Fallout 3 is not a bad game by any means. Still some aspects of it are lacking; the heavy focus on combat while the originals had many ways of dealing with situations, the compressed landscape and timescale (as opposed to Fallout 1/2 which had realistic distances between actual locations, and was real time when in a location), and the godawful writing.

The setting itself goes from being fairly faithful to the originals to flat out inconsistent. Normal Super Mutants and Ghouls getting along, the ridiculously high volume of Ghouls both feral and otherwise (Ghouls are supposed to be a lot rarer than they are in Fallout 3), the presence of newer and more advanced energy weapons but no presence of the laser and plasma rifles from Fallout 1/2, the Enclave's new Power Armor being called MK II rather than MK III and being inferior to the T-51b, and this is to say nothing about the leaps of logic in their own game world. Fallout 3 was certainly more consistent with the setting than Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, but it also has more issues than Fallout 2 did.

Ummm... they had a lot of places to fall back to if they needed. Considering they could open any vault they wanted.
So dont get all gamesas plot-holey.. cause if youre gonna use that then F2 had the same plot hole.

let alone the whole experiment thing going against the story of fallout one..

If you want to talk about consistent with the setting, fO2 was, by far, the worst of the three, with it's ridiculous special encounters and annoying OOC dialogue options. I'd rather deal with intergame, or even intra game inconsistencies than be beaten over the head with out of game pop culture.

I hated those as well, but they have nothing to do with consistency.

It was a huge gamestopper for me, in that it went far beyond the mild annoyance I have over what I consider to be minor internal consistency issues in FO3. i just don't are about lore inconsistencies between the games.

If we're going to talk about difficulty, then I found all three games to be fairly easy to breeze right through after some initial hiccups in the beginning. In Fallout 2, I always really enjoyed the first big trek you take out East to try and find Vault City (if that's the way you end up going,) because it could take quite a few reloads before you actually made it there in one piece. After that, though, most of it was pretty much a breeze. And in Fallout 3 I had a lot of fun with the first few levels where you'd run into situations where you'd get swamped by Raiders and have to take down one of them so that you could loot their body for enough weapons and ammo to kill the next guy, and so on. But before long I'd always end up with an effectively infinite supply of ammo and meds.

The old games my standard character would tag Speech, Science, and Small Guns to start. Within a level or two I'd have Small Guns up to a 100 or so and be working on a decent amount of points in some other areas, as well (Melee always makes a good backup.) I'd usually also end up picking the extra Tag Perk at some point and Tag Energy Weapons - around the halfway mark, I'd have Energy Weapons up to 100 and be working on setting it around at least 150 or so. I actually ended up doing pretty much the same thing in Fallout 3, as well. Except I never ended up having to pick up the extra Tag skill - I'd have Small Guns, Speech, Science, and Repair maxed out before long; and Energy Weapons would simply be the next skill to work on maxing out to 100.

Personally, I think the very fact that they kept any resemblance to the previous Fallout games' ruleset is exactly what opens Fallout 3 up to such criticism. I've played Morrowind and Oblivion, but I never spent much time on the forums talking about it. I'm sure there's plenty of room for improvement in their ruleset, but I don't have any "amazing" ideas on how to "fix" it. I loved Mass Effect, and am currently having a lot of fun with Dragon Age, but I'm not exactly overly impressed with their rules, either. But I also have nothing to compare them to. Those are their rules, that's how their stats work; in all of those cases - I can either take it or leave it.

But with Fallout 3, we're talking about a game that's ostensibly based on it's predecessors system. They've kept SPECIAL (if in name only,) etc - so it's set itself up for direct comparisons between the two. I can look directly at what (I thought) worked well in Fallout 1; and see how it works in Fallout 3, and draw my own conclusions. Fallout 2's skills go up to 300 - Fallout 3's skills go to 100, etc. It's naturally going to lead some of us to ponder what the purpose of that change was, and how it affected othe areas of the ruleset; and obviously lead us to draw conclusions about whether or not we like any of those changes. (And I still can't figure out exactly why they made that change...)

