MeanPatrick
November 8th, 2008, 07:13 PM
I've played Fallout 3 for at least 70 hours, made it to level twenty with two characters and beaten the main quest with three different characters (Good, bad, neutral) and here's what I have to say. (If you happen think Fallout 3 is the greatest game ever made you should probably stop reading now)
Gameplay:
Non-combat:
I'm starting with the non-combat skills first because this is an RPG and those aspects always seem to be the most dilapidated.
I was surprised the find that stat checks are actually in the game, always a plus, but unfortunately lockpicking gets a minigame, yet again as well as hacking. I wouldn't mind a visual display of either of these, like the locking picking display in Wizardry 8 (but with just an automatic pick lock button instead of clicking on all the tumblers over and over). But really, what's the point of having the skill if I still have to fumble with the minigames? Lockpicking, like Oblivion, has a basic pattern to it, in this case just rotate the bobby pin to about ten'o'clock or two, somewhere there abouts, and it works most of the time.
As for hacking they decided that while on the one hand lockpicking might be easy, hacking should be a straight up pain in the ass. If I guess and get a word with about half the correct letters I can usually guess the right word by the third try, but I only have three tries before I have to close the damn thing and start it up again in order to avoid it shutting off, but the correct password is never the same. While this is good in terms of keeping people from starting the game over and just putting in the password from before it also means I have to start over again and pray I pick something close to the correct word.
I wouldn't mind minigames if they were meaningful and weren't based purely on twitch reaction or patterns but as they are now in Fallout 3 and most games that feature they they surve no propose other than as distraction from the rest of the game.
Repairing is more simplistic than I had hoped. Given the setting, putting emphasis on the need for repairs makes sense. Normally when it comes to repairs, most RPGs will let you either choose to put points into repair or pay money to have NPCs repair things for you, but with Fallout 3 while the option to pay for repairs appears to be present it is essentially a false option, as I have yet to find any person who can repair items anywhere past 60%. Why should I bother to pay people to barely repair something when I can do it better?
Speech is actually is really useful. I used it on Three Dog to get him to tell me about me father's whereabouts without having to slave over something for him, which actually something that rarely happens in RPGs. Nice job Bethesda, you aren't such brainless twerps after all! Unfortunately, as glorious as this moment was this sort of use of the speech skill isn't as prevalent as I had hoped, instead speech is used like any other persuasion type skill, getting peaceful results and better rewards for the most part, but it is at least usable and handy.
In Fallout 3 when it comes to skills you need in general, repair and either lockpicking or science (hacking) are almost a requirement. This generally means your character ends up being a jack-of-all-trades. Now given the setting this makes sense, as someone living in the post-apocalyptic wastelands would have to be something of a one-size fits all, but it also seems like a cheap attempt to keep your character from becoming over-powered in areas to keep the game from getting too easy.
Combat Gameplay:
V.A.T.S. pause isn't a half bad system, but, considering it was made in an attempt to appease Fallout fans to some extent, it's pretty shallow. There's no option to change the rate of fire on weapons and grenades can't be thrown anywhere but at targets. Also there's the problem that after you pick a target and accept it takes place in real time, just slowed down, meaning sometimes when I shoot at someone who's starting to move behind cover or some such thing sometimes they'll get in front of something and I'll still be fring, wasting shots and there's nothing I can do. This is partly a fault of my own and partly a fault of the game's, though it mostly only happend when I first started playing. Because the game plays more or less like an FPS, at first it will get you pumped like an FPS, which results in twitch tactics.
V.A.T.S. at first is really fun, but after awhile it can get dull and sometimes down right annoying. At first, when enemies rushed me and I shot the head off one I forgot the others and hooted in glee at the ruin brought upon mine enemy, but because heads and limbs come off so easily my enthrallment at the gore started to fade and soon I began to to find this feature annoying, because while an enemy's head was slowly, oh so god-damn slowly, rolling around there were enemies swarming around me and I just want to kill them.
General Writing:
Most of the quests are pretty good, considering they all boil down to fetch or kill quests, but that's a problem all RPGs suffer from. My favorite quests are probably Vault 112 and the Oasis quest.
