Fallout 3

[Quillan]

Originally posted by Main_Brain
Do Shops have opening hours or am i simply unable to find the correct entrance to Craterside supplies?

This Town drives me mad, i think i'll blow it up =)

Yes, just like Oblivion, the shops do have opening hours. It seems to be around 8 AM to around 8 PM, but I haven't pinpointed it exactly. Craterside was closed at 7:55 AM but open when I waited an hour using the PIPBoy.

[snoopy369]

It was also closed at 8:25 pm last night... so there you go.

No, haven't found ANY vaults yet, but I have only explored the area around Minefield south to the area around megaton.

[Felch]

I haven't seen Rockville yet, but I heard that Bethesda is in (obviously). As far as other vaults, I've found one so far.

Spoiler:

Vault 106 is a short hike west of Vault 101. It is interesting, but didn't give me a vibe of being quest related. I've heard of other vaults, but can't confirm them.

[Quillan]

I'm going to keep the spoilers out of this as best as I can, but I had to share this one as an example of some of the bizarre things that have cropped up in the game so far.

I'm in this location for another quest. While I'm sneaking around, avoided or picking off the creatures that infest the location, I stumble across a skeleton. Near it is a tape, labeled "Grady's Last Recording". I pick it up and listen to it. Basically, Grady says that if you're hearing this, he's eaten a bullet and now it's up to you to find the "package". He's hidden the package in a safe in a room marked by a rotating light, the key to the safe is in a firehose locker in a maintenance closet in the location I happen to be in currently, and hopefully they won't find you like they did him.

Since I was there anyway, I explored the area fully. Before I got halfway to my primary goal, I'd found the maintenance closet and recovered the key to the safe. When I neared my primary goal, I spotted the rotating light and went to the room. After both picking the lock and hacking the computer (double xp that way, hack the computer first but don't tell it to unlock the door, then pick the lock), I opened the safe to recover the package: the Naughty Nightie. It's a leopard-print set of pajamas (now I wish I'd made a female character; I'm curious to see what it is on a female) that adds +10 Speech and a couple of points of Charisma.

As I was leaving the room, a bandit named Lug-Nut came running up and demanded that I hand over the Naughty Nightie (he called it by name). Since I had a SMG in my hands at the time, I basically told where he could go and what he could do with himself when he got there, and blew him away.

Well, some time later I was exploring in a totally different area of the map when I happened across a small settlement. While talking to one of the NPCs there, she was telling me about her big, tough neighbor who protects her, and was recounting a story about how they were attacked by a group of raiders led by a guy named Lug-Nut. When she finished, it gave me a conversation option of "Do you know a guy named Grady"? She didn't, but I really didn't expect these to be connected at all and it surprised me.

[Felch]

Any quests or anything stand out so far?

Spoiler:

Oasis was kind of funny, but I hate fighting Mirelurks, and that's mostly what it amounted to.

What I've loved about these Bethesda games is just how many quirky things there are. And the knowledge that I haven't even seen most of what's out there. Jumping into the painting in Oblivion was probably the tops for me.

[Felch]

Originally posted by Quillan
When she finished, it gave me a conversation option of "Do you know a guy named Grady"? She didn't, but I really didn't expect these to be connected at all and it surprised me.

Is she the Nuka-cola addict? I think I ran into her, but missed out on the other stuff, so I didn't have that option.

Great game. I really feel bad for the people who can't get out of the NMA mindset. They don't know what they're missing.

[Quillan]

Nothing that compares to the painted trolls so far, but some of them are more than a little quirky. Moira at Craterside Supply has some fairly ridiculous requests for her Wasteland Survival Guide quests (get 600 rads for critical radiation sickness?), and one woman I found will give you the schematics to make the Nuka-grenade if you bring her 30 Nuka-Cola Quantums. Oh, and the quest Tranquility Lane is absolutely surreal.

Edit 2: Yes, she's the Nuka-cola addict.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
Well then again it builds on the foundations of two games that were famous for that. If they deviated from that, they'd probably lose a large number of the old games' following...

They already have. Check out No Mutants Allowed, a Fallout fanboy site. Its like they're in such agony over this game, even more than they were Fallout: Tactics or Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (aka Fallout:POS) because its called Fallout 3. It's kinda like people who hated Civ: CTP, but then hated CivIV even more because it had a "IV" after it.

Its really pathetic, but that's what to expect from late-30s-mid-40s fanboys.

[Quillan]

I'm an early 40s fanboy, and I'm loving the game so far. I have not been to NMA in some months, and I'm almost afraid to venture near the forums currently, because I just know they're foaming at the mouth and barking at the moon over the game.

[Solver]

One of the good things about Bethesda's games is stumbling onto locations. Morrowind had plenty of unique locations with some interesting stuff, Oblivion's locations were a bit more generic. Now, on my way to a settlement, I found a great location that made me all excited. It's one of the other Vaults...

Spoiler:

Vault 106 specifically, you get some crazy-ass hallucinations in there. Loved it when you're in a room full of "Brain Softworks" computers that have messages to yourself. The place is creepy and good fun, shows that they have some very well-designed areas.