That's really why I think they'd have been served just as well by coming up with their own rules - down to renaming all of the stats and such. I'd probably still find myself making some correlations between the two, but I wouldn't be able to make such direct comparisons. I enjoy Fallout 3, but I can't help that I'm left feeling that the underlying ruleset is but a shadow of it's former self - one where the changes made have even led to some of the more common gripes about the game. (Such as the level cap, being able to max out all skills, running out of places to spend skill points, etc.) I never had those concerns when playing the previous two games (though - believe it or not - I actually do have some gripes about the original ruleset as well,) and yet they've been introduced as a direct result of the changes made in Fallout 3. No matter how good the story or "immersion" get, there's always going to be that shortcoming there.

Special encounters are a good point to raise; Fallout 1 & 2 had them, but Fallout 3 did not ~it did have odd encounters though (like the alien ship, and the firelance drop). The reason I say it did not have the so-named "special encounters", is because the ones in Fallout 1 & 2 were not intended to be taken literally in all cases. The wasteland itself is the only place you find them in FO1 and the chess playing scorpion in FO2 IMO is a mistake (also the opinion IIRC of the guy that put it there, Such should have been out in some abandoned wasteland shack miles from nowhere).

Fallout 3 takes place 100% from the internal view of the PC, and what you see is the PC's experience (even the drug effects wearing off), but in FO1 you see the land and the PC from your perspective as an observer. The wasteland is a harsh unexplored place in Fallout (1), and the idea behind the regular encounters, is that you get jumped, or find something of interest (during the assumed hours and hours and days of walking uneventfully). The Specials are supposed to be "what the hell?" moments in the unexplored wastes where "anything" might be out there now, and its practically stamped "here be dragons". Interpret them as you wish (mechanically you cannot return to them or mention them to others); They may well be hallucination, simply just odd, an in joke gag for the player/observer (like the oil can), or an artifact of the setting (like the crashed alien ship with the Elvis print ~and personally, I take it as a one off that does not prove that aliens exist in the Fallout universe).

In Fallout three the game has you spend those (virtual travel) hours in real time, and salts the land with interesting encounters; (I can't see how they could do otherwise). Players are watching a virtual world and suspending disbelief as they play ~presenting them first person events that didn't really happen, or that they might not "get" just wouldn't play smooth or for the best IMO. (Like having quotes and limericks on the headstones of a partially obscured cemetery).

Different games, different style ~but Fallout (1, 2, and 3) encounters fit each game nicely IMO.

The Ghouls and Super Mutants don't seem to get along so much as the Super Mutants don't raid Ghoul Settlements simply because Ghouls are of no value to them. The Ghouls you meet in the Wasteland that can't get to Underworld on account of the Mutants imply that the Super Mutants have no qualms about shooting at Ghouls if they're bored.

I'm shocked that there's a complaint about the high volume of Ghouls. The DC area (And indeed, the Capital Wasteland in general) was home to MULTIPLE Nuclear Strikes within a fairly small area. That's a lot of Radiation being pumped out, and that's what creates the Ghouls. Indeed, if we want to get technical about it, Bakersfield was struck with a single Nuke and gave rise to Necropolis. So DC being filled to bursting with Ghouls isn't exactly a surprise.

The Advanced Weaponry makes sense. It's D.C., Nation's Capital. If there's anywhere in the Country where advanced military tech is going to appear outside the Front Lines, D.C. would be one of the top places. As for Enclave's armor still being Mark II and inferior to the T-51b...I think that was more a Gameplay decision. With the Brotherhood knocking around in even older T-45ds, making Enclave's armor weaker while still preserving the specialness of the T-51b made it so it was still a treat to find (Even if without Mods Power Armor is nigh-worthless anyway for it's lack of any meaningful bonuses).





It doesn't really fly in the face of Fallout 1. It's just retroactively turns Vault 13 into a Control Vault. Which isn't that difficult to see, given how you're not allowed back into the Vault at the end of the game (Contaminating the Experiment). Similarly, the Enclave was the one who set up the Experiments. Fleeing into one of their own Vaults would be kind of silly. Especially since they knew what was up with them.




Fallout 2's Pop Culture References and flagrant disregard of the setting make it the hardest Fallout Pill for me to swallow, despite the fact it has beautiful gameplay. The OOC is so bad, by the time I hit San Francisco and have to deal with a Chinese Kung Fu Contest, I simply cannot take it any longer. I get to San Fransisco, and I quit playing Fallout 2. I've never beaten it. New Reno's worse then San Fran, and it makes me really worried for New Vegas, but at least with Reno I can generally just ignore it's existence and avoid being ripped completely out of the experience. The fact San Fran ties directly to the Main Plot (In Fallout 2's plodding fashion in regards to the MQ - talk about a side event in the game. Unlike Fallout 1 and 3, I felt no threat even after Arroyo)...I can't take it. I get to the Hubologists and just cease playing.

