Starwars

Thing is, the game is an excellent improvement upon Bethesdas Elder Scrolls series, not on the Fallouts. As a stand-alone game I'm liking it more than I thought I would but as a Fallout sequel I think it's pretty bad, with many older plot elements/factions forced into this game to try and tie them together (which was pretty much what I expected before the game came out as well). I would never blindly recommend it to someone wanting a similar experience to Fallout 1 or 2, which I think is a shame considering it's a sequel. But I would heartily recommend it to someone wanting a good Post-Apocalyptic Elder Scrolls-ish experience.

I'd have to agree with this as well. It doesn't have the over the top pop-culture stuff that Fallout 2 did but I still think Fallout 3 spreads itself to wide when it comes to the consistancy of content. Some of it is just silly and over the top, which is a shame because they've got some great stuff going occasionally.

The most amusing thing was that either Pete or Todd said something like how they wouldn't want Fallout 3 to glorify child killing. It's strange to me how there's appearantly such a huuuuuuuuuuuge moral leap between nuking an entire town, selling people (children even I believe) into slavery, watching bullets travel in slow-mo into peoples skulls, and killing a child. I mean, I get that they want to keep the rating down. That's perfectly understandable I suppose. But don't say crap like that when you've also said stuff like "violence is %

Personally, I'm a bit skeptical. I'm not a fan of action-RPGs in general as I often find the combat A) to simplistic and uninteresting both from a RPG and action standpoint, and B) way to plentiful. Mass Effect is a good example of this and I really hope AP will be doing some different things to make things more interesting. I guess the 'genre' (3rd person actionRPG) is what I'm holding against the game at the moment. Other than that I think the spy setting, while being something I'm not enormously fond of, could be quite interesting in a RPG format. Especially since it's present day. It's had good people working on it as well, Mitsoda and Avellone, so the writing should be up to par as well. But yeah, worried about gameplay. I also think this game will be met with so-so receptions from the gaming media/mainstream gamers. Obsidian has a lot of baggage of being Biowares little brother that makes buggy games and I think this game will be held up as something trying to be like Mass Effect (even though they will obviously be different from one another in many ways), but not quite succeeding. Obsidian doesn't have the clout of Bioware and Bethesda (however unfair that is) when it comes to the mainstream and I think we will unfortunately see this when AP gets released. Of course that's a lot of guesswork from me, but eh.

The SoZ manual was posted somewhere (though appearantly it's an old version, so it's not completely up to date) and it said that there will be some optimization, particularly with shadows.

Fallout 1 wins. Still a great example to me on how a shorter game can make for a better experience. There's basically only one particular thing (the whole Thieves Guild thing in the Hub) which I felt was to tacked on. The rest of the game was consistant and didn't have any filler content (which Fallout 2 and 3, good as they may be, have plenty of). After replaying it recently, I must say the combat was designed a lot better than I initially as well. The main exception being that of the giant battle of Adytum. But the rest of it is fairly contained, smaller groups battling it out. This is in contrast to Fallout 2 where you often run into encounters with two factions warring it out, with lots of players on either side. Not good design for a turnbased game, at least not if you don't have a "skip enemy turns" button Fallout 3s combat is not that fun to me but it's the sheer amount which puts me off. So yep, Fallout 1 is far ahead for me personally.

Well, my Fallout 3 playing is coming to an end I think. My enjoyment started out pretty neutral, then soared quite high for the most part of the game and now it is slowly going downwards. It most certainly won't have the same strong replayability for me as the older games do, mostly because of the fact that the combat turns into a bit of a slog and many, many quests have combat as a fairly integral part of them (where you have to go through a dungeon and retrieve something etc). I'd like to see how some things could turn out differently though but I'm not sure whether the options would be worth it for me to replay the game at once though. I will say this though, the exploration in this game is a lot of fun the first time around. Much more enjoyable than Morrowind or Oblivion. On the other hand, the main quest is awful. In closing, I think the game was pretty much as I expected in its overall direction (not very reminiscant of Fallout at all, or stuffing up the Fallout stuff so to speak). But the actual quality of the gameplay and exploration was quite a bit higher than I expected. Most definetely worth a try at least for any RPG fan.

I think "contentwise" the downtown area is the biggest disappointment because of the rate of encounters, plus the fact that you have to go through tunnels filled with even more monsters. I love the idea of exploring a barren urban landscape but as it is I think it's slightly to much of a warzone for my tastes (though that is also obviously what they were aiming for). It gets repetetive. Exploring the wasteland outside the main city is more fun.

If you have the quest set to "active", you'll see waypoints on your world map. The different points are subway entries, and you'll need to go through them.

