Fallout 3: Your thoughts

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Wolfman Walt
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Post by Wolfman Walt »

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Post by Mismatch »

popscythe wrote:I played through megaton.

I must say, I'm not terribly distraught about how fallout 3 turned out. As a friend of mine put it, "Why spend 30 minutes bitching about dog shit you find in your yard when you fully expected it to be there."

This travesty of a reskinned oblivion might have been a little easier to swallow had oblivion itself not been such a flaming piece of crap.

The AI (of course, it's a bethesda game) is utterly terrible, and the puppet show "towns" only seem to be a vehicle intended to kick you in the face over and over with the knowledge that life in the wasteland is a fucking errand boy's paradise of "oblivion" quests. You know, those type of quests that are so poorly written that you neither know nor care why someone would be trying to send a letter to their parents who live a five fucking minutes "overburdened" stroll from where the letter was written. Or, you could help someone write a book by going to check out the supposedly 200 year old wal*mart, which, as well as every other little "hey, we remember the 50's so we're going to put fucking 50's bullshit EVERYWHERE throughout the wasteland" has decayed only enough for you to notice that it's decayed, but not enough for you to miss how fucking clever todd howard was when he noticed people noticing the 50's and decided to mention it. You know, like in the original Fallout, where there were 90% legible billboards everywhere with a bright, shiny picture of CAPTAIN PROTON that has it's lower left corner looking a little crumpled.

Besides the fact that the wasteland is a insulting puppet show of random encounters from STALKER filled with signs and portents that bethesda really wanted to be let into the "we talked to someone about what fallout was about and tried our best to fit in" club, the skills have been dumbed down to a bioshock level of crudesence. That's right, Crudesence. Medical, which replaces first aid and doctor has thus far yielded absolutely zero role playing application. Nor has repair (only used for fixing/creating weapons) or science (only used for hacking terminals). But wait! If you have Explosives (now combined with throwing, because throwing a football and using a land mine are the same skill when you're designing games for xbox fans) you can do the quest regarding the bomb in megaton!

Hey! Now we're talking! Forget the unkillable npcs that are already littered throughout the game (Andy the fucking robot?) and the fact that exactly like oblivion, the weapons certain people are holding are level scaled out of the game if you manage to shoot them the three times it takes to kill them (I'm talking about you, sheriff of megaton, you tutorial npc piece of garbage who's dialog options let me inquire about things it is literally impossible for me to have heard about yet). Forget all those "features", you can use your explosives skill on the bomb! Now we're talking!



Oh, so you've clicked on the bomb, gotten the ridiculously belief- suspension shattering popup WAARGK! ERROR! WARRRGK! ERROR! MYSTICAL INTERFACE SPEAKING TO YOU ERROR! YOU, PLAYER CHARACTER! YES YOU! YES I'M TALKING TO YOU! YOU MUST HAVE EXACTLY 25 SKILL POINTS IN EXPLOSIVE TO QUOTE UNQUOTE INTERACT WITH THE BOMB. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.

At this point I just sat with my head in my hands going "Wow, so you people didn't play fallout, did you? You just didn't actually play the game, huh? You saw the game. You heard about why people loved it... or more to the point, what game magazine reviewers have written about why people loved Fallout, because you refused to listen to what the fans of the series were saying. We loved the game because of many reasons, so many that many fans might even choke up a little and be unable to describe exactly where those feelings came from. But one thing that's really, really damned easy to mention is the immersion. The fact that when you tried to do anything, the game addresses your character in the dialog box as "You." "You attempt to pick the lock on the door, but fail." It's this indication that like in real life, your character can attempt and fail things without having some red goddamn hologram pop up and say ACCESS DENIED. THIS DOOR REQUIRES 100 LOCK PICK SKILL. YOU CAN TELL. IT'S CLEAR FROM THIS RED GODDAMN HOLOGRAM."

Where the hell did you go so far wrong that you decided that between wrist radios that function after 200 years, but look about like they just came out of a goddamn plastic molding factory (like everything on the oblivion engine) and teddy bears being fired from a spring decapitating raiders that you'd prefer to Set A Course for Shitville, heading 102.285, Warp 8 rather than play the original games and see what made them special?