Wouldnt leaving in the first place contaminate the experiment?


I mostly bring up the vaults as a place they could go because in the post i replied to it seemed to be an issue that the enclave would even be at raven rock.. that they shoulda just been on the oir rig..

Given that there are some years between the oil rig blowing up and fallout 3 starting, there was time to get that base set up.

Though i may have mis-read the intent of what was being said.. the "fleeing to the oil rig" being at the beggining of the great war.

any rate, i dont think its impoossible to have RR as a base

Only in regards to Vault 101 (Which was supposed to be closed forever), but through dialogue it's fairly clear that the original intent of that Vault - and even it's participation in the Vault-Tec experiment - has been lost as time went by.

Vault 13 was supposed to remain sealed for 200 years. As a result, sending out a scout or two every generation makes sense and helps the Overseers build to the eventual "End Date". The Vault Dweller had to go out because the Water Chip went belly up on them. His was an unscheduled departure, but one that had to be done and then he had to be readmitted. The Super Mutant threat gave the Overseer an excuse to kick him back out into the Wasteland and keep him out there after it was apparent he had to go much farther and longer then was intended (He was only supposed to jaunt over to Vault 15, after all). Obviously, that plan backfired on the Overseer.



Oh no no no. I never meant to imply that the Enclave had to have been at the Oil Rig. I was wondering aloud why they'd even go to the Oil Rig if a facility like Raven Rock was available to them. Raven Rock was set up, in Eden's own words, for the continuity of Government. Seems like it'd be an ideal place rather then for the Enclave (Who were comprised of government officials) to simply up and vanish for the West Coast months prior to the Great War (And get people asking bothersome questions, perhaps even uncovering the Enclave and its motives).

Then again, it's possible they didn't want to risk being at Ground Zero of the Nuclear Exchange, and the Oil Rig did give them access to some of the last Oil Reserves on Earth.

i meant to say that opening the vault would void it as a control, from a scientific standooint.. it would introduce variables-people and supplies leaving, extra things coming back- or at least that potential.. thats just contrary to what a control is. so there is a bit of an issue, its being a crontrol vault retro-actively.
if it were originally designed (in fallout one) to be a control vault (which it wasn't), replacement supplies above and beyond whats realistically necessary would have been implemented as a contingency for things like water chips breaking in order to reatain control status validity




well i geuss i hadnt gone thought the dialoges where it points out that raven rock had been there all along, and couldnt find it in the timeline, so i reckon being a bit more studious on that issue would ahve been good.
but, ya, i would agree that the reasoning for the rig being the primary location is that its isolated from any land mass, therefore isolated from being remotely close to an impact site..

Vault 8 (Vault City, Fallout 2) received Vault 13's replacement Water Chips, while Vault 13 got Vault 8's second G.E.C.K.

So how is that a control vault again?

was that a clerical error? i mean..
i could understand it beign a clerical eoror in F1 setting and being OK with that.
But If yiou want to retro-act it as an experiment.. and 13 is the control, youd do an inventory check well before hand.

But there's nothing saying that the west coast region wasn't hit multiple times either, and there's very few ghouls on the west coast outside of Necropolis.



Well that's yet another issue with the logic. So if the Capital Wasteland gets all of the advanced technology; then why is the T-45d far more common than the T-51b? The West Coast doesn't even have the outdated T-45d (or at least we never see it) while the Brotherhood there has a boat load of T-51bs. Granted West-Tek is located in California which could explain that inconsistency, but I'm also pretty sure that a lot of the advanced weaponry is also made by West-Tek.

The Enclave MK II in Fallout 3 isn't the same as the MK II in Fallout 2 (which looked exactly like the MK I) meaning that it probably should have been called the MK III. This is likely an oversight on Bethesda's part, but it's an understandable one since there was only one instance of APA MK II in Fallout 2 and it's easily missed. Bethesda obviously intended for the Enclave power armor in Fallout 3 to be a new model, so the less effective DR and bonuses could be chalked up as inferior R&D and production after the loss of the Poseidon Oil Rig. Unfortunately there is no official explanation, and Casdin acts like he's seen the Power Armor before. :shrug:



Most of the non-SE OOC dialogue is completely optional. There's nothing actually forcing you to select it; though what will lead to an OOC conversation isn't always apparent I will admit.

yes

I think it was stated as being a Clerical Error. As for why nobody caught it - remember, the actual "Start Date" of the Vault Experiments were completely up to chance. Also, there was a lot of equipment INTENTIONALLY left out of many vaults and Vault-Tec was literally flooded with complaints and requests for parts and equipment. I suspect any inquiry made into Vault 13 simply got lost in the shuffle.