[Felch]

I was looking at the gamefaqs board (which is nightmarish) and the NMA crowd are there, whining about how "It's not really Fallout" and blaming "Bethe$da" for ruining their childhood memories.

None of them have played it of course. And none seem to realize that Fallout 2 was a nearly identical game to the original.

Go back and play the first two after this, and you'll start to notice annoying trends. Handling money in transactions was a pain (try spending 1500 out of 3000 and you'll go too slow at first and then too damn fast). If you fight in a city, you have to wait for all sorts of civilians to have their turns. Encounters in the wasteland were mostly cookie cutter. I'm not saying it was bad, but Bethesda fixed problems like these. And reading people who act like those games were perfect is kind of annoying.

Ah well. I'm not sad that I bought it. That's really the key. Hopefully we'll see a return of Arcanum, minus the bugs.

[Alinestra Covelia]

I liked both the original games, and I like the current one a lot too. I think they all go well together.

That having been said, I do appreciate that the development cycle had several points of tension between the original developers and the new ones, not least the resentment of the first team that their intellectual property was transferred wholesale by somebody else to Bethesda Softworks.

If you take the backstory into account, that may explain some of the bitterness. (Even if it does not excuse it. And in my opinion it does not.)

But just looking at the games as games, they're all excellent and if you like any one of them, there's really no compelling reason why you shouldn't play and enjoy all of them.



I understand it's commonplace for me to post innuendos even in threads that have nothing to do with them, but I'm finding it hard and I can't slip one in right now.

[Quillan]

I was over at Metacritic looking at their scores on the game earlier. The Metacritic score is 94, but the user score is 7.5 out of 10.

http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/pc/fallout3

I think the reason for the lower user score is posts like these:

Shodan gave it a0:
Forgettable, one-dimensional characters. Unoriginal and simplistic narrative. Short, linear and poorly-written narrative. Poorly-written dialogue. Poorly-voiced dialogue. No real moral ambiguity. No real choices and consequences. No real freedom (there are unkillable NPCs everywhere, narrative progression relies mostly on combat) No intellectually/emotionally complex quests such as in the previous games. Massive illogical contradictions and abuse of established lore. Atrocious animations, lackluster models, textures and art direction. Unoriginal and out-of-place LOTR-styled score more suited to Oblivion. Tactical combat removed. Importance of perks/traits removed. Traits removed. Claustrophobic, small cut-and-paste world. Poorly designed interface. Buggy. Failure to correct any of the issues with Oblivion. A mockery of and stain upon Fallout and Fallout 2. Bethesda's Fallout fails on all counts to emulate even an echo of the complexity and design achievements of the decade-old 2D games it fails to imitate. Even when removed from the context of being a sequel, it's an exceptionally simplistic, arrogant and incompetent game all by itself.

Of course, you just know that this balanced and informative review was based on a thorough and complete play through of the game from beginning to end with lots of exploration and side questing thrown in.

[Felch]

Claustrophobic?

I don't think that word means what he thinks it means.

[Solver]

It isn't always easy to accept that games change.Of course Fallout 3 can't be like the first two. After more than a decade, things are bound to be different and that's not necessarily bad. F3 seems to me, so far, to have the atmosphere and feeling of Fallout, actually.

A few things are unnecessary changes. Such as unkillable NPCs. Such a game should let anyone be killed and let you deal with the consequences. I also strongly dislike how much modern games have to conform to the demands of censorship, I mean, wtf? Having addictive drugs and swearing in the game isn't easy and there's an absurd amount of protest over things such as Mass Effect's sex scene

What I really like is that Bethesda is definitely learning from its own mistakes. Things that were silly in Morrowind and/or Oblivion are often improved in Fallout 3:

1. You have full dialogues here, like in Fallout. You actually have a choice among several responses, extra responses for some skills, perks, etc. Contrast that with Oblivion's "responses" where you click on one-word topics mostly.

2. NPC conversations. Oblivion allowed NPCs to talk to each other, which was nice in theory but got bad after half an hour. Half the conversations sounded like something retards would say and sometimes they just talked constantly. Fallout 3 has far fewer NPC conversations and I've heard NPCs say things that are meant for other NPCs. Say, they greet each other by name or exchange a few sentences. This is definitely a case of where less is more. Fewer conversations with stricter rules -> much more realistic.

3. The economy is better balanced. Something that never happened in Elder Scrolls games at all. I find medical supplies to be fairly common but I actually have to look for stuff to sell and buy some supplies periodically, I can't find everything I need or make it myself. Ammo is somewhat too cheap, though.

4. Voice acting is better than Oblivion. Oblivion had a really, really small voice cast and the non-human races were horribly sounding due to being very much exaggerated. Fallout 3 does have some exaggerated voices for a few loony characters but I am, so far, very pleased by how many characters just sound normal.

5. Side quests keep getting better. In Morrowind, they were really poor, most were just fetch an item / kill a NPC quests. Oblivion got better, had at least one interesting quest in every major area. Now they're better again... I've got a quest by listening to information from a holotape recording. Every quest seems to have multiple possible ways to complete it and / or multiple possible outcomes, which is very much like Fallout.

As a side note, thankfully the levelling and skill system is like that of Fallout and not the very weird Elder Scrolls system.