newc0253

wait, it has to do with other 'circumstantial/situational things'? oh, i take it all back then. seriously, how hard is it to connect to the internet these days? between unlimited broadband, wireless, and 3G portable modems, it seems hard to imagine 'circumstantial/situational things' that would prevent someone from downloading a simple patch. the only people i can think of who would have trouble connecting are people living in remote cabins in the woods and folk working at NORAD who aren't allowed to access the internet from inside the US Defence Department firewall...

SoZ works straight out of the box too. but patching it would be a good idea, just like 'every single pc game' that you've bought since the 1980s 'worked' without a patch. truth be told, virtually every game nowadays needs patching, for better or for worse, it's the nature of the industry. shoddy as it may be, it's welcome that Obsidian have the patch ready to go on day 0 rather than having to wait a week before the necessary fixes are available. and, let's be honest: how much of a burden is it to download a patch these days? you already have to wait x minutes for it to install, so you wait another y minutes for it to patch? it's not exactly a hurdle, is it? your main complaint seems to be that you're installing it on a computer that's not connected to the internet. in which case, permit me to ask: what cave is it that you're living in? and do they have running water there as well?

first of all, i don't know what game you played, but there were plenty of ruined wooden buildings in the version of Fallout 3 that i played. secondly, yes, there were some intact wooden buildings (e.g. some of the houses in minefield). so what? i work in central london and can think of a half dozen wooden buildings within walking distance that date back to the 16th or 17th century. thirdly, if there is a real complaint to be made, it's not the survival of wooden buildings but the relative lack of vegetation. if anything is implausible, it's the idea that the only surviving plants in the wasteland would be brush and tussock. more likely than not, somewhere like minefield would be covered in radioactive kudzu or something. but that's a trivial matter because they were going for a wasteland/ruined city look and - to my mind - they acheived it. quibbling about the use of wood is the kind of silly complaint that distracts from proper debate.

iirc, there were still working computers and wooden shacks in Fallouts 1 & 2 - does this mean an 84 year old shack or a 164 year old computer system is plausible but a 200 year old shack or computer ain't? like Gromnir says, the first two Fallout games were hardly paragons of realism: i find it hard to see how a rickety old shack is somehow more implausible than using chimp brains to build a robot, a suitcase-sized terraforming device or a ghoul with a tree on its head.

at the moment, my view on the awesomeness of SoZ is inhibited by the UK release date inexplicably being a day behind the US one. feh.

he was complaining that it was their fault, for overloading his mind with too much info about the game. i understand that future marketing by Obsidian will use only small words written in very large letters: "THIS GAME LIKE ICEWIND DALE: COMPANIONS NO TALK PLENTY MUCH", etc

so, by your own admission, you didn't pay attention to the original design decision? but you nonetheless lashed out at the guy who confirmed it had been well-publicised? and then demanded an apology, blaming them for giving you too much info? bravo, sir, a rare display of chutzpah.

according to gameplay.co.uk, my order is still 'preparing for despatch'. frak.

that review had at least one eye-brow raising bit: 'to be fair'? NMA? fair? that review was exactly what anyone would expect from the NMA-crowd. an utterly knee-jerk (but nonetheless highly detailed) rant against Bethesda's choices, e.g. VATS is 'horribly conceived', exploration is strangely 'crippled' despite being 'wide-open' (why? because you level up too fast), the basic problem with that review is the basic problem of every die-hard fanboy rant against Fallout 3: they can't seperate the wood from the frakking trees & perfectly sensible criticisms that can be levelled against the game (and there are many) get lost in the vitriol against anything and everything. for instance, the criticism he makes about the is perfectly sound: like several locations in the game, it would have been better if there were more story to it, a dialogue path as an alternative to killing everything, or an interesting perk for solving it. to cap it all off, the rant ends with a suprising concession to Bethesda making Fallout 4:

