Richard's Online Journal
[02/11/08] Fallout 3
After Ending Report: Except for one of the most staggeringly poorly thought out endings in the history of all things - I’d explain more, but I need to go finish that short story about a fish who was frightened of drowning - it’s good. The main plot is depressingly predictable, especially if you’ve wandered through these wastelands before, and many of the areas badly needed a smack with the design stick, but there’s so much cool stuff to experience, I doubt you’ll care. What’s missing is sadly what I expected - the breakdown of the different towns demonstrating I was doing more than standard RPG quest-bitch duties, and that any of my decisions mattered outside of their individual tasks. Right. Back to the past...
War. War never changes. Unless you count it changing from an isometric tactical RPG to a big AAA FPS hybrid from a different development team with a totally different design style. Then it does. Quite a lot, actually…
I haven’t finished Fallout 3 yet, so this is more a loose collection of thoughts than a review. In a nutshell: I like it. I like it a lot. It’s far from perfect, but it’s an excellent game. If you need a number to explain that, it’s high eighties/low nineties. If you’d rather have a vegetable: tomato. If you just shouted at the screen ‘Tomatoes are a fruit!’, please submit your name to this year’s edition of “Who’s Whom?” - the world’s leading directory of pedants and pendants (patent pending). That score could flicker either way during the rest of the game, so don’t take it as gospel.
Headshots are your friend. They never stop loving you. They never leave you. Not like those cheap melee tarts.
Having played the original Fallout games quite a bit, it’s tough not to come into this one with a certain amount of baggage. For instance, in the original games, the action tended to be focused on the towns themselves. Here, the towns are quest hubs, with most of the action taking place out in the wastelands. That doesn’t make Fallout 3 better or worse, simply different. Another major difference is the amount of combat you have to do compared with the number of times you can talk your way out of trouble. Mutants in the wastelands simply won’t listen. Deploying high speech in the towns, at least so far, mostly feels like a roulette wheel with ‘Skip Quest’ as the prize, not an alternate path.
Of course, I could be missing lots of stuff if it’s tied to skills. Definitely planning on a second playthrough with a totally different build after the credits roll. I do like that if someone asks you to do something that sounds boring, you can pull a gun, shoot them in the face, and continue your adventures until you find the plot again.
Combat is surprisingly good fun. The VATS targeting system (yes, I know) works brilliantly, but doesn’t go far enough. On my system, there’s a nasty issue where it takes about four seconds from zooming in on enemies to actually letting me assign targets, and is laggy as hell after that, but the rewards are terrific. The slow-mo, loving pans of explosions and assault rifle tools to the face make you look so much cooler than if you were locked behind your gun the entire time, with the only downside that the regular FPS bit has clearly been gimped in the name of making you use VATS. You’re nowhere near as effective with the point-and-spray weapons, a few exceptions like flamethrowers and melee weapons and portable tactical nuke aside.
When you run out of Action Points during VATS mode, you don’t typically have a hell of a lot to do except dance around the enemy until they return and you can have another go at being Captain Bullet Time. In addition, actual tactics are minimal unless you force yourself to use them, or really, really let your supplies run low. Your best approach most of the time is to blitz as close to the baddies as you can and unload a few shots in their face/smash them around the face with a futuristic sledgehammer. Targetting limbs can give you an edge, but certainly on Normal difficulty, the effect isn’t enough to bother going for over a simple headshot. Shooting guns out of peoples’ hands can be very useful though. And funny, especially if you remember to quip.
Playing armchair designer for a second - the big weakness of VATS is that it encourages you to take on enemies as discrete entities, rather than as components in a larger fight. Targeting only zooms in on one enemy, limiting your scope, and you’ve got to spin round in circles to get a bead on anyone else. You’re typically up against one or two enemy types at once, so there’s no real benefit in flitting between targets, and nothing in the way of crowd control - at least, so far. You’re usually best off just slamming everything you’ve got into the closest person, then moving onto his closest friend.
Every fight with VATS suggests that what it really wants is to suck the camera back into a third person view, make the player character considerably more squishy, and have all the fights as proper tactical combat, with action points covering everything from movement to reloading. What we actually get is definitely an easier sell to the mainstream market, but the most satisfying thing about it has nothing to do with tactics. It’s watching limbs go slow-mo splattering to the tune of ‘Maybe’.
All ghouls must die! Except the nice ones.
