So we're just here to argue eh? I think I know where this thread is going...

No, it covers a large blank unplayable area with the only explorable places being small and far between.


Visual, detail.



How can you argue that realism is more lacking in FO3? What's more realistic: taking 3 steps, shooting a guy in the chest, and then saying "Your turn!", OR being able to run and take cover when you get shot and pull the trigger at each other at the same time in Real-time?




Yes not too much later, only 3 years. But it was made by a small staff with extremely limited resources and therefore the graphics svckED and they still allowed details like facial hair.

What? How much SC did you play? There was whole debates, conversations and arguments. It released in the exact same year, FO gets no free pass.


Why argue semantics?




I bet I know why you played through the game so quickly; so you could run back to your buddies and go "ZOMG GUYS! Failout3 is the Sux0rZ!". It seems that's the only reason someone would sabotage their own game experience like that. If you complete every single quest and sidequest in both games you'll have your proof that Fallout 3 is longer.


Fine, there is SLIGHTLY more interaction with factions in FO 3 considering O:A and Broken Steel.

Edit: Sorry, had to edit one of my replies. It was a bit too offensive.

Good point! I had to use mods for the weapon damage. Which is kind of stupid indeed because a bullet is bullet whomever is weelding the gun.
A skilled person or not doesn't really matter, if a bullet strikes it inflicts the same damage IMO. Skill should only effect the aiming capability.

The same goes for perception in relation with weapon skills. I missed that also.

I don't want to get you rattled up more, but Fallout 3 didn't have a lot of sidequests. If you compare things to Fallout 1 you're probably right, but considering the amount of sidequests in Fallout 2 it might be a little different. Some of them even stretched out over multiple towns and could take a lot of investigation. I honestly think that I would take less time completing every quest in Fallout 3 than I would in Fallout 2 (not counting DLC's, don't have the opportunity to buy those).

Lol. Maybe it's a individual thing. I mean FO2 had a whole lot of sidequests, but I completed Fallout 2 in about 40 hours give or take a few. In Fallout 3 I can play for 30 hours and not even scratch the surface of all the quests and sidequests available in the game without intentionally trying to avoid them at all. I say it might be a individual thing because I don't use fast travel for example, but even when I did I spent over 100 hours in FO3 before I beat it.

I don't buy the argument regarding the sandbox and the fun that can be had with it. The GTA series is a fun sandbox, F3's is pretty bland.

I've played 100 - 200 hours of F3 and can easily say that without more quests, I've no interest in playing through it again. I've played a similar amount of GTA IV and I still enjoy playing with its sandbox in short bursts.
A decent sandbox world can help offset a lack of sidequests, but I don't feel F3's sandbox is that good. If I'm not actively changing something in it by completing a quest, the entire world stands still. There's so few people in the game, even before I start killing people, raiders are all near enough identical.
In F2 I could run into mobsters, Hubologists, press gangs, slavers, traders, Yakuza, tribals, Enclave patrols, security patrols, rangers, farmers, caravans, and many more, just naming humans.

I also dislike the fact that time never really feels like a factor in F3's quests. Whilst I actually like it when games don't give me a time limit, I dislike it when they try to make me think there is one. My immersion is broken for quite some time when I'm told by an NPC "Please, it's urgent! Rescue NPC X or they'll soon be killed!" only to find that "soon" means I could spend months of in-game time doing other stuff without failing the quest.

Touché!!! :thumbsup:

I don't want to drag this thing all off-topic, but there are two things I'd like to respond to, just for clarity's-sake, and then hopefully we can move on...

Come on, now - that's completely misrepresenting the entire concept of a turn-based system. You know, and I know, that the concept of taking turns doesn't actually represent two opponents civilly waiting in line, but rather actions that are so close to simultaneous as to have been imperceptible during the time frame represented from one round to the next. This isn't a new concept, and done well (and admittedly Fallout 1&2 were hardly the penultimate acheivement in turn-based gaming,) can provide a great deal of simulated accuracy. Back in the day I played both Dungeons and Dragons, and Cops and Robbers. One method of simulating a real-life encounter was never inherently more "realistic" than any other - and I don't see how it's so terribly different within the realm of videogames.

