortable with a archer/poisoner/thief type. In particular, is it worth investing on speech or charisma or whatever it's called? The speech mechanic looks different than that of Oblivion. An interesting skill, 'Black Widow', intrigued me when I played it briefly, I wonder if it's possible to play a femme fatale throughout the game.
EDIT: Wow, guys, nothing? Ah well.
rasoforos
05-30-2009, 05:29
Oblivion with Guns...
...I am now at lvl 14 and this certainly is not Fallout. All the dirty risquee elements are out and attempts towards humour are very sub par. Dialogues and voices are the usual Bethesda stuff (make you want to be deaf and illiterate). The funny elements have been killed off (you cannot shoot someone in the groin...) The atmosphere is Oblivion, the trading is Oblivion (who on Earth liked that?) and it even has a...
vampire clan :thumbsdown:
...Oh and am I just unlucky or they kicked out special encounters too??!
It is still an enjoyable game,although boring at times, but Fallout it ain't.
Whilst it is not a Total Failure, I would be glad if Bethesda sells it's rights to a developer that has the guts to create a proper Fallout game.
Even more frustrating is the total disregard Bethesda and Microsoft have for my sweet sweet money. Games for Windows does not support my country so no DLC for me. An option to pay by credit card to download it does not exist. Of course there was no such information available when I bought the game so in essence I bought a compromised product.
frogbeastegg
05-30-2009, 12:10
Are there any suggestions for the new player? Like, what skills/perks/items to avoid, etc? In Oblivion I was most comfortable with a archer/poisoner/thief type. In particular, is it worth investing on speech or charisma or whatever it's called? The speech mechanic looks different than that of Oblivion. An interesting skill, 'Black Widow', intrigued me when I played it briefly, I wonder if it's possible to play a femme fatale throughout the game.
EDIT: Wow, guys, nothing? Ah well.
Black widow gives you a tiny number of special dialogues throughout the game. It’s not worth taking for that. It is worth taking for the bonus damage against men in combat – many of the human enemies you encounter will be male.
Drop charisma down and put the points into something useful. Charisma is totally useless.
Intelligence is probably the most powerful stat. The more points you put in it the more skill points you gain on levelling up. With 10INT and a particular perk you can gain 23 points per level. You'll be a powerhouse after a few levels if you put the points into a selection of key skills (a weapon, repair, sneak, speech once the others reach 75) and by the time you reach level 20 you will have maxed out pretty much every skill you would ever want to use.
Endurance is either awesome or not. Depends on how much you expect to get hurt. If you're going sneaky stealth then you won't need as much health as a toe to toe bruiser.
Strength is likewise. If you plan on big guns and the like then it's good. Otherwise drop it to 4 and add the point to something useful like INT. There's an easy way to gain +1 to STR early on in the game, so you can soon bump it back up to 5. Loot isn't important after the first few levels; it's possible to become stupidly wealthy with very little effort. I had more caps than I could ever spend by the time I was level 8.
Luck should either be pumped or ignored. You gain extra chance at critical hits and +1 to all of your skills.
Perception is quite important. If you get it to 7 you can get some very good perks. Shouldn't need more than that.
Agility should be pumped. More action points = more time in VATS = easier combat.
Pick a single primary weapon and get it to 75 ASAP. Work on a secondary weapon type later. Small guns are the best type to start with as they are common, have plenty of ammo, and don't have the drawbacks of the other types. Big weapons are heavy and a bit rare. Energy weapons take a while before they start to drop in loot but do good damage and have a low AP cost in VATS, so they're great for mid to high level characters. Explosives are more of a support than a main. Hand to hand and unarmed are quite specialist; if you take them then you need to build your character around the idea with lots of health, high STR, high medicine etc.
Explosives of 25 is needed if you want to solve a quest you can find early on in a certain way. The quest will sit there and wait for as long as you need so there's no huge rush, however the reward is very nice.
Barter is totally useless. Don't put points into it. After a few levels money is not a problem.
Repair is vital. Better condition means more damage from your weapons and more protection from your armour. Guns in poor condition can jam when you reload. It's also a good way to handle loot; repair items so you are carrying less weight but higher quality. Items in good condition sell for more caps than broken ones.
There are bobble heads and books which raise stats and SPECIAL scores. That's why you don't want to start out with a 10 in anything, or take a skill to 100 early on.
Some perks are awesome, many are poor. Try to plan ahead.
IIRC my last character (smart, stealthy small guns talker) was something like:
S:4
P:6
E:4
C:4
I:9
A:9
L:7
TAG: small guns, repair, speech.
On level up I put points into repair and small guns until they reached 75. Then stealth to 75 while doing locking and science to 25. Once stealth was 75, I got science and lock picking to 50 because at that point you can open most locks and computers. Then I worked on speech, energy weapons, medicine.
