He means Shady Sands. And IIRC there is a bug that means you can say as little as "hi" and get the XP.

I always get those two mixed up. I think it's because Shady Sands is the first place you visit in Fallout 1, and Modoc is the first place you hit in Fallout 2. (Or crap, am I getting that name wrong, too?)

LOL. I'm just that good at Fallout 2...

Wasn't it Klamath? And then theres the Den between Klamath and Modoc.

Frak... why am I having so much trouble with these names??? :banghead:

Duh... what's like the very first quest you get in Fallout 2 after finishing the Temple of Trials? "Find Vic in Klamath"... :shakehead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yA8IMXOsDQ&feature=related

Sounds like Baldur's Gate talk with WIS < 10

There's a big difference between saying that something is an exception, and saying that it occurs 50% of the time. Just regarding the quests, Tenpenny Towers and Blood Ties really aren't exceptions to any rule in Fallout 3. I remember one quest that required me to kill some super mutants (the one at the Jefferson Memorial), which was one of the very few quests that required killing (I can only think of the mole-rat quest as another example, but that was avoidable with a speech check). And I would say that Vault 87 was pretty much a dungeon crawl. But I could sneak through Raven Rock easily without any stealthboys (the levels were designed for that sort of thing), and I don't remember any forced unavoidable boss fights in the game. In general, the quests were more complex than "kill monster X" or "crawl through this dungeon and collect this loot."

The game affords a lot of dungeon crawling, but many of the dungeons aren't directly related to quests.

Yeah, I know I'm hurting my own argument here (somewhat) but what about the Behemoth in front of GNR? You can't get inside GNR until that thing dies.

This is highly subjective anyway, so I'm not saying you're "wrong."

But even if the actual objective isn't "kill all these things," there's still going to be a lot of combat involved in completing that quest. There's a number of options on how to complete the Oasis quest, for example; and really only one necessarily requires you to do any killing. But still, there's a cave you have to go into and lots of enemies down there. Sure, how you do deal with them is up to - but you still have to deal with them. For myself - I actually consider Stealth to be a combat option. I can do a ton of sneaking in Splinter Cell - but no one's going to argue it's any less of an action game because of that. That's just my opinion, though.

For example - Raven Rock I see as a dungeon. It's filled with enemies and you have to find a way from point A to point B. You can kill everything in your path, let the robots do most of your fighting, or sneak underneath the flooring (and I did think that was kind of a nice bit of level design to give you that option,) or just 23 skidoo your way out as quick as your feet will let you. All of those still come down to "here's a bunch of things that want to kill you, and they're standing in your way of completing your objective - how are you going to deal with them?" To me, that's a dungeon. As far as gameplay, it doesn't really work any different than all the caves, fortresses, and ruins to be found in Oblivion (with the new addition of turrets and protectrons, of course.) I go into a place, it has lots of enemies and some stuff to find. I don't have to kill those enemies, but they're also the only obstacle I have to deal with. To me, that's a dungeon.

I'm not saying Fallout 1 and 2 didn't do that, either. They're all combat-intensive games where pretty much anywhere you went it was going to be a room filled with enemies and you had to figure out a way through them. I might have more options at my disposal than I did in Diablo or Eye of the Beholder - but a lot the level design is still essentially a dungeon, when you get right down to it.

And again, I'm not complaining. I'm just saying I don't see that FO3 is any huge step in a new direction or anything. If anything, it was my experience that there was even less puzzle-oriented obstacles in FO3 than in the previous games.

The science skill does open up dialogue options in Fallout 3. For example if you have a high science skill you can explain to Moira how radiation affects the human body so you don't have to get irradiated to complete that portion of the wasteland survival guide.

You can just run back to Megaton or wait for the BoS to take it out. Also, you aren't forced to go to GNR at all. It's really nothing like a mandatory boss fight in a dungeon crawler. It's a far cry from the stuff that you'll encounter in Jade Empire, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Bloodlines, and most other RPGs.

