You know, I never thought about it until recently... The Capital Wasteland is much more of a wasteland than the wasteland in FO1 and FO2. Less towns, less people, less variety, etc. That's obvious, but it goes deeper than that...

What I'm going to say next will bother some of you:

Bethesda did "post-nuclear" way more convincingly than Interplay. That's not just the difference in graphics or perspective talking. Survival seems harder in FO3. I can't remember how many times I've wiped out dozens of foes at once in the original games. And that's before power armor, super-stims, pancor jackhammer, party members and so on. Once you hit a certain point, no Raider base, Deathclaw pack, Mutant army or Enclave outpost can stop you. In FO3, even at lvl 20, if I try to fight 2 or 3 deathclaws at once I could easily die unless I make the right moves. Even so, between each mini-battle I often have to heal or fix my gear. The threat of radiation is also more evident. The feelings of being disconnected, alone and desperate are more evident.

Before you accuse me of saying that FO3 is better, I'm not. I won't go into what Beth did wrong, but I felt like sharing something that they did right.

Intresting

I have seen both camps here the likers and the dislikers

I havn't played Fall Out 1 and 2, affraid somewhere I have seen to forgot that series in my past (most likely spending to much time in Civilization and Civilization call to power)

The game is not the 'perfect element' we are far from that, the perfect element is still real life, but I like the game and give it a 8 out of 10.

Wasteland? Before arriving in another town in Fallout 1 and 2, your character would travel for days in nothing;

And it's easier to die in Fallout 3 because, the armors don't do anything.

I'd have to agree with you there. In FO2, my current character is level 17, and using Advanced Power Armor and a Gauss Rifle, as well as three power armor allies, nothing, not even 6 deathclaws or an army of Enclave, could stop me. In FO3, my level 20 has the best equipment, but is constantly getting owned at those big Talon forts, or by a Behemoth, or several Death Claws. Considering I don't sneak first

I have to disagree with this, The Capital Wasteland is much more densley populated. How did you come to this conclusion?
See:




What you describing here is not my experience of Fallout 3. Ive never found Fallout 1/2 as easy as you are making them out to be. In Fallout 1/2 you could easily die if you didnt make the right moves too, hell you could even die if you did make the right moves!
In Fallout 3, getting attacked by a group of super mutants is a minor nuisance. In Fallout 1/2 odds are its going to be the end of you.
Deathclaws are just as dangerous as they used to be, but now enclave patrols are a joke.
In Fallout 1/2 you frequently have to heal too. If you didnt you would be highly likely to die.

In fallout 3 radiation is hardly evident at all, its a minor nuisance. In Fallout1/2 the effects are crippling.

agreed

I agree somewhat and disagree somewhat. I don't think radiation really feels any more dangerous than FO1/2...but there is more of it. Rad-Away and Rad-X were a little harder to come by in FO1 (there's WAY too much of it around in FO3), and you could actually get stuck in the wasteland with no way to get home alive in FO1 if you didn't plan ahead for The Glow.

I think survival would seem harder in Fallout 3 if:

- They didn't give you so damn much of everything...at no point in time playing Fallout 3 did I feel stretched or short on supplies.

- They didn't let you get a free teleport to a town from anywhere in the wasteland...they should have at least added encounters or something so it wasn't so easy to get to a safe haven the second there aren't any enemies nearby.

let the battle begin again :nuke:

as I have never played Fallout 1 or 2 I cannot say, but in 3 if you really RP then radiation can become a problem. At level 20 I pretty much own the wasteland, but that just opens up more for me in the ways of RPing, any other questions can be directed to my sig :fallout:

original fallout days=seconds
bethesda hours=minutes

F3 also takes place on a completely different scale than others, as well. Sure, in Fallout 1 and 2 you'd travel a couple days between towns - there isn't enough map in all of Fallout 3 to accomodate for that. Ratio-wise, all of Fallout 3 takes place in what would be the size of what - one square, maybe two, in Fallout 1 or 2?