NB: That's from rough memory; I don't know if the points add up to the correct total or not. There may actually be more points to use than that; if so bump END to 5. Use it as a guideline not a rule.
I would be glad if Bethesda sells it's rights to a developer that has the guts to create a proper Fallout game.
Heard about Fallout Vegas (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=116319)? Obsidian has some of the original Fallout 1/2 team.
rasoforos
06-03-2009, 10:27
Heard about Fallout Vegas (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=116319)? Obsidian has some of the original Fallout 1/2 team.
No I havent.
You 've made me a very happy misanthrope :2thumbsup:
Let's hope for the best.
Quirinus
06-08-2009, 17:17
I'm at Lvl 14 now, roleplaying a goody-two-shoes stealth gunner. I've been enjoying the game immensely. It's certainly "Oblivion-with-guns", but as I enjoyed Oblivion very much, this is a plus rather than a minus for me.
The world is very immersive, and, though from the map I could see that the world is not that big, it feels big when exploring it. The quests are pretty good, except for the Wasteland Survival Guide quests... Moira is very annoying. I'm role-playing a good character so I can't kill her. I can't wait for when I replay as an evil character.
VATS is a godsend for someone with a retarded trigger finger like me, but even without VATS combat was ver satisfying. I do hate the interface though. I get that they're trying to build on a post-apocalyptic theme, but I hate the PipBoy's monochromatic display. I think there's a way to bind weapons to the number buttons, but I haven't figured out how. The repair system doesn't bother me as I pumped skill points into repair early. But I wish they had implemented something like Hellgate: London instead (break down unused loot to scrap metal).
I haven't played the first two Fallouts, so I don't know if they were in them, but I don't like the Super Mutants. They just seem too much like a fantasy orc to me, and- who are they supposed to be anyway? How come some swing nail boards but some can operate missile launchers and miniguns? I love the Ghouls as a race though, and the Ghoul Mask is awesome. I keep wearing it around when killing even if I don't happen to be killing feral ghouls. It just looks so darn cool.
Apparel-wise, the choice seems pretty scanty so far. I don't think I've encountered a new piece of apparel for ages. The modding community is no help here. It's because it's a new game I'm sure, but the FO3 modding community is small compared to Oblivion's. My favourite weapons so far are the scoped .44 Magnum and the hunting rifle. Nothing like sneaking up to a raider and blowing up his head over an iron sight. It's not as cool with the sniper rifle because it kicks and you can't really see the target go down. And the scoped .44 Magnum... well it's the world's most powerful handgun... with a scope. =o
A pretty entertaining game so far, all considered.
Greyblades
06-08-2009, 23:17
I think there's a way to bind weapons to the number buttons, but I haven't figured out how.
In the pip boy screen, just hold down the number key and click the weapon you want to bind to it.
Justiciar
06-09-2009, 01:43
I haven't played the first two Fallouts, so I don't know if they were in them, but I don't like the Super Mutants. They just seem too much like a fantasy orc to me, and- who are they supposed to be anyway? How come some swing nail boards but some can operate missile launchers and miniguns?Super Mutants were the bad guys in Fallout 1 and have featured in every other game in the series. It's only in Fallout 3 that they became braindead Orc-things, however. Initially they were intelligent megalomaniacs that thought themselves superior to all other creatures but at the same time were cursed with infertility and - as a result - inevitable extinction.
Zenicetus
06-11-2009, 20:25
The trailer for the Lookout Point DLC is out (release date is June 23):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5uSZ7REcWg
I was assuming this would just be a basic shoot-em-up, and was more interested in the last DLC, with the aliens. But 'ya know.... the Zombie horror movie vibe in the trailer looks like it could be fun.
OTOH... I can't quite see this working with my level 26 uber warrior with Hellfire armor and a Tesla cannon. It just doesn't fit the vibe in the trailer. I'd rather be that guy in the trailer with just light armor, a baseball bat and a shotgun.... maybe a level 10 character, with enemies scaled appropriately. Otherwise, if it's scaled for players who completed Broken Steel, the ghouls (or whatever they're showing) will have to be even tougher than the Feral Ghoul Reavers in BS.
I could see the final Alien encounter DLC working that way. You should need to be near level 30 with the highest-tech weapons to fight an alien, but how much do you need to off zombies in a swamp? That's baseball bat and shotgun territory, if we're going to stick to the classic horror cliches. It will be interesting to see how they balance this one. Maybe it would be worth starting a new game and running up to level 10, if it's actually scaled that way.
Greyblades
06-11-2009, 20:57
Eh, they'll probably have some sort of special zombies that take more punishment for the higher level players.
Quirinus
06-16-2009, 19:10
Whew! Finally finished the Main Quest at level 19. I still like it, though perhaps a bit less than I did at level 13.
