Also one thing everyone seems to disagree on is the Map/Exploration issue. I LOVED exploring and finding new things. But there were so many places with 1 quest, and only 3 residents. I don't buy the, live as far away as possible from raiders thing... When people band together they are more protected.I certainly don't advocate collapsing the whole gorgeous wasteland down to a few large settlements, but megaton was the biggest damn town! There should be at least 1 or 2 places like New Reno or the Hub in the originals, with multiple areas and quest chains, lots of roaming people... Caravaners, addicts, merchants...

Just a few areas where you can see what kind of civilization would have developed out of the wasteland. A democracy? A tyrant leader?


As for factions, I think Bethesda created a great piece of work with the Outcasts. Interesting group. But no you can't join them. You can hardly join the Brotherhood. You can't join Talon company. You can't even MEET 2 raiders who will talk to you, let alone join a raiding group. Any "factions" you can join are superficial. Slavers have only 1 quest, Rangers offer you a little cash for exploring. They need to DEVELOP on these cool groups they've created.

'Survival: Difficult combat, weighted ammo/aids, rarity of ammo/aids, severe radiation, poorly stocked vendors, modified ruleset for skills/attributes. THIS should be hard. You should have to lie, cheat, steal, or worse to get by.'

This is probably the most needed addition to the game.

That's why we have mods for. Mods like http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4187 , http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2406, http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3238, http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1636 and http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1990 help make the town & cities feel more alive and bigger than they should be( if you're using the PC that is)

I don't want to rely on mods to bring me content, and I DEFINITELY don't want developers justifying their decisions with, "Oh we'll just release a modding tool." Just improve for Fallout 4, thats what I want.

If I were capable at modding myself I would love to get involved, but truth be told Im not.

I was refering to Fallout 3 for that post. For part 4 i'm sure every gamers alike around the world would love to see a biggest worldspace and a lot more NPCs in terms of number and variations(and you may need a better PC when the time comes) but when the time comes, would gamer be satisfied? The most obvious answer is NO. Even if you give them double the content and quality, they'll still receive complaints. With the mass media hype nowadays, "expectations" is the real killer as it will never be met especially with those angst teen gamer crowd or hardcoe "previous game" purists! http://www.nma-fallout.com/ website is a good example.

One of the best suggestions yet

on the subject of item descriptions, perhaps bethesda wanted to have item descriptions but they couldn't because they found that the pip boy screen was too small to have all that information on there at once.

It's possible, but I do think they did a good job overall with the interface/HUD. It's clean, effective, and doesn't drag you down like some item management systems. If they can add this bit in it would be great.

moved to the less read forum =(

I'm very much against the implementation of vehicles into the post-apocalyptic survival genre (unless it's Tank Girl of course!). Cars are very symbolic of human apathy and excess; so adding them to the raw survival scenario of desperation and the day to day struggle of survival dilutes the situation somewhat. Whilst I appreciate FO2 had a car, it certainly was one of the weaker ideas (this is *my* probably unpopular opinion) that Black Isle came up with and is probably one of the reasons I prefer Fallout over Fallout 2.

Indeed. I find it strange that anything with potential 'spoilers' is moved to ''General Discussion Forum''.

If you are talking about Fallout 3 on an online forum then its pretty obvious you should expect spoilers. Add to the fact there is a pretty clear spoiler tag available for posting and this whole 'policy' makes no sense whatsoever.

But back to the topic, I pretty much unanimously agree with all of it.

I liked Fallout 1 much more than fallout 2. Not because of the car though.

Wouldn't someone who could get a car working have an advantage over the many people who could not.... And why wouldn't you exploit every advantage you could in a survival situation? There are vertibirds in the game and you expect me to believe that they wouldn't have cars/jeeps/hummers for troop transport as well?

I CAN appreciate NOT having vehicles, its just my personal opinion that it would be more fun with one.....

Fallout Tactics was a good step forward in the vehicle area. Sadly, this was not emulated due to engine restraints. Like I said in other threads, I hope they make FO4 with a whole new engine.

I would love it on a new engine but would never bet on it. Maybe if its pushed to the next generation of consoles I wish bethesda owned the Unreal Engine.
The art in fallout was good... the implementation in some areas lacked, especially character actions and death animations. The exploding and severed heads are so redundant it hurts.


I really enjoyed your review BTW, we have some similar views.