As for the NPCs, with a few expections, almost every one of them seems to act like a talking billboard. The game's dialogue for my character isn't bad, at least I'm sort of in the conversation unlike Oblivion, but it still feels like I'm not really talking to the other person, like I'm just a wall for them to unload a heap of information on. This something alot of RPGs suffer from though, but the really great ones (Planescape: Torment and to some extent the Fallout games) would let you ask some, say, a hooker what their job is like to which they tell you and that starts a conversation, where as with most RPGs, Fallout 3 included, they just tell you and that's the end of that, barely any imput on your part. The conversations in Fallout 3 made me appreciate Mass Effect's dialogue system much more, but, although Mass Effect made it seem like my character was actually part of the conversation it made me feel like I wasn't.
Most of the dialogue is bland, not bad but good either. But the worse writing, by far, in the game comes from the stat based dialogues, I'm looking at you intelligence. Most of the options for intelligence should be titled "Captain Obvious" instead. There were only two examples I've seen intelligence used intelligently, the first is talking to Knock Knock in Light Lampshade about her jokes, and the second from the conversation with the guard outside the Outcast's base. I'm starting a new character with maxed states to see just how all of thses turn out.
The Main Quest:
It's pretty good, much better than Oblivion's. The father-son thing was kind of nice, but somewhat one dimensional.
The ending is prime example of bad interactive writing. Why in the name of God's Big-Bang-Powered testicles can't I have Charon or Fawkes just walk into the chamber and put in the code for me? Fawkes' reasoning, as stupid as it might be, is still certainly plausible, but Charon's excuse makes no fucking sense. He's a brainwashed ghoul who follows the command of whoever has his contract. He seemly hates the guy who had his contract before me, so much so that he blows the guy's head off after he was informed I had bought his contract. More over, he's a ghoul and ghouls are immune to radiation, the worse he might get is fucking tan.
Then there's the whole 200 endings thing. When I had heard this from Todd Howard I figured by 200 he meant all the epilogues concerning the fate of the towns and peoples you either helped/ruined, but it seems even that was giving Todd too much credit. Instead, the 200 endings are just fucking pictures. For one character I did the Lincoln memorial quest, which showed a picture of the memorial with the head restored, but that's not even that fucking special since you can wait a bit, come back and find the memorial restore in the actual game.
Of all the things the Fallout series did, one of it's biggest pluses was the fact that it did away the idea that the ending to a game should only concern the main story. The Fallout games showed the affect you had on the world through the choices you made, but instead of continuing and strengthening that feature of the Fallout franchise Bethesda opted for a dumbed down ending that barely even mentions the affect you had on the world outside of the main quest.
With those very tiresome issues aside the endings are pretty good.
In regards to the Fallout universe:
As far as I can tell Bethesda hasn't fucked with the universe that much, expect for one glowing issue, the super mutants. I have no problem with the FEV virus being in Vault 87, what I have a problem with is the fact that there always seem to be Super Mutants, but FEV can't mutate people without direct exposure, and the entrance to Vault 87 is too irradiated to enter and once you get in through murder pass the super mutants inside are all too happy to kill anyone who stumbles inside. So where are the mutants coming from? They can't be breeding because the FEV virus considers reproductive cells to be damaged and respairs them constantly, rendering mutants sterile. Keep in mind, Vaults were designed to hold only about a thousand people at a time, and Elder Owyn Lyons' Brotherhood of Steel group have been fighting the super mutants for twenty years. It could be said that some of the mutants are the one who are mentioned to have fled east in the first Fallout, but the mutants in Fallout 3 are supposely derived from a different FEV strand that the West Coast mutants.
That aside, I'm happy to say that while the Brotherhood generally are not minded or get painted as knights in shining armour, there are some (the ghouls) who paint them in a less favorable light.
Final impression:
Fallout 3 is a pretty good RPG, most certainly the best Bethesda has made in a while, but I would have been happier with it if it didn't have the Fallout name on it, because when I play Fallout 3 find it hard to think of it as Fallout, making the alot of the nostalgic charms here and there all the more remorseful. But as a sequel Fallout 3 is to the Fallout franchise what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to the Indy franchise, fun and entertaining, but wanting.