One main gripe for me is the limited scope of the game. For a freeform game, FO3 is awfully short on quests. The major city in the game, Megaton, has one short quest and a long series of errands (Moira's quests). The other settlements are pretty much the same. Coming from Oblivion, where a town can hold tons of quests, this is something of a disappointment. I was expecting being able to join a caravans' guild, or a merc organisation, or something.
I don't know, it seems to me that a lot of extra missions could have been tacked onto the sides of the existing missions without much additional work. For example, considering that raiders/slavers are such a big problem, there could have been a quest to raid a raider den. Or if you choose to listen to Mister Burke, there could be have been a line of 'dirty work' missions-- kill this NPC, threaten that NPC. Or: convince the Rivet City citizens to take Pinkerton back. Etcetera.
Throughout the game, I never really felt that I was scratching a living out of a barren wasteland-- caps and ammo were relatively abundant, and radiation wasn't such a problem. Of course, while it detracts from the apocalyptic setting, imo it does make the game more playable. In this respect it's similar to Left 4 Dead.
The perks are somewhat unbalanced-- some perks are clearly better than others. Come on, "Computer Whiz" at level 18? Really?
Gripes aside, however, I still enjoyed it while it lasted. The world of the Capital Wasteland is interesting to explore, and I was hooked into the game. I think I'll play through it another time with an evil character before I uninstall it.
Looking forward to blowing up a certain blight on the landscape of the Wasteland. ;)
Best video (http://www.theonion.com/content/video/are_violent_video_games) on the subject ever.
Zenicetus
06-27-2009, 06:38
The Point Lookout DLC for Fallout 3 is out. I'm such a sucker... I had to see what it looks like, so I bought it on the execrable MS Live thing for the PC. Still downloading, won't be able to play until later tonight or tomorrow. Is anyone else here trying it?
If I use my main character that went through all three of the other DLC's (Anchorage, The Pitt, Broken Steel), he's at level 25 and can kill anything. From the look of the trailer, Point Lookout is more of an atmospheric storyline (hopefully) instead of just wasting large numbers of teched-up soldiers like Broken Steel. So I'm planning to drop off my Hellfire armor and most of the uber energy weapons at my shack in Megaton... just hop on the steamship with light armor, a rifle and shotgun, and see how it goes.
After running through the main campaign and the three DLC's so far, one thing I *dont* have to worry about, is having enough ammunition. :beam:
White_eyes:D
06-27-2009, 15:34
Funny thing is....I didn't drop off most of my gear for Point Lookout....:brood: Ended up over weight most of the time.....it was nice but....(My guy is pretty much unkillable...I basically have over a thousand skims....I can drink just about anything...because my guy absorbs rads over time...and all my stats were at a hundred....) Point Lookout is more based for a up and coming character....not one who has "Seen it all and laughs at your petty attempts to harm him":smash:
It was nice to kill a couple of hours with.....but I wouldn't really think it worth much more then that...:bow:
Zenicetus
06-27-2009, 20:51
I played a little bit of Point Lookout last night, just enough to get oriented to the area and the general vibe. Not very far into the plot yet... just looking around. The environment design and atmosphere is well-done, I think. It feels a little less "plot on rails" than the other DLC's, but we'll see how that goes.
While wandering around, I got jumped by some rabid locals straight out of the "Deliverance" movie. That was a nice touch... I was expecting only ghouls as the main enemies.
I agree it's probably better as a side-quest for medium level characters, but I think it still works if you're willing to roleplay it at a higher level, and go very light on armor and weapons. Light armor makes you more vulnerable even at level 25.
I'm having fun fooling around with melee weapons too, which I never really did in the main campaign or other DLC's. Staying simple there too, with either a shovel, baseball bat, or that fancy sword from the Chinese general at the end of the Anchorage DLC. The sword looks good with my leather armor and confederate cap. Yee haw!
Still no idea if it's a good bang for buck. I'm trying to stretch it out and play in small doses instead of just running through it, so it may take a few days to finish.
I played a little bit of Point Lookout last night, just enough to get oriented to the area and the general vibe. Not very far into the plot yet... just looking around. The environment design and atmosphere is well-done, I think. It feels a little less "plot on rails" than the other DLC's, but we'll see how that goes.
While wandering around, I got jumped by some rabid locals straight out of the "Deliverance" movie. That was a nice touch... I was expecting only ghouls as the main enemies.
I agree it's probably better as a side-quest for medium level characters, but I think it still works if you're willing to roleplay it at a higher level, and go very light on armor and weapons. Light armor makes you more vulnerable even at level 25.
I'm having fun fooling around with melee weapons too, which I never really did in the main campaign or other DLC's. Staying simple there too, with either a shovel, baseball bat, or that fancy sword from the Chinese general at the end of the Anchorage DLC. The sword looks good with my leather armor and confederate cap. Yee haw!
