Fallout 3

[Visplane Overflow]

Apparently people challenged my opinion on Fallout 3, which is understandable as Fallout 3 is the single best selling game of all time.

I figured instead of derailing the Halo thread, I'd start my own and hear some opinions on Bethesda's latest fuckup. Keep in mind that I'm not saying that you're now allowed to enjoy Fallout 3 if you do, that's perfectly acceptable. However, myself, I felt cheated and it looked like Bethesda was pissing all over a good franchise. The game caused me nothing but frustration - but once again, I don't give enough of a damn about any of this to lose sleep because a game is overrated.

Alright, let's see if I can summarize why Fallout 3 was an unsuitable sequel and overall poorly executed game.

First of all, I will not deny that quite a lot of work went into the creation of F3. However, so many things are implemented so badly that you wonder where exactly those man-hours went. For example, the many impassable, invisible walls preventing travel in straight lines. This thwarted me on so many occasions - heaps of scrap metal and rubble that you can't climb sitting conveniently in the middle of the shortest route to your objective. Nonetheless, the first issue to tackle is the fact that F3 is completely different than any other Fallout game. The isometric view is gone, much of the smartass writing is absent, there are no well-developed NPCs in sight anymore, the voice acting is some of the worst I've seen since the expansion to Red Alert 2, and the dialogue is simply bad.

I'll turn a blind eye to the poorly done story and dialogue because Pete Hines had this to say on the subject :

“Dialogue wasn't a battle we wanted to pick. There were other things that were more important for us to spend time and energy on… we just don't have unlimited monkeys and typewriters.”

Fair enough. Lazy enough, too.

Next, the third-person system. I don't even think a comment is necessary on this sickly blemish. Why did they think this would work? What was going through their heads? Whatever the case, the third person camera looks atrocious, and makes gameplay extremely inconvenient.

Now on to the other gameplay elements. Combat is amazingly dull somehow, despite Oblivion being at least mediocre in this aspect. I blame the addition of firearms, which is something the guys at BethSoft just don't understand. Swords and sorcery worked for me! Anyway, after the first few levelups, combat becomes as simple as tapping V as soon as an enemy spots you and blowing his head off. Literally blowing his head off, actually. Somehow the 10MM pistol has the capacity to turn someone's whole cranium into vapour! I don't know, it is kind of funny, I'll give them that, but I expected things to be a bit more graphic and ridiculous in the gore department. I guess it's my fault for expecting the combat to be fun, challenging, and amusing, after all none of the previous Fallout games had that...oh shit, nevermind. Was it too much effort to have Bethsoft create an actual turn-based combat game? Their design decisions just reek of laziness.

The world! This is the best part of the game. The world is nicely developed, I've gotta say and it's quite pretty if you happen to think brown and grey as far as the eye can see constitutes beauty. Oblivion was a lot easier to look at plain and simple. To be fair, the DC wasteland does indeed look like a wasteland; boring and miserable. However I was quite shocked to see vampires, a peter pan settlement, and a city founded around an undetonated atomic bomb (durp). Did we all just forget how retarded this all is? None of these belong in a Fallout game. Speaking of Megaton, Bethesda holds the distinction of creating the most irritating character ever, Moira Brown. I can understand making lifeless characters or giving them bad dialogue, but going out of your way to make an NPC annoying is just disrespectful to the player.

The last thing that pissed me off was the relation to Fallout. Near as I can tell, the only similarities between Fallout and Fallout 3 are the title and the pip boy. Let's take a peak at a cogent example...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8U9T8Z_Ayhw <-- Fallout 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_ZTfPE8kc <-- Fallout 3

See the difference? That whole subquest with detonating Megaton was really silly in the first place - "Hmm, Megaton is ugly. Let's commit genocide!!"

Anyway, there's lots more that I could say about F3's many shortcomings (Chinese Officer committing Sepuku? That's completely racist. The Tenpenny tower thing? A moral dilemma where only the wrong answer wins. Feral ghouls? Canon, now! Super Mutants taking Pilates classes? You bet! A ham-fisted attempt at a karma system? The more amateur it is, the better.)

...but given that it only sold about a hundred billion copies I'm sure my ranting would just cause nerd rage. Anyway, the point of this is that F3 does not contain the level of quality I expect from a modern game, nor does it contain the level of quality I expect from a Fallout game, nor does it deserve to be called an RPG in the first place! Suck it down.

Edit: Further reading - A review of Fallout 3 : http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=47347

And a review of Fallout 3 as a standalone game, separate from the Fallout franchise : http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=47192

[wildweasel]

Alright, you appear to have explained your opinion well enough. I wanted to like Fallout 3 myself; the characters and slow-assed travel kind of prevented that from happening, in addition to the weapons feeling really badly done (sounds were alright but they just didn't feel like much fun to use). Stalker is better than Fallout, in retrospect.

