Fallout 3 Impressions and Opinions

[Shinova]

Then I went to Evergreen Mills and cleaned it out to get another

I've been there and cleaned it out but I can't find the bobblehead. Where'd you find it?


PS: The Behemoth was really scary..... until it ate a few shots from my alien blaster.

[Pulp Hero]

You know where that trader guy was? All the way back in the cave. You go to the right past him to a workbench, jump over the workbench. The bobblehead is on the shelf behind it.

[K. A. Pital]

Rockopolis quest only works if you speak to Dashwood before going there, IIRC. In that case, once you find Argyle, you can report to him of his death.

[Vympel]

I let the Behemoth kill everyone by letting him out of his cage (shoot the generator) - it was a simple matter of sniping his legs from afar and then giving him a facefull of A3-21s Plasma Rifle.

[Shinova]

Yeah, what happened for me was that some bastard of a raider let him out while I was still making my way through the trains. Interesting thing is that said bastard stayed alive throughout the whole thing, until I capped in the very end.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Well, I just finished the main plot, and I totally agree about its lameness toward the end. Watching Prime smash through everything was cool, but it was really just a barely interactive cinematic. It was way too easy to talk Eden into blowing Raven Rock up. Even if there's only one Speech check, it still should have been a back and forth conversation before he finally sees the light and has an "Oh god what have I done?" moment. What they did felt totally fake and emotionally underwhelming.

The sacrifice plot at the end was just utter drek. Gee, maybe we should send the mutant who's standing right fucking there in. You know, the one who not 30 minutes ago had a whole quest revolve around the fact that he can happily stroll through radiation. Not only does it artificially end the game without letting you continue to explore and do sidequests, but it's shitty writing and half-assed emotional manipulation of the worst kind. It's like in I Am Legend when he has to kill the dog and we're supposed to get all teary eyed, except he was sitting right next to the fucking stasis pods he'd been shoving the other vamps into. I guess random zombies are more important. Sadly, that scene made more sense than the endgame of FO3.

I was also disappointed by the black and white narration after the end. They put zero effort into it. This is a game that has enough spoken dialogue to fill a library, and more locations and sidequests than 5 other games combined, I think at the least they could have covered the major sidequests and NPC's.

The sidequests and exploration are probably the game's strongest point. There really is a whole big world out there, and it's got a lot more character than Oblivion, that's for sure. But while the game admirably departs from the Elder Scrolls games by having more variety and character, I really started to get tired of traipsing through so many metro tunnels to get places. Those were just dungeon crawls, and while FO 1 and 2 had their fair share of dungeon crawls, it didn't approach the number in this game. At a certain point I just got tired of all the sidequests and exploration and decided to just finish the main quest and be done with it. I couldn't bear the thought of going through yet another metro station to retrieve yet another macguffin from yet another historic building that's really just a dungeon. Sure, maybe I'd get some custom gun or some stimpacks for my trouble, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

The combat was fairly well done, I thought. I liked VATS for the most part, but the balance wasn't great. You use weapons like the Chinese Assault Rifle and Combat Shotgun until the end of the game, and if you get into a fight that's hard to handle you can always just break out the Fat Man. The Power Armor wasn't enough of an improvement over Ranger Armor or even Combat Armor to give it the wow factor it deserves, and the plasma weapons aren't really any better than what's available early on. In FO2 you couldn't easily mow down squads of Enclave soldiers with an assault rifle, that's for damn sure. But let's not forget that FO2 had some serious balance issues of its own, a lot worse than this game's. In FO2 you could obtain the game's most powerful weapon and a suit of advanced power armor within 5 minutes of leaving Arroyo. Even if you didn't know how to get that stuff ahead of time, having adv power armor just be handed to you for free with no strings attached was a load of shit. FO1 stands to date as the only Fallout with proper equipment balance, where you had to work really hard to get a suit of power armor and a turbo plasma rifle or gatling laser really stood out and put the earlier weapons to shame. Balance issues aside, the combat also became fairly easy later on. The enemies are made out of paper and you have tons of health.

I was fine with most of the changes they made to the skill system, but I felt like the SPECIAL stats were made fairly meaningless. I didn't like that you could dump all your points into a few stats and ignore the rest. Like if you're into big guns you don't need Perception to be accurate, unlike the previous Fallouts. And I was especially distraught about the 1 companion limit regardless of Charisma. I used to enjoy playing Charisma characters in FO2 who traveled around with a huge posse and let them do the dirty work. It added another option for viable character builds. In fact, due to the design empahisizing dungeon crawls, there really aren't any viable builds that don't fight directly. The auxiliary skills are nice, but never necessary, and there's often no alternative to simply walking in and blasting everyone up. This is a far cry from the previous games, especially FO1.