Still no idea if it's a good bang for buck. I'm trying to stretch it out and play in small doses instead of just running through it, so it may take a few days to finish.
Thanks for the first impressions, Zenicetus. Will be very interested to hear what you (and any others) have to say about Point Lookout. The only DLC i've gotten thus far for FO3 is Broken Steel and that was solely to get to a more satisfying ending.
Zenicetus
07-04-2009, 23:21
A follow-up on Point Lookout. I finished it recently, or at least the main quest and almost all the side quests. I think there's one more minor quest that I need to find, but the area is 90% explored.
For me, this was the most enjoyable of the DLC's, mainly because it has a more open, relaxed feel than the first three. There is a main plot, but you can take it at your own pace. It doesn't dominate the area or keep pushing you forward in a linear path, the way the three previous DLC's did. There are 5 other side quests, 3 mini-quests (ones that don't trigger info on your quest log), and lots of little easter eggs and hidden loot in the area. This DLC rewards exploration in a way the other three DLC's didn't. It feels like a miniature version of the original game.
After fighting Enclave guys in power armor in the last DLC, it was nice to get into a low-tech area like this. To fit the theme, I used only Ranger armor, and only small arms and explosives. No heavy weapons or energy weapons. Ranger armor works well in PL, because it can be repaired with combat armor, and you can find that on smuggler bands that respawn in the area. Combat armor is also sold by one of the vendors. If you choose any of the lighter armor types, you should be able to repair easily. There is no power armor except maybe one or two sets in trunks or boxes, so self-repair of that type can't be done as easily as in Broken Steel. There is plenty of ammo to be found for heavy and energy weapons, but you'll run into a similar difficulty finding weapon spares for repairing. Aside from a few smugglers with rocket launchers, and a few robots here and there using lasers, I saw no higher-tech weapons.
I have to revise my earlier comment about it being for mid-level characters. It might feel that way if you go in with power armor, the best unique weapons and a post-20's character, but there are some very tough enemies in Point Lookout. A few have attacks that bypass damage reduction stats, and they have very high hitpoints. That's actually about my only complaint with Point Lookout. It's not that the enemies are tough, but there's a disconnect between what they look like -- wearing normal clothing, un-armored, no headgear -- and how much damage they can take. It just doesn't look right for a "tribal" human to take three or four shotgun blasts direct to the head, and keep coming at you. I suppose people would complain it was too easy otherwise, But it does break the immersion a little. Maybe it's just all my guns going rusty and the ammo getting wet and ineffective, from walking around in the swamp water? In contrast, there is a new monster type... a humanoid MireLurk with obvious Creature from the Black Lagoon influences ...that was always easy to kill. It should have been a lot scarier. Someone screwed up the balance there.
Anyway, for me it was a good DLC. Easily the best bang for the buck. In retrospect I would have passed on Anchorage and The Pitt, and would only have done Broken Steel for the higher level cap.
Speaking of that... maybe they were trying too hard to avoid making the player too powerful, but I just can't get very excited about the perks past level 20. Nothing is all that interesting or useful. I think I ended up putting points mostly into the early part of the list that I had bypassed. Also I think it would have been better to increase the cap on weapon skill past 100, so you could still have some sense of specializing in one type or another. When you get up into about level 27 or so (where I am now), you'll probably have most of the weapon types maxed to 100, and you have to use "house rules" like I'm doing with Point Lookout (no heavies, no energy weapons) to play a more interesting game.
It's just a game ... or is it (http://englishrussia.com/?p=3178#more-3178)?
rasoforos
07-09-2009, 12:18
Fallout 3 made me nostalgic about Fallout 1 and 2...
...which made me play Fallout 2...
...where I play a slaver lesbian than sold her wife to slavery :laugh4:
<---- Which is why Bethesda can never make a fallout game.
When a game makes you quit playing it to finish its 11 year old predecessor then...well...
...it isnt Fallout. It is just a nice game.
I got Fallout 3 (latest DLC and patched, Steam version) and I was wondering, what mods are highly recommended and rather simple to install to expand my game experience.
Greyblades
07-11-2009, 23:30
Any mods that removes that green overlay. (http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2672)
Hah, I like the idea of that. I am going to use it.
Zenicetus
07-17-2009, 17:45
Some screenshots are up at the main Bethesda/Fallout site for the Mothership Zeta DLC, which I think is coming at the end of the month.
On the one hand, that type of environment with lots of corridor crawling is my least favorite in the F3 game. I prefer the open spaces of the Wasteland, and that's one reason I enjoyed the Point Lookout DLC. The plot sounds like it will be fairly linear too, unless the ship is humongous and allows some exploration and side plots.
