Fallout 3 - Codex Opinions Thread

[Devil]

dear gods of the abyss, i just found the ufo crash encounter. wtf were they thinking?

Isn't that like, you know, cool?

 

[Lemunde]

Well from the beginning I never really had anything against Fallout 3. I just haven't found any incentive to want to buy it. STALKER and Farcry 2 have already quenched my thirst for a free roaming FPS and they both do it quite well. If I want a free roaming RPG I'll just play Oblivion(codex be dammed). Post apoc? Meh... Actually, that word pretty much sums up all my feelings for Fallout 3. Meh...

 

[hakuroshi]

It may be some kind of fun to play but I don't like postnuclear setting by itself and there is no elven... ears.
So I'll skip as intended.

 

[poocolator]

Isn't there a segment where you've gotta grab the fatman and nuke the behemouth, or does he eventually die from the brotherhood guys or get bored and leave?

They give you the fat man or you find it laying around (just before the behemoth comes by), complete with like 4+ rounds of... mini... nukes (?)

I accidentally blew up one of the Brotherhood of [Bethesda] guys with the fat man and they all turned on me. I had to get out of there before I was torn to shreds. For some reason they attacked me instead of the Behemoth >.< I think I broke the quest because now I can't go anywhere near the brotherhood douchebags without being shot at.

 

[SuicideBunny]

dear gods of the abyss, i just found the ufo crash encounter. wtf were they thinking?

Isn't that like, you know, cool?

fo1 easter egg - all the charm = cool?

 

[Suchy]

Holy shit, you can replace the music? Well, now I know what I'll do as soon as possible...

You don't even need to replace anything, just throw in your mp3s to the respective folders: base, explore, dungeon, public, battle.
Base has some military style tracks, so I guess it's Enclave and shit. Public are town tracks, there goes A Trader's Life, Khans of New California, etc. Dungeon and Explore are self explanatory, all the neat ambient goes there. And every track from Battle should be removed, because: 1) cheesy orchestrals, 2) it's abomination to have music changed for combat in a (wannabe) Fallout game.

 

[Trash]

I'm not even going to touch this turd unless I have absolutely nothing better to do or some fans finally managed to mod it into a good game.

So I'll probably play it around the time that hell freezes over.

 

[uhjghvt]

hey remember when BS first posted a screen of the inside of tenpenny tower and everyone was making fun of it for being too well preserved?

this is the ghoul town. I'm not even lying.

a closer view of the spotless marble. btw the voice actor for this guy didn't start slurring his lines until he got to the one that said he was drunk

 

[corky842]

Whoever was directing the voiceovers really sucks. They couldn't make Moira (the female questgiver with the annoying voice and moustache) sound less annoying? Really?

 

[MetalCraze]

We're talking about Bethesda here. Their philosophy is "shit sells". So making everything shit is a guaranteed success on all fronts.

 

[Xor]

I always thought the was a myth.

 

[bossjimbob]

What I didn't like:
* Liam Neeson's performance is pretty wooden
* There are some weird moments when you do something horrible and nearby NPCs don't react in ways you expect
* Animations not so good
* Third person camera pretty useless
* Some bad dialogue and bad voice acting in spots

What I liked:
* Character creation process is kinda clever
* Ridiculous number of beards
* Despite all the Codex hate, I thought the integration of V.A.T.S. to be a nice change of pace for "Oblivion with guns"
* The environments are convincing
* The quests seem to have more flexibility than Oblivion in that you can complete them a number of ways with different outcomes
* Some decent dialogue and voice acting (it's just not consistent)
* Quests go a lot deeper than Oblvion from what I've seen

I've only played about four or five hours, but it's growing on me. And yes, I've played the original Fallout (and liked it).

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Andyman Messiah and Fallout 3.
Alright, here goes, here fucking goes...

Fallout 3 is, just like Oblivion, a sloppy product with glaring, obvious, bloaty fucking errors everywhere which the main fanbase is going to ignore because they either choose not to look at them or are simply too stupid to acknowledge that Bethesda is a lazy developer who can't be bothered to hand in an honest, well-polished piece of work. Here's a tip, Bethesda: you gotta see that the production makes it on through the night and everything is handled okay.