All in all, Fallout 3 is a great game that provided me with more hours of enjoyment than any other recent game purchase. Its flaws are deep, but they are only aggravating because the game is so good. I don't forsee myself replaying it anytime soon as the thought of going back through all those metro stations and redoing all those sidequests triggers a gag reflex, but when you have a solid 20 hour experience even with a huge number of sidequests and locations that I could have done and chose not to, I can't really fault it for not being replayable.

[Stark]

I'd like to echo some of Tuxedo's mechanical issues; the SPECIAL system is basically irrelevant in F3, instead of being very important in shaping your character and play path as in F1. Strength is basically worthless due to the carry-weight formula, perception provides a useless red dot and a tiny skill boost, etc, whereas in the older systems each stat was desirable and the system wasn't 'get max agi and int to win'. The perks follow this, where very obvious stacking effects made some combinations completely absurd (mostly the skill-point boosts and VATS modifiers make these systems even more broken than they are). The convo options based off stats/skills either are very rare or require very high levels instead of a nice even spread - I've only noticed science speech options snince getting SCI to 100, and int options after being 8+. Since only 4 skills in the game are worthwhile, this makes the skill system itself pretty meaningless at least until level 12 (when two will be at 100 and the player can raise some of the less useful ones). I'm sure Tuxedo can discuss how the tiered nature of the lockpick/science requirements invalidates the points put into these skills (as they do nothing else) far better than I can.

Putting aside the whole nature of VATS as cheese, the camera flakyness is unforgivable. Sometimes control returns to the player immediately (or at worst waits for the damage animation to play), whereas other times you can fire a single shot and VATS will hold a 'dramatic' camera angle long enough for the player to be shot repeatedly while unable to move. If the game wasn't laughably easy, this would be a terrible flaw.

The endings are sad and lame and generic. Even more amusingly, they are very granular, and switch with a grating of gears between LOL IS PUSSY WHAT A LOSER to HAIL THE ANGEL OF WASTELAND. Very few game events are mentioned, the future of the wasteland and people/places is barely discussed, and no reason is provided as to why the player can't keep playing.

I really hope it's a bug that nobody in the FUCKING WORLD has a repair skill of more than 25. No wonder noone can fix those leaky pipes! Being unable to use a toolbench to repair weapons better/without stupid gluing together system is dumb enough, but not even being able to pay BoS to fix a fucking bolt-action rifle above 50% is totally retarded. Making custom weapons is hilarious, since midgame you pretty much have to make two or three of each and glue them together, which makes perfect sense really.

[Stark]

I've been there and cleaned it out but I can't find the bobblehead. Where'd you find it?

It's in the bar in the back of the tunnels, same room as the named shotgun.

[K. A. Pital]

VATS will hold a 'dramatic' camera angle long enough for the player to be shot repeatedly while unable to move

Apparently you take no damage when in VATS. Hardly rectifies the problem, but still.

I really hope it's a bug that nobody in the FUCKING WORLD has a repair skill of more than 25.

Traders have 75 repair, IIRC. Though that is not until midgame, and you do the "investment" in the caravans.

[Stark]

Apparently you take no damage when in VATS. Hardly rectifies the problem, but still.

Really? Maybe all the times I've died I've just been 1-shot after I regained control; I tend to spend the entire game at 30% health. Still, annoying.

[Covenant]

Apparently you take no damage when in VATS. Hardly rectifies the problem, but still.

Really? Maybe all the times I've died I've just been 1-shot after I regained control; I tend to spend the entire game at 30% health. Still, annoying.

Having been able to play it this weekend--and doing a marathon run that got me until the beginning of the Rivet City storyline part, but no further sadly--I would agree. I made a character who was primarily into Unarmed and Energy weapons, and my first quest in the game supplied me with both. Outside Super Duper Mart I got a deathclaw gauntlet schematic and inside I got two laser pistols. Being as the pistols were sucky and low on ammo, I went with the unarmed, to great success. During VATS you are either invincible or very less prone to damage than out of it, but once you come back out badguys have had a lot of time to line up a shot, so it can be dangerous. However, I'm fighting minigun users with my fists and I'm playing on Very Hard, so if I can do it I assume others can do. It gets more troublesome with whole squads of raiders though.