A few of the traps have really gotten me so far, but you kinda learn to avoid them as well. Since the game is overall darker than Oblivion it's harder to see the triggers. But the first time you run into a trap in a dungeon area, you quickly become more cautious. So it is quite similar to Oblivion, just replace the traps there with rigged shotguns and mines etc. One simple thing that makes it work a lot better though is that you can disarm them for XP. Biggest problem with dialogue and characters is... Well, have you played Shivering Isles? You would then know that characters do have personalities and quirks when compared to Oblivion which is great. The trouble is that many of them (many of the bigger characters) feel like cartoons. Mr Burke is your "mwahahaha" villain, Tenpenny is a weirdo who likes to dress-up, the girl who gives you the quest to collect info for the survival guide is over the top (and that's before you blow Megaton up, just wait until you see her if you decide to blow it up). Many of these characters are rather hard to relate to because they don't really display any signs of normal humanity. On the other side, there *are* belieavable characters as well, which is a great step for Bethesda. It's not a very consistant game in this regard though. And yes, the invisible walls suck hard. Downtown is like a rats maze, constantly broken off by unconvincing piles of rubble.

I'm not sure if it's their "base" but there's a place called Fort Independence (which I think is like southwest of Megaton) where some Brotherhood outcasts hang around. Didn't seem to be an important quest location or anything, but you can turn in some junk tech to them for rewards (pretty good source for stimpaks). I still *really* don't like the Fat Man. And the whole bit about how rare it was going to be is just bullcrap. You practically get one if you follow the main quest and the ammo isn't that hard to come by (like I said, I had 9 nukes last time I played). You can also buy the freaking thing for between 200 and 300 caps (!) in Rivet City. I like that the DC area feels quite hostile and dangerous all in all. But man, I really wish they hadn't put those invisible barriers all over the place. It was also about the last thing I expected Bethesda to do. Kinda feels like they just wanted to force you to go down into the metro dungeons. EDIT: Oh yeah, I actually got Dogmeat. And the very first encounter after that, some mercs showed up and killed him. That was a bit depressing, heh. But I'm teh hardcore!11 so I played on.

Yeah, I know (and one of the reasons I'm looking forward to SoZ). I think the travel map is a great solution for a game with a big empty wasteland such as Fallout because it gives you some sense of scale (watching days and weeks go by fast when you travel on the map). Whereas the "open free-roam" approach of The Elder Scrolls might be great for feeling a sort of visual connection to the world and feeling like it's all "laid out" for you to explore. However, the downside (which is amplified because of the fact that Fallouts world always was a very desolate one) is that despite the fact that the gameworld may feel huge to the player, the scale seems really off with you encountering enemies every other *hour* or so in gametime. Instead of it feeling vast, empty and generally depressing, it actually feels like it's teeming with life. Also, as much as I fancy the idea of exploring the DC downtown area, I can't believe that Bethesda chose to put up invisible walls here and there to force the player down certain paths (and through the metro system which are essentially monster dungeons). There are piles of rubble that you can't climb over despite the fact that my character easily makes it to the top of them. Nope, there's an invisible barrier blocking the way.

The thing is that the tutorial in Fallout 3 is a very integrated part of the overall game, it's where the story starts and it's not a "seperate entity" from the rest of the game. Thus the premise of it comes off as pretty strange when you, an inexperienced 19 year old, can pluck off these Vault guards *really* (and I really mean really) easily despite the fact that they have guns and armor. It's like they're made of paper. And there's the other logical problems like, why the hell are the people "looking for you" and they didn't even think to look in your room? These things need not be drumtight, but come on man? About Directx, I'm not sure what causes it but I had a lot of problems when installing Oblivion for the first time. It would freeze constantly and crash when it tried to update my Directx (can't remember how I worked around it, I guess I manually updated it). When I installed Fallout 3 (this is another newer computer), I thought the same thing would happen. When it checked Directx it basically "froze" (though I guess it was working) for an *extremely* long time (way longer than the actual installation). Not sure why that happened? I've not had issues like that with other games that update Directx. Something to do with the installer?

The Combat Shotgun seems to be a rather good weapon. I'm using it quite a bit now that I've got the ammo count up a bit. My favourite weapon in terms of overall feel though is the Hunting Rifle. Something about that just screams "old piece of crap with loads of personality". Really like using it.

It's almost as amusing as my level 6 character carrying around a Fat Man with 9 nukes in it.

One has to wonder though, does an incredibly stupid design decision like that (one, I might add, that is pretty much disliked by most of the really hardcore Fallout fans as well) excuse bad design decisions in this game?

The problem is one of consistancy, where you can easily beat up a whole bunch of people and kill the Overseer without even breaking a sweat, this with the player character being a level 1 weakling (and using skills that the character is rather weak in to start with). And why on earth should tutorials be so easy that you can basically kill enemies (full-grown humans with weapons) by sneezing at them. I don't see what's wrong with his complaints so far. And hell, in his second post there's some positive stuff as well and he says that it looks like it'll be a better game than Oblivion.