[ArmouredBlood]

From your post, obviously you liked the fallout games before fallout 3 was even announced. No problems there. But every failing you point out I either completely ignored because it didn't matter to me or was actually expected.

I expected meh dialogue, bethesda has always done better with the jist of the story than telling it.

I expected bad 3rd person gameplay, I never used it except to look at my char in morrowind/oblivion and now fallout3.

I expected the world to look dreary. There was a nuclear nightmare 100+ years ago and it was a pretty heavily populated area, do you think it's going to be open waves of grass in nebraska? (EDIT: there was a ton of grassland outside the cities though ... meh)

I ignored the vats system, it's nice in some ways but I've always preferred getting the headshot myself thanks. Although the plasma overkills are lolsworthy. combat otherwise isn't so different from oblivion, bows are similar to sniper rifles and magic can make up for the heavier stuff. And melee is actually an option here, versus other purer FPSes.

I ignored the impassable walls, DC is annoying to walk through subways all the time but it makes sense that 90% of the buildings will be rubble-ized considering a nuke or 10 were supposed to go off here.

I think you have a legit argument that fallout 1/2 are not much like fallout 3 but those arguments have little to do with common bethesda drawbacks. Fallout 3 is Fallout 3, it's not Fallout 1/2. Nor Oblivion for that matter.

[pavera]

I loved Fallout 1, and I loved Fallout 2 (been playing it a lot on my laptop recently too). I also really liked Fallout 3, even if it was a completely different game. It wasn't quite as challenging as Fallout 2 (the hardest difficulty is still a breeze), but it was the first game in a long time to have me completely immersed for weeks. Yeah, weeks. I loved skulking around the early levels, shooting raiders in their arms to disarm them, scavenging for ammo and stimpacks, and talking to various NPCs to learn the ins and outs of the Capital Wasteland.

[Visplane Overflow]

ArmouredBlood said:

blah blah

Yes I liked Fallout 1 and 2 before I played Fallout 3. It had the Fallout name attached to it - so call me crazy, but normal people should expect the game to be more like the previous games.

Anyway, you went on to say that F3's shortcomings didn't bother you because you expected them. I did not expect that Bethesda would do justice to the Fallout franchise, I was prepared to see Oblivion in a different setting but just because you're ready for disappointment doesn't make the game any less of a disappointment. I'm poor, so I'm not going to pay top dollar for another copy of Oblivion. That said, Fallout 3 might interest me more if I hadn't played any of the Fallout games or Oblivion for that matter, as it is though, I can't help having done so.

[Whoo]

I played Fallout 3 right around when I started playing the original Fallout games. I went toward the originals. There was just so much of a difference between the two. Fallout 3 had a first person and third person point of view, which was nothing like the originals. The parts of the story that were taken from the originals pretty much convinced me that this game was a piece of garbage. The one thing that continually annoyed me was how easy it was to level up. Half way through the game, what do you know, I'm at the max level cap, 20. The enemies were all weaker than the ones in the original, and didn't share the characteristics. Take a look at the Ghoul leader Set, from Fallout 1:


They put so much into designing one single ghoul, while most of them in Fallout 3 just have messed up faces, and everything else is normal. The ones who do have everything messed up are basically mindless, that's not how it was in Fallout 1:



The original Fallout games put a huge amount of time on the story. In Fallout 1 if you went through everything in The Glow, you would see that every single part of the story matched up perfectly, and make sense. In Fallout 2, they again did a splendid job on the story. Now the Brotherhood is not the top in the wasteland, because of the remains of the stronger US Government, the Enclave have moved west. Bethseda just slightly added onto this stating that the Brotherhood simply moved to the east, mainly around the Washington D.C. area. I do not consider this to be a Fallout game at all, and same as always for the last 8 years: Fuck you Bethesda, you don't know how to make games.

[Bank]

Fallout has a really cool and unique story but I despised the boring slow gameplay of the first two games. Fallout 3 on the other hand I had a blast playing.

[Nomad]

I reckon I'm one of the few classic Fallout fans that thoroughly enjoyed Fallout 3. Sure, I had low expectations and in many cases Fallout 3 met them, but it surpassed enough of them that I was pretty satisfied to play. Despite all it's flaws, it turned out pretty decent in my opinion.