okay, of all the complaints re Fallout 3 continuity, this has to be one of the more anal. the chinese in the factory were spies. yes, only 0.02% of the population exposed to radiation became ghouls, but that don't mean that it's a uniform distribution. how do we know that it's not some special high concentration of gamma rays that does it? and that one of those special high concentrations hit the processing plant? seems reasonable to me... i thought locations like that were a nice touch: there weren't any NPCs or associated quests, but it wasn't a cookie-cutter location either - it was something distinct with its own little backstory instead of yet another metro with ghouls and molerats. i think my main complaint about the Fallout continuity was that the destroyed world of Fallout 3 seemed somehow less futuristic and arcane and more recognisably our own world than the destroyed world of Fallouts 1 & 2. maybe it was the closer attention to real world locations e.g. despite the skewed metro map, the metro stations in Fallout 3 are strikingly similar in design to the ones in real life, whereas when i went to the Boneyard in Fallout 1, i wasn't looking around thinking "hey, i've actually been here". or maybe it's that DC is inevitably more steeped in historical monuments and classical architecture than California. yes, there were robots and lasers, etc, but one of the things about the original Fallouts was the disparity between the retro-50s 'world of tomorrow' that existed before the war & the radioactive rubble that followed. whereas Fallout 3 felt more like it was a cheesy 50s version of our world that was nuked, not an especially futuristic one. i dunno, it's hard to put one's finger on the tonal shift. i think Bethesda did an excellent job of trying to recapture the feel of the original Fallouts but i don't know if they completely succeeded.

Yes, lets argue over the definition of the vague phrase 'went under'. yes, maybe 'went under' has a legal definition in podunk town, northern ontario but most people would say being forced to sell all your assets, lay off all your employees, & close all your offices (except for a shoebox in Irvine) doesn't really count as 'staying afloat'. applying volo's magical definition, bear stearns never went under either. neither did merrill lynch. or fannie mae or freddie mac. no sir, they're all doing fine - nothing to see here, move along please.

the crashing in Fallout 3 was annoying but i'm pleased i got it when i did. i've barely got a week to play SoZ before i go on a 5 week trip without a computer...

it's kinda academic whether the Fallout franchise was successful or not. the fact is once Interplay went under, it was for all intents and purposes dead until Bethesda revived it.

speak for yourself: i'm still using a cassette tape drive.

i will always think of Fallout 3 as Frogger 2, except for the lack of giant mutant frogs.

so about 80+ hours into the game, i finally finished the main quest. i now see the force in others' compaints: . but kudos to Bethesda for the overall effort: they really worked to get the Fallout feel and, in particular, lift their game when it came to writing and NPC characterisation. i wouldn't say that they succeeded 100%, there were elements of classic fallout that i still missed & it would have served the game better to cut more of the cookie-cutter guff. i never got to paradise falls, for instance, but it feels like i spent nearly half the game in various metro tunnels. that's great for replayability and fantastic for exploration, but the noise-to-signal ratio could certainly have been tweaked. but for all the complaints, i'm still more impressed than not. especially stuff like or . Fallout 3 may only be my third favourite Fallout game, but i'd definitely buy a Fallout 4 from Bethesda based on this effort.

exploring is fun until you find .

i say keep the wide open landscapes (which look great btw) but reduce the cookie-cutter areas. that way you're more likely to find something distinctive rather than just another metro station with rubble in it.

ha! my main complaint at this point is the levelling. the levelling in and of itself is actually pretty reasonable - the main problem is that the game is just so damned big. like several others, i've held off doing much of the main quest and explored. although i've completed several of the main side quests (e.g. ), i'm aware of plenty of other areas and sidequests i've yet to come across myself and i'm already at lvl 16. while i salute bethesda's attention to detail, they could have cut out more of the cookie-cutter locations (the endless metros and service tunnels), making the more distinct areas sparser. i've probably gone up 5 levels just from wandering tunnels and shooting ghouls... but for every same-y metro, i continue to be impressed by the more idiosyncratic, off-the-beaten-track locations that seem ordinary but turn into something a little more (e.g. ).

you're dissing Fallout 3, but you're looking forward to STALKER: Clear Sky? dude, have you even read any of the reviews for Clear Sky? it's supposed to suck compared to the original and Fallout 3 is a better game than the original STALKER.

