So I guess I'm the minority that actually really enjoyed this game. Which is surprising I guess because of how fanatically obsessed with the original 2 games I am and hwo cynical I was going into this. I guess it's funny how it's ME coming out thinking that this game is great, and yeah I have run into graphical glitches where piles of rubble are floating feet off the ground and AI glitches where my dad gets stuck looping in and out of a door or an NPC can't find his way up a staircase.
I think some of you guys are kind of over-exaggerating how ATROCIOUS you think the game is. One of the complaints mentioned was "repeating textures." I'm not even sure what this means really. I'm pretty sure every game out there doesn't render a brand new texture for every surface in the game, I think they make stock objects and textures and use them to build the world and I think EVERY game does this.
I guess my main issue going into the game was how well they would adhere to the fallout universe, and I think they did it really well. I don't even know what you guys are really talking about when you say it's not fallout because as far as I can tell they've spruced up the graphics and kept it as close to the fallout universe as I probably would have done if I made the game myself. All the enemies are the same, it looks how I imagine it would have looked if they took that isometric perspective and made it 3D. A couple of issues with the world is bringing dogmeat and harold over from california or whatever just for the sake of having a cameo appearance didn't really seem necessary but all the other boxes are checked. The game takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland, it features wastelanders, raiders, slavers, small community pockets, the brotherhood of steel, super mutants, ghouls, the enclave, vaults, what about it ISN'T fallout?
It's been labelled "oblivion with guns" but I don't really see the problem there, of course they are going to use the oblivion engine to build the game, just like Valve use source to build all their games. The way every valve game is just a HL2 mod REALLY. It's still well put together enough that it is believable as a new world. I never once looked at the engine like "THIS IS JUST AN OBLIVION RESKIN" because a lot of the gameplay is entirely different and the only really glaringly obvious comparisons I made were the resting menu. The rest isn't even really an issue for me at all. I don't think the game is BAD because it uses the same engine as oblivion becuase I think it has enough going for it to actually work as a standalone game.
A little issue I had with the world was the lack of real "cities" or clean areas. Fallout 2 had Vault City and NCR which were actually kind of civilized areas to visit, they look like they had been spruced up a bit and had trees and gardens and clean buildings. Fallout 3 is RUSTED METAL WASTELAND from start to finish. Even the enclave base, raven rock or whatever looks like you would contract some kind of damp mould virus if you touched the walls. It would have been nice to see a little more civilization rather than small pockets of 5 - 10 survivors in stitched together tin can shacks.
I don't think the story was really too bad at all. The dialogue in the game had a tendency to be pretty bad and sometimes kind of cheesy but it was the same in the first two games and aside from the big problem of everything being a RIGHT/WRONG/NEUTRAL I actually enjoyed the storyline of the game and I think it had some great gameplay moments like helping the brotherhood of steel assault in on GNR and the final liberty prime section of the game.
There were a couple of points where I really wanted to be an asshole but it turns out every evil dialogue choice pretty much starts a fight and has to end with you killing someone. Take Simms for instance, I wanted to be a dick to him but not fight him and this isn't possible without going back on yourself by saying something like "Heh, just pulling your leg pal! Friends really." It was either FIGHT or BE NICE and I think a lot of other people have had this problem as well but although this is kind of the extent of the dialogue it's not the extent of the GAMEPLAY because you don't really have to do anything anyone asks and you don't really have to talk to anyone at all. One of my big problems in games and especially bethesda games is fetchquests.... CANNOT STAND FETCHQUESTS but thankfully you never actually have to do them. Take GNR for example this whole section of the game is DO FETCHQUEST IN ORDER TO CONTINUE and I didn't want to do it so I didn't. I left them alone and found out the information on my own in Rivet City without having to do Three Dog's quest at all. It's also possible to just STUMBLE UPON your father at any point in the game and it's freeform to the point that everything is really optional.
Do not want to do fetchquest? Don't do it.
I've noticed that a lot of the "rewards" for doing things in game are fairly indirect which makes dungeons and other things feel a little unrewarding. You can make an assault on a dungeon and fight your way through it hoping to find some kind of treasure but you don't, the vault is empty and it was completely pointless but then you return back to a town or a trader and find that you've got MISSILE LAUNCHERS and FLAMETHROWERS in your inventory that were dropped by enemies. So you WERE rewarded but just in a way that made the dungeon feel slightly pointless. Thankfully however you don't actually have to do any dungeons if you don't want to either!
I don't know if it's possible to play as a fully pacifist player but I'm willing to bet it's possible to complete this game without ever entering a dungeon or doing a fetchquest or really selling out the goals of your character through bland, black and white dialogue options.
Animations and AI? Pretty horrible yeah, but not so bad that I am going to condemn the game because of it, just make sure you don't play in third person mode because you will regret it. The worst AI is really in your companions but the animation problems aren't SO BAD that I would call the game a complete failure because of it. I mean it seems kind of cop-out to say "I've seen worse!" because you expect some level of quality from a game that you pay for and you expect it to keep up with some level of standards but the world is actually pretty impressive and immersive and I only really notice these horrific animation problems when I play in third person.... which I never do.
