Fallout 3 discussion

[frogbeastegg]

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. Oh and that hacking mini game I have so much difficulty with? It's green.

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.