I thought it was great. In fact the best part of the game and why I still say it's better than NV. Not so much the being James' son part, but growing up coddled in the vault, and then emerging into the blinding light of the mysterious wasteland. It puts you and your pc on equal footing, you both don't know what to expect, it's a scary alien world to you both, it was just downright beautiful in fact. IMO every fallout should start in a vault definitely, it's too perfect.

In NV you know your crappy backstory too, you're a lame courier who gets shot in the head by a d*****bag loser (how embarrassing). I only want one of two things- ambiguity so I can make up my own backstory (like TES), or exactly as FO3 did, start as a kid so I can forge my own story. A kid is ok because you're nothing yet. I don't want them telling me what occupation I had as an advlt. They're insisting that my character is some guy who turned out to be a working stiff, when I might not want to RP a loser.

I'm happy if every fallout you start as a vault kid, every TES you start as a mysterious stranger who has found him/herself in trouble with the law.

The original Fallout does the same thing. You start out in front of your vault, in a cave which the vault is located. When you get close to the cave exit, you get a message saying "To the west, you can see a natural light. For the first time in your life, you are looking at the outside world"

That was quite an interesting moment for me.

The ballistics model.

I've lost count of how many times I've lined up a head shot with the sniper rifle, pulled the trigger, only to hit the concrete wall I'm using for cover. Annoying.

And I'm using the auto aim fix mod too.

That has not to do with the auto aim. I think I read somewhere about the game mechanics and it said that the bullet doesn′t actually emerge from the gun′s nozzle when you fire but from a place under it and then it lines up with what you aim at. So if you take cover behind something you will hit it, even if you have the barrel of the gun well over it.

No such thing. Every gun is hitscan. The problem is the giant collision boxes around statics, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2024117

And as far as the game is concerned, you fire bullets from the center of your chest, which is why you can't fire over chest high walls

Seriously, someone needs to teach Beth how to make games Or at least the weapons part

What bullets do not come out of your chest. I guess I learn something new everyday.

Maybe it is a side effect from rad poisoning. Bullets come out of your chest and not the gun nozzle. Maybe we will have a perk like that in FO4.

Yes, I read this explanation in the read me of the auto aim fix I downloaded from the nexxus. Like I said, it does not help, even though it said it would. Also, this does not just happen with walls i'm peaking over, but walls I'm peakin around. In other words, the bullets hit the wall that's two feet to the side of me. I have to actually get out of cover and stand in the open or I am sure to hit something that is not my target.

I realize we are crying over spilled milk here. The game is 5 years old. It has it's flaws, but I am enjoying it.

But whenever the above happens, I say outloud ... "This game is no Stalker!"

-The Enclave being more than twenty people

-The Enclave even making it that far East and having that much power

-Airborne FEV

-The government giving a vault the FEV, a super secret confidential super human military prototype, to a bunch of civilians.

-Vaults being used for science testing in general rather than psychological studies

-No plant life anywhere but Oasis

-Lamplight

-Mothership Zeta

-Super mutants ever being able to be created on the East Coast (the Master spent many years of assimilating exposed mutated animals and humans to perfect the mutant to be brawny)

-Plasma Rifle not being like Fallout 1 and 2 Plasma Rifle (Plasma Caster in New Vegas). Little weapon dedication to old games.

-Metro tunnels

-The storyline (the entire thing)

-The morality system

-The lack of civilization or interaction between communities

-No towns have any farms

-Barely RPG

-Brotherhood and Enclave occupying areas and not cleaning them completely up (no dynamic changes seen in result from game choices other than Tenpenny and Megaton)

-The East Coast not having any order or cleanup of the rubble 200 years after the West already did it

-Jet being in East Coast vaults

-Jet making it to the East Coast

-Brotherhood members break off from original Brotherhood, when really that's like furries splitting from other furries because their original group likes furries. It just doesn't make sense and wouldn't happen

-No originality or creative content other than Tranquility Lane

I could still go on if I wanted. I had some fun playing through the game but dear god, it was a terrible Fallout game. If it was a different titled game then I could have enjoyed it more as I would other casual simple games.

A friend of mine described Fallout 3 as "A good game, but not a good Fallout game"

It bothers me how empty and dead the world feels and how shallow the characters are. Also the lack of choice and consequence.

Who's lighting all those fires in the trashcans at night ? Thats the only thing that ever bothered me.

Well, it is the Capital Wasteland

NV felt more empty for me, but my memory of FO3 might be skewed, I don't own it anymore. When I play NV after skyrim the emptiness kills me, I know it's a wasteland and should be empty, but sometimes it really just feels like it's lacking content.

You realize this is a part of the FO franchise right? You are the Vault Dweller, Chosen One, The Lone Wanderer, The Courier.

You have a back story, but you make the choices and write your characters destiny based on your actions. Many RPGs do this, it is how you role play that character. This is a series that has important lore based upon what this character does, so it is good to give them some backstory(as it helps with canon) than to just have a bunch of mysterious wanderers pop out of nowhere.

When the canon events of FO3 are revealed, it will be the Lone Wanderer from Vault 101 who did this and that.

Anyway, Little Lamplight bothers me. A lot bothers me, but that right near the top. Most of my gripes are with story and LL about the worst one.

Of course I know this is part of the Fallout franchise. That doesn't mean I have to like being handed a pre-fabricated backstory for my character. I don't like any game or game series - the Witcher series is a good example - that wants to force me to play someone else's character or follow someone else's story.