Combat in the game I think is actually one of the most fun parts. VATS is pretty great and makes the stats that you choose worthwhile. The game is an RPG, not an FPS so you HAVE to miss and it HAS to be based on your stats, just like in the first two games where you could be standing one tile away from someone and miss them point blank with a flamethrower. There are also perks you can take to really improve your VATS experience, like grim reaper's sprint and action boy. In my first playthrough I got really good with small guns and VATS kind of became my best friend in the game. Surrounded by 5 - 6 enclave soldiers? VATS: Queue up some 95% distance headshots on each of them and let the game play out the slaughter for me. Yeah the slow motion is pretty annoying but I never found it so bad and I guess that's personal preference. It actually gave me some time to take a sip of drink or eat some crisps or something which I usually find hard to do while playing games.
My character specialized in Small Guns/Explosives so I don't really have much experience with Melee but even VATS in Melee seemed preferable to playing without for me. I took on a pack of Feral Ghouls with a baseball bat and did much better WITH vats than WITHOUT. Vats seems to allow your character to move faster than the opponent, crit more and take less damage. I could drop 2 - 3 feral ghouls with the bat in vats before they could damage me, whereas without vats fighting them with the bat was clumsy and painful.
There have been a couple of times in the game where I've clambered over a rock and actually been kind of taken by surprise by the view. I think the world is actually a really cool place to explore and there are lots of nice sceneries and interesting things worth looking for. A big problem for me was the way streets were stategically cordoned off by fallen rubble or other misc. objects forcing you to take a certain route around, but aside from that one of the most fun parts of the game I found was just generally exploring the wastes and finding the interesting things that happen, stumbling upon the mechanist and the antagonizer's street battles or robots battling off mad brahmin.
I think the random encounters and the interesting little AI quips that you find in the game are a really nice touch. At certain points I've found myself with allies in combat completely by accident because I happened to stumble upon a trader being assaulted by raiders or someone has caught me in the act of doing something and been able to react to it. Like someone posted earlier in the thread about the raiders returning to super duper mart mid-way through combat. There are also some very creative ways you can interact with the people of the wastes and things you can do from sneaking around planting land mines in peoples inventories to hacking computer terminals and sending robots on killer rampages through towns and dungeons.
ON TO COMPANIONS: Biggest disappointment in the game? Dogmeat. I remember reading somewhere that dogmeat was supposed to be a very durable companion but in reality he is weak and fragile. In Fallout 1 dogmeat was easily capable of taking 2 - 3 raiders singlehandedly towards the endgame with astounding results. Same with the second game, Dogmeat 1 on 1 or 1 v 2 with the enclave would usually come out the victor. I don't know if he is getting old but I've found that he seems to struggle with basic enemies like radscorpions and when he gets himself into sticky situations (which he does a lot) like fighting a Yao Guai or whatever they are called or a DEATHCLAW or some MUTANTS he gets destroyed in under a minute. He's the first guy to CHARGE IN GROWLING and then whimpers and dies before I can even rescue him.
The second companion I picked up however, Fawkes was a different story. The guy was durable, had great firepower and had no problem taking down groups of enclave singlehandedly. Another little lie that Bethesda dropped in an interview however was how hard it would be to lose your companions. I'm fairly creative traveller, I will jump over fences, scramble over rocks and drop off ledges to get where I need to go, my companions however aren't that creative and short of KEEPING MY FEET PLANTED FIRMLY ON THE GROUND I lost them pretty quickly.
I have no idea if your companions level up alongside you, I haven't really found any proof that this happens yet so I'm not sure but I hope they do because so far Dogmeat has been a massive disappointment and I think I will leave him behind on my next few playthroughs because I don't want to have to babysit him.
I guess my final disappointment with the game is the repair system. I like to keep all my equipment in top shape so with both of my characters I've invested a lot of points into the repair skill. It's a shame that it requires an exact replica of the weapon you want to repair in order to repair anything. There's so much JUNK lying around the wastes that you could use to patch shit up but it's wasted and useless. If you want to repair a hunting rifle, you need a second hunting rifle. If you want to repair Outcast Brotherhood of Steel Power Armor you need Outcast Brotherhood of Steel Power Armor. It's not even as simple as being able to use Enclanve Power Armor to repair Outcast Brotherhood of Steel Power Armor, you need the EXACT SAME item replicated and it is terrible that 80 or so of my skill points have to go into this worthless skill to keep myself in tip top shape because I am too stubborn to pay the extortionate prices that traders ask of you to repair your items. I find myself using weak but abundant items like HUNTING RIFLES because they are easy to repair. But yeah, Junk around the game is useless and they could have made it possible to repair with it and repair would have been awesome but they didn't and now, twice, I feel like I've wasted skill points in getting repair.
Short of all of this however, this is still probably one of my favourite gaming experiences this year, despite what anyone else really says I think the world is pretty immersive and fun to explore. I've found combat very fun and often very tactical as well, especially when explosives are involved. I think the storyline was good, even the ending which so many people seemed to detest and aside from not being able to continue after finishing the game I had no problems with it. (The final liberty prime section was great fun I think.) I honestly can't really find any complaints with it not being a worthy successor to the fallout series aside from a few bugs and gameplay gripes which EVERY GAME I PLAY has and I think some of the complaints that other people have brought up are actually kind of petty. Also I would feel cheated if the game didn't have some bugs because the original two games were cram packed with them.
I am not a big fan of bethesda the people, the company but I think they did a pretty good job with the fallout series and I enjoyed the game a lot, I'm playing through a second time already.