Yahtzee is a very funny bloke but he sometimes gives good reviews to crap and gives bad reviews to stuff which deserves much better, c.f. his treatment of most CRPGs. the thing to bear in mind is that he's writing to entertain more than actual analysis - even when he's ripping on a game that i like, i can appreciate the jokes he's making.

okay. my very initial first impressions, having done the tutorial and spent a night in the wastelands: Fallout 3 feels like Fallout. as expected, it isn't as well-written as the first two but it still feels of a piece with them. if i can draw any kind of crude analogy with tv, this is what Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is to the first two Terminator movies. some people hate the latter but not me. stuff i like: the look - visually, Bethesda have nailed this. the Vault? the blasted wasteland? the wreckage of a 50s futuristic world? it feels like the Fallout world in 3D. yes, the visuals share certain resemblances with Oblivion (given the engine, how could it not?) and no doubt this will give some Bethesda-haters all the pretext they need to declare it a failure, but i reckon most Fallout fans will appreciate the attention to detail and cute allusions to the previous games (e.g. ). the tone - feels about right so far. the tutorial was a little cheesy but that's easy enough to forgive. in some ways, the cheese helps to set up the contrast with the transition to the wasteland, which is handled incredibly well: you leave the Vault at sunset, and as your eyes gradually adjust to the glare, you see a ruined DC stretch out before you (although, honestly? given the number of nukes that would have hit downtown Washington in a nuclear exchange, i don't expect the dome of the Capitol to have survived...). the creepiest moment so far was . i also like that i spend most of my time hoarding ammo, caps and a variety of guns, just like in the original. the graphics - great. the wasteland looks incredible and this is where Bethesda's wide-open exploration approach to setting comes to the fore. one of the best things about Oblivion was looking to the horizon and wondering what lay there and it's the sheer opportunity for exploration that has me most interested. VATS - very good way to recreate the turn-based feel. also love the slo mo. the Pipboy 3000 - spot on. stuff i don't: the writing - actually, let me start off with the good. first of all, the writing doesn't suck. it's actually above average for most CRPGs and - by the standards of games like Oblivion or Morrowind - it comes as a major relief to discover that Bethesda can actually write perfectly decent NPC interactions with actual dialogue and proper characterisation, instead of the cookie-cutter NPCs and yellow pages approach to conversation that you get in any of the Elder Scrolls games. the main problem is that 'perfectly decent' just about describes the entire range of writing so far: i haven't encountered any bad writing so far, and i've enjoyed the jokes and the swearing and the discovery of a Bethesda game with more than two actual characters but i can't say that i've encountered any great writing yet either. Perlman's opening into straight away highlights Bethesda's main weakness: the intro is their first (and presumably best) foot forward but it's forgettable stuff by comparison with the intros to Fallouts 1 & 2. the problem isn't that Bethesda are terrible writers, it's that they just can't write as well as the folk at Interplay/Black Isle could. i'm happy to keep giving them opportunities to wow me and it's very early days with the stories and subplots so far, but my expectations are suitably trimmed.

this ain't your grandfather's fallout! ... but that's because i'm guessing your grandfather is at least 70 or 80 and they didn't make fallout until 1997. p.s. my copy is about to be delivered but the general tone of all the reviews so far seem consistent with what i expected: despite the doomsayers, Bethesda managed to get it about 70%-80% right. i'm not expecting FO3 to be as great story-wise or writing-wise as Fallouts 1 or 2 but i'm really looking forward to this nonetheless...

OMG, if this is true then i'm never ever ever gonna buy this game! i can't believe they dared to call this game FALLOUT if the VATS hit % are weird! this is just Oblivion With Guns!! uh, uuuh, beeearURGH. sorry, i'm better now. i just had to get that anti-Bethesda knee-jerk rant out of my system.

ha! i just checked my order status with gameplay and it now says 'preparing for despatch'! p.s. would be interested in knowing how it runs on the PC for those who already have it - i was equivocating between PC and 360 and finally went with the PC out of a sense of loyalty...