Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mainiac]

My biggest annoyance? It's has been 200 years since the bombs fell in game. What have we, in the real world, done in last 200 years? Electricity, flight, Space Travel, micro-computers, advanced robotics, ect. What have the people in Fallout 3 done? Built tin shacks.

To be fair, they probably are spending a lot of extra time puking from the radiation poisoning.  Probably puts a damper on progress.

Unlike the Californian Wasteland, where everything's hunky-dory and radiation free?

No. The people in FO3 are just total fucking morons. They're concerned with stupid shit like bottle collections, history museums, or worshipping a bomb. If they put their heads to it, they could've made the next NCR (which grew out of a primitive farming community, btw.). They could've even moved into one of the more functional vaults, or simply looted them for tech. Instead they just wallow in their own trash and worry about irrelevant crap.

Yeah, this.  Add onto that the fact that there was still food in the vending machines.  Because not only do potato chips keep for 200 years but nobody in those 200 hundred years thought to loot the vending machines that are a short walk away from what passes for major settlements.  Oh and the prewar guns and ammo still work and are readily available.

FO3 felt more like it's setting was 5 years after the war.  Pretty much the only thing you'd have to change about the setting would be renaming the white hats in powered armor from the Brotherhood of Steel to the Maryland Marine Forces Reserve and you are good to go.  And frankly, that would be a pretty good lore change in it's own right as the Brotherhood of Steel apparently received a lobotomy in between FO2 and FO3.

[Urist Mcinternetuser]

I like Fallout 3 more. New Vegas was awesome, but it didn't quite do it for me. I did like the NCR though.

[nenjin]

I dunno, maybe I'm just wishing for a game like that where you got cool junk but it wasn't a constant trip back to your house to stash five billion guns, then a careful loadout to make sure you didn't run out of ammo if you had to shoot scorpions.  Maybe I should try a "no repair" run of NV, where I can't even pay for repairs, can't hold any ammo if I don't have an appropriate weapon in my inventory, and can't stash any weapons.  That + hardcore sounds like fun...constantly scavenging and scrounging.

Having played both Fallouts with as many ammo-reduction/rarity mods as possible....the problem will always be with placed objects and hand-crafted content. Until Bethesda moves away from hard-coded object placement and starts doing procedural generation, there is always going to be too much everything in Bethesda games, unless someone goes in and takes stuff out by hand. And that takes forever. I might say it's possible for Bethesda to finally change their thinking on this issue....but Skyrim pretty much killed that fantasy.

How is F3 where stupid collectibles are concerned?  I say this as a good thing, btw.  Not game-necessary things, just pointless self-guided collections.  My house in NV has about thirty teddy bears in it, and a small gnome army.

Bobbleheads actually give you stat bonuses, so they're worth finding. There's Nuka Cola Quantums. Couple other things. I would say there's more of it than in NV.

[Alkhemia]

NV would be better if it had less bugs obsidian does not no how to bug test, but on the topic of best fallout game it FOnline: 2238

[fenrif]

Having played both Fallouts with as many ammo-reduction/rarity mods as possible....the problem will always be with placed objects and hand-crafted content. Until Bethesda moves away from hard-coded object placement and starts doing procedural generation, there is always going to be too much everything in Bethesda games, unless someone goes in and takes stuff out by hand. And that takes forever. I might say it's possible for Bethesda to finally change their thinking on this issue....but Skyrim pretty much killed that fantasy.

I always thought that Bethesda were pretty heavy on the procedural loot thing? Thats why as you level up you find better loot/ enemies have better equipment. Most of the containers I remember looting in F3, F:NV and Skyrim were all random stuff, since if you loot something, load a save game, and loot the same thing you generally get different stuff.

I'd argue that MORE hand-placed loot would fix the problem more. You wouldn't find plasma cells everywhere just because you're high level, so you'd have to use weaker guns because the big ones ammo would be much harder to find. Sure you could play through the game and memorise where all the "i win button" items are, but I'd take that anyday over all the bandits suddenly being in full power/daedric armour wielding the best weapons in the game because you dinged one too many times.

[mainiac]

I do not remember NV being particularly buggy.  Maybe the console versions were buggy?

[Gunner-Chan]

New vegas is actually less glitchy than Fallout 3 for me. Though it's more unstable at times unless you use one of the large address aware patches. Havent had a single crash outside of the extremely rare first load crash nearly everyone reports happening at some time or another.

[Reudh]

Haven't played FO1, 2 or NV. I watched a friend play FO1 a few years back, and it seemed like EPIC fun, what with the dark comedy aspect.

