Fallout 3 for the Faithful

[PsyckoSama]

If you're going to criticise Fallout 2's story, do consider that - aside from the whole Tribal nonsense - Fallout 3 rips it off wholesale.

 

And badly for that matter.

[Bar_Barian]

Don't get me wrong, if it was named something, anything, besides Fallout 3 I'd like it, but you call if Fallout 3 and there's a whole new set of standards to meet.

 

This is my only problem with your argument. The rest I more or less agree with, FO3 is weaker in every intangible way than the originals. However it's those same areas where it blows the current crop of games out of the water. It sucked me in for 36 hours straight the weekend I got it, which is unheard of. In fact, I put more time into that one caffeine fueled Fallout frenzy than I put, in total, into... oh, I just realized the only other games I've put that much total time into recently... are Mass Effect... Guitar Hero... and WoW...

 

I think I'm going to go have a very hot shower before I put another 150 hours into Fallout 2...

[DDigit]

It'd be more like making a total conversion mod. Imho F3 is what it is, use its strong points i'd say, don't try to change it completely.

[0Bahamut]

Fallout 3 is just that : Fallout "3". It's not F2, or F1. But, it looks good, if you take your time with the editor, you can practically replicate the settings from the originals. THIS is the strong point of F3 : how easy it is to mod and how it looks. I've played games where you don't have a say in what you'll do next, you don't get to be the "good guy" or the "bad guy", you just follow the plot. So if I can spend 100 hours and in this time recreate what's been changed in the SPECIAL system, add every gun/item/armor that was in the previous titles (not with their own textures or models, i suck at it), and probably try and recreate the first part of F2, namely the Temple and Arroyo, then it's worth it. With all the other Fallout crazies out there, there'll be at least a bunch who get a great idea for how to change the plot of F3 to make something really worthwile in that aspect. The previous games where great, but they didn't really have the potential to be even better, and that's the only difference that should matter, given enough time this game can be really THE best RPG in quite a few years

[Vandrel]

Anyone know of any plans for some kind of collaborative effort to make Fallout 3 actually like a true Fallout sequel instead of the post apocalyptic Oblivion we got? Bethseda just seems to have totally missed the mark... again.

 

 

NB: while I do not think it deserves the title of Fallout 3, I still like the game, much in the same way that I like Far Cry 2 but it can't claimed to be anything to do with Far Cry in anything but name.

 

 

I'm sure someone will come along before long and create a massive overhaul for Fallout 3 brining some of the old school stuff back to the table for everyone to enjoy. I beleive that is one of the reasons Bethesda let us have the GECK was so the player community could finally have some control over their beloved game.

[Haito13]

I never played the 1st or 2nd Fallout but have played Elder scrolls, thing is I enjoyed fallout 3 more than the elder scrolls series combined, its actually easier for noobs like me to get into the game. unfortunately the quest and plot are kind of a let down, that's my only problem with this game. But this game has potential, and maybe if we ask bethesda for a true sequel they'd listen. When i 1st finished the game i sort of felt like the developers didn't went all out on this one.

[PsyckoSama]

Don't get me wrong, if it was named something, anything, besides Fallout 3 I'd like it, but you call if Fallout 3 and there's a whole new set of standards to meet.

 

This is my only problem with your argument. The rest I more or less agree with, FO3 is weaker in every intangible way than the originals. However it's those same areas where it blows the current crop of games out of the water. It sucked me in for 36 hours straight the weekend I got it, which is unheard of. In fact, I put more time into that one caffeine fueled Fallout frenzy than I put, in total, into... oh, I just realized the only other games I've put that much total time into recently... are Mass Effect... Guitar Hero... and WoW...

 

I think I'm going to go have a very hot shower before I put another 150 hours into Fallout 2...

 

I understand why you disagree on that point, but my feelings are that if it wasn't fallout 3 we would be able to judge it completely on its own merits, but by calling it fallout 3 it is automatically compared to the other games of the series, especially the first and second, and in that comparison it falls short. Not as short as PoS, but lets be honest, that much fail takes work to pull off. Personally, I rate it around tactics.

[Guest]

Of course, hardcore fans are going to expect an honest to god sequel, however, take into account the company is different and all they've known is the elder scrolls, everything changes. Realistically speaking, everyone has to understand the video game industry is all about money, it has always been about money and it will continue to be about money. People may enjoy making the game, but that doesn't mean they'd still do it if that hefty paycheck wasn't wafting in their faces. If you don't believe me look at what the market has become, games are getting more expensive and they're not even complete, as the companies then release micro transactions that aren't full expansions but little pieces of the game, ie Oblivion's horse armor.. People laughed at the idea, but when so many people flooded to buy it, this let gaming companies take a mile. Now, with that in mind,say you are a video company, and you get this grand idea/opportunity to make a new game in a very popular saga of games, however, you have a short amount of time and you want that paycheck before winter, this will limit your ability to really develop a game. Yes I know this sounds horrible but it's true, the video game companies will half ass a game and cover it up with nice graphics saying "LOOK EXPLOSIONS! ok demos over" then you want to buy it not knowing its the true game.