You can take the 50's feeling into the wasteland, plaster our beloved icons all over the place, do up your own really "endearingly clever" (in your own opinion) recreations of the original art and plaster it on immortal billboards and install process slides, but if you miss the fact that being railroaded through a clearly fable-esque childhood tutorial that only exists because you "fine folks" got a chortle out of thinking up the "You're SPECIAL" book, and needed, by any means necessary and excuse to include it in the game, despite the damage it did to the entire credibility of survival in the wasteland experience, especially in sight of the fact that the entire introduction sequence is clearly a teary eyed "heheheheheeheheh!111" on the part of bethsoft, managing to work their little garbage "we do this every time" elder scrolls prison sequence into the game, you are and to put it lightly "responsible for a terrible game." Oh, it's a metaphorical prison though. Nobody will notice that like in our ACCLAIMED SERIES FOR XBOX AND XBOX360 THE ELDER SCROLLS we've forced the character to start in a prison where he can create his character, do a tutorial, then escape, do a combat tutorial and then receive the insulting "Are you sure this is what you want the character that you are playing in this video entertainment game Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks Copyright 2008 Bethesda Softworks to be like? Feel free, despite the fact that you're already responsible for several things that have happened and have probably killed something and been injured already to click NO on this dialog and recreate your character starting with appearance. Copyright 2008 Bethesda Softworks" dialog before exiting into the wide, wide, wide, smaller than the last game we made on this engine, society and world of the wasteland.

Well.

I seem to have unfortunately spent the 30 minutes complaining that I mentioned I was going to try to avoid doing, and I really haven't even scratched the surface of the things which stood out to me as blatantly shiesty about the game. I guess if you want to pick up where I left off, just take a look at the things that sucked about oblivion, sucked about morrowind and have always sucked about Bethesda games and tack those on the list, tear that page off, start a new page and include the fact that fallout 3 plays exactly as poorly as every other carnival ride 60 bucks at the door xbox360 game, then take the entire list and bury it, as no matter how many times people say this exact same thing over and over again, nobody will read it because it's not economically viable to make games that arn't garbage.

Or at least, that's the way things appear. Prove me wrong next time guys. Prove me wrong.
finally a review from someone I can trust. This deserves to be posted as news on the first page: "Popscythe reviews FO3".
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Post by entertainer »

player review from metacritic wrote:Forgettable, one-dimensional characters. Unoriginal and simplistic narrative. Short, linear and poorly-written narrative. Poorly-written dialogue. Poorly-voiced dialogue. No real moral ambiguity. No real choices and consequences. No real freedom (there are unkillable NPCs everywhere, narrative progression relies mostly on combat) No intellectually/emotionally complex quests such as in the previous games. Massive illogical contradictions and abuse of established lore. Atrocious animations, lackluster models, textures and art direction. Unoriginal and out-of-place LOTR-styled score more suited to Oblivion. Tactical combat removed. Importance of perks/traits removed. Traits removed. Claustrophobic, small cut-and-paste world. Poorly designed interface. Buggy. Failure to correct any of the issues with Oblivion. A mockery of and stain upon Fallout and Fallout 2. Bethesda's Fallout fails on all counts to emulate even an echo of the complexity and design achievements of the decade-old 2D games it fails to imitate. Even when removed from the context of being a sequel, it's an exceptionally simplistic, arrogant and incompetent game all by itself.
:salute:
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Post by popscythe »

Mismatch wrote:finally a review from someone I can trust. This deserves to be posted as news on the first page: "Popscythe reviews FO3".
Little did you know, I was thinking of you specifically when I wrote some of the more brilliant pieces of literature in that little blurb.

See if you can guess which ones!
"I've decided that if positive affirmations can "cure cancer" then negative affirmations can cause cancer. Chant with me: Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard. Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard. Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard."
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Post by Smiley »

I'm writing a review based on some focused points as I write this.

My quick 2 cents about it though?

Unplayable due to freezes, plays like oblivion, in that all dialogue is about nothing, too much irrelevant gameplay and not enough sex.
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Post by VasikkA »

The dialogue is just D:.

The thing with Fallout was that you could always find a dialogue option that suited you. In Fallout 3, I'm just trying to pick the least horrible line. It's almost as if I'm cheating myself.

Also, the wasteland is way too small. Ultima 9 all over again.
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Post by popscythe »

VasikkA wrote:The dialogue is just D:.

The thing with Fallout was that you could always find a dialogue option that suited you. In Fallout 3, I'm just trying to pick the least horrible line. It's almost as if I'm cheating myself.

Also, the wasteland is way too small. Ultima 9 all over again.
Dude, ultima 9. The fallout 3 of it's time.. yet somehow not as terrible. Perhaps because it wasn't clearly a different game with Ultima stamped on it.
"I've decided that if positive affirmations can "cure cancer" then negative affirmations can cause cancer. Chant with me: Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard. Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard. Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard."
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Post by Dreadnought »

Mismatch wrote:
popscythe wrote:I played through megaton.

I must say, I'm not terribly distraught about how fallout 3 turned out. As a friend of mine put it, "Why spend 30 minutes bitching about dog shit you find in your yard when you fully expected it to be there."

This travesty of a reskinned oblivion might have been a little easier to swallow had oblivion itself not been such a flaming piece of crap.