I think we need a dose of negativity in this thread! Keep in mind that I'm playing on Normal. I haven't yet encountered Enclave soldiers but yes, the Super Mutants feel rather weak. I did a quest which involve killing quite a few of them at a rather early level, and I had no problem whatsoever. But the difficulty among enemies seems a bit weird. At about the same level when I was killing Super Mutants, I was having much more trouble with Mirelurks (those Crabmen things) and small Radscorpions. That's fine of course but what's not fine is how weak the Super Mutants feel in the scope of the gameworld. I haven't noticed anything like this. However, for long distances, it feels way easier to hit enemies using the regular FPS mode rather than using VATS. I'm not entirerely sure how it's calculated but I think when using FPS mode, your skill sin weapons *mainly* affect damage dealt (though it does affect aiming a bit as well) whereas in VATS its completely skillbased. So from what I'm experiencing, it feels like you can really override your characters skills over long distances if you're good with aiming at the head. When enemies get close though, VATS start to feel almost like a last-way out cheat mode where you can easily launch of volley of shots into someones head without them really being able to do anything about it. I don't know if this was the attention of the modes, but I think the balance feels rather weird. I will say also that I use VATS very rarely. I can't remember much of Morrowind but yes, it feels a bit like Oblivion in this regard even though Fallout 3 is set "only" in the DC area. It feels rather cramped which hurts the idea of the vast, sunbleached and empty Wasteland. The earliest example is that Megaton lies almost next door with the Vault, it feels weird. The Wasteland is also full of enemies, whether it be mole rats or Robobrains randomly wandering around. Again, it feels a bit... schizophrenic. The high level of combat encounters in the game would probably be my biggest complaint. Can't comment on consequences much, but there are definetely choices in many (most) quests I've encountered so far. There are a fair amount of skill checks in dialogues. No clue. I think much of what I don't like about the game lies in the execution. For example, it should obviously be praised that Beth have skill checks and the like, but the implementation and writing is often clumsy. A good example is how I handled Mr Burke in Megaton. *spoilers for Megaton* *end spoilers* But at any rate. I don't think the game lives up to the older Fallout games at all, and it most definetely doesn't feel very related to them. It feels more like an Elder Scrolls game with Fallout things thrown in there. But also, I will say that the game is the best game Beth has made since Daggerfall (well ok, can't remember much of Morrowind but I did enjoy it though didn't love it). Certainly much better than Oblivion. I think most people can probably figure out whether they'll like the game or not. If you really don't like the TES style of free-roaming, then you should skip this game. If however you're not completely opposed to it, and you could fancy a post-apocalyptic TES game then I don't think you'll be disappointed. Just don't expect a game that feels like a follow-up to the older games. EDIT: Also, while the world doesn't really feel like Fallouts, I will say that there is some wonderful post-apocalyptic atmosphere going on. Megaton at night looks absolutely great, with lamps on wires kinda lighting the place up. Overall, I think something like STALKER is much more consistant and well, I think it's better. But Fallout 3 definetely does have its moments as well where you sort of think "yeah, this is what it's about".

It's not that I think STALKER was a perfect game, far from it in fact. But it did offer some variation in gameplay at least, and I think you need this in open games. Far Cry 2 is so utterly simplified for being a free-roamer, I constantly find myself wishing for something to break up the pace a little bit.

I got the camo suit, hard to say exactly how much it helps. It feels easier to sneak up on people initially, but I definetely need silencers for my crap to really take advantage. I actually almost wish we always had to rely on old beat up piece of crap weapons. It's much more exciting when your weapon decides to jam in the middle of a firefight. The whole "order weapons" feel a bit weak to me somehow... Gah, I just wish they had a trading system like STALKER in it. It would've greatly upped my enjoyment of the game I think.

You could maybe say it's a very STALKER lite type of game. Differences are that in FC2, the world really is open and not divided into levels with loading times. There is a store, but it's not an inventory based game (possibly the biggest loss if you ask me). You order guns through teh interwebz and they show up in a building next to the weapon shop. You can't sell stuff. But yeah, I keep missing stuff from STALKER in this. If the world was slightly more dynamic, and had the factions actually fight each other... Or if there were actually people roaming the world who *don't* want to kill you. And I want the inventory management... Just feels like the game could've been a lot more. It's far less buggy than STALKER though, but yeah... Far Cry 2 is a fun action-game but it's extremely repetetive. I play it in short bursts which works well.

You can also look through the logs of the recent SoZ dev chat here: http://www.rpguides.de/soz/soz_devchat.html Thanks to the guy who posted the log. The chat was fun times even though I had to stay up all night basically.

Amusing, depressing... and true.

Like it's been pointed out, the atmosphere and presentation of Rapture was very well done. But the gameplay was made of suck. There are certain FPS games which makes me feel that I'm really playing a character (which is what FPS games are about) and there are games where I feel like I'm just controlling a blob that floats around firing at things. That was Bioshock to me. It completely lacked the "weight" that I want a FPS to have. So yeah, it was a disappointment as far as I'm concerned.

That's still better than Oblivion in Fallout setting. AHA!