Thats funny I was just about to point you in its direction lol...

Completely disagree with almost all of it!


No, what the ending suffered from was Missing Reel syndrome. I have the same problem with one of the mods I made where right at the last minute I removed a section of the story and there's a visible gap where it was. That said, it didn't svck and was a lot better than most other games I've played, which clearly had their originally-devised endings intact which were almost without exception dull, cliched and repetitive.


They're not mutually exclusive. Wes Johnson aside, most of the better actors in videogames are also well-known film/television actors. This is as true of Mass Effect (which pretty much had an all-star cast) as it is of Fallout 3. Most people think the actress playing Amata did a good job in Fallout 3; they just don't realise it was the same actress who was the main girl in Cloverfield. They'd probably like her less, on principle, if they did because there's such a strong aversion on these forums to perfectly able screen actors voicing videogames.


Uhhh ... I think you need to play Mass Effect again. How much choice do you really think you have? I actually recall only making two or three major choices in Mass Effect in the entire game. The rest was only a choice between being polite or being snarky. There was far greater choice, consequence and depth in Fallout 3. I bet you haven't even seen all the consequences of your actions in Fallout 3, either - I've found stuff in the construction set that I might not have noticed in the game; little subtle outcomes of your actions.


No thanks. *yawn*
I'd accept brief text epilogues describing it, though - like you get in films - but not a long voiced narrative, please.


Ugh! No! Please no!
And I liked the bears.


That sounds like a great idea until you actually implement it, and then you just have a frustrating and annoying game. It's like the "drunkenness" scripts in Necessities of Morrowind. It seems like such a good idea for alcohol to half-blind you and make you clumsy until you're actually just trying to get somewhere and it is just this huge, irritating PITA and you can't for the life of you imagine why anyone ever thought it would be clever to do that.


Agree with you about the six, but the drugs thing they already did in Shivering Isles. I guess they just didn't want to repeat themselves.


Again that's something that seems like a good idea until you actually try to do it. Realistically, the only way to do that would be to have more characters with absolutely no dialogue (which people would complain about) and more repetitive interiors (which people would also complain about). It's something I didn't like so much about Mass Effect - you had these big locations with people you couldn't speak to, interiors you couldn't enter, and low-detail repetitive cells. I'd rather see fewer, more-detailed locations and inhabitants - which was something much-praised about Shivering Isles that they repeated for Fallout 3.


You don't have to use the shishkebab, you know. I'm still looking for that railway rifle schematic, and I do love that Power Fist.

So, really, the only things we agree on is that we should be able to mix our own drugs, upgrade weapons, and have six. The first two are highly possible for FO4 but I'm not too confident about the latter. People are still way to twitchy about that.

Not really. The first two Fallouts did it fine.

Whats the point of implementing something if its going to be half-assed? Fallout 3 is waaay too easy. Its like, yeah, we are going to let you break limbs, but ooh don't worry, one stimpack and you are away. No need to invest im them pesky doctor skills. Oh, did we mention we did away with that too?

Breaking a limb in real life does not resolve itself by sleeping away or injecting yourself with something. If you are going to include these things in game, them make them matter.

@princess_stomper

1-You're saying I should look into the world editor to see how my decisions SUBTLY affect the world?

2-Okay. Keep the star voice acting. But at least get more than 3 other people to voice EVERYONE else. I have no problem with Star Talent per se, but I'm assuming you could pay other actors less, and get a bigger variety. Im tired of hearing the settler, being the brotherhood guard, being the merchant, being the slaver.

3- I'm not saying you had more FREEDOM in mass effect, im saying the choices mattered and were difficult. These are the ONLY choices reflected in the epilogue, and non of them have moral ambiguity. The epilogue isn't the only reason the ending was bad. You just . A town-by-town and key character epilogue shows the long term effects of your decisions. Stating what you already know is redundant and stupid. "Oh he wasn't evil and didn't blow up megaton." I know i didn't do that. What I didnt know was that maybe Gob turned feral, and Leo Stahls addiction led to the eventual murder of
Lucas Simms over thefts to feed his drug addiction. Maybe a quest involving helping Moriarty vs The Brass Lanter led to something.


