Fallout 3 Impressions and Opinions

[Nephtys]

I'm stuck in the god damned crazy german dude's simulation. Can someone tell me how to break up the rockwell's marriage without killing one of them?

You don't HAVE to. You can just leave. Fuck Braun.

What was the step before last to unlock the terminal? I found the harmonics puzzle in the abandoned house, but I couldn't find the object before last in the sequence, so I gave up and killed everyone using a variety of inventive ways, and then a clown mask instead .

You have to hit a few of them more than once to do the harmonics puzzle.

[Mr Bean]

I found the sequence through simple trial and error, oh and Braun whistles it which I noticed when I went back to confront him.

[Stark]

It's kinda funny how astonishingly boring, short and linear the main quest is; it's a symptom of Oblivion disease I guess, where the random quests and dialog varies so much in tone and style you almost wonder if there was any level design communication at all. Crushing desperation and subsistence in the wasteland can be found a hundred meters away from 21st-century normal lolbertarian retardation with blade runner quests.

[charlemagne]

I agree with the "Oblivion disease", which also brings up another subject: perceived smallness of the whole world. It's what comes with the "have complete voiceovers for EVERY NPC because players are too retarted to read nowadays" bullshit, and it gives us stuff like the ghouls invading Tenpenny's Tower being what, 4 people overall? It's ridiculous.

That quest also pisses me off, because I didn't think that getting the ghouls in over the tunnel would mean they murder everyone. I thought about convincing everyone in the tower the let them in first, but I also had the quest to kill Tenpenny, so I foolishly did that first. Then Gustavo was in command, and he was even more "hell fuck no ghouls", so I killed him too - and after that, no one else seizes control of the tower! I thought the old commie would be in charge then, he seemed like a nice enough guy. But no, after killing both bad guys there's apparently no way to solve the quest peacefully. I mean, there's not exactly a gazillion quests in FO3, they could've really worked better on solving an overlapping quest like that one.

It's also a bit retarted how the whole world acts like the bombs just fell three weeks ago. There's no reason the brotherhood or any other faction couldn't have cleaned up downtown DC and having organized big time by now. There's still electricity EVERYWHERE, there's factories and army outposts to be raided for ressources, there's means of long-way communication... so there's really no excuse for that.

There's also no farms of any kind to be found, should we really believe that this whole wasteland just lives off two-headed cows and 200 years old food? Oblivion had at least a few alibi farms.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I agree with the "Oblivion disease", which also brings up another subject: perceived smallness of the whole world. It's what comes with the "have complete voiceovers for EVERY NPC because players are too retarted to read nowadays" bullshit, and it gives us stuff like the ghouls invading Tenpenny's Tower being what, 4 people overall? It's ridiculous.

This was my main complaint with Bethesda back when Oblivion came out, the dialogue and plot is simplistic and limits the amount of characters with an actually interesting/original dialogue tree drastically.
You cannot make a Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate 2 with this sort of limitation (Unless you have a truly massive budget, which admittedly, Bethesda does have).

It's also a bit retarted how the whole world acts like the bombs just fell three weeks ago. There's no reason the brotherhood or any other faction couldn't have cleaned up downtown DC and having organized big time by now. There's still electricity EVERYWHERE, there's factories and army outposts to be raided for ressources, there's means of long-way communication... so there's really no excuse for that.

There's also no farms of any kind to be found, should we really believe that this whole wasteland just lives off two-headed cows and 200 years old food? Oblivion had at least a few alibi farms.

Fallout 2 addressed this, what with large farms to be seen, some vegetable growths (mainly in cities), and settlements from Fallout 1 growing greatly (assuming they weren't destroyed by armies of super mutants, slavers, raiders, or technology breakdown).
There were way too many vaults, and a distinct lack of the organized groups (Super mutants, the master, even the more active Enclave) that would explain why most settlements couldn't grow and expand. The availability of Mr. Handy butlers was even sillier.
Also, is there any explanation where Megaton gets its power from? I was pissed at the masses of large electricity transmission towers standing around in the wastes, after 200 years, someone should have stripped them down for materials or built a grid using them.

