Fallout 3

[BasiliskWrangler]

I have heard some people saying level scaling is in this game. Is it like it was in Oblivion?

I am on level 6 in the game and if it does level scale, it's more subtle than Oblivion. I took on a longer, more advanced quest that had me barely getting through it alive (I was literally down to 3 bullets when I completed the quest). After that, I did a shorter quest that was closer to the starter town of Megaton and it was very easy in comparison. So yeah, if it level scales, it's subtle.

I am really having fun with it. Yes, many of Vault Dweller's comments on the game are accurate, but that doesn't make it any less fun. Fallout 3 really has nothing to do with the first Fallout game(s), it's got cheesy dialog, and it's got some extremely annoying NPCs....but yeah man, it's still a fun game, and that's what gaming is all about.

[Rune_74]

Just for the record here is some fallout 2 dialogue to compare:







Its not like it was steller either.

[Saxon1974]

Played F2 recently, I dont remember that kind of Cave Man like speech. Was that due to a very low IQ in the character?

[Rune_74]

For the second one yes, for the first one no I don't think so....however, my point was the writing was on par with what the npc's are saying....not so much your character....

I'm not sure if your iq effects your speech in the game.

[quasimodo]

Well with both Vince and BW playing FO3 I guess we won't be getting much work done on games that really matter...you know AOD and EB2.

That pretty much sums it up for me. I am looking forward to these two games far more that FO3 despite (or possibly because of) its multimillion dollar buget and large production crew. Have fun guys and enjoy your little vacation!

I just thought about what I wrote....Bethesda has made a big budget "sequel" to my favorite RPG series and I'm far more interested in a couple of low budget independently developed RPGs.....pretty amazing when you think about it.

[Getharn]

Well, I spent a worrying chunk of this weekend playing Fallout 3, and I am enjoying the game a lot - it does, however, very much remind me of Oblivion. There seems to be a lot of polarised opinions on that topic aruond the place, and I'm a little confused as to why it seeming similar to a similar-genre game using the same engine is considered such a contraversial thing to suggest.

While I can't help but feel that the game is encouraging me to play it in the same way I did Oblivion, the flavour of the setting is quite, quite different, which is a relief. Also, the quests seem to be rather better laid-out - they don't seem to drag you traipsing all over the landscape, and- but enough of comparisons.

I think the VATS goes quite a long way to resolving my issues with "action RPGs" - it gives me the option to pause the action and consider my options without getting my head blown off. To be honest I think Obli-, er, other action RPGs could include this feature. You could imagine a "bullet time" feature, whose extent and duration improves as you put points into weapon skills. Perhaps even as the opponent swings the sword (in slow motion), you get a visual indication of where it's going to strike, so you can move yours to block it. That, to me, properly reflects the point of an RPG - your character learns to do things that you can't.

The VATS could go further, I think, but as it is it helps a lot. Besides, what could be more fun than watching a cinematic slow-mo of your opponent's head dissolving in a spray of gore? Hm, I can see that wouldn't appeal to some.

The game balance seems quite reasonable - I haven't had to fall back on quicksave very often, but at the same time some parts have been properly challenging. I'm up to level 11 by now, and while things like ammo aren't much of a problem any more, I'm starting to have to get creative to get through encounters without taking a beating.

Re: scaling, I believe there is a scaling system, but it's more lightweight than that in Oblivion. My understanding from this post is that areas have a "minimum encounter level", and even low-level characters will never encounter monsters (and equipment) any lower than that in that area. However, if a high-level character enters an area for the first time, this level is somewhat scaled up to give them a challenge, but the scaling factor is less than the difference in character levels, so there's still a benefit to being a higher level. Also, once a character has entered an area for the first time, its scaling factor is frozen, so they can come back later and trounce everyone without fear of them having levelled up.

Empirically, they seem to have got it right. I've had to run away with my tail between my legs (damn mutations...) on a few occasions when I've become too bold, but on the whole I've been able to get through most places with a certain degree of caution. I always sneak everywhere when I'm in new territory, for example.

I have a few gripes, the biggest of which being the relatively close distance that creatures fade from view (probably related to the detail level I'm using, but still highly annoying, since they can still shoot at me) but mostly it works pretty well.

On the subject of graphic detail, in case it helps anybody else I'm using an ATI X1950 XTX, and it runs the game perfectly well on medium detail with HDR enabled and 1600x1200 resolution. I might try high detail sometime, but I'm pretty sure it'll run like a dog. Also, my whenever my character steps outside my graphics card sounds like concorde taking off as it is - I don't think I want to push the poor thing any harder, lest it wrench itself from the box and fly skywards.