FO3 I bought in a bargain bin for $20AUD; it's been pretty fun but to me it feels like Oblivion with guns, and nothing different.

Oh, hunting rifle. Welp, that mutant's gone before he even noticed me. Good thing I can repair it because 9239238 mutants carry them.

It was great fun, but there was so much underutilised.


"Oh, just gonna start running in this direction to Canterbury Commons..."

A half hour later: "Oh look, mole rats. Hm."

Five minutes later: "Oh look, a scripted sequence that I could probably ruin with a single shot."

But aside from that it was great fun.

[MasterFancyPants]

I'd argue that MORE hand-placed loot would fix the problem more. You wouldn't find plasma cells everywhere just because you're high level, so you'd have to use weaker guns because the big ones ammo would be much harder to find. Sure you could play through the game and memorise where all the "i win button" items are, but I'd take that anyday over all the bandits suddenly being in full power/daedric armour wielding the best weapons in the game because you dinged one too many times.

I completely agree, I liked the Alien Blaster (and Fire Lance  ) in FO:3 with the very limited ammo (until Mothership Zeta ruined that). I would always keep it in my inventory in case of a really tough fight, unfortunately that fight never came (EVER). At least not unmodded and when I modded the game I gave weapons really high damage, so it still wasn't useful.

[Teneb]

While I enjoyed Fallout 3, I preferred New Vegas myself. New Vegas actually creates the feeling of an actual world. And the DLCs were amazing, Old World Blues especially. (Dead Money is a close second, in my opinion, especially in hardcore mode, that causes quite a few changes in that DLC). Fallout 3's wasteland just felt... "stagnant" to me, somehow.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I enjoyed Fallout 3, and it certainly showed a lot of love for the Fallout universe on Bethesda's part. It wasn't a bold addition to the series though; their conservatism in holding to the feel of previous games made a lot of the setting feel empty and unbelievable.

Consider these elements:

a) Vaults
b) The Brotherhood of Steel
c) Supermutants
d) The Enclave
e) Water Supplies

These are major, iconic features of the earlier Fallout games. FO3 centered almost entirely on them. That should make it a great Fallout story, but it doesn't. Because the original games told original stories, and Fallout 3 retells those stories with some twists. It stretches lore and credibility for the sake of forcing the old factions together again. In a way, it was probably necessary; with the series dead for so long, Bethesda needed to announce that Fallout was back, without deviating too far from the old lore. And if you haven't played the earlier games, Fallout 3 captures a lot of the cool iconic ideas that were in them, and shows them new to you, which is probably way cool. But to me, they're old ideas -- and neither of the original two Fallout games would be remembered if they were full of old ideas.

New Vegas has the creativity of the originals. Instead of telling stories about vaults and mutants and power armor, they told new stories about Mr. House and the Legion and the Boomers and they continued the unfinished story of NCR's expansion. Just like the originals did, New Vegas presented a world full of surprises, and got me thinking about possibilities and wondering about the future of the in-game world.

My biggest annoyance? It's has been 200 years since the bombs fell in game. What have we, in the real world, done in last 200 years? Electricity, flight, Space Travel, micro-computers, advanced robotics, ect. What have the people in Fallout 3 done? Built tin shacks.

To be fair, they probably are spending a lot of extra time puking from the radiation poisoning.  Probably puts a damper on progress.

Unlike the Californian Wasteland, where everything's hunky-dory and radiation free?

No. The people in FO3 are just total fucking morons. They're concerned with stupid shit like bottle collections, history museums, or worshipping a bomb. If they put their heads to it, they could've made the next NCR (which grew out of a primitive farming community, btw.). They could've even moved into one of the more functional vaults, or simply looted them for tech. Instead they just wallow in their own trash and worry about irrelevant crap.

Yeah, this.  Add onto that the fact that there was still food in the vending machines.  Because not only do potato chips keep for 200 years but nobody in those 200 hundred years thought to loot the vending machines that are a short walk away from what passes for major settlements.  Oh and the prewar guns and ammo still work and are readily available.

FO3 felt more like it's setting was 5 years after the war.  Pretty much the only thing you'd have to change about the setting would be renaming the white hats in powered armor from the Brotherhood of Steel to the Maryland Marine Forces Reserve and you are good to go.  And frankly, that would be a pretty good lore change in it's own right as the Brotherhood of Steel apparently received a lobotomy in between FO2 and FO3.

Also, this, including all the complaints in the quote pyramid here. This drove me crazy. Fallout 2 showed a world that was growing and rebuilding in the wasteland. Fallout 3 presented a world that was actually regressed from that, back to Fallout 1, so frozen in time that even the plot is based on the completely implausible idea that the river is undrinkable from radiation, 200 years later. I'm very glad New Vegas came out, because it corrected what would have been a sad "new canon" -- sequels so loyal to the originals that the world stops changing, and is permanently just a couple years after the bomb.

