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[Sir Pseudonymous]

Yeah, good for you.

Why did Bethesthda focus on combat? Why not instead focus on non-combat trials skills instead, since it would be rather unlikely that people would level up that, thereby making it very hard to pull off?

What kind of FPS would it be if you resolved situations through means other than combat?
What kind of Bethsoft game would it be if you resolved situations through means other than combat?

I believe he was ineptly trying to mock my disorganized ranting about the worse design choices. The lol thing is there are many situations where high non-combat skills come in very handy, allowing you to deactivate or frenzy turrets remotely, bypass fights, etc. You also generally focus on one combat skill (after repair), at least at first, so you've maxed it out by level ten, and the only things making fights easier mechanics wise are perks and better equipment. Well before level 20 you can handle a deathclaw without any trouble at all if you use the bullshit stealthsuit and a good gun (alternatively, your bare hands with the paralyzing palm perk; also, this is what I wound up doing. It was awesome the first dozen times I did it, then it was just boring routine). No matter the level or enemy (the only exceptions being Broken Steels spiritual successors to the vanilla game's deathclaws: the ghoul reavers and super mutant overlords) that tactic works, and on the tougher ones it's all that works well (I did kill a reaver once, unarmored, with a lever action rifle and eugene. Only lost half my health (due to the lack of armor, no doubt, as they don't get the magic 35 point bonus point lookout denizens do), and spent a full magazine of 5mm rounds, with 100 big guns :/ ).

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I'll get around to downloading and trying out stuff like RTS, FWE, and MMM when I'm back on campus on wednesday and have internet that isn't completely shit.

In any case, I tried Fellout, which alters the exterior lighting a bit. For the worse in most cases, as the lighting clashes with the textures, but it does reveal that fallout 3 needs better lighting (it removes all ambient light outside at night, except in the mall, apparently, which is brightly illuminated >:| ). The jarring thing is going from this pitch black night, navigating by pipboy light, into say, a subway, and having the whole goddamn place be nicely illuminated, rather than dark with just bubbles of light cast by fires and lamps. I wonder if it would be possible to script something approximating the player's eyes adjusting to changing brightness, where darker areas seem darker when viewed from light/the character has been in brightly lit space and moves to a darker area, and after a while darker areas seem brighter, etc. I've never played around with scripting or modding for FO3, or Oblivion for that matter. I should look at the GECK and see if I can figure it out, and try to figure how much work it would take to alter the lighting. Of course, it could just be the fact that my laptop screen can't be adjusted to make things darker, as far as I can find, so things are brightly illuminated even in what seem to be intended to be pitch black caves or the like.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Wait, you mean like High Dynamic Range Lighting?

[Servant Corps]

I believe he was ineptly trying to mock my disorganized ranting about the worse design choices.

No, I was really just curious. Have Bestheda release a DLC that has only non-combat missions, and nobody will complain about how combat is repetitive and boring.

What kind of FPS would it be if you resolved situations through means other than combat?
What kind of Bethsoft game would it be if you resolved situations through means other than combat?

There are lots of non-combat missions in The Elder Scrolls: Fallout. Several quests in Megaton, for instance.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

I believe he was ineptly trying to mock my disorganized ranting about the worse design choices.

No, I was really just curious. Have Bestheda release a DLC that has only non-combat missions, and nobody will complain about how combat is repetitive and boring.

What kind of FPS would it be if you resolved situations through means other than combat?
What kind of Bethsoft game would it be if you resolved situations through means other than combat?

There are lots of non-combat missions in The Elder Scrolls: Fallout. Several quests in Megaton, for instance.

My mistake, it seemed like a sarcastic response to "And that the way of scaling up new enemies in the addons for high level characters was just to give them crazy dr and health".

My complaints over combat being boring come mainly from my favoring stealth over charging in guns blazing, which is slow and requires patience, and with the stealthsuit makes combat just a drawn out matter of creeping around to get the right shots, and slaughtering everything with the benefit of sneak attack crits. I went through the whole latter part of Broken Steel's main quest (the tunnels and base) without getting hit once, doing that. It wasn't fun, and any satisfaction at the accomplishment was killed by just how fucking cheap a strategy it was. I even did that with the character built as a brawler, albeit with slightly less success... I couldn't resist, sadly. Just diving into combat is more entertaining, but the way it stutters on my computer once combat ai starts chugging away, or something intensive like that (graphics remain constant the whole time, so I don't think the problem lies there), that doesn't usually go nearly as smoothly as it would in other shooters D: .

