Okay gomez. Although you did seem a little jumpy earlier for someone who's 50/50 like-dislike of this game is already fading to a semi-sour memory.

Anyways, I guess even though there's a six page thread complaining about fresh canned food in the Wasteland, that's also another small thing that doesn't rise to a top personal gameplay peeve. How about the Metro system? There's a couple threads going on right now complaining about having to use tunnels to get around in DC. Personally, I think it's a great idea - it makes sense and it adds an intersting new environment, but a lot of people have trouble finding their way around.

My pet peeve is one I did not think of at first but come to realize. The simple fact that only some actions cost AP. Using chems, switching armor and weapons and such in combat should come with a cost. Simple AP in VATS and basically an animation in real time.

Making the game too hard? Make it an option.

My biggest peeve is that it ends.

GIZMO you have spent a lot of time ragging on the game very loudly thats why you have the reputation. I think I understand now and others too that you intend to be constructive and have been misunderstood.

My pet peeves about the game.

(1) The dialogue is lousey you dont really get to flesh out the charachters.
(2) Karhma? Theres is Kharma in this game? I can committ horrible unspeakable acts that would make Hitler blush and come back into town and be greeted with "HI its good to see you" Huh?
(3) S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is not exedcuted properly.
(4) Why do I need to fight or make tough descisions when in spite of nuclear holocaust and devastation every refridgerator has all I need?
(5) long before maxing out my charachter I only die if I really want to and Im the richest guy on the planet!
(6) Immortal Children! Now Im not one of those people who wants to kill children in the game. I always play a good guy ........But .....accidents happen and if your in a fire fight and one
of your bullettes goes stray and hits a child or whatever they should be mortal and there should be consequences both immediate " the whole town tries to kill you" and Kharma and reputation
effects.

I do like this game very much and its one of the funnest games in recent memeory but stuff like this just needs to be fixed.

Not really, if I did, I'd have preferred it over on the West coast - well with a lot of things, really. Seemed a bit silly to have him cross the country to me.

I think they should have just left him alone. Harold was a unique character in the fallout series, he made me laugh and in both FO1 and 2 he had something worthwhile to say. He was a bit strange, but nonetheless a real personality. In FO3 they made him a bitter old ghoul, getting angry at a lot of things and frankly, he just repeated what was clear from the first five sentences he spoke to me.

Yea she was the only whose response to the situation made no sense at all. I wanted to smack her upside the head for her air head replies. To think I took the job for no money. I hope her brother comes after her to finish off his..duty.

Yes and some blood curdling screams as its happening would have been orgismatic!

Hi!

I loved F1 & F2, and at first i was quite disappointed with F3, but actually i like playing it a lot. But there are still some (actually many) things i don't like, but which i see more and more of in all the so-called RPGs of today.
Personally i think that is because the games get developed for all platforms (PC; PS2,3; Xbox etc.), usually after playing 1 minute i can tell if the game was also made for a console.

The one thing in F3 that i am most sad about, because there would have been tons of potential for it, is the fact that the wasteland is so "lifeless". You might also say it didn't get very much attention except the graphic design (which, on the other hand, is quite awesome).

But it's so obvious that some parts got some attention (like Megaton), and the rest of it is just a big empty place that was filled with random monsters (read super mutants, raiders, bugs etc.). That's a sign for people running out of ideas. So the designers maybe had that big empty space and just filled it up with things to shoot. That's really a shame i think because the possibilities are there!

For example when i walked into Megaton and talked to the sherrif (forgot the name) and he told me about this irish guy who ownes the bar (Moriarty?), and told me he was scum, and after talking to some villagers, it would have been fun to help one of the two to gain some more power in Megaton (something along the line of what happend in F1 between Killian Darkwater and that fat gangster guy). Or all the information in Moriartys computer - interesting to read, but why can't i do something with it?

