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[Muz]

I like how this game makes people fight. I'd love to make a game which people would fight about one day. I've done articles which people fought over, but never a game

[Asehujiko]

I finaly got a chance to try it and i didn't like it. Most of the dialog is unconvincing, the combat is clunky(and realy, how does that guy survive an entire pistol clip to the head?), the landscape is reminicent of oblivion(in the bad way, gravel and boulders EVERYWHERE) and i spent 30 minutes trying to find the damn supply story in the first town before i gave up and uninstalled it. I never played FO1&2 so i won't comment of how much/little it plays like those. I don't mind slow paced games, but i do mind having to talk to everybody in order to not miss something important and being forced to sift through half an hour "the inns over there, the shop over there but that's a fucking lie because the shop is hidden in a place you will never find" in order to do so.

[Soulwynd]

I need your address Asehujiko.

So I can send you a pair of glasses.

[Zironic]

I think the major problem is, most of the humor was lost. Fallout 1 and 2 seemed to be very impausible worlds, were decisions could have funny and unexpected consequences of dark humor. Theres none of that in FO3, as decisions you make have serious reprecussions in game. The main storyline gets bad simply because you decide at the end, who to help, while most of the other quests, are progressive, with little changes building up to dramatic changes. Like letting the ghouls into Tenpenny. There's nothing humourous outcome. Just the death of people, and the destruction of beauty, a beauty preserved by evil, but beauty none the less.

P.S: Megaton is kind of lame, I sometimes set mines down and leave.

[Micro102]

just got it and so far i like it....dont compare it to the other fallouts rate it as its own game


just a question, about the megaton bomb. this guy wanted me to blow it up, if i did would megaton be gone? i didnt, i told the sheriff and he went to arrest him, got shot by the guy, then i immidiently killed the guy so now they are both dead....so what the heck does that do. he told me i made a grave mistake before i killed him

[Virtz]

just a question, about the megaton bomb. this guy wanted me to blow it up, if i did would megaton be gone?

It'd be an unenterable pile of scrap with high radiation levels and immortal NPCs sticking out of it (Simms's son and 2 others out of view in my case).

i didnt, i told the sheriff and he went to arrest him, got shot by the guy, then i immidiently killed the guy so now they are both dead....so what the heck does that do. he told me i made a grave mistake before i killed him

If you can kill Burke just before he shoots the sheriff in the back, the sheriff will thank you and give you stuff (although some have reported that they found the sheriff dead somewhere outside later anyway). Otherwise, try checking with Simms's son, either he'll give you the stuff or you need to reload and first tell the sheriff you'll disarm the bomb, then have him happily die and Simms's son should then run up and give you some stuff (he did that for me even when I was the one who killed his dad).

[Zironic]

Blowing up megaton gives you access to a suite in tenpenny estates. Which isn't much, because it is much smaller and less quests than megaton thus: do all quests in megaton, then nuke.

[McDoomhammer]

Did you seriously just ask if setting off a nuke that a town is built on would remove the town or not?

[Micro102]

i had no idea what it was...maybe a test. i didnt think that megaton, the only town i have found so far with things needed for survival, could be wiped out so quickly

[Jake]

Can I throw in some observations as someone too young to remember the original Fallout games? I'm going by the GameTrailers videos so far, unfortunately.

Graphically, it's not blow-you-away awesome, but not too awful either; about level with HL2 from the standard-definition video, and the scenery definitely has a desolate, post-apocalyptic feel to it, though character animation's a little on the stiff side. The music seems weirdly appropriate, and I'm curious as to how they'll handle the radio station dynamic; get far enough out into the boonies that you lose the signal and you've got nothing but the wind and the wildlife to fill the silence... Well, that'd be quite something.
The interface looks a little clumsy, but tolerable as long as the eventual PC version includes some hotkeys; I wouldn't fancy trying to mess around on it with the mouse under pressure. Would have been nice to see hunger and thirst implemented instead of the generic 'eat/drink = health up' approach, but hey, can't have everything.
I'm less than enthused with the called-shot thing, to be honest; it's overpowered, and felt more like bullet-time with a faint veneer of pseudo-rational explanation than anything else. The ragdoll physics are exaggerated to the point of being cartoonish, which frankly grates; they talked up taking a more serious angle to the Fallout canon, but the actual fighting feels like the "Woohoo! Fragged that sucker!" school of mindless FPS that I think we're all getting a bit weary of. The AI looked pretty uninspiring as well, and unless there was a cheat-code involved (which is a bit off if you're doing a supposedly representative walkthrough of the first level) then I'd love to know why your character is that heavily armed from the word go. Some sort of limit to how much he can carry might have been nice too.

