Time for another fallout 3 discussion

[thesheeep]

Just don't eat any of the potatos.

 

[Cael]

Just don't eat any of the potatos.

I'd be more worried about one of these:

Especially in Japan. Those stories had to come from somewhere...

 

[Gerrard]

 

[deama]

For fallout 3 to make sense you have to be somewhat good, so what's your point? That stops roleplaying? Well then, in fallout 1 I can't "roleplay" and get my revenge on those damn vault 13 guys.

You can actually join the Super Mutant army and destroy Vault 13. Can't do any of this in Fallout 3, i have to be a goody two shoes in the end, no matter what i do.

And yes, it stops roleplaying when i can literally only be one thing and nothing else. What is the point of doing evil shit, if in the end i have to be Jesus of the wasteland anyway?

You can put in the enclave's fomulae in the purifier instead to get rid of the mutants. If that isn't evil enough for you then you can just ignore the main story and let your father rot in that simulation. The latter choice may seem retarded, but it's still a choice, it's still part of the story and you can choose to ignore it and damn everyone.

I guess you can just say "I'm gonna intimidate the kid with my guns", well ok, you do intimidate him, but he's just a kid, he'll probably think your bluffing

Wow, maybe that could be some kind of Skill or SPECIAL check in dialogue. Like a Strength check to intimidate, or a Small Guns check, or an Unarmed check. Just think of the possibilities for intimidating through dialogue in a game where VIOLENCE IS THE SOLUTION TO 99% OF PROBLEMS ANYWAY

Eh, what? What are you trying to say? There's already a speech check for getting into little lamplight?
I guess I'll just latch onto your last point: eh, no, you can solve a reasonable amount of situations without violence; how about this, how about you give me an example where violence is unavoidable in fallout 3?

I am saying that dialogue should be solvable via. solutions that aren't just the 'Speech' skill, partly because it encourages stupid play (just pick the Speech options to skip content and get to the good stuff), but also because it severely limits roleplaying. There is no reason NOT to choose Speech, because it is the only skill which allows the player to solve situations non-violently in the entire game. New Vegas is also guilty of this for the most part, although it includes more checks for other skills, with the 'Ghost Town Gunfight' side quest providing the proof of concept. To convince characters in town to help you in some way, there are checks for Speech, Barter, Medicine, Explosives, Sneak, and then there are auxiliary checks for Lockpicking (getting a Stealth Boy from a locked vault to boost your Sneak) and Science (you can talk to Victor after the battle and this comes up). These are all very low checks around the 25 range, and a player can conceivably do them all with a level up or two and some planning, but for the casual player it means that they will only be able to receive help from certain people. It encourages replayability, because the player character is able to achieve certain things depending on their skillset.

Like I said, this quest was very much designed as an early-game proof of concept, and I'd argue that these kinds of checks don't show up in the game nearly often enough, or are always tied to skills that the player will WANT to use anyway (Medicine, Science, etc.) because the benefits of investing in them far outweight the negatives. The final encounter with Legate Lanius also proves that Speech is designed to encourage DUMB play, since you can pick literally any of the options without reading, and as long as you meet the skill requirement, you can convince the Legate to stop his assault on Hoover Dam and he will run away. Still, at least there was some thought put towards the player being able to convince or persaude characters using their knowledge and particular skillset, instead of all situations being solved by silver-tongued rogues. Saying, "well there's a Speech check" isn't an argument. Why shouldn't my 9 STR, 3 INT character be able to scream at the literal child until he opens the door in sheer terror? Why shouldn't my character with 100 Unarmed be able to show the kid his calloused knuckles, or throw him to the ground before ordering him to open the door? Why can't I blast my way through using the Explosives or Big Gun skills? Why can't I sneak past? I understand the developer can't fit in every expectation of the player, but in such a ridiculous situation, they should ask, "What will the player realistically expect to be able to do in order to get around this roadblock? How many of these options can we implement?"

I don't think that a Speech check, one usually pointless perk, or a boring fetch quest suffice in this case. Especially in the main quest.

I don't understand what you're getting at here, you mention that you wouldn't like to have to fix a problem with just one solution, ok, fine, do a quest, or do the other speech check, what's the issue? You want more skill checks? If you want to have the ability to solve every problem with any skill, go play a PnP game then.

The devs did it sensibly, you walk inside a cave, with a big-thick-looking barricade blocking your way; then a kid pops up at the top, you think the kid is smart enough to know that if you try to fuck with him he might get killed? Does he even know wtf that even means? Kids don't understand violence that well, that's why you have to use a silver-tongue when against a kid.
Hell, even if he does know what you'll do to him, you think even 10 STR will be enough to show him you can smash the gate open? That really strong and big looking gate that he's behind?