Overall, a good, fun game. You know a game's pretty involving when you find yourself up at 3am, cackling with glee as you finally fell the last of a party of mercs sent to bump you off. The last chap scuttled off shouting something like "I didn't sign up for this ****..." - I stood on a vantage point watching him disappear and then, when he was just far enough away he must have been thinking "phew, I should be safe by now", I took no small satisfaction from sending a mini-nuke arcing down on to his head.

[Rune_74]

That was an awesome impressions post...I totally hear you on the being up till 3 am....for some reason it feels awesome to chase that one last guy down and blast him.

My wife even wants to play now, crazy. Although, she did also really get into Eschalon...I'm converting her.

[CrazyBernie]

*sigh* Well, I took the bait, and grabbed Fallout 3. It's keeping me up a few hours past my normal bedtime each night (normal being 2-3am).

Initial impressions (more notes than anything else):

It's Oblivion with guns, but oh what a difference. If someone releases a VATS mod for Oblivion, I might actually go back and finish it. Bethesda could breathe new life into Oblivion if they release an expansion that injects the Fallout leveling scheme and VATS into the game.

I've gotten my small guns skill up to 100, and it doesn't seem to have done a whole lot for me. Doesn't seem to help the range or accuracy as much as I'm used to from previous Fallout games. I'm really disappointed with the sniper rifle...

While its cool having a Perk at every level, I don't like the fact that they're mostly just skill point boosts.

Tagging a skill just gives you an initial point boost... also disappointing.

I'm used to going into every building in the Fallout series, and you can't do that in Fallout 3.

I don't like how there's blocked off areas you can't get past... I've spent a lot of time trying to find my way to rivet city and the sewers.

Performance: 3.2GHz P4 Extreme w/HT, 4GB DDR 667, 512MB Radeon X800 (This card is below minimum req. on the box), Vista Ultimate x64... I'm running @ 1280x1024 with medium details and fade distances all set to medium or better. In all fairness, the video requirements on the box are based on card age, not performance, which is greatly misleading. Regardless, with those settings I get decent performance... there's the occasional stuttering when loading a new area, and bringing up the Pip Boy 3000 seems to take longer than I'd like, but all around it's a good experience.

I've been playing with an Xbox 360 Controller and I think I need to switch to Mouse/Keyboard... turn around speed, aiming speed, aiming sensitivity, they all just suck on a controller compared to a M/K combo. The 360 controller is a lot more convenient though. Someone needs to invent a left handed controller to complement a mouse, and I'm not talking about those saitek/belkin things... they're not nearly ergonomic enough.

Anyone else been accosted by Mercs??

So much for C&C: Red Alert 3... *sigh*

[Getharn]

I've gotten my small guns skill up to 100, and it doesn't seem to have done a whole lot for me. Doesn't seem to help the range or accuracy as much as I'm used to from previous Fallout games. I'm really disappointed with the sniper rifle...

I've left my small guns at around 55, because I'm the sort of indecisive person who tries to be too much of an all-rounder. Still, with a combination of VATS and selection of the correct weapon, I find I can make it through most encounters. Admittedly I have a couple of perks which improve my accuracy in VATS, but still, I don't feel much incentive to push that skill up much further.

While its cool having a Perk at every level, I don't like the fact that they're mostly just skill point boosts.

The further you diverge into original ideas, the harder it is to ensure game balance, and the harder it is to test. Of course, that's just a reason, not an excuse - I also wish there were some more interesting ideas in the perks, even if they didn't provide as much game benefit.

At least there are a few faintly original perks - the cannibalism one, for example. The main thing that stops me taking it is that I can't find any fava beans and a nice Chianti.

I'm used to going into every building in the Fallout series, and you can't do that in Fallout 3.

I don't like how there's blocked off areas you can't get past... I've spent a lot of time trying to find my way to rivet city and the sewers.

I can see where you're coming from, but the game world was presumably a real terror to build and QA as it is - if they'd had to design a whole pile more interiors, I suspect it would be multiplied the effort up hugely. They could have just re-used some of the other interiors, and perhaps used some sort of pseudo-random placement policy, but personally I prefer a smaller number of hand-built interiors than a massive heap of carbon-copy trash. It always used to bug me in Morrowind that all the dungeons started to seem alike after awhile. Also, even carbon-copy trash only reduces design time, not QA impact.

Anyone else been accosted by Mercs?

Oh yes, about four times now. The first time they cornered me in a metro station entrance. I personally don't like leaving a map to escape, since it feels like exploiting the AI (I guess it isn't, but I don't like taking the easy way out - perhaps I'm just a masochist). So, I ended up on a terror-filled dash through ruined streets until they lost me. Fortunately they then made the tactical error of splitting up to look for me, and I stalked them one by one from the dusty gloom, taking them all out with a single point-black headshot with the shotgun. Revenge has never been so sweet.