The RPG elements are pretty enjoyable in their own right. Character creation is terrific, visiting your character at key points in his/her life until fate finally forces you out of the Vault. There are things I don’t like, most notably that EDIT: Perks now include the Traits of old, without their negative elemensts. Many seem like a wasted opportunity for early-game character customisation. Being able to choose Animal Friend at the start - stopping animals attacking you - makes more sense than magically becoming the Mary Sue of the Capitol Wasteland. Similarly, picking up things like Porn Star (in the earlier games - Fallout 3 is nowhere near that brave) was a good way of customising your character through deeds rather than stat choices. I’ve only seen a couple of those in the game so far, and they’re not remotely as interesting.
The multiple levels of each Perk are also pretty annoying. Even if it’s the same idea as the original games, with all the different stat systems at work, it’s tough to know exactly how much, say, a point in X or a 5% bonus to Y actually matters. RPGs really need to get into the habit of levels like Beginner/Expert/Master instead of 35 and 22. Silliness!
On an unrelated note, my character is currently a long-haired diplomat with a flamethrower, stamping around the post-apocalyptic wasteland in a metal bra and science glasses. If Bethesda hires Felicia Day to play her in the movie version, I think we’ll hit at least 90% of all geek fetishes, including cosplay.
“Daddy’s going to be so proud when I finally find him.”
Outside the opening bit in the Vault, you get exactly the same trick that Bethesda pulled in Oblivion - a dark underground area suddenly blooming into the gorgeous open world up top, in this case with an ironic ‘Scenic Lookout’ post. The wasteland looks terrific. It’s strewn with crap, littered with bombed out buildings and ancient ruins, individual blocks of overpass and filthy water that you actively avoid until realising it’s not actually that dangerous. And it’s hostile, to the point that you’ve got to wonder how the Raiders ever managed to band together in the first place.
While I’d prefer more action to take place in the towns, where good/evil offers more social possibilities and the chance for unexpected twists, the sheer number of sets built for the various subquests is excellent. I’d have liked a bit more life to it though - more people going from A to B, more of a feel that at least the well-trodded paths have been somewhat tamed to contrast with the parts that sensible people simply don’t tread in, rather than a succession of walled off citadels. The original Fallouts were reasonably busy, due to being built around the ‘stranger’ character archetype - coming to town to sort out problems, but never finding a home. This one pushes loneliness and isolation just a bit too much for my liking, but again, it’s ‘different’, not ‘bad’.
You can hire wingmen in various places, and unlike Ian from the original Fallout, you can trust them with an Uzi, but for the most part your only companion is your trusty radio. This is one of many parts of Fallout that’s basically decent, but leaves you hungry for something more. You’re restricted to just a couple of major radio stations, and they repeat constantly. Enclave Radio plays canned messages from the lost President of the United States, along with cheery patriotic music. Galaxy News Radio plays the latest news and oldest music from Three Dog, a DJ fighting the ‘Good Fight’ in the ruins of Washington D.C with his six or so jazz CDs. It’s fun to hear updates on your progress through the game, even if he keeps bouncing between being a personal friend and only having heard of you in passing. Hearing Butcher Pete for the fiftieth time, not so much.
The music choices themselves are excellent, don’t get me wrong. And they’re perfectly in keeping with the world. Way Back Home really makes you feel like a weary exile, and no Fallout fan can hear the opening chords of Maybe without welling up, just a little. There just aren’t enough of them. Post GTA, we need more radio stations. Hell, there’s going to be DLC. Throw Sean Kennedy a few bucks to record an official Fallout version of Tales From The Afternow. That’d be pretty fun.
(Well, Rachael’s Mutt and onwards, except for Series 3. Brr. Series 3. Gah...)
Maaaaybe. You’ll think of me. When you are shopping at the Super Duper Mart, only a short walk from scenic Megaton. When you shop, shop Super Duper Mart. Ask about our Raider discount.
Fun as the Wasteland is, you can’t expect to survive too long in it. Well, that’s a lie, you can last more or less indefinitely due to not having to eat or drink and the general radiation level being incredibly low. Still, at some point, you need to go to town to actually get the quests started. The first one you visit is Megaton, a city built out of scrapped planes, just a short hike away from the sealed Vault 101, where your character spent a whole tutorial growing up. Fallout is easily at its best when it comes to strapping scrap metal together into something cool, even if Fallout 3 has an annoying tendency of going all-out sci-fi with things like the Super Mutants everywhere, flying eyeball drones, and futuristic sledgehammers. Megaton is a great example.