The game would make a LOT more sense if it took place before Fallout 2 or even 1 (say, a century or a century and a half after the bombs), even with the fact that DC was more heavily bombed than the West coast.


Also, on a different note, after the lack of details on the Collective - What about the rest of the world?
You'd think that after 2 centuries South America or Africa or some other former 3d world country would want to come and to "colonize" the smoking ruins of America, the bombs were mainly between China and the USA (with Russia and Europe probably caught in the middle), and the FEV and (MUL - Supermutant virus) were accidentally released only in the states as far as we know. (they didn't have time to launch them at China, or even if they did, there's still the rest of the bloody planet).

[charlemagne]

This was my main complaint with Bethesda back when Oblivion came out, the dialogue and plot is simplistic and limits the amount of characters with an actually interesting/original dialogue tree drastically.
You cannot make a Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate 2 with this sort of limitation (Unless you have a truly massive budget, which admittedly, Bethesda does have).

At least it got better with FO3, it feels more like talking to people instead of just barking "Rumors!" into their faces.

I also still don't get why they thought the full voice-over was really necessary. Morrowind had ungodly amounts of text to read, and it still was pretty well. I think it's a case of thinking gamers - and especially console gamers - are dumber and less patient than they really are. The industry still thinks that sucking up to the mythical "casual gamer" is golden, when more and more people seem to start to complain about missing depth.

[The Grim Squeaker]

This was my main complaint with Bethesda back when Oblivion came out, the dialogue and plot is simplistic and limits the amount of characters with an actually interesting/original dialogue tree drastically.
You cannot make a Planescape Torment or Baldur's Gate 2 with this sort of limitation (Unless you have a truly massive budget, which admittedly, Bethesda does have).

At least it got better with FO3, it feels more like talking to people instead of just barking "Rumors!" into their faces.

I also still don't get why they thought the full voice-over was really necessary. Morrowind had ungodly amounts of text to read, and it still was pretty well. I think it's a case of thinking gamers - and especially console gamers - are dumber and less patient than they really are. The industry still thinks that sucking up to the mythical "casual gamer" is golden, when more and more people seem to start to complain about missing depth.

Not really, the casual gamer is about a game being easy to pick up and play. The Wii's games have almost no voice dialogue, but are succesful due to how easy it is to get into them.
The brainbug of "Let's give everyone a voice-over" sucks, it's awesome for, say the main villain voiced by Irons or Jaa or whatever, but it's become a mantra that everyones doing and investing tech in. (Just look at Bioware making lots of variations for "malawah blaaa hakta!" for their games and lipsynchs)

[Ohma]

Well I just got spoilered on the ending and am now not particularly enthused about working my way through most of the game.
Spoiler

I can understand that they wanted to have an ending with the impact of Fo1. However, I don't think that forcing the player to choose between "OMG SACRIFICE YOURSELF" and "OMG SACRIFICE SOMEONE ELSE" is necessarily the best way they could've accomplished that, particularly since it's apparently very easy to poke holes in their story at that point by taking anti-radiation drugs and wearing a radiation suit (making your melty death by radiation ridiculously drawn out) or having one of your party members be all mutanty and radiation resistant (though you can apparently ask at least one of them to do the thing for you, but he'll reply with a really cop-outy "it is your destiny").
The ending narration sounds disappointing as well since there are only really two variations (based on whether you have good or bad karma...because that concept just won't die). And the only things you get to tie up the loose ends of all the sidequests are some really quick slides, which I don't think all play unless the narration waits for them.
Now I'm not saying that that stuff makes me hate the game, but it does make me give a lot less of a shit about how I resolve quests.