WORDS! THAT ARE SPOKEN!!
Take the voice acting for example. Uhjghvt nailed it. The voice acting is (still) completely worthless. Some of the new actors do manage to shine through all the shit that the recycled Oblivion voice actors drop but they have a real fucking rough time competing against Imperial Soldier Baurus and his merry friends, and irregularities like "Whoops, I forgot I was supposed to be drunk! Allow me to start slurring my lines for no reason beginning now, sir!" It's nothing more than embarassing. The voice director should have made the fuckers re-record their lines 'til they were perfect.

Speaking about embarassing! Let's take a superquick moment to talk about the lovely dialogue! You ready? Bethesda: ban "take your kid to work"-day. Those little fucks can't write shit even if you threatened to take away their fucking allowance. Yes, the dialogue is fleshed out compared to Oblivion. Yes, you can probably feel that characters have some personality. But that doesn't stop the stupidity. Skill checks, Bethesda! Seriously! I knew you would screw those up, but THIS bad?! Seriously?!

"I'M TWO DOG COCK! I FIGHT THE POWER WITH MY RADIO STATION! AWOOO!!!"

1 [INTELLIGENCE] Aha, so you fight the power with the power of radio?!!
2 What is a radio?
3 AWOO!!!
4 Get to the point!

That's what intelligence is? Repeating what the guy just said to you? Showing that you pay attention to shit?

"GOOD BOY! YOU LISTENED TO ME! GOOD BOOOOOOYYY!!! HAVE A COOKIE!!"

Jesus crotchgrabbing Christ, I don't want to believe that someone actually wrote that and looked at it and thought "yeah, that's intelligence" and brought it over to a bunch of other people who said "yes, you've nailed intelligence."

Fucking hell!

On a side note: Liam Neeson sounds bored out of his mind but he deliver his lines professionally and well enough. It's just that he sounds bored all the time. Like Todd was bothering him to sign his Qui-Gon action figure every time he had a break or something. Ron Perlman is the only high-level voice actor that does an absolutely stunning job. Sure it's a fucking easy job to talk all tough and grizzled up and stuff. And if you're bored of Bethesda people, bored can still pass as a tough guy voice.


QUESTS!
Moving on, let's see how many sentences I can conjure up to describe quests in this game. 90% is shoot to kill missions. 5% is escort missions. 5% is other missions where you go from A to B and click on something, rinse and repeat until quest is completed.

Yep.


COMBAT!
Killing stuff is essentially what Fallout 3 is built for. More importantly, killing stuff in VATS is what Fallout 3 is built for. VATS is an ingame cheating mechanism that allows you to pause the game and direct your attacks on one specific part on your enemy's body. When you fire your weapon everthing goes into slowmotion bullet time matrix max payne mode and all the pretty colors vanishes as you're shown what's essentially a cinematic of your badass character shooting a monster in the head or the left arm. And it's the most retarded thing I've ever seen.

I just know some brainless retard designer went "Oh we gotta have head explosions and eyeballs popping and limbs flying everywhere! That's MATURE!" And then the other brainless retard designer sitting next to him says "Let's design an entire game mechanism where your character look awesome as he's slaying the beasts of the wasteland!" "IN SLOWMOTION!!" "YEAH!!"

Speaking about slaying beasts... it's a hell of a mess. Combat is always a bloody mess in F3-land. Doesn't matter if you have the actual Bloody Mess perk or not, because pretty much every enemy is going to go down in the most over the top messiest of messy bloody messes ever even though the perk clearly says that it ENABLES the gory deaths. Makes me wonder if there's more gory death sequences out there that I haven't had the pleasure of triggering, but hey, a 5% damage bonus to everything is pretty neat.


ANIMATED!!
Bethesda isn't good at animating. And the usual physics engine fuckup is a delight.