On the other hand, okay... a few cool new weapons, some new armor types. Maybe it'll be fun. Based on the screenies, it looks like you won't be stomping around in power armor (probably stripped of armor and weapons as part of the abduction scenario).
I can't say I love the look of the spaceship interiors. Why would an alien mothership use a 1930's German industrial design motif? I'm almost expecting to see rivets everywhere. I was hoping the Bethesda designers would go nuts doing a really weird-looking environments, but this just doesn't look all that different from the other F3 interiors.
Point Lookout...
Well I just finished playing through PL and I have to say, wow. That was probably the blandest DLC i've ever played. My own belief about DLC is that it's a great way to expand upon the game world by throwing you into a unique situation not seen inside the original game. It's like adding another sandbox, inside the sandbox.. but this one has, say, ice cream in it!
Point Lookout is not that kind of DLC. It just adds nothing new, plain and simple. Sure, some of the enemy types are nice, but there's just so little to do that it blows my mind. I've heard there's lots of hidden side quests but frankly who cares? The moment i saw a Feral Ghoul Roamer kicking around near the Cathedral I knew I was in trouble. Yeah, haven't seen one of those before. The enemies who are unique felt like they were tacked on at the last minute for interesting screen grabs. You encounter the new enemies so rarely that if you do all the main quests you will only run into the new enemies a handful of times. I'm not joking.
I mean really, Mirelurks? Ghouls? I could be fighting those in DC. I came here for irradiated backwoods brawling and I get Mirelurks!?
The difficulty was a roller coaster, up one moment and down the next. I went in at around level 12 with a decent enough arsenal and found that some of the enemies were quite tough to bring down, while the new weapons could kill me in five shots! Unfortunately Point Lookout practically throws Stimpacks at you, I don't think i dropped below having 20 once. So while the enemies hit hard and provided a quick bloody nose, when I realized I'd never run low on healing it became trivial.
The main quests...I don't like them. One made literally zero sense as to why my Vault Dweller would want to even do it. It's called the Velvet Curtain and.. well...
You find a dead Chinese spy's mission logs in a hotel room and suddenly decide to complete his mission despite the fact that he's been dead for two hundred years. Even forgetting that he's dead, why would I want to help this guy? The few communist characters who I'd met up to this point have wanted nothing more of me than to die, so why am I helping this guy out - exactly? Sure it all leads to a nice weapon. But the question remains: WHY. Sure I can finish this guy's 200 year old mission by why in the world would I want to in the first place? I don't even know there's a reward involved in the game's continuity, i'm just doing it. :thumbsdown:
As for The Pitt, I won't comment to much on it other than saying:
I didn't appreciate the morality trap that you walk into.
Veho Nex
07-19-2009, 04:19
Ahhh the pitt choices....
As for point lookout, despite the times where I could swear I was back doing Agatha's vault quest and the shroom experience, don't get me started on that thing.
As for any new content, so much of it made little sense including what monk touched up on.
Like the light house, the book of mauahdyasghda or how ever it's pronounced. It is by far the worst add on to date. There are little to no new weapons, though the Lever action seems to be in great supply.(They were in the original fallout 3 just hard to find). Also the new inbred back water slobs where the biggest challenge. They seemed to have incredible life resilience strength and to top it all off, would notice me in stealth but I could walk right by them sometimes and have it result in nothing at all.
Zenicetus
07-19-2009, 21:06
Well, I enjoyed PL, but I can see where it wouldn't be everyone's cup of radioactive tea, and it did have some weak plots in some of the side quests.
About that Velvet Curtain quest and the "little to no new weapons"...
The unique rifle you get at the end of that quest is one of the two best conventional rifles in the game. I think it's worth having, but then I'm a fan of rifles for roleplay reasons (it fits my idea of the Vault Dweller better than stomping around in power armor and energy weapons). It doesn't hit quite as hard as Lincoln's Repeater, but it crits much higher, uses fewer action points in V.A.T.S., and it uses the much more common 10mm ammo. I never use machine guns or heavy weapons, so I always have more 10mm than I know what to do with. It does have one drawback: it can only be repaired with lever-action rifles from the PL zone. Still, I think it's a pretty nice weapon if you're into the conventional arms.
Well, I enjoyed PL, but I can see where it wouldn't be everyone's cup of radioactive tea, and it did have some weak plots in some of the side quests.
About that Velvet Curtain quest and the "little to no new weapons"...
The unique rifle you get at the end of that quest is one of the two best conventional rifles in the game. I think it's worth having, but then I'm a fan of rifles for roleplay reasons (it fits my idea of the Vault Dweller better than stomping around in power armor and energy weapons). It doesn't hit quite as hard as Lincoln's Repeater, but it crits much higher, uses fewer action points in V.A.T.S., and it uses the much more common 10mm ammo. I never use machine guns or heavy weapons, so I always have more 10mm than I know what to do with. It does have one drawback: it can only be repaired with lever-action rifles from the PL zone. Still, I think it's a pretty nice weapon if you're into the conventional arms.