Also, I'm beginning to loathe weapon degradation in the game (my pistol went from about 70% to 20% in the span of one medium length firefight), I kind of wish you could use the random junk all over the place to repair your shit. And as a purely aesthetic choice I hope that a mod comes out soon to switch the passage of time in the game over to real-time instead of GTA-ish, 24 minute time.

[charlemagne]

And as a purely aesthetic choice I hope that a mod comes out soon to switch the passage of time in the game over to real-time instead of GTA-ish, 24 minute time.

You can do that already with the "set timescale=x" console command, you'd just have to enter it whenever you load a savegame. I don't know the variables right now, but there should be threads at the official forums about it.

[Vympel]

I agree with the voice-over thing - I find that in non plot-critical conversations, unless they're telling me something interesting in an interesting way, I just quickly skim the sub-title and then click the mouse. I don't necessarily always want to listen to an actor deliver lines.

However, I think that to argue Fallout or Fallout 2 had more conversation depth merely because they didn't have voice overs is false, and the subject of some seriously rose-coloured glasses. I've not got the impression during conversations that they're any more or less complex than the original. Further, the conversations in Fallout 3 are affected by perks - Gun Nut and Toughness are two I've seen come up.

Also, I'm beginning to loathe weapon degradation in the game (my pistol went from about 70% to 20% in the span of one medium length firefight), I kind of wish you could use the random junk all over the place to repair your shit. And as a purely aesthetic choice I hope that a mod comes out soon to switch the passage of time in the game over to real-time instead of GTA-ish, 24 minute time.

I agree with the accelerated time (this is a standard trope), but I think you're overstating the degradation. I've never had a weapon degrade to that point in even very long firefights.

I agree with the "Oblivion disease", which also brings up another subject: perceived smallness of the whole world. It's what comes with the "have complete voiceovers for EVERY NPC because players are too retarted to read nowadays" bullshit, and it gives us stuff like the ghouls invading Tenpenny's Tower being what, 4 people overall? It's ridiculous.

That is standard RPG stuff. Fallout and Fallout 2 were just as small. Look at the population of say, NCR. You'll be surprised. Look at the 'attacks' that you launch in cooperation with others. They're always that small. I don't know what that is, but they don't give it up.

Fallout 2 addressed this, what with large farms to be seen, some vegetable growths (mainly in cities), and settlements from Fallout 1 growing greatly (assuming they weren't destroyed by armies of super mutants, slavers, raiders, or technology breakdown).

IMO Fallout 2's level advancement was unrealistic and not in line with Fallout, and it was Fallout that Bethesda was going for in FO3 more than the sequel, both in terms of technology and everything else. Fallout 3 actually makes a very good point what with the irradiated water - in such a blasted wasteland how could they possibly grow crops to support large, technologically advanced settlements? The only one that made sense was Vault City, thanks to the GECK. NCR certainly didn't, in my view.

There were way too many vaults

Not really. Fallout's play area alone had Vault 12 (Necropolis) Vault 13, Vault 15, and the Demonstration Vault in the Boneyard.

Fallout 3 has Vault 101 (control group vault), Vault 106 (psycho vault) Vault 108 (cloning vault), Vault 112 (Braun's private playhouse), and Vault 87 (FEV experimentation). In other words, one extra, and only one of them is even fully functioning. So it's actually better, not worse. The lack of any GECK equipped Vaults in the area that actually didn't do evil shit to the inhabitants actually makes it a much crappier environment than the West.

Remember - the vaults weren't actually meant to save anyone.

and a distinct lack of the organized groups (Super mutants, the master, even the more active Enclave) that would explain why most settlements couldn't grow and expand. The availability of Mr. Handy butlers was even sillier.

Eh. There's a RobCo production facility in the area. A few robots is to be expected. Your Mr Handy is the only one in all of Megaton, not so bad.

Also, is there any explanation where Megaton gets its power from? I was pissed at the masses of large electricity transmission towers standing around in the wastes, after 200 years, someone should have stripped them down for materials or built a grid using them.