True. However, outside the D.C. Ruins and some buildings along the outskirts, the Ghoul population seems diminished in the Capital Wasteland. The Pitt has none, and if Maryland has an unusually high concentration then that could simply be forced relocation, maybe flooding out of denser population zones like New York.

While I understand Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland has some compression going on, in regards to distances, I still like to think on the whole, the entire game world of Fallout 3 would exist in a few squares of Fallout 1 or 2's Game Map. Thus I can accept the high concentration of Ghouls.

Of course, that's not taking into account yahoos like the Apostles of the Holy Light.



I seem to recall that the Brotherhood found the T-45ds in the sub-levels of the Pentagon, along with Liberty Prime. Hence why they're using those suits. As to why use them and not T-51bs, think about it.

You're sending a detachment out to the other end of the Country to face God knows what along the way. You have at your disposal a limited number of T-51b Power Armors (Even in Fallout 1 and 2, T-51bs were fairly rare), and there's no guarantee these men will survive. After the disaster that befell the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel, and the overall dire straits the West Coast Brotherhood found themselves in (By Fallout 2, they were pretty much a nobody), I doubt they wanted to throw even more T-51bs away if they could help it, especially since those suits constituted their ace in the hole.

As for why there were more T-51bs on the West Coast then East Coast (Where exactly two suits exist), I suspect it has something to do with the fact the vast majority of T-51bs were participating in the Mainland Invasion of China, and California would be a logical place for most of those not in China to be.

right.. but manifests being signed and all of that, you'd know right off the bat if you were supposed to be closed for 200 years as a control that you might want to get your water chips sorted.
the vault was completed eight years before the bombs hit.. thats a pretty big amount of time to let something that could be mission critical slip like that.
if you dont have all the materials that are supposed to be part of your experioment when your experiment starts, then that experiment is over.. its no longer a control because it wasnt even started right.

with the vault only being closed for 10 years from a F1 viewpoint, and vaults not being experiments at all at that time, the overseer would surely say "ok go out and get another".
the water chip is just broke. its not because the extras were sent somewhere else.. vault 13 was only supposed to have one chip.

then two rolls raound and youve got enclave and experiments.. and someone probably thought.. "vautl 13 a control vault? well they should have had more water chips.. quick, fabricate something flimsy about water chips being shipped somewhere else." thats a hard pill to swallow when youve got eight years to get crucial equipment sorted.

it would have been much more believeable if they didntmake vault 13 a control vault when they changed the plotline with 2

I salute you GC Rust, you've smacked me down good.

I still feel that the concentration of Feral Ghouls at least is ridiculously high, though. :shrug:

Indeed, However I put it down to them being "generic underground enemies" like the raiders are the generic wasteland enemies.

It is kinda stupid, 200 years after the bombs fell, for a whole lot of lunatics to still be wandering around (Lunatics who are insanely easy to bring down, to boot). But then we get into problems with the time tables in the game itself. DC's Ghoul Population is probably just right for a city that had been hit fairly recently with a large amount of nuclear ordinance, but after 200 years? You'd think the Metro Tunnels would be quieter by now.

But then we wouldn't have anything to shoot down in those tunnels, and we can't have that - can we? (Seriously, just like in Point Lookout, the Ghouls are there to be shot at.)



Except for the fact the person signing off on these things WAS NOT PART of the Vault Experiment program. Only the Overseers and specialty personnel were privy to the fact these weren't Bomb Shelters, but Human Research Centers. The original Overseers were simply Vault-Tec administrators - useless management types.

The fact you had Vaults requesting supplies they weren't supposed to receive in the first place means the security on the Vault Program was extremely tight and strictly Need To Know. So stores didn't get any extra Water Chips - the one they've got is brand new and they only have to last a couple of decades until it's time to come out, right?

Or maybe they did receive extra Water Chips only to discover too late that it was a mislabeled container of Water Flasks instead?