Kinda.
Visually speaking, it’s a great town - dirty and grungy, with plenty of vertical movement as the walkways spiral around the place. Sadly, as a bit of game design, it’s pretty weak. It’s very hard to find things in the sprawl, and that includes things to do to get your character started. The big quest here is the one everyone knows about - whether or not to destroy the city on behalf of the world’s stupidest baddie.
If you accept his quest, which he gives you in the middle of a crowded bar while ignoring the hardened mercenary on the next table or the handful of other people who might take exception to his boss’ plan to improve the view by turning them all into cinders, you press one button on the bomb. To disarm it, you press another. As long as your Explosives stat is high enough, otherwise you can’t do either. Likewise, if your Repair skill isn’t high enough, you can’t fix the leaky pipes all over town and thus sort out the town’s soon-to-be-critical water supply problem.
There are still quests to find, but hitting two stop signs in quick succession is a bit silly for the tiny starter town. Sure, there are ways of boosting your stats to take them on, but like many other elements in the game (notably repair, lockpicking and hacking) they’re poorly explained. Not that it matters. You’re almost certainly too broke to use them anyway, which is why you’re… doing them in the first place. Doh…
Another irritating bit here is that you need to sleep to regain health, but you need to ‘own’ a bed before the game lets you have your forty winks. Why you can’t just be kicked out by an angry owner is beyond me, but no matter. When you get into town, you can ask the Sheriff where you can rent one, and he sends you to a bar run by the evil brother of Atlas from Bioshock to talk with a girl called Nova.
Fine. So far so good. Except that instead of dropping a few caps to put your feet up, you find you’re actually expected to pay 120 caps to rent Nova herself for the night. This seems… excessive, especially since the same Sheriff is only willing to cough up 100 caps for you to save the town from an atomic bomb. Dammit, game! Just give me a bed, and I’ll take any other matters into my own hands!
(In fairness, if you do save the town, he gives you a house where you can rest up for free. And a robot butler. And you can talk his fee up a bit if you’ve got the speech stat, just as you can get a really funny outcome to the Megaton bomb quest if you have the Black Widow perk and chat up the guy who wants to blow the town up instead of outright refusing him. It’s a pretty good quest overall.)
Best. Game. EVER.
After Megaton, the main plot funnels you… more or less.. on a rail through the gameworld, but you can turn right around and head off in whatever direction you like. Much as I wanted to find somewhere as cool as Fallout 2’s New Reno, the locations tend to be decently ‘realistic’ environments instead of anything that grandiose. There are plenty of random encounters, including mutated animals, different factions taking a pop at each other, and lots and lots of subquests scattered around the place.
When getting from A to B involves dungeon-crawling through a complicated Metro system and maze like ruins, it’s easy to get lost. Unlike Oblivion, you can get out of your depth, and I suspect it’s one of those games like Bioshock where half the people who play are constantly short of the all-important water chips of healthpacks and ammo, while the other half have them in abundance. Washington D.C is particularly bad for this, with a couple of areas that suddenly shot up in difficulty so fast - a whole hospital full of bullet-soaking Super Mutants being a particularly painful bit - I wasn’t sure if I’d accidentally stumbled into another subquest by accident. Still, you can always Fast Travel back to a known area if you get lost. So that’s okay.
What wasn’t okay was my first trip to Rivet City - a converted aircraft carrier - where my character suddenly became psychic and started asking questions about an important location I’d never actually been to or heard of. A mission objective that boils down to ‘Go Back And Look More Closely’ doesn’t help when you have no idea where/what the bloody thing actually is and nobody wants to ‘remind’ you.
Wait, no I haven’t. Who the hell are you anyway?
I’ve yet to encounter many particularly memorable characters - a couple, definitely, which I won’t spoil. They’re far, far, far better than the horrible army of blanks we had to sit through in Oblivion, but remind me of Vampire: Bloodlines only in the sense that the similar treatment given to the conversation engine and zooming head-portraits reminds me of just how much better Bloodlines handled its social elements. On the other hand, Fallout 3 is easily the superior ‘game’, so it all works out okay.