Given that, it's certainly more dense an area than the equivalent in the previous games, but it also gives me the impression that none of these settlements in the DC area have really been able to establish as much of a foothold as the various cities you come across in the previous games. Shady Sands in Fallout 1 was a more stable settlement, it seems, than what even Megaton was able to cobble together.

I get the feeling that the situation in DC is probably a lot like what the Hub, or NCR, etc looked like before they were able to effectively organize into a unified whole in the area - lots of disparate factions and settlements with no one faction able to get a real foothold in the area. Given that DC seems like a more highly-contested area, and was likely more densely populated in the first place, I don't think that's terribly unlikely. (DC area probably would have 5 times more Vaults in the area than places in California, when I think about it. At least to me.)

I have,radiations only a problem in the glow.

I didn't like the raiders in FO3, they look as if they belong at a punk show. Didn't like the enclave being the main antagonist either, after F2 was hoping for Presper or an original design.

Sorry. I disagree with everything you said.


Fallout 3 is not hard. At all. The game holds the players hands in so many ways. Once people realize that, the game stops being scary, challenging, or fun. And I'm not just comparing it to the previous Fallouts, but to other FPS's and RPGs.

Supplies (Drugs, Stimpaks, Food, Water, Ammo, Weapons, Caps, Books, Armor, etc) These can be found everywhere and in great abundance. These were a lot more scarce in the previous Fallouts, and also a lot more expensive.
Weightless Ammo - Sorry. But being able to carry 10,000 bullets for each gun and 10-20 mini-nukes throws "wasteland survival" out the window.
Weightless Meds - See above.
Weak enemies. Bad AI. Low health. And the ability to land successive headshots at low levels, make everything in the wastes non-threatening.

Threat of Radiation more evident? More evident since you can see exactly how many rads you have on your pip boy now. But that actually makes it less threatening since you can see how much it'll take before you hit the next radiation level. Even then, the negative effects aren't that bad. On the off-chance that you get highly irradiated, don't fret, Rad-Away and Rad-X are in high supply. Pop a couple, or take a trip to your nearest doctor to have them all removed. Radiation is a lot easier to manage than in the previous games.

Sure, if you powergame in the previous Fallouts, you'll become unstoppable. But to get that point, you had to go through hell.

In Fallout 3, you're unstoppable from the moment you're born.

As for a convincing post-nuclear setting? Don't forget to take into account the attitudes of both games. Compare how NPC's in both games talk. One game greets you and showers you with all the love and assistance that you need. The other game takes your caps and guns you down for no apparent reason. Not to mention the abundance of six, drugs, and slavery in FO1 & 2, which are all viewed as part of everyday life. As opposed to FO3's black and white wasteland. Noble heroes, dastardly villains, and innocent townsfolk. Sounds more like medieval fantasy than post-apocalyptic.

Sorry for all that. I guess I was bothered by what you said.

I actually agree with most of what you just said. And I think you misunderstood what I was saying.

For one, the idea of being in a wasteland and not just fast-traveling past it or through it to get to places like New Reno, Junktown or Vault City.
I don't know about you, but I could always tell how irradiated I was in the original games. It was right there in the pip-boy, too.
I was rolling in caps and supplies half-way through Fallout 1 and 2. Every time I played. Every time I started a new game. In Fallout 3, I'd have to grind or glitch to get anywhere near what I had.

Don't confuse presentation with the actual challenge. Each version is easy if you play them right.

Are you really trying to say that e.g. the super mutants or Enclave are more of a challenge in FO3 than in FO2? You must be joking. In FO2, an encounter with an Enclave patrol mostly ended with your death during the first enemy turn. In FO3, you can easily kill them without high-end weapons or armor.

I definitely find FO1/2 combat much more challenging.

I agree with this. But you didn't say this in your OP


Fair enough. Still less threatening though.