One of the major things that attracts me to roleplaying games is the ability to make a character of my own. I play these games to tell my own stories, not to participate in someone else's stories.

So if you are content to be handed a backstory by someone else, good for you. I want more than that. And I will always be dissatisfied when I don't find it.

MUNGOS

I think that is limiting your roleplaying. Cleary you are a roleplayer and thus could be handed a thousand character sheets and generate a 1000 different stories regardless of a backstory. A back story just a book title, with a note from the editor. You fill in the pages. How is that not your story?

I have to agree here, Fallout is not an open-world MMO; it has a story, it has a plot and even though your often given some lee-way as to what exactly unfolds (and there's of-course a plethora of smaller events you can determine the outcome of) ultimately it's not that kind of RPG. Honestly there's nothing stopping anyone from playing whom-ever they wanted. I never played as the Courier or the Lone Wanderer ever, if there was dialouge that disagree with my current RP then I simply ignored it and chose based on what outcome I wanted for my character - kind of writing my own internal dialogue I suppose; it's an open-game, do what-ever you want.

Even Skyrim has a very basic backstory. Regardless who you want to be, you are still, dragonborn. You were still captured, wrongfully, and held prisoner as a stormcloak when you were not, regardless if you later make that choice. You were meant to be executed and survived and escaped the dragon attack on Helgen.

This will be the same for every character in Skyrim. It isn't as precise as FO world characters, but it doesn't define who you are. That is based on your story which is yet to unfold.

I wish that was what bothered me in FO. Lol. Little Lamplight makes me hurt.

I don't think a single person likes Lamplight, even the people who don't care about that kind of thing usually hate the fact that you can't give that bratty Mayor something for constantly harassing you. That and the whole idea of the town is frankly quite creepy in terms of how they've continued this long.

I totally get what you're saying and feel the exact same way, all these games could stand to chill out with the cramming THEIR story down your throat. All of them. I don't want to be told their story, I want to tell my story, and to different degrees all of them still cling on to trying to force their story on you and they need to seriously stop it if they really want to play to the strengths and potential of this genre.

Somehow fallout 3 bothered me a lot less than NV though in this regard. I think because I liked the backstory of being born in a vault, taking school tests to determine what you're like and then as a very young advlt/teenager you leave as basically a fresh clean slate. You're just a kid and then at that point you can choose to just be whatever, you left to go after your dad but now you might just slowly deteriorate into a common bandit murdering alcoholic and drug addict and forget about your dad.

With NV you're an advlt courier who got fooled by a loser and shot, now ofcourse you're compelled to get revenge on him but it means you have to go through all the same motions. I feel way more railroaded onto the main story line, it seems to permeate every side quest, and I also feel way less able to be different characters. I feel like all I get from NV is to observe obsidian showing off, where in fallout 3 I was more able to show off. Fallout 3 was a real wasteland free for all, the little factions dip their toes in but aren't really in control, in nv you feel much smaller because the factions are so dominant. There's a society in place and the whole lawless wasteland feeling is way way way reduced and that svcks because that's the point of the whole bloody thing.

Skyrim gets the freedom to make your own story better than nv and fo3, but still even skyrim could make HUGE improvements in this department, and the weird thing is it would be easier for bethesda to make these improvements, they could fire all the people that come up with these big elaborate stories because they svck and it's a waste of my time. They could drop all the cut scenes and big elaborate quest lines and stories and just instead focus on random encounters and having npcs that hold little quests that can be unlocked with dialogue.

All you know is you are a young advlt courier who got shot in the face. That's pretty vague and lets you have an open past for character development. I think one of the DLC might give some background to you but a little background doesn't impede on immersion as your character. You get shot and your main objective is to get your package back, revenge isn't even necessary if you don't choose it to be. You follow whatever path you want to get to him and have multiple large side quests during this journey.

In Fallout 3 you follow a linear path, are given extreme background in the vault, and then are kicked out of the vault because your dad left which endangers the vault so the overseer decides to start shooting a bunch of innocent people to make sure no one in the vault dies. Fallout 3 just has so little sense and hand feeds you the entire game. Of my five or six playthroughs, I've walked the same path every single time as I travel the main quest. In my third playthrough of New Vegas I haven't even entered the Strip from the same cardinal direction. Fallout isn't supposed to be an empty deserted wasteland and you are supposed to feel miniscule to the large factions. A boy walking around after leaving a vault shouldn't be seen as an all-talented and powerful Jesus in comparison to everyone else in every town.

I felt I had the most immersion in New Vegas and Fallout 3 lacked it majorly. You walk to Megaton and they have no idea what in the world is out in the world. You walk to Rivet City and they just interact with caravan. Those are the only two cities with decent civilization. New Vegas has multiple factions with multiple settlements. Settlements have problems with each other just like the original two games and your choices impact each town greatly.

That's not what fallout is though. Fallout has always been about having multiple large elaborate and complex conflicts for you to deal with. In Fallout 1 you had to retrieve a water chip from scavenging neighboring towns, kill a mutant mastermind who is under protection by a religious cult who worships him, and explode a factory where they dip humans to mutate them into mutants. In Fallout 2 you have many large factions with different large objectives (the best game quest-wise, although it gets a little stale in the last cities of the game). Random encounters were common in these games but only as small raids by slavers or mercenaries, it was never the main part of the game.

I do, it's one of my favourite locations in the game.

Muted, reported, backtraced, and about to get air-striked.

How did you like Little Lamplight? O.o