I would also echo the skill issues. Along with that goes the problem of capped skills and a proliferation of skill boosts, and of perks. Ending up at endgame with 20-40 more skillpoints is like having an entire other functional skill, since the skill tops out at 100 and you're able to get a +10 skill bobblehead and probably take a Perk to boost it too. For Big Guns, for example, there is somewhere a Big Guns bobblehead along with a "Size Matters" perk, making your effective maximum investment into Big Guns somewhere less than 75, depending on the amount of big gun books you find. Boosting it to 90, grabbing the bobblehead and "Size Matters" will only end up wasting your points. It's an issue which has a very simple solution--max your imput into a skill to 100, and add bonuses atop that. Lowering the effective level of the skill by 20 or more points, like most are, means that those extra 20, 40, or 60 points you end up with are basically going to add up to an entire other 100 max skill, or several mid-range skills. Considering how many things are barred to minimum skill users, this opens up vast swaths of the game to higher int players while also assuring them of greater combat potential at the same time. No other stat has such a dramatic effect on everything else, and with so many stat-boosting items, you can really do without in a lot of ways aside from int.

-Strength should directly modify gun wobble on all guns, and boost melee AND unarmed damage much more noticably. Guns no longer have a minimum strength requirement, and with ammo, chems and a variety of doo-dads being weightless, strength is pretty useless. The carryweight bonus is laughable too, just get strong back and save yourself an intense training on another stat.
-Perception adding the red lines is fine, but I'm suprised how little it has to do with your Perk choice and VATS accuracy, or other things. Raising the Perk requirements for perception would have been fine enough. Not much else you can do without making manual aiming a joke, though I would have made it alter critical chances, similar to luck, due to good aim.
-Endurance is much handier than people give it credit for, but aside from the huge starting HP boost, not so much, and it's pointless to raise it later since HP's aren't retroactive and don't affect how many you get per level. You should get 10+endurance per level, not just 10, and a minor DR boost would be nice as well, maybe half END.
-Charisma I have no idea about. I assume charisma is a useful stat for something, I just don't have it. Charisma has always been kinda useless though, in every game. A simple fix would be to make Charisma alter the aggressiveness of badguys to you, so that a high charisma lets you walk amongst raiders and slavers and a low charisma makes the brotherhood fire warning shots as you approach. Oblivion did this, and let you 'yield' when a guard would accost you with a sword, you should be able to do the same thing to raiders in a "White Flag" maneuver.
-Intelligence is way too potent. Skillpoints being based of intelligence is fine, but the max skill limits need to be somewhat higher and less hard limits on doors and computers. It should be less easy for a smart character to throw 2 levels into a skill and be godlike at it. Or you should make the +3 skillpoints per level perk require an intelligence of 3 or less.
-Agility is, and has always been, total wank. In every game. The AP boost is minor but important here, but I don't really see that much wrong with it. You have to put quite a few points into agility to get more than one extra shot in VATS, so it provides little overall. I don't use VATS that much, but I did put 7 into it to get 3 Deathclaw Gauntlet strikes per use. Agility is only potent because all the other stats seem so irrelevent.
-Luck does goofy stuff, all behind the scenes. The crit boost and minor skill boost is fun, but it has always seemed somewhat odd to me to have a stat that does almost nothing be in the same catagory as Intelligence or Agility. If luck doesn't alter what encounters you run into, it should. It should also alter what kind of stuff you find in boxes.

[charlemagne]

I would also echo the skill issues. Along with that goes the problem of capped skills and a proliferation of skill boosts, and of perks. Ending up at endgame with 20-40 more skillpoints is like having an entire other functional skill, since the skill tops out at 100 and you're able to get a +10 skill bobblehead and probably take a Perk to boost it too. For Big Guns, for example, there is somewhere a Big Guns bobblehead along with a "Size Matters" perk, making your effective maximum investment into Big Guns somewhere less than 75, depending on the amount of big gun books you find. Boosting it to 90, grabbing the bobblehead and "Size Matters" will only end up wasting your points. It's an issue which has a very simple solution--max your imput into a skill to 100, and add bonuses atop that. Lowering the effective level of the skill by 20 or more points, like most are, means that those extra 20, 40, or 60 points you end up with are basically going to add up to an entire other 100 max skill, or several mid-range skills. Considering how many things are barred to minimum skill users, this opens up vast swaths of the game to higher int players while also assuring them of greater combat potential at the same time. No other stat has such a dramatic effect on everything else, and with so many stat-boosting items, you can really do without in a lot of ways aside from int.