Gameplay:
Non-combat:
I'm starting with the non-combat skills first because this is an RPG and those aspects always seem to be the most dilapidated.
I was surprised the find that stat checks are actually in the game, always a plus, but unfortunately lockpicking gets a minigame, yet again as well as hacking. I wouldn't mind a visual display of either of these, like the locking picking display in Wizardry 8 (but with just an automatic pick lock button instead of clicking on all the tumblers over and over). But really, what's the point of having the skill if I still have to fumble with the minigames? Lockpicking, like Oblivion, has a basic pattern to it, in this case just rotate the bobby pin to about ten'o'clock or two, somewhere there abouts, and it works most of the time.
As for hacking they decided that while on the one hand lockpicking might be easy, hacking should be a straight up pain in the ass. If I guess and get a word with about half the correct letters I can usually guess the right word by the third try, but I only have three tries before I have to close the damn thing and start it up again in order to avoid it shutting off, but the correct password is never the same. While this is good in terms of keeping people from starting the game over and just putting in the password from before it also means I have to start over again and pray I pick something close to the correct word.
I wouldn't mind minigames if they were meaningful and weren't based purely on twitch reaction or patterns but as they are now in Fallout 3 and most games that feature they they surve no propose other than as distraction from the rest of the game.
Repairing is more simplistic than I had hoped. Given the setting, putting emphasis on the need for repairs makes sense. Normally when it comes to repairs, most RPGs will let you either choose to put points into repair or pay money to have NPCs repair things for you, but with Fallout 3 while the option to pay for repairs appears to be present it is essentially a false option, as I have yet to find any person who can repair items anywhere past 60%. Why should I bother to pay people to barely repair something when I can do it better?
Speech is actually is really useful. I used it on Three Dog to get him to tell me about me father's whereabouts without having to slave over something for him, which actually something that rarely happens in RPGs. Nice job Bethesda, you aren't such brainless twerps after all! Unfortunately, as glorious as this moment was this sort of use of the speech skill isn't as prevalent as I had hoped, instead speech is used like any other persuasion type skill, getting peaceful results and better rewards for the most part, but it is at least usable and handy.
In Fallout 3 when it comes to skills you need in general, repair and either lockpicking or science (hacking) are almost a requirement. This generally means your character ends up being a jack-of-all-trades. Now given the setting this makes sense, as someone living in the post-apocalyptic wastelands would have to be something of a one-size fits all, but it also seems like a cheap attempt to keep your character from becoming over-powered in areas to keep the game from getting too easy.
Combat Gameplay:
V.A.T.S. pause isn't a half bad system, but, considering it was made in an attempt to appease Fallout fans to some extent, it's pretty shallow. There's no option to change the rate of fire on weapons and grenades can't be thrown anywhere but at targets. Also there's the problem that after you pick a target and accept it takes place in real time, just slowed down, meaning sometimes when I shoot at someone who's starting to move behind cover or some such thing sometimes they'll get in front of something and I'll still be fring, wasting shots and there's nothing I can do. This is partly a fault of my own and partly a fault of the game's, though it mostly only happend when I first started playing. Because the game plays more or less like an FPS, at first it will get you pumped like an FPS, which results in twitch tactics.
V.A.T.S. at first is really fun, but after awhile it can get dull and sometimes down right annoying. At first, when enemies rushed me and I shot the head off one I forgot the others and hooted in glee at the ruin brought upon mine enemy, but because heads and limbs come off so easily my enthrallment at the gore started to fade and soon I began to to find this feature annoying, because while an enemy's head was slowly, oh so god-damn slowly, rolling around there were enemies swarming around me and I just want to kill them.
General Writing:
Most of the quests are pretty good, considering they all boil down to fetch or kill quests, but that's a problem all RPGs suffer from. My favorite quests are probably Vault 112 and the Oasis quest.