How would they strip em down and transport them? More trouble than its worth, most likely.

[Vympel]

One annoying bug I've started running into is when I start the game it'll look like shit - the detail will be minimzed and everything will look like ass. I have to exit out and start it again for the graphics to reset to what they're supposed to be. Very odd.

[charlemagne]

However, I think that to argue Fallout or Fallout 2 had more conversation depth merely because they didn't have voice overs is false, and the subject of some seriously rose-coloured glasses. I've not got the impression during conversations that they're any more or less complex than the original. Further, the conversations in Fallout 3 are affected by perks - Gun Nut and Toughness are two I've seen come up.

TBH I've never played Fallout 1 or 2, so my comments were based on how Morrowind had more depth than Oblivion and how Fallout 3 is more like Oblivion than any "old school" not-everything-voice-overed RPG.

[charlemagne]

One annoying bug I've started running into is when I start the game it'll look like shit - the detail will be minimzed and everything will look like ass. I have to exit out and start it again for the graphics to reset to what they're supposed to be. Very odd.

You can try setting fallout.ini to read only after having set everything the way it's supposed to be.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I agree with the voice-over thing - I find that in non plot-critical conversations, unless they're telling me something interesting in an interesting way, I just quickly skim the sub-title and then click the mouse. I don't necessarily always want to listen to an actor deliver lines.

Same, hurrah for fast reading .

However, I think that to argue Fallout or Fallout 2 had more conversation depth merely because they didn't have voice overs is false, and the subject of some seriously rose-coloured glasses. I've not got the impression during conversations that they're any more or less complex than the original.

Some are (ZAX for example), but some aren't. Maybe I am visualizing too much, I forgot what a pile o shit "rumours" were.

Further, the conversations in Fallout 3 are affected by perks - Gun Nut and Toughness are two I've seen come up.

Eh? I left those perks alone due to it not saying anything about affecting conversations, interesting to know for the replay...

Also, I'm beginning to loathe weapon degradation in the game (my pistol went from about 70% to 20% in the span of one medium length firefight), I kind of wish you could use the random junk all over the place to repair your shit. And as a purely aesthetic choice I hope that a mod comes out soon to switch the passage of time in the game over to real-time instead of GTA-ish, 24 minute time.

I agree with the accelerated time (this is a standard trope), but I think you're overstating the degradation. I've never had a weapon degrade to that point in even very long firefights.

Same.

I agree with the "Oblivion disease", which also brings up another subject: perceived smallness of the whole world. It's what comes with the "have complete voiceovers for EVERY NPC because players are too retarted to read nowadays" bullshit, and it gives us stuff like the ghouls invading Tenpenny's Tower being what, 4 people overall? It's ridiculous.

That is standard RPG stuff. Fallout and Fallout 2 were just as small. Look at the population of say, NCR. You'll be surprised. Look at the 'attacks' that you launch in cooperation with others. They're always that small. I don't know what that is, but they don't give it up.

My bet is simply technical and AI limitation. That or "Let's make the player feel important!!!!!" nonsense.

Fallout 2 addressed this, what with large farms to be seen, some vegetable growths (mainly in cities), and settlements from Fallout 1 growing greatly (assuming they weren't destroyed by armies of super mutants, slavers, raiders, or technology breakdown).

IMO Fallout 2's level advancement was unrealistic and not in line with Fallout, and it was Fallout that Bethesda was going for in FO3 more than the sequel, both in terms of technology and everything else. Fallout 3 actually makes a very good point what with the irradiated water - in such a blasted wasteland how could they possibly grow crops to support large, technologically advanced settlements? The only one that made sense was Vault City, thanks to the GECK. NCR certainly didn't, in my view.

The water bit was interesting, and a good addition to the mythos, although I think I recall water pumps in the older games. (Some towns were in the middle of the desert after all).

There were way too many vaults

Not really. Fallout's play area alone had Vault 12 (Necropolis) Vault 13, Vault 15, and the Demonstration Vault in the Boneyard.