It's perfectly okay to have a preference. Not everyone is going to be a big fan of turn-based mechanics (and apparently some people have trouble wrapping their heads around the concept.) That's okay. But there's no need to denounce one or the other method of gameplay as inherently more or less "realistic." No matter what, all you're doing is trying to make it fun to pretend to kill people, after all...

Let's pretend for a moment that we're out deer-hunting. We're both equipped with identical rifles firing the exact same ammunition. We come to a clearing and find two deer at equal distance from each of us, and within firing range. We're both aiming for the heart at two targets that are aligned to us in exactly the same manner.

We take our shots, and both bullets hit their respective targets in roughly the area we were aiming for (let's call it the upper torso.) Your shot was dead-on, piercing the heart and stopping the little guy dead. It's a clean kill and he never knew what hit him. My shot is only two inches to the left. I puncture a lung - the poor fella certainly knows he's been shot, but it's certainly not a clean kill. He takes off in a blind panic and I have to rush off to put him out of his misery.

That's two identical bullets hitting the exact same body location (Fallout only recognizes Head, Torso, Arms, etc - it doesn't discriminate between proximity to "critical" areas within that location,) and yielding two very different results. All bullets (of the same caliber and fired from similar guns, at least) are certainly made equal. But exactly where that bullet strikes can make a world of difference.

And that's what skill level represents, as far as damage is concerned.

You make a perfectly legitimate point in this "bullets do more damage with higher skill" discussion and I have been confronted on this matter by you and others on multiple occasions. Still, I have a different view on this, because somehow bullets doing extra damage just seems a little silly to me. I'll try to explain it as best I can, though I'm somewhat lacking in that regard

I always interpreted the system used in Fallout 1 and 2 as more correct in that regard. My weapons always have around the same amount of damage, and increasing my skill in using that type of weapon would just result in my character being more able to hit my opponent (with targeted shots) on certain spots I'm aiming for. I just interpret the critical chance the games offer as the possibility that I actually hit a vital organ or a difficult to hit weak spot on the body. I know the critical chance is based on Luck and initially has nothing to do with handling weapons properly in combat if you look at it from a certain point of view, and that my opinion on this is mostly based on emotions. But this somehow makes a little more sense for me, because even though I could interpret the bullets doing more damage in Fallout 3 when my skill increases as being more able to target and hit important physical parts of my enemies, that's still pretty much something I tell myself, while my statistics just show me that my bullets do more damage.

Hope this gibberish is somewhat understandable :hehe:

Almost forgot: what I found truly phenomenal in FO3 was Tranquility Lane. Especially from an evil perspective and the whole virtual matrix thingy with the suburbs in the 50thies theme. :hehe:

Now that was awesome!!! Appropriate music too! Pity it wasn't bigger coz I really luved it! :ahhh:

Well okay if you put it like that I can see your point. Still it's a bit silly having different damage values IMO, like Salival stated I prefer it equals critical hit chances too. Maybe it comes down to preferences. What would we do with FO without modding? Pfiew!

Talking about damage: The only thing that never worked for me in the old series was the Armor Piercing ammo. Not even with Killap's patch... I don't know if this issue is solved with the latest release of his mod. I hope so. That always was kind of a bummer. I know there are patches for this. But what I don't know if it's compatible with Killap's patch.

Wouldn't this be much better simulated by having an impact on say critical chance though? The base damage of a weapon shouldn't be affected by its operator skill.

I understand why it's the way it is of course but it just seems like an illogical and fairly ineffective attempt to prevent player skill from completely overpowering character skill.

Ignoring completely what each game is trying to achieve, I'd say that FO3 is overall a far better action game than the first two could ever be (with anything that might entail)...
Though that's not an 'improvement' per se unless you like it, in which case it's a great thing.

Other than that I like how some skills, such as repair, have become more relevant to the gameplay instead of something that you could occasionally use.

Also I don't find the graphics of FO3 'better' overall, I find them more technologically advanced and it's resolution higher.


I personally find it both logical and effective. But even if it's not, it's probably still a necessity in order to, as you very nicely stated, prevent player skill from completely overpowering character skill.
The reason why I consider it a necessity is because the (logical) chance to miss hitting your target with a low skill seems to annoy most people - it was a constant complain in Morrowind.
As such I think that when you reject chance to hit then it's only by making damage depend on it that character skill can have any relevance to the gameplay.
Perhaps the best solution could be to completely drop character skill therefore turning Fallout into a proper action game with exploration... it seems as a natural next step to me since most people seem to be annoyed by such RPG mechanics and only very few people care to suggest that they should be enriched.

