You should have put more points in Perception.



Unknown officially, I can only say that there were other bidders.

Its not fun, but it adds depth and challenge to the game. Fallout 3 is pretty easy even on Very Hard. I think luck also played a part, further evidence that that stats impacted your game to some extent.




Care to comment on WHY you disagree? Simply disagreeing doesn't really add anything to the discussion, so why say it in the first place?



Huh, odd. I thought that would be public knowledge.

Well, I like a game to be challenging. In Fallout 3, I can easily win most fights even with a character with only non-combat skills tagged, with no skill points put in the combat skills.



And Fallout 3 has even less options. E.g. no targeting of body parts in melee and unarmed, no possibility of using objects on people or on other objects (e.g. stimpaks), no possiblity of doing a single shot instead of a burst with a weapon that can shoot in bursts when targeting.

IMO a game should stand on its gameplay, not its story ~Otherwise its just an interactive cutscene.

It was an attempt to impart the reasons & strengths of TB game design.


It was the essence of the series ~Why play the game at all when you can watch a speed run on Youtube then?

That's just what I said when I read that they were intending to voice every single character in the game down to the vagrants and random merchants :yuck:
~such a cruel waste of potential for the IP, to restrict the game to what little they recorded in the studio.
{and it makes user mods stand out like pink fungus... Why would they intend the GECK, but require any quest mod to supply studio quality audio tracks to fit in? }

Sometimes a good voice actor can save really improve on what's already a good game (Patrick Stewart did this with the CD version of Throne of Chaos), but no voice talent will improve a game that cannot stand on its own to start with.

Yeah, it turned me off at first too. But it's still not as bad as Fallout 3's tutorial and unskippable cutscenes.

It would be incredibly immersion-breaking if you ran up to Moira and she had a voice, but when you turned to her guard there would be only text...
If the devs went with this design choice, I would write it off as plain laziness and would be absolutely infuriated over their half-assed work.

Good enough?

Funny thing is, Fallout 1+2 had about the same number of actors together as Fallout 3, with much smaller budget and much fewer characters voiced. And most of them were experienced voice actors, unlike FO3, which only has a handful of these.



Never distracted me either.

FO2 could have used more talking heads, though. It had fewer than FO1, in a bigger game.

The thing was, it was my first ever RPG. Excluding X-Com, it was also my first ever turn based game.

I had already been deliberately not playing it for years because I stuck with FPS, RTS, and some other games, but mostly the latter two. I had seen Diablo, did not like it, did not like the style, and assumed Fallout was more of the same.

So for somebody with that mentality, to be greeted with ''Temple of Trials'' it was like, [censored] this. I imagine these days it will be even worse for newcomers, with games such as Halo, Half Life II and all the uber l33t awesum graphics out there.

But take it from me, I thought exactly the same. I came this close to not giving the game a shot, and I am glad I gave it a second chance. The temple of trials does svck, but once you get out of it, learn how to play, and explore the game, you will be greeted by what is possibly one of the best RPG's out there. And this is from somebody that hated RPG's beforehand.

No. You miss the point. Fallout is not [supposed to be] a post apoc. simulator. Having voiced characters that talk bunk, is a waste of game time and distracts by implying importance instead of atmosphere ~and you can't skim their dialog to find out if what they say is pertinent.

(most Fallout players read faster than the NPC's speak, and would prefer it to be easily / quickly understandable / dismissible.

Plus... They read with a voice for the NPC in their head that can alter inflection and emphasis, unlike a repeating sound file. I prefer the unvoiced unless the voice is needed to establish a unique personality (like the Lou, and Set).

Well, FO2 could have used more voiced characters. They did make it cheaper than FO1, which had a larger cast despite being smaller. In FO1, all towns have from 1 to 3 talking heads. In FO2, there are quite a few of them without any talking head whatsoever (Den, New Reno, San Francisco, Modoc).

Would be better if e.g. Vic, Metzger, all of the Reno mob bosses, AHS-9, Ken Lee, Tanker captain, Jo and Vegeir were voiced.

As far as I remember, all characters in KOTOR had audible voices. Sure, it was "Alien Speak", but not mute text.
As with Fallout 1&2, well, for me it wasn't immersive enough experience to require voices for every insignificant NPC. But if I walked up to someone in FP, and had no audible dialogue, it would plain svck...