I get what you are saying, but I think you are arguing against the dictionary at this point. If you are sneaking around and avoiding trouble, then you aren't engaging in combat.

I certainly didn't suggest that it was a huge step in a new direction. I just think it's silly to characterize it as a dungeon crawler, in the same way that I think it would be silly to suggest that Fallout and Diablo are both dungeon crawlers. There's no reason to have subcategories if they are going to include everything from the larger category.

On the other hand, it's a far cry from Fallout 1 and 2 as well. In FO1 and 2, you get some clues as to how proceed, but there's no fixed progression through the main quest like in FO3.

haha I think the best description for FO3 is simply a "crawler" minus the dungeons.
Ok I kid, that was mean!

Grapichally better yes. Better game no ^_^

I bought and tried Fallout 1 and 2 quite a few years ago. I thought they were terrible, couldn't get myself to finish either of them. IMO boring gameplay and no more than boardgame quality graphics. I do understand that some people like them, heh, even tetris has it's followers.
When Beth announced Fallout3, I wasn't too exited. A new Fallout game? What the .... do we need another one of those for! But I always have faith in Beth, so I gave Fallout3 a chance and I really liked it. To this day it's the only Fallout game I've actually liked. I bought fallout tactics a long time ago but I gave it away to someone because it was boring boring boring.

I'm not too optimistic when it comes to Fallout new vegas, as I understand that a bunch of the guys responsible for the first 2 fallout games will be involved in it's developement.
Hopefully, beth has showed them the way now, and they can use Fallout 3 as inspiration to make New Vegas a good fallout game this time around. Good luck with that.

Bethesda was the LAST company I wanted making Fallout 3 because their previous RPGs were so far removed from what the original Fallouts were. I was fairly shocked to find that they actually put effort into putting REAL roleplaying choices into Fallout 3.

I still have my disapointments about 3 like the rules being somewhat dumbed down, the game's ease and some of the writing in spots. The main quest especially seems to fall apart midway through the game. Most of my complaints though are overshadowed by the good.

Its really going to come down to personal preference. When Deus Ex came out I remember thinking Fallout would be an excellent series to make as a FPS/RPG hybrid, so I always was open to this style of Fallout game.

If Beth "showed them the way", God help us all. That's all I'm gonna say.

I'm sure they will make the gameplay very "accessible" so you won't find it too boring.

I wonder whether people would've preferred Blizzard Entertainment. They would've turned Fallout 3 into a Space Siege like game. *shudder*

I doubt that would happen... The art director for Fallout works for Blizzard and is working on Diablo3.


My own post could mirror this but for two changes...

• Fallout did not need a facelift ~with that kind of iso style game, the more complex graphics would hardly make much difference, though the switch to 3d would allow for better lighting effects and allow real (Z) "depth" to the game world ~and that's a big plus in my book.
  
• Fallout 3 is not (IMO) a worthy sequel, though it is a great and impressive game on its own. Its just not a [good] sequel.

Well..... more than two... :hehe:
*Consider it this way... If they made TES5 as a DX10 enabled http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgqunnw_Lm0 clone, set in Tamriel, would that qualify as a sequel? It would have graphics a few notches well above any previous TES offering, but the game would feature a pre-designed (and non-improvable) main character, it would be all puzzles and zero combat except for puzzle related actions ending in death or capture. This is just not the gameplay expected of a TES game ~yet there would be many that proclaimed it a masterwork of a sequel.

Such a direct comparison between FO & FO3 is not so easy, because on the surface the goals seem the same, you play a PC of your own making, they explore the vast wreckage of the world before the bombs fell, and encounter its changes and its past and present dangers. Yet the two are not at all alike. FO3 is a constant "run around /eyes down the barrel FPS", with NPC dialogs for intermission. and I found it VERY linear in level design and possible outcomes. This is exactly the opposite to FO.