Basically what rebet said. I think that when people are playing an action game (real-time combat,) that a lot of players are going to get annoyed when they have their crosshairs directly over a target and still miss. So that's naturally going to minimize the impact of a skill like Small Guns, for example. As far as "realism" goes, it's probably a little more accurate with the old way where the skill's impact on damage was more due to critical chance, or another old RPG trope where you do more or less damage depending on how close or far away you were from the target chance (ie, if you need a 20 and roll a 35 you'll do better damage than if you'd rolled a 21.)

How to reconcile this with a real-time action is something I don't think anyone's come up with a perfect solution for, as yet.

Anyway, we're going way off-topic with this, and the title of this thread isn't "Fallout 1's damage calculations vs. Fallout 3's."

EDIT - So anyway, I did enjoy the cinematics that play out during VATS attacks. That was something I certainly had a lot of fun with, and an element I'm sure they're going to continue to improve upon. I would like to see more varied "gore" effects, however. I got a little bored of seeing what amounted to the same effects every time (though to be fair that's going to happen regardless in a game of this length - and something that I got rather desensitized to in the older games, as well.)

That's because the 95% of the time you spend in Fallout3 is spent going to places, fighting and wandering. In Fallout2, this time is roughly 15% or so.

So many things to respond to, I'm going to just respond to this one post for now.

No, there are also more areas to explore. I've played hundreds of hours and still haven't scoured every inch of Wasteland. Perhaps the quests in the original are more numerous (personally I'm not a huge fan of that style of game, but I can certainly appreciate that they're fantastic games) but it's almost like fast-traveling to each quest. If you could walk from area to area then maybe you'd have a point, but there are so many things to do even if you're not on a quest. The bobblehead hunt is just one way of making you go out and explore more.



Selling slaves is kind of cool. You can sell tech to the Brotherhood Outcasts in FO3 though. Lyons has separated himself from the typical Brotherhood, so he doesn't much care about tech. Makes sense. That said, if you REALLY wanted to get technical, you could sell your tech in the armory, but she'll eventually run out of caps so you might have to buy some stuff in exchange ;P
Get the Contract Killer perk or...the similar perk on the other end of the scale. Those allow you to hunt outlaws or goodie-two-shoes for a certain faction. I see your point of course, but at least they included something. As for tricking factions to attack each other, that's pretty cool...you can get NPCs to do all kinds of stuff by lying in Fallout 3 as well, but starting a full-scale war is pretty cool.


You have to remember that some of these changes aren't due to better tech, but also due to better understanding of what makes games fun. Of course, fun is decided by the individuals on a very personal level, but for me the extra exploration wasn't just a technological advancement: it was added because Bethesda knows that it's fun to explore open worlds.
Your example in this statement, however, has given me a good idea for a way to make a new Fallout intro more interesting and keep it unique even if you come from a Vault. Not really a discussion for this topic though so I suppose if you wanna discuss that you'd have to PM me.

By realism when I'm talking about Fallout games, I never mean why some guy don't die with a single headshot. Or why there is no hunger, thirst, etc...

Realism comes to effect when the main quest in Fallout3 is about cleaning the water. This is nonsense. Or same weapon doing higher damage as you level up. Or being able to nuke a place. Or the base mechanics of the game don't make sense. even the fact that there's only walk forward animation when you move diagonally.

or when you can drive your car through the whole map (there aren't roads or drivable terrain everywhere) in Fallout2. That's nonsense too.

Well in New Vegas there WILL be Dehydration so the thirst thing is covered despite you saying that doesn't matter ;P

And cleaning water is nonsense? Really? Because last time I checked, we clean water in real life too. Plus, when you add on Broken Steel the main quest becomes fighting the Enclave. And having more skills and practice with a weapon allows you to become better with it. How is that unrealistic? And nuking a place is unrealistic? Sure because nukes are just a made-up little story the Japanese use to tell us we're bad people? Oh wait, nukes ARE real and you CAN nuke places like we did in WWII. About the only statement you made there that makes sense is the walking diagonally.