Alas, I haven't really been able to play it all week, due to a combination of work emergencies, visiting friends, trying to get some decent photos of Guy Fawkes night and, frankly, recovering from the utter exhaustion of only getting four hours' sleep on Sunday night due to... Well, guess.

Still, there's another weekend coming up soon. Now if only those pesky friends would stop nagging me to come out and be sociable... Honestly, some people have their priorities totally topsy-turvy.

[Rune_74]

For the 360 pad go into settings and adjust the sensitivity if you haven't already made a huge difference.

[CrazyBernie]

Well, I've completed the game, with 70+ hours and over 350 saves. At one point I had to go back and re-play about three hours worth of game because of an apparent bug in dialogue (in the Lamplight Caverns). The dialogue options that I needed never showed up and I was worried that I had already saved over the point where I needed to replay but fortunately I didn't need to go back quite that far. My recommendation for anyone who hasn't reached the Lamplight Caverns is to create a new save before you enter, as it contains part of the main quest, and you don't want to get stuck 3/4 of the way through...

Here's some more impression ramblings...

I built my character to be a sniper, so I took perks like Commando, Finesse, Action Boy, Concentrated Fire, Silent Running, Sniper, etc. I also picked up Lady Killer and Child at Heart, but wasn't really impressed with the dialogue options they presented. All said and done, I wasn't to pleased with the results. I was hoping for some good long distance sniping, but even with an agility of 9 and a small guns skill of 100 I'd still see chances to hit the head of 25% or less. I'm not talking about partially concealed foes, but ones that are standing up and facing in my direction. I ended up just maxing out Energy Weapons and using a Plasma Rifle in the end.

You can forget about real time combat as a sniper. You'll miss 75% of the time from any actual distance, even with the best Sniper Rifle in the game. The real time combat in general sucks, since it still pulls off your skills whether you'll actually hit or not. Only good thing about sniping from a great distance and having to use real time since VATS won't allow you to shoot that far is the fact that the enemies usually can't spot you from that distance. The bad part is you'll use two or three mags just to down one enemy.

Some of the random encounters are pretty nifty... at one point I had some dude run up to me and say "The raiders strapped this bomb to me, you've got to help me!" or some garbage like that. Needless to say I failed to disarm the bomb... and that was the only time I had that encounter, even after reloading the game.

The Merc encounters did start to get a bit on the annoying side... seemed like every time I exited a building I had some Merc in my face with a knife shouting "There he is!" This was even after I went to their base of operations and annihilated it. I guess they couldn't take a hint.

I could detect the subtle scaling of encounters: the radscorpions gave way to giant radscorpions, the raiders went from pistols and hunting rifles to assault rifles and rocket launchers, and so forth. Still, it was far better and less obvious than Oblivion.

I liked the named weapons/armor, but it would have been nice if they actually looked different from their regular counterparts (well the armors tend to look different anyway). Also, it's far to easy to accidentally repair a regular weapon or piece of armor with the named version... there should be some sort of warning when you're about to do that.

I was also disappointed with the endings. I won't go into detail so as to not spoil them for anyone. Maybe I'll write up a spoilerish review later... There were a lot of things I didn't get to do that hopefully will be addressed in the expansion that seems to be inevitable considering how well the game is selling and the fact that the loading screen shows a progress bar for level 20-21 even though you max out @ 20...

Obviously as a whole I still enjoyed the game... the graphics where top notch, the sounds were excellent, the story for the most part was really well fleshed out with interesting side quests dotting the landscape. I'm impressed at how well the game is running on this "old" computer. Hopefully they will release the mod tools to the community and prep an expansion ASAP so I can sink more of my free time into it...

That's enough rambling for now, I suppose... thanks to this game there's been a delay in my Lewis the Fighter series... but stay tuned for a bonus episode!!

[Getharn]

I think I'd broadly agree with most of the points you raise, CrazyBernie, though I must admit I found the long-distance sniping was more limited by the fact that enemies didn't get rendered until they got relatively close. It seems to me that the game can get away with not rendering scenery, if the graphics hardware isn't powerful enough, but it should be displaying foes long before they're within perception range. Sometimes I'd find a blank patch of landscape firing laser blasts at me, which was a little illusion-breaking, to say the least.

I didn't have too much problem with sniping toward the end, though I did find it a lot easier with automatic small arms than with energy weapons, despite those skills being fairly even. Admittedly, however, my usual tactic is to sneak as close as I can before opening fire, so that probably affects the results quite substantially. On the rare occasions I did snipe, I had a lot more success with the hunting rifle than the sniper rifle.

