Yep, in FO3 you can hide around a corner, wait for them to rush around, then shoot. Awfully familiar to Fallout or Fallout 2, actually. The quality is about the same, FO3's armour mechanics and rather worthless opposition hurts it a bit.

Debatable. I usually enjoyed reading the different (and very often hilarious) descriptions that followed after targetting certain body parts with different weapons. I miss the text box. Not to mention you could blind and anemy by shooting them in the eyes.



Indeed, in FO3 I almost never find myself actually NEEDING cover as my weapons, armour, and companions are usually all I need to quickly dispatch the opposition, regardless of who they are.

In Fallout 2 having a random encounter with the enclave, and spawnng in the open usually meant the death of you, a party member of the entire party. And that applies even to high level characters. Have you ever seen THAT happen in FO3?

It's just a difference in playstyles, like I said upthread. If you're just standing there and shooting in FO 1, it's fair for me to say that you're really not making full use of the system and using all of your tactical options. By that same token, I spend most of Fallout 3 just standing in one place and shooting, then going into VATs. But it's just as fair to say that if I'm playing that way in Fallout 3 that I'm not really making full use of that game, either.

Myself, I'm more comfortable with turn-based gameplay, I've been playing those sorts of games since before there really was an option to do so on a computer - the tactical options with that sort of gameplay come more naturally to me. (And I will agree that Fallout isn't the best turn-based game around, but when there's so few to choose from you take what you can get.) Real-time shooter-type games like Fallout 3 can easily overwhelm me - if it weren't for the option to pause gameplay with VATs, I honestly might not have played it very much. I need either a "pause" button (like in Mass Effect,) Bullet-time (like Max Payne) or a really good cover system (like Gears of War/ Kill.Switch) to break the combat into manageable chunks, or I really just can't get into it. I'm fighting the gameplay too much at that point to have much fun with the other stuff.

I liked Bioshock very much, but it was just too hectic for me. I'd scraqe through a battle, and only afterward would I realize what some of my other options were ("oh, I should have hacked that med terminal ahead of time, then blown up that barrel so the bad guy would have run to get healed only to get damaged more - that would have worked alot better than running around like crazy.") Luckily I rented it before buying, because after a few days' playing on the easiest difficulty, I was just having way too much trouble and getting frustrated. That it had an interesting and well-woven story was really the only reason I checked it out, I just wish I wasn't fighting the game so much so that I could actually get into the better parts without being frustrated all the time.

The only reason I took I chance with Fallout 3 was because of the old Fallout games - I'm not a big fan of real-time games but I'm not going to let that get in the way of playing a good game, either.

It's just a matter of what you like in a game, and what you're used to.

Geez. FOT was a better combat game than FO1. And I liked both games.

Yep your absolutely right. Combat was handled very well in Tactics and you had 2 turn based modes plus real time. The options for battle and setting up kill zones and traps etc, and executing maneuvers was great and something I really miss. It was a very good game in other respects as well. They were working on a FO Tactics 2 game but I dont think they got very far with it. I would have liked to have seen that.

Well there are all sorts of posts about people getting one-shotted by Raiders with Firelance - and last night I ran into a full health Deathclaw near Arefu at Level 14 which would have killed me if I didn't have a Bottlecap Mine - immediately followed by a Yao Gaoi attack and then a Giant Radscorpion just minutes later. If I had been less lucky with the Bottlecap Mine and had to run a bit more so that I didn't get any time to recover between attacks - I'd have died for sure. And there's also that one spot in Vault 92 where you have to fight 4 Mirelurks at the same time in a dead-end corridor. Also, I suspect a lot of people ended up facing the GNR Behemoth more than once on their first playthrough (because the game reloads your last save when you die). And there are occasional patrols of Super Mutants that are both large and equipped with Missile Launchers, and sometimes Talon Company spawns with a Sentrybot in tow.

I guess it all comes down to - how prepared you are for the engagement. If a Deathclaw gets the jump on you, you will be taking significant damage - and if something else spawns nearby, you may well end up as monster chow before you know it.

But I concede that Stimpack abuse can get you around a lot of these situations.

Sorry folks, post limit and then some.