Don't waste perks on things like "Size matters" or "Gun nut". As you've seen for yourself there's plenty of skill points around - and then there's Bobbleheads for every skill, plus 25 skill books, which means 60 free points just waiting to be picked up (you shouldn't read skill books before taking the perk that grants 2 skill points upon reading on instead of only 1). If you want to make your character as "efficient" as possible don't waste skill points above 40. I still think getting science and lockpicking up to 100 ASAP is worthwhile, though, because of the stupid caps.

Luck improves your chances to hit critical, which is always nice. Also, don't waste more than 9 points on int, because of the bobblehead.

[Zixinus]

Personally, I came up with the personal theory that the more simple the RPG, the better. For example, I think that about 80% of the RPG system could be replaced by a much simpler and possibly more interesting "skill" system that should be more story-driven. Leveling would be non-existent. You increase health by wearing armour and your health is depended on body-damage rather than an arbitrary health metre, which has more health according to the armour you're wearing (like, a vest will give you more health to your torso but it won't do anything for your head). The only way to increase health without external accessories, is by augmentation (which would require an actual doctor and associated kit).

You get perks for completing various quests or part of the storyline. Like getting Black Widow/Ladykiller perk during your childhood or in some quests where a character from the opposite sex betrays you and the game gives you the option of either humiliation/loss of resources/etc or channel your (character's) rage into sexism, helped by finding a guy/gal that is also sexist. It may sound silly, but it makes a bit more sense than levelling up and suddenly deciding that you are a sexist.

Or another example, completing the Wasteland Survival Guide should give you radiation resistance as well as the additional bonuses of learning new weaknesses of creatures (by giving us more body parts to attack rather than an arbitrary +21,3432% increase in damage) among a variety of other things. Like, completing the quest about the mirelurks gives you more useful drops from them or the Roboco quest gives you the Robot Expert perk. Ultimately, the quest would grant you endurance.

Skills would be increased by reading magazines, learning from instructors and doing associated missions. Doing a firing range nets you a 1+ to the gun skill (out, of say, 20, where 10 equals well-trained/practised and 20 equals "magician", like "gun-magician"). Of course, you can only use raise your gun skill so much with easy-to-find stuff , as learning from magazines will obviously won't turn you from "can't hit the wide side of the barn" to "can hunt flies". So if the player wants to become better, he has to work hard for it.

Stuff, like charisma is increased by two things: what you are wearing and how well can you express yourself. Obviously about the latter, a character focusing on this from the start will have less trouble. But the former means much, because I think people are a little less friendly when they see a guy in power-armour walk into town. Of course, karma and reputation perks will also effect various characters. Killing slavers to free slaves will give you good karma, but previously indifferent slavers will shoot you on sight.

Of course this would require some shiton of script programming, but it would still be more interesting than "level up! assign your point to increase your skills which you never used based of arbitrarly-earned experience points".

I think this game would suit Fallout 3 far better than your traditional "level up" system. After all, the best thing about Fallout 3 is exploration. This would reward exploration even further.

[Stark]

Uh, okay, that's not relevant. We all know the F3 skill system is bollocks. Is your next trick 'reputation/karma being a simple integer is primitive and ineffective'? How about 'modern computers are able to have events happen when the player isn't around'?

The very idea of putting 9 points into Luck terrifies me. I get criticals maybe every second shot by loading perks and having luck 6. There are plenty of levels where there are no 'good' perks to get, so boosting stats is very easy.

[Darth Onasi]

Seems like an age since I was last here and people were drooling over screenshots of Fallout 3, and now... well, good game. But thank the heavens for modders!
Bethesda are rubbish at implementing skills, always have been, always will be (they have no financial incentive to change).

[DrMckay]

There's a named shotgun? where?

And how do you get the key to the armory of Hamilton's hideout anyway?

[Darth Onasi]

This one?

[Vendetta]

The very idea of putting 9 points into Luck terrifies me. I get criticals maybe every second shot by loading perks and having luck 6. There are plenty of levels where there are no 'good' perks to get, so boosting stats is very easy.

There are 4 luck increasing items anyway. (Lucky Shades, Lucky 8-Ball, Ranger Battle Armour, Bobblehead), so you don't want to start it at more than 6.

[Vendetta]

And how do you get the key to the armory of Hamilton's hideout anyway?

Off of Three Dog.