The AI (of course, it's a bethesda game) is utterly terrible, and the puppet show "towns" only seem to be a vehicle intended to kick you in the face over and over with the knowledge that life in the wasteland is a fucking errand boy's paradise of "oblivion" quests. You know, those type of quests that are so poorly written that you neither know nor care why someone would be trying to send a letter to their parents who live a five fucking minutes "overburdened" stroll from where the letter was written. Or, you could help someone write a book by going to check out the supposedly 200 year old wal*mart, which, as well as every other little "hey, we remember the 50's so we're going to put fucking 50's bullshit EVERYWHERE throughout the wasteland" has decayed only enough for you to notice that it's decayed, but not enough for you to miss how fucking clever todd howard was when he noticed people noticing the 50's and decided to mention it. You know, like in the original Fallout, where there were 90% legible billboards everywhere with a bright, shiny picture of CAPTAIN PROTON that has it's lower left corner looking a little crumpled.

Besides the fact that the wasteland is a insulting puppet show of random encounters from STALKER filled with signs and portents that bethesda really wanted to be let into the "we talked to someone about what fallout was about and tried our best to fit in" club, the skills have been dumbed down to a bioshock level of crudesence. That's right, Crudesence. Medical, which replaces first aid and doctor has thus far yielded absolutely zero role playing application. Nor has repair (only used for fixing/creating weapons) or science (only used for hacking terminals). But wait! If you have Explosives (now combined with throwing, because throwing a football and using a land mine are the same skill when you're designing games for xbox fans) you can do the quest regarding the bomb in megaton!

Hey! Now we're talking! Forget the unkillable npcs that are already littered throughout the game (Andy the fucking robot?) and the fact that exactly like oblivion, the weapons certain people are holding are level scaled out of the game if you manage to shoot them the three times it takes to kill them (I'm talking about you, sheriff of megaton, you tutorial npc piece of garbage who's dialog options let me inquire about things it is literally impossible for me to have heard about yet). Forget all those "features", you can use your explosives skill on the bomb! Now we're talking!



Oh, so you've clicked on the bomb, gotten the ridiculously belief- suspension shattering popup WAARGK! ERROR! WARRRGK! ERROR! MYSTICAL INTERFACE SPEAKING TO YOU ERROR! YOU, PLAYER CHARACTER! YES YOU! YES I'M TALKING TO YOU! YOU MUST HAVE EXACTLY 25 SKILL POINTS IN EXPLOSIVE TO QUOTE UNQUOTE INTERACT WITH THE BOMB. THANK YOU FOR LISTENING.

At this point I just sat with my head in my hands going "Wow, so you people didn't play fallout, did you? You just didn't actually play the game, huh? You saw the game. You heard about why people loved it... or more to the point, what game magazine reviewers have written about why people loved Fallout, because you refused to listen to what the fans of the series were saying. We loved the game because of many reasons, so many that many fans might even choke up a little and be unable to describe exactly where those feelings came from. But one thing that's really, really damned easy to mention is the immersion. The fact that when you tried to do anything, the game addresses your character in the dialog box as "You." "You attempt to pick the lock on the door, but fail." It's this indication that like in real life, your character can attempt and fail things without having some red goddamn hologram pop up and say ACCESS DENIED. THIS DOOR REQUIRES 100 LOCK PICK SKILL. YOU CAN TELL. IT'S CLEAR FROM THIS RED GODDAMN HOLOGRAM."

Where the hell did you go so far wrong that you decided that between wrist radios that function after 200 years, but look about like they just came out of a goddamn plastic molding factory (like everything on the oblivion engine) and teddy bears being fired from a spring decapitating raiders that you'd prefer to Set A Course for Shitville, heading 102.285, Warp 8 rather than play the original games and see what made them special?

You can take the 50's feeling into the wasteland, plaster our beloved icons all over the place, do up your own really "endearingly clever" (in your own opinion) recreations of the original art and plaster it on immortal billboards and install process slides, but if you miss the fact that being railroaded through a clearly fable-esque childhood tutorial that only exists because you "fine folks" got a chortle out of thinking up the "You're SPECIAL" book, and needed, by any means necessary and excuse to include it in the game, despite the damage it did to the entire credibility of survival in the wasteland experience, especially in sight of the fact that the entire introduction sequence is clearly a teary eyed "heheheheheeheheh!111" on the part of bethsoft, managing to work their little garbage "we do this every time" elder scrolls prison sequence into the game, you are and to put it lightly "responsible for a terrible game." Oh, it's a metaphorical prison though. Nobody will notice that like in our ACCLAIMED SERIES FOR XBOX AND XBOX360 THE ELDER SCROLLS we've forced the character to start in a prison where he can create his character, do a tutorial, then escape, do a combat tutorial and then receive the insulting "Are you sure this is what you want the character that you are playing in this video entertainment game Fallout 3 by Bethesda Softworks Copyright 2008 Bethesda Softworks to be like? Feel free, despite the fact that you're already responsible for several things that have happened and have probably killed something and been injured already to click NO on this dialog and recreate your character starting with appearance. Copyright 2008 Bethesda Softworks" dialog before exiting into the wide, wide, wide, smaller than the last game we made on this engine, society and world of the wasteland.