[Ampersand]

What I disliked was the very apparent lack of deep quest lines that stand on their own, as in Oblivion. I'd argue that taken together, the Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, and Dark Brotherhood questlines are better than the main quest. In Fallout 3, there's simply no compelling reason deviate from the main quest, other than because you actually want to make it last longer.

Hell, Morrowind hardly lets you start the main quest without joining an organization.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Oblivion's major side quests were extremely shallow compared to morrowind's. In Fallout 3, there's simply no compelling reason to start the main quest until you're sick of leaving a trail of mutilated corpses in your wake as you wander the wastes in search of new victims admiring the scenery. The main quest was just a shallow piece of shit that was tacked on to give some semblance of purpose to the game. If you only followed the main quest, you miss out on most of the game, especially if you fast traveled when you could (which I did, admittedly, though I spent a shitload of time just wandering around exploring; when I got around to the main quest I rushed through it). Now, bethsoft has never been really good about central storylines in general. Even in morrowind, which easily beats its successors in that regard (and in the case of Oblivion, almost every other as well... Fallout 3 is too fundamentally different to be compared on more merits than depth and writing), the story is pretty shitty, though much deeper.

You know, if you think about it optimistically, with Fallout 3, it could just be they realized "hey, whatever we do, the storyline is going to be the weakest part of the game, so why fucking bother even doing it half-assed? Let's spend that effort somewhere where it'll actually help". Now, they do seem to be slipping towards over simplified bullshit elsewhere, but only time will tell if they've gone to hell like so many other once good dev studios...

[Ampersand]

What they did good in Morrowind and to a lesser extent, in Oblivion was make a world that was easily expanded upon, and filled it with material that allows the player to sort of be drawn into the game. If not believe it, then at least suspend disbelief enough to sort of manage to immerse yourself.

Fallout three doesn't do it so well. Might be because everything almost invariably ends with a dead body, and theres never any real sense of danger when, even on some important enemies, two shots to the head is all it takes. And if it takes more than that to bring down a human character, like that general from Operation Anchorage, it's really hard to keep your disbelief suspended. Seriously, who would believe there's a man that can withstand having a Belt Fed minigun unload 200 rounds in his face?

[Servant Corps]

What I disliked was the very apparent lack of deep quest lines that stand on their own, as in Oblivion. I'd argue that taken together, the Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, and Dark Brotherhood questlines are better than the main quest. In Fallout 3, there's simply no compelling reason deviate from the main quest, other than because you actually want to make it last longer.

There's simply no compelling reason even to DO the main quest. Your father said, "Do not follow me." Now, I may be an idiot, but if my father says "Do not follow me", you would think I would respect his wishes. And I'm too meta to know that my father will only be in danger if I do follow him.

You got an excuse to do the mini-quests...you gotta put some food on your table.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

The vanilla minigun is hilarious weak. It's like it's shooting spitballs... wait, could you even have a minigun in OA? I thought the heavy weapons package was a missile launcher and smg. Also, OA is a simulation made to the exacting specifications of a batshit insane twat, according to the logs on one of the computers in the lab.

FOOK2 seems to fix combat completely, mainly by making several shots to the head understandably fatal. The new weapons are equipment in general is nice too, haven't noticed too much else though.

I also managed to fix the lighting (to what I felt it should be...); playing around with the graphics settings didn't work (in fact, it took me a long time to find where the relevant ones were, as they're absent from the in game menu, rather being in the options menu from the loader, which I don't believe I'd used since the first time I launched Fallout 3 around a year ago...), but using a few obscure mods did (one of which contained a modification of fellout, which worked in the wastes but left certain areas, like the mall and megaton (that I saw...) in a fully illuminated state, brighter than without fellout). I used Realistic Interior Lighting and Lighting Overhaul (just the .esp with the modified version of fellout).