[Xess]

I really like the game. The multitude of faults have already been mentioned but I like the game inspite of them. The ending is annoying. I had plenty of RadX, Rad-Away and a radiation suit going into the control chamber but the program still makes you die even though you've survived worse getting the G.E.C.K.

I find it fun though, and that's what matters to me. I bought the PC version specifically so I could mod it, hopefully some un-official patch will fix some of the problems.

[K. A. Pital]

Kid kill mod is already there. I hope someone will rectify the ending for the game to be more epic and take into consideration the side quests to produce an ending where "loose threads" come together in some fashion - that'll take time of course.

Other than that, the flaws of FO3 are fairly minor. I can live with a somewhat crippled RPG skill system if the quests are interesting and dialogues are well-written, which is the case.

[charlemagne]

There are 4 luck increasing items anyway. (Lucky Shades, Lucky 8-Ball, Ranger Battle Armour, Bobblehead), so you don't want to start it at more than 6.

Ah, right, I forgot about the Lucky 8-Ball! Well I wouldn't want to wear the Ranger armour, so I'll eventually start over with a luck of 7.

[Vendetta]

Well I wouldn't want to wear the Ranger armour, so I'll eventually start over with a luck of 7.

I wouldn't write it off so quickly. I think the only armours better are Tesla Armour and the T.51b and both of them require power armour training (and the T.51b is NPC repair only, whereas Ranger armour you can repair with Talon armour), so aren't available until later in the game. It's only one point short of Power Armour in DR but has no stat penalties, +1 Luck, +5AP, and +10 Small Guns.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

So, let's see... The absolute minimal skill points, with only 1 in INT from level 1-20 is 209.
With 10 1-20: 380. (Easily enough to put 29 into each skill.)
You only loose one off of that min-maxing it to have 9 out of the vault (autolevel up from the Escape Mission...) and grab the bobble before gaining 3...

Each point of luck is also technically worth 13 skill points, since it adds 1 to every skill... (And a 2% crit chance, aside.)

In addition the minimum of +2 from each SPECIAL to it's related skill...

I'd have to say that, not only are all +Skill-only Perks worthless, the Educated Perk (+3 Skill points on level) is looking pretty regrettable now... Even if it is another 51 points.

Appearently, endurance adds 2% to Rad resistance and 5% to Poison for each point above 1...

Charisma is the most useless... it's tied to Speech & Barter, it's linked skills are also all pretty useless. Animal Friend takes 2 Perk points to really be useful. As they'll then attack things attacking you instead of just not attacking you. While Master Trader is just a -25% shop prices, which I sincerely doubt drops them below the item value, which I think you buy AND sell at at 100 Barter Points. (Not to mention caps flow like irradiated water if you even half heartedly scavenge...)



In anycase... it looks like I either glitched, or any method of ending Tenpenny Tower without the Ghouls wallowing in their own blood ultimately ends up with everyone else in the tower dead... (Well, except Burke for some reason...)

Only annoying due to my completionist tendencies... as I'm now out a capmine scheme... Ah well.



Also: On NPC repair, the wandering merchants do indeed get very high skill if you invest in them. My Wolfgang is the highest @75, Lucky surprisingly only has 60, while the Good Doc was at 70. Haven't seen the other guy...

[Vympel]

Just finished the game - I agree the ending is a total letdown, though it's hard to be too disappointed with it given the awesomeness of LIBERTY PRIME that came before.

"COMMUNISM IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF FAILURE!"

AMERICEERRRR! FUCK YEAAAHH!

Is there supposed to be an narration-ending for Megaton? Because it didn't mention it?

If they had done the endings of Fallout and Fallout 2 (where Fallout 2 wasn't broken, that is) then I would've expected to see the following endings:-

1. Fate of Megaton;
2. Fate of Paradise Falls (i.e. did you wipe it out? I did);
3. Fate of Canterbury Commons (dependent on outcome of the superhero quest);
4. Vault 101s fate;
5. Talon Company (i.e. if Fort Bannister their main base)
6. The Capital Wasteland's raiders (wipe out Evergreen Mills);
7. Tenpenny Tower (real obvious one);
8. Reilly's Rangers;

Oh well.

One thing I didn't end up doing - at Rivet City I used my speech to tell off that brat kid, and he got upset and ran away with the other kid, the little girl. Never found em. Anyone know where they are? Unintential negative karma, but really, fuck that kid.

Now to do the game again as an evil bastard.

Anyone else scratch their head over what the purifier code was? I had no idea - apparently it's supposed to appear in your notes, but it didn't for me, so I had to use google.