Unsurprisingly, most of the best characters have shown up in the subquests, where things can be wacky without infringing too much on the Proper Storyline about tracking Liam Neeson through the wasteland and making him record more character dialogue. There’s some excellent little touches, like a treasure hunter you can team up with not being stupid enough to take the ‘just wait here’ instruction while you’re holding onto the item you teamed up to collect, or the entirely random love letter your character might get from a very unusual lovesick Romeo. I do miss the black comedy of the original games though. There’s the odd bit of it here and there, but Bethesda plays everything much safer than Black Isle, both in terms of how much it tries to get away with in terms of mature content (no more selling spouses to slavers, at least, not so far) and in how far it’s willing to deviate from the expected wasteland template.
Anyway, that’s about it, at least from this point in the game. I’m throughly enjoying Fallout 3 - it’s as good a follow-up to the original games as anyone can reasonably have expected, and the fact that it’s a bit patchy is hardly a surprise given the sheer scope of what it’s doing. It’s not a game to talk and talk about, a la last year’s Bioshock, but it’s hands-down the best FPS/RPG since Deus Ex and Vampire: Bloodlines. It’s definitely been worth the wait as far as Bethesda’s development time goes, and a pretty decent chunk of the twenty eight years or so since Fallout 2 hit the shelves.
I remain mostly ambivalent to setting the world on fire. I just want to start a flame in your hair. I like fire. Possibly too much…
It’s not Oblivion with guns. It’s reminiscent of Oblivion in many ways, as you’d expect from, say, your favourite fantasy author doing sci-fi, but that’s all.
Question is, who do we give Fallout 5 to, to see how they do it?
Irrational. Clearly.
Posted by Richard on Sunday 2nd November
I hate to be this guy, but…
“There are things I don’t like, most notably that Perks are now tied to levels and don’t have negative elements. Being able to choose Animal Friend at the start - stopping animals attacking you - makes more sense than magically becoming the Mary Sue of the Capitol Wasteland.”
Perks were always tied to levels (though it was only on multiples of 3), you’re thinking of Traits. Traits were things like Small Frame, Jinxed, Bloody Mess, and so on, that had positives and negatives. In Fallout 3 Traits were dropped from character creation but some Traits were ported to Perks minus their negatives. Animal Friend was a Perk in the old games though; you could only choose it after character creation, and not before Level 9.
I point this stuff out not to be nit-picky, but because I think it’s easy to remember the old games imperfectly and Fallout 3 doesn’t deserve to be criticized for failing to match up to imaginary precedent.
Posted by Adam on Sunday 2nd November
Perks were always tied to levels (though it was only on multiples of 3), you’re thinking of Traits. Traits were things like Small Frame, Jinxed, Bloody Mess, and so on, that had positives and negatives.
Yes, you’re right, of course. The way it works here is that Fallout 3 doesn’t have Traits at all, but winds them all into one general Perks list. You get a new Perk every level. I didn’t remember the level restrictions first time round, but yes, they were tied to them.
The point still pretty much stands though - the game has too many stats as it is, and I’d have preferred that the Perks were more open at the start to help create a customised character, in much the same way that Traits originally were. I’m not particularly bothered if Bethesda does things differently to the original games so much as how it plays now. In this instance, it’s more that taking multiple levels of the same perk is just one more bloody stat to deal with. That’s the same as the original games, sure, but I didn’t like it there either, so it continues to bug me.
Not much, but a little.
Posted by Richard on Sunday 2nd November
I’m pretty much in agreement, I like the game a lot (and I wasn’t expecting much from them after Oblivion) and am enjoying myself with only the occasional bit of annoyance. Like sleeping and stimpacks healing crippled limbs (and heads being “crippled” rather than fractured or something) and the occasional shocking piece of writing ("I’m looking for my father, middle aged guy..").
Posted by Nick on Sunday 2nd November
It’s a fair point. I do miss the Traits, and wonder if another stage of childhood (maybe in that 1-10 gap?) could have worked in a reasonable way to include those. My favorite Trait (aside from the overpowered Gifted, obviously) was Finesse, which gave you +10% chance on critical hits in exchange for a reduction of base damage. Finesse is in Fallout 3 as a Perk but I think it’s not as effective.
The multi-rank Perks, especially those which just give you a few extra points to your skills, seem like a bit of a waste. I already get skill points every level and I only get to pick 19, so I much prefer to focus on those which give me a big bonus in one rank or allow me to interact with the world in some new, special way (such as Mister Sandman).