 

One other scenario, say said video game company wants to make a spin off or game based on a previous line of games, why start from the bottom and work your way up? With a name like Fallout 3 for a post apocalyptic video game, most likely you are going to get a lot more sales than "TES: There's a whole lotta f*#@in' brown out here with some big green guys"

[Dylath Leen]

I'm with Dylbot - list the concrete things a mod should achieve to make it a "true sequel," otherwise this is just empty whining. A post that said, "Are there any plans to develop a mod which does the following five things, which I think would make it a truer sequel" would deserve a substantive reply. This one did not.

 

I couldn't begin to make a list of the things that would need changing to bring the game more in line with the previous two games. I wish I could and I wish had the time and skill needed to put into such project, but I haven't and I am not. I don't dislike the game but it is not the game I was hoping for and all I am curious about is whether some of the hardcore fans of the original titles with modding experience are possibly working on such a project. I doubt very much a list of five changes would constitute a authentic recreation of the original games. I magine just to make the list of changes would be a task in and of itself, and would it even be possible, I don't know so that is why I am asking. Hmm, repeating myself a little, but ya get the jist.

[Nom de Plume]

I'm not a "Fallout fanatic" - haven't played either of the games this century - but I easily saw the flaws of Fallout 3. It's a good game overall but my experience was that it had an amazing intro, a very fun early game (first 8-10 levels), and then it got kind of tedious as I realized that to find cool stuff in the world I had to go through a lot of boring places. And certain gameplay and balance choices were pretty limiting. The endgame started as a letdown (I hit level 20 2/3 of the way through the game and nothing could touch me). Then it had one of the worst endings I've seen in an RPG - a giant robot you've barely heard of comes out of nowhere and kills all the enemy for me, I walk right over to the final "boss" and take him down in a couple of shots, and it forces me to kill myself in radiation even though my companion already saved my ass once by being immune to radiation. Heck, the last mission was easier than assaulting a random Enclave patrol.

 

Even just looking at late 90s games, the actual game experience of Fallout 3 isn't much like Fallout, it has far more similarity to the original Baldur's Gate. Wide open game world focused on random exploration (really random), sort of tedious at times because there's lots of background detail but little foreground NPCs/story. Ends up overwhelmingly combat oriented (not just because it's D&D, the "find stuff in the woods" theme doesn't make for non-fighting solutions). Main quest is linear and very irregularly paced - if you follow it too much you have to turn away and do random stuff for experience. Dialog fits the theme in a serious way and stuff generally plays it straight, not much humor.

 

Baldur's Gate is generally regarded as the least well done and clumsiest of the 90s Bioware/Black Isle games, due to some of the same problems that affect Fallout 3.

 

Fallout 3's main failings are departing from what's known to make a good RPG, which also means departing from Fallout because Fallout had a lot of the things that make a good RPG.

 

1. Dialog and characterization. Can make or break immersion in a game. Fallout 3 picked a "black humor/50s satire" theme but their writers weren't up to it. Most of the humor was in the background. And their satire was generally making fun of the 50s itself, rather than poking any fun at the modern world. Serious writing in over-the-top setting, not so good.

 

2. Action-RPG rather than RPG. Fallout 3 naturally has more combat. But they also drastically reduced the number of quests, and made a higher portion of quests solvable only by combat. So you have to be first and foremost a killing machine, with non-combat skills occasionally used to get more loot. They swung far away from what many people liked best about Fallout 1/2 - the fact that so many quests had alternate solutions where you could go in guns blazing, or try to sneak your way through it, or see if there was a diplomatic solution. This was and still is unusual for RPGs and was the best thing about Fallout other than the setting/writing itself. You could take a sneaky character and know that you would see your skills providing unique solutions to many quests. Which you would get experience for - this is important, you could skip unnecessarily tough fights and know you'd still get some experience from quests. They DO have some quests like this in Fallout 3 but far less.

 

3. Broad but shallow world. The game feels as if they spent forever developing a painstakingly detailed world with lots of atmosphere, and then populated it with a small number of automatons. Roaming around the wasteland, almost everything you see is a raider, a wandering monster, or dead. Some civilization has obviously recovered, but even the ruined areas seem rather enigmatic and random. Most of the vaults are a letdown - just full of some monsters and a few logs. It gives the impression that they were putting in NPCs and quest givers last, and ran out of time to do a lot of places (example: Little Lamplight has a bunch of unique NPCs with full backstories, and it's huge, but there's actually very little to do there). In Fallout, even the simpler ruined bunkers had clues pointing to what happened post-war in the world outside.