Only things I could say I wish it had is a better selection of weapons and armor. Not necessarily just more, but a better selection. There should be a clear distinction of pros and cons to use different armors, but in Fallout 3 basically the choice is 100% clear most of the time. Needed loads of more variety of weapons too. That's one of the things that was most popular about the originals, was the wide variety of guns ranging from good, cool, or just wacky you could use. The "custom" weapons (rock-it launcher, shishkabob, railway spike gun, etc) were pretty lame and not particularly useful by the time you could make them anyway.

Also, I know I'm not alone in hating the fucking item condition system. In FO1/2 there was the slim chance that your gun would blow up if you had a critical miss, but the item condition system is unnecessarily limiting. Same with inventory limit (which I always hate in games). The game world is expansive enough to explore without having to travel back to town all the time to fix your shit and sell whatever you've picked up that you can manage to part with without leaving yourself completely unprepared to go back out in the wastes.

The crappy dialog and voice acting was to be expected, really. Though numerous, pretty much all the other flaws of the game are petty and superficial and you'd have to be a real picky asshole to hold them against the game itself. Overall it was entertaining, and that's what matters. Me spending 80+ hours on a game is pretty damn good for my shit low attention span.

[Jodwin]

Fallout 3 was an ok..."game." But as an RPG, it was horrible. There were way too few interesting NPCs, way too few towns (not to mention interesting ones), way too few quests, way too few...

You get the idea.

I can't comment much on the main story because the time I spent playing was spent exploring and trying to do side quests, which has always been where you spend most of your time playing the original Fallouts. With the originals the main story has always been "Go save the world...and if you have good luck with the random numbers, you'll do it in a few hours", so I wouldn't have really minded a short main story though.

However, I don't remember there being much of a background story unlike in the originals (Vault City & the ghoul town? All drops of information from before to war? etc.). You know, that stuff that makes things feel alive. Instead you just have some guy who, with no particular reason, wants to blow one of the very few actual towns in the game up, or then there's a tiny settlement that's, for no particular reason, a playing field of two wannabe superheros/villains.

...but I'd still recommend it as a "game to consider" for a lot of people, just with the reservation that's it's more like an adventure/action game, rather than an rpg.

[Sharessa]

I'm a huge fan of the old Fallout games, and I really would love to play Fallout 3. Unfortunately my computer sucks and I'm in a terrible monetary state right now. Also, I was a big fan of Morrowind. So I'll probably at least like the game.

[Jodwin]

Danarchy said:

Also, I was a big fan of Morrowind. So I'll probably at least like the game.

Depends, really. I enjoyed Morrowind a lot too, but was hugely disappointed by Oblivion's dumping down. Similarly, if compared to Morrowind, Fallout 3 feels quite a bit simpler and smaller.

[Craigs]

Personally, I hated the first 2 games. The felt slow and dull compared to tactics and Fallout 3. Tactics was good, but the game really started to get frustrating when the super mutants started to show up, partially because of how overpowered the machine guns they were using were, especially the browning m2, which had a slightly shorter range then the sniper rifle and could wipe out one of my squad members as well as anyone near them with a single burst, even if they were wearing the second best armor in the game. The random encounters were also annoying too, mainly because of how frequently they occurred. In a lot of cases, I'd run into a random encounter on the world map without even moving. I personally enjoyed Fallout 3. It didn't quite suck me in, but I found it pretty entertaining, especially when I got the bloody mess perk.

[Blargharghargh]

My problem with what you said about Fallout 3 in the Halo thread was that you (at least how I read what you said) thought it was a cheap oblivion clone, to which I responded, "Well yeah, it's the same engine, so of course the games are going to be similar."

The whole thing about invisible walls, the way too easy combat (how to win fallout 3 combat vs anything: step 1, get a shotgun, step 2, stick your barrel in the enemy's face, step 3, go into vats and target the head, step 4, loot and pop a stimpak or 2, maybe...), the storyline that has about as much depth as FF1, and dialog that is just passable enough to make it almost a choice between muting the game's effects and listening to your own music or leaving the effects on so you can hear the 10 or 12 funny lines, if you took the perks to get the extra dialog. The enemies that all look exactly the same, despite the stupid random haircuts. The retarded quest lines (ant powers? seriously?), the completely one-dimensional characters, the complete lack of non main storyline factions, a whole bunch of really terrible shite in this game.

Y'know what saves it for me? GECK, or, the Elder Scrolls Construction Kit for Fallout. Mods, plain and simple. Yeah, the game is boring as fuck after you go through the main storyline and a couple of the sidequests (I found it hard to not just kill NPCs, rather than listen to them talk), but, if you're looking to experiment with an idea for a game (say, zombie apocolypse?), between oblivion and fallout, you've got the means to do it. Need magic in your mod? Oblivion. Want some gunplay in your fantasy? Fallout. Hell, I love oblivion (probably my favorite game [I like the leveling system and the dynamically leveled environment]), but I can't play it anymore without mods for new weapon models, armor, buildings, quests, towns, graphic improvements, races, etc. And that's what makes these games great; they were meant to be modded.