Fallout 3 has Vault 101 (control group vault), Vault 106 (psycho vault) Vault 108 (cloning vault), Vault 112 (Braun's private playhouse), and Vault 87 (FEV experimentation).

Yeah, but this was in a tiny, tiny area, and they're far less hidden. As Stark said, you'd expect some people after over 200 years to open the wire door and to set up shop inside. (Albeit, raiders were trying to do this to 101 via the fire ant caves).

In other words, one extra, and only one of them is even fully functioning. So it's actually better, not worse. The lack of any GECK equipped Vaults in the area that actually didn't do evil shit to the inhabitants actually makes it a much crappier environment than the West.

Guess they saved it for the Government flying saucer vault .

Remember - the vaults weren't actually meant to save anyone.

Yeah, yeah, It Never changes .

and a distinct lack of the organized groups (Super mutants, the master, even the more active Enclave) that would explain why most settlements couldn't grow and expand. The availability of Mr. Handy butlers was even sillier.

Eh. There's a RobCo production facility in the area. A few robots is to be expected. Your Mr Handy is the only one in all of Megaton, not so bad.

Yeah, I saw the facility (which felt odd, a guy has a fucking factory and material for it, it's automated, and yet so few robots? it's contradictory). And you getting a Mr.Handy as has been said, doesn't make sense. (It's given as a bonus, as though it were common).

Also, is there any explanation where Megaton gets its power from? I was pissed at the masses of large electricity transmission towers standing around in the wastes, after 200 years, someone should have stripped them down for materials or built a grid using them.

How would they strip em down and transport them? More trouble than its worth, most likely.

Bash down the support struts and carry the metal bars off to make houses with. Not too hard.

[Zixinus]

I also would like to add to the voiceover-only thing is stupid. It's unnecessary and modders will require to do voice acting if they want to make their own lines. The traditional "voice overs only for cutscenes and important dialogues" is fine. Then again, I can't quite understand the mayor level of retardation required for consoles.

And by 'base' I mean 'strangely not damaged or salvaged structures with 200 year old tents'. It's so funny to hear stupid people ingame complain about omg wasteland stuff like water and shit, when there's a dozen vaults just lying around in varying states of undress and NOBODY CARES. Let's build our town out of planes we dragged from miles away next to a giant bomb instead of moving into that near-fully functional vault AND THEN COMPLAIN ABOUT WATER. Cretins.

You should have gone and learned about the town's history. The place was a crater that was supposedly safe from dust storms and thus made into a shantytown. That's also why they built the thing next to a bomb. The plane parts were relatively nearby, so the mayor sent some people out to get them. That guy might had some brain damage, I might give you that.

Also, the vault is inaccessible from the outside, remember? And hidden? You can'T just walk in.

OHMYGAWD!! there's like, no WAY we can fix the piddly little leaks on our water pipes, and man, moving the town away from the bomb would've been like, effort"

They can, its just that the only guy that can has to keep the actual system running and preventing it from falling apart.

As for moving, that would require dismantling the town, packing up everything and than moving it to... where? As far as I seen, that place is as good as in any. Also, I don't think that the town has enough community strength to muster the manpower, resources, tools and organization to pull that off. I also think that its a safe guess that the town wasn't built under a year and that the last 200 years was spent turning the town into what it was.

EDIT: Also, they could've just moved the bomb, but ohnoes the cultist losers would get all pissy, except not because they couldn't even be bothered to notice that I disarmed their god.

What did you expect from a religious leader that worships a nuke? I also never saw the guy actually coming close and actually detonating the nuke.

And really, from the standpoint of the survivors, the deal made sense: they needed the manpower so why bother moving the nuke away when its not doing anything?

[Vympel]

FUCK. I was outside of the Arlington Library (doing another Moira mission) when an Enclave Vertiberd flew in and dropped off some soldiers who promptly proceeded to slaughter some nearby ghouls - if anyone's been there it's across the hideout of a lone sniper raider who likes to take potshots at you, and who has a bunch of traps protecting her if you want to get up there and kill her.