It reminds me of Star Wars. Love the prequels or hate them, they brought the same sort of discovery and innovation and grandeur that the originals had. When most of the expanded universe made only small, safe changes, and told stories using the well-trod paths already beaten out for them, George Lucas told stories where everything was new -- gungans who fought with spears and insane shield/grenade energy technology, stormtroopers as all clones of Boba Fett's father, Yoda fighting with a lightsaber, even those stupid cutter droid missiles. A lot of it was pretty cheesy, but Star Wars has always been like that, it was just cool and new enough to forgive. Lucas's own addition to his old canon was more true to the originals than anyone else could have been, because his prequels were creative, original, and full of surprises, just as Star Wars was always supposed to be.

[mainiac]

I disagree with the notion that the game was conservative.  The names might have been there but beneath those names, everything was different.  The BoS and Enclave are on insane missions that deplete their thin ranks for no good reason.  The supermutants have been replaced by orcs.  And the story of water has been changed from a story of survival into a doomsday weapon.  Even the feel of the setting is off, everything is serious.

I will agree though that I liked Fallout 3 best when it was doing it's own thing.  Some of the stuff that was completely unrelated to previous fallout lore I liked.  But when dealing with previous lore they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to have things feel right.  So why if you do things best when you tread your own path, do you call this a sequel?  Call it a prequel or have it's events be too distant to be affected by the other titles.  Do whatever you want with the setting, without distorting all the existing characters and icons.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I disagree with the notion that the game was conservative.  The names might have been there but beneath those names, everything was different.  The BoS and Enclave are on insane missions that deplete their thin ranks for no good reason.  The supermutants have been replaced by orcs.  And the story of water has been changed from a story of survival into a doomsday weapon.  Even the feel of the setting is off, everything is serious.

I will agree though that I liked Fallout 3 best when it was doing it's own thing.  Some of the stuff that was completely unrelated to previous fallout lore I liked.  But when dealing with previous lore they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to have things feel right.  So why if you do things best when you tread your own path, do you call this a sequel?  Call it a prequel or have it's events be too distant to be affected by the other titles.  Do whatever you want with the setting, without distorting all the existing characters and icons.

I agree with you, really. If Fallout 3 had been framed as a story in the Washington DC area in the same general time period as the original Fallout (when the degree of helplessness and barely-getting-by they wanted in their game is more believable), and they'd a) replaced the Brotherhood with a different fragment of the US military with a different symbol and name and theming, and b) made their Enclave some other descendant of the former government under a different name, I wouldn't have described it as conservative. It would have been bold and assertive, cutting their own uncharted territory out of the Fallout universe, telling their own story.

I think Bethesda just tried too hard to avoid being excessively original. They had to prove it was really Fallout, not Oblivion With Guns. They hadn't earned the trust of the franchise's fans, and would be hated even more if they mucked up the lore too much. It is what it is, and I'm glad they made it. I look back on Fallout 3 as some really great fanfiction, a love letter to both fans and the original developers. Takes the old characters, mixes them in a reunion, gets a little irreverent with the details. It was fun, I don't hate it, but I do get annoyed if I think about the lore too much. I'm not usually a lore buff, but it does undermine the story's coolness if the canon contradicts itself in successive games.

[Virtz]

I can't help but think that it's FO3 (rather than NV) that's the spin-off here. It introduces nothing of relevance. Every previous proper FO shifted the focus to a different, new faction. In FO1 you had the BOS and the Super Mutants. In FO2 the BOS and the Super Mutant remnants became pretty irrelevant, with only the BOS scheming in the background, while the focus was on the Enclave now. In NV, the focus is on the NCR (which was just beginning to thrive in FO2), New Vegas, and the Legion. All the previously major factions are sorta there, but they're nowhere near as important as before.

What have you got new in FO3? Nothing of relevance. Just a bunch of smaller haha-funny factions like Little Lamplight, the bomb worshippers or the Harold-huggers. Everything comes down to the BOS versus the Enclave, with the Super Mutants in the background, so that we can have an overblown Michael Bay battle.

[Rakonas]

Personally my problem with Fallout 3 was just the story. The bullshit that happens with your father's retarded actions that serve no purpose due to some strange contradictory logic just ruined the story for me.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Seriously. "Oh no you can't save him, he's already instantly dead from the radiation." "Well that was retarded of him, at least the colonel is dead then" nope.jpg