 

4. Game system was dumbed down for console players (I think they explicitly admitted this at least once). Fallout was already unusual in replacing fixed classes with the ability to pick whatever skills you want. Fallout 3 tries very hard to make all of your character creation choices matter less than in a typical RPG, so it's harder to screw up. Forget jack-of-all-trades vs. specialization choices, you can be master-of-all-trades. The effect of all SPECIAL abilities was reduced, skill specialization was eliminated, far more skillups were made available, etc. So basically, in the early game you specialize somewhat but by the late game there's basically one character type (you do have to go guns vs. melee in perks but you overpower everything so it doesn't matter). A lot of people understandably don't like how characters become generic.

 

5. The game has a poor difficulty curve where it's quite hard at the beginning and obscenely easy near the end. Even if you put it on hard difficulty that gives you MORE experience for some insane reason, so you hit the level cap early. The main quest simply doesn't require a level 20 character in power armor to beat, let alone one tweaked out with the best gear. There is in fact zero reward to getting most of the high-quality gear. To be extreme, if you actually get the MIRV, there's literally nothing in the entire game worth using it on. You're simply never in firing range of enough targets at once. Availability of generic items also follows this curve - early on it's hard to get anything, at higher level you are just overflowing with stuff. Huge wads of money - and nothing to spend it on! Even the house upgrades are chump change if you take the scrounger perk.

 

Given how much cash and power the game gives you by the time you're in the level 15+ range, it totally fails to offer any kind of bonus challenges to make that useful. At a certain point you realize that wandering the wasteland now just involves fighting trash, because only in one corner with the Enclave and deathclaws is there anything vaguely challenging. It's a basic game design failure to let endgame characters dramatically overpower the toughest endgame enemies. Unless someone wants to spend 300 hours racing Chocobos, in which case it's their problem.

 

6. Copies and pastes from Fallout storyline (this criticism applies only to people who've played the previous games). Stop and think for a second - what is there in Fallout 3's main story that isn't lifted straight from Fallout 2, minus the originality? We're in a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with roaming supermutants. The character comes from a vault (actually FO2 departed from that and had a wastelander PC) which has been totally closed by the outside world. Outside, the main force for civilization is the Brotherhood of Steel, who is friendly but not terribly helpful until the late game. In comes... the Enclave, with a plot to exterminate all mutated life. Well, one difference is that you take out the Enclave by just following a giant robot into a water plant and killing one guy, rather than commandeering a giant oil tanker, sailing to the world's largest oil rig, and sneaking around for a chat before tearing apart a 10 foot power armored supermutant. Couldn't they have come up with SOME original antagonist?

 

Actually, this does matter to people who haven't played the original games. The Supermutants and the Enclave made a lot of sense in context, where the history of their creation and the reasoning of the Enclave were established in some detail. In Fallout 3, there are missing pieces of their history, like how it's quickly brushed over why they are suddenly in the neighborhood.

 

7. Breaks with the setting. Also mostly relevant to those who have played the original game. Despite using the same enemies, Fallout 3 massively breaks from the Fallout setting. In the original games it's 80+ years past the apocalypse and it looks it. LA is a forest of twisted metal, San Diego is nuked into radioactive glass, even San Francisco is utterly wrecked. Civilization is rebuilding itself from the ashes - the wastelanders aren't "survivors", they're people making use of ancient ruins for their own ends. By decades before Fallout 3, serious civilization has been restored in California, the actual New California Republic.

 

But in Fallout 3, depending on where you are it looks like anywhere from twenty years to two weeks since the war. Washington shows signs of only one direct bomb hit (and you have to look for that). Pre-war clothes, drinks, and even food are just lying in obvious places everywhere. Places seem in "just bombed yesterday" order even where there is obviously nobody to maintain them. There is working electrical power in the subways (and I mean robots. not just stuff set up by raiders). And the nation's capitol, apparently not incinerated by the bombs, is still almost completely uncivilized 200 years later. Rivet City, Megaton, and Tenpenny Towers are all very recent (no more than 40 years). The Brotherhood only arrived a few years ago. The Enclave didn't show up again until Just Now. This leaves the setting with absolutely no sense of how much time has supposedly passed. Nothing has actually been around that long except in a dormant state (vault 101 etc). Raiders are a bigger presence than in previous games, but there's obviously not much for them to raid.

 

 

There's more, but that's enough typing from me...