But if the insignificant voiced dialogues bother you people THAT much, why don't you fire up the GECK and remove them? Problem solved

For me, FO3 isn't any more immersive than FO1 and 2.

There's the rub... It should never have been FP. (at least not as the primary UI). KotOR 2 had FPP, as did Nocturne, and it worked fine, but was not intended (and did not allow), regular play in FPP.


But it could have been.

A matter of personal preference. For me it's the other way around.

Also many people seem to think Fallout 3 is easy, because it abandoned the "classic" gameplay system. Wrong.

F3 is easy, because the game is not balanced. Perks too powerful, enemies having low HP values, player does too much damage, etc.
This is not the fault of the system however, it just means that the numerical values that define enemy/player HP/damage/crit. chance/etc... With some tweaking, this can be easily corrected.

I can agree with that, and then ask why abandon the system that worked to begin with?

(Obviously so they could make it an FPS ~They have stated that they studied Halo & Call of Duty for the combat gameplay :banghead:)

These are different class of games.

Relic is working on an FPS set in the Warhammer 40k universe, but they sure won't be calling it Dawn of War 3, because its not... and an FPS using the same Blood Ravens, fighting against the same Chaos & Eldar... would not be a 3rd Dawn of War.

And this is where we should end our discussion. For me FP works very well for Fallout. For you it does not. Personal preference.

It's not likely that either of us will suddenly have a change of heart for whatever reason.



Then why try anything new to begin with?

Why did Edison invent the lightbulb, when people used candles for centuries and didn't complain?

why does every thread on this forum turn out to be hijacked by the same few people and turned into an anti FO3 argument?

No, its not preference... Its simply not Fallout. You can't say Chess is your prefered form of the game Go either... they are not the same and seek different objectives in play.

We all like the setting... but we don't all seem to like the series.

For me, "Fallout" is:

- Super mutants
- Vaults
- Radiation
- Wasteland

a.k.a content

and not:

- Turn based
- ISO view
- Hard SPECIAL system

a.k.a gameplay mechanics

Well, if that's where you want to draw your line, that's fine. Personally, I feel that TB/ISO is one of the least important aspects of the original Fallout games - that Fallout is more defined by the post-apocalyptic, a tongue-in-cheek-yet-very-very-dark retro-future style, with open-world gameplay including freedom to not play as an archetypal hero, multiple solution paths to problems, moral ambiguity and the ability to meaningfully affect the world for both better and worse. So, by my measuring - FO3 is Fallout, but that's just my opinion.

As for actual fact - at this point, Fallout is whatever Bethesda says it is - since they own the IP. Personally I feel that they have been very loyal to the Lore (or whatever word you guys prefer) - from the previous games, but I concede that my knowledge of those games is not very deep.

Fallout's setting needs Super Mutants ? heh, I guess that's why we have them tacked on like we do. Anyway, the Fallout setting and the Fallout series' tradition aren't the same, but they overlap. Ideally you should respect both, especially if you're benefiting from from games made by someone else. Having finished Vegas 2 recently, I witnessed what is basically a series losing its soul, in this case, they've ditched the trademark gameplay and made it a console shooter. Anyway, that's an aside. Turn Based and Isometric view aren't something I was dying to see, although I wouldn't have minded FO:T's type of combat with an Isometric view, but as for the "Hard" SPECIAL - I think that should have been left alone, rather than put on as some cheap window-dressing to make it look like the predecessors.

I don't think that super mutants and vaults are essential to the Fallout setting, although they're definitely more essential than the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave, which I very much hope won't appear in Fallout 4. I'd say that power armor is more essential than any of these four, though.

As for radiation, I'd agree that the mutations caused by radiation would be essential, but not the radiation as such. Even Tim Cain said that they set Fallout 1 80 years after the Great War so that most of the radiation is gone, but the mutations caused by it are around.

I was just giving examples with those, but the emphasys is on "Content"

Well, for me gameplay mechanics are essential to a game and to a game series. What's essential to the Fallout series doesn't have to be essential to the Fallout franchise, which encompasses not only the main series, but also its spin-offs.

And what's so hard about the SPECIAL system?

I think Bethesda should've made Fallout 3 a race game or card game just to tick off the self-proclaimed definers of the Fallout universe, who were already virulently dismissing the game as an abomination before it was even out.