Then there was the thing with repairing the pipes and fixing the bomb. I liked that, because i always enjoyed using my "Science" skill on differnent things in F1 to see what's going to happen. So i hoped there was going to be more "world-interaction" like that. But sadly the main interaction with the world is with my gun (or other weapon of choice).
I know of one occation when it acutally makes sense to blow up a generator, and it has an effect on the world (other then sparks, "boooom" and nice graphics). Two thumbs up for that - more of it.

What else - yeah the wasteland - take the raiders for example. Evergreen mills - total waste to make all those raiders hostile. Would have been enough to give some raiders a "gang name" or something, like the Khans in F1, or even make 2 groups of raiders where you can get additional missions / quests.
Some people might now say "what's the point in getting a quest to kill some enemy raiders, i can as well go there and kill them all without any stupid quest". Right. But the point i'm trying to make is that you can actually interact with something in the wasteland and make a decision.

I could give you many more examples, but to sum up what i was trying to say is that basicallly after you've seen 1/3 of the wasteland, you've seen it all, because 95% of it is just things to shoot. And at that point it just didn't make any sense to explore some more (i had all the guns, i had all the cash - hell i even had the tshirt :woot:;) ). I think that's why the Bobbleheads were added. Because someone at Beth. felt like i did so they had to give players a reason to go out there and explore.

And that's a damn shame, all those very nice artwork you folks at Beth. did, really really deserves some game design ...... i don't know how to say in English, but i hope you get the meaning!

cheers,
M.

Nice post. I have a question though.
Does your post boil down to: Storytelling and writing quality in 'fallout 3' is sub par, to put it mildly?

Well I thought it was smooth that the children run away, I tried shooting at Brian Wilks just to see the games mechanics and I like how the kids run away and dodge your bullets. Its kind of a realistic aspect the kids run away and hide real well. I thought that was a cool aspect of the game you can't kill children, but they run away like little rascals. Yeah the immortal NPCs is a bit of change from fallout1&2 where you could kill any NPC you wanted.


Another pet peave of mine is, when you put your weapon away its on your back... I mean it looks goofy with a gun just floating on characters back with no straps or anything holding it. I put my gun complete away because the gun bugs me being on peoples back with no strap holding it or anything. In oblivion you could say well... its magic, fallout3... your character has magnetic back and can hold a metallic weapons on his or her back?

I seriously doubt there are only haters and devoted lovers. It are extrems of both ends of the stick which happen to be around here but its really more that most of are located in the midle with a tendency to either more the one or other side.

Have fun obtaining stimpacks on Very Hard, especially on low levels, and with small amounts of caps. Then, perhaps you won't complain.

My biggest peeve is generally how unbalanced the weapon types are. Small Guns virtually dominate everything.
Second is the reduction in Skill set. When is Bethesda going to learn that in RPG's cutting skills is like Cutting leveling up?
Third is the Skill caps.

Scope
Lack of toggable undiscovered spots.
Too few skill points.

*Why?
*This would be so far at the bottom of a list for things I'd correct about the game that it hasn't even crossed my mind after I read your post.
*Perhaps?

Ever use a scope on a real rifle? For one, air creates drag, when the middle of the crosshair is on an enemy part for instance say the head, when you pull that trigger the round will drop due to air resistance and overall gravity. I've seen games older than this compensate for that and actually incorporate that into the game, (Call of Duty 4 "All Ghilled Up")

The lack of toggable undiscovered spots, what if your a new player and didn't know the game stopped after you finished, but you wanted to go back and explore? I sure as hell don't want to make a new character just to explore... I want to see the fruits of my freakin' labors. I want to uncover every INCH and CENTIMETER of the map and I don't want anything left to find... Say I get to 19 and finish the MQ, boom games over no time to explore.... great.

The skills points, I don't want to turn into a walking tank, I really wish they would have changed the weight attribute, it's waaaaaay to high, not to mention 3 nukes a few hundred rounds of 5.56mm ammo and 12 missles weighs less than a pack of cigarettes. The rest of the skills? Again, say it with me now, I will not become a ML wielding tank.... I will be a normal human being.