As far as the endings go, I don't want to spoil it for anybody but, well, let's just say I was a little disappointed. Sorry, I know that's a bummer of a thing to say to people who haven't yet finished it, and quite possibly the endings are more to other people's tastes, so please reserve your own judgement. Personally I found it all a bit anti-climatic. Maybe that's inevitable for a game of this scope, who knows.

I did like the side quests - they've tended to avoid overloading it with endless assassination and fetch-and-carry quests. A lot of them boil down to the same elements, but the settings have interesting complications or diversions, or you need to gather some info yourself before proceeding. I think they struck a good balance between putting information in your journal, and leaving you to remember it - it wasn't always just a case of "follow the arrows".

Also, I was pleased that the game seemed quite tolerant of however you wanted to play it. When I visited the slaver encampment, for example, I got bored of being nice, and gunned the lot of them down without a word - everything proceeded as you'd expect, with no complications (such as broken quests, etc.). This shouldn't be noteworthy, perhaps, but I've seen enough games not consider player ingenuity or originality sufficiently that I'm pleasantly surprised when it all just works.

Still, getting there was one helluva ride, and overall I've been pretty impressed with what they've put together. Just like any game, it has its flaws, but I think it's fair to say that it hides them rather better than Oblivion did.

[CrazyBernie]

But you know what? I totally agree with about 95% of what he has to say.

In his defense, he compliments the game on quite a few aspects; he gives credit where it's due. He just doesn't pull any punches when it comes down to the nitty gritty, and I completely respect that. While Fallout 3 is a great game, I hardly think it's deserving of all the "10 out of 10" and 95%+ reviews that it's been getting. The fact that he's comparing it to previous Fallout games is why he's so critical about his review.

He's also right about the whole story... honestly, most of it makes absolutely no sense. They just chopped together bits of F1 and F2, mixed them together, and voila! Project Purity! They should have came up with something more original, possibly having nothing to do with the previous Fallouts. I think the best part about the story in the whole game was discovering the secrets behind the purposes of each vault... which of course had little to do with the main quest.

VATS, while it works well, is annoying as all hell with the constant slow motion bit. Watching a guy's head get blown off in slow motion over and over gets quite tedious... and it probably adds a good 10% to the total game time.

Just read his conclusion:

It’s a good and entertaining action RPG provided you can ignore the fact that it was supposed to be a Fallout game and mentally block that aspect of it, and if you can do the same about the silly “amusement park” setting. The game looks pretty good, offers you a huge world to explore with many atmospheric locations, challenging combat, and quite a few interesting quests.

Compared to the first two Fallout games, Fallout 3 is a pale imitation that may anger many fans of the original games. However, comparing Fallout 3 to similar games like Morrowind, Oblivion, Gothic, Two Worlds, Assassins Creed, etc presents a much more favourable reaction. I think that it’s the best game Bethesda have produced since the Daggerfall days and that really says something about the game. The most important feature of the game is the promise of great things to come from Bethesda in the future, so let’s get those monkeys out of the office and kick some ass. God knows, it’s been long overdue.

That's hardly "Vendetta against Bethesda"... and I think it's right on target.

If I wrote an actually review, I'd probably have more gripes than anything (see previous impressions posts ^_^), but as I've previously stated, I really enjoyed the game as a whole.

[Getharn]

He certainly does make some valid points, but it's a shame he cast it in quite such a negative tone. He looks like he's trying to be balanced, but he comes across as a fan of the previous Fallout games venting his disappointment, interspersed with grudging compliments. He does get more positive as you read on - maybe he should have written his review backwards.

Sometimes I think being fair and balanced isn't so much about what you say so much as the way you say it, and his content and tone are at odds, I think.

That said, I don't really detect any underlying agenda there - I think he's just expressing his personal opinions, which happen to be rather mixed. I happen to agree that Bethesda have some noticeable flaws in their games which really need addressing, but I don't have an anti-Bethesday agenda - on the contrary, if I didn't think they had promise, it wouldn't bother me nearly so much when they miss the mark.

I find I always notice the things that annoy me in a game I like, and the good points of a game I don't - rather like the uncanny valley effect, I suppose. Perhaps on that basis, that review is a glowing endorsement.

[Rune_74]

http://www.nma-fallout.com/article.php?id=47347

So, how many of you have read Vince D. Weller's review? It's obviously clear he has an agenda against Bethesda!

It was his usual stuff, who cares. I still have my opinion that nothing could live up to what he wanted in his mind. Is he imprtant in any way in the industry? Not really, lets wait and see how well his game does, as they say...those who live in glass houses...