Ah yes... the new weapons.
I'd be lying if I said i didn't enjoy them, the lever action rifles are a great addition to the game. I had never gotten Lincoln's Repeater in DC so getting my hands on a less powerful version was a definite bonus for me. The Backwater rifle, the quest reward from the Velvet Curtain, is a huge part of my arsenal now. I just wish the way I got it made a little more sense for continuity's sake.
:yes:
Veho Nex
07-20-2009, 06:38
Problem for me was I don't use rifles. I have my Machine Pistol and my .45. Those are all I need fore 90% of the quest and exploring. I never seem to run out of ammo for either.
I used the sniper rifle, till I swapped for the Gauss Gun, because it was really taking its toil on dealing any real damage, and now, even the Gauss Rifle isn't doing much. Takes like 7 shots to take down a super mutant brute, and it is a real killer if you use VATS. The knock back from the gun is great, but if it pushes them behind an object while in VATS, VATS just continues and it wastes ammo.
a completely inoffensive name
07-21-2009, 04:17
Point Lookout...
Well I just finished playing through PL and I have to say, wow. That was probably the blandest DLC i've ever played. My own belief about DLC is that it's a great way to expand upon the game world by throwing you into a unique situation not seen inside the original game. It's like adding another sandbox, inside the sandbox.. but this one has, say, ice cream in it!
Point Lookout is not that kind of DLC. It just adds nothing new, plain and simple. Sure, some of the enemy types are nice, but there's just so little to do that it blows my mind. I've heard there's lots of hidden side quests but frankly who cares? The moment i saw a Feral Ghoul Roamer kicking around near the Cathedral I knew I was in trouble. Yeah, haven't seen one of those before. The enemies who are unique felt like they were tacked on at the last minute for interesting screen grabs. You encounter the new enemies so rarely that if you do all the main quests you will only run into the new enemies a handful of times. I'm not joking.
I mean really, Mirelurks? Ghouls? I could be fighting those in DC. I came here for irradiated backwoods brawling and I get Mirelurks!?
The difficulty was a roller coaster, up one moment and down the next. I went in at around level 12 with a decent enough arsenal and found that some of the enemies were quite tough to bring down, while the new weapons could kill me in five shots! Unfortunately Point Lookout practically throws Stimpacks at you, I don't think i dropped below having 20 once. So while the enemies hit hard and provided a quick bloody nose, when I realized I'd never run low on healing it became trivial.
The main quests...I don't like them. One made literally zero sense as to why my Vault Dweller would want to even do it. It's called the Velvet Curtain and.. well...
You find a dead Chinese spy's mission logs in a hotel room and suddenly decide to complete his mission despite the fact that he's been dead for two hundred years. Even forgetting that he's dead, why would I want to help this guy? The few communist characters who I'd met up to this point have wanted nothing more of me than to die, so why am I helping this guy out - exactly? Sure it all leads to a nice weapon. But the question remains: WHY. Sure I can finish this guy's 200 year old mission by why in the world would I want to in the first place? I don't even know there's a reward involved in the game's continuity, i'm just doing it. :thumbsdown:
As for The Pitt, I won't comment to much on it other than saying:
I didn't appreciate the morality trap that you walk into.
Well I would have to disagree with you on the Velvet Curtain, after fulfilling your fathers mission it doesn't really make sense to anything else beside (IMO) head up north to the commonwealth and find the scientific paradise and hopefully join it as Doctor Li does in the Broken Steel expansion. Unless your character is supposed to be an adventurous person which validates any side quest they give you, because in a post apocalyptic world you have two choices to live your life, find a place safe and secure (in this case you know of the commonwealth by the time you finish activating project purity and could probably join it) and try to live your life in peace or go out and explore the world and fill your time by going on adventures such as completing an old Chinese spy's mission, I mean in that situation where the U.S. and China as we know it has been gone for 200 years why not? You say all Communist people you come across try to kill you so why would you help them, but at this point everyone connected to it is dead, it wouldn't help anyone and you can't spend one in game day without someone trying to kill you anyway. It's an exciting adventure though and there is no T.V., movies or books for you to be spending your time with anyway.
I am guessing this dilemma of "not making any sense" is why they made your character die in the first place and changed it only because enough people complained about not being able to continue on in an open sandbox after that.
Also for the Pitt, I absolutely loved the morality trap they give you. I love any RPG that has options in shades of gray instead of black and white (save slaves and give cure=hero help slavers=bad), it makes for a very unrealistic world which is completely opposite of what the Fallout world really is, it's not black and white but shades of gray that would be prevalent in a world of people doing horrible things just to survive another day. It's probably why I also connected more with KOTOR 2 then the first.