I find the latter true for FO1 and 2, and not for 3, whether I power game in each or not. So it's subjective I guess.

Also, there's no reason for the radiation levels to be as high as they are in FO3 after 200 years. In fact, Tim Cain said that they set FO1 a whooping 80 years after the War so that the radiation would be mostly gone, but its results would be seen in mutations.

"Are you really trying to say that e.g. the super mutants or Enclave are more of a challenge in FO3 than in FO2? You must be joking. In FO2, an encounter with an Enclave patrol mostly ended with your death during the first enemy turn. In FO3, you can easily kill them without high-end weapons or armor."


In the beginning, sure. But eventually, I owned the Enclave base. And whatever Super Mutants I found, and their pets, and the Nightkin, etc. It's always just a matter of time before I'm strong enough. And I could go through it all with one weapon, without healing.

It doesn't always work like that in FO3. Not even at lvl 20 with an optimized character wielding great equipment. Yes, the Super Mutants in FO3 aren't as tough. Nor is the Enclave. But they have a better chance of killing me at lvl 20 than they do in Fallout 1 or 2.

Maybe, but they also definitely have less of a chance of killing you at lower levels than in Fallout 1 or 2. And certainly you have more of a chance of killing them.

I'm not really that convinced that your statement is true anyway, although I haven't played FO3 much. But I found super mutants and the Enclave at low levels, with just a hunting rifle and a leather armor, much easier than in FO1 or 2 at higher levels.

And what's this about radiation after so long? My God, if we're going to be particular about that, and use it as a fault, then let's see how many more unrealistic things we can find about the canon... It's a video game. But even so, the DC area was nuked 20 times. And people like Tenpenny are aching to continue the trend. So it's not too hard to imagine all the radiation issues.

Exactly, it's a video game, so I'm comparing it to previous games in the same series, and to a statement of one of its creators about why there was less radiation in previous games. It's not about being consistent with real-world science, it's about the internal consistency of the series. Low radiation levels aside from the Glow were a design choice, not an oversight.

Yes, it's just a game. Why then do most "hardcoe" Fallout fans treat Fallout 3 as an oversight and not a design choice?

Blind acceptance makes me cringe, but equally as bad, if not worse, is blind disdain. That's what makes it hard to go to NMA these days.

It is not a living entity. It can only be [censored] metaphorically. It's a piece of entertainment. I love Fallout 1 and 2. And I love Fallout 3. And I can get away with this because I like videogames.

I did find the older games were quite a bit more unforgiving, as far as difficulty was concerned. Even for a turn-based game, there was a bit of a learning curve and I usually a do a lot more quick-saving in those games (I usually even keep one save slot just for the beginning of combats.)

Personally, I think to a certain that's just an artifact of the type of game that is - turn-based is sort of by it's very nature a little less forgiving of player mistakes. Just by virtue of being real-time, means Fallout 3 gives players the opportunities to more readily back out of the action when things get too difficult, reload and heal, etc. That's a bit harder to do in a turn-based game, and it almost discourages that sort of tactic just in how long it often takes a character to run out of the firefight.

In that, I think it's sort of hard to really quantify the relative difficulties of the two games - it's like saying Monopoloy is harder/easier than Hop-Scotch.

That said, I can also just compare how often I had to reload in both games, and often I would run into those tight spots where I was low on ammo on health and really in dire straights. As far as that goes, I'd say that I usually do a lot more reloading in Fallout 1 and 2 due to dying - but if I'm being honest I ended up in those dire straights a bit more often in Fallout 3 than the other games. (This might be because in the original games you sort of start out in that position and have to dig yourself out; wheras in Fallout 3 you sort of start out better-prepared for you journey so it's a little more noticeable when you do find you've over-extended yourself.)

i don't understand why these people come onto this site when all they talk about is how much better FO1 and 2 over 3 what is your motivation.

Maybe some people simply enjoy Fallout 3 despite it being inferior to previous games?