In comparison to the lock picking I preferred the hacking mini-game. I actually liked the hacking one, but that may just be a like for puzzles.

I have to say that going First person and switching to real time, were never a problem to me.
But than again Fallout was about the setting, the choices and possibilities of your character and the way the world reacted to the things you did.

EDIT: Which is where my "issues" with fallout 3 are to be found.

I love the setting that they settled on, but Fallout was about the system... The art, the retro style, the story, came after the engine design, which was originally designed to emulate GURPS.

Before they had the license pulled, they called it the best implementation of GURPS for the PC.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/jj125/Gizmojunk/Fallout_GURPS.jpg
After they had the license pulled, it was still pretty close to the intended experience.

Here is Fallout looking like an Ultima Online clone...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfOVLdmEHkg&feature=channel_page
and here is an interview with the lead designer Timothy Cain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc6gvAzuipU&feature=channel_page

My own issues are mainly the FPP view (with the lack of a playable wide angle third person), and the main plot, voice, choices and dialog; The rest is fantastic, and very likely better than anything Troika would have done at the time.... But the rest is purely cosmetic.

It is the fundamental switch of the core rule set, and the shift from "Vault dweller explores the wastes" to "I am the Vault dweller, feel my wrath", that makes it impossible for me to view it as a sequel, or play as intended by Bethesda.

It's been how long? 3 years? And you are still repeating the same crap over and over? :shakehead:



Is pretty much how all of them played out. From simple nobody, even a tribal, to mecha-armored dealer of lasery death.

So in your opinion, my opinion is crap... I can accept that. C'est la vie.

Not personally; None of the Black Isle games were simulators.

{and in fact... the good ones were all Infinity style bird's eye perspective. }

At some point there may be a mod that fixes the F3 game... I can wait.

This thread really needs to cool down or it will be locked and warnings issues to those who have earned them.

This guy is Twinks' opposite number.

My biggest issue would be that Todd wanted to make Fallout 3 just like Oblivion, only better (in all the good ways). I would prefer it to be just like Fallout, only better (in every possible way).

Same here :foodndrink:

*Unfortunately... "In every possible way" means first person shooter to a startling number of people. :sadvaultboy:

**Edit: This was slated for a different thread, but its something better suited to this one.
Tactics was no Fallout game... it was a mission based combat game ~I don't know it they advertised it as an RPG or not, but it wasn't, and I'd assume it wasn't tying to be. Tactics had the one benefit of an improved TB combat mode (strangely off by default). I really hoped for that to be incorporated into the fallout series proper ~but it never happened.

As for FO1, 2, and Tactics being fantastic... I didn't see anything fantastic about Tactics other than the TB combat improvements.
FO and FO2 however... were fantastic ~both. Regardless of perceived gaffs they invoked the exact atmosphere one needs to enjoy such a bleak setting, and the games had that 'rock, paper, scissors' triangle of Dialog breaking up exploration breaking up combat. These were effectively three distinct minigames combined into an overall gameplay ~that for me, never got boring, because there was never to much of one thing without change.

By contrast: Fallout 3 is near constant combat in the wastes and in nearly every location besides a town. In Fallout you might get mugged once or twice a week in the wastes; In FO3 you get attacked on almost every other hill, by Scorpions, robots, Dogs, and Mole-Rats. The "refreshing change" is that when you find someplace interesting (or even not), you then get attacked by Feral Ghouls, Talon/regulators/Enclave, Supermutants, or Deathclaws.

The difference in FO1 from FO3 is that combat encounters in FO1 were quite often "in the way" or obstructing your true objective, where as combat in FO3 is most often simply the point (this is common trait with nearly all FPS games, and that's because FPP combat is why they are fun).

Unlike in FO3, I don't recall a single place in FO1 or 2 that you just visit for the heck of it to see what you can kill in there. Nowhere in FO3 have I found any locations on par with the Glow, Necropolis, the Hub, Den, or even Gecko [to be fair, I've not completed the game and I've read of many locations that I have not found], but can anyone envision Necropolis in FO3? (does anyone think that the underworld counts?)

Very well said.
That's also one of the reasons why the extreme violence in FO3 is one the game's protagonists unfortunately.

I remember the first time I went to Necropolis, the ghouls started attacking me unprovoked. There were extremely easy to kill but I got worried that if I started killing them I might end up screwing things up...it was a rare situation in a game when I had to do my best not to fight.
And then the Glow was a jewel of a 'dungeon' with it's unrepeatable atmosphere deriving partly from the fact that you did not get to fight until you reached the end of it.
Heh... look what those guys did: they put the largest amount and variety of top equipment in a location where you didn't have to fight to get to them, and it works!

It's funny, because when I played Fallout 1&2 I always thought how much cooler and immersive the games would be if they were more like Daggerfall. Well fortunaly my wish came true.


Alright first, Combat in the old Fallout games was pretty skillless and not good even for a turn based game(X-Com or JA2 this is not). And, what exploration? Fallout1's world was to tiny, you could fully explore every nook and cranny in just a few hours. Also, as has been mentioned before, both games only had a very few decent dialogues. On the contrary, Fallout 2's dialogue was pretty atrocious in several situations and immersion breaking.