Sorry for the sarcasm, it's just unbelievable to me what some people consider "unrealistic"

You can clean the radiation from water with sand for free with ease, and everybody (at my age) know this.
If you are good with a weapon, your odds of hitting your target increases. Not the damage you do. a bullet does the same amount of damage to the head whether you're good at it or not.
Nuking a bahemoth that's in front of you is unrealistic. A guy that wants a settlement nuked because they are a nuisance is unrealistic. There are two reasons because you can do it in Fallout3. To show you the "only" real decision you can make that effects the world, and because it's cool.

I am not being sarcastic. :foodndrink:

I disagree, as the two can link into each other. A skilled marksman is more likely to hit areas that are more likely to be fatal than a non marksman.

A skilled gunsperson is going to be able to keep their weapon in better shape, increasing accuracy and decreasing misfires.

Aside from the fact that I don't think that's entirely true, I KNOW it's not true on a mass scale without some big machine. *coughprojectpuritycough*
However if you don't handle a weapon as well then you're more likely to get kickback and miss, possibly grazing their shoulder instead of hitting their head dead on, therefore doing less damage. So really, changing the damage your weapons do is a good way of showing a change in accuracy despite the game being real-time. (EDIT: see above post, he describes it a little better than me I think)
They have more advanced technology than we do at the moment, so I mini-nuke launcher that can be shot relatively close is not unbelievable. And if you shoot it too close, you die. So it works out.
And are you serious that you don't think living in the wasteland would drive someone inherently bad to go crazy enough to nuke a town for no reason? There are evil people that cause pointless destruction for seemingly no reason even in TODAY'S society, no doubt it would be more intense after an apocalypse.

If it's too close, then yes. But small nuclear weapons do exist, in fact F3's Fat Man is based on one - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
Whilst the Fat Man is smaller than the Davy Crockett, it doesn't seem implausible that it could be down-scaled even further given time and research, particularly within the world of Fallout.


Why is that unrealistic?
You simply state that it is, you don't actually provide an argument.

Whilst I thought it was pretty lame in the game, I don't see what's so unrealistic about it relative to the rest of the setting.
If the entire game was real then I imagine the weapon would no longer be viable, but that would be true of any number of things in F3.

See, there was a sentence in there that I included for a reason, hoping it wouldn't simply be overlooked. It went a little like this "even when I did use fast travel I still spent over 100 hours in FO3 before I beat it". Which is over 2x more hours than I spent in FO2 thus more greater game length.

"Bethesda Softworks changed the side quest "The Power of the Atom" in the Japanese version of Fallout 3 to relieve concerns about depictions of atomic detonation in inhabited areas. In non-Japanese versions, players are given the option of either defusing, ignoring, or detonating the dormant atomic bomb in the town of Megaton. In the Japanese version, the character Mr. Burke has been taken out of this side quest, making it impossible to detonate the bomb.[118] "Also in the Japanese release, the "Fat Man" nuclear catapult weapon was renamed "Nuka Launcher," as the original name was a reference to the bomb used on Nagasaki.[118][119]""

This is a really nice touch. Things like this are done better in Fallout3.

When there was a problem with children in the USA release, they were removed altogether from Fallout2 causing glitches in the game. What Bethesda did was much better.

I think someone might have touched on this already, somewhere above, but one thing I really did enjoy was the extended introduction in Fallout 3 - growing up and exploring the Vault before you really "start" the game. I actually wouldn't have minded having the option to linger a little bit more before being forced out.

In Fallout 1, you know that you're a Vault Dweller, but you don't ever really get sense of just what that "means" until later on when you come back and get a chance to talk to people. In #3 I felt I had a more solid foundation on which to base my character - I had a more complete sense of what growing up in that world might be like - and therefore how that might impact my exploration and reactions to Wastes I find myself in during the game.

I hope you understand me on this one. The fact that you can live your childhood is awesome. But when you see so many shortcomings from the start of the game, (like hitting the NPC's don't have any effect on the outcome and they don't do anything when you are hitting them until they become unconscious) then what's the reason to even have some background for your character? Even a basic thing like a guard catching you and throwing you in the jail for punishment could be so immerse. And Amata helping you out if you were good to her.