[scwiba]

Weird. You've got great timing; I finished playing through Fallout 3 just this morning.

Part of me would really love to just spew venom regarding it. I could spend an afternoon listing everything that I hated about it, or every way I feel like it betrays the Fallout world. But I won't accomplish anything by doing that and it only makes me feel even worse in the long run. It's not like me to get worked up over most things, but the Fallout series seems to have me by the balls. Knowing it will never be in the hands of its creators again or that Van Buren will never see the light of day actually makes me feel a little sick.

In the end, what's done is done. I can't change anything, and if other people enjoy Bethesda's take on the series, that's great. I'll stick to the boring, ugly, old games.

[Dutch Doomer]

I'm still playing Fallout 3, its one of the better games I played in an while. I never played any of the other Fallout games, so I can't compare them. But imo Fallout 3 is quite fun, sucks that I have to turn most of the settings off because of my old pc. It would have been an far better experience if I could play it with everything maxed out.

Atm I playing with an good karma charachter, I still want to play the game with an evil charachter. I didn't liked the silly ending though. I liked the weapons, but I wished there where alot more of them. I liked the V.A.T.S. system and also liked the designs of the monsters.

It doesn't beat Oblivion though :p but its still an pretty entertaining game to play.

[Gez]

Visplane Overflow said:

Anyway, the point of this is that F3 does not contain the level of quality I expect from a modern game, nor does it contain the level of quality I expect from a Fallout game, nor does it deserve to be called an RPG in the first place! Suck it down.

lulz.

Fallout 3 contains exactly the level of quality you should expect from a modern Fallout RPG. All the "text" part of a game -- dialogue, story, questlines, etc. -- has fallen by the wayside now that everything must be modeled in high-res, voice-acted, and made accessible to casual gamers. Development takes too long and costs too much to allow another approach.

[Coopersville]

I like it as an adventure game. It's a mediocre RPG, but I look past that, as I have fun just exploring the world and surviving.

[sirjuddington]

I never liked fallout 1 and 2 even though I enjoyed some similar games (Arcanum <3). Fallout 3 I found to be pretty good fun overall, especially if you just take it as an action game with RPG elements rather than a RPG with action elements...

[Enjay]

I have played all 3 but F3 was, for me, the most fun. If people mourn the loss of the isometric view, I don't. I much prefer the FPS view and it was, possibly, the isometric view of the first two that reduced its playability for me the most.

Perhaps F3 isn't quite as edgy as the first two in story and humour but that didn't bother me at all.

In fact, I'm pretty much with ArmouredBlood and what he said. I'll just add that the "expected shortcomings" didn't bother me, not because they were expected and I therefore forgave them, but rather because I wasn't bothered by them in the first place. Effectively, they aren't shortcomings for me at all because they don't impact on my enjoyment of the game.

[Nomad]

I personally don't understand why people have complained about the loss of the isometric view. It's not like that was unique to Fallout, nor what made Fallout what it is.

What it really comes down to, is that Fallout was renowned for being incredibly atmospheric and detailed. Honestly, Fallout 1 and 2 have the most immersive art direction of any games I've ever seen; everything was intricately designed to fit into the unique universe.

That's truly where you need to make the comparison with Fallout 3. Is it immersive? Most anyone I've ever talked to that has played it has noted easily losing track of time playing it. You sit down to play for a few minutes and end up sitting there for a couple hours without realizing it.

I'd say that qualifies as immersive.

Yes, they could have done better. The voice acting and character design are really the parts that could have used the most work. But it really wasn't that bad.

[DoomUK]

"Oblivion with guns" is the highly inventive way which I normally choose to describe F3.

But that's exactly what it is, sans the post-apocalyptic setting and VATs system. And had I not played Oblivion to death, I might not have got bored of F3 within the space of 30 minutes.

[Visplane Overflow]

Gez said:

Development takes too long and costs too much to allow another approach.

Development did take a long time and cost a small fortune, and especially so given that BethSoft was working with their own age-old engine. Where did it all go? It can't cost that much to smother Pete Hines in hookers and blow.

In the end I guess it boils down to whether or not you wasted a lot of time with Oblivion before playing F3. I am definitely in the minority that can't enjoy this game, but unlike the goons at NMA, I'm not letting the fact that people do enjoy it raise my blood pressure.