Granted, there is a lot more combat in FO3, but it is actually entertaining and not a nuisance like in Fallout.


No interesting locations in FO3? Well how about Tranquility Lane, which reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream. And the Dunwich building was a whole lot more scary then the Glow ever was, the audio recordings were just freaky.
And interesting enough, I was horribly dissapointed the first time I saw http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/4/40/Fo1_Necropolis_Halls_of_the_Dead.png, since I had expected something less....generic. http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/fallout/images/c/c6/Underworld_Fallout.jpg is pretty much how I always thought it should look like.

It was easy to think so, I'll grant you that. Fallout is not the prime example of tactical TB combat, but it was good (though Tactics TB combat was better ~and it also offered the option to control the rest of the NPC's if you wanted that ~actually... I think you had to ).

You'd have to give an example... I never found one that was a nuisance.

Who said anything about uninteresting?

Yeah...hmm... That wasn't the point of the Glow. The Glow was perhaps the best location in Fallout (to me at least). Certainly my favorite in general. (Necropolis was 2nd )

**That settles it... I'm never installing the hi-resolution patch... It not only just shrinks the graphics, but actually seems to denvde the game of its atmosphere. (Odd though, because it didn't do that with Torment)

Hold on...
What was it that made Necropolis more generic than Underworld?
Necropolis had the 'bad' ghouls led by a overambitious arrogant dictator, it had the oppressed 'liberals' that lived underground and it had a gang of Super mutants that really ran the show above all... and then there was an abandoned vault right in the middle.

Of course you could say that all that is fairly generic :shrug: but I find it far more interesting than a town inside an unusual location (pretty like all the rest of FO3's major towns), with normal people, shops, bars and the like + a bunch of 'monsters' nearby... again like most of FO3's locations.

Necropolis presentation I find very generic, it's one of the most boring locations in Fallout. From a location called Necropolis I simply expected something far more...foreboding.
It has a nice sounding backstory, but really it's one of the most linear parts of the game. Go in, kill ghouls, talk to leader, kill rats, kill muties, kill ghouls, get waterchip. Along the way you may or may not just kill everyone or repair the water pump.

Underworld just feels far more menacing. And the NPCs there have some of the best dialogues in the game. Not to mention several great sidequests start or end there as well. So yes, Underworld is a helluva lot more interesting than Necropolis.

I've played Necropolis without killing (except the rats & mole rats).

*The funny thing (and its really poignant), is that we are comparing a two games ten years apart, where one runs in 16MB without dedicated hardware and the other runs in 512MB and requires dedicated hardware; The first fits on a 640MB cd, where the second is a dual layer DVD.

Necropolis was a derelict city of broken buildings ~Underworld was some skull shaped Dante's Inferno lobby with barber and bar inside. ~It was as bad as Tenpenny Tower (Worse in fact, because the TP residents can plausibly be that nuts, while the Ghouls are far worse off.)



I once went on a Paris sewer tour in France, now one might expect something out of Phantom of the Opera ~Something like a Disney walking tour... but It was just what it said... A tour of a modern waste management system for a major city. Bare concrete, white walls and yellow pipes.
Necropolis was named for city of the dead ~dead city with ghouls in it. Same as any other dead city without them.
Expecting some grand macabre is just not what you'd find; Ghouls are not the undead, just disfigured ~and infirm ~and not interested in interior decorating. Bethesda's Underworld is the polar opposite of what suits the Fallout setting (as are many of the locations in the game ~they are what many would expect to find in a PA theme park).

@ Kai Hohiro
But from Necropolis you can get taken to see the Lou! That's the one twist that can turn the game around 180 degrees! definitely not a linear development.... (and yeah maybe that was too much)
And btw Set's dialog (with his shadow and dirtnaps and all) is classic! And then there's the dialog were you can try to convince that mutant you're a robot or something. Necropolis perhaps has little dialog compared to other places, but what little it has I found it to be excellent. I found no dialog in FO3 that could compare.

Anyway, to each his own I suppose... when I found Underworld I was not impressed in the least, but, meh... I won't argue personal preferences... it just didn't do the trick for me.



Really? How come?... how do they advertise something like this?... + did they look anything like the sewers from Broken Sword? (damn... can't find a screenshot )

I thought Necropolis was far more fleshed out than Underworld myself; there was more going on at Necropolis, and it actually had a back story. Underworld was simply another Fallout 3 town except full of Ghouls; there wasn't really anything more to it.

Of course I'm still irritated every time I hear a Ghoul mutter the Bethesdaism 'smoothskin'. I liked Ghouls more when they called humans 'normals'; that sounded less ridiculous in my opinion. That's enough to make me hate Underworld.

Right, Underworld is menacing ? I must have missed the horror that is ghouls hanging around in a Museum, heh. Neither of them is really interesting, but I don't see how your criticism of Necropolis doesn't apply to UW. The name Necropolis does make you think of worse, but that name's probably given and bandied about by normal people who'd see the ghouls as something undead-ish. But as you do.