Gameplay in FO presents you the bigger picture of the land and your place in it. Encounters are tougher, and have more opponents sure... The TB combat system affords this, but ironically (I thought) opponents in FO don't just stand there and take 32 shots to the head either. Fallout expects you to look at the area you are in and sometimes offers the astute [or devious ] player some alternate paths. Dialog choices are affected by your PC, and amount to more than mere wise cracks (or not so wise cracks). Fallout {for instance} allowed the player to ask direct questions of the NPC's that were not on the menu (so to speak), and while it was limited, it worked, and the player might think to ask Harry the Super mutant about the Cathedral ~and he could tell them! With F3 being based heavily on FO, I was mighty disappointed when I found that though I had this multi gigabyte quad core machine, that could have handled a massive text database ~In this age extremely clever and convincing Chat-Bots... there was nothing of the sort.

Fallout 3 is a beautiful joke when compared ~its not meant to be of course, and I do get more impressed with it every day as I fiddle around in the GECK ~but there is no comparison. (For those that would press a graphics comparison, I have one that would make my point. Fallout 3 had all the best assets of the industry for its graphics and the F1 Dev team's software assets pale in comparison.... but just because you have Photoshop and the other guy has http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXx58j4B5A does not insure that your results will surpass his. Though in Fallout's case they had to work for the platform as well ... a P90 with 64MB ram). For their day the Fallout heads were incredible... for their day the FO3 heads are not ~and not much when compared directly to F1 IMO. This should have been a key goal I would have thought. (by incredible I mean something that exploits the hardware and gives amazing results... Something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A838dclFr5U&feature=related)

I can only imagine what FO might have been like if designed for a 2009 desktop, More heads sure, better graphics sure, but I'd be more interested in the depths of the interconnected dialog chains that could be a gig by themselves and with a scriptable 3D engine, could affect towns and regions and landmarks, and have NPC chat bots that had access to everything public that they might know of by association (of the world, or of the PC).
~Plant mines in a cave to kill bandits... forget about a few, and come back a few [game] weeks later to find that kids from the nearby town stepped on a mine while exploring the cave you mined (and the town hires you to find out who did it!). This is not impossible, nor unrealistic... it is however not something you'd put in a casual game for a casual audience ~which is what I must assume they were after, and what I consider Fallout 3 to be ~Same as Duke Nukem, same as Halo... Planescape & Fallout its not.. (but it could have been, had they only kept the original fans in mind rather than targeting a different group (that mostly never even heard of the series), and trying to retain little bits here and there to make it seem "familiar-ish").

All F3 seems intended to be is a "Be There, Do Whatever" PA simulator that in the end is of painfully limited scope. Just like Oblivion (when I played it the first for the time), it implies great rewards and great adventures, and results in great disappointment because of its great emphasis on Bloom & Blood and little else ~but hey... that's Bread & Butter to the largest group of consumers, and of course that's what we got.

When you pick up a movie you don't expect it to be a trivia DVD if you don't know anything about it, you expect it to imitate life, why would you assume anything else? So it will always be more natural for a game to become more realistic than more mechanical and arcadey, Fallout went from being a 2D, turn based, isometric RPG, and naturally progressed to what we know life to be, First person/third person, 3D, real time, that just makes sense

What wouldn't make sense is if Fallout became less life-like, instead of characters that looked like people they look like blinking lights, instead of realistic dialog you speak in anagrams, so it's not the same thing to say; what if TES went from a real time RPG to something strange, mechanical, limiting, and abstract, that's not a natural progression.

I think a more natural progression for the Fallout series would it have become a more lifelike 3D game with a free cam with improvements on the existing mechanics and interface. Making an arbitrary leap from a thoughtful turn-based mechanic to an "in-your-face" realtime one, I don't see as a linear progression at all - but a lateral one. There's some interesting things that making Fallout real-time brought to the table, but it also lost some good things in that translation.