But what if your The Six Million Dollar Man?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbvHtizL0x0&NR=1


I get what your saying though. Being able to walk around with a fortress on your back is a bit unrealistic and kind of kills the point of the cyborg perk what can get in the game

I actually started off really liking Fallout 3. It wasn't until 20+ hours into the game that I began realizing the things I didn't like about it. I still think that Fallout 3 is a good game...I was just hoping that it would be a fantastic game. Some of the things Bethesda did are really brilliant. Here's my short list of things that could have been improved toward making it that fantastic game (some of these have already been mentioned by others):

- SPECIAL attributes should have more of an effect on the game. As it is the largest effects are STR = more carrying capacity, AGL = more APs, and INT = more skill points. There are no real penalties for having very low attributes. Game mechanics that worked well from previous games (note that I don't see the previous games as perfect by any stretch and hesitate to make direct comparisons) were omitted - like PER's effect on weapon range modifiers, STR requirements for equipment, etc. Making the SPECIAL attributes have a larger effect on the game would make the player feel like their character creation/development decisions had real meaning and it would make individual characters more unique in their strengths and weaknesses, which makes multiple playthroughs a more attractive prospect.

- Non-combat skills fall flat. Repair is only useful for weapon building/maintenance. Science is just another form of lockpick except for a few exceptions. Medicine only applies to stimpack and rad-x use. There were some real missed opportunities here to add depth to the game mechanics. For example, puzzles that have alternate solutions if you have the skill to repair a machine or some other device, building/repairing robots as extra followers, Science requirements to use/repair certain high-tech equipment, schematics for Science-based characters that increase their effectiveness in combat or provide some other type of combat support, etc. In other words, it would have been nice to have seen some non-combat skills useful for something besides, lockpick, lockpick part II, and stimpack usage. Again, this would help differentiate different character builds by making non-combat-oriented builds more viable and limiting usage of certain powerful equipment to those that have put effort into specializing in a certain area of expertise. You know...role-playing.

- Performing actions in combat should burn Action Points. This was mentioned by a couple of others and is pretty obvious. It's way too easy to pause combat in the middle of a huge firefight and build a ship in a bottle.

- No really difficult battles. To anyone that's played Fallout 2 the Enclave soldiers in Fallout 3 (just as an example) are target practice. Once you've mastered the basics of Fallout 3's combat and reached level 15 or so there aren't many enemies that pose a big threat to the player. In Fallout 2 there were enemies that could really make you sweat...even in the best power armor. I miss feeling like I'm in danger of being killed by powerful enemies.

- Power armor is wrong. I understand that this is a game balance issue. Damage types and a concept of armor penetration could have fixed things like this. Shots from a hunting rifle should be shrugged off like so many mosquitoes by someone wearing power armor. Penetrating armor should require better ammunition or better weapons...that, however would have required the game to have more weapons to keep each combat skill viable later in the game. These balancing issues also had a bit of a weakening effect on Big Guns, but again, these could have been balanced in a lot of ways...like having STR requirements for weapons, for one.

- Very few real consequences. If you shoot a guy's buddy in the face in front of him he should refuse to give you quests or trade with you. Towns should not forgive things like grand theft and mini-massacres in two days. I could go on, but the list is long. The karma system and the tracking of the player's standing with other characters needs work.

- Quests that stop short or seem unfinished. There were a lot of quests and "off the radar" mini-quests that seem like they were unfinished or were rather large missed opportunities for some really cool quests/happenings. Hey, developers have time constraints...but as long as we're complaining...the main quest is too short and feels unfinished or rushed. There were a ton of missed opportunities there to have made it better. I can't believe there weren't any quests revolving around helping to re-activate Liberty Prime...just as an example.

I have other minor gripes, but those are my major ones. It would be easy to think that I'm a hater as well, but I'm not. I just want the games from one of my favorite franchises to be all they can be.


I agree with this somewhat, but I mostly disagree with it. Re-vamping and re-imagining games is great, but if you change the game completely in every sequel you lose continuity within the franchise, and that's not a good thing.