Menacing was maybe not the correct word, but the first time I entered the museum, I was definitly feeling uneasy. Of course once you get to know the ghouls, they're not so bad
I just appreciate UW because it is my safeplace when I'm going deep into DC ruins. Also again, several dialogues are interesting or atleast amusing like Carol and Cerberus.
What does Necropolis have other than Set? And even he will get killed by most players. My point is, you blow through Necropolis in about 15-20 minutes and after that you are never inclined to return there. Really most of it's inhabitants are nothing but shotgun fodder. UW simply is a great safe haven among the DC ruins, especially if you play without auto travel.


Well yeah, Ghouls are the zombie equivalents in Gurps/Fallout/Shadowrun whatever. They're a bit more complex than you're regular fantasy zombies, but still they are the standins for 'real' zombies.

I'll reply to this if you don't mind Kai, even though it wasn't directed at me.



More immersive, yes, but Fallout wasn't about immersion was it? In fact very few RPGs (and they've all been created in recent years) are for immersion. Any game of any genre can be immersive, it isn't a main point for an RPG. So while FPP/TPP will make (and made) Fallout more immersive, that was never the aim of the developers who created the Fallout series.



Combat is pretty simple and straightforward in Fallout, which is why I wouldn't call it a nuisance. The aiming system is the only tactical part of the combat, and I think it's very well done. Fighting against a village IS boring, I'll give you that, although when do you actually fight against a whole village? I can only think of one option where you were forced to fight against all the regulators in the Boneyard.

Fallout 1's world is tiny, but there is a lot going for it. Quality > Quantity. Fallout 2 on the other hand took a different approach, Quantity > Quality. Granted that I loved both, I prefer FO1 over FO2. FO1 really felt racing against time, as well as the characters were more interesting and the plot was quite good, the Master's character being what I loved best (although the final dialogue with him was a bit disappointing, I wanted it to be longer in order to convince him otherwise).

Fallout 2 was filled with jokes, gimmicks and New Reno. I agree that it felt out of place.



Like I said before, I never felt it was a nuisance bar fighting against a whole town. But FO3's combat never felt entertaining to me, not at all.




Can't agree on this. First off the Glow is on of my favourite locations in all the video games I've played. The eerie place, the radiation, finding information about the whole ordeal, revealing another piece of the puzzle....and most importantly it was optional. No one forced you to go deeper inside the Glow. It was just interesting enough to do so yourself.

Whilst Necropolis was nothing special (apart from the super mutants where I suddenly [censored]ed my pants the first time I met with them), Underworld is pretty much the same, although sillier (barber?). Both were pretty average.

To blow through Necropolis in 15-20 minutes I suppose you need to run, take the water chip and leave while avoiding all encounters dialogs etc. and only if you have prior knowledge about what you need to do and what way you need to go, since it has a little underground maze. If that's how you played it I'm not surprised that you didn't find it interesting



I suppose it might be different according to which game you played first... but for me the sole part that Necropolis was a city of ghouls was enough to make it special...
The first Fallout did a good job of creating mysteries. Necropolis, the Glow the Deathclaw, Brotherhood of Steel etc. were all legendary by the time I got to finally see them - due to the way the game carefully provided me with info about them I suppose + the fact that it kept them unique (except the deatclaw unfortunately)... I mean, Necropolis wouldn't feel any special at all if I had to slaughter legions of ghouls before I got there.

So UW's interesting to you as it's just an inn, then ? I blew through UW in ~15 minutes on my first try, didn't really bother with the side-quests as they weren't interesting to me at the time.

I like how Underworld is right next to a legion of respawning Super Mutants who could easily overpower the only two guards the town has. Underworld shouldn't be a very safe haven; realistically Super Mutants would have overrun Underworld within hours of their arrival.

And nevermind that within the first moments you approach approach the musem you actually get an explanation why that is not the case?


Well if I don't bother with the sidequests or anything, I can finish Fallout1 in 15 minutes.


Just for the record, of course I played Fallout first. Hell I even played the very first demo of it, long before the actual game was out(compared to other games I've played Fallout isn't even that old). And I don't disagree that Fallout1 had some very cool moments and a lot of mystery. But just Necropolis in particular was a huge let down to me and not one of the highlights of the game.

Think his point was how silly it is to have two guards. You can blow through Fallout 1 in 15 minutes on the first try ? Bravo then. Still, if all UW's interest garners is...a storage locker/rest area, that's not exactly indicative of anything.

Since when was "they just don't bother us" an adequate explanation? Ghouls and Super Mutants aren't buds; they don't see each other as "kin". The Super Mutants in the original Fallout are shown as being very hostile towards Ghouls in both history, and what can happen in the game. The ones around the watershed tolerated the Ghouls because they had to; the Super Mutants in Fallout 3 have no reason to tolerate Ghouls since they operate on a simplistic "if FEV doesn't work on it, kill it" mindset.