Well.

I seem to have unfortunately spent the 30 minutes complaining that I mentioned I was going to try to avoid doing, and I really haven't even scratched the surface of the things which stood out to me as blatantly shiesty about the game. I guess if you want to pick up where I left off, just take a look at the things that sucked about oblivion, sucked about morrowind and have always sucked about Bethesda games and tack those on the list, tear that page off, start a new page and include the fact that fallout 3 plays exactly as poorly as every other carnival ride 60 bucks at the door xbox360 game, then take the entire list and bury it, as no matter how many times people say this exact same thing over and over again, nobody will read it because it's not economically viable to make games that arn't garbage.

Or at least, that's the way things appear. Prove me wrong next time guys. Prove me wrong.
finally a review from someone I can trust. This deserves to be posted as news on the first page: "Popscythe reviews FO3".
I agree. Very good review.
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Post by Manoil »

MadBill wrote:I like how 20 points in explosives lets you kill anything without effort. If the game were difficult I might become afraid and leave.
lulz.

But I'm at 31, and it still takes 2 or more nades to kill a Supermutant.
Fuggin' mutie pricks.
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Post by S4ur0n27 »

Hey, sounds like a good game? D;
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Post by jiujitsu »

It's fun. Hard in Very Hard mode. Doesn't have quite the same feel as Fallout, but it's not way far off. It's better than nothing. Seriously a lot better.
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Post by Dreadnought »

No. NOTHING would have been a stylish death with some last bit of dignity left to it, you fucking necrophiliac. B)
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Post by Wolfman Walt »

Stop the presses, I agree with Dready on something.
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Post by St. Toxic »

Smiley wrote:So yeah, about that "positive review" and stuff...

Forget it. I take it all back, I'm sorry I ever doubted you toxic, and you are absolutely right about it all.

I can't bring myself to do it. I would've sugared it, maybe even lied a bit, but no amount of bullshit can cover up for the mockery this game is. That is, if I could even get it to work. You can quote me on that.
B)
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Post by Mismatch »

popscythe wrote:
Mismatch wrote:finally a review from someone I can trust. This deserves to be posted as news on the first page: "Popscythe reviews FO3".
Little did you know, I was thinking of you specifically when I wrote some of the more brilliant pieces of literature in that little blurb.

See if you can guess which ones!
:chick:

'twas harder than I thought it would be, I suppose that I do not know myself well enuff.... but this part doeas have 'foul' language in it:
This travesty of a reskinned oblivion might have been a little easier to swallow had oblivion itself not been such a flaming piece of crap.
However that could be the product of thinking about just about n e one.

I suck at this game D:
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Post by jetbaby »

I don't have time to read this shit, suffice to say it IS Oblivion with guns. It's not a shitty game, it's just very sub-par, just like Oblivion. What did you expect? In depth review later when I finish it. God help me.
off topic? OMG YOU'VE BEEN CENSORED... yet you're still posting. MYSTARY!!!!

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Post by popscythe »

Mismatch wrote: :chick:
I was just giving you a hard time. Actually, I think I channeled a bit of each and every DAC member when I was writing that. Like I could taste the humid funk of the whole situation reeking through the internets.
"I've decided that if positive affirmations can "cure cancer" then negative affirmations can cause cancer. Chant with me: Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard. Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard. Fuck you and Die, Todd Howard."
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Post by MadBill »

Compared to nothing else, it is OK, even fun at times.
Compared to other Fallouts, it fails at almost everything.
Compared to other FP RPGs, it feels abstracted, detached, mediocre. (Compared to Deus Ex it fails hard)
Compared to a glass of milk, it manages to hold its own. The glass of milk has higher replay value and a better storyline, but Fallout 3 has more graphics.
I miss the good ol' USSA.
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Re: Fallout 3: Your thoughts

Post by PiP »

hey, good idea for a post, KoC - we should proudly present what we have best on the front page - the community :drunk:
Haris: So played it now, best game in a long time. This is the "fallout rpg" of new gen games that i waited for.
<=golden :D Also lol at Haris being a Mama's gang member :rofl:
VasikkA wrote:The dialogue is just D:
ah shit that's exactly what I was hoping I might be wrong about..
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Post by Nicolai »

Kinda alright so far, I'm having fun with it :aiee:
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