Pet peeve in game. (Stimpack abuse which is now modded out)

Pet forum peeve - comparing a release product to 4 pre-release titles based purely on user viewpoint being unchanged (which honestly for two of them is a no brainer as they are RTS.)

At the end of your comment- This can be true sometimes but i feel Fallout 3 doesn't have this sort of problem, enough things are carried over to make it feel like the old Fallout games while creating many new mechanics and trying its own ideas for older mechanics.

I can understand both sides of the argument, on one hand you have the people who value depth in gameplay and other things, but then you risk breaking the flow of compat and quests.

I dissagree with your comments on the science type skills and how the quests seem unfinished.

After playing the whole game through with a speech, science skill character, i can't think of how much better it can be used, with the speech skill i got many things through dialogues and options then my big guns, dumb guy character. I honestly don't really understand this argument.

Now about the quests, what you are asking is for extending the quests, rather then expanding the quests. What you are basically saying to go on random uninteresting fetch quests to get some robot working. In a story that is a no, and just ends up being arbitrary and uninteresting. You can say im impatient, but i just dont like going on boring parts of quests to end up in the same exact place without it.

I do partly agree on some of your other points, on things like how the special mattering more, but im not sure about the menu using action points, it would need some play testing to work right. While i always think writing in games could always improve, I honestly didn't find anything exactly wrong with the writing in Fallout 3. But i am not sure if we are talking about the writing of the other characters or your character, because i do think your character can use some work, but i believe as pointed out in another thread it is because of a 80 character limit.

Of course i know people dont really "hate" the game (while im sure some do) but when everything you can post is negative, it can give the wrong expression, and rightfully so.

Good post Softnerd, I think I agree with pretty much everything you said.

Not to mention more of a feeling of accomplishment with overcoming said weaknesses by focusing on your strengths. My favorite character build in F1/2 was low STR, very low END focusing on non-combat skills. It was really difficult to make it through the game like that, especially early on (trying to get from Klamath to Vault City at level 4 is still an epic memory for me.) But I also got a real feeling of accomplishment if I could make it work. I wasn't ever going to be combat powerhouse with not being able to effectively wield the bigger weapons, so I had to focus on a more thoughtful approach. I think I miss that the most in Fallout 3. No matter how I set up my Attributes in that game, things were going to work out relatively the same way. Building the same character type that I had fun with in the older games didn't have that same level of challenge to me. (Yeah, I know it's a little unfair comparing it to the previous titles, but that's really the main thing I wanted out of this game, if I had to pick one.)

Agreed. I like a lot of what they did with the skills, streamlining some of the similar ones, etc. (First Aid and Doctor into Medicine, etc.) I think overall it helped balance the skills out. And having Repair play a real role in the game was nice. One thing I do want to say I liked in Fallout 3 was that this time around I wanted points in all of the skills. Previously there were many I could just simply ignore without any real drawback. This time around they all felt much more pressing (now if we could just balance out the skill points per level we'd be in business.)

But yeah, I think they could certainly benefit from a wider variety of uses for all of the skills. I did like seeing some new dialogue options open up, a couple times I could use Medicine on people to help in Quests, etc. But certainly it wouldn't have made the game worse to see more of this. I think ideally, each skill should be equally useful. This time around (and all the Fallouts in general, really) the most useful skills are the guns skills. What I would like to see is Repair or Science being every bit as useful to completing the game as Small Guns or Energy Weapons. When I'm GMing for a tabletop game this is a challenge as well, providing all my players with relevant uses for all their skills. A Fighter shouldn't be so much more useful to the party than a Bard or a Cleric, for example.

id like to see the origionals put into a fpsrpg like fallout 3

You are totally right because Diablo 2 and Warcraft III did absolutely terrible.

I'm amazed blizzard has kept their head above water with the terrible sequals they've been releasing.

I even heard recently that with the abysmal sales of WoW they are going to have to close down like Tabula Rasa/Hellgate London.

