TEXT RUSH KEKEKEKEKE!
Vault Dweller said:
Basic math suggests that there are 20 "moar money!" checks and 31 "other stuff" checks.
The key phrase being "at least one". Many quests have two or more of these "gimme more" things. Take for instance "Those". You can get the kid to give you his Dad's ammo if you pass a speech check and then bargain the lab coat off of Lesko for another one. There's two in one quest. Or with "The Superhuman Gambit", there were actually two or three speech checks with both the Mayor of the town and the sheriff to get more stuff out of taking care of their problem with the goofballs. Or "The Nuka Cola Challenge", where you can do a speech check on each receiver of the Quantum for more money per bottle.
And outside of the "gimme more", a lot of the speech checks could be condensed easily. Like in "Tenpenny Tower", where the diplomatic route requires doing a lot of speech checks to get citizens to accept the ghouls. There's like 4 or 5 of them clustered in this one quest. Stuff like this is really kind of inflating the abundance of speech checks in Fallout 3.
Not to mention, whenever an important speech check does arise, there's always around two or three equivalent alternatives, sometimes not even involving a skill check, totally devaluing speech. In good role-playing games, my speech powers get me places in dialogue nothing else can take me. I don't suddenly get the choice of a necromancy check against Khergan to convince him he's wrong, along with the choice to read a self-destruct code off a piece of paper I found lying in the chamber before him to instantly win. And I wasn't able to [Gambling] Uhhh.....the odds say you're wrong! to beat the Master. Speech actually matters in other games, and gives the player unique opportunities. In Fallout 3, it just let's you skip more crap.
It's fucking awesome. I used it until I ran out of spikes. One of the top 5 weapons, I think.
Not even close. The reason it's effective isn't because it's amazing...it's because the game is piss easy. The railway rifle has a max damage potential of 30 and I'm pretty sure it can't be repaired and the ammo is limited, whereas many more weapons have a much greater amount of power, and are easily repaired and fed with ammunition. I mean, if the railway rifle is top 5, just pick up a chinese assault rifle, sniper rifle or a scoped magnum (all with damage potentials over 35) and prepare to be amazed. And they aren't even on the level of brokenness that is the combat shotgun, Lincoln's Repeater, or a plasma rifle. And I haven't even mentioned the "+1" weapons, the Fatman, or the Alien Blaster all of which make an already easy game into a joke.
Looked very decent to me.
Only problem being melee is almost a direct port of Oblivion, so combat is terribly boring in it.
It's an action game. Comparing it to Fallout is as silly as comparing Bloodlines to Arcanum.
I'm not sure I like this line of logic. Are you saying that we shouldn't hold it to any RPG standards because "it's an action game?" Why is it an action game? It's not a very good one in the least, it misses a lot of the fundamentals, and the developers plus mainstream media sure don't think it's one. I doubt Fallout 3 will change how Call of Duty 5 (6?), Gears of War 3, Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Mirror's Edge 2, Resident Evil 5, or Devil May Cry 5 will play, but it most certainly will influence RPG design based on it's massive sales.
It's like in your Oblivion review, how you pretty much captured how Oblivion fans defended their game.
-If you attacked it as a bad RPG, then "it wasn't your grand-dad's RPG".
-If you attacked it as a bad action game, then "Dude, it's an RPG it doesn't need good action".
I mean the way I see it, Fallout 3 has RPG elements, but does a mostly mediocre job with them, and has action elements and does a piss poor job with them. I can judge it's individual elements compared to other games with them just as easily as I can compare how, say Freelancer handles trading as compared to Elite.
Are you not railroaded in 99% of main quests? In the unpatched Fallout you are railroaded into giving a damn about the water problem or the game is over in 150 days. In FO2 you simply must give a damn about stopping the Enclave if you want to beat the game. And so on, and so on...
The thing isn't that you are railroaded in action, it's that you are railroaded in motivation. You don't get to play anything but someone who wants to fix daddy's project, hence the player character being more like a plot device and less like an RPG protagonist. Even though Fallout 1 railroaded you into dealing with the water chip, you still had freedom of motivation. It still wasn't as jarring as Fallout 3.
I mean, railroading is acceptable to a certain degree for both programming limitations and a cohesive story. It's just if you're going to railroad the player, at least write/design it well. The game gives you no motivation to find your father, no motivation to fix up his project, and this just blows. Compare to Baldur's Gate. They railroaded you even more than Fallout 3 for all intents and purposes, but at least it made sense in the context of the game. Gorion is offed, assassins are hounding you constantly, and your companions encourage you towards investigating things, giving the player plenty of motivations.
Basically, it's not the railroading as much as how they railroaded the player that pissed me off.
It's wrong to criticize a game for not fulfilling this wish. In fact, it's kind of nice that you are not the ultimate bringer of doom and death.
Well, you said it's an action game....so shouldn't I be validated in this? I mean, what kind of action game doesn't make the player character or their group in the center of the action and the driving force in the fight?
Cheap shot aside, I think you're going a little overboard. I don't want to be the chosen one, per se, but I want something. See, if I play the entire main quest through ,and much of it involves me killing loads of stuff in dungeons, I at least expect to be a big part of the climactic final battle. But instead, Bethesda puts zero interactivity into it. Thats kind of a total cock-block, especially considering the fact that they railroad you so terribly. Basically, I can live with having a passive role in the final battle if I've been given good, meaningful choices, because it's scratching the RPG itch instead of the action itch which would be scratched by kicking ass. But when neither itch gets scratched, I feel like a passive character, like my input into the story is minimal, and as a player character in an RPG, that shouldn't happen. It should always be your story, no matter if it's the story of something as basic as climbing the social ladder to screw the prom queen, or as overblown as saving the world from brain slugs, and Fallout 3 makes you more of a sub-contracted quest-doer than a main character.
... in Fallout 1. It's only a point in Fallout 3. So, you only get 19 points per stat point.
No....I don't think that's how it goes. I distinctly remember getting 20 points per level up with 10 Int.