SPOILERS WARNING
I can one-up you on that Abraham Washington thing, by the way. I came to Rivet City after installing Three Dog’s dish on the Washington Monument, but BEFORE I had returned to him for my reward. While in Rivet City I talked to Dr. Li, who spontaneously spilled a big sack of beans about dear old Dad. I was actually worried that I might have skipped a big chunk of the main quest, so I loaded my last save and just avoided her while I was there. Went back to Three Dog and who does he send me to see? Oh well, at least the game does it’s best to adapt when you stray from the path.
Posted by Adam on Sunday 2nd November
That’s actually the problem I had, although I’d collected my reward and been sent to see her. Doctor Li recognising you out of the blue isn’t too bad, but the conversation was terrible. I hadn’t found the lab, so the holotape nonsense she spouted made no sense, and left me completely lost as to where to go next. On the plus side, it meant ambling into some fun side-quests trying to find out.
Posted by Richard on Sunday 2nd November
Rivet City is a great example of how i hate the shift from concept art to actual graphical design. Conceptually Rivet City looked really interesting. Graphically its bloody dull.
Posted by William Main on Sunday 2nd November
Rivet City is a time machine that takes you back to Invisible War.
Posted by Richard on Sunday 2nd November
While we’re on the subject though, a general plea to the inhabitants of this world: It’s been centuries since the Great War.
TIDY YOUR SHIT UP ALREADY
It’s one thing to have the Wastelands full of rubbish, but 200 years is plenty of time to push a broom around your own house and throw out all those empty coke bottles. Honestly, it’s embarassing…
Posted by Richard on Sunday 2nd November
The best FPS/RPG since Deus Ex and Bloodlines? How many others are there? Invisible War, Boiling “The bugs killed my parents” Point, and… STALKER? Does STALKER count? Not much of an RPG, that game. That’s pretty much it, isn’t it?
I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the game, I’m still on the fence about whether (or rather when) to get it, but I have to clear out Far Cry 2 first in any case - if I can make it stop crashing. Your observations are interesting, and your comparisons with the game’s two predecessors seem far more fair than anything else I’ve read so far. Thanks : )
Posted by Jonas on Sunday 2nd November
The best FPS/RPG since Deus Ex and Bloodlines? How many others are there?
You may notice my tongue poking through my cheek with that line. Stalker - note to world, just because the developer wants you to shout it or pretend it’s an acronym doesn’t mean you have to play ball - is the only other one of note, and I really didn’t get on with it myself. Although technically, I’m talking about the original Deus Ex, not Invisible War, so that counts too.
I actually own Boiling Point. I must get round to playing more than the first hour or so of it at some point…
Posted by Richard on Sunday 2nd November
Three Dog needs to shut the hell up - he reminds me of that DJ from Jet Set Radio Future only even more annoying.
I found a lawnmower in a subway station, how the hell did that get there? They didn’t think their junk placement out much it would seem. Then again they included a lot of stuff that makes no sense, like Deathclaws and whatnot.. they just had to get mudcrabs in there too, albeit with legs ¬_¬
Still, good game.
Posted by Nick on Monday 3rd November
Boiling point always crashes on me :(
Posted by Therlun on Monday 3rd November
Boiling Point crash? Never!
Posted by Richard on Monday 3rd November
got myself an xbox 360 to play the new fallout3, and whilst i loved the first 2, and tactics was ok, I still like fallout 3 - I just dont think they played the orginals enough.
1) Map isnt great - I’d love a feature to locate “discovered but unlocked/unhacked containers/pc’s”
2) VATS - used to be more tactical, aimed, burst etc - now its simplified…
3) Economy is not that good,
4) Quests, i’d like it if you could have more variation eg Nuke megaton - couldnt you add “lie- yes i’ll blow it up” then go and kill the guy instead?
5) Radio - seriously tedious after 1st hour, maybe achievements/downloads can allow you to “find” cd’s in the wasteland?!
6) I loved being able to chat to supermutants etc.
Whilst I love the game its a high 80 - i think most of these could be solved in downloadable content or the intevitable expansion pack to push it up to a 95%!
Posted by rob on Monday 3rd November
The economy is horrible, but I’m probably thinking on different lines. Something which increasingly annoyed me is that people in this world couldn’t even conceivably survive. Places like Megaton should be farming brahmin like crazy, but the first time I saw one of them being used for that purpose, it was because they were lying dead outside of Arufu.