Wow, feels like 2008 again. This kind of stupidity is rarely encountered outside of Bethesda's forums.

Worms and fish are not really animals, guise. They're just food for real animals that spawn into existence out of nothing.

I guess you can just say "I'm gonna intimidate the kid with my guns", well ok, you do intimidate him, but he's just a kid, he'll probably think your bluffing, or try to push you until you end up killing him, which brings us back to the "why would they open the gate when you killed their guard" situation.

That's because you're a dumbfuck moron used to play Bethesdian garbage and can only think in whatever retarded situations they set up.

Since you're so awesome at asking the hard questions, here's some for you: if it would be impossible to go in once killing the guard, why have the guard in the first place?
Or here's another one, what if they were not kids, but everything else was the same? Guess, what's the point in having anyone killable or having different options to solve a problem, right?

I don't understand what you're trying to say, the guard is in there so you can go through it via different skill checks or doing them a favour so you can continue doing the main quest? In order to do the main quest you have to somewhat good because that's what the whole point of the main quest is, if you don't want to be good, then don't do the main quest.

 

[DraQ]

Any of you guys arguing about whether plants can grow in an irradiated environment recently seen recent pictures of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl?

A land without human intervention for 200 years is going to look like Arborea on acid.

STALKER makes a decent portrayal of that, although not 200yrs after.
Unless it's been cobalt bombed to shit or something, but then you wouldn't be seeing living, breathing humans around either. Actually, you wouldn't be seeing anything at all, because ded, lolz.

And, if humans have survived 200yrs is enough time for them to kick civilization back into high gear. Maybe not exactly XX century+, but it will no longer be anything that could reasonably be called post-apo (although it would make an interesting setting full of interesting anachronisms).

 

[Okagron]

You can put in the enclave's fomulae in the purifier instead to get rid of the mutants.

This choice has literally zero impact because everyone else treats it as nothing has happened. At worst you have a couple of people in beds, complaining about it. And the game still continues and you still become Jesus Christ of the Wasteland. While becoming part of the Super Mutant army in Fallout 1 is one of the endings. Might be non-canonical now, but at the time nobody wasn't sure if it was or not.

Seriously, you are comparing the shit "choices" of Fallout 3 with Fallout 1. At this point it's really laughable even attempting to do this.

If that isn't evil enough for you then you can just ignore the main story and let your father rot in that simulation. The latter choice may seem retarded, but it's still a choice, it's still part of the story and you can choose to ignore it and damn everyone

What even is this argument? You do nothing and nothing happens. There's no "daming everyone", the game is in a stand still, waiting for you to become the Jesus Christ of the Wasteland.

Not doing the main quest has no repercurssions whatsoever. Nothing happens, the word basically freezes if you do nothing. Choices without any consequences, either good or bad, are not choices.

 

[Quillon]

In order to do the main quest you have to somewhat good because that's what the whole point of the main quest is, if you don't want to be good, then don't do the main quest.

And if you don't play the game you wouldn't even have the chance to "do good", ultimate evil playthrough!

 

[deama]

You can put in the enclave's fomulae in the purifier instead to get rid of the mutants.

This choice has literally zero impact because everyone else treats it as nothing has happened. At worst you have a couple of people in beds, complaining about it. And the game still continues and you still become Jesus Christ of the Wasteland. While becoming part of the Super Mutant army in Fallout 1 is one of the endings. Might be non-canonical now, but at the time nobody wasn't sure if it was or not.

Seriously, you are comparing the shit "choices" of Fallout 3 with Fallout 1. At this point it's really laughable even attempting to do this.

If that isn't evil enough for you then you can just ignore the main story and let your father rot in that simulation. The latter choice may seem retarded, but it's still a choice, it's still part of the story and you can choose to ignore it and damn everyone

What even is this argument? You do nothing and nothing happens. There's no "daming everyone", the game is in a stand still, waiting for you to become the Jesus Christ of the Wasteland.

Not doing the main quest has no repercurssions whatsoever. Nothing happens, the word basically freezes if you do nothing. Choices without any consequences, either good or bad, are not choices.

Well yeah it freezes, this isn't a 100% simulation, you have to draw some abstraction lines, e.g. if you decide to quit, the game implies that basically everyone will either die or become mutated to the point of monsters.

In order to do the main quest you have to somewhat good because that's what the whole point of the main quest is, if you don't want to be good, then don't do the main quest.

And if you don't play the game you wouldn't even have the chance to "do good", ultimate evil playthrough!

That's more neutral, if you play the game and blow up megaton, then quit, then that's pretty evil.