TUTORIAL
... is a painful thing that drags on and on. Character creation has never been so dull. Major cool props for borrowing some character creation from Jagged Alliance 2. Major uncool props for fucking it up and making it the most boring thing ever.


I NEED A FUCKING DRINK
I just bought a jukebox for my Megaton house.

 

[Nedrah]

Way better than I expected. Although it may just me not being good at oblivion with guns, I find things to be nicely challenging from time to time. Unfortunately, it's obvious that level scaling still is very much at work, I shouldn't be able to basically grab Dogmeat and clear a whole quarter of raiders by level 5. Amo can be scarce, which I like. Also, at least there are different kinds of ammunition, which is a bonus - too bad they did away with ap/hp. The interface could be better, but considering the console heritage, it also could be a lot worse. VATS isn't as bad as I thought, but I can see how it may become insanely overpowered later on. Skill points seem to be scarce enough, so I can't just max out everything. In fact, I'm struggling to keep up with my small/big guns, speech and science build. Perks are ok'ish, although they felt better when I didn't get one every level. Npcs are a lot better than in Oblivion, same goes for the voicework. The quests are good enough, but that's with going in without any expectations. Worst thing about the game so far are the crashes and bugs, in fact it once crashed my machine so hard that I had to reinstall my graphics driver - may have been the beta drivers fault, though.

2/10 as a Fallout
6/10 as a RPG
8/10 as a RPShooter
10/10 compared to what I expected.

Edit: forgot the fallout score.

 

[Claw]

As far as I can tell, as long as a bullet weapon can cause a critical it can cause bodily explosions; even the BB gun (Red Ryder LE and normal) can cause the "half my torso fell off" death animation.

Well, that's really what annoys me so much about it as well as the "Fallout had gore" argument. Fallout features a variety of specific death animations with different injuries depending on the gun and fire mode you used. Fallout 3 features gore explosions. That shit was cool in Unreal Tournament. Now it's old and stale. I am tired of it.

 

[DarkenRahl]

To sum up my fallout 3 experience i would relate it to the southpark episode where George Lucas and Steven Spielberg rape indiana Jones =[

 

[Chefe]

I'm enjoying it. That's my opinion so far.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I see a lot of people saying the game is much better than they expected. And hearing a lot more people saying they are enjoying it. There's still a few bitching and moaning, but I knew there were faggots here.

I've just put in my order. Would have pirated, but the download is taking too fucking long. I'm gonna have a legal, hard copy instead.

 

[Vault Dweller]

My copy-pasted 2 cents:

"There are two games here. One is a Fallout game. As a Fallout game, Fallout 3 sucks. Plain and simple.

The other is a post-apocalyptic Bethesda game. Remember that "We’re not going to suddenly do a top-down isometric Baldur’s Gate-style game, because that’s not what we do well." quote? That sums up FO3 well. They did what they do well.

From that perspective, the game is definitely an improvement. Lotsa skill checks (hopefully the next TES game would feature them as well). Multiple objectives. Non-linear main quest (for now). Exclusive content (for now). Different quest options (again, for now). If "for now" turns into "overall", I would be pleasant surprised and impressed.

Dialogues are bad. Really bad. Stat lines are absolutely idiotic so far. Looks like whoever wrote it had no idea what a smart or charismatic person is supposed to say in certain situations.

VATS is poorly designed. The slow motion thing is annoying. I use VATS to "get it over with" because the alternative is a clickfest.

Hacking minigame is boring. They should have made it skill-based. Lockpicking is "meh", but at least the skill check prevents trying till you get it right.

So, forgetting about Fallout and talking about the new Bethesda game, unlike Oblivion which was bad, Fallout 3 is flawed, but shows promise. After the modders are done with it (hopefully rewriting dialogues, changing vault 101, VATS and hacking), it could be a pretty good game."

Updated:

"At the moment, based on my current impressions (!), it looks like it's a pretty good game overall. Again, keep in mind that I'm still at the early stages of the game.

The fact that it was supposed to be a Fallout game constantly gets in the way and requires a mental block to ignore. It's hard not to compare the game to Fallout and develop a negative impression because everything is inferior (character system, quests, characters, dialogues, combat, etc). That's on one hand.