Seriously, doesn’t anyone in this universe consume anything other than iguana on a stick, purified water, and 200 year old soft drinks that are clearly so festering, nobody can even be bothered to take them out of the vending machines to loot the bottle cap?
Quests, i’d like it if you could have more variation eg Nuke megaton - couldnt you add “lie- yes i’ll blow it up” then go and kill the guy instead?
You can, can’t you? You can show the Sheriff the evidence and he goes to arrest Burke and it ends in a firefight.
Posted by Richard on Monday 3rd November
You can, that’s what I did. Walked out of that saloon with a very nice hat too.
Posted by Adam on Monday 3rd November
The Bloodlines mention is something that got me thinking once again about its reviews on release. That is to say, I don’t think I know of a single person whose opinions of that title haven’t increased dramatically in the last four years.
Do you think this is as a result of the thing being underrated at the time? I’d argue that this is probably true (in 2004, I didn’t bother playing bast the game-ending bugs early on, but playing through again twice in the last couple of years drove home quite how brilliant it is), but I wonder also if - as you implied - it’s because no-one’s really tried to do that sort of thing since. Until Fallout 3, of course - which, funnily enough, reminded me a lot more of the old Deus Ex types than it did of either Oblivion or the original Fallouts.
Posted by Lewis on Monday 3rd November
Bloodlines is a game that benefits from a bit of distance, mostly because of the tremendous gulf between the absolutely brilliant bits like Therese/Jeanette and the wonderful atmosphere… and the horrible bits like the combat system and the sewer crawling that are fresh in your mind when commenting on it after a first play. When you’re not still wincing from one of those, the good bits stand out far more, and with good cause. Lots of games have shitty sewer levels - even if sewers in games tend to be weirdly clean. Not many have that scene in the haunted house, or the business with Samantha, or custom dialogue like the Malkavian stuff.
Sadly, in a review, the crap bits are likely to be the frustrations still lurking in your mind, especially in a game that decreases in quality so much in the final furlong. I remember it getting pretty good reviews overall though.
(It helps that Invisible War had previously disappointed just about everyone - not absolutely everyone, but, bah - so people were coming into Bloodlines from another game with terrible combat and level design, but which had also completely failed when it came to atmosphere and set-pieces. Nobody had any real expectations for Bloodlines - not really - which made it that much more exciting to be blown away by it going above and beyond in the cool-thing department. Not least because unlike a lot of developers, Troika was smart enough to front-load a lot of its most most eye-catching content. And I’m not just talking about Jeanette’s chest...)
I think the sheer number of cool things in Bloodlines, not least its sense of personality after the fairly sterile Deus Ex games, and the fact that it was the first to do a lot of the clever things it did, would mean that people would remember it fondly even if there had been another big FPS/RPG hybrid thing since. I’d still love to see another one pick up the baton though.
Posted by Richard on Tuesday 4th November
I’m starting to replay Bloodlines now, thanks to its cheapo-weekend on Steam. I really enjoyed it at the time (8/10), though the part from Chinatown onwards really annoyed me with their bugginess. It’ll be interesting to see how much it improves now that it’s had a few years worth of patches and fan-love.
As for Fallout 3, I’m more convinced now than I was a week ago as to whether I’ll like it or not. But it’s going to have to wait until I get over my first flush with Wrath of the Lich King.
Posted by Iain on Tuesday 4th November
I love that there is/was two competing patch projects, one restoring it to how Troika intended it, and another just trying to improve it. Don’t know if they’re both still going, mostly because I stopped caring.
And yeah, not long to go until the Licking.
Posted by Richard on Tuesday 4th November
Funny, I just got Bloodlines for the first time over the weekend, loving it so far. Not finding combat particularly bad, except that firearms are a bit weak, even against puny humans. It does seem to suffer from the fact that if your stats are low enough you can blaze away at someone three feet away from you and miss every time, something which I recall Deus Ex suffered from as well. Probably helps that I really like the original tabletop games as well.
I was really looking forward to Fallout 3, but the constant torrent of “Oblivion-with-guns/Bethesda-r-gey/Unrealistic” stuff made me start avoiding all the coverage. Never sure how far to trust internet opinions, everything seems to skew too far to the extreme ends of the scale. Couple of mates said good things about it though, probably pick it up soon.