 

[udm]

That guy's videos are so entertaining, even though the only thing he does is eat MREs.

Best one by the way:

The best thing about Steve is that he's a Fallout 1/2 fan. He actually implied it in one of his videos' comment section. I wish I could remember what video it was though.

 

[JarlFrank]

What some posters in this thread have been saying about the Speech skill really rings true for me. I run my own Pathfinder games and I've recently started telling my players to stop saying things like 'I make a perception check' or 'I use diplomacy to change his mind'. The checks are for me to call, not you - you need to tell me what you're doing or saying, and I'll decide whether or not to call a check.

This feels similar to the problem that games like FO3 have. Speech checks should be buried inside complex dialogue trees that involve actual thought and reflection. You should have to make a series of difficult choices about what to say, using intuition and your knowledge of the person you're speaking to, before having a Speech check finally at the END of the tree, once you've successfully navigated the tree and avoided bad dialogues.

Instead, most games use the Speech check at the start of the dialogue tree, so all the player has to do is pick the one labeled SPEECH 75 and they know they're going to succeed no matter what it actually says. Just like PnP players that say 'I roll for diplomacy' and expect the NPC to automatically do whatever they want because they rolled a 20.

This is a stupid trend that irked me ever since it came into existence.

I fondly remember Arcanum's dialogue trees, where high persuasion and high int would give you more options and convince NPCs of your point. But none of the dialog options were tagged. Heck, the dialog options that would only appear with high int didn't appear at all if your int was low, and the only way to even know these dialogue options existed was to replay the game with a high int char. These days, you get greyed-out dialogue options that you can't select because your skill is too low. But they still appear. There's no mystery. The systems are laid out plainly before your eyes. You don't even have to think about which option would be the best from the viewpoint of your character... you just pick the option tagged with a skill because that's obviously better than the non-tagged options.

New Vegas does this. The Shadowrun trilogy does this. Even Age of Decadence does this. Tagging dialog options with the governing skill has become the new standard, and that's stupid. Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape Torment - none of these classics that routinely win on Codex Top 5 lists did this. And they were better RPGs for it.

 

[Sigourn]

New Vegas does this. The Shadowrun trilogy does this. Even Age of Decadence does this. Tagging dialog options with the governing skill has become the new standard, and that's stupid. Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape Torment - none of these classics that routinely win on Codex Top 5 lists did this. And they were better RPGs for it.

Were they, though? To me, visible tag skills are a tradeoff between the better RPG (ironically) and the most fun game. Because while I think New Vegas is a better RPG for plainly displaying what is the smart option to take (if my character is supposed to be smart, then me as a player should know what the smart option is), whereas Arcanum had the most fun interactions because I had to think for myself before choosing the dialogue options, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having high Intelligence to unlock dialogue options if I as a player can still fuck up and make the wrong call.

 

[Yosharian]

New Vegas does this. The Shadowrun trilogy does this. Even Age of Decadence does this. Tagging dialog options with the governing skill has become the new standard, and that's stupid. Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape Torment - none of these classics that routinely win on Codex Top 5 lists did this. And they were better RPGs for it.

Were they, though? To me, visible tag skills are a tradeoff between the better RPG (ironically) and the most fun game. Because while I think New Vegas is a better RPG for plainly displaying what is the smart option to take (if my character is supposed to be smart, then me as a player should know what the smart option is), whereas Arcanum had the most fun interactions because I had to think for myself before choosing the dialogue options, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having high Intelligence to unlock dialogue options if I as a player can still fuck up and make the wrong call.

There's definitely an argument to be made that having those options tagged allows you to role-play your character.

BUT it's also the case that it completely destroys player involvement, which I think is a far more important issue. The player stops getting engaged in dialogue if they're simply picking an icon or tag every time. That's exactly what happens in all the more recent Bioware games that use the emotion tag system. Even though this can still be quite fun (for example, picking Renegade options in Mass Effect - although this is a marked option, it's still quite fun to pick the 'fuck you' option, so it's ok i think), it often reduces dialogue to a 'pick the icon you like' game rather than an actual 'read what the NPC and your character are fucking saying' game.

 

[commie]

Fuck this guy....though to be fair, to warm up this rotted, dried out, flaky, dog-turd of a shit burger pattie that is a 'defense' of this abomination and to have so many take a bite, is quite an achievement, given that it's been 10 years since the game came out and hundreds of 'FO3 is shit pages' that came out in the first 3-4 years since release.

 

[Volrath]

Some low effort trolling going on in this thread.

 

[Butter]

New Vegas does this. The Shadowrun trilogy does this. Even Age of Decadence does this. Tagging dialog options with the governing skill has become the new standard, and that's stupid. Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum, Planescape Torment - none of these classics that routinely win on Codex Top 5 lists did this. And they were better RPGs for it.