So I told Dogmeat to go back to Vault 101, killed the Enclave troops (who only had Tesla Armor, which I didn't like the look of, so I kept my standard Power Armor) - killed the Raider, and then spoke to the one surviving Ghoul out of a group of five, trying to make their way to Underworld. He didn't tell me anything except thanked me for not attacking him, and when I said I had to go, he said "fine, we don't need you anyway".

He then walked away and promptly stepped on a landmine, dying. Hilarious.

Then I went into Alexandria Arms and cleared it.

I come back outside.

"Dogmeat has died".

FUCK.

[Vympel]

And another thing - where the fuck is Arlington Cemetery? Can't find it for shit - want the Luck Bobblehead.

The amount of random quests you can find is great - I just went into Grayditch and in the middle of doing that quest, found a dead guy and a recording telling me to go retrieve "the package" and take it to someone. The package turned out to be Naughty Nightwear. Which some dude promptly showed up and demanded. I had 100% speech so I told him to take a hike. Weird. Wonder what happens when I deliver it.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

And another thing - where the fuck is Arlington Cemetery? Can't find it for shit - want the Luck Bobblehead.

The amount of random quests you can find is great - I just went into Grayditch and in the middle of doing that quest, found a dead guy and a recording telling me to go retrieve "the package" and take it to someone. The package turned out to be Naughty Nightwear. Which some dude promptly showed up and demanded. I had 100% speech so I told him to take a hike. Weird. Wonder what happens when I deliver it.

Unless there's another +10 speech body peice it ain't worth it. It's only 300 caps.

[Vympel]

Meh I'm a completionist. Before I finish the game I'm going everywhere.

Then I'll play the game as an evil fucker.

[Vendetta]

Yeah, I saw the facility (which felt odd, a guy has a fucking factory and material for it, it's automated, and yet so few robots? it's contradictory).

The RobCo facility doesn't work because there's not enough power for it. If you access the main computer and try to start it up it says so.

[Ghost Rider]

Split out the idiot's hijacking. It's in the HoS.

[White Haven]

Aaah, I was wondering why the thread was shorter when I logged back in at home. Aaanyway, I see Bethesda, for all the good things they did with this game, continue their tradition of fucking ASS-terrible endings that they began in Oblivion. Granted, the enormous communist-bashing war robot of propeganda +5 was hilarious, but 'OH NOES your POWERED ARMOUR and ANTI-RAD MEDS will not avail you against MINOR LOW-LEVEL BACKGROUND RADIATION!' And Fawkes, if you have him...ARGH, just prior to that, he'd walked into a hoplessly-irradiated area as a story point to get the GECK for you. And then now that you need someone to walk into an irradiated area to punch in a simple code and walk out, noo, that won't do at all.

Also, what happened to the old tradition of 'Okay, you just beat the game, now you get treated with the goddamned awesome ending sequence?' I remember beating Independence War (fucking HARD game later in) and the ending was both awesome and enormous. Yes, I appreciate that in-game engines can manage some nice things now, but there are some things cinematically that you can't do that way, especially when you insist on remaining locked to the player's perspective. Developers took the wrong lesson from Half-Life...yes, that did in-game, in-perspective as an stylistic choice, but, like bullet time, it's not always the right answer.

And as a total aside, the laser weapons look properly weaponish. What the hell is up with the aesthetics of the plasma weapons?

[Stark]

I thought the same thing; they appear to be made with fucking washing machine hoses and stuff. What'd they look like in the other Fallout games?

[White Haven]

Behold the Old Plasma Rifle.

[Stark]

So not a few green bowls with washing machine hoses wrapped around them, then?

It's a shame that while I dig the look of the laser weapons, their utter lack of sights is pretty sad. Hell, the powerdrills they based them on have more usable sighting lumps on the top!