Zenicetus
07-21-2009, 05:01
I agree with the previous post about the Vault Dweller's motives. If you didn't go north to the Commonwealth, and the Brotherhood after Broken Steel is still treating you like a second-class hired gunslinger (I really hate those guys at this point)... then you're just still exploring to see what excitement and loot is out there. This feeds into the next and final DLC (Mothership Zeta), where you're still just wandering around the Wasteland looking for adventure.
Well I would have to disagree with you on the Velvet Curtain, after fulfilling your fathers mission it doesn't really make sense to anything else beside (IMO) head up north to the commonwealth and find the scientific paradise and hopefully join it as Doctor Li does in the Broken Steel expansion. Unless your character is supposed to be an adventurous person which validates any side quest they give you, because in a post apocalyptic world you have two choices to live your life, find a place safe and secure (in this case you know of the commonwealth by the time you finish activating project purity and could probably join it) and try to live your life in peace or go out and explore the world and fill your time by going on adventures such as completing an old Chinese spy's mission, I mean in that situation where the U.S. and China as we know it has been gone for 200 years why not? You say all Communist people you come across try to kill you so why would you help them, but at this point everyone connected to it is dead, it wouldn't help anyone and you can't spend one in game day without someone trying to kill you anyway. It's an exciting adventure though and there is no T.V., movies or books for you to be spending your time with anyway.
Not true! There are certainly places in the capital wasteland where you can find chinese ghouls (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Chinese_Remnant) who will shoot you on sight. There's even a radio broadcast that they keep going. Explore the DC ruins near Arlington to find out their story, i won't spoil it for you.
For reference.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Mama_Dolce%27s
I am guessing this dilemma of "not making any sense" is why they made your character die in the first place and changed it only because enough people complained about not being able to continue on in an open sandbox after that.
It could have made perfect sense if I knew there was a reward going into it, but I didn't. I was just going through the motions because i knew outside of the game there would be compensation. Inside there was no real sign that this was nothing more than a waste of time.
In fact, now that I think about it I really don't recall any sort of talk of compensation in the quest. Could be wrong, but all i remember is it talking about getting "extraction orders" when i was done. The reward you do get is not at all related to the quest, all the quest does is put you in the right spot at the right time to see a nice rifle sitting on someone shelf.
Also for the Pitt, I absolutely loved the morality trap they give you. I love any RPG that has options in shades of gray instead of black and white (save slaves and give cure=hero help slavers=bad), it makes for a very unrealistic world which is completely opposite of what the Fallout world really is, it's not black and white but shades of gray that would be prevalent in a world of people doing horrible things just to survive another day. It's probably why I also connected more with KOTOR 2 then the first.
I'm all for shades of gray but when you throw a curve that late in a quest progression without giving any indication it's coming it doesn't count as a good plot twist for me. If I had no way of figuring things out for myself then it's nothing more than a beginner's trap. I understand fully what they went for, it's just executed horribly.
It's not that I didn't enjoy the DLCs, it's just I took issue with many of their plot choices. Mainly because i've seen much better within the same game. If you take it for what it is, Fallout 3 trying to be a sandbox then it's perfectly acceptable. However that is exactly why I took issue with it, it breaks the immersion factor that Fallout tries very hard to maintain. I still spent enough time in the swamp to get the Bog Walker achievement, so is it nitpicking? Possibly. It's simply something that I think hinders Pitt and Point Lookout, they could have been much better than they are. :shrug:
a completely inoffensive name
07-22-2009, 08:52
Not true! There are certainly places in the capital wasteland where you can find chinese ghouls (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Chinese_Remnant) who will shoot you on sight. There's even a radio broadcast that they keep going. Explore the DC ruins near Arlington to find out their story, i won't spoil it for you.
For reference.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Mama_Dolce%27s
It could have made perfect sense if I knew there was a reward going into it, but I didn't. I was just going through the motions because i knew outside of the game there would be compensation. Inside there was no real sign that this was nothing more than a waste of time.
In fact, now that I think about it I really don't recall any sort of talk of compensation in the quest. Could be wrong, but all i remember is it talking about getting "extraction orders" when i was done. The reward you do get is not at all related to the quest, all the quest does is put you in the right spot at the right time to see a nice rifle sitting on someone shelf.
I'm all for shades of gray but when you throw a curve that late in a quest progression without giving any indication it's coming it doesn't count as a good plot twist for me. If I had no way of figuring things out for myself then it's nothing more than a beginner's trap. I understand fully what they went for, it's just executed horribly.
It's not that I didn't enjoy the DLCs, it's just I took issue with many of their plot choices. Mainly because i've seen much better within the same game. If you take it for what it is, Fallout 3 trying:shrug: to be a sandbox then it's perfectly acceptable. However that is exactly why I took issue with it, it breaks the immersion factor that Fallout tries very hard to maintain. I still spent enough time in the swamp to get the Bog Walker achievement, so is it nitpicking? Possibly. It's simply something that I think hinders Pitt and Point Lookout, they could have been much better than they are.