The thing that really bugged me was the quest. We wander into a township called Megaton, apparently named for the unexploded nuclear bomb it was built around. Somewhat unusual choice of locations, but perhaps it's intended to be symbolic of all that they have overcome and all they shall overcome in the future. You have a brief confrontation with the sheriff, wander around for a bit, and then find an old guy in an incongruously neat and well-kept three-piece suit, out in the apocalyptic wastes enjoying a drink in a run-down saloon. So far, so spaghetti Western, though at least they've refrained from giving more than one person a Stetson.
So, this post-nuclear incarnation of Boss Hog informs you that he's got plans to redevelop this area as real estate, without bothering to lower his voice despite the ambient noise level in the bar being minimal. What he's planning to build there and who's going to buy it are never made clear. The most likely explanation is the simplest one; he's more than a trifle off his head and merely making the townspeople's lives difficult because he can... Wait a minute, run that past me again?
Okay, the mysterious Mr Burke clearly isn't the only person off his head around here. It seems that nobody's ever got around to defusing the nuclear warhead they've built a town around; real smart, people. This perhaps explains why there's no stealth check or anything similar when you rig up the fusion pulse what's-its-name in broad daylight in front of several people, a process that is strongly hinted to take several minutes and involve removing an access panel. That a quest action merely requires a skill roll when routine stuff like lock-picking demands you actively participate smacks of laziness on the part of the developers; even a thirty-second cutscene and some scripted events afterwards would have been a bit more satisfying.
Anyway, you exit the town with alacrity and head over to an old hotel, one of a handful of high-rise buildings that came through the bombing relatively intact. The owner allows you to push the big red button and cause an extremely convincing nuclear explosion effect; funny that a guy who's killing several dozen people for personal gain wouldn't take you with them to save the fee, but then he is quite clearly out of his mind, so no big deal. Besides, it rather pales in comparison to the fact that he's just managed the quite difficult feat of making the real-estate market out here even more depressed on account of the radiation levels going right back up to where they were the day after the original bombing!
Christ. If that's representative of the level of complexity, realism and internal consistency in the quests and plot, I really sympathise with the Fallout fans. The amount of gore's earned it an M-rating, but so far it's been on the intellectual level of a Saturday morning cartoon.

[Tilla]

Jake, a lot of what you mention is addressed in the actual game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is a 200-weight-unit (no idea if it's pounds or what) limit that can be increased with levelling, the weapons you start with are things found in the vault and taken off of enemies there (a bb gun as a 10th birthday present in the character creation-tutorial, the pistol stolen by best friend Amata from her father the Overseer, and everything else taken off of corpses of guards. Anything beyond that though is probably cheat-coded in, yes).

Megaton's backstory can be explained if you talk to people around town, there's one old lady in particular who will explain why the bomb is there, why they lived there, why it's not disarmed, etc. Burke (the guy in the suit) is working for the hotel owner in fact and that is also explained in dialogue, as is the reasoning for nuking it. The radiation in the are is already quite high to begin with so a fresh nuking won't really cause all that much worse - even drinking water in game can eventually lead to radiation sickness.

[Cajoes]

I just find the procedural nonsense to be a bit annoying from time to time.

At one point, Nathan had somehow gotten killed, preventing me from discussing anything with his grieving widow.

At some other point, I came across a Chinese Commando's corpse. Who apparently had a small transmitter surgically grafted to him, sending chinese orders on a looping frequency, bugging up the game when I tried to fast travel back to the site to try to locate the source of the transmission. - Quick loading moments before entering the general area of wilderness several times in a row yielded, and I wish I was joking,

Three dead settlers with a quest note + mysterious key between them and some raiders.

Two enclave eyebots lasering some raiders.

One giant scorpion eating some raiders.

One scavenger and his broken Mr.Handy and some raiders.

Raiders, raiders, more raiders.

And the pride of the nonsense before I gave up and took a break. A lot of dead raiders, and a injured ****ing angry death claw.

Game's kinda fun thou. Fragmentation grenades solve anything. =D

[Heavy Flak]

While I'm still having a lot of fun, and chugging right along, the writing in the game is beginning to wear pretty thin on me.  Occasionally, you'll run into a quest that's both interesting and well written

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Those Fucking Ants, specifically

but then you're met with just... well, retarded stuff, like

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Three Brotherhood members in Falls Church.  You've got to work with two of them to save a third from a bunch of supermutants.  I, as in my character, personally killed 90% of them, and when I rescue their member, what do they say?  "Yes that was a tough fight.  Don't worry, the Brotherhood will protect you in Falls Church!"

No you won't, assholes!  I saved you, your friend, and your intiate!  You should teach me to wear your power armor, then GIVE ME YOURS.  Or at least have a little switch in memory that keeps track if you've killed more mutants than the Paladins, and have them respond accordingly...