Oh and to me, Fallout Tactics seemed to be more of a fitting sequel to the series than F3 was - I really liked the new brotherhood - despite Tactics falling flat on its face in many ways (how could a game that came out after Jagged Alliance be less sophisticated than it? That said, how could F:T be less sophisticated than Fallout? How did Microprose feel justified putting that red herring, 'tactics' in the title? So many questions, so few answers.) when all is said and done, Fallout 3 seems to be a game that people will either love or hate. So whatever, that's just my two bits.

[Captain Red]

Visplane Overflow said:
I am definitely in the minority that can't enjoy this game, but unlike the goons at NMA, I'm not letting the fact that people do enjoy it raise my blood pressure.

Visplane Overflow said:
To be fair though, Halo fanboys aren't as ridiculous as Fallout 3's whores, who are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a shitty Oblivion clone and shitty expansions.

When I say whores, I mean... uhh...

[Visplane Overflow]

Ridiculous means worthy of ridicule. Which is what I had done by posting that in the other thread. I don't remember ever saying I wasn't allowed to call someone a whore for paying for F3 and all its expansions, did I, chief?

[Gez]

Visplane Overflow said:

Development did take a long time and cost a small fortune, and especially so given that BethSoft was working with their own age-old engine. Where did it all go? It can't cost that much to smother Pete Hines in hookers and blow.

And it would have cost more if they tried to give it the depth of the old games.

Let's look outside of Bethesda. Take Ultima Underworld II, and compare it to Arx Fatalis, which for all intents and purpose is its spiritual sequel. Which has the richest storyline? The largest amount of dialog? The longest gameplay? Believe it or not, the answer is "the one which has unspoken text and a tiny amount of low-res sprites", not "the one where everything is voice-acted and modeled in intricate 3D". Oh gee, I wonder why.

Do not expect increasing complexity in the CRPG genre. The trend is to a simplification that blurs the boundaries between action, adventure, and RPG. That's because games cost so much more now to develop that things are streamlined to be made manageable.

[Jodwin]

Gez said:

Do not expect increasing complexity in the CRPG genre. The trend is to a simplification that blurs the boundaries between action, adventure, and RPG. That's because games cost so much more now to develop that things are streamlined to be made manageable.

And also because MMORPGs and JRPGs have showed that you can get away with less. :(

[sLydE]

I'm about 65/70 hours into Fallout 3, and I'm absolutely eating it up.

The only real issue I have with the game is not the game's fault at all. My dual-core CPU is a bottleneck in my machine, and causes frequent 30 fps moments at the worst times. (i.e. combat in an open area)

I don't play games in 3rd person mode generally, so I don't really care about that aspect.

I've been purposely avoiding the main storyline quest, as my wife just played through it and was disappointed. She went back and started playing again from an earlier save game. I'm basically trying to do everything I can before I get bored and want to finish the game.

I think Fallout 3 is great, and I think it's well worth the price tag.

[Patrick]

Having never played the other fallout games, I thought it was good in it's own right. I found the long hikes through the wasteland a lot of fun. The Blocking walls were a bit irritating, but it would make me go through areas I would never had gone through otherwise. The combat was fun because I'm generally terrible at first person shooters, so VATS made up for my terrible aiming. I found a lot of the minor characters fairly lifeless and boring, but some of the bigger characters (Moira for example) charming in their own way. I didn't even play the story of the game, I spent all my time setting up random map markers and trying to find things in the wasteland. The only real beef I have with this game is how dull everything looks. Its fun to explore, and I honestly had a lot of fun with it, but the environments were too grey/brown. "Charming and Fun" is how I'd describe it. Here are some of the things I'd have changed:

Needed to have a society of mind-powered mutants underground worshipping a bomb.

Needed to have highway gangs that drive around killing for gasoline.

Needed to have a religious society of black cloaked guys wearing sunglasses in a football stadium.

The landscape could have stood to have a lot more color. Why do people always assume the post apocalypse has to be so brown?

[Jodwin]

Patrick said:

The landscape could have stood to have a lot more color. Why do people always assume the post apocalypse has to be so brown?

The original games looked very bleak, thematically, so it would have been silly to make Fallout 3 a fairy land theme park. Visually Fallout 3 is a pretty good successor to the originals, but one difference between them is that in the originals you spent less time looking at stuff (no free adventuring in the same sense, etc.) and more time doing stuff.

[Aliotroph?]

For slightly more colour (and I dare say a bit more realism) there's The Wasteland Weather Overhaul!. I wonder how well it gets along with some of the ones that add things like rain.

I find all Bethesda games can be even more fun with your choice of mods.