On the other hand, comparing FO3 to, say, beloved by many Gothic results in a favorable impression. While Gothic is incredibly atmospheric and allows you to side with whoever you want, the character system is simple and often broken, dialogue options are practically non-existent, translated German leaves much to be desired, combat is flawed, and you won't find any depth in quests.

So, the real, unbiased question here is - how does Bethesda PA game compare to similar games not to venerable and completely different Fallout? Comparing it to Fallout is like comparing it to PST. Predictable and serves no purpose other than bitching about Bethesda unwillingness and inability to do "what they don't do well". "

 

[Admiral Rimjob POOBUM]

I've only just gotten out of the vault, and working my way through the school (is there actually anything interesting to find in the tunnels?).
I'm not sure that the biggest problem in a post-apocalyptic game should be having too much loot.

 

[NiM82]

I tried it at a friends earlier, gotta admit it has suprised me somewhat positevely (mostly). Obviously as a Fallout sequel it's insta fail, but it's evident they put an awful lot more work and effort into it than Oblivion, to be fair. Overall it felt like a less atmospheric, not so quite good looking (sounding, or animated) version of Stalker, but with RPG elements and some nice survivalist stuff instead.

VATS was amusing when dealing with solo enemies, initially, but is a pita when in a big fight and the constant slo-mo is infuriating after a while. I liked the radiation implementation, as well as the locational damage and healing - felt a lot more 'survivalist' than I thought it would it would be. Whoever came up with the mini games though should be shot.

Interface is a real crock of shit, surely they could've reduced the font size for the PC so you don't need to scroll as much through text? Dialogue/Quests are complete and utter tripe, I won't even comment on the stupidity of you gaining knowledge and stats from reading CHINESE ARMY training manuals. They be teaching mandarin in the Vaults then?

From what I played, I'd give it ~70-75% as game in it's own right, which is 'acceptable/ok' in my scale. Still won't be buying it tho, on principle of the great raep.

 

[Nedrah]

There's still a few bitching and moaning, but I knew there were faggots here.

That will probably stop as soon as they get the memo about how the codex doesn't actually hate the game to death. Really, misled conformism mostly, I am sure.

Edit:

I liked the radiation implementation

It's ok, but on the hardest difficulty it's still way to easy to either ignore radiation or get rid of it. Too much medication lying around, really. I keep stuffing my face with radiated food / dirty water, a few hours in I only had to use some radaway once, and I could just have ignored the radiation as well, as it has VERY mild effects in the early stages. I had to get insanely radiated for a particualar quest. Can't say I felt alarmed about it, there really were no visible effects. It only affects your stats, which seem to be rather unimportant compared to the skills and perks.

 

[sabishii]

I don't like the combat (clickfest vs. slo-mo slightly less clickfest) and the quests/dialogue are uninspiring. I'll come back to it later to check out the C&C and nonlinearity (which are decent so far), but due to the uninspired gameplay, I have little motivation to play this instead of Fable 2.

 

[NiM82]

I've only just gotten out of the vault, and working my way through the school (is there actually anything interesting to find in the tunnels?).
I'm not sure that the biggest problem in a post-apocalyptic game should be having too much loot.

I didn't find much of value there. Wasn't worth the ammo wasted (assuming your using guns), tho I guess getting XP counts for something. There's a little shack/ruin nearby or around the shcool tho iirc, with a mini nuke on a shelf roll, which you can flog for 150 or there abouts.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

There's still a few bitching and moaning, but I knew there were faggots here.

That will probably stop as soon as they get the memo about how the codex doesn't actually hate the game to death. Really, misled conformism mostly, I am sure.

Exactly. If they actually explained why they think it's a bad game (like what Vault Dweller is doing right now, describing the good things and the bad things he comes across), I would have no problem. But the whole 'BETHESDA ARE RAPING FALLOUT' thing is just old. Yeah, I was disappointed with Oblivion too. And I liked the original Fallouts. Now get over it.