Everything else I'm having fun with, even VATs, and combat, and leveling, and exploring, and all that stuff.  But man, oh man, the writing... If they ever release a SDK, I might see about joining up with a mod making group and pumping out better dialog. 

[Croquantes]

I tried to help the Brotherhood save their initiate in Falls Church. They died.

[Kogan Loloklam]

I have two characters. I haven't even bothered following the main questline yet. i've run into it here or there, but mostly have been exploring and seeing random stuff.


Here's my male adventure...
 I rescued some girl named candy, running around in a skimpy outfit, off to Rivet.
I knew generally where Rivet was, which was south of Three Dog's Radio Station. That left alot of terrain to cover, so I thought...
It turns out, vast swaths of the city fell into key streets when the nuclear bombs fell. You can look at relativly intact buildings on either side of some streets, with a pile of rubble and debris that is quite a sight.
The only explination is that in the 200 years since the bombs fell, the supermutants of the city have spent all their time building city walls. I say super-mutants because you'll have them pop out of windows in buildings you can't get into to shoot at you. The entire city of Washington DC is a rat's maze. it doesn't feel a drop like a ruined city, instead if feels like a gauntlet corridor where you are trying to get a piece of cheese at the end. Okay, so massive wandering later, having found the station, I try to head south through the mazes by the station. No luck. Dead ends left and right. I end up having to go back to where I found the lady with the switchblade and naughty nightie and go south there. Down that path, this happens...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There is a roadblock right where the river turns to Rivet. On one side you have the river, with what appears to be a water treatment facility being patrolled by supermutants. on the other, you have a fortification with several supermutants

So, what do I do? I scout the place. There is no way around it. I save, and attempt a mad dash with Candy. I make it, but she is gunned down.
Load.
I get into a protracted shootout. The supermutant shoots one of the derelyct cars I am hiding behind. it explodes in a mushroom cloud. Candy's dead.
Load.
I stealthily sneak up to the barbed wire along the gate, put a round through the head of the nearest supermutant (more like 3, but who is counting?) And then try to climb over the wall. No dice, the gently sloping steel is just too much for me to scale...
Okay, so I go over to the barbed wire over on the far side and take careful aim at the mini-gun wielding super-mutant. I aim very carefully for it's head. At a 31% chance, I have faith in being able to bring him down. Three shots echo out of my hunting rifle, putting really nice bullet holes in... THE AIR?!?!
Okay, I'm a little mad now... I go around and try to scramble up the cars at the edge of the bunker. I hop onto the hood of the first car, and then I move to jump over to the next one, and run face-first into it.
I've never been very good at jump puzzles, but I am determined to find a way through this besides their set-piece path. So I go back to the hood, and get another face-full of car. Okay, so I go up on the hood to take a few practice jumps... What? The hood isn't a surface you can jump on.
That's typical of Fallout 3. Every place where you try to avoid conflict or make the conflict easier, you will not be able to climb, jump, or use any kind of 3d Terrain to your advantage.
Okay, so I pull out my trusty pistol, given to me by the overseer via his daughter long ago, walk into the base, and procede to face-shoot every super mutant to death. Yes I knew I could have done that from the beginning, but there's no dratted finesse in going in and murdering everyone with my beginning weapon and 35 small guns skill! So, having been forced to do it their way... again... I continued on to Rivet. I only had 3 CTDs on my way from my "Mutant Encounter" to Rivet, and only 1 during the encounter. Not bad, considering my normal track record is a little higher.
That's my "Candy Adventure" with my male character.

My Female Character's got an adventure of her own. My female character is in the process of trying to find a place where she can sell her body for caps. Haven't found any place yet. Here's my memorable moment with her... I encountered a almost-friendly guy in a paticular quest making demands for my hard-looted clothing, and I let him have it. In this paticular quest, I haven't killed a single thing. There is no trail of dead bodies anywhere. So this guy walks out and encounters two of the critters that I didn't kill. He kills one, the other one kills him. Out comes the trusty beginning  pistol, and the murderous ant is dead. I go loot the clothes off the other guy's body. You never need to worry about giving someone something, you can get it back after they walk a few feet.


So, my biggest beef with Fallout 3? LEVEL DESIGN!
Screw dialog, screw clever jokes, how about a little realism in their level design? You make the maps real, you make the whole world real!
So, when the tools come out, I plan to make a fallout community mod. It's going to be called BV 03. it'll be set in a vault with an honest to goodness population of 700 individuals with a storyline of it being a local apartment manager corporation's work on making a private vault for it's citizens. I won't get fancy, I won't do anything except make a simple vault that has the ability to house 1000 Residents. I am betting that my one community mod will beat anything that was offered by Bethesda came up with.

Just waiting on some kind of mod tools, assuming they don't try to greed up and not release them to give their stuff a better chance in the marketplace.