The fact of the matter is these Vaults had massive supply rooms and massive amounts of supplies. Not just technical equipment, but just the every day stuff like Shampoo and Clothing. Even with an 8 year window, it's entirely possible nobody noticed the lack of extra Water Chips simply because of all the other stuff coming in. You can't physically go through each container on a manifest, so you have to in a lot of cases, just sign off on something and hope it's there.



Actually, it was a hundred years after in Fallout 1, not 10. And again, eight years to obtain enough materials to last through however long a nuclear holocaust is going to last. For Vault 13, that was 200 years. Can you even fathom the amount of food you'd need to keep a Vault of a Thousand people fed on a 2,000 calorie diet for three meals a day for 200 years? Now all the spare parts needed for not just essential equipment, but entertainment and education purposes.

The Logistics to a Vault had to be a nightmare, even on the ones designed to fail.

wikia says it was to be closed for 10 years originally (prior to the introduction of experiments).. ? is it in need of update? or are you talking about fallout one taking place a hundred years after?

back to the point though.....Air, power, water and food are arguably the most needed things.. Even if normal people from valut-tec were overseeing the processes until the vaults actually closed. as the Enclave, which was at that time the US GOVT, you wouldnt even design vault experiments, even covertly and leave it up to fate that everyting would be there. especially for your control vault-you cant let the (water) chips fall where they may (<===see what i did there?)... . dropping the ball on that for eight years even if controlled by vault tech at the time is still pretty unbelieveable, as youd still want to rectify that right away because you dont know when the bombs might drop.. you would have to be ready... i would also doubt that they would put all supplies into one main room.. youd keep important componants like water chips either in a maintenace facilty or the overseers office.. they wouldnt need to be piled in with the thousands of boxes of food...
again teh idea being that if youve got peopl comeing to stay at any given time, you would have to get all of that sorted as soon as possible, so if there were things missing, you could get it sorted before it was too late. also since youd only need 10 years worth of supplies (remember youre the one that brought up that it would be Vault-Tec handling these logistics) you wouldnt have to inventory 200 years worth of stuff..

im not gonna write it off as logistics being an nightmare, cause thats not what happened.. fallout two changed the plotline of fallout one and a bad cover up went down in the way of the geck/waterchip swaps.

i still contend it would have been more believeable if they hadnt made vault 13 a control.

i do have other serious problems with many of the vault experiments in general though..
the vault with 20 men 20 women and a panther? i know someone was just trying to be funny.... but its not "ha ha" funny as much as it is, "why would you waste billions or even trillions of dollars to set up this experiment when that money could have been put to better uses?" funny.

oops]

Yeah, Fallout One took place a hundred years after. I'd forgotten Vault 13 was "officially" to be sealed for 10 years.

Which would go a long way to explain why nothing was ever done about the Water Chip situation. A single chip could easily handle the load for a decade.



You'd still need plenty of foodstuffs though. Even after 10 years, and even with a G.E.C.K., there'd be very little edible food to slavage that wasn't highly irradiated. And even then, the G.E.C.K. was an unstable, untested piece of equipment. If the G.E.C.K. didn't work, they might have to go back into the Vault.




What about Vault 77 - One Man, a Vault, and a Crate full of Puppets?

I would like to comment on this (a bit late); that's an interesting spin on special encounters and if you think about it, it does sort of make sense that you would start experiencing hallucinations and the like after days, weeks or even months of traveling the wasteland with little rest. It's definitely an interesting way of accepting something like the Cafe of Broken Dreams into the canon; a ghost cafe out in the middle of nowhere that you may or may not have actually visited. Makes you wonder about the mental states of the Vault Dweller and especially the Chosen One though.

That doesn't explain the fourth wall breaking dialogue in New Reno, though. Granted nothing that you do after you finish the main quest should be taken into the canon (the epilogue states that the Chosen One builds New Arroyo with his or her people) nullifying the OOC NPC floating text; there are still OOC dialogue options in Reno that you can encounter during the main game. Particularly the fighting ring midget, and the dialogue that ensues when you ask if he's "been in the circus".

The vaults were capable of producing food, and most of their supplies from the extruders for that matter. They didn't have to pre-store them. Also, V13 was never a control vault, it was supposed to test 200 years of isolation. It was Vault 8 that was a control vault.

EDIT: Also, F1 takes place 84 years after the war, not 100.