I have been to Mama Dolce's but that is mostly likely a separate group on a different mission then the dead Chinese operatives you come across in point Lookout. What I mean by connected I mean the Chinese government is likely completely destroyed with perhaps a Enclave like remnant which is more likely to be interested in retaking and rebuilding China then in completing some 200 year old mission.
It is supposed to make sense in the way I described in my above post where your character is not doing it for compensation but in the thrill of having an adventure, otherwise the vast majority of side quests don't make sense without injecting some imagination in there.
I think it would have been ruined if they showed you the curve ball ahead of time. I think the impact of making a choice really hits home when it is shown to you when you are least expecting it, which is really how life is. It really wouldn't seem realistic if the slave leader told you, a "good guy" that the cure was a baby before you saw it yourself otherwise you would not likely do it in the first place. The dialog options after taking the baby to the slave leader reveal that your character is not ok with the sudden revelation but will continue on the path since he has gotten to this point already. I agree there it could have definitely been done better, but in my opinion to get both the surprise and the ability to sense that something is not what it seems with this "cure" it would make it necessary for them to scatter really nonsensical pieces of information that make partial sense up until you see the baby where you get that feeling of "I knew there was something off." but still are wow'd by the twist, which is probably more time consuming in terms of writing the script.
I agree completely with your last paragraph.
For me I really thought that covering areas such as the Pitt in just 3-5 hours ruins the region, because it's such a large city that has the opportunity to be another whole game on itself but is kind of dumbed down for the sake of adding on a new and different region to an all ready large game, which definitely does hurt the immersion.
Hmm, point taken though I still find it a bit lazy on the writer's behalf. I just kept thinking to myself "Come on Bethesda you're better than this" as I was doing the quest.
I agree completely with your last paragraph.
For me I really thought that covering areas such as the Pitt in just 3-5 hours ruins the region, because it's such a large city that has the opportunity to be another whole game on itself but is kind of dumbed down for the sake of adding on a new and different region to an all ready large game, which definitely does hurt the immersion.
Well at least we can agree on something. :laugh4:
I just finished Broken Steel last night and I have to say it's my favorite DLC thus far (haven't played Anchorage but it looked terrible). I only had one bad thing to say about it really and, again, it comes back to plot points. It was so trivial though that it in no way hurt my enjoyment of the content so I'll let it pass. As for an ending it does its job while keeping the world open for exploration and that's really all you can ask for in a sandbox.
Think I am done with Fallout for a while, though. I pushed the game passed 1000 gamerscore (first game i've done that with, gotten close with some but never hit the 1k mark) and satisfied my need to kill some muties. I also kept Dogmeat alive through it all this time, which was no easy feat!
frogbeastegg
07-22-2009, 16:58
Please remember to use spoiler tags!
[spoil ]text[/spoil ]
a completely inoffensive name
07-23-2009, 08:20
Sorry! Got too caught up trying to keep track of my large post.
a completely inoffensive name
07-23-2009, 08:28
Hmm, point taken though I still find it a bit lazy on the writer's behalf. I just kept thinking to myself "Come on Bethesda you're better than this" as I was doing the quest.
Well at least we can agree on something. :laugh4:
I just finished Broken Steel last night and I have to say it's my favorite DLC thus far (haven't played Anchorage but it looked terrible). I only had one bad thing to say about it really and, again, it comes back to plot points. It was so trivial though that it in no way hurt my enjoyment of the content so I'll let it pass. As for an ending it does its job while keeping the world open for exploration and that's really all you can ask for in a sandbox.
Think I am done with Fallout for a while, though. I pushed the game passed 1000 gamerscore (first game i've done that with, gotten close with some but never hit the 1k mark) and satisfied my need to kill some muties. I also kept Dogmeat alive through it all this time, which was no easy feat!
Anchorage is the worst of them all, all it does is give a good impression of what the Chinese forces were back during the war. However there is information to be had about the simulation that the general you come across in the simulation commissioned the simulation in real life and rewrote it a thousand times making it unrealistic as to how it actually played out, so I guess with most insights into the larger world you come across, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
If you are planning on not playing Fallout for a while I would advise you to at least power through Anchorage and wait until Mothership Zeta (the last DLC) comes out in early August. From the screen shots and info released I am very hopeful that this one will be the best. You can already see the entire world in one of the screenshots as the character travels the space ship traveling through space. Also it was revealed that significant people from Earth's past will be also held captive on the ship, which you can elicit help from, which I have interpreted as some exposition on the world before the war or at least creating a connection between Fallout 3 and its predecessors with some cameo appearances.
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