Posted by M on Tuesday 4th November
The combat’s not too bad in the early sections, but there are some very fighting-intensive sections where it really, really, really gets painful.
Posted by Richard on Wednesday 5th November
Thanks for the shout out, I’m drooling for this game now thanks to your review. I need to buy my top-end gaming system Christmas present to myself early it seems ;)
Posted by Felicia on Wednesday 5th November
Hiya, Felicia. Yeah, you’ll love it. I know exactly two people who don’t agree that it’s an excellent game, but they don’t count, because I’m shunning them with my new portable shunning device. Shun! Shun! Shun!
Posted by Richard on Wednesday 5th November
It’s a lovely game as long as you’re out in the wasteland exploring, fighting ghouls in dank subterranean tunnels and generally staying the hell away from the uninspiring main quest to the sound of the Ink Spots. But ever so often you’ll stumble on something shoddy and atmosphere breaking that makes you wish they spent another couple of months on polish.
Like heading into Evergreen Mills, the big raider base, where everyone blindly opens fire on you as usual. Fine, I can deal with that. But then you stumble on a raider that’s clearly been locked in a cell for something, running around with a knife drawn in a futile effort to get at you.
It’s a lot harder to dismiss “Why can’t you just TALK to the monsters” when they’re human, and talking’s the sensible course of action.
And noone, not even the Brotherhood of Steel that’s been warring with the them for years, reacts to the fact that you’re walking around with a supermutant sidekick.
And that end! GNNNNNAAARRGHH! I finished it last night, it made me SO mad.
It’s a fine game, but definitely one where the journey’s more important than the destination.
Posted by Sören Höglund on Thursday 6th November
I loved how sad the game made me feel, especially during the first 10 or so hours (after which you start to get a bit desensitised). Entering these houses, filled with bits and pieces of people’s lives, skeletons her and there. I really like that aspect of melancholy.
It’s also what I’ve always been kind of weary of - Bethesda has presented this nuclear blasted landscape in quite a harsh, realistic way, which I thought would be hard to mesh with the dark humour of the first two games (including gory violence, which was pretty cartoony in the old games). I think they haven’t pulled that aspect off.
I am enjoying the game a lot, though!
Posted by Alex on Friday 7th November
Agreed, the harsher landscape and change in perpective makes the slow-mo hyper-violence seen puerile and off-putting rather than the violent slapstick of the previous games.
I think it would have worked better if your bullets decapitating people was an occasional absurd touch rather than happening nearly every damn time.
Posted by Sören Höglund on Friday 7th November
It’s switchblades decapitating people that gets me.
Posted by Richard on Friday 7th November
Have you tried spiked knuckles yet?
Posted by Nick on Saturday 8th November
Well I finally finished the game after 80 hours of play (no, really). I feel pretty confident in saying that if I haven’t seen all there is to see, I came pretty close. The game is the best RPG in years and a truly fantastic experience overall. The ending is a joke. Not how the story ends in plotting sense, but the execution is terrible. I don’t want to go into specifics but I might as well have just sat the final mission out for the impact I had. And yes, the lack of a town-by-town breakdown of my actions was awful. After investing this much time in the game, I cannot describe how disappointing it is to receive an ending summary that essentially says, “You were a good person.” Thanks Ron Perlman, but that is not information that I could not have gotten from my PIPboy at any point in the game.
Posted by Adam on Tuesday 11th November
Yep, I’d agree with that.
The last missions is just… bizarre. Maybe if I’d actually been working towards that or something it would have worked, but just having it show up…
Posted by Richard on Tuesday 11th November
What happened to the “over 300 endings”?
Posted by Therlun on Monday 17th November
They backtracked on that a while ago. The endings are just different mixes of stuff, like a new silhouette if you picked a female instead of male character, different portraits of the father for a photo, and so on, with good/bad segments for two major decisions you make at the end and a more generalised bit based on karma level.
Nothing particularly exciting.
Posted by Richard on Monday 17th November
>That doesn’t make Fallout 3 better or worse, simply different.
I’ve not read any “proper” reviews of Fallout 3 yet, but it’s good we’re seeing more of this than “Ho-hum, Oblivion with guns.”, that people are accepting the idea of Fallout: Bethesda Edition.
Question is, who do we give Fallout 5 to, to see how they do it?
Posted by beemoh on Sunday 2nd November