As for the NPCs, with a few expections, almost every one of them seems to act like a talking billboard. The game's dialogue for my character isn't bad, at least I'm sort of in the conversation unlike Oblivion, but it still feels like I'm not really talking to the other person, like I'm just a wall for them to unload a heap of information on. This something alot of RPGs suffer from though, but the really great ones (Planescape: Torment and to some extent the Fallout games) would let you ask some, say, a hooker what their job is like to which they tell you and that starts a conversation, where as with most RPGs, Fallout 3 included, they just tell you and that's the end of that, barely any imput on your part. The conversations in Fallout 3 made me appreciate Mass Effect's dialogue system much more, but, although Mass Effect made it seem like my character was actually part of the conversation it made me feel like I wasn't.
Most of the dialogue is bland, not bad but good either. But the worse writing, by far, in the game comes from the stat based dialogues, I'm looking at you intelligence. Most of the options for intelligence should be titled "Captain Obvious" instead. There were only two examples I've seen intelligence used intelligently, the first is talking to Knock Knock in Light Lampshade about her jokes, and the second from the conversation with the guard outside the Outcast's base. I'm starting a new character with maxed states to see just how all of thses turn out.
The Main Quest:
It's pretty good, much better than Oblivion's. The father-son thing was kind of nice, but somewhat one dimensional.
The ending is prime example of bad interactive writing. Why in the name of God's Big-Bang-Powered testicles can't I have Charon or Fawkes just walk into the chamber and put in the code for me? Fawkes' reasoning, as stupid as it might be, is still certainly plausible, but Charon's excuse makes no fucking sense. He's a brainwashed ghoul who follows the command of whoever has his contract. He seemly hates the guy who had his contract before me, so much so that he blows the guy's head off after he was informed I had bought his contract. More over, he's a ghoul and ghouls are immune to radiation, the worse he might get is fucking tan.
Then there's the whole 200 endings thing. When I had heard this from Todd Howard I figured by 200 he meant all the epilogues concerning the fate of the towns and peoples you either helped/ruined, but it seems even that was giving Todd too much credit. Instead, the 200 endings are just fucking pictures. For one character I did the Lincoln memorial quest, which showed a picture of the memorial with the head restored, but that's not even that fucking special since you can wait a bit, come back and find the memorial restore in the actual game.
Of all the things the Fallout series did, one of it's biggest pluses was the fact that it did away the idea that the ending to a game should only concern the main story. The Fallout games showed the affect you had on the world through the choices you made, but instead of continuing and strengthening that feature of the Fallout franchise Bethesda opted for a dumbed down ending that barely even mentions the affect you had on the world outside of the main quest.
With those very tiresome issues aside the endings are pretty good.
In regards to the Fallout universe:
As far as I can tell Bethesda hasn't fucked with the universe that much, expect for one glowing issue, the super mutants. I have no problem with the FEV virus being in Vault 87, what I have a problem with is the fact that there always seem to be Super Mutants, but FEV can't mutate people without direct exposure, and the entrance to Vault 87 is too irradiated to enter and once you get in through murder pass the super mutants inside are all too happy to kill anyone who stumbles inside. So where are the mutants coming from? They can't be breeding because the FEV virus considers reproductive cells to be damaged and respairs them constantly, rendering mutants sterile. Keep in mind, Vaults were designed to hold only about a thousand people at a time, and Elder Owyn Lyons' Brotherhood of Steel group have been fighting the super mutants for twenty years. It could be said that some of the mutants are the one who are mentioned to have fled east in the first Fallout, but the mutants in Fallout 3 are supposely derived from a different FEV strand that the West Coast mutants.
That aside, I'm happy to say that while the Brotherhood generally are not minded or get painted as knights in shining armour, there are some (the ghouls) who paint them in a less favorable light.
Final impression:
Fallout 3 is a pretty good RPG, most certainly the best Bethesda has made in a while, but I would have been happier with it if it didn't have the Fallout name on it, because when I play Fallout 3 find it hard to think of it as Fallout, making the alot of the nostalgic charms here and there all the more remorseful. But as a sequel Fallout 3 is to the Fallout franchise what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was to the Indy franchise, fun and entertaining, but wanting.