If I have a really nice John Deere tractor (you know, the ones with like Wi-fi internet, air conditioning, and an HD TV...) and then trade that in for a really fast Sports Car - that's not a natural progression. That's trading one thing in for another. That's kind of how I see Fallout 3. It's not a marked improvement upon the original series in much of anything other than graphics (and I would say art direction, myself - but alot of that's from perusing the Art Book from the Collector's Edition - so it's hard to make a firm comparison unless I've seen something of the same for Fallout 1.) An Aston Martin isn't a "better" vehicle than a high-end Tractor - it all depends on what you want it to do.

I wouldn't say it was a lateral change, turn based isometric is a branch of the real time 3D tree, all forms of gameplay are branches of the realistic tree, all gameplay is based on reality, turn based isometric was a long awkward branch that grew weak, died, and then fell off the tree completely, the default is always going to be what is more realistic, the trunk is the foundation, real time, 3D, and non-isometric, so it wasn't changing from one branch to another equal branch, it was going from a dead branch back to the strong and sturdy trunk that supports the whole tree.

Oh frell... not one of these "turn-based was always a technical limitation" discussions again...

Okay, you're taking a tack that what you look for in a videogame is a move towards realism. Fine, that's a preference, and you're entitled to have that. Others look more towards the game aspect. Saying there's any inherent need to for a game to have one or the other is completely arbitrary. There's no "ultimate endgame" that all videogames are pushing towards - it's just an industry full of people making the products they want/ and feel will sell. It's like saying there's one "Ultimate" movie that all movies are evolving towards - it's just not how it works.

Take Chess - that's the epitome of a turn-based game. There's no inherent improvement to be reached by coming up with some sort of real-time rules for Chess. (Arguably, that's a game system for which it isn't even possible to improve upon - over the centuries it's been stripped down to it's core essentials and is as elegant as you're ever going to get.) You could do it, but it would stop being Chess, at that point. It might even be fun to play, but I hardly think anyone's going to try and argue that real-time Chess would be an inherent step forward. Are you actually going to argue that just because you can play Chess on a computer - that it's going to have to be turned into some sort of real-time version?

You're assuming that the only thing people are looking for in a videogame is "realism." I don't think that's true. I can have fun playing Monopoly, because I like how that game works, not because it's some sort of accurate representation of New York Real Estate practices. They're all just games - what difference does it make if it's on a computer or not? It's just a different way of presenting information.

The popularity of turn based strategy games, and JRPGs says otherwise.

Bethesda went with first person real time because "that's what they do best", they didn't want to leave the comfort of their safe little box. It had nothing to do with what was "more realistic". The irony of this is that while Bethesda's style may be paying off right now, this won't always be the case. When Bethesda's only style is no longer popular they won't be doing so well, because that's all they know how to do. You think they would have learned considering how Arena and Daggerfall weren't that popular, and are mere cult classics as opposed to Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 which came out at the right time when graphics and "immershun" (not to be confused with immersion) were more popular than actual gameplay. When graphics and "immershun" are no longer the top dog, Bethesda could find themselves on a sinking ship with nowhere to go. Oh well, you reap what you sow.



I agree, I play video games for entertainment... not for "realism". Video games aren't reality, they never will be, so I don't understand why some people feel that "realism" is something to strive for. Fallout 3 isn't even remotely realistic to begin with, it's filled with gameplay mechanics that break laws of physics, and common sense. I judge a game based on its entertainment value, and to me, Fallout 3 was far less entertaining than Fallout and Fallout 2 because it aimed more towards that silly "immershun" factor like TES than actual quality gameplay. This is why I feel Fallout and Fallout 2 are vastly superior games, I had more fun with them.

Now one can argue that they found Fallout 3 more entertaining, and that's a valid opinion, but claiming Fallout 3 is more realistic than Fallout and Fallout 2 is just plain silly... especially considering how your character can become a flawless, godlike individual before hitting level 20.