4-Densely populated is too vague a term. I not saying 50 interacting NPCs. I just want at least one larger settlement, and larger quests chains. I first expected Underworld to be a HUGE city of ghouls with lots of quests, because every other ghoul in the game says "Oh I'm on my way to Underworld," or "Oh I'm from Underworld." But as it turns out you get 2 quests and 5 NPCs that do nothing to enhance the experience via quests or even story.
Are you saying the the Hub was a failure in Fallout? Is Megaton as big as you like a town? Whats wrong with having more than 20 people in a town? There are already plenty of generic NPCs in Megaton, and I liked it... So what if i can't INTERACT with everyone. Thats fine.


You think these inhabitants are detailed? These are the shallowest characters I've ever seen. You think these environments are varied and detailed? We can ALREADY complain about repetitive subways, and each vault is no different from the last. Its a curse of games of this size, and repeated textures are VERY LOW on my scale of priorities, so long as there is at least a few groups of major variation. But one large city isn't going to cause riots about interiors or non-interacting NPCs which are ALREADY in the game.



5- I'm not saying KEEP Crippling In the game or make it the focus survival mechanic of the game. Right now its like they said "Oh yeah we should throw that in..." The didnt have a vision for WHY they put it in... Even not being able to heal crippled wounds during combat would suffice to make it a more sensible mechanic. It doubles by making a perk useless because the mechanic its based on isn't important. There are SEVERAL radiation perks, which are also useless because of how trivial radiation is to manage.

6- You don't have to read item descriptions you know....

7-Admittedly the silliness is personal taste, I just felt Bethesda let it limit their crafting system.

Why did this make me laugh out loud and scare my cat?

Are those exclusive? ... Cause if so your cats a prude.

I meant my sudden outburst of laughter scared my cat off my lap

On the town density topic - it does seem a bit like a missed opportunity to me to have these settlements with all this backstory and then come to find that there's really very little to "do" there in terms of quests. That is one thing I kind of miss about Fallout 1 and 2 (and even every other Bethesda game I've played, too.) When I first got to Megaton, I was expecting it to be a source of lots of really good sidequests. I was half expecting to spend a couple days exploring everything that place to offer. Instead I did a couple fetch quests, smooth-talked Moriarty, saved Megaton (which was really a brief quest considering how it important it's supposed to be,) and started Moira's quest. And that was about it.

It didn't feel terribly shallow, so much as there's a lot of missed opportunity to delve deeper into the mythology of the place. And seeing as this is a videogame - quests are kind of the established means of achieving that. Megaton didn't come off as terribly undeveloped in the sidequest category, but it's also the densest area for supplying sidequests in the whole game.

This is a bit of a turn around from something like Fallout 1/2 and Oblivion/ Morrowind. In Fallout, each town I went to was ripe with opportunities beyond just talking to NPCs. In Oblivion, I could spend a week walking around any of the cities in that game just doing all the tasks that came up - not even counting the Faction-based quests.

I just didn't see that as much in Fallout 3 as I was expecting. I'm a quest-geek - I like that sense of achievement.

Agree with the radiation and health things. Make it much harder to get rid of rads - RadAway should be far more valuable - so that when I hear the click-click-click of a rad counter I really have to stop and think about what I'm doing! Is it worth it to cross that radioactive pool?

Broken limbs should require more than a stimpack to heal. The Medicine skill should give us a chance to correct/treat it, but with a cost. Force us to limp/crawl back to a town or outpost and hire a doctor. (Sleeping in a bed for 1 hour shouldn't heal me 100% either!)

Addictions, too, should be harder to cure, require time, and have more punishing drawbacks. That way drug use, too, becomes a question of cost/benefit. I was stunned when I realized that, aside from addiction, there was no downside to using Buffout, for example. In the old system there was always a temporary drawback once a drug wore off. Buffout left you weaker for a few hours once the buff wore off.

Skills shouldn't cap at 100, nor should every character be able to max out every skill. TAG skills should carry more weight than un-tagged. Force us to make choices, choices that make real differences in gameplay.

In other words, what FO3 needs are CONSEQUENCES. Consequences to karma, health, abilities. These things are what make the game varied, and replayable.

Yeah, crippled limbs could use some work. I'm not saying I have a perfect answer, but I found in Fallout 3 getting crippled meant nothing more than hitting tab and using a Stimpak to heal it, even during combat. It was a good 30 hours into my first game that I first noticed the blurry vision effect from a crippled head, and that was only because I hadn't realized it was crippled until I started seeing the symptoms.

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=955121