New Fallout game announced

[Asher]

Yes, we'll actually get another 360 soon. But soon, it's a strategic purchase.

I want to replace the 42" 1080p LCD (3 years old) with a 52 or 56" 1080p LCTV (120Hz), and then wallmount the 42" in the bedroom. Only have the 1 TV currently.

[onodera]

I'm quite excited about that game, actually. If they can combine the atmosphere of classic Fallouts with the sense of exploration F3 has, they can make an awesome game. Vegas, Hoover Dam, Area 51...

[Lemmy]

I hope that by "sense of exploration" you dont mean crawling through the DC metro tunnels.. *shudders*

I liked FO3...but only once. I did start a second game, but i just couldnt stand having to walk through those tunnels again to "unlock" a significant portion of the locations in the game.

[Unimatrix11]

You know, the thing with newer bethesda-title´s (oblivion and FO3, basically) traveling is not that you have to been there once, before you get it the location avaiable for ´auto-travel´, but rather that auto-travel even exists, IMHO. The reason for auto-travel is to cut down ´boring´ walks through the same region for multiple times. Well, then the problem is, that the travels are boring, not that you have to do them. This might be hard to get at first, so let me give you an example:

In, say, Ultima IV (or V, or VI), traveling from one town to another was a journey - it could well be, that it was all, you´d get done in one evening. Thus you would consider very well, if it was worth it and what places you could visit on your way. In FO3, i sometimes droped by at these vampire´s home from Megaton, just to sell some bloodpacks, and then i´d zip myself to the other end of the map, to continue an ´urgent´ ´quest´ that i left unattended for about 300+ km of walking thorugh the wasteland... Well, the first time through i took the ´urgent´ seriously, and ended up having finished the game in like 20 hours, having seen maybe 30% of the map.

---SPOILER AHEAD---
Which brings us to the main story, which is, in retrospective, rather shallow. (Sorry, i dont know how to do spoiler tags - dont read on, if you dont want to know the story yet, please): So you grew up in a vault, beneath a post-apocalyptic world - that part is, i think, common in all Fallout games. Then your father leaves, trying to find a recipe for purifying radioactive water. The overseer of your vault things someone leaving it endangers the whole vault, so you have to kinda force your way out in order to follow your dad. When you do find him, and after having freed him out of a virtual world (by serving an insane scientiest´s sadistic lusts), the enclave wants to get a hold on his work. The enclave is a political body, run by an AI, which refers to itself as president, that claims souverainity over what was once the US of A. If it´s main henchman (who made such a lasting impression on me, that i can only rememeber his name was colonel something) wouldnt come off as brutal and sadisitic, one could question oneself, as to way it would be a bad thing to cooperate with them - after all, this organization seems tailormade to spread the blessings researched by your dad over the whole continent - but luckily, he does come off as sadistic and brutal and so we dont have to ask ourselves... Near the end, the player then is granted two highlights: Liberty One, a RamRod style fighting mech, whose built in dispise for communists is paired with a programmed routine to express it loud and frequent, and the only riddle of the game (riddles once where standard rpg-compenents, but that was when video-gamers still differed themselves from the rest of the human population, mainly by being the ones who liked to think), which took me exactly one (1!) attempt and about 5 seconds to solve - and it killed me, leaving about 70% of the game unexplored after my first play-through.

So i dared a second play-through, thinking there is some much still to discover. You know, when ammo weighs nill and neither do caps and all you do is basically loot, loot, loot, there at least has to be some interesting side-stories to give the game some substance, i thought. And there is, actually. There is a slave camp, for example, that went utterly unnoticed by me the first time. There is canterbury, the oddly famous mini-village full (of a handfull) of whakos mentioned in one of my earlier posts. A town full of canibals. A place where trees grow. Germantown (i didnt know about this one in RL, and being german and all, i couldnt help a smirk).

---SPOILER END---

It´s a shame, that all these places are not part of the main-quest - you can in fact utterly ignore them and still be able to bring the game to a conclusion after which you wont even get another chance to visit them. The game guides you to your next quest location with pin-point accuracy - and thus away from the more interesting places if you follow the main-quest. This has been tried to help, by the radio (which IS excelllent), but it would have been a lot better, to implement them in a prolonged main-quest.

See, how the ´green arrow´ kills the ´quest´? The only thing, that actually comes close to a quest in FO3, as far as i have witnessed, is the android thing. In that one, you get rather vague hints - and while you try to follow those, you might actually stumble on interesting stuff.

Thinking about it, the atmo is really only saved by the radio - the world of FO3 doenst seem to cohesive, really. There are beginner missions in which you are actually asked to radiate yourself - just to see what it effects it had - and then you get healed *poof*. Everything that is an impotant ´consumer good´, from ammo over rad-x to medkits doesnt weight anything, so you can take with you any ammount of it. Once you have collected some 40 medkits, have 500 ammo for each of your guns, and 10.000 bottlecaps (currency), you really wonder, why to any of the ´quests´ really. And you dont get the feeling of being someone who really takes a risk, a hero of somesort, but rather wonder, why you are the only one, who makes a fortune out there. Where is all that stuff that you buy or find being produced (or shiped in, for all i care) anyways? Why is it, that one village seems to rely on canibalism in order to survive, when everywhere else, it seems to be weapons-trade? That just doesnt make sense...

Well, yeah, but i still kinda enjoyed it. I just wish, there would have been more links between the various parts of the world, and thus a more cohesive world in the first place. The link should have been the mainquest, and through what would bring you from one location to the other, it would become clear what functions each place has in this world and how they altogether would make sense. And more realism, instead of this ´consoley´ ´lets have the player carry infinte ammo, medpacks and money and have him make a fortune in no-time´ BS.

[Hansen]

Fallout 3 is released in four separate versions, only two of which are made available worldwide:

* The Standard Edition includes only the game disc and manual with no extras.
* The Collector's Edition includes the game disc, manual, a bonus "making of" DVD, a concept artbook, and a 5" Vault Boy Bobblehead, all of which is contained in a Vault-Tec lunchbox.In Australia, the Collector's Edition is exclusive to EB Games.

Griefster

[Felch]

a bunch of stuff

You're right. You're absolutely right. Popping it in, and playing for the first few hours blows you away. Then it kind of breaks down once you've become filthy rich.

Early on the settings seem to be much better than later. Going through the elementary school in the very first town is fun. There were a couple different ways to navigate it, and there were cool little things to discover like the guys digging the tunnel in the basement. Later on in the game combat gets really old. Rescuing Riley's Rangers involved walking down endless hallways full of mutants without any sense of discovery.

The bottom line though is that it's all fixable with the right mods. Maps with more interesting combat (clever use of terrain features, elevation, and traps would be a good start). Inventory management that forces the player to survive in the wasteland instead of just looting cigarette cartons and bottle caps. A little more logic and sense to the world, with factions that wax and wane based on player actions. Like if you wipe out a raider base, then raiders shouldn't spawn in that general area or something. Kill too many innocent people and raiders start to fill in the empty niche.

It's a good game, but it lost its luster for me over time. I was full of hopes for Broken Steel, but it wound up being just more of the same in terms of dull repetitive combat.

[Quillan]

Remember the Oblivion mod that made you need to eat and sleep? Combine that with a mod that adds a weight to drugs (tiny), bottlecaps (bigger but still tiny), and ammo (should be significant, there's a reason the standard combat load for soldiers is 330 rounds of 5.56 mm) could be very very interesting. Of course, adding weight for ammo means you need a selective fire switch for the SMG and the assault rifles....