The game that did this right was actually Tyranny. It used Lore, Athletics, and Subterfuge instead of just SPEECH, and although the skill checks were always marked, they were usually not "win the conversation" options. You still had to think about the consequences of what you were doing (ie you might have an Athletics check to headbutt a guy, which would initiate a combat and tank your reputation with a faction).

 

[Agame]

This is a stupid trend that irked me ever since it came into existence.

This is caused by the "Skyrim" effect, people want to be able to achieve and master everything in a single playthrough. For some reason the new standard for games is doing a single 100+ hour playthrough rather than replaying the game many times over and finding the alternative content that way.

And as we are talking about dialogue, one of my most hated features of "modern" games is the wikipedia links in dialogue. If you feel you need that in the game then you have utterly failed as a writer. Once again Obsidian gives us more shitty legacy features we will see in all new games...

Regarding this threads existence, maybe there should just be a Fallout 3 mega retardo thread that these weekly topics can get rolled into, and these morans can have a safe space to sling their feces at each other? I mean no one here is genuinely trying to convince this guy right? Its like arguing with a child about why the sky is blue.

 

[Yosharian]

morans

 

[Beastro]

STALKER makes a decent portrayal of that, although not 200yrs after.
Unless it's been cobalt bombed to shit or something, but then you wouldn't be seeing living, breathing humans around either. Actually, you wouldn't be seeing anything at all, because ded, lolz.

And, if humans have survived 200yrs is enough time for them to kick civilization back into high gear. Maybe not exactly XX century+, but it will no longer be anything that could reasonably be called post-apo (although it would make an interesting setting full of interesting anachronisms).

Issue is the best way to destroy a city is an airburst, which just so happens to produce the least amount of fallout do it less material being sucked up into the fireball. The only application for a ground burst or penetrator is to dig out a fortified, buried structure, like a missile silo.

None of this applies to Fallout when we're nit picking here. One of the big, foundational things of the original game was building a world around the perceptions of science and nuclear war that were common in the 1950s.

That's the problem with Bethesda's Fallouts: They're not only shallow games, they look on the setting shallowly as nothing more than a mash up of weird Sci-Fi with elements of the 1950s and a smiling little blonde haired character. They completely misunderstand the setting, or simply don't care, because all that matters to them is what can be marketable.

Josie Moran was always hot:

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Just don't eat any of the potatos.

I'd be more worried about one of these:

Especially in Japan. Those stories had to come from somewhere...

HEY!! ..

Yellow musk creeper? Japan? I thought that and yellow musk zombies was made up shit. Unless it’s a pervy Asian underwear snatcher being the creeper and all those panty-less co-Ed’s just stare into blank space at having to go commando all the time.

Windy days...

 

[Yosharian]

Josie Moran was always hot

Not sure if I'm being trolled at this point, but... do you mean Josie Maran?

 

[Beastro]

Josie Moran was always hot

Not sure if I'm being trolled at this point, but... do you mean Josie Maran?

Joke.

See the parrot~

 

[Jazz_]

Fallout 3 feels like it was conceived by manatees randomly picking idea balls like in that episode of South Park about Family Guy, it's just so nonsensical, random and retarded; and if that wasn't enough Gamebryo makes everything look derpy as hell, add braindead gameplay on top of that and here's your GOTY masterpiece acclaimed by the open-world starved masses.

 

[Cael]

Just don't eat any of the potatos.

I'd be more worried about one of these:

Especially in Japan. Those stories had to come from somewhere...

HEY!! ..

Yellow musk creeper? Japan? I thought that and yellow musk zombies was made up shit. Unless it’s a pervy Asian underwear snatcher being the creeper and all those panty-less co-Ed’s just stare into blank space at having to go commando all the time.

Windy days...

That's an assassin vine... Although your pic is oddly appropriate...

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

3.0 + monster? Damn I totally never saw that one

 

[Tweed]

There's definitely an argument to be made that having those options tagged allows you to role-play your character.

BUT it's also the case that it completely destroys player involvement, which I think is a far more important issue. The player stops getting engaged in dialogue if they're simply picking an icon or tag every time. That's exactly what happens in all the more recent Bioware games that use the emotion tag system. Even though this can still be quite fun (for example, picking Renegade options in Mass Effect - although this is a marked option, it's still quite fun to pick the 'fuck you' option, so it's ok i think), it often reduces dialogue to a 'pick the icon you like' game rather than an actual 'read what the NPC and your character are fucking saying' game.

There is a solution to the problem, put in "gotchas" like the barter checks with Dean Domino in Dead Money.