Just beat the game a few hours ago...  didn't even explore half of the Wasteland.  The ending was kinda  "ehh..."  to me.   Since even an evil character has to Save the world.  If i'm wrong let me know...  I played as a good guy the first time.

you can choose to not do anything at all and the purifier blows up

the game is pretty fun, i like the multitude of things you can do :O!!

So to the people who have completed the game, are there any vehicles that you get to drive in the game??

I don'T even want to imagine how Bethesda would handle vehicles.



Brrr.. horses..

Well that sucks then... I thought I could fix up some broken motorcycle because I found a Motorcycle Gas Tank and a Motorcycle handbrake.

Just beat the game a few hours ago...  didn't even explore half of the Wasteland.  The ending was kinda  "ehh..."  to me.   Since even an evil character has to Save the world.  If i'm wrong let me know...  I played as a good guy the first time.

Ending spoilers: I believe maybe the "evil" ending is that you put the mutagen into the water purifier in order to commit genocide.  I guess it sort of makes sense because all of the evil actions in Fallout 3 are staged as selfish things, and not specifically really evil things.  Any ending where you actually end the human race would be not only silly but a little out of place!

Just beat the game a few hours ago...  didn't even explore half of the Wasteland.  The ending was kinda  "ehh..."  to me.   Since even an evil character has to Save the world.  If i'm wrong let me know...  I played as a good guy the first time.

Just about everyone you meet in the entire game minus the enclave and the vault dwellers are classified as mutants, they explain this alot better in fallout 2 and yeah if i only played fallout 3 this option would seem really stupid to be evil. I was kind of dissapointed that no matter what you did you were essentially the pawn of a government, the enclave and the brotherhood dont seem that much different other then the brotherhood seems rather apathetic to the whole mutant situation

also the end uh...boss was kind of lame.

I have skipped several quests with the speech skill, like Moriarty will tell you right away that your dad went GNR without you doing any quests for him. And Two Dog or w/e his name is will also direct you to Rivet City without helping him on a successful Speech.

in general i have noticed from QUICKSAVE that speech skips big parts of any given quest. i typically never play high speech characters, but i find it a bit lame that high speech essentially removes gameplay instead of presenting other opportunities (it does SOMETIMES, but rarely). even if i can talk my way out of things i usually don't because you typically miss out on things.

When I went to the memorial place to get the Declaration of Independence, I told the robot I was Thomas Jefferson.
I avoided what could have been a tough battle.

Speech is pretty useful. The problem is you can always quick save before talking to someone, and if the dialogue choice fails you can just try the speech option again.
edit: well GZ just said it.

in general i have noticed from QUICKSAVE that speech skips big parts of any given quest. i typically never play high speech characters, but i find it a bit lame that high speech essentially removes gameplay instead of presenting other opportunities (it does SOMETIMES, but rarely). even if i can talk my way out of things i usually don't because you typically miss out on things.

To be fair, this is pretty much a Fallout staple.  It's not as viable in FO3 because combat is MUCH harder to avoid but you can beat the game at a ridiculously low level (like level 2 since you auto-level when leaving the vault).

Anyways, where is the schematic for the death claw gauntlet???

The only one I found for it so far was on a chance encounter with a wounded deathclaw. I got the deathclaw hand, and the schematic from the corpse of one of the nearby hunters. Thing is, it was a joke play because I'd just shot up Tenpenny Towers so I re-loaded my serious save and went looking for it again.

After a couple hours of wandering, I triggered the encounter again, this time in a different area - only problem was that the dead hunters didn't have the plans, so there might be a little bug there. One of the earlier posts describes a couple of the locations where the encounter triggers, if I recall correctly.

Yeah so far I like the random encounters because you never really know what to expect but it freaked me the fuck out when I'm walking through downtown and hear THUMP THUMP THUMP turn around and there's this wastelander running for his life from a 10 foot tall behemoth.  Thankfully those dudes are slow but I'm playing on hard and even though he had 2 bars of health left it took nearly 2 clips from an automatic to put him down.

I suspect not however because you have to CLEAR OUT THE JEFFERSON MEMORIAL and I'm sure there are other points where combat is forced on you and there is no speech option to get out of it.

You're only forced into combat once and that's where you have to kill a radroach during the tutorial.  You can skip every quest in the game and proceed straight to the ending if you know where the final "level" is and there are several primary quests you can just work around.  The world is more dangerous, though, but a high perception lets you spot enemies you haven't seen on your compass and a high sneak means you can just avoid them. 

Also in F2, Speech was not just SUBVERTING THE QUEST, it was a different outcome for the quest, you would still recieve exp and level up just as fast.

Uh speech in the previous games let you either avoid combat or bluff someone into thinking you did whatever it was you were supposed to do.  Same thing in this game.  You still get experience and stuff but just like in the previous games if you speech your way through everything you'll have less experience and equipment than if you blasted your way through whatever dungeon.

Speech and certain perks (child at heart and lady killer/black widow) make characters give you specific rare items so a speech focused character can essentially pad their low equipment handicap but just like EVERY western RPG where you can bluff your way to victory you won't have all the cool equipment a combat oriented guy would have.

I only fought two or three in random encounters and they move as fast as super mutants.

Anyways, I installed some mod that adds "realistic" weapon damage and it's pretty great.  Shooting someone in the head actually does damage!  As a result, I put the difficulty to very hard and holy crap the experience of playing the game is 30x better.