Sarcasm aside I have played many TERRIBLE sequals or remakes. Games that are so bad that I refuse to leave a store till they let me return the game (like Masters of Orion III).

All things aside my biggest peeve about Fallout 3 is probably my inability to find a good difficulty. On hard I find myself downing armies of mobs and on very hard I find myself downed by flies. But I've found mods to fix that sort of thing.

Really I like Bethesda but I've noticed that if it tweren't for mods their games wouldn't really compete in my opinion. Oblivion for instance is almost a chore to enjoy without mods, FCOM makes it an amazing game but it shouldn't require THAT big of an overhaul. I suppose they deserve immense props for modability but I think it might make them lazy.

Then again most PC developers are lazy (meh bugs will fix themselves if we let the community have enough control).

Oh wait I have one more huge peeve...



However in retrospect. The quality of this game in relation to my opinions of it pre-release compared to SPORE before and after make this easily a HUGE blessing upon me. Had this been as terrible as that coaster I'd be very distraught (trying to figure out what game companies make worthwhile games anymore ).

My other peeve is one that Oblivion shares. I want to be able to put my own markers and comments on the in game map. I'm forever finding places with terminals and locked items that I can't deal with now and have to come back later. I'd like to ahve a way to mark those on the map.

That's an excellent idea! I'm always running into safes and terminals that I'm only a few points away from breaking into, or know that I want to be able to get back to at some point. It's nice they give you the one marker you can place anywhere, but it's certainly nowhere near as useful as being able to place many more (and make notes about them) would have been.

Maybe someone will Mod that in at some point.

Quoted because I agree with this... I never considered you a hater, per se, and agree with a lot of what you've posted in the past, but even in this thread, your complaints about game play are quite vague... "...it gets a lot of things right, a few things near perfect, and a lot of gameplay aspects flat wrong" Doesn't really point out any particular problems, nor does comparing FO3 with Diablo 3, etc.

Now, I really love FO3--I've pumped almost 200 hours into it and I still love it, and very, very few games I've played over the past 20 years can make that claim. That being said, to answer your post, aside from a lot of little things I would have done differently (ie. text descriptions, more text dialogue and less speaking, which I usually skip anyway, etc). My #1 problem is that it is way too fast to Lvl 20, and it's way too easy, even on very hard, when you hit the max. Granted, by the time you hit 21 ini FO1 you could dominate anything that didn't immediately flee from you, but it was a serious process to get there. I loved the challenge in the beginning when I was going into raider posts and just hoping I got more ammo than I used clearing it out, and needing to drink water full of rads just to heal because I couldn't afford stimpacks.

By 20 I had around 100 stimpacks, which I almost never needed, and 1500 rounds for the plasma rifle, which I could kill a deathclaw with in 1 VATS attack. He's maxed in 6 skills and almost maxed in 2 more. I didn't even want to give him more skill points after about level 15/16 because he was already where I pictured he would be at 20, and I didn't want him to me homogenized and good at everything, which is close enough to where he ended up. I know there are mods to fix this stuff, and by god I wish I could use them on my XBox, or they'd release FO3 for the mac, neither of which is going to happen... :cryvaultboy:

To make it more challenging on my second character, I decided she would only ever wear raider armor and use only melee and big guns (not the gatling laser--she has a phobia of energy weapons). I also gave her an INT of 3. She's a psychotic, drug-addled raider, (first character was good) so she'll use up her big gun ammo as soon as she gets it--like taking out mole rats with a rocket launcher or flame thrower so I don't build up stupid amounts of ammo for anything. So far, it's quite challenging, but she's only level 8, and I'm still a little concerned about what I'll do at 20 if I have a ton of ammo, without altering the way I think of ole' Zoya Manglerod.

Anyway, my point is that I shouldn't need to impose limits on my characters to make them consistently, even slightly challenging, and by the same token, I feel sort of punished by upping the difficulty before I hit 20 because I already level way too fast. that was a... strange decision on Bethesda's part.